Whirlwind - Barrett Tillman [72]
Choshi was one of the coast-in points for XXI Bomber Command.
The first bombers were pathfinders, sweeping in low and fast over Tokyo, doing nearly 300 miles per hour at 5,000 feet. Their navigators had worked to perfection with an identical time over target of 12:15 A.M. Approaching at right angles to each other, the B-29s’ bomb bay doors snapped open and the bombardiers toggled their loads. Bundles of M47 incendiaries spewed into the slipstream, cascading onto the urban congestion that was Tokyo. As the napalm sticks ignited they formed a fiery cross on the ground.
The pathfinders did their work well, marking targets for the following bombardiers. Among the best work was the load that marked the Tokyo Electric Power Company. The firebombs seared the buildings, which were engulfed in flames, providing an almost unmissable aim point.
For trailing bombers, X literally marked the spot. Each group and wing had designated target areas, as mission planners had divided the sprawling city into fire zones to avoid excessive concentration in one locale. Attacking between 4,900 and 9,200 feet, 93 percent of the B-29s struck the briefed urban-industrial area. As LeMay foretold, the defenses were wholly saturated. Searchlights swept their pale white arcs skyward, occasionally illuminating a passing bomber, but seldom long enough for flak gunners to draw a bead.
It was Major Arthur Ray Brashear’s tenth mission. The 499th Bomb Group’s target was the First Fire Zone between the Ara and Sumida Rivers. His navigator’s notes summed up most fliers’ reactions to the defenses: “Night incendiary at 5,000 ft. KEE RISTE! Caught in lights for a short time. All kinds of flak, mostly inaccurate. No hits but this one had us scared! No fighters.”
Almost half a million M69s cascaded down from the night sky, and wherever they hit they spurted their napalm-filled cheesecloth bags. In a matter of minutes thousands of small fires from the little “fiery pancakes” were swallowing everything they touched, coalescing and swelling into a roaring conflagration unlike anything man had previously inflicted upon man, anywhere on earth, Dresden included.
A Vichy French journalist reported the scene, writing in the present tense common in Europe, “Bright flashes illuminate the sky’s shadows, Christmas trees blossoming with flame in the depths of the night, then hurtling downward in zigzagging bouquets of flame, whistling as they fall. Barely 15 minutes after the beginning of the attack, the fire whipped up by the wind starts to rake through the depths of the wooden city.”
As the sky over the city became superheated, huge amounts of air were sucked upward through multistory buildings in the “stack effect,” draining the cool air from ground level to feed the insatiable stack. As more and more ground air was drawn into the conflagration from further afield, the storm naturally spread of its own predatory accord.
A fully developed firestorm is a horrifically mesmerizing sight. It seems a living, malicious creature that feeds upon itself, generating ever higher winds that whirl cyclonically, breeding updrafts that suck the oxygen out of the atmosphere even while the flames consume the fuel—buildings—that feed the monster’s ravenous appetite. Most firestorm victims do not burn to death. Rather, as carbon monoxide quickly reaches lethal levels, people suffocate from lack of oxygen and excessive smoke inhalation.
In Tokyo that night some citizens felt that hell had slipped its nether bounds and raised itself through the earth’s crust to feed on the surface. People fled panic-stricken from searing heat amid the demonic roar of flames, the crash of collapsing buildings, and the milling congestion of terrified human beings. Some survivors found themselves suddenly naked, the clothes burned off their bodies, leaving the skin largely intact.
In those frightful hours humans watched things happen on a scale that probably had never been seen. The superheated ambient air boiled the water out of ponds and canals while rains of liquid glass