Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [210]
With absurd, ironic perversity, father and son said to each other: “Thank goodness we don’t need to worry any more about the house burning down.” Ryoichi’s cousin Takako appeared. She said that the banner she had carried to lead the old people had proved useful for beating out the flames on their bodies. By the sort of fluke that pervades all great tragedies, they found that almost all their own neighbours survived, while in the main street a few yards distant every inhabitant had perished. The Sekines went to live in a temple whose chief priest had been a schoolmate of Ryoichi’s, until that too was burned out in the great raid of May 1945. The family was unlucky in its choice of destinations. After quitting the ruins of Tokyo in favour of taking refuge in Osaka, they had to abandon their train en route, when it was strafed and wrecked by American fighters. Mr. Sekine said: “We should have ended this war a long, long time ago.”
Two days later, Yoshiko Hashimoto and little Hiroshi made their way to the primary school where her husband’s air-raid post had stood, and found him alive, together with her sister Chieko. Etsuko also came. She was hideously burned, but had survived after jumping into the river. Hisae and their parents were never seen again. Yoshiko mused long after: “Who did I blame for it all? The Americans? The Japanese had done the same thing to people. It was the war. Mine is the generation which allowed the war. We did nothing to stop it.”
The Wada family fled from the remains of their old lives, and found refuge in the mountains of the Nagano Prefecture, with friends who ran a factory making armaments. Space was found in a workers’ dormitory for the traumatised refugees. The former spice seller worked on a production line until the end of the war, while his wife took a job in the factory canteen. Japan’s foreign minister, Mamoru Shigemitsu, a long-standing opponent of his nation’s militarists, wrote later about the profound public bitterness generated by attacks such as that of 9 March: “Most of my mail consisted of571 questions why enemy prisoners, guilty of inhuman conduct, should receive favoured treatment when they burned people to death together with their homes, while those who escaped had nowhere to live and nothing to eat.” Shigemitsu described the air attacks as “the most frightful experience572 the Japanese people have ever undergone.” Even the Japanese military suffered no illusions about the impact of the Tokyo raid on civilian morale. On 15 March, a Japanese army general staff circular warned that “elements of the population573 have given way to a spirit of unrest. Throughout the homeland there are elements which we shall have to watch carefully, lest they jeopardise the prosecution of the war.” Navy pilot Masashiko Ando said: “After the war574, people would sometimes say to me: ‘It must have been really tough out there, flying combat operations.’ But when I had seen the bombed cities of Japan, I said: ‘The toughest place to be was Tokyo.’ ’’
GEORGE BECK, a B-29 gunner, wrote in his diary after landing back in the Marianas on 10 March: “An unforgettable mission575…Squadron CO told us we were starting a new phase of the war in which we were going to burn down Japan’s major cities. I took it with a grain of salt—but he was right.”
The 9 March 1945 American bomber attack on Tokyo killed around 100,000 people, and rendered a million homeless. Over 10,000 acres of buildings were destroyed—16 square miles, a quarter of the city. A hundred of the capital’s 287 fire stations and a similar number of its 250 medical facilities were wiped out. Over the weeks that followed, the XXth Bomber Command launched a succession of further raids, designed to achieve the same result elsewhere. On 11