The Nagoya raid of 14 May

On the morning of 14 May 1945, 472 American B-29 bombers appeared over Nagoya – the largest formation yet sent against a single Japanese city. Within a few hours their incendiaries had burned out more than 8 km² of the northern part of the city, and with it the 17th-century castle of the Tokugawa, one of Japan’s most treasured monuments. Two nights later, on 16/17 May, the bombers returned and burned almost 10 km² more in the south of Nagoya. It marked the start of a new and the heaviest phase of the American campaign against Japanese cities.

The bombers return to the cities

Nagoya had already been the target of many raids. As the centre of the Japanese aircraft industry – by American estimates it produced 40–50 per cent of the country’s combat aircraft and engines, including the Zero fighters built by Mitsubishi – it had been on the target list from the first days of the campaign. The first bombs had fallen on it as early as 18 April 1942, during the Doolittle Raid. From December 1944, B-29s flying from the Marianas had carried out precision attacks on its aircraft factories, and in March 1945 the city was hit twice by night incendiary raids – on the nights of 11/12 and 18/19 March.

After the March series of raids on Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka and Kobe, the incendiary campaign broke off. XXI Bomber Command of the Twentieth Air Force, led by General Curtis LeMay, had exhausted its stocks of incendiary bombs, and from the end of March it had to support the fleet in the Battle of Okinawa. For several weeks most of the B-29s bombed airfields on Kyushu, from which the kamikaze pilots attacking the ships off Okinawa took off. The cities suffered only isolated blows in this period, such as the night raid on Tokyo of 13/14 April.

In mid-May LeMay regained his freedom of action. The command of Admiral Chester Nimitz, to which the B-29s had been subordinated for the Okinawa fighting, released them from tactical duties, even though the suicide attacks on the fleet were still going on. At the same time XXI Bomber Command reached full strength: in April two more bomb wings arrived in the Marianas, among them the experienced 58th Wing, transferred from India. LeMay now had around a thousand B-29s at his disposal – the most powerful air formation in the world. Nagoya was chosen as the first target of the new offensive.

The daylight raid of 14 May

This time LeMay opted for a daylight raid. According to the official history of the US Army Air Forces, 472 bombers reached the target. They attacked from an altitude of several kilometres, in formation, covering one another with the fire of their defensive machine guns. The target was the dense built-up area of northern Nagoya – residential districts interspersed with small workshops that worked for the great aircraft factories – together with the area around the castle, which the army was then using as a command post. Napalm-filled incendiary bombs started hundreds of fires, which merged into a single sea of flame.

Some 8.2 km² of the city burned. The Japanese defences, much more effective by day than by night, shot down two bombers and damaged 64; the Americans lost another eight B-29s to other causes – mechanical failures, accidents and ditchings on the way home. The crews reported 18 Japanese fighters shot down, 30 “probably destroyed” and 16 damaged, but such claims as a rule exaggerated the enemy’s losses.

The castle in flames

The most painful loss for the Japanese that day was Nagoya Castle. It had been built in 1610–1615 on the orders of Tokugawa Ieyasu as the seat of one of the three branch houses of the shogunal family, which ruled Owari Province. Its five-storey main keep was crowned by two gilded dragon-fish, the shachihoko, the symbol of the city, and the Honmaru Palace was decorated with paintings by masters of the Kanō school. Before the war the castle and the palace paintings had the status of a national treasure.

On 14 May incendiary bombs struck the castle complex. Both keeps – the main and the small – burned down together with the golden shachihoko, as did the Honmaru Palace, the north-eastern corner turret and other buildings. Three corner turrets and the Omote-Ninomon gate survived, as did most of the palace paintings, which had been evacuated earlier for fear of air raids. The keeps were rebuilt in reinforced concrete in 1957–1959, with the golden fish recast at the mint in Osaka. The reconstructed Honmaru Palace did not open until 2018.

The night of 16/17 May

The Japanese had not yet finished putting out the fires when the bombers came back. On the night of 16/17 May, 457 B-29s reached Nagoya. This time LeMay returned to the tactics proven in March: the aircraft flew singly, at night and at low altitude, with a heavy load of incendiaries. The target was the southern part of the city, with the port on Ise Bay, the marshalling yards, the arsenal and the Mitsubishi works. The fires consumed some 9.9 km² of the city.

By night the Japanese defences were much weaker – there were few night fighters, and the anti-aircraft artillery could not cope with bombers flying at low altitude. The Americans lost three B-29s, all to technical failures.

The toll

The two May raids burned out a total of some 18 km² of Nagoya – more than all the earlier attacks on the city put together. According to an American tally cited by later studies, the raids killed 3,866 people and left 472,701 homeless; some studies apply these figures only to the two May raids, others to all the attacks on Nagoya. According to the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS), between 13 December 1944 and 24 July 1945 the city was attacked 21 times and more than 14,000 tons of bombs were dropped on it; no other Japanese city apart from Tokyo was attacked so often.

The fire destroyed tens of thousands of homes and countless small workshops on which the output of the great factories depended. Many inhabitants left the city; Nagoya’s industrial production, already badly weakened by the precision raids on the Mitsubishi factories, collapsed still further.

Place in the war

The May raids on Nagoya opened the last and most destructive phase of the American campaign against Japanese cities. In the following weeks XXI Bomber Command struck Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka and Kobe in turn; by mid-June the six largest cities in Japan had been largely burned out, and the bombers moved on to several dozen smaller towns. According to American figures, the area destroyed in Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya alone exceeded the total area destroyed by the Americans and British in all German cities.

LeMay’s strategy, tested in March and applied in full force from mid-May, stemmed from the conviction that dispersed Japanese industry could not be destroyed without destroying the cities in which it was hidden. Its victims were overwhelmingly civilians. Nagoya, bombed once more in the summer, became one of the symbols of this campaign – and the burned Tokugawa castle its most recognisable emblem.