Identifying the Long Dead

The consequences of expedience over morality.

Apr 12, 2025

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This is a riff on a Richard Sisk story that first appeared on Military.com in May 2024.

Unintended consequences of the Fire Blitz

On the night of 9/10 March 1945 Curtis LeMay’s B-29 Superfortresses hit Tokyo with over 1,600 tons of incendiaries in XXI Bomber Command’s Mission 40 (also called MEETINGHOUSE II, the second major area raid on Tokyo, the city codenamed MEETINGHOUSE). The single most devastating air raid ever conducted incinerated the wood and paper houses of the city and killed about 100,000 people in three hours of bombing. Some believe that the Showa Emperor Hirohito knew the war was lost when he saw the destruction after this raid. On the night of May 23, 1945, Mission 61/MEETINGHOUSE V sent over 500 B-29s to Tokyo. This raid killed 22 American officers and 40 enlisted B-29 crewmen held at the Tokyo Military Prison.

In the ten days after Mission 40, XXI Bomber Command dropped 9,373 tons of bombs on Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka and Kobe, destroying 31 square miles of those cities. The raid that killed the American prisoners was a continuation of the first phase of the Fire Blitz, that continued on a different scale until August.

Recovering the American Dead

The Japanese buried thousands of bodies in mass graves after each of five successive fire raids on Tokyo, and apparently segregated the American remains in their own mass grave. After the war, the US Graves Registration Service disinterred the commingled remains. The service could identify some personnel, and interred the rest as unknowns at the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial. In 2022, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) launched the Tokyo Prison Fire Project, analyzing the remains at their labs in Hawaii. Teams are still working with a list of flyers compiled from reports of Japanese personnel and the memories of some POWs transferred to other camps before the raid. The laborious task of working with historical records and deteriorating remains is in the early stages—the outcome is still uncertain—but the project has opened a window into the past and shed light on the long-ago deaths.

Expedient Morality or Moral Expediency?

The fire bombings resulted from a major strategic shift in using the B-29s. Henry "Hap" Arnold, the Army Air Forces chief, pressed for new tactics to replace the ineffective daytime, high-altitude precision raids against Japanese military targets.

As the war of machines is less destructive to life and property, and more destructive to will and nerves, the tactical object of war will become demoralization and disorganization rather than destruction and annihilation.
J.F.C. Fuller

While the planners knew it was possible that American PWs were in the target areas, expedience demanded that could not be a factor. LeMay ordered the switch to low-altitude nighttime incendiary raids against Japanese cities because both LeMay and Arnold believed it was the best way to compel a Japanese surrender and avoid a ground invasion.

Fuller, writing in 1922, was wrong.

Mechanized warfare became horrifyingly destructive of lives, property, will and morale, but did not affect everyone in the same way. In early 1945, there was no external evidence Japan was ready to end the fighting after four years of slaughter on an industrial scale. The Fire Blitz was the best way, nearly everyone believed, to compel Japan to stop fighting. From March to August 1945, LeMay’s B-29s destroyed roughly 2/3rds of the buildings in Japan, making about 10% of its population homeless and killing over 800,000 Japanese (the real numbers are unknowable) before Hiroshima. The campaign killed only a few U.S., British, Australian, and Dutch prisoners of war in Tokyo during that campaign; however, the exact number of deaths, like that of their Japanese counterparts, may remain unknown.

These “friendly casualties” and “non-combatants” were the unfortunate victims of both Japanese recalcitrance and American “expedient morality,” choosing to kill this many people now to save that many later in a ground invasion or, in the extreme, starving Japan to extinction. The military leadership of Japan sincerely preferred the death of their people to the indignity of capitulation. Only direct orders from the Showa Emperor Hirohito compelled the leadership to seek peace. Only after acting in a way none of his predecessors did—issuing direct orders to the government that acted in his name and telling the world he had done so—did the destruction end. For the Showa, expedient morality meant ending the madness.

The Fire Blitz: Burning Down Japan

The Fire Bliz, LeMay’s name for his campaign against Japan, was the culmination of frustration, success, and desperation on a global scale.

From the end of World War One to Tokyo Bay, the promise of strategic bombardment was only realized by numbers of machines dealing destruction that Fuller couldn’t have imagined in 1922.

Coming Up…

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Downside of Prosperity

And Finally...

On 12 April:

1861: The bombardment of Ft. Sumter in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina begins. This action, sanctioned by the Provisional Confederate Government, compelled President Abraham Lincoln to declare the seceded states to be in rebellion, triggering the American Civil War.

1945: Franklin Delano Roosevelt dies in Warm Springs, Georgia. While FDR did not see the end of WWII, he probably could see the end, since Germany was on the verge of collapse and, yes, Arnold could report that the second most expensive project of the war—the B-29s—had finally shown their worth. The most expensive, of course, was the Sperry/Norden bomb sight; the Manhattan project came in third.

And today is NATIONAL BIG WIND DAY, commemorating the highest recorded wind on Earth—231 miles an hour—at the Mount Washington Observatory in North Conway, New Hampshire. It is said the anemometers measuring that wind burned out their bearings during the blow.

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