-----Original Message-----
  From: [log in to unmask]
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of John Smith
  Sent: Thursday, March 09, 2000 11:51 AM
  Subject: How it all began, and what we are up against


  Dear friends,
  I hope none of you will mind that I've taken the liberty of posting the
appended article about the USAF's firebombing of Tokyo in 1945. It appeared
on the front page of the review section of last weekend's Financial Times.
It would be better for your peace of mind that you do not read it, but this
is a story that we need to know about, this is a story that must be told.
  This article made me weep with sadness and rage. It is much more than an
incredibly moving story, however. The barbaric attack on the civilian
population of Japan "cast the mould of postwar American air power as a
weapon of strategic devastation", as the article says. It is therefore
highly relevant to the current Iraq crisis. It gives us a glimpse of the
real face of imperialist democracy, usually hidden behind a smiling mask; it
show us what our enemy is capable of and what we must learn how to destroy.
  One weakness in the article is its suggestion that the US rulers decided
to target the civilian population because of technical problems with the
B-29 bombers. There were much more important factors than this, factors
which were also behind the merciless, genocidal civilian bombing campaign
carried out against the working class districts of German cities by the UK's
own Bomber Command. I have gathered some evidence and insights on this
question of questions into an article entitled "The Straight Line Connecting
Iraq and World War Two", which I will send anyone on request.

  Best Wishes to You All

  John S

  Breathing Fire

  Financial Times March 4-5 2000
  Lead article of review section

  In a harrowing account, Paul Abrahams explains how the American
fire-bombing of a Tokyo district marked a change in US policy towards
civilians - and paved the way for use of the atom bomb.

  The night more than half her family died, Kazuyo Funato was woken by her
mother’s screams.  As the startled 12-year-old ran down the stairs of her
wooden home, her mother was bundling her baby brother, Takahise,
Japanese-style, on to her back.  Outside she could hear the shouting of
neighbours and the drone of aircraft.  The earth and sky were shaking.
  The working-class district where she lived next to the Sumida River in
eastern Tokyo was ablaze.  For two hours, on the night of March 9 1945, an
unprecedented force of more than 334 B-29 bombers rained napalm, phosphorus
and oil on the most densely populated and inflammable districts of Japan’s
capital, which also contained many small workshops supplying the military
machine
  For those watching outside the target area, the raid had a theatrical
quality.  Japanese accounts describe the bombers as “translucent, unreal,
light as fantastic glass dragonflies”.  The bombs were visible, too, as they
descended slowly like a “cascade of silvery water”
  Those cascades of M-47 napalm bombs wreaked unprecedented damage.  Nearly
16 square miles of Tokyo were destroyed and 267,171 buildings damaged.  The
official history of the US Army Air Forces (AAF) concluded with pride: “The
physical destruction and loss of life at Tokyo exceeded that of Rome [in
Nero’s time], and that of any great conflagration of the western world.”
  The statistics of human destruction were equally numbing.  At least 84,000
people, and possibly more than 100,000, died in the great Tokyo air raid.
The historian Michael Sherry concluded: “By some reckonings [this was] the
highest toll of any air raid, conventional or atomic, during the war or for
that matter any single manmade catastrophe.”
  Yet, in most accounts, the bombing of Tokyo is but a footnote, ignored as
much by the Japanese who endured it as the Americans who inflicted it.  Only
in May will the Tokyo metropolitan government at last compile a definitive
list of the names of those who died that night.
  Kazuyo, now in her 60s, sits upright and formal in the living room of her
perfectly ordered Tokyo home.  A small woman even by Japanese standards, she
wears sombre clothes and dark glasses even though there is little natural
light in the room.  She knows that the pain of bearing testimony again will
bring tears.
  She explains how, as the raid began, the family initially gathered in the
trench behind her parents’ home.  Her father, a pharmacist, grabbed his iron
helmet and rucksack of medical supplies, and, as instructed by the civil
defence code, rushed to put out the flames.  Minoru, her eldest brother,
went to their grandmother’s home to fetch her and their three-year-old
sister Teruko, but they had already fled.  They were never seen again, their
bodies never found.
  Around midnight, about two hours after the raid began, the fire began to
close in on their home, turning the sky red.  First, they fled to a nearby
school - the local evacuation point.  But the fire followed them.
  At that moment, Kazuyo’s father arrived with the two brothers.  Flight was
the only option.  All around the family were falling cinders, described by
survivors as “flaming dew”, which threatened to set them ablaze.  Equally
dangerous was the wind.  There were already strong gusts from an unusually
brisk northerly breeze that fanned the flames, but the inferno was also
sucking in oxygen, creating huge drafts.
  “The wind was throwing shop signs and door frames through the air.  That
was terrifying enough,” explains Kazuyo.  “But suddenly the wind took my
mother.  She was scooped up and started rolling away.  I remember her hair
blowing in the wind.  My baby brother, Takahise, was on her back - I think
he was crying.”
  Kazuyo’s father reached out desperately for his wife, but he, too, was
whisked away into the smoke, together with Yoshiaki, a brother who was
holding on to his belt.  Kazuyo was left with her six-‘year-old sister
Hiroko, and brothers Minoru and Koichi.
  Across the street, Kazuyo’s brothers spotted a small trench which might
have offered some shelter but just after they clambered in, Minoru’s back
burst into flames.  He jumped up and was immediately swept away.  Koichi
stood up to go after him and was taken by the winds, too.
  Kazuyo was now alone at the bottom of the trench with her little sister
Hiroko.  As they had crossed the street, Hiroko’s purple stuffed cotton hat
caught fire and her hands and head were badly burnt.  “Hiroko kept saying
how hot she was, and how her hands hurt and she wanted water,” explains
Kazuyo.  “The air was cooking.  Only the soil seemed cool.  I began digging
with my hands like a dog.”  Fatefully, Hiroko copied her.
  As they lay in the trench, the area around the Sumida River was being
scorched, boiled and baked.  Many of those expecting to find safety in open
spaces were killed or knocked unconscious by the superheated vapours running
ahead of the flames.  Others were sucked into the flames by the winds or
found the intensity of the inferno spontaneously set their clothes on fire,
turning them into human torches.
  Those who tried to flee found their path blocked by flying debris and
thickets of fallen poles and live electric wires.  The natural Instinct to
head for water betrayed others.  In fact, the waterways crisscrossing the
district created fatal fire-traps.  The bridges were blocked by other
refugees or were already ablaze.  Even jumping into the canals provided no
sanctuary: keeping your head above water meant breathing noxious fumes.
  This mass slaughter was the result of an air strategy devised by Major
General Curtis Le May.
  In the spring of 1945, the US AAF in the Pacific was in trouble.  The B-29
“superfortress” bomber was proving an expensive mistake.  The fuel system
had persistent faults, with the result that many of the aircraft were being
forced to ditch in the ocean.  At that time only 20 percent o f the bombers’
losses were caused by Japanese action.  The crews feared the aircraft more
than the enemy.  Worse, when the B-29s did reach Japan, they proved
inaccurate.  It took eight raids to inflict meaningful damage on the
Nakajima aircraft factory on the western outskirts of Tokyo.
  In January 1945, Le May was brought in to demonstrate the value of the
B-29.  At 37, he was a master of Improvisation.  He decided to fly at night
and attack low, below the range of anti-aircraft guns.  So that more
munitions could be carried be daringly left off defensive ammunition and
crews.  And for the raid he mustered the largest bomber force yet assembled
in the Pacific.
  The targets were to be residential areas – the region around the Sumida
River, the city’s most densely populated district, with 103,000 people per
square mile.  Until then, the Americans had condemned bombing of civilian
targets, such as that practised by the British over Germany.  The Tokyo raid
represented for the AAF the final breakdown of the distinction between
combatant and non-combatant.
  Official reports justifying this morally dubious shift are filled with
business jargon and euphemism.  One read: “Dehousing industrial workers
causes a greater loss of man hours per ton of bombs dropped than can be
accomplished by any other method.”
  And for the new target, Le May chose new weapons incendiary bombs.  Each
aircraft carried six tons of munitions, primarily the recently developed
napalm, as well as oil and phosphorus.  Nearly 2,000 tons would be dropped
over 12 square miles of Tokyo.
  The effects had been predicted.  In 1943, mock-ups of wooden Japanese
houses had been built at Eglin Airforce Base in Florida to measure the
effect of an incendiary raid.
  But the results were even greater than the Americans could have hoped.
Tokyo was defenceless.  Anti-aircraft batteries did not work against
low-flying targets and the imperial air forces had only two units of
effective night fighters.  American losses were just 4 per cent, far lower
than normal.
  The only defence against Le May’s tactics was Tokyo’s civil defence plan.
It was found wanting.  Internal wrangling had prevented the implementation
of effective precautions.  The Japanese appeared complacent.  In 1943, the
most notable development was the decision to kill the lions at Ueno Zoo in
case they escaped after a raid.  Only 18 of the planned 5,000 concrete
shelters had been completed.
  The men In the B-29B were soon aware of the devastation they had wrought.
Inside their aircraft they could smell the soot and burning flesh.  Many
struggled to avoid choking and vomiting.
  But even now the full scale of the carnage remains unclear.  Hiroshi
Hoshino is trying to set the record straight.  He sits in a cold cramped
office on the top floor of a rickety two-storey wooden building.  On the
walls are maps of Tokyo, covered with red splotches indicating where the
city was destroyed.  In the corner is a computer compiling a list of those
killed?
  “We’ve been pressing the municipal government to record the names of those
who died,” explains Hoshino, secretary-general of the campaigning body.  “At
first they had just 3,930 - people whose bodies were identified but never
claimed.  But finally, last year they began a poster campaign asking people
to come forward.  By December, our group had found more than 7,300, and in
all we have 45,000.  The problem is that many families were obliterated, so
there’s nobody to come forward.”
  The reluctance of the Tokyo municipal government is typical of Japan’s
primary reflex to the second world war - to indulge in collective amnesia.
  There has never been an appropriate time for the Japanese authorities to
commemorate the raid, argues Seiichi Imai, professor emeritus at Yokohama
City University.  “At the time of the war the government denied the truth
because it was afraid of the effect on morale.  During the American
occupation, nothing could be said.  And then with the cold war, the
Americans were suddenly allies,” he says.
  That alliance with the Americans led to one of the greatest ironies of the
20th century.  Le May, who had devised the raids, later helped Japan rebuild
its air force.  In 1964, the then emperor awarded him the kyokujitsu
daijusho - “cord of the rising sun” - a great honour.
  The west has also mostly forgotten the Tokyo raid.  It attracted big
headlines the following day but was overshadowed by the death throes of
Germany and then by the technological novelty and symbolism of the atomic
bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Besides, as historian John Dower has
pointed out, the American public had little concern about killing Japanese
civilians.
  In fact, Le May let loose his force on 63 other conurbations.  The
casualties were far lower - 80.000 were killed in total - partly because the
Americans dropped warning leaflets and partly because civilians now knew
they needed to run rather than fight the flames.  But the campaign cleared
the moral ground for the atomic bombs of that August.  They were merely the
culmination of be May’s strategy.
  For Le May, personally, the campaigns were a huge success.  As Sherry
argues in The Rise of American Air Power: “Le May’s decision reversed the
fortunes of the faltering air force... and cast the mould of postwar
American air power as a weapon of strategic devastation.”
  It was people like Kazuyo who paid the price for Le May’s triumph.  After
emerging from the trench just before dawn, she and her sister Hiroko
struggled to find their home.  They only located the site because of a stone
water trough outside.  There was a dead body in it.
  Gradually, what was left of her family emerged.  Her father and other
brother Yoshiaki had survived in a small water-filled hole.  Her brother
Koichi had sheltered in a truck.  Minoru was never found.  As for her
mother, Yoshiaki spotted her sitting near the house.
  “At first we didn’t recognise her,” said Kazuyo.  “She was wrapped in a
blanket.  Almost all her clothes were burnt, and so too were her hands.  I
went running over.  Then I noticed she didn’t have the baby.  One of the few
places she wasn’t burnt was on her back where the baby should have been.
None of us dared ask what had happened, whether she had left him or dropped
him.  My mother lived until she was 90.  She never did tell me.”
  The family’s ordeal was not yet over.  A few days after the raid, Hiroko
was found to have contracted tetanus.  “One night, I heard relatives saying
didn’t you contract tetanus from soil?  I realised then that by encouraging
Hiroko to put her hands into cool ground while in that trench, I might have
killed her.”
  The six-year-old died 10 days after the raid.  She died alone.  Her father
had been away begging the army for drugs.  “She knew she was dying.  Maybe
it would have been better if she had died straight away because she was in
such pain.  I remember the tears on her cheeks,” said Kazuyo.  “As long as I
live I will regret what happened.”
  Until she died, Kazuyo’s mother would visit the family grave.  Kazuyo says
she had the habit of pouring water on her children’s graves.  As she did,
she would repeat the same refrain: “Teruko darling, you must have been so
hot.  Hiroko darling, you must have been so hot.”  And then she would pour
on more of the cool water.