Today is the 64th anniversary of the horrible Tokyo Air Raid on March 10th, 1945, which claimed approximately 100 thousands lives in one night.

I present you the English translation of an editorial published
by the Japanese newspaper YOMIURI SHIMBUN one year ago.(March 10th, 2008)

-----------------------------------------------------------------

"I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal. Fortunately we were on the winning side."

This remark, made years after World War II, is attributed to Gen. Curtis LeMay (1906-90), a U.S. Air Force commander who directed a massive incendiary attack on Tokyo in the predawn hours of March 10, 1945, scorching a good portion of the city's eastern shitamachi, a low-lying area with many small independent shops and factories.

The Great Tokyo Air Raid should be regarded as a genocidal attack that mainly targeted civilians in obvious violation of international law. The aerial bombing came after the U.S. Air Force had failed to achieve much in its intermittent pinpoint bombing of military-related facilities in Japan. The United States was shifting the focus of its military campaign against this country to firebombing and scorching urban areas as a means of sapping the people's will to continue fighting.

The air raid turned crowded blocks of wooden houses in Tokyo into a sea of fire, claiming about 100,000 lives. The figure exceeded the death toll from the bombing of Dresden, Germany, by the U.S. and British air forces in February 1945, one of the largest air raids carried out in Europe during World War II.
After successfully accomplishing its military aim in the Tokyo air raid, the United States expanded its list of indiscriminate bombing targets to launch an air attack on Nagoya on March 12 and Osaka on March 13-14. By the end of war, the United States had bombed about 150 Japanese cities, killing an estimated 500,000 people.

LeMay is not the only one to acknowledge the Great Tokyo Air Raid as a war crime. "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," former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara said in "The Fog of War," a U.S. documentary movie produced in 2003 and released in Japan last year. McNamara was one of the U.S. officials who played a major role in the deepening military involvement of the United States in Vietnam.

During World War II, McNamara helped plan efficient bombing campaigns as a lieutenant colonel under Gen. LeMay's command.

In light of McNamara's remarks, what was the meaning of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, known as Tokyo Trial? McNamara's remarks can give anyone cause to rethink the significance of the Tokyo Trial, which tried Japanese political and military leaders as war criminals.

In 1992, the German government raised a strong objection when a bronze statue of Arthur Harris, a British general who had directed the Dresden bombing, was erected in central London.

This is in stark contrast to the attitude taken by the Japanese government toward LeMay after the war. In 1964, he was awarded the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun for his "cooperation in the development of the Air Self-Defense Force." This symbolically showed how strongly the Japanese public's perception of the prewar and wartime history had been distorted by their own blind acceptance of incidents established as historical facts during the Tokyo Trial.

Immediately after the Tokyo air raid, Koyo Ishikawa, then a photographer of the Metropolitan Police Department, photographed the city's landscape. Although the GHQ ordered him to hand over rolls of film used to photograph the war-ravaged Tokyo, Ishikawa never surrendered the film, instead burying it in the garden of his house.

The Edo-Tokyo Museum exhibits some of his photos taken with the film, including one depicting the charred bodies of a mother and child, in a section featuring the 60th anniversary of the air raid.

Today, the Tokyo metropolitan government, which has designated March 10 as Peace Day, holds an annual ceremony marking the significance of peace. The Great Tokyo Air Raid should never fall into oblivion. The story of the bombing should be handed down from generation to generation.

http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/kyoiku/learning/editorial/20050318/index.htm

-----------------------------------------------------------------

My mother is a surviror of this holocaust.

Nori

*