By 2:30 a.m. on March 10, 1945, the bombers had all disappeared over the glowing horizon and the “all clear” sounded across a shattered Tokyo.
While back on Guam, Gen. LeMay and his staffers were breathing a collective sigh of relief, over a million suddenly homeless Japanese wandered the smoldering lunar landscape of their devastated capital city like bewildered phantasms. When the smokey dawn arrived, the grey, muted sunlight revealed badly burned survivors stumbling into what medical centers remained while others returned to ash heaps that were once their neighborhoods searching for family members separated from them in the chaos of the night before. Ishikawa Iwao came upon the charred remains of his wife and two girls. One young girl would recall having to push her way through the dead bodies with her feet. In the Tokyo subway, thousands of naked and seared humanoid figures were piled into the narrow confines. If it was not hell itself, LeMay’s bombers had come as close as the human race could to replicating it on this earth.
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