Whirlwind - Barrett Tillman [71]
Before the March fire raids, every department save Tokyo’s was limited to two hours of gasoline per engine. It was a penurious policy: during the March 14 attack on Osaka, forty-eight pieces of equipment burned where they stood, out of fuel. Thereafter a five-hour supply was approved for the remaining pumpers. Even then, fuel drums were seldom delivered where needed in the smoke and confusion of a major conflagration.
No Shelter
Given Japan’s inability to defend its airspace, and the universal ineffectiveness of fire protection, the last resort was air raid shelters. But there, too, the government failed on a colossal scale. In 1940 an American military attaché in Tokyo noted that the few bomb shelters were “totally inadequate.” His report demonstrated how little the Japanese had learned from the hard experience of earthquake-induced fires.
Some official explanations for poor preparations sound disingenuous. Home Affairs Minister Genki Abe reflected, “The reason we had no definite policy of air raid shelter protection . . . is that we did not unduly wish to alarm our citizens concerning the necessity for underground shelters, as we feared it would interfere with normal routine life and have some effect on war production.” He conceded that after the late May raids on Tokyo, most residents considered civilian defense “a futile effort.” Lacking sufficient steel and concrete for major shelters, a poor substitute was tunnels bored into the sides of large hills.
Meanwhile, in the summer of 1944 Japan began cutting blockwide firebreaks through some urban areas. Tokyo reported 615,000 buildings razed to clear areas for firebreaks, though four times that number were destroyed by bombing. The one advantage was that the wide swaths provided relatively uncluttered escape routes for people who otherwise would have been trapped in congested streets.
There was one notable exception. In late 1942 an air raid shelter was constructed inside the Imperial Palace, and the royal couple spent increasing time there from December 1944, after XXI Bomber Command began operations. However, rather than publicly conceding the need for the all-highest to seek refuge in a bunker, the facility was designated “the library Obunko.”
Thus did the subjects of the reclusive Showa tenno hope to survive the destruction of their cities and their nation.
Tokyo Aflame
Mission 40 from the Marianas was code-named Meetinghouse. It set such a standard of success that each subsequent fire raid was called “a Meetinghouse.”
Of 325 B-29s airborne on March 9, 279 unloaded 1,665 tons on the Tokyo urban area while twenty planes diverted to alternates. LeMay’s weight-saving measures worked dramatically well. The fuel saved by stripping guns from most B-29s and cruising at lower altitudes had doubled the February ordnance average to nearly six tons per bomber.
Approaching the Japanese coast beneath a quarter-moon, B-29 crews tugged on flak vests—heavy, cumbersome garments with steel plates that could stop a shell splinter. Some also donned helmets that interfered with earphones, but the airmen were flying into the enemy’s most cherished piece of sky at a frighteningly low altitude.
The primary target was a section of downtown Tokyo measuring three by four miles, recalled by historian John Toland as “once the gayest, liveliest area in the Orient.” Though wartime shortages had closed most businesses, the area teemed with life: an estimated 750,000 workers crammed into twelve square miles of low-income housing and family-operated factories. It was probably the most densely populated place on earth.
The sirens blared at midnight but evidently few Japanese were concerned. They were accustomed to repeated alerts, mostly annoying false alarms. Furthermore, radio reports only mentioned American aircraft orbiting at Choshi, a port city fifty miles northeast—no