New Weapon, Old Results

During a night raid on Tokyo by U.S. Superfortresses last week, the Japs struck out with something new in the Pacific war--jet-propelled fighters, probably built in Japan from German blueprints. Like their German prototypes, the Japanese jets were fast but ineffective. Their radar equipment must have been defective or nonexistent; they could not seem to find the 6-293 in the darkness.

This, the heaviest attack on Tokyo, was another fire raid, and thousands of tons of incendiaries were unloaded on the Itadashi Arsenal and 30 other targets in five square miles of the city. The U.S. crews noticed that the raging fires they started were swept by the wind toward the Imperial Palace. The Japs screamed that the palace had been set afire and the Emperor Meiji's shrine damaged; the people were "irresistibly indignant."

Two days earlier, day raiders escorted by fighters from Iwo Jima had hammered Tokyo's Musashino-Nakajima factory for the eighth time, and others had blasted an aircraft factory in Koriyama, 110 miles north of Tokyo--the most northerly target so far attacked. From reconnaissance photographs, the results of last fortnight's raid on Nagoya were read: the Mitsubishi plant almost completely destroyed, 90% of the roofing gone over the whole target area. This week Tokyo was hit again--the third time in five days--by B-29s in "very great strength."

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