The Night Tokyo Burned

About 25 years ago, while flying back from Seattle to Oakland, I read the Boeing Company's semi-official history. When I got to the chapter where they illustrated the millions of tons of bombs dropped on the people of Japan, where they inumerate the hundreds of thousands of people who were murdered by those bombs, when they pile up the statistics of the numbers of buildings destroyed, when they add up all the square miles of Japan that was made into wasteland by their bombers, I simply broke down in tears. It wasn't the air war's impact that shocked me. I had been aware of it since childhood. What hit me was the callus inhuman gloating and the treatment of murder as an industrial statistic that sickened me. I was not naive. In fact, I was travelling around the West as the regional organizer of a revolutionary socialist movement. The Boeing book smacked me right in the face. The billionaires who run this country care not one wit for the lives of ordinary people, in Japan, in Vietnam, or in Seattle! If it serves their purpose to kill us off by the hundreds of thousands and millions, they will do it, and gloat over how well they can do it. Hoito Edoin puts the terror-bombing campaign against Japan's people in human terms. He speaks of real people: a 12 year old separated by the firestorm from his family, a mother who has her baby sucked out of her back harness by the firestorms, a doctor who has a few assistants to deal with hundreds of thousands of injured,a man who would like to wake up in the morning and see his city as he always has, a woman who fights her hair, her clothes, a group of terrified Tokyo citizens hiding in a ditch, praying out loud to keep themselves awake and alive, and people who have to climb over, fight their way through, or up out of piles of bodies. We stare these people in the face as the US Army Air Force bombers try to incinerate them and their cities. Yet, Edoin never over dramatizes. He never lectures. Restraint and accuracy keep his story on a human scale and prevent us from being overwhelmed by the carnage. The real facts are that in the history of bombing, particularly in the Second World War, the bombers had difficulty hitting any targets in a precision way. When the US tried to do that over Germany, the majority of US aircrew were killed. By 1942, the British gave up any pretense at precision bombing. They borrowed the tactics that made the German bombing of Coventry such a horror. They bombed to kill people and destroy cities through firebombing--creating huge fires whose convection became so strong that it was an explosive force itself. While the US made the pretense of precision bombing in Europe,it soon joined the British terror bombing efforts at places like Dresden and Hamburg and many smaller cities that suffered under firestorm raids. Curtis Le May, who many may remember as a war-criminal in Vietnam and a proponent of nuclear warfare, carried the same strategy to the air war against Ja

Edoin does a good job detailing the initial fire bombing of Japanese cities by American B-29s. Over 300,000 Japanese lost their lives and many millions became homeless because of General Curtis LeMay's decision to go after the residential areas of Japan. Rather than try to precision bomb the factories that made munitions and aircraft engines, LeMay went after the residences because many were home based industrial enterprises. These small shops were destroyed affecting the large plants. In addition, workers who lost their homes also tended to go to work less ofter thereby destroying the morale of the Japanese worker.This destruction (although a dirty business) proved to the average Japanese the loss of the war and served the Americans.I think this was a balanced book. Edoin proves the military clique of Japan made the civilian work force an acceptable military target. It also shows how the American military went after a targets which caused thousands of civilian deaths. More people lost their lives in the fire bombing of Japanese cities than the deaths caused by Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A thoughtful read.