Operation Meetinghouse (March 9-10, 1945) was the single most destructive bombing raid of WWII, overshadowing both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Operation Meetinghouse lead to 75,000 - 200,000 deaths, with roughly 1,000,000 people displaced. Operation Meetinghouse differed from other bombing raids executed by the US throughout the war, as it was a low-altitude incendiary raid, whereas the others were high-altitude precision bombings. The switch was made as these previous high-altitude raids proved to be largely ineffective, with bombs hitting their targets less than 10 percent of the time, due to the poor understanding of the jet stream, and frequent cloud cover over Japan. For Operation Meetinghouse the altitude was lowered from 30,000 feet to 5,000-9,000 feet as at that point in the war Japanese air defenses were nearly non-existent. Under the recommendation of Major General LeMay the bombers were loaded with incendiaries containing white phosphorus and napalm since he believed that the tightly packed, wooden structures of Japanese cities would burn easily. The B-29’s to be used in the raid were then stripped of all nonessentials such as guns and gunners, excluding the tailgun. The bombers were then ordered to fly at night and in single-file in order to reduce risk from Japanese fighters. Over a three-hour period and by three bomber streams the industrial heart of Tokyo was hit by roughly 2,000 tons of incendiaries. The combination of a doubled bomb load, new formation, windy weather conditions, and lack of coordinated fighter fighting, lead to an enormous firestorm. One that burned nearly 15 square-miles of densely populated urban centers to the ground and had temperatures up to 1,800 degrees. The firebombing campaign destroyed 63 percent of Tokyo's commercial area, 18 percent of its industry, and a total of 267,000 buildings. By the time Operation Meetinghouse and the ensuing aerial bombardments had stopped by July 1945 its was concluded that there were no longer any viable targets on the Japanese mainland.
Resources
http://www.wired.com/2011/03/0309incendiary-bombs-kill-100000-tokyo
Before viewing this, I had no idea that this operation existed. Why is operation Meeting House the most destructive out of the three? isn't 75,000-200,000 a little ambiguous?
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