Attacks on Kobe and Nagoya

In the last days of July 1945 American aircraft appeared once again over Kobe and Nagoya – two great industrial centres of central Japan that B-29 Superfortress heavy bombers had already burned in the spring. On 30 July P-51 Mustang fighters from Iwo Jima attacked railways, airfields and other targets in the Kobe and Osaka area, while aircraft from American carriers struck airfields and industrial plants in central Honshu, including the Nagoya area. These were no longer great incendiary raids but attacks on individual targets, part of the final phase of the air and naval offensive against the home islands.

Some war chronologies list these attacks under 31 July, as US air raids “on the cities of Kobe and Nagoya”. According to the American chronologies of Army and Navy air operations, however, B-29s flew no raid at all on 31 July, and the attacks on the Kobe and Nagoya area were carried out on 30 July – and by fighters and carrier aircraft, not heavy bombers. What did happen early on 31 July was that American destroyers shelled the port of Shimizu on Suruga Bay, between Nagoya and Tokyo.

The great cities already burned

Kobe, one of Japan’s two largest ports, and Nagoya, which according to American estimates produced 40–50 per cent of Japan’s combat aircraft and aero engines, were among the country’s six largest cities and had been prime targets of XXI Bomber Command from the outset. B-29s had attacked Nagoya since December 1944 – first with precision raids aimed at the Mitsubishi aircraft works, and from March 1945 with incendiary raids on entire districts. The March incendiary raid was followed by the great raids of 14 and 17 May, after which the city centre, the port and the industrial districts lay largely in ruins. Kobe burned on the night of 16–17 March, and on 5 June several hundred B-29s destroyed further districts of the city. That June raid on Kobe and neighbouring Nishinomiya later became the background to Akiyuki Nosaka’s story and the film Grave of the Fireflies.

After the raid on Osaka on 15 June, General Curtis LeMay’s command concluded that the first stage of the incendiary campaign – the destruction of the great cities – was complete. On the target list Kobe and Nagoya were marked as largely burned out, and the bombers were turned against medium-sized and small towns. The great centres did not cease to be attacked, however: where important plants had survived, precision raids with high-explosive bombs returned to them. On 24 July 625 B-29s flew seven such missions against aircraft and metallurgical plants in the Nagoya and Osaka area, losing one aircraft. From 20 July single B-29s of the 509th Composite Group were also flying over Japan, practising the release of heavy “pumpkin bombs” shaped like the future plutonium bomb. According to Japanese studies, one of them fell on 26 July in the Yagoto district of Nagoya, near the Red Cross hospital – according to municipal tallies, the last of 63 B-29 raids on Nagoya.

The July offensive against smaller cities

From the night of 17–18 June the B-29s struck every few days at three or four medium-sized cities at once, each with the forces of one bomb wing. On 16 July XXI Bomber Command was redesignated the Twentieth Air Force, with headquarters on Guam and LeMay in command; from 1 August General Nathan Twining took over, and LeMay became chief of staff to General Carl Spaatz, commander of the US Strategic Air Forces in the Pacific. At the same time B-29s were dropping sea mines in the approaches to ports, including Kobe, cutting Japan off from coastal shipping.

On the night of 27–28 July bombers dropped leaflets over Japan naming eleven cities and calling on their inhabitants to leave, because they would be bombed in the next few days. According to American air historians, this was both a psychological weapon and a show of strength: the defences were so weak that targets could be announced in advance. The following night, 28–29 July, B-29s burned six of them – Tsu, Aomori, Ichinomiya, Ujiyamada, Ōgaki and Uwajima – without losing a single aircraft. Three of these cities, Ichinomiya, Ōgaki and Tsu, lie in the immediate vicinity of Nagoya. The leaflets did not warn of a particular night, however, and according to Japanese accounts many inhabitants could not, or did not dare, leave – the police ordered that leaflets be handed in, and keeping them was punishable.

30 and 31 July

Since 10 July the carrier aircraft of Admiral William Halsey’s Third Fleet had been attacking targets on Honshu and Hokkaido. On 24, 25 and 28 July Task Force 38 aircraft attacked Kure and the Inland Sea area – the British carriers were striking other targets at the time – and in the process also bombed airfields around Nagoya and Osaka. On 30 July naval aviators bombed airfields and industrial plants in central Honshu, including the Nagoya area, and over Maizuru Bay sank, among others, the escort ship Okinawa and the minelayer Toshima. The Japanese air forces scarcely offered battle: their aircraft had been dispersed and hidden against an American invasion.

The same day P-51s of VII Fighter Command, flying from Iwo Jima, attacked railways, airfields and other tactical targets between Kobe and Osaka. Such sweeps, flown by anything from a few dozen to more than a hundred Mustangs, had been a routine part of the campaign since April: fighters that had initially escorted the B-29s were increasingly hunting for targets over the islands on their own, strafing airfields, trains and ships.

Earlier, on the night of 29–30 July, American and British battleships had shelled the works at Hamamatsu – the last occasion on which a British battleship, HMS King George V, opened fire on the enemy. Early on 31 July the destroyers of Captain J. W. Ludewig’s Destroyer Squadron 25 steamed deep into Suruga Bay and in seven minutes fired some 1,100 5-inch (127 mm) shells at the marshalling yard and the aluminium plant at Shimizu (today part of the city of Shizuoka). According to American post-war assessments, the plant was hit but was producing almost nothing anyway for lack of raw material, and the tracks were not damaged. Meanwhile Task Force 38 withdrew eastwards to replenish and avoid a typhoon, and the B-29s flew no raids that day – on 31 July neither Kobe nor Nagoya was the target of an American attack.

The toll for Kobe and Nagoya

Figures for the victims of the raids on the two cities vary by source and are incomplete. According to Japanese municipal tallies, in Nagoya, attacked by B-29s 63 times, 7,858 people were killed and more than 10,000 injured; the US Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS) gave a lower figure of about 3,900 dead. In Kobe, according to city figures, at least 7,491 people were killed, although Japanese researchers regard this number as too low, and according to other tallies the March raid alone claimed more than 8,800 victims. In both cities hundreds of thousands of people lost their homes; many inhabitants had been evacuated to the countryside earlier, which reduced the death toll but also paralysed the factories.

For industrial purposes both cities were largely lost by July 1945. Nagoya’s aircraft production had fallen after the spring raids to a fraction of its former scale, and attempts were made to move factories into underground shelters and smaller towns. Traffic in the port of Kobe, whose approaches had been mined from the air, had largely ground to a halt.

Significance

The attacks of 30 July were neither the first nor the heaviest blows against Kobe and Nagoya – rather, they showed that by late July the Americans could strike any point in central Japan with impunity: with heavy bombers, with fighters from Iwo Jima, with carrier aircraft and even with the guns of ships lying off the coast. The Japanese command was husbanding the remnants of its air forces for defence against invasion, so most of these attacks met no opposition in the air.

All this took place in the days when Kantarō Suzuki’s government, in line with the Prime Minister’s statement of 28 July, had met the Potsdam Declaration with silence. On the night of 1–2 August more than 800 B-29s attacked four more cities – Hachiōji, Toyama, Nagaoka and Mito – in the largest raid of the war, and a few days later American bombers used the weapon whose power had been proven in the Trinity test. Cities such as Kobe and Nagoya, already burned out by conventional bombs, show how far the campaign had gone before the final decisions of the Pacific war were taken.