The Firebombing of Tokyo

In his memoirs, the American air force general Curtis LeMay reflected on the results of the devastating air raid he had ordered on the crowded central zones of the Japanese capital, Tokyo, in March 1945. Although the raid resulted in the deaths of at least 80,000 people in one night – the heaviest death toll of any conventional bombing raid then or since – LeMay considered it a necessary price to pay in the effort to end the war in the Pacific. ‘We knew we were going to kill a lot of women and kids when we bombed that town,’ he admitted: ‘Had to be done.’

Until the night of 9/10 March 1945, the United States Army Air Force had focused on the doctrine of ‘precision bombing’. It had never been very precise, but the object was to destroy military and military-economic targets to undermine the enemy war effort. The devastation of Tokyo, by contrast, was carried out almost exclusively with incendiary bombs which aimed to burn the civilian city centre, rather than Japanese war industry. The change marked a significant shift in strategic thinking among American air force leaders. In the five months that followed, some two-thirds of Japan’s urban area was destroyed by incendiary bombing and a further 190,000 people, mostly Japanese civilians, were killed. In the Korean and Vietnam wars this strategic shift continued. Only in the past 40 years has precision again become the normative aim in the exercise of American air power.

‘Suffocation, incineration, and heat’

How did this shift come about? In Mission with LeMay: My Story, published in 1965, LeMay claimed it was his idea: ‘My decision and my order.’ The raid, he wrote, was carried out without prior sanction from the air force staff and its chief, General Henry ‘Hap’ Arnold. Many historians have since endorsed this claim, but it is only part of the truth. The air force had already begun to explore the possibilities of incendiary bombing from at least 1942; Arnold had been impressed with the firebombing carried out by RAF Bomber Command on German cities. The two air forces collaborated closely on the development of the technology and tactics of incendiary bombing. They experimented with different kinds of firebomb and shared results. Reports on incendiary bombing produced by the American Office of Scientific Research and Development were used by the British Air Ministry, and in 1943 experts from the United States Fire Protection Service arrived in Britain to give advice on how to initiate a conflagration. One of them, James McElroy, stayed until the end of the war, working with his British counterparts.

When Arnold asked the Committee of Operation Analysts in 1943 to consider the bombing of Japanese cities, they noted that the cities were ideal targets for firebombing because they were largely constructed of wood. They recommended urban areas as a target because they were thought to contain a multitude of small domestic workshops – so-called ‘invisible industry’– which could not be destroyed in any other way. In May 1943 American air force intelligence asked the recently founded Office of Strategic Services to provide reports on the flammability of Japanese cities, including Tokyo. The cities were divided into zones on inflammability maps, with bombing priority given to zone R1 (‘R’ meaning ‘residential’) in the city centres and zone X, in which factories were surrounded by workers’ housing. To test the vulnerability of Japanese housing, a mock Japanese village was built at the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah (a similar test site was built in Britain near Watford). The tests showed that Japanese houses and furnishings were extremely prone to catch fire, particularly with the new incendiary bombs filled with napalm, an inflammatory gel invented and tested for the first time in July 1942. By August 1944 the Boeing B-29, a long-range bomber capable of reaching Japanese home targets, was available to the air force. It was calculated that incendiary attacks could destroy 70 per cent of the main urban area in Japan and kill as many as 560,000 inhabitants by ‘suffocation, incineration, and heat’.

LeMay was almost certainly aware of the drift in air force thinking, and he had carried out an incendiary attack in December 1944 on the Chinese port of Hankou, used by the Japanese occupiers, which destroyed two-thirds of the central urban area by fire. But the decision to firebomb Tokyo also had other motives. Arnold was anxious that the air forces contribute in a visible and decisive way to the defeat of Japan after three years of conflict dominated by the army in the south-west Pacific and the navy in the battles across the central ocean. The objective was to win independence from the army and to establish a strategic air arm capable of bringing the war to the enemy without army or navy help. Arnold believed that the bombers could force Japan’s surrender and enhance the claim for autonomy.

LeMay knew that air force success was urgent, but up to March 1945 the B-29 force had been completely ineffective in high-level precision raids using mainly high-explosive bombs. Precision raids were almost impossible to conduct effectively because of the powerful jet-stream winds over Japan found at the bombers’ high altitude. Air force headquarters in Washington pressed LeMay to think about incendiary raids instead; the Tokyo operation was his answer to the pressure to perform. This raid would be conducted from 5,000ft (instead of bombing inaccurately from 20,000ft), with aircraft loaded primarily with incendiary clusters (M-69 napalm bombs), and at night when the Japanese air forces’ ineffective night-fighters would have little opportunity to react. Success in the raid would be a step towards redeeming the promise of American air power in the Pacific theatre.

Was the decision also a product of American racism towards the Japanese? Or the desire for revenge after Pearl Harbor? These are certainly arguments that have been made regularly since the war, and there is no doubt that there was deep racial antagonism against Japan’s armed forces not evident in the American conflict with the Germans in Europe. When Arnold later arrived at the air force main base on the island of Guam in June 1945, he found a mood indifferent to any doubts about killing Japanese, soldiers or civilians alike: ‘There is no feeling here of sparing any Japs, men, women, and children: gas, fire, anything to exterminate the entire race.’ Desire for revenge for the Pearl Harbor attack in December 1941 and the Bataan Death March in May 1942 prevailed in American public opinion and among servicemen. Neither racial hatred nor revenge were formal motives for the firebombing campaign, but they were sentiments that blunted any concern that indiscriminate killing of urban inhabitants violated conventional moral norms. ‘But to worry about the morality of what we were doing,’ wrote LeMay 20 years later: ‘Nuts!’

The firebombing

LeMay prepared what he called ‘Operation Meetinghouse’ in the first days of March 1945. At the briefing where he described the plan to his crew, one of the officers objected that the raid resembled exactly the British terror bombing of major German cities that the air forces had been trying not to imitate. LeMay told him that no war can be fought without civilian casualties. The mission outline prepared by air intelligence chose to emphasise the dispersed nature of Japanese war industry, hidden in small domestic workshops, which justified the firebombing of workers’ housing. The pilots were told to concentrate their incendiary loads on the most densely populated area of Tokyo, flying in low in quick succession to make sure the fires merged together quickly into an uncontrollable conflagration.

For the terrified population, escape was difficult as policemen tried to force them back to save their homes. Sparks filled the air, igniting clothing and hair. Women with babies strapped to their backs could not see that the infants were burning to death. People crowded for safety into solid, non-wooden buildings, but these gave no protection and they were roasted alive in the intense heat. Firefighters later found nothing left but buckles or pieces of bone, and piles of ash. Thousands crowded onto the bridges over the River Sumida running through the city, but they fell in heaps into the river and drowned. In the morning there were visible piles of charred bodies; the wind scattered the most incinerated bodies as a grey dust. Police estimates put the dead at 83,000 but a precise figure was difficult to calculate given the state of the remains. A total of 267,000 homes were burned, leaving one million of those who survived homeless.

The raid was the deadliest conventional bombing of the war, exceeding the 18,000 who died in one night in the Hamburg firestorm, and the 25,000 in Dresden. In one of the worst nights of the German Blitz on London, 10 May 1941, the number killed was 1,400. A few days after the firebombing, Emperor Hirohito left his palace to view the destruction. One day before the bombing he had instructed his chief adviser, Kido Kōichi, urgently to find a means of ending the war. But before that happened, Tokyo was subjected to further heavy raids, destroying more of the urban area than on 10 March, but with fewer casualties. The Tokyo memorial to the dead from the bombing numbers 104,000 victims.

Aftermath

LeMay was delighted with the result after spending a night awake. ‘A lot could go wrong,’ he told his public relations officer. Photo-reconnaissance confirmed that 16 square miles of the city, with a population density of more than 100,000 per square mile, had been burned out entirely. For the air force commanders it seemed possible now to speak of success in the air war. ‘Brilliantly planned and executed,’ Arnold wrote to LeMay, who replied that at last the capacity to destroy Japan’s war effort ‘lies within the capability of this command’. The press in the United States was unstinting in its enthusiasm for a raid that clearly targeted civilians, despite the reservations that had coloured reporting three weeks before on the Dresden raid. Nevertheless, LeMay’s publicity chief, St. Clair McElway, instructed reporters that the air force had not abandoned precision bombing and to guard against anyone trying to describe the raid as ‘area bombing’. Later he issued a statement that the air force was now conducting ‘pin-point incendiary bombing’, a linguistic sleight-of-hand designed to mask the deliberate and indiscriminate destruction of the civilian milieu.

The bombing of Tokyo did not bring Japan to the point of surrender, which occurred only five months later. By that time LeMay had destroyed 60 per cent of the Japanese urban area, not only major cities but also smaller towns, which were bombed from June 1945 onwards and some of which were destroyed almost 100 per cent. Nor was the bombing responsible for undermining the Japanese war economy decisively. By March 1945 Japan’s war economy was deep in crisis because of the naval blockade, which cut Japanese industry off from vital supplies of minerals and coal, and the population from essential supplies of food. The value of munitions produced in the first nine months of 1945 was a fraction of 1944, 3.2 million yen compared with 13.1 million the previous year. By the time the bombing started, many factories were working on half capacity or less, and were running out of aluminium, steel, and explosive, all dependent on overseas sources of raw materials. A report presented to Hirohito in June 1945 warned that by the end of the year imports would be down to zero. The bombers contributed to the blockade by dropping mines around the southern coast of the Japanese islands, but the damage was really done by the United States Navy. Even damage to factories was carried out more effectively by the naval air force dive-bombers, flying from offshore aircraft carriers.

More serious still was the crisis of food supply. A combination of poor harvests and shortages of agricultural equipment, fertiliser, and manpower was exacerbated by the collapse of overseas supply. Hunger was widespread by the summer of 1945, and fear that this might provoke serious social protest was a major reason for the search during the summer for a way to end the war. The Japanese political and military elite had a profound horror of communism, and they feared that they might face a repeat of the Russian situation in 1917 that led to the revolution. Bombing contributed to these fears by forcing mass evacuation, disrupting food supply, and increasing resentment of the imperial regime, but these effects were indirect rather than the intended outcome. By the end of the war almost ten million city dwellers had moved to the countryside or small townships.

It was at this point that the US leadership decided to drop the atomic bombs, and their impact on American and world opinion has overshadowed the effect of naval blockade and conventional bombing. The scientists and soldiers who collaborated in developing and building the first nuclear bombs were convinced that if they produced them in time they would bring the war to an immediate end, which the conventional bombing, horrific though the damage had been, had failed to do. The view that Japanese surrender must have been a result of atomic bombing has long been a standard argument to explain the end of the war. But the current view among historians is to place the two attacks into a different context. From the firebombing of Tokyo onwards, the emperor and the ‘peace faction’ in the political and military leadership had searched for a way of overcoming military intransigence and of terminating the war on terms the Allies would accept. The military regarded surrender as unacceptable and dishonourable, tantamount to the destruction of the historic Japanese nation, and wanted an apocalyptic fight to the finish.

It was the emperor who finally recognised that Japan could not defend the home islands from invasion, and his close advisers who feared that any delay in terminating the war would usher in domestic political and social disaster as the bombing continued its remorseless damage to the urban fabric. The bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, whose nature was not fully understood at the time in Tokyo, played only a modest part in convincing most of Japan’s elite that the war should not be fought to a final catastrophic end. When the Soviet Union declared war on 8 August 1945 and attacked Manchuria the following day, the prospect suddenly opened up that the Soviet Union might invade and occupy Japan before the Americans, bringing communism in its wake. The blitzkrieg of the Red Army through Manchuria and into Korea made this possibility more likely by the day. Hirohito accepted the inevitable and early on the morning of 10 August announced the ‘sacred decision’ to accept the Allied ultimatum to surrender delivered from the Potsdam Conference in late July. The ultimatum was accepted in full on 14 August and the war terminated. Hirohito never used the word surrender, but that is what it amounted to. The decision for Japan’s leadership meant that the Americans and their British Commonwealth allies would occupy Japan – not Stalin’s Soviet Union.

Remembrance

As a result of the two atomic attacks, which occurred simultaneously with the final Japanese efforts to terminate the war, the firebombing of Tokyo and its atrocious consequences have not had the effect on postwar memory of the end of the war in Japan that the onset of nuclear war has had. Efforts to memorialise the victims of the Tokyo raid began only in the late 1960s, partly because the alliance with the US, sealed in a security pact in 1952, made it prudent not to dwell on the impact of American bombing. Plans for a peace museum in Tokyo in the 1970s prompted a long debate about how the Japanese war effort should be represented and the idea of a museum petered out. In 2001 the Tokyo war dead were finally memorialised in a monument built in the capital in Yokoamichō Park.

With the passage of time, there has been mounting criticism not only of the decision to use atomic bombs, but of the deliberate burning of city residential areas and high civilian casualties. The Geneva Convention of 1949 offered some protection to civilians, but not until the Geneva Additional Protocols of 1977 was civilian immunity from deliberate harm enshrined in international law. The current status of the laws of war in international law would render the bombing of Tokyo a war crime, along with the two atomic attacks. None of these efforts to give legal protection to civilians has been effective enough in preventing the violation of these principles by powers that still see bombing civilians as unavoidable or expedient. There has been no repeat of bombing on the scale of Tokyo or Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but that is not because of any historical understanding of what happened and why, but because damage on that scale has been prevented by the operation of deterrence. Nonetheless, the story of Tokyo on the night of 9/10 March needs to be better known if history is to have any influence on the military decisions of the near future.

Richard Overy is Honorary Professor of History at the University of Exeter. His latest book Rain of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima, and the Surrender of Japan is published in March by Allen Lane.