Interestingly, about two weeks before the finalization of the plan, America brought a new weapon into the war with an incendiary attack on a large, lower-class neighborhood of Tokyo. Even among the almost continuous air raids over Japan, the Great Tokyo Air Raid had been the most devastating so far, with an estimated one hundred thousand civilians burned to death by a combination of conventional incendiaries and America’s new contribution to modern weaponry, napalm. Even this failed to deter Umezu from his veto of a germ attack on America. General Umezu was later given the inglorious duty of
...more
