An aerial view of Tokyo after the March 10 bombing.Credit...U.S. Air Force, via Associated Press
Over several hours [the night of March 9-10], U.S. Army Air Forces warplanes destroyed the shitamachi, or the low-lying section of Tokyo, and killed an estimated 100,000 Japanese citizens in a firestorm. The United States Strategic Bombing Survey later wrote that “probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a six-hour period than at any time in the history of man.” …
Saotome was just 12 when he and his mother, father and two older sisters scrambled for their lives to escape the incendiary bombs that fell from low-flying B-29s — a U.S. military operation known as Operation Meetinghouse that incinerated nearly 16 square miles of Tokyo 75 years ago. […]
Flames were everywhere. Mattresses set on fire rolled down the alleyways. Mothers carried babies on their backs and clung to their older children’s hands, but the blasts from the bombs blew some children away as strong northerly winds fueled the conflagration.
Saotome and his family followed a railroad line toward the Sumida River, stopping at fire buckets placed on street corners to pour water over themselves. By dawn, they could make out the river. Their eyes were crusted with ashes, the tips of the cotton gloves they wore on their hands burned off. Charred bodies were piled on the river banks and in the river.
“The Man Who Won’t Let the World Forget the Firebombing of Tokyo.”
We had changed from fragmentary bombs to the incendiaries at Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay’s request — or demand. He brought us down from high-altitude bombing with fragmentary bombs to low-level with incendiaries. We wiped out that whole area on that one night. It was terrifying, really.
You could smell, I’m sorry to say, burning flesh in the airplane. And we were really tossed around from the updrafts.
“‘We Hated What We Were Doing’: Veterans Recall Firebombing Japan.”