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By Root 1266 0

of steel plants, oil refineries, and everything else. When the commander of the Marianas-based XXI Bomber Group, Haywood (‘Possum’) Hansell Jr., proved reluctant to implement the new policy, he was replaced in early January by General Curtis LeMay, who had recently achieved some success against long odds with China-based B-29s and had never exhibited compunction about unleashing incendiaries against civilians. LeMay was a man of few words, pugnacious looking with what seemed a perpetual glower and a cigar clamped in his teeth. He had been impressed with the results of an 18 December raid on the Japanese base at Hankow, China, in which his planes had dropped over 500 tons of incendiaries and burned the city lavishly. ‘To worry about the morality of what we were doing—Nuts,’ declared LeMay after the war. ‘A soldier has to fight. We fought. If we accomplished the job in any given battle, without exterminating too many of our own folks, we considered that we’d had a pretty good day.’ LeMay tried, like his predecessor, to hit industrial targets, but the memory of Hankow burning stayed with him, and a successful incendiary raid on Tokyo on 25 February—a pretty good day—persuaded him to change his tactics. He would target not factories but urban neighborhoods. He would replace many of his planes’ high-explosive payloads with incendiaries. And, given the evident weakness of Japanese defenses, he would remove all guns and gunners from the B-29s and order his pilots to fly at lower altitudes over their targets, thereby improving bombing accuracy, saving fuel (and preserving weight for payloads), and reducing the chances that his planes might be hit by enemy or fratricidal gunfire.19

The target was to be Tokyo. LeMay selected as a site for the incendiaries an area of roughly 12 square miles in eastern Tokyo encompassing the Asakusa ward. It had a population density of 103,000 per square mile. (Deliberately excluded from the target zone was the Imperial Palace; the sight and smell of nearby burning would be enough to send a message to its leading resident, the Emperor Hirohito.) On the evening of 9 March, B-29S took off from Guam, Saipan, and Tinian, rendezvoused, and headed west, 334 in all. Each bomber carried up to 6 tons of napalm, phosphorous, and oil-based incendiaries. Japanese radar detected the force and sounded an early warning at 10.30, but inaccurately reported that the attackers had headed off over the sea. The first of the incendiaries—napalm, so as to illuminate the target for the second wave of bombers—came down just after midnight, followed by M-69 magnesium cluster bombs that burst just above the ground. Japanese air defense broadcast an attack warning belatedly at 12.15. The fires spread rapidly, enveloping the target area and an additional 4 square miles besides. Back on Guam, LeMay was uncharacteristically nervous. ‘I’m sweating this one out myself,’ he told his public information officer. ‘A lot could go wrong. I can’t sleep. I usually can, but not tonight.’ He was worried about his crews. There were flak and some interceptors over the city, but the biggest danger the Americans faced was from turbulence, the result of the powerful updrafts caused by the fires below them. Crew members donned oxygen masks to block the stench of napalm and burned flesh. Nearly all the B-29s returned safely to their bases. (One B-29 crew claimed they had monitored Radio Tokyo during the attack, and insisted they had heard the American songs ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ and ‘My Old Flame’.)20

The 25 February attack and others ostensibly on industrial targets meant that the people of Tokyo were no strangers to the B-29s—indeed, one of the nicknames given them was ‘regular mail’. But they were unprepared for the waves of bombers that set fire to the city after midnight on 10 March. What anti-aircraft batteries they had were deployed near major factories and were aimed not by radar but by searchlights. Tokyo had trenches and some tunnels, but citizens who managed to reach these found them no protection from the oxygen-sucking heat of the