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Yahoo
16-07-2025
- General
- Yahoo
‘Utterly foolish': 12 hours before World War II ended, the US firebombed this Japanese city
Eighty years later, the scars of the last American firebombing of a Japanese city remain — on the skin of a man who still lives mere yards from where hundreds died, on the surface of a statue of a revered Buddhist monk, and in the minds of those whose city was turned to ash in a matter of hours. Almost 90 US B-29 bombers dropped about 6,000 tons of jellied gasoline — napalm — on Kumagaya, Japan, on the night of August 14-15, 1945. The resulting fires, burning at 800 to 1,200 degrees Celsius, killed at least 260 people, injured 3,000 and left, by some estimates, almost 75% of the city of 47,000 in ruins. The last in the string of US warplanes that created that firestorm left the skies over Kumagaya less than 12 hours before the voice of Emperor Hirohito would be broadcast announcing Japan's unconditional surrender. Current Kumagaya resident Kazumi Yoneda came into the world that day, not long before the US bombers struck. In 2020, she published a book of poetry, 'The Day I Was Born,' and she shared it with CNN. One read: 'The day I was born, flames devoured the city.'My mother gave birth,'held me close –'And stood among'The ruins of her home.'Her body gave no mother's milk'She held her ever-crying child in her arms.' 'No one wants to die in the closing moments of a war.' Those words came from New York Herald Tribune correspondent Homer Bigart, who was on board one of the last B-29s to strike Kumagaya. He flew from the Pacific island of Guam in the Superfortress City of Saco, part of the 314th Bombardment Wing. It was a mission US commanders were at pains to justify to the aircrews, Bigart wrote. The second atomic bomb attack, on Nagasaki, had occurred just five days earlier, killing almost 46,000 people. Three days before that, on August 6, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima killed an estimated 70,000 people instantly. Japan's capitulation was expected, and US bomber crews hadn't flown for five days — 'an uneasy truce,' Bigart wrote. And now they were being asked to risk their lives hitting what Bigart called 'a pathetically small city of little obvious importance.' But in a pre-mission briefing, commanders said Kumagaya had an important rail yard and shops that made airplane parts, legitimate military targets. 'This should be the final knockout blow of the war,' commanding officer Col. Carl Storrie told the fliers, according to Bigart. 'Put your bombs on the target so that tomorrow the world will have peace.' And in case the surrender was announced during their flight to Kumagaya, the B-29 crews were told to monitor their radios for the word 'Utah.' That would mean Japan's surrender was official and they could turn back to Guam. It never came, and late on the night of August 14, 1945, the last fire raid of World War II began. Kazue Hojo was 7 years old when Kumagaya burned. She lived in a house with her family, having a reasonably happy childhood despite the hardships brought on by the fact that her country had, with its invasion of China, been at war in Asia for her entire life. On a June afternoon, she shared photos of that childhood with CNN. As we sit down in the house of Shoichi Yoshida, non-executive administrative director of a civic group that keeps memories of the fire raid alive, it's the first time she has spoken with media about her recollections of that fiery night. As the bombing began, she fled with her mother, her 5-year-old sister and 2-month-old brother to a railway embankment, dodging the incendiary bombs that 'came down like rain,' she said. A piece of shrapnel struck her mother in the neck. At the same time, her brother, whom her mother carried on her back, suffered a serious burn on his forehead. Both of them were left with scars they would bear the rest of their lives, she said. And fires raged. 'It was bright like daytime,' Hojo said. 'Everybody seemed wet,' she said, but she didn't know why. Was it rainfall? Was it the napalm, was it a combination of both, as the fires could sometimes cause localized rainfall? What Hojo does remember vividly is what she saw when she came down into the city the morning after the raid. Her house still stood — at the very edge of the destruction. Beyond it, she could see for miles, distances unimaginable the day before, with smoke still rising from what a day earlier was Kumagaya. The next day, as she and her family walked through the ruins, hoping to get to her grandparents' home about six miles away, it was wet, very wet. All along the route, through the city's burned downtown district, many adults were lying on the ground amid the rubble, crying inconsolably, which she says is her most painful memory of the war. It's a brutally hot June afternoon when we begin our visit to explore Kumagaya, now with a population of almost 200,000 and just over an hour by rail from Tokyo. At the train station, a souvenir T-shirt espouses the city's modern claim to fame: the hottest temperature ever recorded in Japan — 41.1 degrees Celsius (105.98 degrees Fahrenheit) on July 23, 2018. From there, Yoshida takes us on the six-minute drive to the Sekijoji Buddhist temple, where outside a Japanese elm tree has grown new wood around that which was charred on the night of August 14, 1945. Inside, 79-year-old head priest Tetsuya Okayasu introduces us to a wooden statue of Kobodaishi — one of ancient Japan's most respected Buddhist monks — a sacred symbol of spiritual legacy and devotion. The left side of the statue's smooth, cherubic face is blackened by fire. Okayasu explained how this was one of seven sacred statues in the temple, and it was the last one inside the structure as it burned from the American bombs. His father risked his life to get it out, he said, literally as the structure crumbled around him. After the war, his father stashed the statue away. Near the father's death, as he handed leadership to his son, he told him his two wishes for the statue: One, it should never be repaired. 'The statue is a living witness to the air raid on Kumagaya,' Okayasu said his father told him. And two, it should never be shown to the public. 'Because it is heartbreaking in appearance, people should not see him like this,' his father instructed. The son has kept the first promise and held to the second for years, until the director of the nearby Saitama peace museum asked to display the statue. Okayasu relented. The first members of the public to see it were young people at the museum's summer peace education program. It showed evidence of the horror of war and what it had done to Kumagaya long before their births, he said. The statue worked, and the children who visited it asked questions — some were brought to tears — and began to understand their heritage better, the museum director told Okayasu. 'While I feel bad going against my father's will, I have decided that if people are to learn about peace, they can see the statue,' Okayasu said, his voice trembling in a whisper. Still, he doesn't display it constantly. But he'll bring it out for those with an interest, as he did for CNN. Outside the temple, Okayasu points out a gate with a slim tiled roof. It's the only part of the complex that stood after the bombing. Okayasu, who was 10 days old when Kumagaya was bombed, explained its importance to him. The 200 or so square feet under that gate roof, with makeshift walls of burned corrugated iron, were shelter for him, his mother and father, four siblings and grandmother, for six months as they waited for post-war housing to be built. Kumagaya, along with nearby Isesaki, were the last cities to burn from US firebombs, but were just the final blows in a campaign that began in February 1945. The fire raids were the brainchild of Gen. Curtis LeMay. He'd been given command of the US bomber force in the Pacific after earlier B-29 raids, using high-explosive bombs dropped from 30,000 feet, were ineffective at crippling the Japanese war machine. As few as 20% of targets were hit in those early raids, and air crews blamed poor visibility in bad weather and jet stream winds blowing bombs off target after being dropped from high altitude. LeMay's plan shocked many of those involved in the war effort. The B-29s would go in low, at 5,000 to 8,000 feet. They'd go in at night. And they would go in single file, rather than in the large multi-layered formations the US had used in the daylight bombing of German forces in Europe. And they'd carry incendiary bombs, cluster munitions dropped in cannisters of 38 apiece that broke apart near impact, spreading their bomblets of napalm over a wide area. LeMay thought they'd be perfect to burn Japan's wooden homes and businesses, and he was quickly proven right. A March 9-10 fire raid on the capital of Tokyo killed 100,000 people, the deadliest air raid in human history, a toll worse than Hiroshima or Nagasaki. It — and subsequent raids — destroyed about 60% of the city, leaving about a million people homeless. The worst-hit city was Toyama — 99% destroyed — on August 1. Robert McNamara, who was US defense secretary during much of the Vietnam War, was a Guam-based analyst of bombing effectiveness in 1945. The fire raids, McNamara said in the 2003 documentary 'The Fog of War,' showed humanity 'has not really grappled with what are, I'll call it, 'the rules of war.' LeMay said, 'If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals.' And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?' Though it was dozens of US B-29s that burned Kumagaya in 1945, the survivors and others in Kumagaya said they hold no animosity toward America. Norihiro Ooi, curator at the Kumagaya City Library, said Kumagaya was really just unlucky, bad timing. 'The reason Kumagaya became the site of the last air raid was simply by chance,' Ooi said. If the surrender had been announced sooner, or if peace negotiations had started later, it would've been someplace else, he said. 'One place had to be the last bombed,' he said. That's little consolation to Hojo, the 87-year-old survivor. 'If it was just one day earlier that the war ended,' she said. 'The very next day Japan was defeated. Kumagaya's tragedy feels utterly foolish in that light.' Some people blame the Imperial Japanese government. Its invasion of China beginning in 1931 set the stage for World War II in the Pacific and the destruction that would eventually be meted out by the US and its allies, they said. The years of conflict brought a momentum of war. 'Once it reaches that point, common sense and conscience can no longer resist it,' Yoshida said, adding that Imperial Japan's system of governance left no checks or restraints on the power of the military. Poet author Yoneda talked about, as an adult, visiting Nanjing, China, where from December 1937 to February 1938 Imperial Japanese troops massacred more than 300,000 people, including Chinese troops and civilians and raped tens of thousands of women. The visit gave her a new perspective on her city's fate, she said. 'In Japan, the focus is on the damage Japan suffered during the war, but I was shocked to learn about the Nanjing Massacre — a part of history where Japan was the perpetrator.' Hojo and Yoneda turn their thoughts to the Americans who were in those B-29s. 'The human heart is complex — we endured terrible suffering, but those who inflicted it must have suffered in their own way, too,' Hojo said. 'That means even the US military had hesitations, doesn't it?' Yoneda asks. Vivian Lock was the pilot of the second-to-last B-29 to hit Kumagaya that night. In a 2004 exchange of letters with a Kumagaya survivor, Ken Arai, Lock gave an airman's perspective on the raid. 'I have always regretted all the innocent people killed, injured and the loss of home and property,' wrote Lock, who died in 2010. In his correspondence, he noted how on the flight to Japan B-29 crews were eager to hear the code word that Japan had surrendered — 'Utah.' More than once, radio silence between his aircraft and others on the mission was broken with the words, 'Have you heard anything yet?' Lock wrote. 'Meaning that they were hoping the war had ended.' Yoneda said the situation was really beyond the control of anyone directly involved that night. 'I'm not going to say Kumagaya had to happen,' she said. 'But if war starts, it's hard to end.' A short walk from the temple is a stream bed, fresh water gurgling through the heart of Kumagaya for several blocks. It's arrow-straight now, but in 1945 it was a meandering creek – and a grave for some of the hundreds of people who died that night. They jumped into the streambed, hoping to avoid the flames and heat. But because the stream was narrow and the buildings on its banks were made of wood, the burning structures collapsed on them. Now, a statue marks that spot, the names of the known Kumagaya victims inscribed on its base. Susumu Fujino lived near that spot in August 1945. He was 3 years old at the time, and shrapnel from a US bomb hit him in the shoulder. Eighty years later, he still lives there and is outside tending to his garden as Yoshida shows us the area. Fujino removes his shirt and shows us the scar from the night of the bombing that remains with him. Behind him, a poster advertises upcoming local commemorations of 'The Last Fire Raid.' That night and the scars of war are something Fujino didn't talk about for most of his life, he said. But, at 83, he's talking now as he and the other survivors come to the end of their lives. Fujino now uses his retirement years to grow the Kumagaiso, an orchid, and Kumagai Tsubaki, a camellia flower. Both are now considered symbols of peace for Kumagaya. The fire raid left the flowers at risk of extinction, Fujino said. 'Kumagaiso plants were almost completely wiped out. That's why I've been growing them — I want to preserve them. To me, they are symbols of peace.' His own peace garden, just a few hundred feet from the stream where so many died. Kumagaya can be a side day trip if you're visiting Tokyo and want something different to do off the usual tourist tracks. Most of the sites related to the Kumagaya fire raid are a short bus or taxi ride — or even a walk — from Kumagaya Station, which is accessible from Tokyo Station by Japan's Shinkansen bullet trains in around 40 minutes or only an hour and 15 minutes when using standard rail lines. If you want to visit the Sekijoji Temple and see the burned statue, be sure to contact the temple beforehand so they can get it ready for viewing. A small museum on the second floor of the Kumagaya City Library, a short walk south from the train station, has a history of the area and includes an exhibit on the fire raid. There's not much information in English, however. The stream near the center of the bombing attack is a few blocks north of the station and if you walk along it to the west, you'll see the statue commemorating the victims of the fire raid. From August 13 to 18, you can visit a peace exhibition, 'The Last Air Raid on Kumagaya,' at Yagihashi Department Store in the city, co-hosted by the Kumagaya Air Raid Memorial Civic Organization. Yoneda will be reading her poems.
CNN
16-07-2025
- General
- CNN
‘Utterly foolish': 12 hours before World War II ended, the US firebombed this Japanese city
Eighty years later, the scars of the last American firebombing of a Japanese city remain — on the skin of a man who still lives mere yards from where hundreds died, on the surface of a statue of a revered Buddhist monk, and in the minds of those whose city was turned to ash in a matter of hours. Almost 90 US B-29 bombers dropped about 6,000 tons of jellied gasoline — napalm — on Kumagaya, Japan, on the night of August 14-15, 1945. The resulting fires, burning at 800 to 1,200 degrees Celsius, killed at least 260 people, injured 3,000 and left, by some estimates, almost 75% of the city of 47,000 in ruins. The last in the string of US warplanes that created that firestorm left the skies over Kumagaya less than 12 hours before the voice of Emperor Hirohito would be broadcast announcing Japan's unconditional surrender. Current Kumagaya resident Kazumi Yoneda came into the world that day, not long before the US bombers struck. In 2020, she published a book of poetry, 'The Day I Was Born,' and she shared it with CNN. One read: 'The day I was born, flames devoured the city.'My mother gave birth,'held me close –'And stood among'The ruins of her home.'Her body gave no mother's milk'She held her ever-crying child in her arms.' 'No one wants to die in the closing moments of a war.' Those words came from New York Herald Tribune correspondent Homer Bigart, who was on board one of the last B-29s to strike Kumagaya. He flew from the Pacific island of Guam in the Superfortress City of Saco, part of the 314th Bombardment Wing. It was a mission US commanders were at pains to justify to the aircrews, Bigart wrote. The second atomic bomb attack, on Nagasaki, had occurred just five days earlier, killing almost 46,000 people. Three days before that, on August 6, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima killed an estimated 70,000 people instantly. Japan's capitulation was expected, and US bomber crews hadn't flown for five days — 'an uneasy truce,' Bigart wrote. And now they were being asked to risk their lives hitting what Bigart called 'a pathetically small city of little obvious importance.' But in a pre-mission briefing, commanders said Kumagaya had an important rail yard and shops that made airplane parts, legitimate military targets. 'This should be the final knockout blow of the war,' commanding officer Col. Carl Storrie told the fliers, according to Bigart. 'Put your bombs on the target so that tomorrow the world will have peace.' And in case the surrender was announced during their flight to Kumagaya, the B-29 crews were told to monitor their radios for the word 'Utah.' That would mean Japan's surrender was official and they could turn back to Guam. It never came, and late on the night of August 14, 1945, the last fire raid of World War II began. Kazue Hojo was 7 years old when Kumagaya burned. She lived in a house with her family, having a reasonably happy childhood despite the hardships brought on by the fact that her country had, with its invasion of China, been at war in Asia for her entire life. On a June afternoon, she shared photos of that childhood with CNN. As we sit down in the house of Shoichi Yoshida, non-executive administrative director of a civic group that keeps memories of the fire raid alive, it's the first time she has spoken with media about her recollections of that fiery night. As the bombing began, she fled with her mother, her 5-year-old sister and 2-month-old brother to a railway embankment, dodging the incendiary bombs that 'came down like rain,' she said. A piece of shrapnel struck her mother in the neck. At the same time, her brother, whom her mother carried on her back, suffered a serious burn on his forehead. Both of them were left with scars they would bear the rest of their lives, she said. And fires raged. 'It was bright like daytime,' Hojo said. 'Everybody seemed wet,' she said, but she didn't know why. Was it rainfall? Was it the napalm, was it a combination of both, as the fires could sometimes cause localized rainfall? What Hojo does remember vividly is what she saw when she came down into the city the morning after the raid. Her house still stood — at the very edge of the destruction. Beyond it, she could see for miles, distances unimaginable the day before, with smoke still rising from what a day earlier was Kumagaya. The next day, as she and her family walked through the ruins, hoping to get to her grandparents' home about six miles away, it was wet, very wet. All along the route, through the city's burned downtown district, many adults were lying on the ground amid the rubble, crying inconsolably, which she says is her most painful memory of the war. It's a brutally hot June afternoon when we begin our visit to explore Kumagaya, now with a population of almost 200,000 and just over an hour by rail from Tokyo. At the train station, a souvenir T-shirt espouses the city's modern claim to fame: the hottest temperature ever recorded in Japan — 41.1 degrees Celsius (105.98 degrees Fahrenheit) on July 23, 2018. From there, Yoshida takes us on the six-minute drive to the Sekijoji Buddhist temple, where outside a Japanese elm tree has grown new wood around that which was charred on the night of August 14, 1945. Inside, 79-year-old head priest Tetsuya Okayasu introduces us to a wooden statue of Kobodaishi — one of ancient Japan's most respected Buddhist monks — a sacred symbol of spiritual legacy and devotion. The left side of the statue's smooth, cherubic face is blackened by fire. Okayasu explained how this was one of seven sacred statues in the temple, and it was the last one inside the structure as it burned from the American bombs. His father risked his life to get it out, he said, literally as the structure crumbled around him. After the war, his father stashed the statue away. Near the father's death, as he handed leadership to his son, he told him his two wishes for the statue: One, it should never be repaired. 'The statue is a living witness to the air raid on Kumagaya,' Okayasu said his father told him. And two, it should never be shown to the public. 'Because it is heartbreaking in appearance, people should not see him like this,' his father instructed. The son has kept the first promise and held to the second for years, until the director of the nearby Saitama peace museum asked to display the statue. Okayasu relented. The first members of the public to see it were young people at the museum's summer peace education program. It showed evidence of the horror of war and what it had done to Kumagaya long before their births, he said. The statue worked, and the children who visited it asked questions — some were brought to tears — and began to understand their heritage better, the museum director told Okayasu. 'While I feel bad going against my father's will, I have decided that if people are to learn about peace, they can see the statue,' Okayasu said, his voice trembling in a whisper. Still, he doesn't display it constantly. But he'll bring it out for those with an interest, as he did for CNN. Outside the temple, Okayasu points out a gate with a slim tiled roof. It's the only part of the complex that stood after the bombing. Okayasu, who was 10 days old when Kumagaya was bombed, explained its importance to him. The 200 or so square feet under that gate roof, with makeshift walls of burned corrugated iron, were shelter for him, his mother and father, four siblings and grandmother, for six months as they waited for post-war housing to be built. Kumagaya, along with nearby Isesaki, were the last cities to burn from US firebombs, but were just the final blows in a campaign that began in February 1945. The fire raids were the brainchild of Gen. Curtis LeMay. He'd been given command of the US bomber force in the Pacific after earlier B-29 raids, using high-explosive bombs dropped from 30,000 feet, were ineffective at crippling the Japanese war machine. As few as 20% of targets were hit in those early raids, and air crews blamed poor visibility in bad weather and jet stream winds blowing bombs off target after being dropped from high altitude. LeMay's plan shocked many of those involved in the war effort. The B-29s would go in low, at 5,000 to 8,000 feet. They'd go in at night. And they would go in single file, rather than in the large multi-layered formations the US had used in the daylight bombing of German forces in Europe. And they'd carry incendiary bombs, cluster munitions dropped in cannisters of 38 apiece that broke apart near impact, spreading their bomblets of napalm over a wide area. LeMay thought they'd be perfect to burn Japan's wooden homes and businesses, and he was quickly proven right. A March 9-10 fire raid on the capital of Tokyo killed 100,000 people, the deadliest air raid in human history, a toll worse than Hiroshima or Nagasaki. It — and subsequent raids — destroyed about 60% of the city, leaving about a million people homeless. The worst-hit city was Toyama — 99% destroyed — on August 1. Robert McNamara, who was US defense secretary during much of the Vietnam War, was a Guam-based analyst of bombing effectiveness in 1945. The fire raids, McNamara said in the 2003 documentary 'The Fog of War,' showed humanity 'has not really grappled with what are, I'll call it, 'the rules of war.' LeMay said, 'If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals.' And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?' Though it was dozens of US B-29s that burned Kumagaya in 1945, the survivors and others in Kumagaya said they hold no animosity toward America. Norihiro Ooi, curator at the Kumagaya City Library, said Kumagaya was really just unlucky, bad timing. 'The reason Kumagaya became the site of the last air raid was simply by chance,' Ooi said. If the surrender had been announced sooner, or if peace negotiations had started later, it would've been someplace else, he said. 'One place had to be the last bombed,' he said. That's little consolation to Hojo, the 87-year-old survivor. 'If it was just one day earlier that the war ended,' she said. 'The very next day Japan was defeated. Kumagaya's tragedy feels utterly foolish in that light.' Some people blame the Imperial Japanese government. Its invasion of China beginning in 1931 set the stage for World War II in the Pacific and the destruction that would eventually be meted out by the US and its allies, they said. The years of conflict brought a momentum of war. 'Once it reaches that point, common sense and conscience can no longer resist it,' Yoshida said, adding that Imperial Japan's system of governance left no checks or restraints on the power of the military. Poet author Yoneda talked about, as an adult, visiting Nanjing, China, where from December 1937 to February 1938 Imperial Japanese troops massacred more than 300,000 people, including Chinese troops and civilians and raped tens of thousands of women. The visit gave her a new perspective on her city's fate, she said. 'In Japan, the focus is on the damage Japan suffered during the war, but I was shocked to learn about the Nanjing Massacre — a part of history where Japan was the perpetrator.' Hojo and Yoneda turn their thoughts to the Americans who were in those B-29s. 'The human heart is complex — we endured terrible suffering, but those who inflicted it must have suffered in their own way, too,' Hojo said. 'That means even the US military had hesitations, doesn't it?' Yoneda asks. Vivian Lock was the pilot of the second-to-last B-29 to hit Kumagaya that night. In a 2004 exchange of letters with a Kumagaya survivor, Ken Arai, Lock gave an airman's perspective on the raid. 'I have always regretted all the innocent people killed, injured and the loss of home and property,' wrote Lock, who died in 2010. In his correspondence, he noted how on the flight to Japan B-29 crews were eager to hear the code word that Japan had surrendered — 'Utah.' More than once, radio silence between his aircraft and others on the mission was broken with the words, 'Have you heard anything yet?' Lock wrote. 'Meaning that they were hoping the war had ended.' Yoneda said the situation was really beyond the control of anyone directly involved that night. 'I'm not going to say Kumagaya had to happen,' she said. 'But if war starts, it's hard to end.' A short walk from the temple is a stream bed, fresh water gurgling through the heart of Kumagaya for several blocks. It's arrow-straight now, but in 1945 it was a meandering creek – and a grave for some of the hundreds of people who died that night. They jumped into the streambed, hoping to avoid the flames and heat. But because the stream was narrow and the buildings on its banks were made of wood, the burning structures collapsed on them. Now, a statue marks that spot, the names of the known Kumagaya victims inscribed on its base. Susumu Fujino lived near that spot in August 1945. He was 3 years old at the time, and shrapnel from a US bomb hit him in the shoulder. Eighty years later, he still lives there and is outside tending to his garden as Yoshida shows us the area. Fujino removes his shirt and shows us the scar from the night of the bombing that remains with him. Behind him, a poster advertises upcoming local commemorations of 'The Last Fire Raid.' That night and the scars of war are something Fujino didn't talk about for most of his life, he said. But, at 83, he's talking now as he and the other survivors come to the end of their lives. Fujino now uses his retirement years to grow the Kumagaiso, an orchid, and Kumagai Tsubaki, a camellia flower. Both are now considered symbols of peace for Kumagaya. The fire raid left the flowers at risk of extinction, Fujino said. 'Kumagaiso plants were almost completely wiped out. That's why I've been growing them — I want to preserve them. To me, they are symbols of peace.' His own peace garden, just a few hundred feet from the stream where so many died. Kumagaya can be a side day trip if you're visiting Tokyo and want something different to do off the usual tourist tracks. Most of the sites related to the Kumagaya fire raid are a short bus or taxi ride — or even a walk — from Kumagaya Station, which is accessible from Tokyo Station by Japan's Shinkansen bullet trains in around 40 minutes or only an hour and 15 minutes when using standard rail lines. If you want to visit the Sekijoji Temple and see the burned statue, be sure to contact the temple beforehand so they can get it ready for viewing. A small museum on the second floor of the Kumagaya City Library, a short walk south from the train station, has a history of the area and includes an exhibit on the fire raid. There's not much information in English, however. The stream near the center of the bombing attack is a few blocks north of the station and if you walk along it to the west, you'll see the statue commemorating the victims of the fire raid. From August 13 to 18, you can visit a peace exhibition, 'The Last Air Raid on Kumagaya,' at Yagihashi Department Store in the city, co-hosted by the Kumagaya Air Raid Memorial Civic Organization. Yoneda will be reading her poems.
CNN
16-07-2025
- General
- CNN
‘Utterly foolish': 12 hours before World War II ended, the US firebombed this Japanese city
Eighty years later, the scars of the last American firebombing of a Japanese city remain — on the skin of a man who still lives mere yards from where hundreds died, on the surface of a statue of a revered Buddhist monk, and in the minds of those whose city was turned to ash in a matter of hours. Almost 90 US B-29 bombers dropped about 6,000 tons of jellied gasoline — napalm — on Kumagaya, Japan, on the night of August 14-15, 1945. The resulting fires, burning at 800 to 1,200 degrees Celsius, killed at least 260 people, injured 3,000 and left, by some estimates, almost 75% of the city of 47,000 in ruins. The last in the string of US warplanes that created that firestorm left the skies over Kumagaya less than 12 hours before the voice of Emperor Hirohito would be broadcast announcing Japan's unconditional surrender. Current Kumagaya resident Kazumi Yoneda came into the world that day, not long before the US bombers struck. In 2020, she published a book of poetry, 'The Day I Was Born,' and she shared it with CNN. One read: 'The day I was born, flames devoured the city.'My mother gave birth,'held me close –'And stood among'The ruins of her home.'Her body gave no mother's milk'She held her ever-crying child in her arms.' 'No one wants to die in the closing moments of a war.' Those words came from New York Herald Tribune correspondent Homer Bigart, who was on board one of the last B-29s to strike Kumagaya. He flew from the Pacific island of Guam in the Superfortress City of Saco, part of the 314th Bombardment Wing. It was a mission US commanders were at pains to justify to the aircrews, Bigart wrote. The second atomic bomb attack, on Nagasaki, had occurred just five days earlier, killing almost 46,000 people. Three days before that, on August 6, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima killed an estimated 70,000 people instantly. Japan's capitulation was expected, and US bomber crews hadn't flown for five days — 'an uneasy truce,' Bigart wrote. And now they were being asked to risk their lives hitting what Bigart called 'a pathetically small city of little obvious importance.' But in a pre-mission briefing, commanders said Kumagaya had an important rail yard and shops that made airplane parts, legitimate military targets. 'This should be the final knockout blow of the war,' commanding officer Col. Carl Storrie told the fliers, according to Bigart. 'Put your bombs on the target so that tomorrow the world will have peace.' And in case the surrender was announced during their flight to Kumagaya, the B-29 crews were told to monitor their radios for the word 'Utah.' That would mean Japan's surrender was official and they could turn back to Guam. It never came, and late on the night of August 14, 1945, the last fire raid of World War II began. Kazue Hojo was 7 years old when Kumagaya burned. She lived in a house with her family, having a reasonably happy childhood despite the hardships brought on by the fact that her country had, with its invasion of China, been at war in Asia for her entire life. On a June afternoon, she shared photos of that childhood with CNN. As we sit down in the house of Shoichi Yoshida, non-executive administrative director of a civic group that keeps memories of the fire raid alive, it's the first time she has spoken with media about her recollections of that fiery night. As the bombing began, she fled with her mother, her 5-year-old sister and 2-month-old brother to a railway embankment, dodging the incendiary bombs that 'came down like rain,' she said. A piece of shrapnel struck her mother in the neck. At the same time, her brother, whom her mother carried on her back, suffered a serious burn on his forehead. Both of them were left with scars they would bear the rest of their lives, she said. And fires raged. 'It was bright like daytime,' Hojo said. 'Everybody seemed wet,' she said, but she didn't know why. Was it rainfall? Was it the napalm, was it a combination of both, as the fires could sometimes cause localized rainfall? What Hojo does remember vividly is what she saw when she came down into the city the morning after the raid. Her house still stood — at the very edge of the destruction. Beyond it, she could see for miles, distances unimaginable the day before, with smoke still rising from what a day earlier was Kumagaya. The next day, as she and her family walked through the ruins, hoping to get to her grandparents' home about six miles away, it was wet, very wet. All along the route, through the city's burned downtown district, many adults were lying on the ground amid the rubble, crying inconsolably, which she says is her most painful memory of the war. It's a brutally hot June afternoon when we begin our visit to explore Kumagaya, now with a population of almost 200,000 and just over an hour by rail from Tokyo. At the train station, a souvenir T-shirt espouses the city's modern claim to fame: the hottest temperature ever recorded in Japan — 41.1 degrees Celsius (105.98 degrees Fahrenheit) on July 23, 2018. From there, Yoshida takes us on the six-minute drive to the Sekijoji Buddhist temple, where outside a Japanese elm tree has grown new wood around that which was charred on the night of August 14, 1945. Inside, 79-year-old head priest Tetsuya Okayasu introduces us to a wooden statue of Kobodaishi — one of ancient Japan's most respected Buddhist monks — a sacred symbol of spiritual legacy and devotion. The left side of the statue's smooth, cherubic face is blackened by fire. Okayasu explained how this was one of seven sacred statues in the temple, and it was the last one inside the structure as it burned from the American bombs. His father risked his life to get it out, he said, literally as the structure crumbled around him. After the war, his father stashed the statue away. Near the father's death, as he handed leadership to his son, he told him his two wishes for the statue: One, it should never be repaired. 'The statue is a living witness to the air raid on Kumagaya,' Okayasu said his father told him. And two, it should never be shown to the public. 'Because it is heartbreaking in appearance, people should not see him like this,' his father instructed. The son has kept the first promise and held to the second for years, until the director of the nearby Saitama peace museum asked to display the statue. Okayasu relented. The first members of the public to see it were young people at the museum's summer peace education program. It showed evidence of the horror of war and what it had done to Kumagaya long before their births, he said. The statue worked, and the children who visited it asked questions — some were brought to tears — and began to understand their heritage better, the museum director told Okayasu. 'While I feel bad going against my father's will, I have decided that if people are to learn about peace, they can see the statue,' Okayasu said, his voice trembling in a whisper. Still, he doesn't display it constantly. But he'll bring it out for those with an interest, as he did for CNN. Outside the temple, Okayasu points out a gate with a slim tiled roof. It's the only part of the complex that stood after the bombing. Okayasu, who was 10 days old when Kumagaya was bombed, explained its importance to him. The 200 or so square feet under that gate roof, with makeshift walls of burned corrugated iron, were shelter for him, his mother and father, four siblings and grandmother, for six months as they waited for post-war housing to be built. Kumagaya, along with nearby Isesaki, were the last cities to burn from US firebombs, but were just the final blows in a campaign that began in February 1945. The fire raids were the brainchild of Gen. Curtis LeMay. He'd been given command of the US bomber force in the Pacific after earlier B-29 raids, using high-explosive bombs dropped from 30,000 feet, were ineffective at crippling the Japanese war machine. As few as 20% of targets were hit in those early raids, and air crews blamed poor visibility in bad weather and jet stream winds blowing bombs off target after being dropped from high altitude. LeMay's plan shocked many of those involved in the war effort. The B-29s would go in low, at 5,000 to 8,000 feet. They'd go in at night. And they would go in single file, rather than in the large multi-layered formations the US had used in the daylight bombing of German forces in Europe. And they'd carry incendiary bombs, cluster munitions dropped in cannisters of 38 apiece that broke apart near impact, spreading their bomblets of napalm over a wide area. LeMay thought they'd be perfect to burn Japan's wooden homes and businesses, and he was quickly proven right. A March 9-10 fire raid on the capital of Tokyo killed 100,000 people, the deadliest air raid in human history, a toll worse than Hiroshima or Nagasaki. It — and subsequent raids — destroyed about 60% of the city, leaving about a million people homeless. The worst-hit city was Toyama — 99% destroyed — on August 1. Robert McNamara, who was US defense secretary during much of the Vietnam War, was a Guam-based analyst of bombing effectiveness in 1945. The fire raids, McNamara said in the 2003 documentary 'The Fog of War,' showed humanity 'has not really grappled with what are, I'll call it, 'the rules of war.' LeMay said, 'If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals.' And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?' Though it was dozens of US B-29s that burned Kumagaya in 1945, the survivors and others in Kumagaya said they hold no animosity toward America. Norihiro Ooi, curator at the Kumagaya City Library, said Kumagaya was really just unlucky, bad timing. 'The reason Kumagaya became the site of the last air raid was simply by chance,' Ooi said. If the surrender had been announced sooner, or if peace negotiations had started later, it would've been someplace else, he said. 'One place had to be the last bombed,' he said. That's little consolation to Hojo, the 87-year-old survivor. 'If it was just one day earlier that the war ended,' she said. 'The very next day Japan was defeated. Kumagaya's tragedy feels utterly foolish in that light.' Some people blame the Imperial Japanese government. Its invasion of China beginning in 1931 set the stage for World War II in the Pacific and the destruction that would eventually be meted out by the US and its allies, they said. The years of conflict brought a momentum of war. 'Once it reaches that point, common sense and conscience can no longer resist it,' Yoshida said, adding that Imperial Japan's system of governance left no checks or restraints on the power of the military. Poet author Yoneda talked about, as an adult, visiting Nanjing, China, where from December 1937 to February 1938 Imperial Japanese troops massacred more than 300,000 people, including Chinese troops and civilians and raped tens of thousands of women. The visit gave her a new perspective on her city's fate, she said. 'In Japan, the focus is on the damage Japan suffered during the war, but I was shocked to learn about the Nanjing Massacre — a part of history where Japan was the perpetrator.' Hojo and Yoneda turn their thoughts to the Americans who were in those B-29s. 'The human heart is complex — we endured terrible suffering, but those who inflicted it must have suffered in their own way, too,' Hojo said. 'That means even the US military had hesitations, doesn't it?' Yoneda asks. Vivian Lock was the pilot of the second-to-last B-29 to hit Kumagaya that night. In a 2004 exchange of letters with a Kumagaya survivor, Ken Arai, Lock gave an airman's perspective on the raid. 'I have always regretted all the innocent people killed, injured and the loss of home and property,' wrote Lock, who died in 2010. In his correspondence, he noted how on the flight to Japan B-29 crews were eager to hear the code word that Japan had surrendered — 'Utah.' More than once, radio silence between his aircraft and others on the mission was broken with the words, 'Have you heard anything yet?' Lock wrote. 'Meaning that they were hoping the war had ended.' Yoneda said the situation was really beyond the control of anyone directly involved that night. 'I'm not going to say Kumagaya had to happen,' she said. 'But if war starts, it's hard to end.' A short walk from the temple is a stream bed, fresh water gurgling through the heart of Kumagaya for several blocks. It's arrow-straight now, but in 1945 it was a meandering creek – and a grave for some of the hundreds of people who died that night. They jumped into the streambed, hoping to avoid the flames and heat. But because the stream was narrow and the buildings on its banks were made of wood, the burning structures collapsed on them. Now, a statue marks that spot, the names of the known Kumagaya victims inscribed on its base. Susumu Fujino lived near that spot in August 1945. He was 3 years old at the time, and shrapnel from a US bomb hit him in the shoulder. Eighty years later, he still lives there and is outside tending to his garden as Yoshida shows us the area. Fujino removes his shirt and shows us the scar from the night of the bombing that remains with him. Behind him, a poster advertises upcoming local commemorations of 'The Last Fire Raid.' That night and the scars of war are something Fujino didn't talk about for most of his life, he said. But, at 83, he's talking now as he and the other survivors come to the end of their lives. Fujino now uses his retirement years to grow the Kumagaiso, an orchid, and Kumagai Tsubaki, a camellia flower. Both are now considered symbols of peace for Kumagaya. The fire raid left the flowers at risk of extinction, Fujino said. 'Kumagaiso plants were almost completely wiped out. That's why I've been growing them — I want to preserve them. To me, they are symbols of peace.' His own peace garden, just a few hundred feet from the stream where so many died. Kumagaya can be a side day trip if you're visiting Tokyo and want something different to do off the usual tourist tracks. Most of the sites related to the Kumagaya fire raid are a short bus or taxi ride — or even a walk — from Kumagaya Station, which is accessible from Tokyo Station by Japan's Shinkansen bullet trains in around 40 minutes or only an hour and 15 minutes when using standard rail lines. If you want to visit the Sekijoji Temple and see the burned statue, be sure to contact the temple beforehand so they can get it ready for viewing. A small museum on the second floor of the Kumagaya City Library, a short walk south from the train station, has a history of the area and includes an exhibit on the fire raid. There's not much information in English, however. The stream near the center of the bombing attack is a few blocks north of the station and if you walk along it to the west, you'll see the statue commemorating the victims of the fire raid. From August 13 to 18, you can visit a peace exhibition, 'The Last Air Raid on Kumagaya,' at Yagihashi Department Store in the city, co-hosted by the Kumagaya Air Raid Memorial Civic Organization. Yoneda will be reading her poems.
Scoop
29-05-2025
- Politics
- Scoop
Who, Neither Politician Nor Monarch, Executed 100,000 Civilians In A Single Night?
Answer: Curtis LeMay, American Air Force General, in the wee hours of 10 March 1945. While authorised by his immediate superior, this firebombing of Tokyo was a decentralised military operation which received subsequent popular approval. It was called 'Operation Meetinghouse'. While Japanese civilians were aware that they had become a collateral target to the encroaching American military machine, these victims had no prior idea of the murderous danger they faced that night. Le May went on to execute at least another 120,000 Japanese civilians in the next five months and five days; from 10 March until 15 August. The method of execution was to burn people alive. LeMay's inflammatory instrument was napalm. The politicians approved, but did not fully comprehend. They had been softened up by bureaucratic-speak, and they did not see burning people on their TV screens. (In that August there was an additional couplet of mass executions; nuclear executions. This parallel military operation was not under the command of LeMay, but used the same airfields and the same B29 aircraft type. Contrary to impressions given that the atomic bomb was planned for Germany, pilot Paul Tibbets was chosen in 1944, and was doing test manoeuvres from Cuba at the end of that year. And there were five cities LeMay had been asked not to firebomb, and did not bomb, knowing that these were 'reserved' targets. An additional 120,000 people were summarily executed by the untested 'Little Boy' [Hiroshima] and the New Mexico tested 'Fat Man' [plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki], with thousands more suffering lingering executions. These bombings – rubber-stamped by President Truman – were arranged by technocrats and military bureaucrats. The American authorities were preparing to give a repeat larger dose when more 'Fat Men' would become available towards the end of 1945.) In the middle centuries of the last millennium, one particularly appalling form of execution was to burn 'heretics' and 'witches' at the stake. These executions peaked in the sixteenth century. The most renowned perpetrator was Bloody Mary, Queen of England during the 1550s. Her tally, those burned while she was queen, was about 500 people. Unlike the citizens of Tokyo, most of Queen Mary's victims had options, albeit unsatisfactory options, to escape their fates. We think of such executions-by-fire as the epitome of terror. (And we note that some Holocaust victims, in places such as Belarus, were burned in wooden buildings locked by their Nazi executioners.) It is 200 kilometres from Auckland to Tauranga via SH2. (For an international example, try London to Cambridge.) Just imagine 20,000 stakes, faggots at the ready, 10 metres apart, all the way along the highway between those two cities. Now imagine a family being burned at each of those 20,000 stakes. That is, in essence, what General Curtis LeMay achieved in one spring night, in central Tokyo. (And, as we have noted, he was only warming up. His total civilian kill count was 'limited' because putative victims, now forewarned, were more able to take measures to save their lives though not their homes. He firebombed literally hundreds of Japanese cities.) Did we remember this event in March this year, its 80th anniversary? No. This literal holocaust was barely remembered, even in Japan. Indeed, in the 1960s, political leaders in the new Japan presented him in 1964 with a prestigious accolade for his supposed sine qua non role in making the new Japan possible. 1945 was not LeMay's first participation in megadeath; not his first rodeo. He earned his stripes in the European 'bombing theatre' in 1942 and 1943, where he took on board the 'atrocities may be more effective' approach of the British RAF. He also operated out of Bengal in 1944, during the Bengal famine which resulted from food being diverted away from millions of Bengali civilians to facilitate war objectives, in an earlier attempt to bomb Japan via India and China. In addition to starving Indians – a somewhat wretched people, in LeMay's view – the American military was willing to sustain huge American losses, eg flying over the Himalayas, for minimal military success. A mitigating factor for LeMay, then, was that he was implementing other people's plans. On 10 March 1945, Operation Meetinghouse was his scheme. Why? What was the purpose of this mass execution, this collective punishment of civilians who happened to live in a country that was losing a war? Japanese civilians were neither fascists nor communists nor anti-semites nor anti-hamites nor anyone else 'deserving' of immolation. Their government was however guilty of good old-fashioned imperialism, and the usual atrocities that come with conquests of other people's lands. There were two officially-stated arguments used to justify these executions. One was that, as civilian victims of such suffering, they, demoralised, might somehow convince their political masters to end the war sooner. The second justification was that the civilian victims were either workers in factories producing military goods, or were involved in 'cottage industries' which contributed to the production of military goods; this really amounts to some kind of 'revenge' justification masked as 'normal warfare'. And this second justification is uncannily like the 'Hamas' argument used at present by the Israeli government to justify executions of civilians in Gaza. The American bombing culture in Europe had been more reserved than that of the British. The Americans, including LeMay, witnessed the British firebombing of German cities during 1942 to 1944 – especially in the west of Germany where Nazi support was the least – which had conspicuously failed to create conditions facilitating popular revolution in Germany. Dead people tended to be passive, and survivors tended to channel their despair towards the perpetrators of their anguish. Indeed, among victimised communities, murderous bombing campaigns generally reinforced propaganda perpetuated by the victims' governments. Further, despite calling their tactic 'morale bombing', the British already knew that the morale narrative was false, having been able to closely evaluate the morale effects of comparatively small amounts of German bombing in 1940 upon British civilians. Overall, it comes across that the main reason for the executions was some kind of 'impunity'; they did it because they could. The more they failed to bring the war to an end, the more they persevered in doing the executions that hadn't achieved their stated goals. Just one more city. And then another. And another. The impunity argument was augmented by the 'scientific' rationalisations. Applied scientists developing ever more efficient methods of execution would never be satisfied unless they could see the success of their own apparatus 'in the field'. Sky-executions this century: Iraq from 2003, Afghanistan, and Gaza from 2023 In the last decade (or so) of the twentieth century, most people believed that humans – except perhaps a few terrorists (who indeed perpetrated a sky-execution in 2001) – could never repeat such atrocities upon civilians. Then we saw, in 2003, based on false claims about 'weapons of mass destruction' held by Saddam Hussein, executions similar to those of WW2 were perpetrated upon the civilians of Iraq. And a huge bunker bomb – the Mother of All Bombs"the most powerful non-nuclear bomb ever used" – was dropped on a village in eastern Afghanistan in 2017. (A comment to this recent Al Jazeera news clip says: "Americans tested their weapons on innocent civilians' villages". And see BBC: The Mother of All Bombs: How badly did it hurt IS in Afghanistan? 27 April 2017.) These executions were seen to be a mix of 'revenge' and 'impunity', although once again cloaked as being part of a higher purpose; in this case the higher purpose being the export of western-style 'Democracy'. We saw in Iraq that the main consequence of western sky-executions – the 'shock and awe' bombing campaign – was the formation of terror-group ISIL, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan dragged on for twenty years before the eventual humiliation of the United States in Afghanistan in 2021. Since 2023 in Gaza we have seen a constant stream of airborne executions of civilians; mostly people who by fate were born into that occupied or encircled ghetto; a piece of real estate, densely populated by the descendants of refugees, coveted by the descendants of comparatively recent European colonisers making bizarre historical claims of entitlement. The young people of this world were shocked to see that their political leaders were indifferent, and that many were actually prompting these executions; executions by explosion and fire. Admittedly the scale of what is happening in Gaza is much less than the scale of Curtis LeMay's murderous firebombs. But otherwise it is much the same. Our elders, some of whom protested against the Vietnam War, by and large couldn't care less. This indifference is facilitated by the fact that the victims' fates are simply too graphic to show on television. There is no lack of footage; it's just too horrible. But now, there is footage that's less horrible – though still very horrible – of emaciated starving children. I don't think that those western elites who were indifferent to the live burnings are really any less indifferent to the starvations perpetrated, not by Jews, but by the state of Israel. But the elites are sensitive to the impact of detrimental optics on their ability to garner political support from non-elites. G-Hats and B-hats It must be hard for young people to explain why there is so much indifference among their elders, especially their elite elders, towards the sky-executions that appear on daily news feeds (though commonly at about 6:25pm – after two sets of advertisements – on the nightly six o'clock news). My explanation is this. We put hats (ie labels) on various groups of people. Especially 'Goody' and 'Baddy' hats. Hats labelled G (for good or for God), and hats labelled B (for bad, or evil). Sometimes there is a D-hat; western liberal 'Democracy', the imperialism we most see today. Following westerners' contrition for The Holocaust, the first people in line to be awarded G hats were the Jewish citizens of the newly created state of Israel. We gave out many G and B hats to various other people of course. And, of course, just about every identity group issues themselves with G-hats, reserving B-hats for distinct others. One of the problems with the human brain is that it reacts badly to contradiction. Neural pathways short-circuit when we see people with G-hats doing B (bad) – often very bad – things. Most observers will resolve the contradiction in favour of the hat rather than in favour of the observed action. So, if a G-hatted person or institution sky-executes some people, then we rationalise this dissonance by ignoring the action or by presuming that the victims must have been B (effectively converting a grotesque action into a good action). We expect our societal leaders to rise above these forms of neural conflict. Through this kind of dissonance, we both excuse the bad actions of the Good, and fail to acknowledge the good actions of the Bad. (An example of the latter is that, in many contexts, colonisers and their descendants are given B-hats by the descendants of the colonised; and any genuine achievements which may have arisen from a colonised setting are devalued, deamplified, or disregarded.) On the matter of cognitive dissonance, for which my hat explanation is an example, see Social Atrophy on the Rise, France24 26 May 20125, featuring Sarah Stein Lubrano, author of Don't Talk about Politics (published this month). She says: "When people are given new information or new arguments about something about which they already hold beliefs – especially strong beliefs – they experience cognitive dissonance, they feel discomfort between the contradiction between new ideas and existing ideas and this often causes them to re-entrench, to double-down on their existing ideas." Conclusion Some things are so horrible - including inflammatory executions – we cannot compute them. That's no excuse to repeat them. ------------- On Curtis LeMay, my three main sources have been: Richard Overy (2025), Rain of Ruin Malcolm Gladwell (2021), The Bomber Mafia James Scott (2022), Black Snow ------------- Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand. © Scoop Media Keith Rankin Political Economist, Scoop Columnist Keith Rankin taught economics at Unitec in Mt Albert since 1999. An economic historian by training, his research has included an analysis of labour supply in the Great Depression of the 1930s, and has included estimates of New Zealand's GNP going back to the 1850s. Keith believes that many of the economic issues that beguile us cannot be understood by relying on the orthodox interpretations of our social science disciplines. Keith favours a critical approach that emphasises new perspectives rather than simply opposing those practices and policies that we don't like. Keith retired in 2020 and lives with his family in Glen Eden, Auckland.
India.com
02-05-2025
- Politics
- India.com
If India fires a nuclear missile on Pakistan..., how much area will be destroyed? Figures reveal shocking...
If India fires a nuclear missile on Pakistan…, how much area will be destroyed? Figures reveal shocking… New Delhi: Pakistan is a safe haven for terrorists and the roots of terrorist attacks anywhere in the world are always linked to the neighbouring country. Pak, after facing defeat in all four wars (1947 to 1999) with India, realised that it can never win a direct war. It then made terrorism a weapon. Islamabad does terror attacks in India and when New Delhi talks about retaliation, the country threatens with a nuclear attack, knowing the fact that India is a much bigger nuclear power. If the situation ever worsens so much that India has to drop a nuclear bomb in response, then cities such as Karachi, Lahore, and Islamabad can be reduced to dust in a few minutes. One nuke bomb and how big a part of Pakistan is destroyed. Let's know. It is noteworthy that, nuclear weapon has been used only once in an actual war. During ] World War II, America dropped nuclear bombs on two Japanese cities—Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These attacks made the world realise the destructive power of nuclear weapons. After seeing the devastating results of the nuclear blast on Hiroshima and Nagasaki every country in the world consider nuclear weapon as a last resort. Hiroshima and Nagasaki Hiroshima: On 6 August 1945, during the Second World War II, American B 29 bomber dropped the world's first atomic bomb on Japan's Hiroshima. Name of the atomic bomb: 'Little Boy' Weight: About 4399.8 Kg Explosion: Occurred at a height of 2,000 feet Power of the bomb: 15 Kiloton or 15,000 tons of TNT. Impact: The city was destroyed up to 12.9 square km. Deaths: About 80,000 people died instantly. Nagasaki: 9 August 1945 Another B 29 bomber dropped a plutonium based bomb on Nagasaki at 11:02 am. Bomb Name: 'Fat Man' Explosion: Occurred at 1,650 feet above sea level. Bomb Power: 21 Kiloton or 21,000 tons of TNT. Explosion: Its power was 40% more than 'Little Boy' Blast: Humans and animals within a radius of 1 km were killed almost instantly. Deaths: About 40,000 people died instantly Aftermath: Tens of thousands of people died from radiation for months and years India's Nuclear Trials Power Notably, India has done two nuclear tests, first in 1974 under the leadership of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and the other was in 1998, during Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's regime. Pokhran 1 – 'Smiling Buddha' 'On 18 May 1974, India conducted a nuclear explosion for the first time at the Pokhran Test Site, which was given the code name 'Smiling Buddha'. Pokhran I was the first demonstration of India's nuclear technology. This nuk test brought India into the nuclear club. The bomb had a yield of about 15 Kiloton (15,000 tons of TNT). What would happen if Smiling Buddha bomb explodes over Islamabad? If a nuclear bomb of this massive power detonated in the air over Islamabad, it would kill about 75,470 instantly, and about 1,53,410 would be injured. Fireball Radius: 198 m (0.12 km²): The size of the fireball depends on the height of the explosion. Anything inside the fireball will be blown away completely Radiation radius (500 rem): 1.1 km (3.78 km²): 500 rem radiation is extremely dangerous; death can occur within about a month. 15% of survivors may later die of cancer. Pokhran 2 – 'Operation Shakti' India conducted five nuclear tests on 11 and 13 May 1998 and declared itself a nuclear weapon state. The tests included – 45 kiloton thermonuclear bomb, a 15 kiloton fission bomb and a 0.2 kiloton. What will happen if the Operation Shakti bomb explodes on Islamabad If 45 Kiloton nuk bomb is detonated in the air over Islamabad: Estimated deaths: 1,26,070 / Estimated injured: 2,27,140. Fireball Radius: 307 m (0.9 km²): The size of the fireball depends on the height of the explosion. Radiation Radius (500 rem): 1.16 km (4.25 km²): 500 rem radiation is extremely dangerous; death can occur within about a month. 15% of survivors may later die of cancer Medium blast damage radius (5 psi): At 5 psi of pressure, a 19.6 square km area (a radius of approx 2.5 km) would experience widespread building collapse, resulting in significant injuries and fatalities. The increased risk of fire spread in densely populated residential and commercial areas would lead to moderate levels of urban damage. Radius of damage from a mild explosion (1 psi): A nuclear explosion at 1,070 meters altitude can cause glass windows to break within a 7.03 km radius (155 square km area) due to the pressure wave. This level of damage, resulting from the initial flash and subsequent pressure, is considered relatively minor in urban areas, though it poses a significant risk of injury to those nearby.
