Radio National - Tokyo's Burning (original) (raw)
'Tokyo's Burning'
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TOKYO'S BURNING
The most devastating civic fire in history occurred fifty years ago in Tokyo. In just a few hours on the night of March 10 1945 about a hundred thousand people died and a million homes were destroyed. It was worse than the fires that razed Moscow in 1812, San Francisco in 1901 or even the fire that followed Tokyo's terrible earthquake of 1923. But like Moscow it was man-made, a military tactic, the deliberate design of the US air force's youngest general Curtis LeMay. The very same general who later supervised the strategic bombing of Vietnam in the late 1960s.
Radio-Eye remembers the Tokyo holocaust in a special feature made by Tony Barrell - Tokyo's Burning - in which he talks to eyewitnesses, victims, participants and observers in Japan and the USA. The horror of Tokyo is assessed in the context of the development of 'strategic' or terror bombing of civilians throughout this century of air power, culminating in the more obvious nightmares of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the latent threat of ICBMs.
One of the most famous eyewitnesses to the raid was veteran French journalist Robert Guillain who spent all the war in Tokyo. Now in his mid-eighties he lives in a retirement home outside Paris but his memory of the events is as vivid as in his bestseller of 25 years ago I Saw Tok~o Burning. The down-town working class area was the target and 'those wood and paper homes were buiit to burn. Even with a 'normal' fire they would be consumed in just a few minutes.'
A less fortunate survivor, Mr Obata, also in his eighties, describes how he would have been left for dead if he hadn't been useful to the war effort. Even though his face was rebuilt from the flesh from his chest, 'I was too ugly to get married again and spent most of my life doing jobs where no-one could see my face.' He's in no doubt who's to blame:
'I accuse the late Emperor and all supporters of the Emperor system. They wanted the war, they should pay up.' He even says that he and his fellow victims would have been better off if Tokyo had been hit with an atomic bomb. 'At least we would have been compensated.'
Chester B. Marshall, who took part as a B-29 pilot in the Tokyo raid and fifty other B-29 missions, recalls how the heat was so intense debris from the fire was thrown back up into his bomb bays and he and his crew could smell burning human flesh. 'Before we took off from the Marianas we were told that it was now justifiable to attack civilian population centres' - something the USMF had studiously avoided in Europe - because wartime Japan's industrial culture had turned the entire population into workers.
'Every one of those wood and paper homes in the downtown area of Tokyo had some kind of war-making business going on.' Kei Watase, who was sixteen at the time, says this is not true. 'The factories were separate. Our houses were all around them. And anyway, many factories werenlt hit at all.' Like the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Tokyo raid was designed to bring the country to its knees, to end the war quickly, without the need for an invasion. Therefore, it's still claimed, it'saved lives.'
transcript | taking part | producers | sources and further reading | version française