The night the snow turned black
Firestorms created by US mass bombing raids on Tokyo left indelible scars on Japan’s population
THE “Night of the Black Snow”, as the Japanese later named March 10, 1945, when Tokyo, the capital of Imperial Japan, experienced a terrible agony as the city was transformed into the biggest crematorium the world has ever known.
Official Japanese records and photographs taken of the raid have never been published, not even in Japan, due to its horrifying truth.
Fred Saito, a former news broadcaster for Radio Tokyo, though, later indeed made the statement – derived from official files – that: “it was a savage air raid in which the combination of people killed, maimed and missing, plus the great area destroyed by the raging holocaust, made it the single most effective aerial assault of the entire war”.
By 1945 the tide of conflict had tipped against Japan. Their naval and air forces were gradually whittled away by the American counter-assault in the Pacific theatre. Almost immediately after the bitter handto-hand fighting on the Marianas islands, the American 20th Air Force under command of General Curtis Lemay, launched a concerted strategic bombing campaign against the Japanese mainland.
On the breezy, clear night of March 9, the sirens’ warnings wailed at 10.30, and the Japanese civilians and defenders braced themselves for the ensuing onslaught.
As the first bombers, or pathfinders, approached, they placed napalm markers on a working-class suburb in Shitomachi, and carved out a so-called “flaming X” in the slums.
The city’s air defences proved pitiful as the main armada of nearly 330 gigantic Boeing B-29 Superfortress bombers swarmed over the city and released 1 665 tons of incendiary bombs.
For more than three hours, bombs rained down from the sky continuously on to Tokyo.
With the favourable conditions of wind and high density of the wooden houses, the separate fires rapidly merged to produce a sea of fire.
Astonishingly, scientists later described the resulting firestorm as a deadlier force – known as the sweep conflagration, literally a tidal wave of flame raging out of control.
It was noticed that a “pillar of flame appeared, grew to a solid wall of fire leaping high above the burning rooftops and bending down like a breaker” to plunge down on the hapless Japanese.
Superheated flaming gases and temperatures of 980ºC were reached, resembling those of a blast furnace.
From above, American pilots witnessed “great boiling clouds of smoke, the glowing fearful red of a surface that seemed like a volcanic fury”.
The realities of the suffering faced by the civilians were disturbing. In the interior of the firestorm there were no survivors, and those who attempted to escape beyond the reaches of the flames were only marginally fortunate. In the centre of the burning city, people were cremated, for those who sought refuge in the seemingly safe concrete buildings were roasted alive. Buildings were gutted and their interiors became death traps for hundreds.
On the periphery of the firestorm, people were fainting from the effects of the heat and suffocating due to the lack of oxygen.
Even more disturbingly, people who jumped into the rivers died agonisingly as the water started to boil. Fire protection was worthless as the ill-equipped firefighters succumbed to the inextinguishable flames. For the injured there was no medication, not even bandages.
American airmen could even smell the nauseously sweet-sick stench of burning flesh as they returned to the Marianas, completing their raid with minimal loss.
The next morning, the surviving Japanese were speechless on witnessing the astounding destruction – nothing but a garish wasteland of ash, with blackened and charred bodies littered about. Sixteen square miles had been razed to the ground.
Only steel and concrete structures remained, with the ruins still smouldering. According to estimates, more than 100 000 people perished. It took 25 days to clear the bodies, sometimes inseparably fused, or interred in mass graves. Eight million were made homeless.
During the following months, the 20th Air Force inflicted further firebombing raids against other major cities such as Osaka, Kob and Toyama, which was 99.5% destroyed, claiming more than half-a-million lives.
Apart from the urban and industrial bombing, the 20th also extensively mined shipping, which effectively cut off Japan, thereby starving the population.
Although debates continue as to the morality of the bombing, the counter-argument is that it decisively crippled Japan’s capacity to wage war. Kenneth P Werrell argued in his Blankets of Fire that: “American airmen did much more than aid in the defeat of Japan; they did not make war less cruel, but revealed the horror of total, unrestricted war so vividly no one will ever fight one again.”
Although the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki cast a shadow over the Tokyo raid, it nevertheless remains significant in the final decision to end hostilities.
Today, 73 years on, in the massive reconstructed and ultra-modern city of Tokyo, the tremendous fire raid is still remembered in a country which has renounced war entirely.