History's deadliest air raid happened in Tokyo in World War II & you've probably never heard of it
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/07/asia/japan-tokyo-fire-raids-operation-meetinghouse-intl-hnk/index.html__________________________________________________________________________________________________________
by Brad Lendon, and Emekia Jozuka, updated March 8, Sunday 9:54 am ET. CNN
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Tokyo (CNN)Everywhere she turned, 8-year-old Haruyo Nihei saw flames.
Bombs dropped by the Americans had created tornadoes of fire so intense that they were sucking mattresses from homes and hurling them down the street along with furniture -- and people.
"The flames consumed them, turning them into balls of fire," says Nihei, now 83.
Nihei had been asleep when the bombs began raining down on Tokyo, then a city comprised of mostly wooden houses, prompting her to flee the home she shared with her parents, her older brother and her younger sister.
As she raced down her street, the superheated winds set her fireproof wrap ablaze. She briefly let go of her father's hand to toss it off.
At that moment, he was swept away into the crush of people trying to escape.
As the flames closed in, Nihei found herself at a Tokyo crossroad, screaming for her father. A stranger wrapped himself around her to protect her from the flames. As more people piled into the intersection, she was pushed to the ground.
As she drifted in and out of consciousness beneath the crush, she remembers hearing muffled voices above: "We are Japanese. We must live. We must live." Eventually, the voices became weaker. Until silence.
It was the early morning of March 10, 1945, and Nihei had just survived the deadliest bombing raid in human history.
(rest of article at link...This happened 75 years ago on this Tuesday, March 10, 2020)
virgogal
(10,178 posts)No argument from me,thats just what I always heard.
sdfernando
(4,896 posts)Were built if brick and stone. Tokyo was almost all wood so the fires were horrendous.
virgogal
(10,178 posts)Karadeniz
(22,267 posts)Them was so pretty, so smart, so sweet...but from her I learned that even in the 1980's, she was a second class citizen because of her Korean ancestry. I can't remember all the details of what liberties were compromised...I think she had a special passport to identify her past. I also learned that the Japanese don't teach Pearl Harbor with many facts. Maybe that there was a battle, so the US entered the war.
CTyankee
(63,769 posts)Japan.
It was nonetheless horrific.
Nitram
(22,671 posts)to the civilian population than the atomic bombs. The rationale was that the Japanese war machine depended not on a few large industrial facilities but thousands of small family-run machine shops and other businesses in residences and buildings all over the city. Buildings made of wood. The first wave of bombing smashed the wooden structures into kindling and the second wave dropped incendiary bombs that set the entire city alight. The same thing happened in Dresden, and was described by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. in "Slaughterhouse 5." Vonnegut's was a prisoner-of-war in Dresden who took shelter in the building after which the novel is titled. When they emerged after the bombing they were horrified by what they saw.
Hekate
(90,189 posts)My long-ago BA is Asian and Pacific History. So yes, I knew about the firebombing of Tokyo. Also the Bataan Death March and the Rape of Nanking. War is ugly beyond belief.
eppur_se_muova
(36,227 posts)US and Allies bombed factories w/HE to destroy infrastucture. They bombed Dresden, Hamburg and Tokyo w/incendiaries specifically to inflict maximum civilian casualties, and not only coined the term "firebombing" but figured out how to optimize the technique:
Arthur Harris, [26]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firestorm#Firebombing
Traditional Japanese houses were built of wood, bamboo, and paper, so Allies knew firebombing would be much more devastating even than Dresden.