The incendiary raid on Nagoya

On the evening of 11 March 1945, barely a day and a half after returning from the raid on Tokyo, American B-29 Superfortress bombers took off from the Marianas once again. This time their target was Nagoya, Japan’s third-largest city and the main centre of its aircraft industry. According to the American official history, 310 aircraft were dispatched, of which about 285 dropped their bombs on the city in the early hours of 12 March; Japanese tallies speak of about 200 bombers. The raid was the second in a series of five great night-time incendiary attacks carried out over ten days in March by General Curtis LeMay’s XXI Bomber Command – a series known in English-language literature as the “fire blitz”.

The city of aircraft

Nagoya, on Ise Bay in central Honshu, produced by American estimates 40–50 per cent of Japan’s combat aircraft and aero engines. Here stood the great works of the Mitsubishi concern – an airframe plant that built, among other types, the A6M Zero fighter, and an engine works in the Daikō district – as well as the Aichi works, an army arsenal, the port and numerous subcontractors’ workshops scattered through the residential districts. The city had been a target for American bombers before. The first bombs fell on it in April 1942, from aircraft of the Doolittle Raid, and from December 1944 B-29s from the Marianas repeatedly attacked the Mitsubishi plants, including during the B-29 raids on Japan in January 1945. These precision daylight raids, however, achieved meagre results.

The raid of 11/12 March

Over Nagoya LeMay used the same method as over Tokyo two nights earlier: the bombers came in singly, at night, from altitudes of 1.5–2.5 kilometres, carrying loads of M69 and M47 incendiaries instead of defensive armament. The target was the inner-city area between the aircraft works and the port. The effect, however, proved much smaller than in the capital. According to American figures, about 5.3 km² (2.05 square miles) of built-up area burned – one-eighth of the figure for Tokyo. American analyses pointed to several reasons: the bombs had been spread over too large an area, so the individual fires did not merge into a firestorm; there was no strong wind that night like the one that had driven the flames through whole districts of Tokyo; and Nagoya also had wider streets, extensive firebreaks and better-prepared fire defences.

Japanese sources state that 519 people were killed in the raid and 734 injured; 25,734 buildings were damaged or destroyed, and more than 105,000 inhabitants were affected. About five per cent of the city’s area was burned out. The Japanese defences did not shoot down a single bomber.

The fire blitz

The Nagoya raid was part of a series that LeMay had planned at a conference on 7 March. After Tokyo (9/10 March) and Nagoya it was the turn of Osaka on the night of 13–14 March: 274 bombers burned out about 21 km² of Japan’s second city for the loss of two aircraft. On the night of 16–17 March 331 B-29s struck Kobe; a firestorm destroyed about 18 km² – roughly half the city – killing, by American estimates, about 8,000 people and leaving some 650,000 homeless. On the night of 18–19 March the bombers returned to Nagoya and burned out a further 7.6 km², including the area around the main railway station; according to Japanese figures 826 people were killed. Only one B-29 was lost, and its crew was picked up from the sea.

There the series broke off. XXI Bomber Command had exhausted its stocks of incendiaries and had to wait for new deliveries, and from the end of March its bombers supported the preparations for the invasion of Okinawa by attacking airfields on Kyushu. In ten days the five raids had burned out more than 90 km² of built-up area in Japan’s four largest cities, at a cost of about twenty bombers – fewer than had been lost when the B-29s tried to hit factories from high altitude. The next significant attack, a night precision raid on the Mitsubishi engine works in Nagoya on the night of 23–24 March, achieved nothing and cost five of the 251 aircraft sent.

Was Tokyo burned on 20 March?

Popular chronicles of the war record under 20 March 1945 that Tokyo was again bombed with incendiaries. American listings of the raids, including the official history of the Army Air Forces (Craven and Cate), record no such attack: the March incendiary series covered Tokyo (9/10 March), Nagoya (11/12 March), Osaka (13/14 March), Kobe (16/17 March) and Nagoya again (18/19 March), after which the bombs ran out. Tokyo burned again only on the night of 13–14 April, when 327 B-29s burned out about 30 km² of the arsenal district in the north of the city, and then on the night of 15–16 April and – most heavily – on 23/24 and 25/26 May. The reference to 20 March probably relates to the end of the March series or to individual harassing raids.

Japan’s response

The March raids shook the Japanese government and high command. They showed that the military could not defend the skies over the country’s most important cities: in ten days night fighters and anti-aircraft artillery destroyed fewer than twenty bombers. The authorities speeded up the evacuation from the big cities of children, the elderly and workers not connected with war industry, while absenteeism in the factories rose – people were afraid to leave their families, or no longer had anywhere to live. Air defences were strengthened: in April about 450 fighters were assigned to home defence, still too few to stop hundreds of bombers that would soon be escorted by P-51 fighters from Iwo Jima.

On the American side the results were regarded as a breakthrough. The Joint Target Group in Washington drew up a plan for a two-phase campaign against 22 Japanese cities, and LeMay and part of General Henry Arnold’s staff believed that the raids alone could force Japan to surrender without an invasion. In March the B-29s also began dropping leaflets calling on the population to overthrow the government, under threat of the destruction of their cities.

Nagoya itself was attacked many more times. On 14 May the 17th-century Nagoya Castle, used by the military as a command post, burned down in an incendiary raid. According to Japanese tallies, 7,858 people were killed in 63 raids on the city by the end of the war (American studies give a lower figure of about 3,900), and more than 135,000 houses were destroyed or damaged.

Its place in the war

The Nagoya raid of 11–12 March 1945 did not in itself match the Tokyo catastrophe, but it confirmed that the Tokyo raid had been not a one-off exception but the beginning of a new strategy. From March 1945 American strategic air power in the Pacific systematically burned Japanese cities, in which the arms industry was interwoven with housing. The lessons of Nagoya – bombing too dispersed, a weaker wind, better-prepared fire defences – led LeMay’s staff to make adjustments in later raids. When in May and June the B-29s returned to the big cities in still greater strength, several hundred bombers at a time, the destruction in Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe, Yokohama and Tokyo covered between a third and more than half of their built-up areas, and in the summer the campaign extended to dozens of medium-sized and small towns. By August 1945 several million people had fled Japan’s cities, and arms production – already throttled by the naval blockade – was collapsing. Japan’s leaders nevertheless did not decide to surrender until the atomic attacks and the Soviet Union’s declaration of war.