Napalm The Destroyer: The Burning of Tokyo
Major General Curtis LeMay overshadows Oppenheimer
Written by Neil Gonsalves for Seeking Veritas on Substack
“From January 1944 to August 1945, the U.S. dropped 157,000 tons of bombs on Japanese cities, according to the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey. It estimated that 333,000 people were killed - Other estimates are significantly higher. Fifteen million of the 72 million Japanese people were left homeless.” - Tampa Bay Times
I watched the Oppenheimer movie a few days ago, (no spoiler alerts required here, as a cinephile I would never ruin a movie for someone else. So read on, I assure you I do not give anything about the movie away.) There was a passing line in the film about the bombing of Tokyo that caught my attention - it is easy to miss if you are not familiar with the story - It inspired this post.
The movie, along with all the hype it is generating is sure to spurn at least a few conversations about the atomic bomb, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. - Let me state unequivocally, those are important conversations. Hiroshima marked the first time a single weapon capable of such mass destruction was employed.
Little boy and the fat man
On August 6th, 1945 the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, nicknamed “Little Boy” killed approximately 70,000 people within minutes. It was followed three days later on August 9th, 1945 by the bombing of Nagasaki that instantly took the lives of another 46,000 people. - The American’s nicknamed the second bomb, “Fat Man” - Both bombs accounted for countless more lives lost in the aftermath.
The use of the atomic bomb arguably set in the motion the nuclear arms race and untold atrocities in the pursuit of greater more destructive weaponry. - But neither of those days get the horrific record of being the bombing event that killed the most Japanese people in a single event. That had actually happened almost four months previously, when the US Air Force killed 100,000 Japanese people, mostly civilians, in Tokyo.
Burning cities and the people who live in them
On March 10th, 1945 the US Airforce conducted an aerial bombing mission they called “Operation Meetinghouse” - They sent in more than 300 American B-29 bombers and dropped 1,500 tons of firebombs on the Japanese capital of Tokyo. An area with tightly packed wooden houses, a target intentionally selected for its high flammability and population density.
As the Japanese people slept, the American bombers approached under the cover of darkness, between 1:30 a.m. and 3:00 a.m. the Americans unleashed 500,000 M-69 bombs, each one clustered in groups of 38. - (The clusters would separate during their descent and small parachutes would carry each bomblet to the ground. The jellied gasoline (napalm) inside the metal casings would ignite seconds after hitting something solid and shoot the flaming gel onto the surrounding surfaces.) - They burnt the city down that night.
The American Major General Curtis LeMay, was the officer in charge of strategic bombing, he utilized U.S. military research on the flammability of Japanese buildings in developing the aggressive tactic of dropping firebombs at night on population centres. The strategy was simple, if they couldn’t take out the factories, they could kill the people who worked in them.
As many as 100,000 Japanese people were killed and another million injured, most of them civilians. The bombs incinerated an area of approximately 16 square miles to ash. A million people were left homeless. The death toll that night exceeded that of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki later that year.
Irony and Hypocrisy
There was a cruel irony at play; in 1939, US President Franklin Roosevelt had urged world leaders to not use “the inhuman barbarism of bombing civilian populations” by 1945 the American government weren’t as concerned about that issue. - The United States Strategic Bombing Survey later wrote:
“probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a six-hour period than at any time in the history of man.”
Eye witnesses reported that the horrors were unimaginable. Everything was on fire, the sky was red, homes all in flames. Children were running out on the street while still on fire, the river was full of corpses and the smell of napalm filled the air.
"Babies were burning on the backs of parents. Animals were on fire, too.” recalled a witness named Nihei for a CNN interview in 2020 (She is one of the few remaining survivors, aged 83 at the time of the interview).
Major General LeMay is widely quoted as saying, "Killing Japanese didn't bother me very much at that time... I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal," - He was never tried for war crimes but LeMay was awarded numerous medals and later promoted to lead the US Strategic Air Command.
The non-atomic bombing attacks have been largely overlooked while teaching about WWII and are commonly overshadowed by discussions of the atomic bombs. - Tokyo was not the only city that was set ablaze. The carnage was deemed so effective, the strategy was used on other major cities like Osaka, Kobe and Nagoya, followed by 58 “medium sized towns” killing tens of thousands more people along the way. Those campaigns however set a military precedent for targeting civilian areas that persisted into the Korean and Vietnam wars that followed.
A lesson in empathy from my high school history teacher
I remember talking about Tokyo in school. I was fortunate to have an insightful history teacher who cautioned us to pay close attention to the stories on the periphery. She asked us to drop the labels of axis and allies for a moment and imagine how we would feel if a foreign nation dropped bombs on our civilian population centres.
She asked us to imagine waking up to a sky on fire, everything we know and love turning to ash. She reminded us that every one of those people had dreams and hopes, they were somebody’s mother, father, uncle, aunt, brother, sister or child - They loved and were loved - It was one of the greatest lessons in empathy I ever experienced in school.
She pointed out that iconic events get the movies but many real experiences and people on the margins throughout time have been left off the pages of history. - We collectively need to keep their stories alive too.
Bio: Neil Gonsalves is an Indian-born Canadian immigrant who grew up in Dubai, U.A.E. and moved to Canada in 1995. He is an Ontario college professor, a TEDx speaker, a columnist, a recreational dog trainer and an advocate for new immigrant integration and viewpoint diversity.
Notes: