Flames over Tokyo - Hardcover

E. Bartlett Kerr

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1556113013 ISBN 13: 9781556113017

Publisher: Dutton Adult, 1991

Synopsis

A comprehensive history of the most massive sustained air campaign employs material culled from interviews with servicemen and survivors of the attacks to describe these destructive raids

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

Kerr's notable study recounts how U.S. Air Force general Curtis LeMay, unable to destroy Japan's war factories with conventional bombs from high altitude by daylight, made a radical departure from strategic bombing doctrine by sending an air armada over Tokyo on the night of March 9-10, 1945 at low altitude, loaded with bombs designed to set fire to Japan's highly combustible cities. The destruction was awesome: 83,000 killed, more than a million left homeless. In the ensuing five months B-29 bombers dropping incendiaries destroyed or heavily damaged some 60 Japanese cities. Kerr also describes the campaign from ground level, reporting details of the futile firefighting efforts, the overwhelming medical challenge and the massive corpse-disposal problem. His riveting narrative reveals how the raid affected virtually every facet of Japanese day-to-day life, crippled war production and led the emperor and his advisers to accept Allied demands for surrender after the ultimate firebombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kerr is author of Surrender and Survival: The Experience of American POWs in the Pacific, 1941-1945. Photos.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

The war in the Pacific entered its final phase when General Curtis LeMay unleashed his armada of firebombing B-29s against Japan's cities. This popular study by a respected military writer does a skillful job of blending background material with numerous first-person accounts. Details of the strategic background and command structure provide counterpoint to the in-the-cockpit memoirs of the raids themselves. The book makes a dramatic complement to Hoito Edoin's eyewitness view of the devastation on the ground, The Night Tokyo Burned ( LJ 12/87), and nicely enlarges upon Wilbur Morrison's earlier study, Point of No Return: The Story of the Twentieth Air Force ( LJ 3/1/79). Previewed in "The Day of Infamy in Print," LJ 9/1/91, p.206-7.
- Ray mond L. Puffer, U.S. Air Force History Prog., Los Angeles
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Dutton Adult
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 1556113013
• ISBN 13: 9781556113017
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 348