Facts on bombing Japan 1945:

On the night of March 13/14, eight square miles of Osaka went up in flames. On March 16/17, three square miles of Kobe were destroyed, and on March 19/20 in a return visit to Nagoya, three more square miles were destroyed. This destructive week had killed over 120,000 Japanese civilians at the cost of only 20 B-29s lost.

On April 7, 153 B-29s struck the aircraft engine complex at Nagoya, destroying about 90 percent of that facility. Five days later, 93 B-29s destroyed the Nakajima factory at Musashi. The Japanese aircraft engine industry essentially ceased to exist after this time.

On June 5, the B-29s attacked Kobe with such effectiveness that the city was crossed off the target list as not worth revisiting.

In late March of 1945, the 313th Bombardment Wing began a series of mining operations against Japanese ports. Nearly 13,000 acoustic and magnetic mines were placed in the western approaches to the narrow Shimonoseki strait and the Inland Sea as well as in the harbors of Hiroshima, Kure, Tokyo, Nagoya, Tokuyama, Aki, and Noda. The mining operation was extremely successful and brought Japanese coastal shipping to a standstill by April. In May, merchant vessels were ordered to break through the line of mines, and 85 of them were sunk. These mining efforts were so effective that the postwar Strategic Bombing Survey credited the B-29 with 9.3 percent of the total Japanese shipping losses during the war.

By mid-June the B-29 raids were essentially unopposed by Japanese fighters. In late June, B-29 crews felt sufficiently confident that they began to drop leaflets warning the population of forthcoming attacks, followed three days later by a raid in which the specified urban area was devastated.

http://www.csd.uwo.ca/~pettypi/elevo...s/b029-10.html

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