Eighty years after the U.S. firebombing of Tokyo, survivors recall the Second World War's deadliest air raid using conventional weapons, which killed over 100,000 people in a single night. As global tensions rise, survivors fear history could repeat itself.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00In the Pacific, the Ruthless Air War is continued against Japan.
00:08Another Tokyo raid is briefed at the huge super-fortress base of Saipan.
00:12From the Marianas, 1,500 miles northward over the Pacific flies this great armada on what
00:16has become almost a daily mission.
00:22The United States Army Air Forces conducted around 60 bombing raids over Tokyo during
00:43World War II.
00:45But it was the firebombings that took place 80 years ago, between March 9 and 10, 1945,
00:52that left the deepest scars on the city.
01:10The raids were the deadliest in history, with immediate deaths surpassing each of the atomic
01:15bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki five months later.
01:19Nishio Shizuko was celebrating her sixth birthday at the time.
01:23Eighty years later, she considers herself among the lucky ones.
01:39There were among the more than 100,000 killed in the firestorm that consumed a quarter of
01:44Tokyo, 42 square kilometers on a single night.
01:48Raid bombers first used high explosives to turn Japan's paper and wood cities into kindling,
01:54then dropped incendiaries to ignite them.
01:57The blaze it created sucked air from lungs and cooked people alive inside their shelters.
02:24Over Tokyo firebombings, the Americans had been unsuccessfully trying to target Japan's
02:29factories and war economy.
02:41The March 1945 raids reflected the brutal logic of total war.
02:46Allied planners, led by General Curtis LeMay, saw Japan's residential areas as part of its
02:51war economy.
02:53Small workshops produced materials, and the residents worked in them, making entire neighborhoods
02:58targets.
03:13Eighty years later, the March 1945 raids on Tokyo are often remembered as yet another
03:19atrocity in a war full of them.
03:22Of a few still alive who lived through it, the terror of that night is coupled with a
03:27fear that nearly a century later, the world has failed to learn from it.
03:46Devon Tsai and Bryn Thomas for Taiwan Plus.