From John Dower's "War Without Mercy"
"Precision bombing was abandoned dramatically on the night of March 9-10, 1945, when 334 aircraft attacked Tokyo at low altitude with incendiary bombs, destroying sixteen square miles of the capital city and making more than a million people homeless. Between eighty thousand and one hundred thousand civilians died in the Tokyo raid-- "scorched and boiled and baked to death" was how the mastermind of the strategy, Major General Curtis LeMay, later phrased it. The heat from the conflagration was so intense that in some places canals boiled, metal melted, and buildings and human beings burst spontaneously into flames. It took twenty-five days to remove all the dead from the ruins. With the exception of the fires that raged through Tokyo and Yokohama at the time of the Kanto earthquake in 1923, this was the largest urban conflagration in recorded history. Radio Tokyo referred to the new U.S. policy as "slaughter bombing," and in the days and months that followed, incendiary attacks against urban areas became the primary u.S. areal strategy against japan. By May, incendiaries comprised 75 percent of the bomb loads, and in the final reckoning firebombs accounted for close to two thirds of the total tonnage of explosives dropped on Japan. By the time Japan surrendered, sixty-six cities, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been subjected to both precision raids and general urban-area attacks. The exact number of civilians killed by both incendiaries and the atomic bombs in uncertain, but probably was close to four hundred thousand." (41)
"An American who lived in Hayama prior to the war (where children threw pebbles at hmi while yelling "foreign devil") recalled lounging on the beach and eavesdropping on the conversation of his high-class japanese fellow bathers, who were discussing his sickly white coloring and comparing him to a squid." (241)
"In his distinctive way, MacArthur meant this [his comment that the Japanese were comparable to twelve-year-olds and therefore more "susceptible" to new ideas like democracy] as a compliment of sorts, in that he was attempting to convey wy he beleievd democracy might tkae firmer root in postwar japan than in Germany. The bluntness of the metaphor embarrassed the general's Japanese admirers, however, and--in one of history's smaller losses--prompted some of them to abandon plans for a Statue of Liberty-sized statue of the general in Tokyo Bay." (304)
"An American who lived in Hayama prior to the war (where children threw pebbles at hmi while yelling "foreign devil") recalled lounging on the beach and eavesdropping on the conversation of his high-class japanese fellow bathers, who were discussing his sickly white coloring and comparing him to a squid." (241)
"In his distinctive way, MacArthur meant this [his comment that the Japanese were comparable to twelve-year-olds and therefore more "susceptible" to new ideas like democracy] as a compliment of sorts, in that he was attempting to convey wy he beleievd democracy might tkae firmer root in postwar japan than in Germany. The bluntness of the metaphor embarrassed the general's Japanese admirers, however, and--in one of history's smaller losses--prompted some of them to abandon plans for a Statue of Liberty-sized statue of the general in Tokyo Bay." (304)