Word: osaka
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...General of the Army Henry H. Arnold dropped in on Guam to hunt up parking space for some of his 12,000 European combat airplanes, and prepared to realign air force commands for the big Pacific push. While 520 of his Twentieth Air Force B-29 Superfortresses bombed shuddering Osaka for the fifth time, proud Hap Arnold outlined to correspondents the kind of punishment U.S. airmen planned for Japan...
Major General Curtis E. LeMay, commander of the Marianas Superforts, gave more details: "Yokohama is gone, Nagoya is no longer a worthwhile target. Kobe is gone. Soon we'll be striking smaller cities in the 100,000-population class." Osaka had had it, and only ten square miles of Tokyo's 60-sq. mi. industrial area was left intact-one year after the first B-29 raid on Japan. Unlike Germany, Japan lacks the time, technicians and industrial savvy to rebuild ruined factories quickly. Said General LeMay: "It is just a matter of time before we get everything...
...just after midday, when thousands of Osaka workers had paused to bolt down meager lunches in the partly ruined Chicago of Japan. High in the heavy overcast the U.S. planes rode in-more than 400 B-29s and 150 escorting P-51 Mustang fighters. For three hours the planes were overhead. High-explosive bombs fell first, driving Japanese air-raid workers to the shelters. Then the fire bombs fell, destroying without interruption...
Intelligence officers estimated that 40% of Japan's plane production was gone, that 50% of metropolitan Tokyo, 20% of Kobe and Osaka, more than 10% of Nagoya had been burned out. 6-293 have destroyed 395 Jap planes in the air, racked up another 301 probables, smashed 106 on the ground...
...Tokyo, once the world's third largest city, more than 3,000,000 of the 7,000,000 inhabitants (according to official broadcasts) had been evacuated or killed. Three other big cities - Osaka, Kobe, Nagoya -had been similarly scourged...