by Toland, John
The siren howling around midnight on March 9 sounded just the same as dozens of other alerts. Since previous raids on the city had done little damage, there didn’t seem to be any cause for alarm; Radio Tokyo reported that enemy bombers were circling above the seaport of Choshi, fifty miles northeast of the capital, and that there was no immediate danger.
The pathfinders had not yet been discovered in their low sweep toward the unwary city at better than 300 miles an hour. The first two planes, crossing paths over the target, released their strings of bombs in perfect unison at 12:15 A.M. One hundred feet above the ground the M47 missiles split apart, scattering two-foot-long napalm sticks which burst into flame on impact, spreading jellied fire. In minutes a blazing X was etched in downtown Tokyo. Ten more pathfinders roared in to drop their napalm on the X. Then came the main force, three wings, in orderly but random formation, at altitudes varying from 4,900 to 9,200 feet. Searchlights poked frantically at the raiders, and puffs of antiaircraft fire detonated without effect. There was no fighter opposition.
Whipped by a stiffening wind, the fires spread rapidly as succeeding bombers fanned out toward the residential areas to unload their thousands of sticks of napalm. Flame fed upon flame, creating a sweeping conflagration. Huge balls of fire leaped from building to building with hurricane force, creating an incandescent tidal wave exceeding 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit.
Those on the ground were momentarily paralyzed by the awesome sight of the planes blanketing them like huge dragons—greenish from searchlight beams, crimson from the glare below. From the Bunkyo-ku residential district overlooking the center of the blaze, seventeen-year-old Susumu Takahashi watched clusters of bombs—they would soon be nicknamed Molotov Breadbaskets—flower over Tokyo Imperial University. He was a student at Showa Medical College, and after the air-raid alarm he had remained in the house to study for exams while the rest of the family went into the shelter. From the dull-red sky, pieces of flaming debris floated down all around Takahashi. A blaze erupted on the roof of the house and he started slapping at it with a “fire swatter”—strips of rags attached to the end of a long pole. The next house exploded into flames like a gas-filled oven. He ran to his room to pick up three books—he was still going to take the exam the next day—then looked for the family memorial tablets at their private Buddhist shrine. They were gone; his mother must have taken them earlier. He grabbed a silver-and-gold Buddha and carefully selected the best antiques—ivory figures. Out of habit, he pulled the door shut, buried the antiques in the family shelter (it was empty, the others had fled) and started up the street. To the right everything was ablaze. He ran to a main road on the left where a fire engine stood helpless, its hoses slack, surrounded by flaming buildings. There was no water.
The only way to safety was a bridge across the Kanda River but it lay beyond a wall of fire. A group of people huddled in the street, staring at the flames as if hypnotized. Charred trees and telephone poles were scattered across the road like matchsticks. The firemen shouted to make for the bridge—or die. Young Takahashi led the way, leaping over tree trunks that burned like logs in a mammoth fireplace. The others followed in single file. He was blinded by the intense light and gasped for breath. He stumbled, at the end of his endurance. Then through the roiling smoke he made out the concrete bridge, crowded with squatting people. He was safe.
Takahashi had struggled through the fringe of the conflagration. The Sekimuras lived less than two miles from the center of the fiery X. When they first saw flames near the Tokyo Station, they bundled up their four children in quilted hooded fire capes and joined a stream of people heading for one of the branches of the Sumida River. Walking through crisply burned debris that was beginning to fall like black snow reminded Mrs. Sekimura of the fires after the great earthquake of 1923, when she was twelve. The sight of bombs bursting open overhead “like bunches of bananas” entranced rather than terrified her.
They pushed their way across the bridge to escape the roaring blaze that was pursuing them “like a wild animal.” A strong wind sucked into the flames swept a stinging storm of pebbles into their faces. They turned, backs to the gale, and plodded slowly away from the conflagration, fascinated at the sight of oil drums rocketing through the roof of a cable factory near the river and exploding into balls of fire a hundred feet in the air.
The center of Tokyo was as incandescent as the sun. Billowing clouds of smoke surged up, illuminated below by orange flames. Thousands crouched terrified in their wooden shelters, where they would be roasted alive, but most of those in the doomed area tried to flee—to the great Buddhist temple in Asakusa, which became their tomb, or, like the Sekimuras, toward the eleven steel bridges spanning the winding Sumida River. For a while these were escape routes, but the flames, too, crossed the river and then there was no escape for those lagging behind.
“The red glow that spread over the southeastern horizon quickly bulged up and filled the entire sky,” Mrs. Sumie Mishima observed, “so that even where we were, on the opposite edge of the city, an eerie pink light settled on the earth and clearly lit up the deep-lined faces of the awestruck people. The burning seemed to go on all the night.”
The tremendous thermals of heat buffeted the B-29s overhead, tossing some of them several thousand feet upward in the air. Far above, the plane carrying LeMay’s chief of staff, Brigadier General Thomas Powers, cruised back and forth. He photographed the conflagration, and reported to LeMay that Tokyo was an inferno. The crews in the last waves could smell the stench of burned flesh; some men vomited. Bombing in Europe had seemed antiseptic from the air; here it was a nauseating reality.
At dawn young Takahashi looked down on the smoldering city from his vantage point in Tokyo Medical-Dental College. The center of the capital was flat wasteland except for stone statues, concrete pillars and walls, steel frames, and a scattering of telephone poles, their ends smoking like tapers. It’s gone, he thought.
Mrs. Sekimura, baby on her back, set out to try to recover the belongings she had buried in the ground. The bridge was clogged with the bodies of those who had been trapped. The river itself, almost evaporated, was choked with swollen corpses and household possessions. On the other side, heat still radiating from the ground made the brisk March day feel like early summer. The places she had known most of her life had vanished. All she could recognize was the cable factory; it was twisted and deformed like melted candy. There were bodies everywhere. Some were naked, black; a few were oddly upright, crouched as if trying to run; some were clasping hands in prayer; others seated as if in contemplation. One man’s head had shrunk to the size of a grapefruit. Dead covered with straw were piled high in schoolyards. The stink of death permeated the air.
At last she found the ashes of her home but the ground was too hot to dig. She looked around carefully, since it was almost impossible to buy even a piece of paper or a pair of chopsticks; if the loss of a teapot was tragic, the loss of one’s possessions meant a reversal to animal life. All she could save was a kama for cooking rice; she picked it up with a stick so it wouldn’t scorch her hands. Curiously, the sight of so much death left her untouched. She walked mechanically by the corpses of neighbors, unable to shed a tear. There were the mother and daughter who lived across the street. They were completely black except for white rings around the eyes; and they had always been so neat. Dazed, she passed the hospital and its emergency pool of water. It was filled with layer upon layer of sprawling bodies. A man stopped her and remarked that he had been in that human heap. “Everyone else is dead,” he said in a toneless voice. “Miraculously I didn’t even get hurt.”
People poked at the layers of bodies with long sticks in search of relatives. Money spilled out of an old woman’s obi and stuck to her wet body. Nobody reached for it. Through the gutted wall of a geisha house spilled hundreds of colorful silk kimonos. Mrs. Sekimura lifted the filmy garments tenderly in her hands; they were so expensive. What a shame such material was ruined. Not far away legs protruded awkwardly
from the rubble.
Everywhere she encountered corpses in agonized positions—mothers trying to shield charred babies; husbands and wives welded together by the heat in a final embrace. Other survivors had returned and in charcoal were scrawling public messages to their loved ones on walls and sidewalks.
Sixteen square miles of Tokyo had been burned to the ground and city officials later estimated that there were 130,000 dead, almost the same carnage as at Dresden.*
The next night LeMay sent 313 bombers with napalm to Nagoya, the empire’s third largest city. Massive incendiary raids on Osaka and Kobe followed in rapid succession. Within a week, forty-five square miles of crucial industrial areas had been incinerated. There could be no doubt that LeMay’s new tactics would soon crush Japan’s capacity to wage effective warfare. But more was being destroyed than Japanese military power. In the process a multitude of defenseless civilians had already been killed.
Americans’ attitude toward bombing had undergone a complete reversal since their sincere revulsion against the indiscriminate murder of civilians in Spanish cities and in China. At the outbreak of war in Europe, Roosevelt, reflecting the humanitarian ethics of his countrymen, dispatched messages to all belligerents urging them to refrain from the “inhuman barbarism” of bombing civilians. Even after Pearl Harbor, leaders of American air power emphasized daylight precision bombing, aimed at the destruction of selected military targets. But gradually the efficacy of this program was not borne out, and areas of bombing were enlarged to include the destruction of anything that sustained the enemy’s war effort, including, if necessary, the populace itself. It was a policy which went largely unspoken and unrecorded but it seemed clear that the entire enemy population, at home as well as at the front, would have to be brutalized before it could be forced to surrender.
Public opinion accepted this metamorphosis with only an occasional outburst of moral concern. By 1945 almost every American agreed that Japan and Germany deserved every bomb that fell on their countries. Time magazine, for example, described LeMay’s fire bombings of Tokyo as “a dream come true” which proved that “properly kindled, Japanese cities will burn like autumn leaves.”
Americans in particular had little sympathy for an enemy which had attacked Pearl Harbor without warning and perpetrated such atrocities as the Bataan Death March. It was, consequently, the rare voice which spoke out in the name of humanity for the hundreds of thousands of mutilated and cremated civilians. America, the Jesuit weekly, doubted that mass raids squared “either with God’s law or the nobility of our cause.” An English pamphlet entitled Massacre by Death was distributed in the United States with a special introduction endorsed by twenty-eight prominent American educators and clergymen such as Harry Emerson Fosdick and Oswald Garrison Villard; it urged the readers to “examine their hearts” regarding their participation in the “carnival of death.” America, including most of its clergy, rejected such exhortations. “God has given us the weapons,” retorted one clergyman in the letter section of the New York Times; “let us use them.” What was criminal in Coventry, Rotterdam, Warsaw and London had become heroic in Hamburg, Dresden, Osaka and Tokyo.
2.
Japan’s last important outposts of resistance in the Philippines and Burma were in jeopardy. On Luzon, MacArthur’s men had retaken Bataan and Corregidor. Nothing better illustrated the difference between the two foes than their defenses of the tiny, tadpole-shaped island. The Americans had resisted for twelve hours before Wainwright felt that further fighting was meaningless. Three years later the 5,000 Japanese defenders fought for eleven days against an aggressive, overwhelming parachute and amphibious assault. All except 20 died. Strategically it made little difference whether they had fought for eleven days or eleven hours.
MacArthur was in a sentimental mood when he journeyed to The Rock by PT boat. “Gentlemen,” he said, “it has been a long way back.” On the shattered remnants of the outpost he gave the order to raise the American flag. “Hoist the colors and let no enemy ever haul them down.” After the ceremony he inspected the ruins. “This is atonement,” he said.
Unlike Corregidor, Manila was not to have been defended at all. Yamashita moved all except security troops out of the city, but no sooner had they left than Rear Admiral Sanji Iwabuchi reoccupied Manila with 16,000 sailors. Iwabuchi had orders from his superior, Vice Admiral Denshichi Okochi, to destroy all port facilities and naval storehouses. Once there, Iwabuchi commandeered the 3,750 Army security troops, and against Yamashita’s specific order, turned the city into a battlefield. By the time the Americans secured it on March 4, the capital was rubble and thousands of civilians had died, many as the result of atrocities committed by the Japanese.†
But the Philippines were far from cleared. Yamashita had 170,000 well-fed, well-armed troops. Most of them defended the northern redoubt under his direct command, but there were large groups holding out in the mountains east and northeast of Manila and in the Zambales Mountains near Clark Field. Theirs was not to be the long-sought Decisive Battle but rather one of attrition. Yamashita’s role was to delay MacArthur, and in the process, kill as many Americans as possible.
The GI’s, incited by the deplorable state of American civilian and military prisoners at the Santo Tomás prison, set out to annihilate Yamashita’s men with renewed vehemence. Posters urged them to have no mercy on the “yellow bastards.” Even without such incitement, the attitude of many American soldiers toward the Japanese led to excesses. In his Wartime Diaries, Charles Lindbergh, who toured the Pacific, wrote: “Our men think nothing of shooting a Japanese prisoner or a soldier attempting to surrender. They treat the Jap with less respect than they would give an animal, and these acts are condoned by almost everyone. We claim to be fighting for civilization, but the more I see of this war in the Pacific the less right I think we have to claim to be civilized. In fact, I am not sure that our record in this respect stands so much higher than the Japs’.”
The racial implications extended even to the victims of the Japanese—the Filipino civilians—who were disparagingly referred to as “flips” or “gooks.”
There would be no battle of attrition in Burma. The British had followed the Japanese survivors of Imphal across the mountains into Burma and across the Chindwin River. On the day MacArthur’s troops landed at Lingayen Gulf, January 9, they launched an offensive toward Mandalay and the heart of Burma. Still drained by the Imphal disaster, the Japanese could do little to impede the British sweep south.
Ba Maw knew the war was lost and he began preparing for the postwar armed struggle to evict the British from his country. He would have to find ways to keep alive the spirit of freedom among the Burmese, coupled with a continuing hatred for the British raj. He set up a Supreme Defence Council to mobilize war activities among his people. “This is the final battle in our long struggle with British imperialism,” he told them. “We have fought it three times before and lost, and so became a subject race for generations. We must now fight and win this fourth and final round with the help of Japan, for if we lose again we shall be slaves for a very long time more.”
Ba Maw was successful in implanting a lasting antagonism toward the British but could not slow their drive. On March 9 they entered Mandalay, capturing the Obo railway station and Mandalay Hill, then continued south toward the capital, Rangoon.
Important as the Philippines and Burma once seemed to the Japanese military leaders, they could not escape the inevitable logic that the empire’s last hope lay in the successful defense of a relatively small island just 350 miles south of the homeland—Okinawa. Admiral Tomioka, for example, believed the enemy could be beaten there with an all-out effort, and this victory would give Japan six months to negotiate a peace which would guarantee the continuing rule of the Emperor.
The fall of Leyte and Iwo Jima had left General Koiso’s Cabinet at the point of collapse. Koiso had purposely been installed as interim premier, and from his first day in office his course had been uncertain. With
all the prestige of his position but without genuine support from any faction, Koiso exerted almost no influence on the prosecution of the war and none at all on the subterranean efforts for peace. Unlike Tojo, he did not represent the militarists, many of whom regarded him with suspicion. Nor was he privy to the continuous and complex maneuvers of the peace groups.
Concern over the future of the nation under such leadership was so acute that the Emperor summoned Marquis Kido and suggested that it might be necessary for him to consult the former prime ministers concerning the deteriorating war situation. Only once before, on the eve of the war itself, had the Emperor convened the jushin to discuss anything except the selection of a new premier.
Kido had the jushin brought to the Emperor’s office one at a time, lest the military become suspicious if they appeared as a group. It would also make it easier for each man to speak freely. But except for Konoye’s, their advice was vague and poorly thought through, or simply an emotional appeal to continue the fight with determination. Konoye’s appraisal was a closely reasoned, if misguided, examination of the political and military abyss into which Japan would fall unless peace were concluded shortly. His opinions were expressed in an eight-page Memorial to the Throne, written in his own hand with Japanese brush and read aloud to the Emperor. It is doubtful that any subject other than Konoye would have dared present such a frank evaluation directly to His Majesty. Like almost everything else concerning Konoye it was an anomaly—objective and subjective, practical and impractical. Starting with a courageous pronouncement (“Regrettable though it is, I believe that Japan has already lost the war”), he made a charge based solely on his own growing paranoia toward Communism (“The greatest danger to maintenance of Japan’s imperial system comes not from defeat itself but from the threat of a Communist revolution”). Then, in an attempt to prove that Japan was about to be seized by native Reds, he accurately foresaw the course of Marxism in eastern Europe and Korea. His next historical assessment, however, was again faulted by his fixed idea: the Manchurian Incident, the China Incident and the Greater East Asian War, too, had been “a scheme consciously plotted” by Army radicals, themselves puppets of right-wing civilian extremists who were “simply Communists clothed in national essence, secretly intending to bring about a Communist revolution.”