What Happened On March 10th?
Japan has been prone to natural disasters in the past, but March 10th, 1945 in Tokyo was unlike anything else the country has seen. The Japanese capital was swarmed by a man-made inferno – the single most destructive bombing raid every to exist. Codenamed Operation Meetinghouse, the attack by the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) permanently scarred the city and its people.
With over 279 “B-29 Superfortress” bombers, the mightiest aircraft of the era, incendiary bombs were dropped from above. These bombs were unordinary, as they were filled with napalm, a jellied gasoline that clung to surfaces and burned fiercely.
Still rattled and furious from the devastation of Pearl Harbor four years prior, America wanted to both take revenge and put a cap on the war with one last deadly attack.
This tactic, designed to create a firestorm, proved to be devastatingly effective. The closely packed wooden buildings of Tokyo, despite incendiary rain, ignited rapidly. The rising heat created powerful updrafts that sucked in even more oxygen, turning the flames into a self-sustaining inferno.
Over 15 square miles (41 square kilometers) of central Tokyo were reduced to ashes. Estimates suggest that over 100,000 civilians perished in the fiery conflagration, many burned alive or suffocated by the smoke.
The intense heat literally melted asphalt streets, and the resulting firestorm generated winds strong enough to rip clothes from people’s bodies. The Japanese named this horrific night “The Night of the Black Snow”, referring to the charred debris which rained down from the burning city.
The intense heat generated by the firestorm created a powerful upward draft, which caused issues even more the American bombers themselves. This unexpected turbulence even resulted in the crash of one B-29 within the city limits.
Some Tokyo residents found refuge in the unlikeliest of places – the city’s underground subway system. The tunnels offered a degree of protection from the flames and searing heat above. Survivors reported the sound of trains continuing to run throughout the night, carrying desperate citizens to safety and ferrying firefighters and medical personnel into the burning heart of Japan.
The bombing of Tokyo on March 10th, 1945 demonstrated the destructive potential of strategic bombing. Decades later in December of 1972, the U.S. utilized a similar tactic to end the war in Vietnam, which further raised questions about the morality of bombing innocent civilians.
