Whatever fragile equilibrium residents of Hiroshima and its suburb of Takasu maintained would totter, however, after March 10, 1945, the day that Tokyo burned. From the night of the ninth, more than three hundred B-29s buzzed low over the city, releasing almost 2,000 tons of seventy-pound napalm bombs over the course of two hours. The jellied gasoline ignited houses made of pine, paper, and bamboo; fires rampaged and screamed through vast swaths of the city. When the raid was over, sixteen square miles of the nation’s capital had been reduced to smoldering debris, more than one million
...more
