<text id=00he1108><title>Fireball in the Night</title>
<history>US Air Force: Events History</history>
<article><hdr>Fireball in the Night</hdr><body>
<p>The first mission was scheduled for 9 March 1945. Each aircraft was loaded with about six tons of bombs. The main force carried two dozen M69 500-lb incendiary clusters; the pathfinders were loaded with 180 M47 napalm bombs each. The orders dispatched 334 Superforts. They struck a target area of about 12 sq miles (30 km<su>2</su>) in Tokyo. Their fires were spread by the wind from house to house across tiny alleys and narrow streets, burning bamboo and paper and the resinous cedar wood frames. A fire storm was generated. The damage was far worse than in any other raid on Japan, including the two atomic bomb strikes at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One million Japanese no longer had homes; 84,000 were dead, and 41,000 injured, primarily from burns. A quarter of Tokyo was blackened, smoking rubble. It cost 14 B-29s.
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<p>March 11: Nagoya hit by 285 B-29s, and burned. March 13: Osaka hit by 274 B-29s, and burned. March 16: Kobe burned. March 19: Nagoya burned again. Then the fire blitz died, out of incendiaries. It had been an outstanding campaign, and it was a complete abandonment of the traditional doctrinal use of daylight, precision, high-altitude bombing.
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<p>For a few weeks, the Superforts were diverted to hit tactical targets in support of the costly invasion of Okinawa. Bomb dumps were replenished with incendiary stocks during that series of missions, and in mid-May the fire raids began again. In a month of concentrated, devastating and terrifying firebombing, Japan's six leading industrial centers—Tokyo, Nagoya, Kobe, Osaka, Yokohama and Kawasaki—were incinerated.
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<p>The smaller cities came next; on average, two fire raids per week hit them. There were little or no defenses, and B-29 losses were small. In late July, LeMay began dropping warning leaflets over Japan, listing the cities on his target list. The effect on the Japanese has been recorded; it created a sense of terror, or of inevitable death. Whichever reaction it provoked, it broke the will of the Japanese home front.
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<p>LeMay's leaflets listed the target cities, and warned that some of them would be bombed on the night following the leaflet drop. The raids eventually destroyed another 57 secondary industrial cities.
