Bombing of Tokyo

• 1. Introduction

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  The bombing of Tokyo on the night of the 9th of March 1945 was the single most destructive aerial raid in human history. Operation Meetinghouse, as the mission was codenamed, reduced vast stretches of central Tokyo to ash before dawn. It surpassed the attacks on Dresden and Hamburg, and it caused more destruction, as a single event, than either of the atomic bombings. Three years earlier, American planes had reached Tokyo for the first time on a mission so limited in scope it was mostly symbolic. Between that first gesture and this night of fire lay a chain of decisions, each consequential in its own right. What technology made Japan reachable from the air at this scale? What choices brought incendiary bombs into residential neighborhoods rather than military installations? And what did Tokyo become, and what happened to the people who survived it, in the long aftermath of the flames?

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• 2. The Doolittle Raid

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  On the 18th of April 1942, the USS Hornet's task force was spotted by a Japanese picket boat. The detection came before the force reached its planned launch point. Sixteen B-25 Mitchell bombers, modified for carrier operations, were forced to take off from a greater distance than intended. Their targets were Tokyo and Yokohama. The mission was framed as retaliation for Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor four months earlier, and its symbolic weight was considerable. Its practical effect on Japan's warfighting capacity, however, was minimal. What it delivered, instead, was a significant propaganda victory for the United States.

  Not one of the sixteen B-25s reached its designated airfield in China. Crews were forced to crash or ditch their aircraft short of the intended landing zones. One plane came down inside the neutral Soviet Union. Its crew was interned by Soviet authorities, then smuggled across the border into Iran on the 11th of May 1943. Two other crews were captured by Japanese forces in occupied China. Three of those captured crewmen were later executed by Japanese troops.

  The Doolittle Raid proved American resolve, but its bombs left almost no lasting mark on Japan's industrial capacity. The next phase of the air campaign would require something fundamentally different: the means to reach Japan repeatedly, at scale, without depending on airfields on the Asian mainland.

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• 3. The Turn to Fire

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  The B-29 Superfortress had an operational range of 3,250 nautical miles. It could attack at altitudes above 30,000 feet, where Japanese air defenses struggled to follow. Nearly 90% of all bombs eventually dropped on the Japanese home islands would be delivered by B-29s.

  Saipan and Tinian, seized in June 1944, gave American forces the island bases necessary to strike Japan's home islands with regularity. Before that, the Twentieth Air Force had conducted bombing raids from mainland China under Operation Matterhorn, run by XX Bomber Command. Those missions could not reach Tokyo, and the supply lines stretching from India were circuitous and expensive to maintain. Mariana Islands operations began in November 1944, but high-altitude bombing quickly proved ineffective. Powerful winds were carrying bombs off target. American commanders were encountering the jet stream, a phenomenon they had not yet named or understood.

  Between May and September 1943, the U.S. had already been testing an alternative approach. Bombing trials were conducted on a set-piece installation called the Japanese Village, at the Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah. Those trials established the effectiveness of incendiary bombs against wood-and-paper construction of the kind common in Japanese cities. General Curtis LeMay ordered his bomber wings to shift to incendiary munitions. The campaign's first incendiary attack struck Kobe on the 4th of February 1945. Tokyo received its first incendiary strike on the 25th of February 1945. One hundred and seventy-four B-29s flew a high-altitude daylight raid and burned roughly 643 acres of the snow-covered city, dropping 453.7 tons of bombs.

  LeMay then pushed further. He ordered future raids on Tokyo to fly between 5,000 and 9,000 feet, at night. His reasoning: Japanese air defenses were weakest in that altitude band, and fighter defenses performed poorly in darkness. He stripped all defensive guns from the B-29s except the tail gun, making the aircraft lighter and capable of carrying more ordnance. Target selection drew on maps produced by the Office of Strategic Services, which had ranked Tokyo's five wards by their susceptibility to fire. OSS analysts had drawn on building density, structural composition, and risk assessments prepared by Japanese insurance companies before the war. Neighborhoods were chosen primarily for how well they were expected to burn. LeMay set the date for the first full test of this doctrine: the 9th of March 1945.

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• 4. Operation Meetinghouse

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  Three hundred and thirty-four B-29s took off for the mission codenamed Operation Meetinghouse. On the night of the 9th of March 1945, 279 of them reached the city and dropped 1,665 tons of incendiary bombs on the Shitamachi neighborhood. The primary weapon was the 500-pound E-46 cluster bomb, which released 38 smaller M69 incendiary bomblets at altitudes between 2,000 and 2,500 feet. Each M69 punched through thin roofing material or landed on the ground. Three to five seconds later, it ignited, ejecting a jet of burning napalm. A smaller number of M47 bombs were also deployed: 100-pound devices filled with jelled gasoline and white phosphorus, designed to ignite on impact.

  The first B-29s to arrive over Tokyo dropped their loads in a large X pattern, centered over the dock areas of Koto and Chuo wards. Follow-on aircraft aimed toward the burning X. Within the first two hours of the raid, the spreading fires had overwhelmed Japanese firefighting capabilities. Individual blazes merged into a general conflagration. Prevailing winds, gusting at 17 to 28 miles per hour, drove the flames outward with great force. Those winds were too strong to produce the self-reinforcing inward vortex that defines a true firestorm. For those trying to escape the burning city, the distinction was academic.

  The conflagration destroyed approximately 15.8 square miles of the city. Twenty-seven B-29s were lost to enemy gunfire, mechanical failure, or the violent updrafts generated by the fires below. American intelligence in early 1945 had estimated that over half of Tokyo's industry was spread across residential and commercial neighborhoods rather than concentrated in dedicated industrial zones. The firebombing destroyed much of that dispersed industrial base, cutting the city's total output in half. The Tokyo police force later counted 267,171 buildings destroyed, a figure that left more than one million residents without homes.

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• 5. Counting the Dead

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  No single figure for the death toll from Operation Meetinghouse went uncontested. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey later estimated that nearly 88,000 people died in the raid of the 9th to the 10th of March and 41,000 were injured. The Tokyo Fire Department's count was higher: 97,000 killed and 125,000 wounded. The Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department established its own figures at 83,793 dead and 40,918 wounded.

  Historian Richard Rhodes placed the death toll above 100,000. Writing in 1968, historian Gabriel Kolko cited 125,000 deaths. Professor Elise K. Tipton of Japan Studies offered a broad range of 75,000 to 200,000 fatalities. Donald L. Miller, citing Knox Burger, gave "at least 100,000" Japanese deaths and "about one million" injured. Historian Mark Selden argued that the commonly cited figure of roughly 100,000 might itself be too low. Both Japanese and American authorities, he suggested, had possible reasons for understating the toll. He pointed to the population density of the burned areas, the ferocity of the winds that night, and survivor accounts as evidence for a higher figure. An estimated 1.5 million people had been living in the areas consumed by fire. Some postwar analysts have characterized the raids as a war crime, pointing to the deliberate targeting of civilian neighborhoods and the scale of civilian deaths.

  The wider American bombing campaign against Japan as a whole killed more than 300,000 people and injured a further 400,000, the great majority of them civilians. Emperor Hirohito personally toured the destroyed areas of Tokyo in March 1945. What he witnessed contributed to his eventual decision to accept Allied surrender terms. Japan surrendered six months after the March raid.

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• 6. Ruins and Memory

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  In 1945 and 1946, Tokyo received 26.6% of Japan's national reconstruction budget, a share proportional to its bombing damage. By 1949, that allocation had fallen to just 10.9%. Simultaneously, runaway inflation had significantly eroded the value of the Japanese currency. Occupation authority figures such as Joseph Dodge stepped in to cut back government rebuilding programs, redirecting resources toward roads and basic transportation infrastructure. Tokyo did not experience fast economic growth until the 1950s.

  Between 1948 and 1951, the ashes of 105,400 people killed in the Tokyo attacks were interred at Yokoamicho Park in Sumida Ward. A memorial opened there in March 2001. The park maintains a list of names built from applications submitted by victims' families. As of March 2020, that list carried 81,273 names. Families may still apply to have additional names included.

  Japanese author Katsumoto Saotome, a survivor of the 10th of March 1945 firebombing, helped start a library in Koto Ward dedicated to preserving the history of the raids. It is called the Center of the Tokyo Raids and War Damage. The center holds documents, survivor testimonies, and accounts gathered by Saotome and the Association to Record the Tokyo Air Raid.

  In 2007, 112 bereaved family members brought a class action against the Japanese government. They were members of the Association for the Bereaved Families of the Victims of the Tokyo Air Raids. Their demands included a formal apology and 1.232 billion yen in compensation. Their suit argued that the government had failed to end the war sooner and that postwar support had gone disproportionately to former military personnel rather than civilian victims. The case was dismissed in December 2009. Appeals were rejected, and in May 2013 the Supreme Court denied the final appeal. That same year, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's cabinet called the raids "incompatible with humanitarianism, which is one of the foundations of international law." The cabinet also acknowledged that judging their legality under the laws of the time remained difficult.

  In Higashimurayama, Tokyo, a memorial commemorates eleven American crewmen whose B-29 crashed on the 2nd of April 1945. The memorial takes the form of a Heiwa Kannon Buddhist statue. It was built by the local farmer on whose land the aircraft came down. After the war, that farmer sought out the families of the fallen men. He built the statue in their honor, on the soil where they died.

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