On the night of 9-10 March 1945, 279 giant US B-29 Superfortress bombers launched a new type of raid on the Japanese capital Tokyo. They dropped 496,000 small six-pound M-69 incendiaries which, unlike those used in Europe, each contained a small amount of a highly flammable jelly known as ‘napalm’ that had been developed earlier in the war by a Harvard scientist, Louis Fieser.
Tokyo’s Air Raid Precautions were very poor. There were few shelters and limited anti-aircraft batteries. Thousands of fires were started in some of the most densely populated areas of the city. The small wooden houses were soon engulfed in a major firestorm that spread rapidly from roof to roof and building to building in the strong winds that blew that night. Sparks in the hot air quickly ignited clothing as people rushed to escape the conflagration and one witness described bodies as being turned into ‘blackened lumps of charcoal’. In places where there were solid brick buildings people gathered to try to avoid the flames. But there was no escape from the fires, and on the next day bodies could not be identified in the piles of ash that were all that remained.
It was estimated that more than a quarter of a million homes, offices, and factories were destroyed that night and 16 square miles of the city were burnt to the ground. One million people were left homeless and Tokyo police reported that 83,000 had died. The real number was without doubt much higher.
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