The Firebombing of Tokyo
Seventy years ago, the United States needlessly killed almost
100,000 people in a single air raid.
By Rory Fanning
August 07, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - "Jacobin"
- August 06, 2015 - Today marks the
seventieth anniversary of the American firebombing of Tokyo, World
War II’s deadliest day. More people died that night from napalm
bombs than in the atomic strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But few
in the United States are aware that the attack even took place.
The lack of ceremonies or official state
apologies for the firebombing is unsurprising considering that
many Americans see World War II as the “just war” fought by the
“greatest generation.” These labels leave the war and the atrocities
Americans committed during it largely untouched by critique.
The little that is available to study on the
firebombing, at least here in the US, is told from the perspective
of American crewmen and brass, through usually
biased American military historians. Those seeking better
understanding of the March 9 tragedy must wade through reams of
history primarily devoted to strategy; the heroics of American
soldiers; the awesome power behind the bombs unleashed that day; and
a cult-like devotion to the B-29 Superfortress, the plane that
dropped the napalm over Tokyo and the atomic bombs, and was the
inspiration for George Lucas’s Millennium Falcon.
The overriding narrative surrounding the events of
March 9, 1945 is that the American pilots and military strategists
such as Gen. Curtis LeMay, the architect of the firebombing, had no
other option but to carry out the mission. The Americans had “no
choice” but to burn to death nearly one hundred thousand Japanese
civilians.
Most historians seem to believe that LeMay should
be
commended for making “tough choices” in wartime, for it was
these tough choices that allegedly saved lives on both sides by
ending the war sooner.
What little criticism that exists of the
firebombing is attacked for failing to put the bombing in proper
context and not providing alternate solutions for ending the war.
These attacks are also riddled with “they did it too”
justifications.
World War II was carried out with brutality on all
fronts. The Japanese military murdered nearly six million Chinese,
Korean, and Filipino civilians by the end of it. However, to argue
that Japanese civilians deserved to die — that children deserved to
die — at the hands of the US military because their government
killed civilians in other Asian countries is an indefensible
position, in any moral or ethical framework.
Operation
Meetinghouse saw more than three hundred B-29 bombers flying at ten
thousand (as opposed to their usual thirty thousand feet) to avoid
the effects of a 100 to 200 MPH jet stream, and setting Tokyo ablaze
in the late hours of March 9. The American planes dropped five
hundred thousand M-69 bombs (nicknamed “Tokyo Calling Card”), which
were designed specially to consume the largely wooden residential
structures of Tokyo.
Clustered in groups of thirty-eight, each M-69
weighed six pounds. The five hundred–pound clusters would disperse
at two thousand feet. A white phosphorus fuse that looked like a gym
sock ignited flaming jellied gasoline that spurted one hundred feet
in the air on impact.
Like a sticky fiery plague, the globs of napalm
clung to everything it touched. The M-69s were so effective at
starting fires in Tokyo that night that gale force winds turned
thousands of individual fires into one massive firestorm.
Temperatures around the city raged between 600 and 1800 degrees
Fahrenheit. In some areas, the fires melted asphalt.
LeMay planned the attack to coincide with 30
MPH winds in order to intensify the effect of the bombs. Ultimately,
sixteen square miles of Tokyo were reduced to ash.
LeMay claimed that the Japanese government relied
on residential “cottage” war production, thus making the civilians
living in Tokyo a legitimate military target. However, by 1944 the
Japanese had essentially terminated its home war production. A full 97
percent of the country’s military supplies were protected
underground in facilities not vulnerable to air attack the day of
the bombing. The Americans knew this.
The United States had broken Japan’s
Red and
Purple cipher machines well before 1945, allowing them access to
the most classified enemy intelligence. American generals understood
the war would soon be materially impossible for the Japanese.
The
US Naval blockade had also prevented oil, metal, and other
essential goods from entering Japan long before March 9. Japan was
so cut off from basic supplies that it was constructing its planes
partially out of
wood.
The Japanese population at this point in the war
was most concerned with starvation. The 1945 rice harvest was the
worst since 1909. Surveys commissioned by Japan’s
government in April 1945 reported the population was “too
preoccupied with the problems of food” to worry about fighting a
war. Victory for the Allies was guaranteed by the start of the year.
The most damning evidence against the firebombing
can be traced to
August 19, 1945, when Walter Trohan of the Chicago Tribune
finally
published a piece gracefully titled “Roosevelt Ignored M’Arthur
Report on Nip Proposals” that he had been sitting on for seven
months.
Trohan wrote:
Release of all censorship restrictions in the
United States makes it possible to report that the first
Japanese peace bid was relayed to the White House seven months
ago. . . .
The Jap offer, based on five separate
overtures, was relayed to the White House by Gen. MacArthur in a
40-page communication, [who] urged negotiations on the basis of
the Jap overtures. . . .
The offer, as relayed by MacArthur,
contemplated abject surrender of everything but the person of
the Emperor. President Roosevelt dismissed the general’s
communication, which was studded with solemn references to the
deity, after a casual reading with the remark, “MacArthur is our
greatest general and our poorest politician.”
The MacArthur report was not even taken to
Yalta.
In January 1945 — two days before Franklin
Roosevelt was to meet with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill
and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in Yalta — the Japanese were
offering surrender terms almost identical to what was accepted by
the Americans on the USS Missouri in the Japan Bay on September 2,
1945.
The Japanese population was famished, the
country’s war machine was out of gas, and the government had
capitulated. The Americans were unmoved. The firebombing and the
nuclear attacks were heartlessly carried out. If anyone is guilty of
disregarding the “context” of the firebombing of Tokyo, it’s the
sycophantic and biased American historians who deride these
critical facts.
Let
us not forget what actually happened on the ground that day. It has
been too easy to bury the stories. Largely ignored by mainstream
reviewers,
Edwin P. Hoyet‘s Inferno: The Fire Bombing of Japan,
March 9 – August 15, 1945 is one of the only oral histories
from March 9.
Toshiko Higashikawa, who was twelve at the time of
the bombing, recalled: “There was fire everywhere. I saw one person
caught by the claws of the fire dragon before you could say Jack
Robinson! Her clothes just went up in flames. Another two people
were caught and burned up. The bombers just kept coming.” Toshiko
and her family fled to a neighborhood school, seeking shelter from
fire. The family bottlenecked in a doorway, and Toshiko could hear
children shouting: “Gya. Help! Its Hot! Moma! Uwa! Daddy! It hurts!
Help!”
Moments later, Toshiko lost the grip of her
father’s hand in the frantic crowd. Her father was holding her
younger brother Eichi in his other arm. Toshiko and her sister made
it out of the schoolhouse alive. She never saw her father and
brother again.
Koji Kikushima, who was thirteen at the time,
tells the story of running down a street as fire chased her family
and hundreds of others. The heat was so intense she instinctively
jumped off a bridge into a river below. She survived the fall. In
the morning she emerged from the river to see a “mountain of
corpses” on the bridge. She never saw her family again.
Sumiko Morikawa was twenty-four that day. Her
husband was off fighting in the war. She had a four-year-old son
Kiichi, and twin eight-month-old girls Atsuko and Ryoko. As the fire
began to burn the homes in her neighborhood, Sumiko ran towards a
park pool with her kids. Nearing the pool’s edge, four-year-old
Kiichi’s jacket caught fire.
“It’s hot, mom. It’s hot,” he cried. Sumiko jumped
into the pool with the twin girls and Kiichi. Then a fireball hit
the boy in the head, and his mother doused him with water. But his
head slumped over.
Sumiko fainted and woke to find her twins dead and
son breathing faintly. The water in the pool had evaporated from the
heat. Sumiko ran Kiichi to an aid station and began to give him tea
from her own mouth. He opened his eyes for a moment and said “Mama”
before dying.
There were nearly a million casualties that day in
Tokyo and countless stories like the ones above. However what is
mostly absent from Hoyet’s book are personal reflections from men
about what it was like that day. It’s because cities like Tokyo and
Nagasaki were essentially
devoid of them.
“We rarely saw any fathers in the town,” a women
from Nagaski recalled for Paul Hamm in his book
Hiroshima Nagasaki. “There were a lot of grandmothers,
mothers, and children. I remember seeing one father-like person in
my town but he was ill.”
The remaining population, and hence the main
targets of the bombing, were disproportionately women, children, and
the elderly. The majority of the military-age men were away fighting
in the war.
So
why did the Americans continue to raid and terrorize the Japanese
civilian population knowing the war could have been over? Many argue
that the Americans were flexing their muscles for Russia in
anticipation of the ensuing Cold War. Countless pages have been
written about this.
But what is too often overlooked is the racism of
the day. It is America’s racism that best explains the extent of the
firebombing and the nuclear attacks. The racist mindset that all too
many Americans were comfortable with in the Jim Crow era easily bled
onto the Japanese. The horror stories of the almost two hundred
thousand Japanese Americans who lost their livelihoods as a result
of Roosevelt’s internment camps are just one example of how
Americans saw not only the Japanese but Japanese-Americans.
The firebombing of Japan was about testing new
technologies on a civilian population. Significant funds had gone
into the development of American military technology — 36 billion in
2015 dollars funded the creation of the atomic bomb. Napalm was new
as well. The firebombing of Tokyo marked the first time it was used
on a dense civilian population. The Americans wanted to assay their
new inventions on a group of people who they thought were less than
human.
LeMay famously remarked, “Killing Japanese didn’t
bother me very much at that time . . . I suppose if I had lost the
war, I would have been tried as a war criminal.” LeMay later
leveraged his war credentials and racism to earn a spot on
segregationist Gov. George Wallace’s 1968 presidential ticket.
Terms
like “greatest generation” betray Americans by keeping them
willfully disconnected from their past. These labels flatten complex
legacies, and prevent a thorough questioning of power.
Why did no one from the greatest generation stop
these needless bombings? How can a country whose leaders constantly
invoke its “exceptionalism” regularly fall back on the platitude
“All sides were committing atrocities so why focus on the
Americans?” These are the questions our high school textbooks need
to be asking.
As Howard Zinn put it in “Three
Holy Wars,” his final speech before he died:
This idea of good wars helps justify other
wars which are obviously awful, obviously evil. And though
they’re obviously awful — I’m talking about Vietnam, I’m talking
about Iraq, I’m talking about Afghanistan, I’m talking about
Panama, I’m talking about Grenada, one of our most heroic of
wars — the fact that you can have the historic experience of
good wars creates a basis for believing, well, you know, there’s
such a thing as a good war, and maybe you can find, oh,
parallels between the good wars and this war, even though you
don’t understand this war.
But, oh, yes, the parallels. Saddam Hussein is
Hitler. That makes it clear. We have to fight against him. To
not fight in the war means surrender, like Munich. There are all
the analogies. . . . You compare something to World War II, you
immediately infuse it with goodness.
After the war US Marine Joe O’Donnell was sent to
document the destruction of Japan. His
book Japan 1945: A U.S. Marine’s Photographs from Ground
Zero is something everyone who labels World War II good and
just should see.
“The people I met,” O’Donnell recalls, “the
suffering I witnessed, and the scenes of incredible devastation
taken by my camera caused me to question every belief I had
previously held about my so-called enemies.”
The ubiquity of America’s national security state,
its commitment to war without end, and the chauvinism of our
leadership demands that we be ever-vigilant about propaganda that
maintains the American war mindset.
Connecting with the transformation of Marines like
Joe O’Donnell and Howard Zinn is the way forward. Destroying our war
myths will help unravel the mentality that keeps America to this day
fighting for the benefit of a few at the great expense of the many.
