FINANCIAL TIMES March 4 2000
Breathing Fire
In a harrowing account, Paul Abrahams explains how the American fire-bombing of a Tokyo district marked a change in US policy towards civilians -- and paved the way for use of the atom bomb
The night more than half her family died, Kazuyo Funato was woken by her mother's screams. As the startled 12-year-old ran down the stairs of her wooden home, her mother was bundling her baby brother, Takahise, Japanese-style, on to her back. Outside she could hear the shouting of neighbours and the drone of aircraft. The earth and sky were shaking.
The working-class district where she lived next to the Sumida River in eastern Tokyo was ablaze. For two hours, on the night of March 9, 1945, an unprecedented force of more than 334 B-29 bombers rained napalm, phosphorus and oil on the most densely populated and inflammable districts of Japan's capital, which also contained many small work shops supplying the military machine.
For those watching outside the target area, the raid had a theatrical quality. Japanese accounts describe the bombers as "translucent, unreal, light as fantastic glass dragonflies." The bombs were visible too, as they descended slowly like a "cascade of silvery water."
Those cascades of M-47 napalm bombs wreaked unprecedented damage. Nearly 16 square miles of Tokyo were destroyed and 267,171 buildings damaged. The official history of the US Army Air Forces (AAF) concluded with pride: "The physical destruction and loss of life at Tokyo exceeded that of Rome [in Nero's time], and that of any great conflagration of the western world."
The statistics of human destruction were equally numbing. At least 84,000 people, and possibly more than 100,000 died in the great Tokyo air raid. The history Michael Sherry concluded: By some reckonings [this was] the highest toll of any air raid, conventional or atomic, during the war or for that matter any single man-made catastrophe."
Yet in most accounts, the bombing of Tokyo is but a footnote, ignored as much by the Japanese who endured it as the Americans who inflicted it. Only in May will the Tokyo metropolitan government at last compile a definitive list of the names of the those who died that night.
Kazuyo, now in her 60s, sits upright and formal in the living room of her perfectly ordered Tokyo home. A small woman even by Japanese standards, she wears sombre clothes and dark glasses even though there is little natural light in the room. She knows that the pain of bearing testimony again will bring tears.
She explains how, as the raid began, the family initially gathered in the trench behind her parents' home. Her father, a pharmacist, grabbed his iron helmet and rucksack of medical supplies, and, as instructed by the civil defense code, rushed to put out the flames. Minoru, her eldest brother, went to their grandmother's home to fetch her and their three-year-old sister Teruko, but they had already fled. They were never seen again, their bodies never found.
Around midnight, about two hours after the raid began, the fire began to close in on their home, turning the sky red. First, they fled to a nearby school -- the local evacuation point. But the fire followed them.
At that moment, Kazuyo's father arrived with the two brothers. Flight was the only option. All around the family were falling cinders, described by survivors as "flaming dew," which threatened to set them ablaze. Equally dangerous was the wind. There were already strong gusts from an unusually brisk northerly breeze that fanned the flames, but the inferno was also sucking in oxygen, creating huge drafts.
"The wind was throwing shop signs and door frames through the air. That was terrifying enough," explains Kazuyo. "But suddenly the wind took my mother. She was scooped up and started rolling away. I remember her hair blowing in the wind. My baby brother, Takehise, was on her back -- I think he was crying."
Kazuyo's father reached out desperately for his wife, but he, too, was whisked away into the smoke, together with Yoshiaki, a brother who was holding on to his belt. Kazuyo was left with her six-year-old sister Hiroko. As they had crossed the street, Hiroko's purple stuffed cotton hat caught fire and her hands and head were badly burnt. "Hiroko kept saying how hot she was, and how her hands hurt and she wanted water," explain Kazuyo. "The air was cooking. Only the soil seemed cool. I began digging with my hands like a dog." Fatefully, Hiroko copied her.
As they lay in the trench, the area around the Sumida River was being scorched, boiled and baked. Many of those expecting to find safety in open spaces were killed or knocked unconscious by the superheated vapours running ahead of the flames. Others were sucked into the flames by the winds or found the intensity of the inferno spontaneously set their clothes on fire, turning them into human torches.
Those who tried to flee found their path blocked by flying debris and thickets of fallen poles and live electric wires. The natural instinct to head for water betrayed others. In fact, the waterways criss-crossing the district crated fatal fire-traps. The bridges were blocked by other refugees or were already ablaze. Even jumping into the canals provided no sanctuary: keeping your head above water meant breathing noxious fumes.
This mass slaughter was the result of an air strategy devised by Major General Curtis Le May.
<snip>
The results had been predicted. In 1943, mock-ups of wooden Japanese houses had been built at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida to measure the effect of an incendiary raid.
[End excerpt]