Tokyo, Japan • February 24, 1945 The first appearance over Japan in June 1944 of the massive 4‑engine B‑29 bomber—with its service ceiling of 33,000 ft./9,144 m, an operational range of over 3,200 nautical miles/5,926 km, and a maximum takeoff weight of 133,500 lb./60,555 kg—meant that the enemy’s Home Islands were squarely in the crosshairs of the war’s deadliest delivery system….
Dresden, Germany • February 13, 1945 On this night in 1945, Fat (or Shrove) Tuesday, and over the next day, Ash Wednesday, some 1,300 British and American bombers appeared over largely untouched Dresden in Eastern Germany. A city of 642,000 (1939) swelled by 300,000 refugees fleeing from fighting on the Eastern Front, Dresden, 120 miles/310 kilometers south…
Tinian, Mariana Islands • December 3, 1944 On this date in 1944 86 4-engine B‑29 Superfortresses belonging to XXI Bomber Command, a unit of the U.S. Twentieth Air Force, left the northwestern Pacific Mariana Islands base on Tinian on their third Tokyo bombing mission. Ten days earlier 111 of these 4‑engine heavy bombers had launched the…
Northern Mariana Islands • October 12, 1944 The Pacific Theater was the largest theater of World War II. Because of its watery expanse, Army aviation engineers and Seabees had to build more than 100 airfields on islands that dotted the Pacific Ocean, from New Guinea in the south, up through Guam, the Marianas, Iwo Jima, to Okinawa….
Forward German HQ in Poland • September 24, 1939 On this date in 1939 in Poland, Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering prepared to send hundreds of aircraft to blitz Warsaw in the largest air raid ever up to that time, while German armored forces prepared for a ground assault on the Polish capital. At 8 a.m. the…
Tokyo, Japan • August 29, 1944 From the summer of 1944 to the spring of 1945, Japanese forces continued their retreat from military outposts in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Japanese losses in personnel, warships, and airplanes were minimized by frontline commanders, who exaggerated Japanese military successes against the Allied enemy in reports to Imperial…
Hamburg, Germany • July 24, 1943 On this date in 1943, over the North German city of Hamburg, the Royal Air Force kicked off Operation Gomorrah (July 24 to August 3, 1943). British retaliation for the Luftwaffe’s firebombing of the medieval city of Coventry in the English Midlands, where 503 tons of explosives, 56 tons of incendiaries, and 127 parachute…
Tokyo, Japan • March 9, 1945 Apart from Lt. Col. Jimmy Doolittle’s April 1942 raid on the Japanese capital, Tokyo, early air raids on Japan focused on military and industrial targets with disappointing results. So, U.S. Army Air Forces Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay, a veteran of the Eighth Air Forces’ horrific air campaign over Nazi Germany, filled…
Chengtu, China · June 15, 1944 On this date in 1944 67 B-29 Superfortresses took off from their base in Chengtu, mainland China, to release 221 tons of bombs on the Imperial Iron and Steel Works at Yawata on the southernmost Japanese home island of Kyūshū. This was the first attack on the Japanese homeland since…
Coventry, England • November 14, 1940 On this date in 1940 the first firestorm of the war was inflicted on Coventry, England, a city of almost 240,000 people, during the German Blitz against that country. German “pathfinder” bombers flying along radio-direction beams targeted the medieval cathedral city and industrial-munitions center in the English Midlands. For…