On this day in 1945, the United States Army Air Forces launches an unprecedented air raid on Tokyo, Japan.
On this day in 1945, the United States Army Air Forces launches an unprecedented air raid on Tokyo, Japan. To date, it remains the single deadliest bombing raid in history—worse even than the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki later that year. Unfortunately, the Japanese government still refused to surrender. The U.S. 20th Air Force faced serious challenges in the early part of 1945. They’d been conducting high-level, precision bombing attacks over Japan, but nothing was going right. Bombers were coming in high, at 30,000 feet, then watching as their bombs got torn off course by high winds. Jet streams were not understood as they are today—and the frequent cloud cover in Japan simply made things worse. The accuracy rate of American bombers was sitting at an abysmal 10 percent. Something had to be done, and Major General Curtis LeMay knew it. He would no longer try (and fail) to take out high value targets with precision bombing. Instead, he would simply burn the city around them....