On this date in history - The Firebombing of Tokyo: A Devastating Chapter of World War II

On March 10, 1945, an estimated 100,000 Japanese died in Tokyo after 334 US B-29 Superfortress heavy bombers attack Tokyo with 120,000 fire bombs.

In the 1930s, Army Air Corps planners studying at the Air Corps Tactical School at Montgomery's Maxwell Field developed the principle of high-altitude daytime precision bombing. While the British abandoned precision daylight bombing for nighttime fire-bombing in 1942, the U.S. Army Air Corps targeted individual factories, railyards, refineries, ports, fortifications, and more in their precision high altitude bombing strategy. The two combined had a devastating effect on Germany's economy and war machine.

Due to the distances in the Pacific and the fall of American bases in the Philippines, American Samoa, and Guam Japan was out of reach of U.S. bombers until late 1944.

After U.S. forces liberated Guam, airfields were constructed and B-29s under the command of Brigadier General Haywood Hansell attacked Tokyo on November 24, 1944. The results were underwhelming.

U.S. military planners became unsatisfied with the damage done on Japanese cities using ordinance better suited to the stone and concrete cities of Europe. Haywood's attacks on Japanese industry were largely ineffective despite the men, aircraft, and material the U.S. was putting into the effort.

Army Air Corps Commander General Hap Arnold fired Haywood and replaced him as Commander of the 21st Bomber Group with Major General Curtis LeMay as more and more U.S. airbases and B-29s were coming online for the arduous cross Pacific missions as the Navy and Marines were taking islands closer and closer to Japan. For two months LeMay had the same poor results as Haywood had had.

At that time, most Japanese cities were overwhelmingly made of wood. High explosive ordinance simply fell through the roof, went through the floors, and exploded in the earth beneath muffling the impact to largely just the building hit. Precision bombing targeting factories had proven to be very ineffective and LeMay abandoned the concept.

Without telling his superiors, the 38-year-old LeMay changed everything about how the Air Corps thought about tactics and strategy. LeMay borrowed his military philosophy from Britain's General "Bomber" Harris. No longer would his command focus on the enemy's industry. Instead LeMay armed his bombers with napalm incendiaries. He was not targeting factories but downtown Tokyo. The 334 bombers dropped their payloads low and in the dark of night. Fires instantly sprung up all across the heart of Japan's capital city. By the time the smoke cleared on March 10, 105,000 Japanese men, women, and children were dead and sixteen square miles of one of the most densely populated cities in the world was a charred wasteland.

The lack of any serious blowback whatsoever from Washington, the press. or the American public by the carnage emboldened LeMay to extend this campaign across Japan.

Japan would not surrender until five months later when two other B-29 dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – produced by the secret Manhatton Project - a project that LeMay did not know about in March. One reason why the atomic bomb was not dropped on Tokyo was that the damage was already so severe that war planners felt it would not be an effective demonstration of the new weapon's destructive potential.

The two World Wars were the bloodiest in world history and the March 9-10 bombing of Tokyo was the single most deadly air strike in history – dwarfing casualties of the attack on Dresden, Germany by American and British forces.

https://www.historynet.com/firebombing-tokyo/

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