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The Firebombing of Tokyo and Its Legacy: Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

Bret Fisk  and
Cary Karacas
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More than sixty-five years after the Great Tokyo Air Raid of March 10, 1945, and the subsequent firebombing and destruction of Japan's cities by the United States Army Air Forces in World War II, a cursory examination of the relevant English-language literature, both popular and academic, reveals a striking lacuna. Researchers have covered substantial ground in analyzing various historical aspects of the U.S. bombing campaign against Japan. Specifically, much has been done to situate the events within the emergence of strategic air war in the twentieth century and within the concurrent evolution of American military air power doctrine. Scholars have discussed the air raids within the context of the evolution (and subsequent violations) of principles of noncombatant immunity during war, and have also provided important analyses regarding when and why the United States chose to target Japan's cities for destruction.

Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 9 , Issue 3 , January 2011 , e1
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Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2011

References

Notes

1 A short list of essential works includes Conrad Crane, Bombs, Cities, and Civilians: American Airpower Strategy in World War II (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993); Gordon Daniels, “The Great Tokyo Air Raid, 9-10 March 1945,” in W.G. Beasley, ed., Modern Japan: Aspects of History, Literature and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977, pp.113-131); John Dower, Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor/Hiroshima/9-11/Iraq (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010); E. Bartlett Kerr, Flames over Tokyo: The U.S. Army Air Forces' Incendiary Campaign Against Japan 1944-1945 (New York: Donald I. Fine, 1991); Ronald Schaffer, Wings of Judgment: American Bombing in World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Thomas Searle “‘It made a lot of sense to kill skilled workers’: The firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945,” The Journal of Military History 66 (2002), pp.103-33; Mark Selden, “A forgotten holocaust: U.S. bombing strategy, the destruction of Japanese cities, and the American way of war from the Pacific War to Iraq,” in Yuki Tanaka and Marilyn Young, eds., Bombing Civilians: A Twentieth Century History (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009, pp. 77-96); and Michael Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power: the Creation of Armageddon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).

2 These are conservative estimates from the Overall Report of Damage Sustained by the Nation During the Pacific War, Economic Stabilization Agency, Planning Department, Office of the Secretary General, 1949, which may be viewed here.

3 Nihon Hoso Kyokai, Unforgettable Fire: Pictures Drawn by Atomic Bomb Survivors (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976).

4 While narrative accounts of well over a thousand people who experienced the Tokyo fire-bombings exist in Japanese, nothing similar to Kyoko Selden and Mark Selden's The Atomic Bomb: Voices from Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1989) has yet to appear in English. See Haruko Cook and Ted Cook, Japan at War: An Oral History (New York: New Press, 1992) for a few exceptions.