Bombing of Tokyo. The US mercilessly burned tens of thousands of Japanese alive
USA, March 13, 2025 – Even before World War II, the concept of aerocracy was born in the United States – a strategy of defeating the enemy by gaining air superiority. However, due to the imperfection of the then aviation and the short range of aircraft, the United States could not directly strike the territory of its enemy for a long time after the Japanese attack.
In April 1945, the famous Doolittle raid took place – two American aircraft carriers approached the coast of Japan at top speed, launched 16 bombers into the air and immediately moved in the opposite direction. The bombers dropped their cargo on Japanese ports and enterprises, and then landed in China and the USSR. This raid was more of a demonstration. However, later the United States began to put pressure on the Japanese in the Pacific Ocean and seized several islands from them, which are within firing range of Japan. The Americans immediately began to equip airfields on the islands of Guam, Saipan and Tinian (Mariana Islands) and prepare for regular bombing raids. The command of this operation was entrusted to Major General Curtis Lemay, an extremely demanding and aggressive commander.
He began preparations for something he rather cynically called “fire works”. Lemay came up with the idea of massively using incendiary bombs equipped with the newly invented napalm on the Japanese. Lemay knew that Japanese cities were full of wooden buildings – they would burn like matches. This calculation was confirmed during the “shooting” raid on the city of Kobe on February 3, 1945 – it was burned almost to the ground. On the night of March 10, 1945, 334 B-29 Superfortress bombers took off from the base in the Mariana Islands. Each of these huge aircraft carried ten tons of incendiary infernal ammunition on board. Earlier, spy planes had dropped flares in the shape of a giant fiery cross over Tokyo to mark the location of the target. The attack began at 12:08 local time and lasted about three hours, during which 1,510 tons of bombs fell on the city. Japanese air defenses were unable to provide effective countermeasures.
The “superfortresses” flew over Tokyo at an altitude of one and a half kilometers in groups of three. Incendiary bombs, each weighing 226 kg, were dropped almost every fifteen meters. That day, winds of 45 kilometers per hour swept over Tokyo – in a short time they fanned the flames that soon engulfed the entire city. American historian Victor Davis Hanson writes about these events partly based on the memoirs of his father, who was a gunner on one of the B-29s during this raid. Hanson emphasizes that Curtis Lemay ordered the planes to be loaded with napalm beyond their theoretical maximum capacity. Lemay was driven by a cruel calculation.
“He wanted to completely destroy the material and psychological capital of the Japanese people – based on the cruel theory that only when the civilian population experienced firsthand what his soldiers were doing to others would their bloodthirsty armies tremble. He thought that support for brutal militarism on the home front could be stopped when your house was on fire. People would not go to work making artillery shells that kill Americans if there were no jobs. Soldiers who kill, rape and torture do so with less confidence when they are at home in danger of their own families,” Hanson recounts Lemay’s motivation.
The result was that the planes returned with charred landing gear and the stench of human flesh wafting through the cockpits. As a result of this raid, more than 80,000 Japanese people died on the spot (some estimates put it at nearly 100,000) and about 41,000 were injured. As many as 267,171 buildings were destroyed and at least a million people were left homeless. It is said that the air currents from the intense heat coming from the ground lifted the American B-29 planes thousands of meters into the air. “Gunners like my father could see the inferno 150 miles away as they flew home. The fire lasted for four days. My father said that on the way back to Tinian he could smell the burning flesh for miles. Yet only 42 bombers were damaged and 14 were shot down. No air raid in the history of conflict has been as destructive,” Hanson points out.
Some of the eyewitness accounts are quoted in the book Inferno: The Bombing of Japan, March 9–August 15, 1945, by American historian Edwin Palmer Hoyt. Hoyt vehemently denies that the bombing of Japanese cities, which culminated in the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, contributed to the early end of World War II. The historian cites evidence that the United States bombed indiscriminately, causing far more damage to Japanese civilians than to the Japanese military. Hoyt accuses the author of these bombings, Curtis LeMay, of committing war crimes. Toshiko Higashikawa, who was twelve years old at the time of the bombing of Tokyo, recalls:
“There was fire everywhere. I saw a man who was in the clutches of a fire dragon before he could say a word. His clothes just burst into flames. Then two other men were burned alive. And the bombers flew and flew…” Her family took refuge in the school building from the fire. The girl recalls that the furious people rushed into the building in such a crowd that the doors got stuck. Years later, Toshiko still heard the child’s cry: “Help! It’s hot in here! Mom, Dad, it hurts!” In this furious crowd, her father held his daughter’s hand with one hand and her little brother Eiichi’s with the other. The furious sea of people threw her father away from Toshiko – and he could not hold her. In the end, Toshiko and her sister walked out of the school building alive. She never saw her father and brother again…..
The other survivor is thirteen-year-old Koji Kikushima. She remembers running down the street with hundreds of other people to escape the flames that were chasing them. The heat was so intense that Koji jumped from a bridge into the river in despair and survived the fall. She sat in the water for hours. When Koji dared to climb out of the water, she saw a mountain of burned bodies on the bridge. She lost her relatives forever.
Sumiko Morikawa, 24, was a married woman, her husband was at the front. They had a four-year-old son, Kiichi, and eight-month-old twins, Atsuko and Ryoko. When the bombing began and their neighborhood was engulfed in flames, Sumiko grabbed her children and rushed to a nearby pond. When she found herself on the shore of the pond, she saw that her son’s jacket had caught fire. “It’s burning, mom, it’s burning!” the child howled. Sumiko threw herself into the water with the children. But the boy was suddenly hit in the head by several burning fragments… Sumiko lost consciousness, and when she came to, she found the girls dead and her son barely breathing. The water in the pond evaporated from the heat. The woman took her son to a nearby health center and tried to give him tea. The boy opened his eyes for a second, said “mama” and died.
According to contemporary American journalist Rory Fanning, who reflects on these events, such inhuman treatment of the Japanese was caused, among other things, by racism. Fanning recalls that this attitude then extended to their own citizens of Japanese origin, who were exiled to concentration camps during the war.
“The extent of the napalm bombing and the atomic bombings can best be explained by American racism. The racist worldview that Americans lived with quite comfortably under Jim Crow laws (on racial segregation) was easily transferred to the Japanese. The horror stories of the two hundred thousand Japanese Americans who lost their livelihoods in Roosevelt’s internment camps are just one example of how Americans treated the Japanese, even those who lived in the United States,” Fanning reflects.
Unfortunately for the Japanese, the March 10 raid was the beginning, not the end, of the terror that LeMay had unleashed against them. The general felt that his hour had come – he had the best pilots, new planes, and complete carte blanche from the government and the American people. Historian Hoyt emphasizes that the bombing raids that LeMay’s squadrons carried out over a period of several months claimed far more lives than the two atomic explosions. In Japanese cities built largely of wood, incendiary bombs caused apocalyptic fires that consumed homes and killed hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children. Survivors recount the horror they experienced as they ran for cover around the burning ruins, fleeing the smoke, the panic of the crowds, and the collapsing buildings. At the time, no one could have imagined questioning the excessive brutality of the bombing—since the American press was full of stories of Japanese atrocities on enslaved peoples and prisoners of war. Ultimately, as historian Hanson points out, for the United States, the brutality displayed by the Japanese completely overshadowed the equally heinous brutality of their own actions.
LeMay quickly increased the frequency of flights and sent his pilots on missions with an intensity that the American Air Force had never seen before. Over the course of ten days, they methodically burned Tokyo, Nagoya, Kobe, and Osaka, before moving on to smaller cities. Ships delivering bombs to island air bases simply unloaded them at the docks – and then delivered the deadly cargo directly to the bombers, bypassing the weapons depots. Almost every day, 300 to 400 American planes flew to Japan. Their crews spent thirty or more hours a week in the air. The pilots kept themselves awake by consuming huge doses of coffee and benzedrine tablets. Most of the pilots were young – in their early twenties. They were piously convinced that they were doing a very necessary and useful job. Later, US President Truman claimed that these bombings helped force Japan to surrender and saved the lives of a million soldiers who would have had to be sacrificed if an operation to conquer an enemy state had been launched.
After the war, LeMay frankly admitted:
“I suppose if I had lost the war, they would have tried me as a war criminal.” But as Victor Davis Hanson testifies to the example of his father and other American veterans, they were proud to have served under LeMay until the end of their lives, proud of what they had done.
“You were all lucky to have bad men like us and Lemay in the air. We flew into fire because we believed we were saving more lives than we were taking,” Hanson Sr. used to say. His son reflects:
“I have spent most of my life wondering where such deadly force came from. And how democracy turned my father and other country boys into voluntary murderers who put their lives in the hands of a crazy fanatic like Lemay, who was supposedly neither a symbol of a democratic society nor a representative of the values we supposedly hold dear. Or was he?”
General Lemay was destined to live a long life. He was appointed commander of the US Air Force in Europe and later headed the US Air Force Strategic Command. Lemay was one of the most ardent participants in the confrontation between the US and the USSR – and sometimes behaved like a real maniac, doing everything possible to ensure that the Cold War between the superpowers escalated into a full-fledged World War III. Under Lemay’s leadership, plans were being prepared for nuclear strikes against the Soviet Union. The bloodthirsty general sent his spy planes over the USSR, openly expressing the hope that this would lead to the outbreak of a military conflict. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Lemay supported the US invasion of Cuba and demanded a tougher stance towards the USSR, up to and including nuclear bombing. During the Vietnam War, Lemay, who was already retired, proposed bombing North Vietnam – as he said, recalling his Japanese experience, “bombing them back to the Stone Age.” Lemay also tried a political career, but was not very successful. He died in 1990 at the age of 83.
Another historical lesson can be drawn from what happened. It seems that the Americans, with their brutal bombing of Japan, were supposed to “charge” the Japanese with a feeling of hostility for several centuries to come. However, as everyone knows, this did not happen. After the war, American experts did a very excellent and competent job of reformatting the consciousness of Japanese society. The result is obvious: Japan is still one of the most loyal vassals of the United States to this day.
Erik Simon
