Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [91]
‘Hell could be no hotter,’ concluded Guillain. No one knew, or knows, how many died that March night. Some bodies were no doubt uncounted because they were consumed by fire; others were quickly buried in mass graves so as to eliminate stench and prevent an epidemic; still others who might have been registered as dead may have left the city prior to the bombing, unbeknownst to relatives or (more likely) the only survivors in their families. Gordon Daniels quotes estimates made by officials in Tokyo of between 76,000 and 83,000 killed, though his own guess is closer to 90,000. That roughly 40,000 were injured by the bombing— that is, about half the number killed—suggests something of the fire’s intensity.23
5. The firebombings and the atomic bombs
Many commentators have compared the Tokyo firebomb raid of 9-10 March to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that followed five months later. One ought to be cautious when making this comparison, as there are significant differences between the attacks. Sherry points out, for example, that Tokyo, unlike Hiroshima, underwent ‘a process of destruction’, one that unfolded over time as the American bombers dropped their incendiaries. ‘The observer’, Sherry writes, ‘could see the destruction take place and watch the thing come alive, becoming some living, grotesque organism, ever changing in its shape, dimensions, colors, and directions.’ (This was Guillain’s experience: not being in the area that was bombed, he and his neighbors stood on their terraces and watched, ‘uttering cries of admiration ...at this grandiose, almost theatrical spectacle’.) There was no such unfolding or ‘process’ at Hiroshima, only what the bomb’s Japanese witnesses called pika-don—‘flash-boom’— an enormous blast, a searing heat and light, with no dramatic narrative, just a climax. Of course, the very singularity of the atomic bomb made it different from other weapons. The psychological effect of being attacked by well over 300 bombers is surely different from that of seeing one’s city devastated by a single bomb dropped from a single plane. Radioactivity, the unseen evil that penetrates the body and keeps on killing and maiming a later generation, was the offspring only of the atomic bomb.24
And, yet, there were also many compelling similarities between these two events, and they make comparison irresistible. Lacking the dramatic explosion and the lingering radiation of the atomic bombings, the firebomb attack nevertheless produced enormous shock of its own, leaving its victims—the accounts say it repeatedly—dazed, vacant-eyed, as if in a bad waking dream. The incendiaries produced no radioactivity, but the heat and flame they generated left survivors with grotesque burns, and the eerily smooth scars called keloids that would become better known as shame-inducing features of atomic-bomb victims. People who experienced either of these events compared them to natural disasters, including volcanoes, typhoons, and most commonly earthquakes, as a way both of normalizing the attacks by naturalizing them and of assigning their causes to other-than-human hands—which may help explain the overall lack of hostility encountered by Americans in Japan after August 1945. Above all, the firebombings and atomic bombings were alike in their unabashed targeting of non-combatants for destruction. Before the March raid on Tokyo, Curtis LeMay might have convinced himself that he was going after military targets; in retrospect he claimed that all one had