AP: Deadly WWII firebombings of Japanese cities largely ignored
http://apnews.excite.com/article/20150309/as--japan-wwii-firebombing-9e240aaab0.html
Mar 9, 4:03 AM (ET)
By ELAINE KURTENBACH and MARI YAMAGUCHI
TOKYO (AP) — It was not Hiroshima or Nagasaki, but in many ways, including lives lost, it was just as horrific.
On March 10, 1945, U.S. B-29 bombers flew over Tokyo in the dead of night, dumping massive payloads of cluster bombs equipped with a then-recent invention: napalm. A fifth of Tokyo was left a smoldering expanse of charred bodies and rubble.
This combination of two photos shows initial destruction and reconstruction after the March 10, 1945 firebombing. The top photo taken on March 19, 1945 shows survivors commute through destroyed Nakamise shopping street after Tokyo firebombing. The bottom photo taken 70 years later on March 7, 2015, shows a visitor prays toward Sensoji Temple at the start of the Nakamise shopping street in Asakusa district in Tokyo. (AP Photo/The Center of the Tokyo Raids and War Damage, Eugene Hoshiko)
Today, a modest floral monument in a downtown park honors the spirits of the 105,400 confirmed dead, many interred in common graves.
It was the deadliest conventional air raid ever, worse than Nagasaki and on par with Hiroshima. But the attack, and similar ones that followed in more than 60 other Japanese cities, have received little attention, eclipsed by the atomic bombings and Japan's postwar rush to rebuild.
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"The Operation Meetinghouse firebombing of Tokyo on the night of 9 March 1945 was the single deadliest air raid of World War II,[2] greater than Dresden,[21] Hiroshima, or Nagasaki as single events"
In a single night:
- 1665 tons of explosive, including napalm, jellied gas and white phosphorus
- 100K dead, >125K injured
- 1 million homeless
- 15.8 sq miles burned/destroyed
Tokyo had >100K inhabitants per square mile at the time, so the death/injury estimates may in fact be low. Both the US and Japan had reason to minimize them.
Tokyo was the capitol of Japan. Kobe was one of its largest naval ports. Yokohama was a major industrial center. Even Hiroshima and Nagasaki made major contributions toward the war effort. One could easily argue that these were legitimate targets during a major war.
Dresden, which was considered one of the most beautiful cities in Europe (it was sometimes referred to as "Germany's Paris" or "Florence on the Elbe"
had little industrial capacity, no military capacity, and was not a major hub for...well, anything really. It's bombing was purely psychological, and its destruction was planned solely to break German spirits. The industrial areas and rail yards that it did posses existed on the fringes of town and in the suburbs, and were not even targeted in the initial bombings. In fact, it's industrial area wasn't even hit until the last night of the bombing, and even then with only one wave of bombers. It was so unimportant that the Allies saw bombing the civilian areas as a more critical use of their bombers time. While the Allies officially claimed that Dresden was a "Nazi communication hub", that too dramatically overstates its reality. Dresden was such a militarily unimportant target that it had escaped bombing during much of the war. By February 1945, it was simply the last major German city that still had a functional telephone system.
The firebombing of Dresden constituted the deliberate targeting and destruction of civilian areas and civilian populations to produce no military objective beyond generating fear and despair in the German civilian population. While it certainly wasn't the only city targeted that way, it was the largest and most glaring example.
General Sherman was one of the first US Generals to specifically target cities & civilians instead of armies and he is considered a great hero to this day.
It's all okay as long as you are on the winning side.
Every definition should have a proof.
He came home on points just before the bomb was dropped.
It was the Imperial war machine (think current Republican hawks) that attacked Pearl. The Japanese people paid for it. Absent Pearl, there would have been no mass bombings.
For all the dead from centuries of war...
