by Jon Erwin
At midnight, back on Guam, General LeMay could not sleep. “A lot could go wrong,”7 he mused to one of his officers. “If this raid works the way I think it will, we can shorten the war. We’ve figured out a punch [the enemy’s] not expecting this time. I don’t think he’s got the right kind of flak to combat this kind of raid, and I don’t think he can keep his cities from being burned down—wiped right off the map.” LeMay drank from a six-ounce bottle of Coca-Cola8 and stared into the jungle, thinking of the three thousand young airmen who were about to fly over the heart of the Japanese Empire.
The City of Los Angeles arrived over Tokyo around midnight and flew a wide, circular observational pattern at 11,000 feet, eventually climbing to 20,000 feet, while the long B-29 armada followed at 5,000 to 8,000 feet below, maintaining 200-foot intervals in altitude separations to avoid collisions.
The first group carved giant blazing X patterns onto the city with roof-penetrating incendiary bombs to mark the target areas for the following aircraft to focus on. Within an hour, a series of massive fires congealed into an apocalyptic conflagration never before seen on earth. The first of 1,665 tons of bombs struck Tokyo at 12:08 a.m. on March 10. The emergency sirens went off at 12:15 a.m. Most of the bombs were 500-pound, finned E-46 cluster bombs, which burst at 2,000 feet and scattered thirty-eight individual M-69 fused napalm canisters that ignited on impact with whatever they struck.
A French journalist named Robert Guillain witnessed the B-29 assault from a hill on the edge of Tokyo and described the scene: “Their long, glinting wings, sharp as blades,9 could be seen through the oblique columns of smoke rising from the city, suddenly reflecting the fire from the furnace below, black silhouettes gliding through the fiery sky to reappear further on, shining golden against the dark roof of heaven or glittering blue, like meteors, in the searchlight beams spraying the vault from horizon to horizon.”
Brig. Gen. Thomas Power, the 314th Bomb Wing commander and overall commander of the raid, climbed into the Plexiglas nose of the City of Los Angeles and stared down at the apocalypse. He squeezed next to the bombardier and began marking a set of maps with a red pencil to record bomb impacts and spreading fires, muttering his approval at the swelling conflagration. At times, he rubbed his eyes and muttered, “Poor bastards.”10 He added, “What a horrible sight! God knows how many thousands are dying below us.”
Power turned to Captain Simeral to tell him how the attack was progressing. Simeral was pleased but nervous as the attack continued, especially after seeing a plane hit by antiaircraft fire plunge to the ground.
Even at 20,000 feet, Red recalled, it felt as if they were “flying in a blast furnace,” and the sickening smells of a city on fire reached them even at that height. Thermal updrafts were also making it harder and harder for Captain Simeral to control the plane.
Red grew increasingly concerned. “Power wasn’t content to fly over the target just once,” he recalled. “He wanted to go over Tokyo a second time and a third to see how it was going. You could feel the heat even at that altitude. It did a number on the trailing planes in the formation. They would come in and hit those thermals, and some would flip and crash or soar out of control like a leaf in a chimney.”
Red saw some B-29s get trapped in intense thermal updrafts and then be blasted vertically, as much as 10,000 feet, within a matter of seconds. Others were flipped upside down by the raging heat and turbulence.
“We lost fourteen brave crews that night,” he remembered.
Thousands of feet above the conflagration, pilot Chester Marshall observed, “We looked upon a ghastly scene11 spread out before us. Flames and debris were climbing several thousand feet, and a dark cloud of smoke hurled upward to more than 20,000 feet. It was a great relief for us to exit the smoke because the odor of burning flesh and debris was very nauseating.”
The aircrews entering the target area after the first wave witnessed surreal, hallucinatory scenes. The firestorm was visible from 150 miles away. One pilot reported that, from 50 miles, it looked like the dawn of a new sun being born on the earth’s surface. Robert Rodenhouse, the pilot of Lucky Strike, recalled, “When we got over the target it was like a thousand Christmas trees12 lit up all over.”
Some of the aircrews that had tuned into Japanese radio broadcasts swore they overheard love songs whose titles had a macabre relevance to the night’s events: “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” “My Old Flame,” and “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire.”13
Above the American warplanes was a quarter moon, and below them was enemy airspace with a few intermittent clouds dotting the sky above the titanic, raging megafires.
Bombardier Carl Manone’s B-29 approached the mainland at 1:00 a.m. “From my front-row seat in the nose,14 I noted a red glare in the sky,” he reported. “It was becoming apparent that the red sky was a reflection of Tokyo ablaze—fires ignited by the first B-29s to reach the target area. As we headed on a northwest bearing, Mount Fujiyama was clearly visible on our left. We proceeded over Shikoku [Island] and the Inland Sea. We then turned right to head for our target, which had an aiming point between the mouth of Tokyo harbor and the Emperor’s Palace—a distance of 5 to 6 miles.”
This was the most heavily defended area of Tokyo. Manone recalled, “Suddenly, as we proceeded into the heart of Tokyo, we saw a huge column of smoke, pitch black, right in front of us. We flew directly into the almost stationary smoke column, and as we did, our plane was completely blacked out.”
The plane shook and twisted violently, and it felt like the craft was vibrating all over the sky.
Manone remembered, “I activated the two buttons to open both the front and rear bomb bay doors. Immediately, you could smell Tokyo burning. Odors and smoke from the devastating fires below had entered the plane. A minute or two later, the navigator and I determined we had reached the point for ‘bombs away.’ When the bombs began to drop, the plane lurched from the weight release. As they left our bomb bays, a surprisingly new world suddenly appeared. Our lone B-29 pierced the north side of the cloud column at 5,500 to 6,000 feet. I looked down and Tokyo, stretched out below, was as bright as in daylight. We were smack in the middle of our flight path—north of Tokyo Bay on our right and the Emperor’s Palace to our left. In a few minutes, this still untouched part of Tokyo would be flooded with flames. We were right on target.”
Manone added, “As soon as we emerged from the towering smoke column, the ground searchlights pounced on our plane. The lights were so bright, I had to partially shield my eyes. I suspect that as many as ten to twelve searchlights flooded our plane at the same time as we continued our flight across the Tokyo landscape. From my firsthand view of the terrain ahead, all I could see was a succession of searchlights, and I knew the flak batteries were coordinated with the lights. Our plane was proceeding straight ahead despite the flak bumps and tracking lights.”
The roughly three thousand airmen attacking Tokyo this night had a host of things to worry about, any one of which could get them killed. Beyond the technical demands of flying their enormous aircraft, they were nervous about the possibility of collision in the chaotic sky. Their exterior red and green running lights were off.
Pilot Charles Phillips recalled, “Hundreds of B-29s were all in the same general area,15 all headed in the same direction at approximately the same speed.” He prayed they wouldn’t collide with each other.
The B-29ers also worried about antiaircraft fire, being rammed or shot up by fighters, the massive fire on the ground, and the potential structural damage, power loss, or fuel loss that would result if any of these affected them. They always worried about engine fires, which were very hard to extinguish in flight. Some Japanese fighters were equipped with two cannons that fired upward, enabling a pilot to approach the bombers from below, fire at the blind spot of the bomb bays, and destroy the bombers.
Like other Allied personnel in Asia and the Pacific, the crews were terrified at the prospect of being taken captive and the barbaric mistreatment t
hat would follow. Some airmen feared that, if they were hit by enemy fire at low altitude, they wouldn’t have sufficient time to get out of the plane. So they decided to unfasten their seat belts as a precautionary measure.
Airmen who couldn’t swim (like Red) had reason to worry about ditching in the Pacific. Of the forty-eight B-29s that were known to have ditched in the ocean, only 30 percent of the crewmen had been rescued.
They also had reason to be fearful of a wrong move by a bombardier, who could send an errant bomb on the off-limits imperial palace at the center of Tokyo, with potentially history-changing consequences if the emperor were killed. If such an accident were to happen, the Allies had every reason to expect the Japanese military, already fighting with what was widely seen to be fanatical intensity, would be enraged to an unimaginable magnitude. The civilian population would react similarly, and the prospects of an Allied victory and successful postwar occupation would be made exponentially more difficult.
The bomber nicknamed T-Square 9 made landfall at 2:00 a.m. Tokyo time and entered a giant cloud created by the raging firestorm. “As our B-29 entered the dirty-gray cloud,” Charles Phillips remembered, “it was tossed about by the wildly turbulent air. We were pinned to our seats, and I used all my skill as an instrument pilot to bring us back to a wings-level condition, over and over again.”
Approaching the center of the cloud mass, the Superfortress was pushed upward at 2,000 feet per minute in a tremendous shear created by the boiling hot air. “Those of us in the forward compartment saw pieces of window and door frames flying by the airplane. The odor was overpowering. It was the smell of a great fire, but it was also the smell of death. The sharp increase in our airspeed was most alarming. Because of the powerful updraft, our B-29 was approaching the red-line, or placard, airspeed of 300 miles per hour, above which it was too unsafe to fly. I had to pull the power back, using the throttles, until I had all four engines operating at idle. We were still climbing at 2,000 feet per minute, with the air speed exceeding 350 miles per hour, well above the placard speed. We could do nothing but allow the airplane to climb, for fear of breaking up the airplane. And climb we did, popping out at about 14,000 feet. To have held the B-29 down to our briefed altitude would have resulted in increases in airspeed to extremely dangerous proportions. Operating in turbulence well above the placard speed eventually would have led to structural failure and breakup [of the aircraft]. Meanwhile, we were bouncing around like a leaf in a windstorm.”
When the B-29 released its 7-ton bombload, the plane abruptly lurched upward several hundred feet. “Suddenly we zoomed out of the big firestorm cloud into clear air,” Phillips recalled. “Just then we were caught in a severely violent downdraft. Our shoulders were pinned to the top of the cabin while the airplane dropped out from under us. We hung on to the control columns for dear life. This situation lasted for several seconds. Then we sank back into our seats and regained control of the airplane. For me and my crew, it was the wildest flight with the most severe turbulence I have ever experienced in over seven thousand hours of flying.”
Even under ideal conditions, B-29s are hard to fly, and Phillips and his copilot had to fight hard on the half-steering-wheel mechanism to control the plane and keep it steady.
Some planes were slammed straight up in the sky about 5,000 feet or more in a matter of seconds by the thermal updrafts. Aboard Sentimental Journey, pilot Philip Webster was stunned to look out the window and see the giant wings of the aircraft whipping up and down 16 feet in the turbulence, flapping like a bird’s wings. The planes were built to allow for this, but the shaking was so severe that Webster wondered when the wings would snap off. The light from the firestorm was so bright, he said he could have read a newspaper in the cockpit.
He recalled, “As we approached, the conflagration was such16 that it didn’t really make any difference where we dropped our bombs, so I tried to pick out a place that was not burning and drop our bombs there. Then we hit the thermals. It flipped me on my back. One of my gunners looked down and he saw nothing but clouds and smoke, and he looked up and all he saw was fire, and he realized we were on our back.”
To recover from the inverted position, Webster executed a split-S maneuver with the enormous aircraft, plunging it down in a half roll and pulling away right-side-up in the opposite direction from which he started.
In other late-arriving B-29s, crewmen who didn’t have their seat belts buckled were violently thrown around the cabin when they hit the updrafts. Orville Blackburn recalled, “It almost cost us our life17 [when] we went from 5,000 feet out of control to 13,000 feet.” He looked down at the city and saw a maelstrom of fire and swirling debris that reminded him of “a bonfire where everything goes in different directions.”
Years later, pilot Ray Clanton explained the experience as “absolutely unreal,” adding, “You’re being buffeted all over the sky because of these thermals. At 7,500 feet we hit a downdraft, and we dropped 1,000 feet before you could bat an eye. And stuff is flying all over the cabin, all over the aircraft.”
For reasons unknown to this day, three bombers from different groups dropped their bombs onto Tokyo and then crashed into 5,657-foot Mount Fubo in the Zao Mountains at nearly the same time, killing all aboard.
Antiaircraft scored a direct hit on Tall in the Saddle just after it released its bombs, causing it to plummet straight down into the target area and crash.
Zero Auer, piloted by Robert Auer of the Nineteenth Bombardment Group out of Guam, was hit dead center by antiaircraft, flew several miles north of Tokyo, and then broke apart. All the crewmen died except one, who bailed out.
While the City of Los Angeles flew circles over Tokyo, Red climbed up into the astrodome above the bomb bay and on top of the plane, his earphones hooked into an extension so he could monitor the radio. Awestruck, he gazed on a sight never before seen on earth on such a scale: an urban metropolis being devoured by a cataclysmic fire. The crystal-clear night was filled with oceans of fire and smoke and debris. He saw huge sections of the city on fire, flanked by blacked-out sections in total darkness. He saw scores of B-29s illuminated in orange, glistening in the light as they passed over the dark areas. He saw fires erupt in the center of Tokyo near the imperial palace and the railroad station and then spread over the districts on the east side of the Sumida River.
To pilot Tony Simeral, the earth appeared to be alive with colossal Fourth of July sparklers, flickering white and orange, the product of searchlights highlighting thousands of M-69 bomb clusters as they detonated in midair, their long, white tail stabilizers-streamers guiding their fall to the ground.
Twenty thousand feet below Red’s observation post in the sky, the gates of Hades opened under Tokyo, and the planet’s molten core seemed to flood to the surface and feed upon the city.
French journalist Robert Guillain described the scene: “Bright flashes illuminate the sky’s shadows,18 Christmas trees blossoming with flame in the depths of the night, then hurtling downward in zigzagging bouquets of flame, whistling as they fall. Barely fifteen minutes after the beginning of the attack, the fire whipped up by the wind started to rake through the depths of the wooden city.”
Author John Dower reported, “The heat from the conflagration19 was so intense that in some places canals boiled, metal melted, and buildings and human beings burst spontaneously into flames.”
Tokyo’s defenses were pathetically weak in the face of such an attack. The Tenth Air Division sortied many of its ninety available night fighters, and the First Antiaircraft Division’s searchlight and antiaircraft batteries swept the sky. But they had relatively little effect on the relentless onslaught. The entire Japanese defense system was surprised and saturated by the massive low-level night attack, just as LeMay had hoped.
The severely undermanned, underequipped, and poorly trained Tokyo fire department and civil defense squads lost control of the fires as soon as they started. Only 8,000 firemen were available to cover a city of 213 square miles,
with primitive equipment such as towed water carts and hand pumps. Only one fire truck had a working aerial extension ladder. It was an inexplicably poor defense against fire in a highly combustible city, especially since the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923 had triggered fires that destroyed more than half of Tokyo and killed up to 140,000 people.
Those fire trucks that were mobilized on the night of March 9–10, 1945, were often stuck in waves of human congestion. As the Tokyo fire chief raced helplessly from blaze to blaze, his car twice caught fire. Around one hundred fire trucks were incinerated, along with hundreds of firefighters and auxiliaries. In one station, all the firemen were burned to death while attempting to start their equipment.
Pilot Robert Morgan described the scene when his craft entered Tokyo airspace: “Other B-29s around us were outlined in orange20 from the great groundfires. Hundreds of searchlights swept madly across the skies, the beams mostly eaten up by smoke, like some hellish Hollywood premiere night down there. Debris, great jagged shapes of burning things, floated upward toward us along with the smoke. The smoke must have reached 5 miles into the stratosphere before it thinned out.”
The enemy’s capital city was almost defenseless: “Most of the Japanese Zeroes and Ginga fighters still sat, some of them melted, on their airstrips. Of those that had managed to get into the air, the thermal windstorms whipped up by the fires tossed them about the skies like helpless kites. As for the ground artillery fire, it was mostly inconsequential—the guns were calibrated for the wrong altitudes.”
Morgan added, “We were bombing with damn near impunity.”
There were few air raid shelters in the city other than the crude so-called bokugo, little holes dug in backyards and cellars. One properly hardened shelter was provided on the grounds of the imperial palace for the emperor and his family, who spent the night belowground, listening to the pounding of the bombs while trying to ignore the unpleasant acrid smells drifting through the vents of the air filtration system.
