Introduction
At 24:15 on March 10, 1945, the tense situation in recent days kept Kimura Yoshitaka, who was only 7 years old, unable to fall asleep.
Suddenly, a familiar and harsh siren sounded like thunder across the earth. He hurried out of the house, only to see an unforgettable scene: Countless bombs fell from the sky like rain, and in an instant, they exploded like fireworks. And these exploding "fireworks" quickly ignited the houses and land, and Kimura watched the familiar land turn into a sea of flames...
This is the memory of Kimura Yoshitaka, a survivor of the Tokyo bombing , about the bombing that year.
The Tokyo bombing was an important opportunity for Japan to cease the war. It destroyed Japan's domestic military industry and caused Japan's economy and military to fall into complete paralysis. It had a very important role and significance for the entire World War II battle situation.
"Tokyo Bombing"
Many people believe that in World War II, the turning point on the Asian battlefield was the two atomic bombs dropped by the US military on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, and this was also the opportunity that prompted the Japanese army to consider an armistice.
However, this is not the case. Long before the Hiroshima and Nagasaki incidents , there had been a major bombing that shocked the world.
The bombing lasted for a full 10 months, killing 140,000 people, leaving more than 1 million people homeless. More than 50% of the houses in Tokyo were burned down, and the bustling Tokyo turned into a "dead city" overnight.
The survivors who crawled out from the ruins, facing the city in front of them, could not believe that they were still in the world.
"purgatory on earth" is the best description of Tokyo at that time. This was the sensational "Tokyo Bombing".
So, why did the US military commit such a tragedy? There are two reasons.
First of all, the US military decided to attack the Japanese mainland through air combat, which was essentially a retaliation for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
In December 1941, in order to overturn the defeat in the Russo-Japanese War and seize oil, oil and other war resources, Yamamoto Isoroku decided to take risks and attacked the US Air Force Base at Pearl Harbor.
In the early morning of December 7, the Japanese army successfully attacked Pearl Harbor, causing the sinking of the USS Arizona battleship, the grounding of the USS Nevada, and nearly 3,000 casualties.
The victory at Pearl Harbor made the Japanese army start to "float". They thought they had achieved a victory in the Pacific battlefield.
As everyone knows, Yamamoto Isoroku made two fatal mistakes during the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor: First, he set the time of the sneak attack on Sunday, and second, he set the bombing target on the US military aircraft carrier .
Regarding the former, it is because the US military has regulations that every Sunday is considered their "holiday", so on this day, there will most likely be no one in the base.
Although this did provide convenience for the Japanese attack, it also gave the US military an opportunity to maintain its effectiveness.
And the latter is even worse. Indeed, the Japanese army blew up more than 640 US military ships, which was a great achievement, but the Japanese army did not blow up the US military shipyards.
This also means that after the attack, the US military can park the damaged ships at the dock for repairs.
In addition, the most critical point is that a full 4.5 million tons of heavy oil are stored in an area less than 8 kilometers away from Pearl Harbor. If the Japanese army sent a plane to handle these oils, it would not take much effort to detonate them.
Without oil, US military aircraft and aircraft carriers will become a pile of broken copper and scrap iron, and the fire caused by the explosion of oil cannot be easily extinguished. It is very likely that the entire Pearl Harbor will be burned as a result.
If Yamamoto Isoroku had really accomplished this, then the U.S. military would have been more than just "suffering major damage."
Therefore, the Japanese army's attack, which seemed vigorous but was actually full of mistakes, was equivalent to a wake-up call for the US military and "by the way" found itself a powerful enemy.
The US military, which had recovered from the attack on Pearl Harbor, targeted Japan in order to win the Pacific battlefield and to retaliate.
Secondly, it is due to strategic needs. Prior to this, in the European battlefield, in order to snipe the German army, the US military had used a high-altitude attack tactic, which was very effective, so it wanted to replicate the victory on the European battlefield to the Pacific battlefield.
In addition, all arms and weapons supplies to the Japanese army come from domestic sources. If Japan's domestic arms workshops are destroyed, it will be equivalent to cutting off the Japanese army's arms supply line.
is more serious. If it can directly destroy Japan's domestic economy and military, it will undoubtedly make things worse for the Japanese army, which no longer has the support of Germany and Italy.
Therefore, under various considerations, the US military decided to attack the Japanese mainland, and the first stop was Tokyo.
The process of the "Tokyo Bombing"
Before the tragic Tokyo Bombing, the US military bombed Japan in June 1944, but the effect was not obvious.
The time was June 15, 1944. At that time, the US military had not yet captured the Mariana Islands, , so US military aircraft could only choose to take off from China.
However, the voyage from Chengdu, China to Japan is too long, which will cause supply problems. Once the bomb load is sufficient, the fuel will inevitably be reduced. On the other hand, if there is enough fuel, the bomb load must be reduced.
As a result, when the US military carried out the first round of bombing, due to insufficient bomb load, the attacks that could be carried out were limited, not to mention the "high-altitude bombing tactics" carried out at that time.
In the end, in that bombing, only 47 of the 68 US military aircraft successfully took off and hit the target.
The remaining 4 aircraft failed to take off, 4 crashed, 6 were forced to abandon the ammunition carried by the aircraft during the battle, and one was shot down. The remaining 6 aircraft only hit some unimportant secondary targets sporadically.
Compared with the past performance of the US Air Force, this bombing can be said to be a great failure.
This problem was not solved until July of the same year, when General MacArthur of the U.S. Army used the "island hopping tactic" to skip islands heavily defended by the Japanese army, conduct amphibious landing operations, and command the Allied forces in the Pacific to seize the Mariana Islands.
The location of the Mariana Islands is very important. It is located at the throat of the Pacific Ocean Channel and is a very important maritime traffic artery for Asia and the Americas. At the same time, it is also the only way for the US military to attack Japan and the Far East.
To make a simple analogy, mathematics says that "the shortest straight line is between two points." If the US military wants to attack Japan, then the Mariana Islands is the "straight line", the shortest distance that the US military can think of.
Therefore, MacArthur's capture of this area was tantamount to gaining the key to victory for the Pacific Allies.
So, in November of the same year, the US military began its second bombing of Japan. This time it was even more generous, directly dispatching 88 bombers .
However, the US military misjudged the situation in Japan. According to the air raid tactics that had been used in Europe, the US military decided to conduct precision bombing during the day, and the height of the bomb was determined to be above 10,000 meters.
However, the distribution of military industrial areas in Japan at that time was different from that in Europe. The industrial areas in Germany were concentrated and concentrated in one place.
However, Japan relies on small workshops hidden in residential areas and commercial areas to produce small parts, and then gather these parts together for assembly. These small workshops are scattered and scattered, making it impossible to achieve precise strikes.
Moreover, the height of the US military's bomb drop is really too high. The coastal waters of Japan mostly have a temperate maritime climate. The weather in this climate is not suitable for high-altitude bomb dropping operations.
In the end, only 30 of the 88 bombers found their bombing targets, and the hits were only a pitiful 10%. The destroyed military factory only had one aircraft manufacturing plant, which was still slightly damaged.
If the US military continues to attack in this way, the final result will be failure.
After the air raid failed in November, the US military also tried to use incendiary bombs to carry out carpet bombing at night, but due to strategic reasons, the results were not good-until Curtis LeMay took over the task of bombing Japan.
Curtis LeMay
It is undeniable that Curtis LeMay was a military talent. As the commander of the Bomber Department at the time, he discovered a problem with the Japanese army after observing the domestic defense of the Japanese army: the Japanese army's night air defense equipment was insufficient.
Therefore, after comprehensive consideration and reference to the previous two failures, he decided to make strategic adjustments: changing the original daytime operation to a night operation; changing the original altitude of 10,000 meters to 5,000 to 6,000 feet; in order to maximize the effect of the fire attack, Le Mei ordered each bomber to remove the guns, turrets and ammunition in the cabin, leaving only the machine gunner at the tail.
In this way, in addition to just enough fuel, the remaining space of the entire bomber is used to store incendiary bombs, and the effect it can exert is twice or even three times that of the original bomber.
In the end, Li Mei just wanted to drop incendiary bombs and did not want to have a head-on conflict with the Japanese army.
In order to avoid unnecessary casualties, he ordered the team members to no longer form a formation during this bombing mission. Instead, one bomber would fly to the target location in advance to bomb, and then the remaining bombers would follow in and bomb at the target point.
The change in strategy made the other team members doubtful. After all, from Europe to Japan, their previous missions were bombing at high altitudes and had never been changed.
But Li Mei's determination infected the 21st Troop, and they were willing to bear the success or failure of this mission together with Li Mei. Thus, the "darkest moment" in the history of Tokyo, Japan began.
On the night of March 9, 1945, 334 B-29 bombers set off from Guam and headed straight for Tokyo. Each of these bombers carried about 6 to 8 tons of incendiary bombs.
According to theoretical analysis, the incendiary bomb on each B-29 can cause an area of 6,500 square meters to be burned.
The entire dropping process lasted more than two hours. More than two thousand tons of incendiary bombs were dropped during this process. In just a moment, Tokyo turned into a sea of flames.
To make matters worse, off the coast of Japan, the hot air waves and cold air generated when the incendiary bombs were dropped formed strong convective winds, which eventually led to the formation of the " flame tornado ".
I believe everyone is familiar with what a tornado looks like. Imagine that the wind carries a raging fire, raging like a fire dragon in the city. People and things within a hundred miles, let alone being caught in it, will only end up being turned into ashes even if they are just passed by it.
A general flame tornado can last for more than an hour and is difficult to extinguish. The US military dropped incendiary bombs in Tokyo for two hours, making it even more difficult to extinguish.
Only this time, 1/4 of Tokyo was burned, nearly 270,000 buildings were burned, river water boiled and evaporated, people were burned to coke, nearly 90,000 people were burned to death, 100,000 were seriously injured, and millions of people were homeless.
This is not over yet. After burning Tokyo, the US military successively carried out bombings in important cities such as Nagoya, Osaka , Kobe .
and then "visited" Tokyo again on May 9th and 26th.
html After the attack on the 226th, the once prosperous Tokyo was "unburnable" and completely turned into a "dead city".The results of the "Tokyo Bombing"
The "Tokyo Bombing" was the bombing with the largest number of casualties and the most serious damage caused by conventional bombing in the history of world military .
After the incident, according to Japanese official statistics, in the city of Tokyo alone, after three bombings, more than 140,000 people died, countless people were injured, and nearly half of the houses in the city were burned down.
When a disaster occurred, people in Tokyo hid in relatively solid buildings to avoid incendiary bombs.
such as Tokyo Grand Theater. As a result, the combustion caused all the oxygen in the air to be consumed. Nearly ten thousand people in the theater suffocated to death, and the pile of corpses was more than two meters high.
Some people chose to jump into the river because they couldn't put out the fire on their bodies. As a result, the entire river was covered with the corpses of Tokyo people.
Fires burned throughout Japan, and wailings and calls for help resounded throughout the world. A survivor later told reporters:
When he crawled out of the ruins, he was surrounded by scorched corpses. It was silent and not a single living thing could be heard. At that moment, he suspected that he was not in the world, but in hell.
The impact of the "Tokyo Bombing"
This bombing directly broke Japan's supply line to the Japanese army. It paralyzed the entire Japanese economy. Those who survived in the city almost couldn't survive because of economic problems.
It destroyed Japan's industry, caused great damage to Japan's productivity, and also dampened the morale of its own people. It forced the leaders at the time to consider an armistice.
It is worth mentioning that from a strategic point of view, the "fire attack on Tokyo" was considered a successful strategy, but the international community believed that the US military's move violated humanitarian and the US government should apologize for the casualties caused by the bombing.
However, on the one hand, judging from the overall strategic situation at the time, Li Mei's decision was not a big problem. On the other hand, because Japan did not apologize for the Chengdu bombing and Chongqing bombing, the US military believed that they did not need to apologize.
Therefore, so far, the US military has not made any moral apology for the bombing of Tokyo.
summary
War is cruel and people are innocent.
For the hard-won happy life, cherish peace and stay away from war.
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