Whirlwind - Barrett Tillman [73]
With barely 8,000 firemen to cover an area of 213 square miles, decades of Japanese unpreparedness and complacency took their terrible toll. There were insufficient shelters and, perhaps worst of all, too few fire lanes to provide buffers that might prevent one conflagration from spreading into another. But even adequate firebreaks might not have helped, not on that night. The bombers possessed an invincible ally in the form of stiff southeasterly winds that whipped and whirled burning embers from one neighborhood to another. Wherever the fiery brands alit, they spread the flames uncontrollably.
Tokyo’s fire department fought a losing battle from the first few minutes. The fire chief spent a horrible night dashing from one area to another, trying to coordinate his insufficient resources. His sedan caught fire twice.
The firemen were gallantly ineffective with their towed water carts and hand pumps—poor substitutes for gasoline-driven trucks, many of which were stalled in the human congestion and, immobilized, melted into the street. Nearly 100 fire trucks were incinerated with 128 firemen and perhaps 500 auxiliaries assigned to help them. Those numbers, pitifully small within the greater catastrophe, further emphasize Tokyo’s woeful unpreparedness over the previous three years.
Extension ladders that could have helped suppress fires in multistory buildings were almost nonexistent, and of limited use where power and phone lines formed a barrier that prevented such equipment from extending beyond the overhead latticework.
It was no better in residential areas, where the burden fell upon thousands of pitifully prepared neighborhood associations. Small groups of families swore to uphold government dictates to swat at fires with dampened cloths or sandbags, and vainly doused blazing napalm with buckets of water. Historian Richard Frank attributed much of the massive death toll to the no-retreat policy. He concluded, “The key to survival was to grasp quickly that the situation was hopeless and flee.”
Everywhere people were thrown upon their own meager resources. Hidezo Tsuchikura saved his family and himself by climbing into a water tank on a school roof. Though a factory worker, Tsuchikura made a Dantesque comparison. “The whole spectacle with its blinding lights and thundering noise reminded me of the paintings of purgatory—a real inferno out of the depths of hell itself.”
Susumu Takahashi, a teenage medical student, watched the spectacle from a neighborhood overlooking the primary target area. His studies had been interrupted by the sirens but he shunned his family’s rudimentary shelter to cram for an upcoming test. When the house ignited he gamely tried to beat out the flames but soon realized the futility. Grabbing his texts, he dashed outside. One end of the street appeared a roaring wall of flame so Takahashi ran to his left, passing an immobilized fire engine with limp hoses. Firemen directed people to cross the bridge over the Kanda River, but the path was blocked by more flames. The seventeen-year-old student took responsibility beyond his age, leading a line of stragglers through a gap in the fire-choked street. He leapt charred, fallen trees and phone poles, strewn around “like match sticks.” Gasping for breath in the cloying smoke, Susumu Takahashi reached the safety of the concrete bridge—the only structure in sight that had not burned.
Not even the Imperial Bunker was immune. When the firestorm’s high winds dropped burning embers onto the emperor’s Obunko, shrubs and camouflage material were ignited, and palace guards and staff were reduced to subduing the flames with water pails and even tree branches.
Safely underground, Emperor Hirohito and Empress Kojun sat out the attack in their bunker. The empress had observed her forty-second birthday three days previously, and now they had planned on celebrating their grandson’s first.