The Tokyo raid of 13–14 April

On the night of 13/14 April 1945 hundreds of American B-29 Superfortress bombers loaded with incendiaries appeared over Tokyo once again. It was the first major incendiary raid on the Japanese capital for a month – since the night of 9/10 March, when the fire started by the B-29s killed 80,000–100,000 people in Tokyo. This time the target was the northern part of the city, with its military arsenal and dozens of armaments factories. Two nights later, on 15/16 April, the bombers struck Tokyo’s southern districts and the neighbouring industrial cities of Kawasaki and Yokohama.

The raid is often dated 14 April, because that is when it ended: the bombs began falling late on the evening of 13 April, and the fires raged until the morning of 14 April. In Japan the raid is known as the “Great Jōhoku Air Raid” (Jōhoku daikūshū), that is, the raid on the northern districts of the city.

A pause and a return to fire

After the March raid on Tokyo, XXI Bomber Command of the Twentieth Air Force, led by General Curtis LeMay, used the same method to burn parts of Nagoya, Osaka and Kobe within ten days. Then the series broke off – the Marianas had run out of incendiary bombs, and new supplies had to come by ship from a mainland thousands of kilometres away. At the same time the bombers had to support the landings on Okinawa, which began on 1 April, by attacking the airfields on Kyushu from which the kamikaze pilots took off.

At the beginning of April LeMay therefore went back to precision raids on aircraft factories. These gave mixed results. A night attack on the Nakajima engine works on 1 April achieved nothing, but the daylight raid of 7 April was the first in which the B-29s were escorted by P-51 Mustang fighters from the recently captured Iwo Jima. On 12 April more than 250 bombers struck three aircraft factories, among them the works at Musashino on Tokyo’s western outskirts.

Once the stocks of incendiaries had been replenished, LeMay returned to the method that had proved so devastating for Japan in March: low-level night raids carrying loads of M-69 cluster bombs filled with napalm. The first target chosen was Tokyo’s arsenal district.

The night of 13/14 April

According to the official history of the US Army Air Forces (Craven and Cate), 327 B-29s from three bomb wings based on Saipan, Tinian and Guam reached the target; Japanese records speak of about 330 aircraft. The bombs fell on a belt of districts from Toshima and Ikebukuro to Ōji, Takinogawa, Itabashi and Arakawa. The Americans estimated the area burned out that night at 11.4 square miles, or about 30 square kilometres. Numerous armaments works and part of the army’s Tokyo arsenal were destroyed. The Americans lost seven bombers.

According to Japanese records, 2,459 people were killed and more than 170,000 houses burned down; hundreds of thousands were left homeless. The death toll was thus dozens of times lower than in March, even though the area burned was only half as large. Several factors probably contributed: the less dense housing in parts of the northern districts, but above all the experience of the March catastrophe. Residents now knew that shelters in houses and gardens became death traps, and they fled towards parks, rivers and open ground, while the authorities had earlier evacuated part of the population from the city and demolished buildings to create firebreaks.

The fires also reached places of special importance to the state. The main buildings of the Meiji Jingū, the Shinto shrine dedicated to the deified Emperor Meiji, burned down, and according to Japanese accounts parts of the palace complex were also damaged, including the Ōmiya Palace, the residence of the Empress Dowager. The War Minister, Korechika Anami, and the Chief of the Army General Staff, Yoshijirō Umezu, went to the palace to apologise to Emperor Hirohito for having failed to protect the monarch’s residence. A scene at the Shinjuku Gyoen garden was also remembered: according to accounts, the guards refused to let residents fleeing the fire into the closed imperial park until the crowd broke down the gate.

American planners justified the choice of target on the grounds that in Tokyo’s northern districts – as in the Shitamachi area hit in March – the armaments industry was intermingled with housing: alongside the arsenal and large factories, hundreds of family workshops produced parts for the military. In practice this meant that the fire destroyed factories and homes alike, and the line between military targets and the civilian population became blurred. Japanese propaganda presented the raids as “barbaric” crimes against the defenceless, while the authorities still urged residents to fight the fires rather than flee, although after the March catastrophe few took such appeals seriously. The debates over the moral and legal assessment of the incendiary strategy, later conducted by historians on both sides of the Pacific, concern the whole of this campaign, not just the night of 9 March.

The night of 15/16 April

Two days later LeMay repeated the attack. On the night of 15/16 April 303 B-29s reached their targets. Some of them attacked Tokyo’s southern districts – Kamata, Ōmori, Ebara, Shinagawa and Meguro – and the rest the industrial city of Kawasaki and the northern outskirts of Yokohama. According to American estimates, some 16 square kilometres of Tokyo, more than 9 square kilometres of Kawasaki and nearly 4 square kilometres of Yokohama were burned out. In Tokyo alone, according to Japanese figures, 841 people were killed and more than 50,000 houses burned down. The anti-aircraft defences were more effective that night – the Americans lost twelve bombers.

Japan’s air defence, however, was in deep crisis. On 15 April the army and navy fighter units were at last placed under a joint command – General Masakazu Kawabe’s Air General Army – but it was too late. Experienced pilots were lacking, and so was fuel, while many aircraft and airmen had been earmarked for suicide attacks on the American fleet off Okinawa.

Significance

The April raids showed that the March catastrophe had not been a one-off shock but the beginning of the systematic destruction of Japan’s cities. Contrary to the hopes of some Japanese leaders, the death of President Franklin Roosevelt, which Tokyo learned of some hours before the raid, did not change American policy: the new President, Harry Truman, continued the war on the same terms of unconditional surrender. The government of Admiral Kantarō Suzuki, formed a few days earlier, had neither the means of defence nor the readiness for peace talks.

For a few more weeks the Twentieth Air Force had to divide its strength between the cities and the Kyushu airfields in support of the fighting on Okinawa. In May, however, the incendiary raids returned with new force: further attacks burned the rest of central Tokyo, along with most of the buildings of the Imperial Palace, and then Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe, Yokohama and dozens of smaller cities. By August 1945 roughly half of Tokyo’s built-up area had been destroyed, and the victims of the raids on Japan numbered in the hundreds of thousands. For the inhabitants of the capital, the night of 13/14 April was one of the five great raids – together with those of 10 March, 15 April, and 24 and 25 May – that lived on in the city’s memory as “the Tokyo air raids”.