A memorial ceremony was held in Tokyo on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the American carpet bombing of the city on March 10, 1945, which killed more than 100,000 people. In terms of the scale of destruction and the number of victims, it is comparable only to the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
The event at the center of the ritual ceremonies was attended by representatives of the relatives of the victims, Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike and the heir to the Japanese throne, Prince Akishino, Kyodo news agency reported.
The carpet bombing of Tokyo is considered by many experts to be the largest attack in history using non-nuclear weapons. According to survivors of the bombing, the landscape of Tokyo, one of the largest cities in the world at the time, resembled the surface of the moon.
A total of 334 B-29 bombers of the United States Air Force participated in the attack on Tokyo in the early hours of March 10, 1945. They carried more than 1,660 tons of various incendiary bombs, specially designed for the built environment and wind of the city. They caused unprecedentedly powerful fires in Tokyo, which merged into giant common spaces of flames and formed fire tornadoes. The temperature in places exceeded 1,000 degrees.
The US Air Force lost only 14 B-29s in this raid, as the Japanese air defenses had by then been largely neutralized and its fighters destroyed. As a result of the airstrike, 330,000 houses were burned down - approximately 40% of all buildings in the city. In addition to the more than 100,000 dead, 41,000 city residents were injured and over a million people lost their homes.