Personal Memoirs
I was nineteen
when the American bombers came, just after
-Masayuki Tadokoro[1]
"There
was no smoke, only flames and flying sparks like a snowstorm. The heat melted the lens in my protective
glasses. I saw a crowd of people lying and sitting on the street, moaning. They
had given up. I joined them and lay down, put my steel helmet against the wind,
and tried to suck oxygen from the pavement. My clothes kept catching fire and I
had to beat the flames out. The air was so hot it burned my windpipe. Everyone
around me died. The clothing on the women was baked off them, leaving their
bodies naked. The bodies didn't burn but dried out completely."
-A German Fireman[2]
The Aftermath of
"We
were caught in a big, big fire. We came
to a street crossing and the houses were all coming down on us. We didn't know
where to go. Bombs were everywhere... We went this way, this way... We were
lost. We were trying to go away from
-Inge
Einspenner, 16 years old
Piles of Charred Bodies in
A thermal column of wind generated heat in excess of
1,400 degrees
Fahrenheit, melting trolley windows and the asphalt in
streets, the wind
uprooting trees. When people crossed a street, their feet
stuck in the
melted asphalt; they tried to extricate themselves with
their hands, only
to find them stuck as well. They remained on all fours
screaming. Small
children lay like "fried eels" on the pavement.
The firestorm sucked all
the oxygen out of the city; a 15 year-old girl said that
the brains of
people in shelters "tumbled from their burst temples
and their insides
[extruded] from the soft parts under the ribs.
-A
Moral Questions Home Targeting Civilians