On this day 75 years ago...the city of Tokyo was wiped off the map

On the evening of March 9-10, 1945, 279 B-29 Superfortress bombers took off from the island of Tinian en route for the capital city of Japan. The attack began at 12:08 AM local time as these 279 bombers dropped some 1,500 tons of explosives onto the city. The raid lasted for just under three hours. By the end of it, the roaring fires from 20,000 feet below caused heavy turbulence for the planes in the air. Crews were forced to don their oxygen masks due to the smell of burning flesh that was wafting up from thousands of feet below them.

Tokyo was turned into a literal Hell on earth. The fires were so intense that they would literally suck people into them. Charred bodies would be shrunken down to less than half their original size. When the bombings had ended and the people of Tokyo recovered from their daze and began taking account of the damage that had been done, they discovered more than 100,000 people in the city had been claimed by the bombs and fires. That's more than were killed in either Hiroshima or Nagasaki some five months later.


Tokyo during the bombing (left photo) and the bombing's aftermath (right photo)


The remains of Tokyo (March 10, 1945)