Rain of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima, and the Surrender of Japan

A leading historian of World War II sheds new light on the purposes and impact of the U.S. incendiary and atomic bombing of Japan’s cities in 1945.

With the development of the B-29 “Superfortress” in summer 1944, strategic bombing, a central component of the Allied war effort against Germany, arrived in the Pacific theater. In 1945 Japan experienced the three most deadly bombing attacks of the war. The firebombing of Tokyo in March burned the city’s most densely populated sector, killed som...