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Enjoy and good luck, Commander.

It's March 9th, 1942.

In the Japanese capital, Tokyo, Nishio

Suzuko has just celebrated her sixth

birthday. She'll sleep soundly tonight.

It's a Friday, and the weekend lies

ahead of her. But as she drifts into

pleasant dreams, a vast airborne army of

300 planes is soaring through the night

sky above the Pacific Ocean. Each plane

is packed with high explosive ordinance

and incendiary bombs, and they're headed

Nishio's way. It's around midnight when

she's woken by the sirens. She's of

course heard these before, and she knows

to fear them. In this show's own words,

"We often heard air raid sirens, and

when we heard them, we would rush home.

But this time, it's different. This

time, home will offer no protection. As

the roar of the bombs grows intolerably

loud, Nishio's mother realizes what they

must do. They must flee. Hopefully, find

somewhere underground away from the

explosions.

Out in the street, it's pandemonium. In

Nishio's district of tightly packed

wooden houses, the wall of fire consumes

all in its path. People quite literally

burst into flames in front of the young

girl's eyes, their clothes igniting in

the intense heat. Others fall dead to

the ground, spluttering and choking as

the inferno rips the air from their

lungs. Young Nishio and her family are

amongst the lucky ones. They do actually

make it to shelter. And here they must

wait it out as the cacophony of carnage

rages overhead. So the family huddles

together in the darkness, taking

shallow, wheezing breaths in the

deoxxygenated air. They wait for this

hell to be over. And they wonder what

they will find when or if they emerge

from their shelter. Nishio's story is

one of literally thousands of stories

from the night that Tokyo was put to the

torch by American bombers. The vast

majority of those stories are lost

forever, snuffed out by a direct hit

from a bomb or by falling masonry or by

the boiling waters of a school swimming

pool. But a few remain and they offer a

reminder of what happened when Japan's

civilian population was left defenseless

and when American air power mercilessly

pummeled the empire's capital. In this

video, we're trying to bring some of

those stories to light with

[clears throat] eyewitness testimonies

from both sides of the bombing raid. A

bombing raid that may have claimed more

lives than the atomic bombs of Hiroshima

and Nakasaki combined.

This is the story of March 9th and 10th,

1945.

The American firebombing of Tokyo.

By October of 1944, the balance of power

had shifted in the Pacific theater.

While the Marianus campaign was still

not concluded, the islands of Guam and

Tinian were now in American hands.

Hard-fought battles for these tiny land

masses cost thousands of American lives,

but that cost was deemed worth it. The

air bases on these islands put Tokyo

within range of American heavy bombers

for the first time in the war. But the

United States had actually struck

Japanese soil before. On April 18th of

1942, 16 B-25 medium bombers took off

from a carrier in the Pacific headed for

Tokyo. The now infamous Dittle raid was

named for its mastermind, General Jimmy

Doolittle. But it could have been named

for another reason, because the raid did

little to dent the Japanese war effort.

The dittle raid succeeded only in

achieving a minor propaganda coup in the

wake of the Pearl Harbor attack the

previous December. It caused minimal

damage to Japanese targets. Following

the raid, the B25s were then instructed

to fly to China. And here they either

crash landed or bailed out into the

Chinese countryside. All 16 bombers were

lost along with seven airmen. And such

losses were not sustainable. So the

dittle raid was not repeated. This time

though, in light of all those tasty new

islands, everything would be different.

The new bases in the Marianis meant that

heavy bombers could now reach Tokyo and

return to base intact. These heavy

bombers were B29 Superfortresses and

they were an entirely new weapon. As

early as 1939, the Airore had issued a

request for what they called a super

bomber, an aircraft that could drop

20,000 of ordinance on a target 2,667

mi away from its base. It was Boeing

that ultimately won the contract for

this super bomber, but the development

of the aircraft was fraught with

difficulty. Technical problems plagued

the B-29. In February 1943, a prototype

crashed into a meat packing plant near

Seattle, killing 11 airmen, 20 civilian

workers, and one firefighter. To quote

historian James M. Scott, "The B29 cost

$3.7 billion, making it the single most

expensive weapon system for the US

during the war. It cost more money than

the atomic bomb." Army Air Force Chief

Harry Hap Arnold had poured so much

money into the project that it simply

had to be a success. The B-29 had to

play a significant role in ending the

war in the Pacific. So, the technology

had changed. We have these incredible

new bombers and the United States

military strategy had changed. They're

going to use them. But something else

had changed, too, and that was military

doctrine. Precision bombing tactics

designed to hit military targets and

minimize civilian deaths had long been

abandoned in Europe. The British Royal

Air Force and the USAF now favored

wholesale destruction of population

centers. Rather than striking at

industrial centers and military

installations, air power would instead

reduce cities to rubble. This was the

strategy that the Americans would use in

Tokyo. James M. Scott described the

situation in the Japanese capital

thusly. It was horrible for bombers.

Some months you would only have 3 days

of visibility and if you were trying to

do daylight precision bombing, it simply

wouldn't work. For mission commander,

Major General Curtis Lameé and his

superior Hap Arnold, there was a key

objective in mind. They weren't just

looking to destroy a few factories and

bloody the noses of their Japanese

adversary. Instead, they were looking to

avoid a costly ground invasion. And this

meant maximum force, maximum damage, and

maximum casualties. Incendiary bombs had

already been used for these ends to

great effect in Europe. In Hamburg in

July 1943, the RAF and the USAF

destroyed 60% of the city and left tens

of thousands dead. At Dresden in

February 1945, incendiary weapons caused

a firestorm that annihilated the

medieval city, resulting in an unknown

number of civilian casualties. In Tokyo,

the wood, bamboo, and paper construction

materials made the city even more

vulnerable to this kind of attack. At

the Dougway Proving Ground in Utah, the

US Air Force constructed mock-ups of

Japanese building complexes and dropped

M69 incendiary bombs on them. As

expected, the complexes went up like

matchwood. So now the Americans had both

the bombing strategy and the actual

weapon that they needed to flatten

Tokyo. They also had the planes needed

to deliver that weapon and the bases

required to fly those planes from.

Everything had fallen into place. And so

in 1945, the Americans began hitting the

Japanese capital. A daylight raid on

February 4th, 1945 saw 174 B-29s drop

more than 450 tons of incendiary and

high explosive bombs on the city. But

the raid was only partially successful

and so Lame decided to change his

tactics. He deduced the Japanese

anti-aircraft defenses were ineffective

at lower altitudes and that intercepting

aircraft were basically non-existent in

the dark. So over the next month, Lameé

ordered more raids, but this time planes

came in low and at night. These were

serious raids. Entire neighborhoods were

flattened and the civilian death toll

was high. By the end of February 1945,

around 1,200 Tokyo residents had died

beneath American bombs. But these raids

were just the prelude. Lame was planning

something much bigger and far more

devastating. This plan was operation

meeting house and in a single

nightmare's planes were going to exceed

that death toll many times over.

At just before dusk on March 9th,

Operation Meeting House got underway. It

was 5:35 p.m. as the first B29s climbed

into the skies above the Maranas. And it

would take nearly 3 hours to get all 325

planes into the air. Another three and a

half hours after that, the first

aircraft would reach the Japanese

capital. The mood would have been

anxious aboard those planes. The crews

knew that the Japanese were likely

expecting an attack and therefore their

interceptor planes and anti-aircraft

batteries would offer some resistance,

but ultimately that resistance didn't

actually come. Air defense fighters had

been put on alert on the approaches to

Tokyo, but no aircraft were actually

launched. The defenders who did spot

enemy planes sent out desperate radio

transmissions which were either lost on

the static or simply ignored. Boston

Globe journalist Martin Sheridan was on

board one of the planes and witnessed

firsthand how ineffective the defenses

were. He said, "Several search lights

played on the plane a few moments, but

we saw no interceptors and only a few

scattered flack bursts." Tokyo remained

largely unaware of the attack until

those bombers were roaring over the city

itself. And by then, of course, it was

far too late. At 8 minutes after

midnight on March the 10th, 1945,

the attack began in earnest. The target

was zone 1 in northeastern Tokyo. This

was a small strip measuring four miles

by 3 mi and included most of the

Asakusa, Honjo, Fukugawa, Cotto, and

Chita Wards of the city. This was very

much a civilian area packed with

residential neighborhoods and home to

more than a million people. But was zone

one also a military target? This is one

of the more controversial aspects of the

raid of March 9th and 10th. In some

ways, zone one definitely was a military

target. Japanese cities were different

to those in Germany or in the United

Kingdom. Cities like Tokyo were not so

clearly divided into different sectors.

Much of Japan's production capacity came

from cottage industries and from

workshops housed in residential areas.

Around half of Japan's total production

came from small factories housed in

people's homes. According to James

Scott, a lot of these factories were

tiny, employing five people or less.

They were making things like the pin for

a hand grenade or the trigger for a

rifle. Tokyo was intermixed. It was a

huge sea of rooftops with a workshop

downstairs, a house above, right next to

a corner grocery mall. One of the

workers in these residential operations

was 12-year-old Katsumoto Saltoi. His

job was to collect scrap metal that

could be used in the production of

weapons. He was one of the juggonom

or the guardians of the home front.

We'll hear more from Katsumoto later on.

But while there were military targets

hidden away in that sea of rooftops, a

raid on zone one would realistically

have done little to hamper the Japanese

war effort. Instead, zone 1 was

primarily selected for its crippling

psychological value. Around 1.1 million

people lived in this tiny section of the

Japanese capital, making it one of the

most densely populated areas on the

planet. The tightly packed houses made

from combustible materials were

immensely vulnerable to fire. Back in

1923, the Great Kanto earthquake had

shattered central Japan, and in this

section of northeastern Tokyo, the quake

ruptured gas manses and overturned

cooking stoves. The resulting fire

ripped through the area and left

thousands dead. The Sumida River became

choked with bodies as the population

fled desperately from the flames. The

Americans knew this well. The US War

Department had even interviewed

insurance adjusters from the 1923 fire.

They wanted to find out exactly what

made the city so flammable and which

areas were most at risk of another

massive blaze.

Zone one was chosen with this in mind.

Yes, it did house some small factories

and cottage industries, but the key

reason for its selection was that it was

deemed the most flammable part of Tokyo.

Now, more than 20 years on from the

earthquake, American planes were going

to torch the area for a second time. The

initial wave of bombers were

pathfinders. They came in two groups,

one from the southwest and one from the

southeast. They dropped their

incendiaries as they passed over Tokyo,

scoring deep lines of flame onto the

face of the city as it slept. The

Japanese capital was now marked with a

giant flaming cross, which would be the

beacon for the next waves to follow.

Even at this early stage in the raid,

tongues of flame had already begun to

illuminate Tokyo. As the next wave came

in, bomber crews were stunned by the

vast lines of flames that ravaged the

city. Flight engineer Richard Bale was

on board one of the B29s. He remembered

the strength of those flames.

You could almost read a paper in the

cockpit. But while X marked the spot for

the approaching bomber waves, this was

just a reference point. Each bomber had

their own target, and the plan was to

obliterate every inch within the cross

shape that now marked zone one.

Brigadier General Thomas S. Power flew

on one of the first bombers to reach

Tokyo. He spent the raid circling above

the city, mapping the chaos caused by

his fellow airmen. Power said, "The area

below me was literally a sea of flame."

It was the greatest show on earth. On

the ground, the city was no longer

asleep. Instead, very much awake and

fighting for survival. Within half an

hour of the first bombs striking zone 1,

it became clear that the fires were

already out of control. The local

authorities decided it was useless to

keep battling the flames and instead

they would lead civilians to safety,

pulling people out of the shattered

rubble and trying to save as many lives

as possible. Meanwhile, a few Japanese

anti-aircraft guns had roared into life.

The planes were flying so low and were

so visible even in the dead of night

that they should have presented an easy

target. 12-year-old Katimoto Sati

remembered seeing those great planes

from the ground. He recalled the strange

shapes they cut in the night sky as the

metal of their fuselages reflected the

flames from below. It almost looked like

tropical fish flying above. But those

anti-aircraft guns were largely

ineffective. The low altitude of the

bombers wrongfooted the defense crews,

and the AA rounds flew either too high

or too low. For 2 hours and 40 minutes,

American B29 soared with impunity over

the pulsating mass of flame that had

previously been Tokyo. But over time,

the flames that had lit their way became

a problem. The raid was suffering from

its own success. Rolling clouds of smoke

obscured the bombers's view and flyers

struggled to find their targets amid

plummeting visibility. Here and there,

the smoke cleared and the crews caught

glimpses of the destruction they'd

rained down on the city. Technical

Sergeant Ed Lawson was supposed to be a

gunner on his B29, but the planes had

been stripped of all their guns except

for the one in the tail. This enabled

the planes to carry the maximum amount

of ordinance possible and so even more

destruction.

total overkill. In any case, though, it

meant that Lorson was given a new job

aboard his aircraft. He reported, quote,

"My job was to stand by the open bay

doors and throw chaff out, these long

strips of aluminium foil to confuse

Japanese radar." Lorson would never

forget that night. For him, the

firebombing of Tokyo was a visceral

sensory experience that would stay with

him for the rest of his life. He

continued, quote, "Can you imagine

standing in front of an open Bombay door

and smelling a city burn up? It was

terrifying." At low altitude like that,

I didn't wear an oxygen mask. All I can

say is that the smell was nauseating.

I've never smelled anything like it

since, and I don't want to. Through a

gap in the clouds, reporter Martin

Sheridan gained his own glimpse of the

hell brought to Tokyo. Suddenly, there

was an opening through the pole and the

clouds, and there lay Tokyo. I have

never seen such a display of

destruction, nor had such an experience.

Fires were raging in several multi-block

areas and creating almost daylight

conditions. There were hundreds of

blazes throughout the waterfront area

and the most densely populated section

in the world. Sheridan reported that the

plains navigator, Second Lieutenant Leo

P. Zamansski seized hold of this brief

window of visibility. Zamansky sang out

3 2 1 mark. At the last words, the

bombardier dropped his eggs in the

target area. Sheridan was of course a

non-combatant journalist and so took no

active part in the bombing. Sheridan's

only offensive action was quote throwing

down a brown beer bottle empty. Of

course, in between his boozing and

bottle throwing, Sheridan remarked, "We

did see the city getting a terrific

pasting from the air, and they'll need a

highly efficient fire department to put

out blazes of those proportions." In

fact, that highly efficient fire

department never stood a chance. On the

ground, the emergency services were

being obliterated just like everything

and everyone else in that area of the

city. Around 125 firemen perished in the

blaze, as well as 500 civil guards

who've been deployed to help them. One

by one, the fire engines themselves were

overcome by the flames and around 96

were destroyed. As the planes struggled

to find their targets in the mess

beneath them, many began to spread out

over a wider area. Incendiary bombs

smashed into residential districts

outside of zone 1. Kitamura Yoko

remembered observing the raid from her

home outside of the target area. She

said, "Since we were far away at the

time, we weren't exactly sure what was

happening. We could hear the bombs

falling, thud, thud, thud. We were so

scared that we ran outside. We looked up

at the sky and saw what appeared to be a

huge fire burning in the direction of

the Asakusa district. Despite the

limited resistance, the 9inth

bombardment group was at risk of

casualties. Captain Gordon B. Robertson

found himself blinded by a search light

at 5,600 ft and struggled to maintain

control of his aircraft. The savage

updrafts caused by the flames tossed the

B29, which Robertson likened to a cork

on water in a hurricane. As the plane

was buffeted and thrown about the sky,

they somehow managed to drop their

bombs. Inside the plane, debris and

equipment rattled around like gravel

inside a tin can. The lights of the

burning city suddenly reappeared above

them, and it was only then that the crew

realized they were upside down. This was

Robertson's first combat mission, but it

was not his first time he'd been behind

the controls of a B29. He previously

worked as a flight instructor, and he

knew precisely what to do. Robertson let

the great plane fall into a nose dive,

sending himself and his crew careering

towards the Earth. Then in an

astonishing display of skill, he managed

to accelerate out of the dive at the

last moment and write the plane. Author

Barrett Tilman believes this maneuver

pushed the B29 to its absolute limits

and that Robertson clocked one of the

highest speeds ever seen in a plane of

this kind. Severely shaken and lucky to

be alive, Robertson turned and headed

back to base. Not everyone was as lucky

as Robertson and his crew. 14 planes

were lost, resulting in more than 105

deaths. Accounts differ as to how many

planes actually reached Tokyo. It may

have been 279 or 299.

In either case, the loss rate reflected

the 5% that Lame had predicted. For the

mission commander, everything was going

to plan. At just before 3:00 a.m. on

March 10th, the raid reached its

conclusion. In the words of Tilman, the

surviving B29s turned southward with

ashes stre on their glass noses and

appalling odor sucked inside the

fuselages. Though well below the

standard 10,000 ft for oxygen masks,

some men strapped on their masks to

escape the stench of burning flesh.

Back on Guam, Major General Curtis Lameé

addressed journalists at the 21st Bomber

Command headquarters. He was overjoyed

with the initial reports of the raid. to

quote him, "This looks like the most

successful attack we've made to date.

But don't get too enthusiastic until we

see the photographs." Hap Arnold was

similarly impressed. After being

debriefed on the raid, he sent an

excited message to Lmé. This mission

shows your crews have the guts for

anything. When the bombs finally stopped

falling on Tokyo, it's possible that the

people on the ground barely even

noticed. By this point, northeastern

Tokyo was engulfed in a carpet of flame

that was incinerating not just zone one,

but many of its surrounding

neighborhoods. 15-year-old Yoshio

Matsumoto was another resident of zone 1

that evening. And he said that, quote,

"I left my house in Ch and looked east.

All of Sumida district and Cotto

district was engulfed in red. The next

morning, my eyelashes were all burnt. I

couldn't open my eyes."

Tokyo was now in a panic. American

intelligence officers intercepted a grim

radio transmission in which the

announcer stated, "Red fire clouds kept

creeping high and the tower of the

Parliament building stuck out black

against the background of the red sky.

The roaring flames became a firestorm

that consumed a hefty chunk of the city.

People ran for shelter in search of

anywhere they could to escape the blaze,

but many never made it. Six-year-old

Nishio Suzuko remembered the devastation

of that night. In front of our shelter's

door were people who until a few hours

before were saying, "Please open the

door. Please let us in." They had been

burned and charred completely black.

They were like human logs piled up in

front of the door like a mountain.

Nishio's life was changed forever by

that night. She recalled, "According to

my mother, I had 20 classmates. In the

March 10th air raid, all of my

classmates except me died. Even those

who actually made it to shelters were

not necessarily safe. The raging flames,

fueled by high winds and the abundance

of fuel in the form of wood and bamboo,

proceeded to suck all of the oxygen from

the air. Many of those who had made it

to shelter were then simply esphixxiated

where they hid. As the heat rose, even

materials untouched by the fire began to

combust. Eyewitness reports tell of how

clothing would just burst into flames,

scorching people to death as they fled.

Glass windows were liquefied, and then

this liquid was whipped into the

cyclonic winds that buffeted the city.

What followed was a hellish rain of

scolding molten glass that stripped

living skin from bone. Just like during

the great Kanto earthquake, people began

to make for the rivers and waterways

that crisscrossed northeastern Tokyo.

But just getting to these waterways was

a hazard in itself. Sprinting through

rubble strewn streets choked with fog

that reduced visibility to just a few

feet, people became hopelessly lost.

Many were separated from family members

and loved ones that they would never see

again. Others stumbled and fell in the

streets and were trampled to death by

the hordes of refugees behind them. Even

reaching water was not a guarantee of

safety. In the intense heat of the

storm, temperatures reached up to 900°

C. For reference, a crerematorium

furnace ranges from 760 to 870 C. Many

of those in the center of the firestorm

were simply vaporized. Around 1,000

people sought refuge in a school

swimming pool. But as the temperature

rose, they were boiled alive. Around

three hours after the planes had headed

back to base, the sun began to rise over

Tokyo. Those who had survived the horror

of that night were met with a scene of

total devastation. Tokyo resident Fusako

Susaki described what she saw that

morning. Stacked up corpses were being

hauled away on lries. Everywhere there

was the stench of the dead and of smoke.

I saw the places on the pavement where

people had been roasted to death. At

last, I comprehended firsthand what an

air raid meant. For the tens of

thousands of wounded, help was almost

non-existent. The fire kept on burning

for many more hours after sunrise,

hampering rescue efforts. Even after the

blaze had been brought under control,

most of the injured were left to fend

for themselves. Hospitals were either

destroyed or swamped with patients. Only

one single military rescue unit was

deployed in the capital, and this

contained just nine doctors and 11

nurses. This meant that many people who'

survived the night of the raid itself

would then succumb to their injuries in

the weeks that followed. Many of these

deaths were preventable, but victims

simply couldn't reach the medical aid

that they so desperately needed. For

Barrett Tilman, not even the capital's

combined civil and military emergency

services could ease human suffering on

an industrial scale. For those on the

ground, it would have felt like the

world had ended. All around, the

writhing forms of the dying lay beside

the static forms of the dead. Soaring

temperatures and raging flames had

consumed everything. Amid this terror,

rumors began to circulate. A Japanese

radio transmission said, quote, "We

thought the whole of Tokyo had been

reduced to ashes." Other rumors were a

little more conservative, but still

terrifying. People began to say that 40%

of the capital had been destroyed. In

fact, the scope of the damage was far

more limited. Probably about 7% of the

city was burned to the ground that

night. Though the civil and military

authorities had lost control of the

blaze, the network of canals and large

public parks created firereaks that

prevented it from spreading further. The

Nakagawa Canal, for example, formed a

barrier that the flames could not cross.

But still, within that small area, the

destruction was total. Other than a

scant few stone buildings, the entire 12

square miles of zone 1 had been

completely flattened and a far greater

area was wiped out by the subsequent

firestorm.

Even though most of greater Tokyo was

still standing, this was a startling

wakeup call. If the Americans could do

all this in just a few hours, then what

would they do next time or the time

after that? Or the time after that? It

would only take a dozen or so raids to

completely wipe Tokyo off the map. For

most people, the chance was one not

worth taking. More than 1 million people

fled Tokyo in the weeks after the raid,

becoming refugees in nearby prefectures.

With the resources drained by an

increasingly dire military situation,

Japan struggled to deal with this sudden

massive population movement. Many

people, of course, had simply nowhere to

go. Tokyo's poorest residents lived in

tightly packed slums which were largely

incinerated in the raid. The authorities

then began rehoming these families,

sometimes in abandoned mansions and

luxury buildings in other parts of the

city. The huge disparity in living

conditions for refugees following the

raid caused some serious friction among

the remaining population. The resulting

rioting and looting cast its own blight

on a city that had already been rocked

to its very foundations. For months

after the raid, large sections of Tokyo

remained abandoned. The once bustling

capital city, let's remember, this was

one of the most densely populated

metropolises on the planet, had

essentially become a ghost town. With

its population depleted and its

infrastructure racked by damage, the

authorities decided it simply wasn't

worth restoring public services to many

of the city's neighborhoods. As Japan

was increasingly backed into a corner in

those final months of the war, large

parts of its capital remained a

wasteland.

We're still not certain just how many

people lost their lives on the night of

March 9th to March 10th and in the weeks

that followed. Official recovery

attempts located 79,466

bodies. This is a staggering number, but

it's a bare minimum. The heat was so

intense in many parts of zone 1 that

many bodies would have been vaporized

with no trace of them left behind.

Tokyo's director of health provided a

higher estimate, believing that around

83,600 people had been killed. The Tokyo

Fire Department put the number at

97,000, while the police's official

estimate was almost 125,000. Part of the

confusion over the death toll stems from

the situation in Tokyo at the beginning

of March. Japan's war effort was now

faltering overseas and the country was

struggling to hold things together

domestically. The nation now teetered on

the brink of chaos and internal

migration was far higher than usual.

Thousands of people moved into Tokyo for

various reasons in the weeks leading up

to the bombing while thousands of people

also traveled in the opposite direction

away from the capital. As a result,

there is no definitive figure for how

many people were in Tokyo at the time of

the bombing. And as for how many of

those people were in zone one, we have

absolutely no idea. Over the second half

of the 20th century, historians have

worked really hard to try and understand

the true scale of the horror, but

disagreements remain. For historian

Edwin Hoit, the number was likely

200,000 dead. For Mark Seldon, the true

number may be several hundred thousand

higher than this. At the very least, the

death toll would have been [snorts]

higher than the 80,000 killed by the

atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki 5 months

later. The highest estimates suggest

more people died in Tokyo than in

Nagasaki and Hiroshima combined. For

those left alive following the raid, the

suffering was just beginning. More than

1 million people were made homeless

while tens of thousands had suffered

horrifying life-changing injuries. Those

who lived through the night of the raids

would never forget the traumas that they

experienced that night. Accounts from

the bomber crews who actually flew in

the mission shows that they were

certainly aware that something

horrendous was unfolding below. Second

Lieutenant Jim Maritch was among the

crews of the B29s that night and he

admitted that we hated what we were

doing, but we thought we had to do it.

We thought that raid might cause the

Japanese to surrender. Others were

coldly pragmatic. First Lieutenant

Richard Gross remembered, quote, "At the

time, you just didn't think about those

things. We had a job to do, and we did

it. We were burning houses, but we

didn't think about the people." These

rationalizations were coping mechanisms.

Early in the raid, it was clear that

death was on the rampage in Tokyo, and

yet the bombing continued for another 2

hours. For the crews, the only way to

deal with this was to be professional.

They were soldiers. They were fighting a

war, and war is hell. As First

Lieutenant Gross said, they had a job to

do. So, from a military point of view,

was the job successful? Well,

strategically, the raid on Tokyo did

little to hinder the Japanese war

effort. Knocking out a network of tiny

factories and destroying residential

districts would have had no meaningful

effect on Japan's ability to prosecute

their war overseas. Allied servicemen

were still dying in the Philippines, and

the Americans would launch their assault

on Okinawa only 3 weeks later, suffering

around 50,000 casualties in the process.

This would have happened with or without

Lame's raid. But from a psychological

point of view, the raid was crushing for

Japan. The fact that so many American

planes could hit Tokyo like this,

demonstrated the value of the Mariana

campaign, it went some way to justifying

the bloody toll of taking those islands

the previous year. In Japan, the raid

confirmed what many had already

believed. But the empire was losing the

war and losing it badly. The young

factory worker, Katsumoto Sami,

remembered feeling uneasy about the way

that the war was discussed in Japan. We

were taught by teachers and on radio

programs that Japan would definitely win

the war because we were the children of

God. Before the March 10th raid, Satama

kept his suspicions and uncertainties to

himself. If I ever said that, I would be

disgraced and considered a traitor. But

after the raid, no one was in any doubt

of what was going on. The Japanese

government's handling of the catastrophe

was haphazard and backfired multiple

times. They first tried to downplay the

devastation, but word quickly spread and

the residents of nearby prefectures

couldn't fail to notice the 1 million

refugees pouring into their cities. So,

the government changed tax and said that

it was a slaughter bombing and used it

as an example of the barbarity of the

American enemy. This then backfired,

too, and led to questions about why

Japan's supposedly superior air force

could not defend against such an

atrocity. Eventually, the government

simply tried to crush disscent. Anyone

caught spreading rumors or disparaging

the empire and its armed forces would

receive a heavy penalty. But Operation

Meeting House was not an isolated

incident. Over the coming weeks,

American planes ran more raids that hit

other cities. The already crippled

capital was itself hit several more

times between March and May 11th. By the

end of the raids, more than half of the

city was in ruins and more than 4

million people were left homeless. When

the raids stopped, it wasn't because the

Americans had lost the capability, but

because they were running out of things

to bomb. There was no way for the

Japanese government to spin this. They

could repress the scent all they want,

but the damage was already done. The

word had already got out. The empire was

failing. But did this bombing bring

about the end of the war any quicker?

Probably not. Pulverizing Japan with

conventional weapons wouldn't have

brought victory. The population of Japan

was still 72 million in 1945, and no

amount of bombing raids was going to

dent that. The empire could also make

their grenade pins and rifle triggers

elsewhere. Those cottage industries

would have kept on flourishing. Even

after Lame's raid, the Americans would

still need to put boots on the ground on

the Japanese home islands if they were

going to end the war. And this would

have been immensely costly. It was only

the introduction of terrifying new

weapons that August, and the

simultaneous Soviet invasion of Manuria

that averted the need for a land

campaign. Viewed in that light, the

destruction wrought upon Tokyo on March

10th, 1945 becomes little more than a

show of strength, a propaganda coup

perhaps, but one of limited military

value. Of course, we are talking about

the Empire of Japan here, and the list

of Japanese atrocities in World War II

is as long as it is sickening. Up to

200,000 civilians dead in Nanjing. Up to

20,000 women and children subjected to

unspeakable abuse. The systemic

mutilation and assault of women and

girls in Manila, some as young as 12.

Thousands of Chinese prisoners dissected

at Unit 731 while still alive and

without anesthetic. The Japanese

military had shown no mercy to civilians

right across the Pacific. And now their

American enemy had returned the favor in

kind with an atrocity of their own. But

Nishio Suzuko was not in the military

and nor were her 19 classmates. The vast

majority of those killed in the raids

were civilians who were subjected to

unimaginably hellish torments on that

night in March 1945 for acts they had

directly taken no part in. This kind of

payback is [snorts and clears throat]

difficult to justify. The Tokyo

authorities also have a lot to answer

for. They turned residential districts

into potential targets by relying on

cottage industries and civilian

workshops. When their air power failed,

these residential districts were left

defenseless. Like is so often the case

in the history of warfare, it's the

innocent civilian population that pay

the price for the crimes of their

government and their armed forces. The

testimonies from the bomber crews

suggest that they believed in their

mission and sincerely thought that even

though they were doing a questionable

thing, they were helping to win and end

the war. But that civilian death toll

and the heartbreaking stories from Tokyo

that night are hard to stomach. The

12-year-old factory worker, Katsumoto

Satami, survived the rage. He would go

on to become a writer and novelist, but

later would dedicate his life to raising

awareness about the incident, which is

often overshadowed by the bombings in

Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Later that year,

Sir directed his anger at both sides in

the bombing. for the Japanese

government. He had this to say. As a

Japanese national, I think the Japanese

government should admit their

responsibility for starting the war. But

he was similarly angry at the Americans.

General was later awarded a first class

order of merit for rebuilding Japan's

air force after the war. But for Sati,

the decision was quote totally

unacceptable. Sir Tommy also laid some

blame with himself and others in his

generation for remaining silent in the

years following the war. In order to

make people understand, we should have

raised our voices much louder. We should

have tried much harder, but it wasn't

enough. I don't know how many more years

I can go on. Satami died in May 2022. He

was 90 years old. Nishio Suzuko, the

six-year-old girl that we covered at the

beginning of our story, also survived

the raid and its chaotic aftermath. In

the spring of 2025, she described her

now distant memories of that night and

her ongoing fears of the precarious

situation around the world. We don't

know what the future holds, and I think

there's no guarantee that this exact

same thing won't happen again. As the

night of March 9th and 10th, 1945 slips

beyond living memory, the lessons

learned from that night slip away, too.

But industrial scale conflicts continue

to rage around the world, and civilians

are still living right in the firing

line.

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