The Fire Blitz: Burning Down Japan
The newest work of non-fiction from JDB Communications, LLC
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JDB Communications, LLC, is proud to announce the release of John D. Beatty’s The Fire Blitz: Burning Down Japan.
February 1945
World War Two was entering its sixth year. Germany was on its knees, its cities battered, shattered ruins from clouds of bombers attacking day and night...in the Pacific, the war had been raging for just over three years, but only a handful of bombs had fallen on Japan…
The Boeing B-29 Superfortress, the most sophisticated airplane in the world, had caused fewer than 1,400 enemy casualties since its combat debut over Japan in August 1944. The island battles in the Pacific had made rivers of blood...and the B-29s barely drew any of it. Over 100,000 people had perished just to grab the islands the B-29s would mainly operate from.
But Japan was a different target than Germany.
The distances between the airfields in England and Europe were a quarter of those between the American fields and Japan. And there were the jetstreams, the howling zephyrs that blew bombs far off their aiming points from 30,000 feet. And there was the target itself, with machine tools that made most of Japan's weapons scattered all over urban areas. Bombing factories—when they could hit them—only affected some of Japan's ability to make weapons. Hap Arnold, boss of the Army Air Force, wanted those big airplanes to prove that a land invasion of Japan was unnecessary. He'd staked everything on those enormous birds that seemed to want to burn themselves up on the runway, a weapons program that cost more than the atomic bombs.
The Superforts were turning out to be costly boondoggles, their commander an unimaginative martinet.
So Arnold found a real operator named LeMay who just might prove those airplanes could end the war without a land invasion of Japan. LeMay looked at the problems...and decided on a completely new tactic, one that threw away all the books. To win, the B-29s would have to start a Fire Blitz, and burn down Japan.
9 March 1945
The mournful, by-now-familiar yet no less urgent wailing of air-raid sirens roused Tokyo from its all-too-brief Friday night slumber. With fresh news of approaching B-29-Sans, the city’s air raid wardens—though mildly confused at this highly irregular night attack—dutifully rushed into the streets and alleyways to alert the citizens, telling the tardy to seek shelter, warning all to put on their fire hoods. Though the wardens knew this was not a drill, they felt certain this would be yet another small-scale raid on the Imperial City of the Meiji.
Many residents, working through the night making ammunition and airplane parts, heard the sirens but continued their labors undaunted. Many others, not involved in war-related industries, scurried for the shelters as they always had, but without the urgency of normal, daylight air raids. This was a drill, they assured themselves. The last air attack on Tokyo, however, burned out the Ginza with firebombs, a very local but very destructive affair, even if there was no longer anything to buy in that shopping district…
Mere seconds after the sirens started, searchlights lanced the dark night with their probing, piercing fingers of light, and the antiaircraft guns began firing…
And the Fire Blitz began…
Coming Up…
Armored Cruisers: The Flame
Java Sea/Bismarck Sea Reconsidered
And Finally…
On 9 March:
1945: The USAAF’s XXI Bomber Command launches 334 B-29s from the Mariana Islands to Japan in a desperate effort to do damage to a target; any target. They would reach their target just after midnight on 10 March.
1974: Onoda Hiroo surrenders to his former commanding officer on Lubang Island, Philippines. Although he knew the war had been over for nearly thirty years, Onoda gave up to his former commander only after a young Japanese man found and reported him. He was eventually presented to the Showa Emperor Hirohito. Onoda passed away in 2014.
And today is NATIONAL GET OVER IT DAY, when people are encouraged to forget about past sins, injuries and foilables and look forward to the future. Japan did…