IV. Firestorms in Japan

On the night of March 9-10, 1945, LeMay's B-29 bombers attacked Tokyo, a city of 6 million people. Nearly 600 bombers dropped 1,665 tons of fire bombs on the Japanese capital. An hour after the first fires started, the conflagration spread beyond the target area, and LeMay’s desired firestorm was achieved with devastating results. The citizenry in the target area ran through the streets in panic, desperate to find any form of safety from the searing heat. The heat, which is reported to have reached an unimaginable temperature of 1,800 degrees in some locations, sucked the oxygen out of the air, asphyxiating those it did not simply roast to death. The clothes on people’s backs, those that weren’t on fire from the actual bombs, literally burst into flames from the heat. The glass in windows began to liquify. The superheated air and cyclonic winds from the firestorm blew the liquified glass into the air, where it fell on people like some terrible rain, embedding itself into their scalps where it continued to melt into the hair and skin.

The resulting firestorm destroyed 16 square miles of the city and killed 100,000 people, more than died at Hiroshima or Nagasaki from atomic bombs a few months later. Most of the victims were women, children, and old men. The B-29 crew members put on oxygen masks to keep from vomiting at the smell of burning human flesh.