Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945 (The Pacific War Trilogy Book 3)

by Ian W. Toll

According to the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, the air raid killed 88,000, injured 41,000, and left almost a million homeless. About 267,000 houses were completely burned down. Sixteen square miles of the city lay in ashes.89 In later revised estimates, the Japanese government put the death count at more than 100,000; other estimates ranged as high as 125,000. The actual number is not known, partly because the fires consumed most official registration records for the districts that were destroyed, and partly because the police and army personnel despaired of making an accurate body count. One Tokyo official told USSBS interrogators after the war, “The condition was so terrible I could not well describe it. After a raid I was supposed to investigate, but I didn’t go because I did not like to see the terrible sights.”90 It seems likely that the March 9–10 firebombing of Tokyo killed more people, at least initially, than the atomic bombings of either Hiroshima or Nagasaki. If the highest death toll estimates are accurate, the Tokyo raid may have killed more people (initially) than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. It was the most devastating air raid of the war, in either Europe or the Pacific. It left more dead than any other single military action in history. The Japanese press downplayed the scale of the catastrophe.