Saotome's experiences during the war had imbued him with a deep pacifism that informed his life and career. Among those who read the article was Saotome Katsumoto, a writer who had experienced the March 10 air raid as a boy of twelve. On June 13, 1967, the shocking discovery of human skeletons in a buried air-raid shelter unearthed during construction at a subway station in the Fukagawa district was reported in the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper. On occasion, however, Tokyo's rapid urban development brought back memories of the devastation of the Shitamachi district from below ground. In the same year, the government awarded General Curtis LeMay – the architect of the firebombing campaign – one of its highest honors, the First Class Order of the Rising Sun, for his work in establishing Japan's postwar Air Self-Defense Force. Tokyo's hosting of the Olympic Games in 1964 served as a symbol of Japan's post-war reconstruction. In the 1950s and 1960s, Japan's high-speed growth transformed the Tokyo cityscape until all the remaining signs of devastation lay buried underground, out of sight and mind. While school textbooks, novels, poetry and films memorialized the atomic bombing and its victims, silence reigned with respect to the firebombing raids. For a quarter of a century after the war, while memorial services were held every year on August 6 and 9 for the victims of the atomic bombings and covered widely in newspapers and on television, the devastating firebombing campaign over Tokyo and much of urban Japan was quietly forgotten. Hardly anyone wrote about the air raids that reduced the capital and most of Japan's other cities to ashes, and the few articles that did appear in newspapers attracted little interest. After the war, while Hiroshima and Nagasaki became symbols of Japan's suffering and the peace movement, the Great Tokyo Air Raid was virtually excluded from public discourse. More people were killed in the indiscriminate firebombing of March 10 than in the immediate aftermath of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. 1 By dawn, more than 100,000 people were dead, one million were homeless, and 16 square miles of Tokyo had been burned to the ground. In less than three hours from just after midnight, 279 B-29 bombers dropped a total of 1,665 tons of incendiaries. Although Tokyo was bombed more than 100 times from November 1944 to the end of the war, the firebombing centered on the Shitamachi district in the early hours of March 10, 1945, was by far the most devastating air raid on the capital. The ‘rough diary’ provides an emotional connection to an individual caught up in the drama of this event, and these quick notes, scribbled under difficult circumstances, make the diary a ‘war relic’ as well as a source of first-hand information on the experience of sustained enemy attack.March 10 is the 70th anniversary of the Great Tokyo Air Raid. Thomas Burstow’s handwritten diary of the bombing of Darwin by the Japanese air force from 19 February to 26 March 1942, held in the Northern Territory Library, is of national significance as the only extant account written by an eyewitness civilian of an event of enormous significance in Australian history, when the vulnerability of this country to hostile air attack became a stark reality. Tom Burstow then joined the army as an engineer surveyor. The diary meticulously tracks the bombing raids from 19 February to 26 March 1942. When the first bombing raid on Darwin by Japanese planes occurred on 19 February 1942, Tom Burstow ripped out the first few pages of a notebook, then began to write a detailed account of the bombings, including damage to ships and buildings, civilians killed and wounded, trenchant comments about the behaviour of civilian men seeking evacuation, and the capture of a Japanese pilot by an Aboriginal man on Bathurst Island. He mapped air-to-ground bombing ranges and drafted plans for gun emplacements, and became an Air Raid Warden. Draughtsman Thomas Burstow moved to Darwin in 1940 to work for the Lands Department.
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