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9-10 March 1945Reputable source · 2 sourcesEstimated

Bombers burn sixteen square miles of Tokyo in one night, the deadliest air raid of the war

On the timeline · around 9-10 March 1945 · Allied VictoryAllied VictoryBombers burn sixteen square miles of Tokyo in one night, the deadliest air raid of the war1945

What happened

On the night of 9 March 1945, over 270 American B-29 Superfortress bombers took off from Guam, Saipan, and Tinian bound for Tokyo. General Curtis LeMay had ordered a sharp break from prior tactics: instead of high-altitude daylight bombing, the planes flew low and at night, with most of their defensive guns stripped out to carry a heavier bomb load. The bombers dropped roughly 1,665 tons of incendiary bombs, largely napalm, concentrated over the densely built Shitamachi district, whose wooden-frame buildings and roughly 750,000 residents made it especially vulnerable to fire. Strong winds turned the incendiaries into a single firestorm that destroyed about 16 square miles of the city and left more than a million people homeless. Fourteen B-29s were lost.

Why it matters

The death toll from this single raid is a genuine, ongoing historiographical dispute rather than a settled fact. The US Strategic Bombing Survey's contemporary 1945 estimate was around 88,000; the National WWII Museum's own account gives 110,000; other reputable accounts give a range as wide as 80,000 to 130,000. What is not disputed is that this raid killed more people in a single night than either the Hiroshima or Nagasaki atomic bombings, and it marked a permanent shift toward area firebombing of Japanese cities for the rest of the war.

How we know

The raid is documented through official Army Air Forces mission records, the US Strategic Bombing Survey conducted immediately after the war, a joint military and civilian study that interviewed Japanese officials and surveyed the damage on the ground, and later historical scholarship that has revised the Survey's original casualty estimate upward using Japanese municipal and hospital records. The range between sources reflects real uncertainty in the underlying record, not sloppy reporting: no single wartime or postwar census fully accounted for a civilian population this dense, this mobile, and this devastated by fire in one night.

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Bombers burn sixteen square miles of Tokyo in one night, the deadliest air raid of the war · World War II · SourcedStory