Where do the number of B-29s in each sortie, the tonnage of incendiary bombs they dropped on each Japanese city, from the end of 1944 to August 1945, come from? So I wondered when Cary Karacas asked me to translate a second round of air raid poems. He teaches cultural geography at the College of Staten Island, with a stress on the civilian experience of aerial bombing during war.
In responding to his first request half a year ago, I was drawn to a teacher's experience and a military officer who put up a legal fight in a postwar tribunal. ("Indiscriminate bombing and legal judgment," Feb. 27, 2017). This time, Karacas made a selection of 15 poems from Katsumoto Saotome's "Great Air Raids: 310 Poets" (2015).
Saotome, a survivor of the air raid on the night of March 9, 1945, as a 13-year-old boy, cited in his earlier book "The Great Tokyo Air Raid" (1971) a wide range of numbers of B-29s that created the biggest firestorm in history, which burned to death anywhere from 80,000 to nearly 100,000 people, from 130 (Imperial HQ), 279 (U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey), to 334 (Len Giovannitti, Fred Freed).
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