Tokyo firebombing - survivors recall most destructive air raid in history [View all]

[Bonobo]

http://www.dw.de/tokyo-firebombing-survivors-recall-most-destructive-air-raid-in-history/a-18300080

An estimated 100,000 people perished in the firebomb raid on Tokyo in the night of March 9-10, 1945. At the same time, 1 million were rendered homeless and over 41 square kilometers of the city were razed to the ground.

Haruyo Nihei was just eight years old when the US bombers unleashed their deadly cargoes above Tokyo, yet the terrors of that night and the days that followed are seared into her memory. Seven decades later, she says her ability to recall can be a curse.

That was about to change for Nihei, her parents, older brother and younger sister.

The family lived in the working-class Koto district of the city, north-west of the heart of Tokyo - an area of small wood-and-paper homes crammed together in close communities. Her parents had a business selling spices to restaurants around the city.

Pile of corpses

Miraculously, as the dawn began to rise and the fires died down, Nihei's father found her and pulled her from the pile of corpses on top of her. Charred beyond recognition, they had saved her from a similar fate, she said.

A total of 279 B-29 Superfortresses took part in the raid, dropping 1,665 tons of bombs on the Japanese capital. The majority were 230kg cluster bombs that each released 38 bomblets carrying napalm at an altitude of around 750 meters.

The weapons were able to burn straight through the flimsy homes, schools and hospitals in what was primarily a residential district.
As well as the 100,000 who were killed, an estimated 125,000 were injured and 1.5 million lost their homes. The raid killed more people than the comparable attack on the German city of Dresden, as well as the immediate casualties of the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki five months later. The firestorm also destroyed countless small companies churning out equipment for the Japanese war effort.

"It has a special meaning for us to have this facility on this spot," said Takeuchi. "I don't hate Americans and I don't hold a grudge, but I do want future generations to know what happened here.

"I don't think that most people really understand what happened," she said. "We want to show that in war, it is the weak and vulnerable - women, the elderly, children - who are too often the victims."


The charred remains of a woman and the child she carried on her back.