McKelway sat down next to LeMay on the bench. “If this raid works the way I think it will, we can shorten this war,” LeMay said to McKelway. The same thing he always said. He looked at his watch. The first reports from Japan were still half an hour away.
“Would you like a Coca-Cola?” LeMay said. “I can sneak in my quarters without waking up the other guys and get two Coca-Colas and we can drink them in my car. That’ll kill most of the half hour”…We sat in the dark, facing the jungle that surrounds the headquarters and grows thickest between the edge of our clearing and the sea.
The two men waited through what would turn out to be the longest night of the war.
4.
Curtis LeMay’s fleet of B-29s had, as its destination, a twelve-square-mile rectangular region of central Tokyo straddling the Sumida River. It included an industrial area, a commercial area, and thousands of largely working-class homes, comprising what was, at the time, one of the most densely populated urban districts in the world.iii
The first Superfortress reached Tokyo just after midnight, dropping flares to mark the target area. Then came the onslaught. Hundreds of planes—massive winged mechanical beasts roaring over Tokyo, flying so low that the entire city pulsed with the booming of their engines. The US military’s worries about the city’s air defenses proved groundless: the Japanese were completely unprepared for an attacking force coming in at five thousand feet.
The bombs fell from the B-29s in clusters. They were small steel pipes twenty inches long, weighing six pounds each, packed with napalm. Little baby bombs, each with a long gauze streamer at one end, so that if you looked to the sky that night in Tokyo, there would have been a moment of extraordinary beauty—thousands of these bright green daggers falling down to earth.
And then: boom. On impact, thousands of small explosions. The overpowering smell of gasoline. Burning globs of napalm exploding in every direction. Then another wave of bombers. And another. The full attack lasted almost three hours; 1,665 tons of napalm were dropped. LeMay’s planners had worked out in advance that this many firebombs, dropped in such tight proximity, would create a firestorm—a conflagration of such intensity that it would create and sustain its own wind system. They were correct. Everything burned for sixteen square miles.
Buildings burst into flame before the fire ever reached them. Mothers ran from the fire with their babies strapped to their backs only to discover—when they stopped to rest—that their babies were on fire. People jumped into the canals off the Sumida River, only to drown when the tide came in or when hundreds of others jumped on top of them. People tried to hang on to steel bridges until the metal grew too hot to the touch, and then they fell to their deaths.
Circling high above Tokyo that night was the master bomber—LeMay’s deputy, Tommy Power—choreographing the attack. Historian Conrad Crane says that Power sat in his cockpit drawing pictures of everything he saw:
[Power] remarked, “The air was so full of incendiaries you could not have walked through them.” By 2:37, the largest visible fire area was about forty blocks long and fifteen wide. The smoke was up to twenty-five thousand feet…
When he draws his last sketch, which is about an hour after […] his first one, there’s basically a score of separate areas from fifty to a thousand city blocks burning at the same time. And his last report says that the glow from the fires was visible 150 miles away.
After the war, the United States Strategic Bombing Survey concluded the following: “Probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a six-hour period than at any time in the history of man.” As many as one hundred thousand people died that night. The aircrews who flew that mission came back shaken.
As airman David Braden recalled, “Frankly, when those cities were on fire, it looked like you were looking into the mouth of hell. I mean, you cannot imagine a fire that big.”
Conrad Crane added, “They’re about five thousand feet, they are pretty low…They are low enough that the smell of burning flesh permeates the aircraft…They actually have to fumigate the aircraft when they land back in the Marianas, because the smell of burning flesh remains within the aircraft.”
The next night, back on Guam, LeMay was awakened around midnight. The aerial photos taken during the attack were ready. As news spread, people came running from their beds. They drove up in Jeeps until the room was crowded. LeMay, still in his pajamas, put the photos down on a large table under a bright light. There was a moment of shocked silence. St. Clair McKelway was standing in the room with all the others and remembers LeMay gesturing at the vast area of devastation. “All this is out.” LeMay said. “This is out—this—this—this.”