Whirlwind - Barrett Tillman [69]
Then came Dresden. In three days of February 1945, the city was savaged in an Anglo-American night-and-day strike intended to destroy German transport and support a Soviet offensive, but critics saw the operation as terror bombing. Some 1,300 8th Air Force and RAF bombers hammered the city with almost 4,000 tons of ordnance, igniting a firestorm that left at least 25,000 dead.
Ten nights later 700 British bombers burned down 83 percent of Pforzheim, killing one-quarter of the population, some 17,000 people. The result became a matter of pride among some bombardment professionals who appreciated the extremely high ratio of area burned and the depopulation of most of the city.
It is uncertain to what extent XXI Bomber Command in the Marianas knew of the recent fire raids in Germany. As a close student of his craft, LeMay was unlikely to have lacked some preliminary information on the events half a world away. Certainly the mechanics of generating a man-made firestorm were well understood in 20th Air Force, especially given the volatile nature of Japanese cities. The challenge to air commanders was timing: placing a maximum number of aircraft over the target, compressed as closely as possible to overwhelm the defenses. Simultaneously, optimum atmospheric conditions were needed: a dry season with high winds to fan the flames and spread burning embers beyond the bomb zone.
Those conditions were met over Tokyo on the night of March 9–10, 1945.
Civil Defense
Humans are supreme procrastinators, and no better example exists than in the near universal indifference to the threat of bombing. Despite months, years, or even decades of awareness, no capital city was prepared for enemy air attack in the Second World War. London, within easy range of France, waited until the last minute to begin adding more firemen, standardizing equipment, and refining procedures. Britain only consolidated the national auxiliary fire service with local organizations in 1941. That same year the Berlin Feuerschutzpolizei had fewer than 2,000 firemen, apparently owing to Hermann Göring’s boast that Reich airspace would remain inviolate.
Despite the European examples, Japan failed to heed the obvious lessons. Once cities began burning, the nation’s near total lack of civil defense would have generated a political firestorm in most other nations. Instead, Japan’s population had no option but to endure the genuine conflagrations that winged their way north from the Marianas.
As was often the case in Japan, civil defense lacked central command. Control was split between a national organization in Tokyo and those nominally at the prefecture level but actually run by community associations. The result was inefficiency and duplication of effort.
It needn’t have been so, as the national government knew a great deal about catastrophe. In 1923 an 8.3-magnitude earthquake—“the Great Kanto”—destroyed 60 percent of Tokyo and 80 percent of Yokohama, killing as many as 140,000 people. Whipped by winds, widespread fires consumed vast areas, including much of the region’s industrial facilities, causing long-term economic effects. Rebuilding took a decade, with lesser but still significant quakes striking the main island of Honshu in 1927 and 1933 that killed 6,000 or more.
Incredibly, twenty-two years after the Great Kanto Earthquake, merely six Japanese cities maintained full-time fire departments; the others relied on volunteers. However, even Tokyo’s measures were inadequate. As one historian has written, the Tokyo fire department was driven “by ritual more than science.” Dating from the 1880s, the department’s formal uniform included a sword, evidence