In some sections of the city the first air raid alarms (kshkeiho!) didn’t sound until minutes after the first bombs fell. Six thousand firefighters were deployed on 843 fire trucks, but they were helpless before the conflagration. Houses exploded, buildings burned like ovens, and entire city blocks ignited. The heat turned shallow canals into boiling cauldrons. Water from fire hoses simply vaporized. Men, women, and children ran from flames that surged down city streets as if a dam had burst its locks. They threw themselves into water tanks and stood on rooftops, only to be incinerated or to collapse from asphyxiation as the fires consumed the oxygen in the air. The radiant heat caused dehydration, respiratory collapse, and agonizing death. People crumpled like puppets to two-thirds their normal size. The Germans had a word for it—Bombenbrandschrumpfleichen—meaning “incendiary bomb shrunken bodies.” Corpses piled up beneath the Kototoi Bridge like thousands of mannequins.
Across the Sumida River in Asakusa, the police and civilian fire wardens urged residents to form bucket brigades, to remove food and valuables from their homes, and to take cover in the nearby air raid shelters. But the fires devoured everything in their path—wood, paper, tatami, air raid shelters, clothing, hair, flesh. Hundreds crowded into the 200-year-old Kwan Yin Buddhist temple, dedicated to the goddess of mercy, which had miraculously protected them during the 1923 earthquake, but magnesium firebombs quickly penetrated its roof. Rafters dripping with flames collapsed into the crowds below, setting entire families alight. Those who escaped faced shrapnel and magnesium sparks streaming down from the sky. There was no sanctuary to be had, neither aboveground nor underground, not in Sumida Park nor in the Sumida River.
“The very streets were rivers of fire,” said police photographer Ishikawa Takeo. “Everywhere one could see flaming pieces of furniture exploding in the heat, while the people themselves blazed like matchsticks.” Tōkyō’s citizens died naked, blackened, shrunken in size, their flesh split open like overcooked meat. The police found bodies that had literally melted into one another. Others perished, as Ishikawa’s photographs revealed, like the victims of Pompeii, in medias res, their last living gestures petrified in disbelief, mouths agape, silently screaming, hands raised in supplication, knees bent, heads shielded by the crook of an arm, as if trying to hide from the horror, as if trying to go to sleep.
“If you could look down in hell,” said Ronald Routhier, “that’s just what it would look like.”
As he headed back toward Guam, 2nd Lieutenant Bernard Greene, a bombardier from the 314th Bomb Wing, could see “a reddish glow 185 miles out to sea and the curvature of the earth because of it.” When Ed Keyser and the boys from the 499th Bomb Group touched down at Isley Field on Saipan, Chaplain William Bray stood by the runway and made the sign of the cross, as he always did at takeoff and landing.
LeMay already knew from Brigadier General Thomas S. Power that the mission had been a “total success,” but the airmen weren’t entirely aware of the extent of the damage they had inflicted on Tōkyō. Except for one thing: B-29s weren’t pressurized when the bomb bays were open. At high altitude, crewmen put on their oxygen masks. At low altitude, the cabin filled with whatever was in the air. And what was in the air over Tōkyō in the early morning hours of March 10, 1945, was the acrid odor of burned human flesh.
“Excellent results,” wrote Jules Stillman in his diary. “Biggest and best raid of the season.”
An AP article that ran in the Sunday, March 11, edition of The New York Times could only wonder at “how many perished in the holocaust.” But Secretary of War Stimson, acutely aware of the uproar that had followed the bombing of Dresden, told J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Manhattan Project, that he “thought it appalling that there should be no protest in the United States over such wholesale slaughter.”
LeMay had no qualms. “We knew we were going to kill a lot of women and kids when we burned that town,” he said bluntly. “Had to be done.” General Arnold radioed that he was “exceptionally well pleased” with the results.
“I believe that all those under my command on these island bases have by their participation in this single operation shortened this war,” LeMay announced in a press release that very day. Churchill had used the same justification for bombing Dresden.
The American firebombing of Tōkyō left 83,793 dead, and 40,918 wounded. A total of 267,171 buildings were destroyed; 1,008,005 people were homeless. Of the city, 15.8 square miles were burned, including 17 percent of Tōkyō’s industrial area and 63 percent of its commercial district. The pulse of the city’s residential area was stilled. In one night an area more than two-thirds the size of Manhattan had been wiped out.
“Even after all the bones were buried,” said Kobayashi Hiroyasu, when it rained over Tōkyō, “a blue flame burned. From the phosphorus. Soldiers stationed there used to say, ‘Maybe they’ll come out tonight.’ Thinking of the ghosts and the blue flames.”
It took almost a month to remove the dead from Tōkyō. In the meantime, the XXI Bomber Command launched a strike against Nagoya on March 11, followed by Osaka on March 13. Then came Kōbe.
23
Total War
THE INCENDIARY RAIDS demonstrated the woeful inadequacy of Japanese air defense and fire-control systems. For each town chōkai (village assocations) were organized, which were divided into tonari-gumi (neighborhood associations) of fifteen to thirty households in Kōbe and broken down still further into rimpo, organizations of five to ten houses for neighbors’ mutual assistance. Families were taught how to extinguish fires, run bucket relays, weather blackouts, and take shelter during bombings. Each home was supposed to be equipped with 40-gallon water tanks, 2.5-gallon buckets, straw mats with which to beat out fires, sand, fire prevention pumps, fireproof clothes, ropes, shovels, and portable ladders. It was recommended that the heads of households study the flow of water from rivers, canals, and ponds.
In December 1944 local municipalities distributed The Anti-Air Raid Guidelines for Families and Tonari-gumi. Men were advised to wear steel helmets and leggings during air raids. Women dressed in monpe and donned padded bōkō zukin, cotton caps that were supposed to “protect the head from the sky,” as did their children. Badges identified individual blood types, and emergency boxes were issued that contained parched beans, preserved foods, and first aid. Another government publication, An Outline for Building Air Raid Shelters, instructed residents on how to construct their own three-foot-deep shelters beneath the floors of their houses, or build open and covered trenches.
The air raid warning signal (one long blast) and the alarm (a continuous wail) “went off so often it was like the boy crying wolf,” said Araki Kiyoshi, who was thirteen at the time. “You trusted it less and less.” Schoolchildren were told to get under their desks and cover their eyes and ears during air alerts. They learned how to distinguish enemy carrier-based planes and were taught to run at right angles to evade a fighter’s line of fire. Posters denouncing the “American and British beasts” were hung throughout Kōbe, and straw effigies of Roosevelt and Churchill were woven to allow passersby to stab them with bamboo spears.
But the air raid precautions were as useless against incendiaries as primitive superstitions. Bomb shelters became death traps. Municipal services were overwhelmed by the ferocity of the B-29 assaults. In Kōbe, all the fire battalion chiefs were policemen, and many of those in firefighting positions had no fire-prevention training whatsoever. Fire departments lacked CO2 extinguishers, foam, water tanks with booster pumps, and salvage and wrecking equipment. Kōbe’s industries developed their own factory air raid protection forces but were short on fire pumps as well. The city’s water supply system was insufficient even under normal conditions.
Only the two and a half miles of tunnels that were feverishly being dug into the slopes of the Rokkō Mountains were safe. Throughout Japan, more than 10 million people would leave the cities for the countryside to escape the American firebombings. Indeed, tens of thousands of women, child
ren, elderly, and infirm fled Kōbe in 1944-45. But by January 1945, an estimated 784,000 people remained behind. Wedged between the mountains and the sea on a strip of land ten miles long, Kōbe made an ideal incendiary target.
“I’m not afraid to fly in combat, but on each mission I become more and more aware of the insipid foolishness of war,” pilot Robert Copeland wrote to his mother before the raid. “I don’t want to kill anyone. I want to be free to live my life in peace, doing the things I like to do most. . . . It hurts very deeply to have that which is paramount to me connected with fear, pain and even death.”
On the night of March 16-17, 1945, 370 B-29s carried out Mission No. 43 over Kōbe from 6,800 feet. Miss Leading Lady led the way. The planes were armed with the M17AI, a 500-pound cluster of 110 four-pound magnesium thermite incendiaries because stocks of M-69s and M-47s were running low.
The Superforts swept Kōbe from west to east, and then from south to north, dropping a record 2,355 tons of bombs in two hours. It was the most concentrated bombardment to date and the first in which the B-29s encountered fighter opposition from the Japanese. Flak was medium to heavy and close enough for Sergeant Stillman’s taste, ripping into the No. 3 engine of the Beaubomber and splintering the right front bomb bay door. The Japs were “waking up,” as Stillman put it. Three hundred and fourteen enemy fighters—Irvings, Zekes, Tonys, Tōjōs, and Oscars—made ninety-three separate passes at American bombers, but to little effect.
Around midnight the men at the Kōbe POW Hospital were awakened by the short blasts of air raid sirens. They parted the black air raid curtains and looked up in amazement. The B-29s were flying in so low, you could see their identification numbers as searchlights flashed on them. “It was the most spectacular and yet awesome sight we had so far been privileged to see,” said Stan Smith. The Americans had finally come. They had rescued POWs in a daring Ranger raid on Cabanatuan on January 29, 1945. They had liberated Manila after a ferocious battle waged by General Krueger’s Sixth Army, during which 100,000 civilians died. They had thrown open the gates of Bilibid Prison on February 4, “the most unforgettable day of all of our lives,” remarked Pharmacist’s Mate Robert W. Kentner. And they had launched the campaign to take back the Rock in a courageous airborne and amphibious assault executed by the 503rd Regimental Combat Team. Now the U.S. Army Air Force dominated the skies over Honsh.
Thank God the B-29s were targeting the waterfront, Fred Berley sighed with relief. The planes were heading to the southwest. The sight of them whipped one Japanese sergeant into a fury. He randomly started beating prisoners with a stick, whacking Fred and Murray between the shoulders. Ōhashi apologized for his behavior. The man was shell-shocked, he explained. Murray thought he must have lost a friend or relative in one of the earlier air attacks.
At Kōbe House the POWs were dressed and standing by as ordered, “waiting for our own building to be hit,” said John Lane, an Australian who had been with the 2nd 4th Machine Gun Battalion at the fall of Singapore. Hundreds of antiaircraft guns fired into the nighttime sky. Murray saw one B-29 get caught in the glare of searchlights over the harbor and plunge from the sky. He couldn’t help but wonder about the fate of its crew. Then at 0300 Harold Mason, a civilian at Futatabi Internment Camp, watched another B-29 break into pieces over Mt. Futatabi, two miles north of central Kōbe. The Superfort had been rammed by a “Tony”—a Kawasaki Ki-61 army fighter—and burst into flames. Two parachutes mushroomed to the ground. The tail section fell 500 yards from the camp.
Radio operator Robert Doty’s plane was one of the last over Kōbe, a “tail-end Charlie.” Suddenly a searchlight locked on to it, and the cabin lit up like the Fourth of July. The tail-gunner screamed that a kamikaze was closing in fast, but the gunners had no ammunition. The pilot spotted a dark cloud and dove into it after the bombs were dropped, but it turned out to be smoke from the ground fires over Kōbe. Thermal up-drafts bounced the plane around “like a feather in a windstorm. We did everything but turn over. Two minutes later we emerged at 25,000 feet.” A whole section of the B-29’s floorboards had been torn loose. Staff Sergeant Doty ended up in the belly of the B-29, still strapped to his chair and secured to the floor, but between two alternators and with a toilet slowly leaking over his head. The plane reeked of smoke.
By the time the raid was over, one-fifth of Kōbe was burned out, including the eastern half of the business district and an industrial sector to the southeast. Five hundred industrial buildings were destroyed, and 162 were damaged, among them the Kawasaki shipyards, which had produced some 2,000 submarines for the Imperial Japanese Navy. A total of 65,951 homes were in ruins; 2,669 people were killed; 11,289 were injured; and 242,468 were left homeless. The Japanese press deliberately downplayed the air attacks and the destruction caused by them. But those on the ground during the raid on Kōbe weren’t so easily fooled.
Fujimoto Toshio was sixteen years old, but he went to bed early on the night of March 16. He lived on the east side of Yakusenji Temple in the Minami-Sakasegawa section of Hyōgo Ward in Kōbe. It was a neighborhood of small shops, a movie theater, a playhouse, and numerous temples. Toshio worked during the day as an apprentice at Mitsubishi Electric. After dark the air raid corps made their rounds to urge people to observe the blackout. Oddly, Toshio hadn’t heard the air raid siren that night. He awoke to the rumble of aircraft. When he went outside to investigate, he saw what appeared to be a rope falling from the sky. Suddenly night turned into day. It was a flare from Miss Leading Lady. Toshio woke his family immediately. They had agreed beforehand that in the event of an air raid, they would meet under the Owada bridge. The bridge was reinforced with steel plates to protect it from horse hooves. Toshio had seen POWs unloading cargo there from barges in Hyōgo Canal.
His mother, younger brother, and sister were the first to leave the house. Then a bomb broke through the roof, and Toshio started to run. When he reached the bridge, smoke was pouring out from the passageway beneath it. Toshio was surrounded by flames. He leaped into the canal and landed in a boat. The sea air was cool, but above him flames reached for the sky. This is hell, Toshio thought. The wind picked up, and the boat caught fire. Toshio jumped into a lighter beside it and lost consciousness.
When he awoke, dawn was breaking. Toshio found himself on the shore, pinned beneath an overturned boat. He struggled to get free. There was no one moving anymore on the bridge. A pitch-black corpse lay in a toilet nearby. Half a dozen people were clustered together, burned to death. One of them, he thought, was his younger sister. Toshio suffered compound fractures in both legs. His mother and brother were badly burned on the arms and legs. His parents were never able to identify his sister’s remains.
Thirteen-year-old Tsuji Hideko had been evacuated from Kōbe but returned so she could attend her graduation. Her family lived in a residential sector of Hygo Ward, sandwiched between a Kawasaki and Mitsubishi factory. They were startled awake in the early morning hours of March 17 and found themselves in the midst of exploding bombs, their house on fire. Hideko’s father, Shimada Kaichi, shouted to the children to dunk their cotton sleeping mats in a pail of water to protect their heads. Her older sister, Kayoko, threw five-year-old Shji onto her back. Her mother grabbed the baby, Tsuruyo. One-year-old Tadahiro was killed instantly.
They ran toward the Owada bridge, but fires licked the sky, drew breath from their own perimeters, and then billowed out into a raging firestorm. Hideko’s nine-year-old brother, Masaru, burst into flames. Only his shoes remained. Her mother and father, badly burned on the face, arms, and legs, collapsed at the bridge. Hideko begged a man on the street for help. She was dying. Wouldn’t he please help her? He pushed her away, and she fell over her father, who lay unconscious. A blackened body lay nearby. She recognized the change purse—it was her mother’s. The force of Hideko’s fall woke Kaichi, and together they tried to tamp down the flames with their bare hands. They ran toward the canal, taking little Tsuruyo with them, but the canal was a sheet of fire. Before losing consci
ousness, Hideko remembered being evacuated by a military vehicle. When she came to, she was in an aid station at Dojo Elementary School. Her skin was so badly burned, it simply peeled off. Her scalp wouldn’t stop bleeding. Her mother was dead. Her siblings Masaru, Shji, and Tadahiro were dead. And now she realized that Tsuruyo must have been dead before she and her father carried him from the Ōwada bridge. His back was blackened. His stomach was untouched, the pale white of a baby’s belly.
Mikitani Hiroko was a busy little toddler who had helped her mother, Kimiko, bury the family’s possessions in the ground to protect them from air raids. Kimiko’s husband, Yashirō, was visiting a nephew in Osaka where he worked in the Kawasaki Aircraft Takasago factory. Kimiko was seven months pregnant.
On March 17 their house in Kōbe received a direct hit from a B-29. Kimiko went up onto the roof and tried to toss off the bombs, burning herself badly. Then she grabbed Hiroko while her aunt, Nakahashi Reiko, ministered to her disabled grandfather. The streets were corridors of flames. The Kempeitai urged residents to “Stay! Protect your homes!” Reiko wanted Kimiko to leave Hiroko with her, but Kimiko refused and carried her on her back. Reiko covered her head and face with a scarf, and when she reached the Owada bridge, she jumped. She ended up floating downstream in Hyōgo Canal instead of landing on a barge, as she had hoped. Kimiko stayed where she was. She feared she was going mad. The heat from the firestorm was intense. She couldn’t hear or see. Her cries were answered with silence. Then she blacked out. On waking, she found piles of bodies burning near her. She swung Hiroko around to her side. The child was dead. Kimiko prayed for her. She wanted to die with her. She needed to find her sister, her grandfather. She needed to go home, and when she somehow arrived where her house once stood, she found Yashirō, as if he had been waiting for her all the time. He took her to a hospital for treatment, but the doctor didn’t believe that the baby in her womb, Masako, would survive.
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