YEAH, BUT BOMBING ISN'T FETISHIZED:

It was 3:30 am, Chamorro Standard Time, March 10, 1945. The great firebomb mission was wrapping up.

The "all clear" sounded at 2:37 am Tokyo time, or 3:37 am on the clock used by the Americans. Stacked blackened corpses were being hauled away on trucks. Tokyo resident Fusako Sasaki said she saw "places on the pavement where people had been roasted to death."

Mark Selden, who wrote in Japan Focus, contends that the widely seen figure of 100,000 who ultimately died in the bombing is misleading. Wrote Selden, "The figure of roughly 100,000 deaths, provided by Japanese and American authorities, both of whom may have had reasons of their own for minimizing the death toll, seems to me arguably low in light of population density, wind conditions, and survivors' accounts.

"With an average of 103,000 inhabitants per square mile (396 people per hectare) and peak levels as high as 135,000 per square mile (521 people per hectare), the highest density of any industrial city in the world, and with firefighting measures ludicrously inadequate to the task, 15.8 square miles of Tokyo were destroyed on a night when fierce winds whipped the flames and walls of fire blocked tens of thousands fleeing for their lives. An estimated 1.5 million people lived in the burned out areas."

Weeks later in an Army publication, Staff Sergeant Bob Speer wrote, "The great city of Tokyo--third largest in the world--is dead. The heart, guts, core--whatever you want to call everything that makes a modern metropolis a living, functioning organism--is a waste of white ash, endless fields of ashes, blowing in the wind. Not even the shells of walls stand in large areas of the Japanese capital. The streets are desolate, the people are dead or departed, the city lies broken and prostrate and destroyed.

"The men who accomplished the job study the photographs brought back by their recon pilots ... and stand speechless and awed. They shake their heads at each other and bend over the photos again, and then shake their heads again, and no one says a word."

Vast warehouse areas, big manufacturing plants, railroad yards, stocks of raw materials, the whole complex of home factories--all of it was gone. The broadcast studio JOAK, from which the voice of Tokyo Rose was sent out to taunt B-29 crewmembers, was heavily damaged. The Imperial Hotel, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, needed serious repair. The biggest railroad stations in Asia--Ueno and Tokyo Central--were completely wiped out.

The torching of Tokyo and Emperor Hirohito's subsequent viewing of the ravaged sections of the city are said to have marked the beginning of the emperor's personal involvement in the peace process.

104,000 Tons of Bombs Dropped on Tokyo

After 15 hours and four minutes in the air, the great Tokyo firebomb mission's on-scene air commander, Brig. Gen. Thomas S. Power, landed at Guam's North Field. There were dark circles around Power's eyes. The aircraft came to a halt, and two of its engines were still running when Power dropped to the ground.

LeMay greeted Power with a hint of a smile. St. Clair McKelway looked on and tried to read the two men. Power told LeMay that antiaircraft fire had been lighter than he'd expected, Japanese night fighters had not been seen, and the fires in Tokyo, which ultimately combined into a single vast conflagration, had been more devastating than anyone expected.

Three B-29s ditched after the mission to Tokyo. Of 334 bombers launched against Japan in the early evening hours of March 9, 1945, some 279 aircraft arrived over target and passed over the primary aiming point at "Meetinghouse," the center of Tokyo. B-29 Superfortress crews brought home with them the stench of burnt death.

Back from the mission, in the sunlit morning, 1st Lt. Bill Lind of the 497th Bombardment Group taxied into his parking slot, pulled back the window next to his seat, and yelled down to his ground crew, "Hey, boys! Come over to this aircraft and smell Tokyo!"

It was 8:30 am, Chamorro Standard Time, March 10, 1945.

By the time the guns went silent, B-29s had dropped 104,000 tons of bombs on Japan, reducing to rubble 169 square miles in 66 cities. The bombing missions left homeless 9.2 million civilians, including 3.1 million in Tokyo.

Between June 1944 and August 1945, 402 B-29s were lost bombing Japan--147 of them to Japanese flak and fighters and 255 to engine fires and mechanical failures. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when combined, inflicted less damage than the great Tokyo firebomb raid.

It is the author's opinion that the defeat of Japan without an invasion was caused by the overall B-29 campaign and not solely by the atomic bombings. Remarkably, the plan for the firebombing of Tokyo worked. U.S. casualties were painful but small in proportion to the magnitude of the mission's success.

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