I am just reading an interesting book: Flyboys, Bu James bradley
(see comment in another post, here: http://www.europeanaf.org/forum/showthread.php?t=14824 )
I read something I did not know before.
Bombing cities in WW2 must have been horrible, especially from the civilian point of view.
Everyone knows the bombing of London by the Germans during the Blitz. Many bomb run are well known due to the terrible effect they had not only on soldiers but also on civilian. Just to give some examples the bombing of Guernica during the Spanish civil war, the bombing of Coventry by the Luftwaffe, the firestorm of Dresden by the RAF, the two nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the USAAF.
The book I mentioned above tells also the story of the fire bombing of the Japanese cities decided by U.S. General Curtis Lee May. This tactics caused the same phaenomena as the firestorm in Dresden. It was terrible. Particularly the bombing of the Japanese cities, where many of the houses were made of wood and paper.
During the night between 9th and 10th of May 1945 Tokyo was bombed with napalm. A formation of 334 B-29 dropped 8.519 bombs weighting 500 pounds each. Those bombs open 2.000 feet above the city, and released a total of 496.000 individual 6.2 pounds cylinders containing jelled gasoline. The B-29 had timing devices named intervalometer that planted the five-hundred-pound clusters of incendiaries every fifty feet. In this way the bomb load of each plane bomber covered a strip of 350 by 3.500 feet. Bomb run lasted two hours and half, and deflagration continued for longer time.
Curtis Lee May said lately: “We scorched and boiled and baked to death more people in tokyo on that night than went up in vapour at Hiroshima and Nagasaki” Not quite, but he came close. Casualties estimate was from 90 to 100.000 people, with 40.918 injured, but those numbers were far lower than the real. That night the allied made more casualties than in Nagasaki. Only Hiroshima would see sligtly more dead.
