The firebombing of Tokyo, March 9, 1945

By Rory Fanning, published in Jacobin, March 9, 2015

Seventy years ago today, the United States needlessly killed almost 100,000 people in a single air raid.

Today [March 9] marks the seventieth anniversary of the American firebombing of Tokyo, World War II’s deadliest day. More people died that night from napalm bombs than in the atomic strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But few in the United States are aware that the attack even took place…

The firebombing of Tokyo by the U.S. air force on March 9, 1945. It killed more people than the two atomic bombs dropped by the U.S. later that year

So why did the Americans continue to raid and terrorize the Japanese civilian population knowing the war could have been over? Many argue that the Americans were flexing their muscles for Russia in anticipation of the ensuing Cold War. Countless pages have been written about this. But what is too often overlooked is the racism of the day. It is America’s racism that best explains the extent of the firebombing and the nuclear attacks. The racist mindset that all too many Americans were comfortable with in the Jim Crow era easily bled onto the Japanese. The horror stories of the almost two hundred thousand Japanese Americans who lost their livelihoods as a result of Roosevelt’s internment camps are just one example of how Americans saw not only the Japanese but Japanese-Americans…