catalyzed LeMay to radical departure. The deaths had to be justified, the debt of death repaid.
One more incendiary test, 172 planes over Tokyo on February 23, produced the best results of any bombing so far, a full square mile of the city burned out. But LeMay had long known that fire would burn down Japan's wooden cities if properly set. Proper setting, not firebombing itself, was the problem he struggled to solve.
He studied strike photographs. He reviewed intelligence reports. “The Japanese just didn't seem to have those 20- and 40-millimeter [antiaircraft] guns,” he remembers realizing. “That's the type of defense which must be used against bombers coming in to attack at a low or medium altitude. Up at twenty-five or thirty thousand feet they have to shoot at you with 80- or 90-millimeter stuff, or they're never going to knock you down… But 88- millimeter guns,
Low-altitude firebombing had other important advantages. Flying low saved fuel coming and going from the Marianas: the B-29's could carry more bombs. Flying low put less strain on the big Wright engines: fewer aircraft would have to abort or ditch. LeMay added in another variable and proposed to bomb at night; his intelligence sources indicated that Japanese fighters lacked airborne radar units. With httle or no light flak or fighter cover Tokyo would be nearly defenseless. Why not, then, LeMay reasoned, take out B-29 guns and gunners and further increase the bomb load? He decided to leave the tail gunner as an observer and pull the rest.
He discussed his plan with only a few members of his staff. They worked out a target zone, a flat, densely crowded twelve square miles of workers' houses adjacent to the northeast corner of the Imperial Palace in central Tokyo. Even two decades after the war LeMay felt the need to justify the site as in some sense industrial: “All the people living around that Hattori factory where they make shell fuses. That's the way they disperse their industry: little kids helping out [at home], working all day, httle bits of kids.” The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey notes frankly that 87.4 percent of the target zone was residential, and LeMay goes on to more candid admission later in his autobiography:
No matter how you slice it, you're going to kill an awful lot of civilians. Thousands and thousands. But, if you don't destroy the Japanese industry, we're going to have to invade Japan. And how many Americans will be killed in an invasion of Japan? Five hundred thousand seems to be the lowest estimate. Some say a million.
… We're at war with Japan. We were attacked by Japan. Do you want to kill Japanese, or would you rather have Americans killed?
A little later in the war a spokesman for the Fifth Air Force would point out that since the Japanese government was mobilizing civilians to resist invasion, “the entire population of Japan is a proper military target.”
Onto the proper military target of working-class Tokyo LeMay decided to drop two kinds of incendiaries. His lead crews would carry M47's, 100-pound oil-gel bombs, 182 per aircraft, each of which was capable of starting a major fire. Behind those crews his major force would sow M69's, 6-pound gelled-gasoline bombs, 1,520 per aircraft. He eschewed magnesium bombs because those more rigid weapons smashed all the way through the tile roofs and light wooden floors of Japanese houses and buried themselves ineffectually in the earth. LeMay also remembers including a few high explosives in the mix to demoralize the firemen.
He delayed seeking approval of his plan until the day before the raid was scheduled to go, taking responsibility for it himself and determined to risk the gamble. Norstad approved on March 8 and alerted the Air Force public relations staff to the possibility of “an outstanding strike.” Arnold was informed the same afternoon. LeMay's crews were stunned to hear they would fly their sorties unarmed at staggered levels between five and seven thousand feet. “You're going to deliver the biggest firecracker the Japanese have ever seen,” LeMay told them. Some of them thought he was crazy and considered mutiny. Others cheered.
From Guam first, from Saipan next and then from Tinian 334 B-29's took off for Tokyo in the late afternoon of March 9. They were loaded with more than 2,000 tons of incendiaries.
They flew toward a city that an Associated Press correspondent who knew it well had described in 1943 in a best-selling book as “grim, drab and grubby.” Freed from Japanese detention in Manila and then in Shanghai, Russell Brines had brought home a message about the people he had lived among before the war and whose language he spoke:
“We will fight,” the Japanese say, “until we eat stones!” The phrase is old; now revived and ground deeply into Japanese consciousness by propagandists skilled in marshaling their sheeplike people… [It] means they will continue the war until every man — perhaps every woman and child — lies face downward on the battlefield. Thousands of Japanese, maybe hundreds of thousands, accept it literally. To ignore this suicide complex would be as dangerous as our pre-war oversight of Japanese determination and cunning which made Pearl Harbor possible…
American fighting men back from the front have been trying to tell America this is a war of extermination. They have seen it from foxholes and barren strips of bullet-strafed sand. I have seen it from behind enemy lines. Our picture coincides. This
The fighting men of the Navy and the Air Force had seen particular evidence of Japanese doggedness that autumn and winter in the appearance of kamikazes, planes loaded with high explosives and deliberately flown to ram ships. Between October and March young Japanese pilots, most of them barely qualified university students, sacrificed themselves in some nine hundred sorties. Navy fighters and antiaircraft guns shot most of the kamikazes down. About four hundred U.S. ships were hit and only about one hundred sunk or severely damaged in a fleet of thousands, but the attacks were alien and terrifying; they served to confirm for Americans the extent of Japanese desperation even as they further depleted Japan's waning air defenses.
LeMay's pathfinders arrived first over Tokyo a little after midnight on March 10. On the district of Shitamachi on the flatlands east of the Sumida River where 750,000 people lived crowded into wood-and-paper houses they marked a diagonal of fire and then crossed it to ignite a gigantic, glowing X. At 0100 the main force of B-29's came on and began methodically bombing the flatlands. The wind was blowing at 15 miles per hour. The bombers carried their 1,520 M69's in 500-pound clusters that broke apart a few hundred feet above the ground. Main-force intervalometers — the bomb-bay mechanisms that spaced the release of the clusters — had been set for 50-foot intervals. Each planeload then covered about a third of a square mile of houses. If only a fifth of the incendiaries started fires, that was one fire for every 30,000 square feet — one fire for every fifteen or twenty closely spaced houses. Robert Guillain remembers a deadlier density:
The inhabitants stayed heroically put as the bombs dropped, faithfully obeying the order that each family defend its own house. But how could they fight the fires with that wind blowing and when a single house might be hit by ten or even more of the bombs… that were raining down by the thousands? As they fell, cylinders scattered a kind of flaming dew that skittered along the roofs, setting fire to everything it splashed and spreading a wash of dancing flames everywhere.
By 0200 the wind had increased to more than 20 miles per hour. Guillain climbed to his roof to observe:
The fire, whipped by the wind, began to scythe its way through the density of that wooden city… A huge borealis grew… The bright light dispelled the night and B-29's were visible here and there in the sky. For the first time, they flew low or middling high in staggered levels. Their long, glinting wings, sharp as blades, 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 farther 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… All the Japanese in the gardens near mine were out of doors or peering up out of their holes, uttering cries of admiration — this was typically Japanese — at this grandiose, almost theatrical spectacle.
Something worse than a firestorm was kindled in Tokyo that night. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey calls it a conflagration, begun when the high wind heeled over the pillar of hot and burning gases that the fires had volatilized and convection had carried up into the air:
