| Bombing of Tokyo | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Part of the air raids on Japan during the Pacific War | |||||
 Tokyo burns under B-29 firebomb assault, 26 May 1945. | |||||
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| Belligerents | |||||
 United States |
 Japan | ||||
The bombing of Tokyo (東京空襲, Tōkyō kūshū) was a series of air raids on Japan launched by the United States Army Air Forces during the Pacific Theatre of World War II in 1944–1945, prior to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The raids that were conducted by the U.S. military on the night of 9–10 March 1945, codenamed Operation Meetinghouse, are the single most destructive bombing raid in human history.[1] 16 square miles (41 km2; 10,000 acres) of central Tokyo was destroyed, leaving an estimated 100,000 civilians dead and over one million homeless.[1] The atomic bombing of Hiroshima in August 1945, by comparison, resulted in the immediate death of an estimated 70,000 to 150,000 people.
The U.S. mounted the Doolittle Raid, a seaborne, small-scale air raid on Tokyo in April 1942. Strategic bombing and urban area bombing began in 1944 after the long-range B-29 Superfortress bomber entered service, first deployed from China and thereafter the Mariana Islands. B-29 raids from those islands began on 17 November 1944, and lasted until 15 August 1945, the day of Japanese surrender.[2]
Over half of Tokyo's industry was spread out among residential and commercial neighborhoods; firebombing cut the city's output in half.[3] Some modern post-war analysts have called the raid a war crime due to the targeting of civilian infrastructure and the ensuing mass loss of civilian life.[4][5]
- ^ a b Long, Tony (9 March 2011). "March 9, 1945: Burning the Heart Out of the Enemy". Wired.
1945: In the single deadliest air raid of World War II, 330 American B-29s rain incendiary bombs on Tokyo, touching off a firestorm that kills upwards of 100,000 people, burns a quarter of the city to the ground, and leaves a million homeless.
- ^ Craven, Wesley Frank, and James Lea Cate, eds. The Army Air Forces in World War II, Volume Five, the Pacific: Matterhorn to Nagasaki June 1944 to August 1945. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953, page 558.
- ^ United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Summary Report (Pacific War), p. 18.
- ^ Rauch, Jonathan. "Firebombs Over Tokyo: America's 1945 attack on Japan's capital remains undeservedly obscure alongside Hiroshima and Nagasaki". The Atlantic. Retrieved 13 June 2019.
- ^ Carney, Matthew (8 March 2015). "Tokyo WWII firebombing, the single most deadly bombing raid in history, remembered 70 years on". ABC Australia. Retrieved 13 June 2019.