Tokyo firebombing (1945)

The Tokyo firebombing (1945) was part of an escalating campaign of incendiary raids on Japanese cities that inflicted catastrophic civilian losses. Its scale sharpened the debate facing Harry S. Truman and his advisers: whether the United States risked committing atrocities even as they sought to end the war as quickly as possible.

Background and Changing Attitudes

By 1945, attitudes in Washington toward bombing civilian targets had changed markedly during the war. The destruction of Shanghai in 1937 had been regarded as an atrocity, and in 1939 Franklin D. Roosevelt had urged the warring sides to refrain from bombing civilians. Later, as cities came under sustained attack, the public and official context shifted. The February 1945 raids on Dresden, Germany, set off a firestorm; an estimated 135,000 people died in the three raids, two British and one American.

Course and Scale of the Raids

A recent issue of Life showed aerial photographs of Tokyo after three hundred B-29 bombers had attacked. On the night of March 9–10, one incendiary raid killed more than 100,000 people. Japan continued to vow resistance, and the raids went on. On May 14, five hundred B-29s struck Nagoya, Japan’s third-largest industrial city. On May 23, five square miles of Tokyo were destroyed; thirty-six hours later, another raid destroyed sixteen square miles. Further attacks hit coastal cities, including Yokahama, Osaka, and Kobe.

The Debate over Ending the War

Henry Stimson told Truman that he did not want the United States to outdo Hitler in atrocities. He was also concerned that conventional bombing might destroy so many targets in Japan that the atomic bomb would lack a fair background against which to demonstrate its power. The juxtaposition struck Truman as odd enough to make him laugh, though he said he understood Stimson’s point.

Stimson and General Marshall were not debating whether the bomb should be used against Japan so much as how it could be used to stop the slaughter as quickly as possible. Stimson’s directive to General Groves in 1942 had called for producing the bomb at the earliest possible date to bring the war to a conclusion. The committee advising Stimson had no authority to make the recommendation to the President: that responsibility rested with Stimson alone, who understood the weight of the judgment before him.