tokyo firebombing deaths

An American aircraft drops napalm on Viet Cong positions in 1965. 2 However, in terms of the number of bombers deployed and tons of bombs dropped, this mission, codenamed Perdition #1, 3 was the largest incendiary attack on Tokyo at that point in the … Firebombing knocked out half of the factories in Kobe and was part of one of the biggest attacks in the war. They would never expect them that low. But because there was no formation, there was some confusion and the alarms were not sounded until 12:15, a full seven minutes after the bombs began to fall. Tokyo burns under B-29 firebomb assault. Out of nervousness, LeMay opened up in an uncharacteristic fashion. And unlike the U.S. or German industry, which was factory centered, Japanese manufacturing was greatly decentralized—individual parts for airplanes, tanks, and bombs were produced in homes and in backyards. Also, it wasn’t just Tokyo. The Tokyo fire department put the casualties at 97,000 killed and 125,000 wounded, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department believed that 124,711 people had been killed or wounded. Young American officers in the sky dropped hundreds of thousands of bomblets on the working-class section of the city, with its densely packed wooden dwellings mainly inhabited at the time by women, children and men too old to fight. . The Tokyo Fire Department gave the total number of casualties as 97,000 dead and 125,000 wounded, although historians 40 years later would argue that the … “I never think anything is going to work,” he told McKelway, “until I’ve seen the pictures after the raid. LeMay watched each plane take off at the flight line. And how many Americans will be killed in an invasion of Japan? It was the highest death toll of any air raid during the war, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For the latest article from “Beyond the World War II We Know,” a series from The Times that documents lesser-known stories from World War II, The Times spoke to four former B-29 bomber crew members who participated in the firebombings of Japan in spring 1945. Father Bitter also recorded, in an almost poetic fashion, the effect of the light and shadows on the planes above: “The red and yellow flames reflected from below on the silvery undersides [of the planes] so that they were like giant dragon flies with jeweled wings against the upper darkness.”. The Japanese laid out their cities like a big checkerboard, and so we had pathfinder crews that went in first and then the other bombers came in after. With the drawing up of firebombing of Tokyo campaign in early 1945, the United States Army Air Force was faced with a strategic and ethical dilemma. The death toll was on par with the August 6 atomic attack on Hiroshima. Before the planes arrived, winds started gusting at over forty miles an hour. The fire falling from the sky reminded a German Catholic priest, Father Gustav Bitter, of the tinsel hung on a Christmas tree back home, “and where these silver streamers would touch the earth, red fires would spring up. The purpose was to break the morale of the enemy. But the city of Tokyo had some 5 million people living in it. Technical Sergeant, 873rd Bomb Squadron, 498th Bomb Group. I’ve always felt bad about that. It was terrifying. By dawn, more than 100,000 people were dead, a million were homeless, and 40 square kilometers of Tokyo were burned to the ground. After the raid, 79,466 bodies were recovered and recorded. He spent those hours with Lieutenant Colonel McKelway. It was a cold, dry wind, typical of early spring in that region. The bombing of Dresden was a British-American aerial bombing attack on the city of Dresden, the capital of the German state of Saxony, during World War II.In four raids between 13 and 15 February 1945, 722 heavy bombers of the British Royal Air Force (RAF) and 527 of the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) dropped more than 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices on … He rationalized the potentially significant loss of Japanese life on the ground with the following logic: Marines were suffering horrendous casualties on Iwo Jima in slow, agonizing fighting, evidence that the Japanese were becoming even more ferocious the closer Americans came to the home islands. But if this one works, we will shorten this damned war out here.”. The bombardier’s job would be greatly simplified, because a small group of planes coming from a different direction would drop incendiaries in the front and back of the target zone before the lines of bombers arrived, similar to lighting up both ends of a football field at night. I was a gunner, looking out the right blister window, right behind the wing. Burning large parts “He cared about only two things,” McNamara remembered, “hitting the target and saving the lives of his men.”. Across Tokyo, residents looked up in amazement. Sign up for our newsletter to get more World War II stories delivered to your inbox every week. Is an excerpt from Warren Kozak ’ s capacity to wage war, we will this. Long lines of bombers coming in at a very low altitude Tactician © 2014 by Warren Kozak is an from! 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