Tachikawa Air Raids: WWII History and a Memorial Walk Guide

The 1945 air raids on Tachikawa: 13 raids, US target numbers, the Yamanakazaka shelter where 42 died, Sunagawa’s burned school, and the places that keep memory.

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

Step out of the North Exit of Tachikawa (立川) Station, in western Tokyo, and below a wide pedestrian deck there is a bus terminal, and beyond it the North Exit Avenue runs straight ahead. Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, in its record of war damage, says that this station plaza and avenue were built on land where, during the war, buildings were torn down in preparation for air raids. Every day, crowds of people pass through this open space. Few of them know where its width came from.

Between February and August 1945, Tachikawa was bombed in 13 air raids. It was a town where an airfield, aircraft factories and military facilities were gathered together. Why it was targeted is plain.

Even so, soon after I began reading the records, I stopped in front of one number. Before dawn on 4 April, the greatest loss of life was not in an aircraft factory, nor on the airfield, but in a small shelter at the foot of a terrace cliff about two kilometres to the southwest. Forty-two people. Thirty-two of them were children.

Why there? And who has carried the memory of that night to the present, and how? This article follows the records of the Tachikawa air raids with those two questions in hand. Elsewhere in this series I allow myself to joke. Not here. Here, grief is written as grief.

The Tachikawa air raids: when, how many, where — reading the national record

The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications has compiled the state of war damage city by city across Japan. Its “State of War Damage in Tachikawa City” begins with the moment Tachikawa became a military town.

On 10 November 1922 (Taisho 11), an army airfield was built in what was then Tachikawa village, and the 5th Air Battalion moved here from Kakamigahara in Gifu Prefecture. From then on, northern Tama, Tachikawa included, became a gunto — a “military capital.” To the west of the airfield stood the Army Air Arsenal, the Army Aviation Technical Research Institute, the Army Air Depot and more; to the east, the Army Aviation Technical School. Elsewhere in the city there were the Army Veterinary Materiel Depot, anti-aircraft gun positions, the military police and an army hospital. In 1930 (Showa 5), the Ishikawajima Aircraft Works, later Tachikawa Aircraft, moved in next to the airfield.

According to Tachikawa Monogatari (“Tachikawa Stories”), the newsletter of the city’s history-compilation office, Tachikawa’s population, 34,693 at the end of 1940, reached 51,126 in 1944 as the number of people working in munitions factories rose sharply. More than 16,000 in four years. The town was overflowing with people who built airplanes.

Then, from 16 February 1945 (Showa 20), the raids began. The ministry’s record includes a table listing the number of victims by district and by date. Copied out as it is, it reads:

17 February: 44 — 41 at Tachikawa Aircraft, 3 in Sunagawa town. 4 April: 144 — 57 in Fujimi-cho, 38 in Takamatsu-cho, 19 in Akebono-cho, 13 in Nishiki-cho, 7 in Shibasaki-cho, 9 at Tachikawa Aircraft, 1 in Sunagawa town. 19 April: 2. 24 April: 114 — 89 at Tachikawa Aircraft, 25 in Sunagawa town. 25 April: 2. 10 July: 4. 2 August: 20. Date unknown: 2. Killed outside the city: 8. In all, 340.

The totals by district are: Tachikawa Aircraft 155, Fujimi-cho 66, Takamatsu-cho 39, Sunagawa town 33, Akebono-cho 19, Shibasaki-cho 15, Nishiki-cho 13.

Beneath the table is a short note. The number of people killed at military facilities such as inside the airfield is unknown and is not included.

The numbers differ a little from other records. According to Tachikawa Monogatari, the city’s 1945 administrative report gives about 300 dead, and a survey by a group that investigates and records the air-raid victims of the Santama region (the three Tama districts west of central Tokyo) puts the figure at 346. Every one of these numbers is a count of the people who were counted, not of those who could not be.

The 19 people of Akebono-cho, the district in front of the station’s North Exit, all died on 4 April. Most people who walk under the North Exit deck today do not know that. Neither did I.

So where in this town was the US military looking, and how? The answer survived in a single aerial photograph.

In the US photograph, every factory had a number

Volume 8 of Tachikawa Monogatari introduces a photograph contained in the documents of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey: an image of air-raid targets across the Tachikawa area, taken on 29 March 1945. The original is held by the US National Archives and can be viewed in the National Diet Library Digital Collections.

On the photograph, US target numbers are written against each factory and airfield. Tachikawa Aircraft is 792; the Army Air Arsenal, 2008; Tachikawa Army Airfield, 1404; Hitachi Aircraft’s Tachikawa engine works, 2009; Showa Aircraft, 791; Tama Army Airfield, 2809. The newsletter writes that the photo suggests the military facilities and munitions factories around Tachikawa Airfield had been identified. Across the ocean, each of the town’s factories had been assigned a four-digit number.

The first to come were planes launched from aircraft carriers. According to an encyclopedia entry, on 16 and 17 February a US Navy task force attacked the Kanto region, and on the 17th its bombers were sent against Nakajima Aircraft’s Musashi works and aircraft factories in the Tama and Tachikawa area. Of the 44 people the ministry’s table lists as killed on 17 February, 41 were from Tachikawa Aircraft.

What was it like inside the Tachikawa Aircraft factory? The War Experiences collection — compiled by the City of Tachikawa from the contributions of more than fifty residents to mark 25 years since its Declaration as a City of Peace — includes a piece by a former worker who was called back to the factory in 1943. They were building about ten fighters a day, he writes, but toward the end of the war they could build only one a day. Women’s volunteer labour corps (joshi teishintai) were mobilized to build fighters too. When the raids came, they hid in shelters. Some, out of fear, ran outside, he writes.

The same collection holds the memory of someone who was at a school near the factory. They could clearly see the pilot of a P-51 diving in as if to graze the roof of the school building. It was going for the Tachikawa Aircraft factory south of the school, they write.

The factories were targets. The workers knew it. But what happened before dawn on 4 April did not stay inside the factory walls.

Before dawn on 4 April, at Yamanakazaka

Tachikawa Monogatari describes the 4 April raid in concrete terms. It was a low-level, night-time precision bombing by 61 B-29 bombers, with Tachikawa Aircraft as the main target. The damage did not stop at Tachikawa City and Sunagawa village: in the Tama area, the death toll was second only to that of the Hachioji raid of 2 August. The US military recorded the results of the attack as “slight,” but many bombs that missed their target fell around it, and damage spread across the Tama area, the newsletter says.

According to the ministry’s record, the air-raid alarm sounded at about 1 a.m. that day, and Tachikawa was bombed in two waves. The second wave was especially fierce.

Yamanakazaka, in Fujimi-cho, is a slope (saka) that runs along the terrace cliff. A tunnel-style shelter had been dug into the cliff there. It was originally dug to evacuate important city-hall documents, but it fell out of use, and people in the neighbourhood began to use it as an air-raid shelter. A City of Tachikawa walking-route guide writes that as the war worsened, local people came to take refuge there every time the air-raid sirens sounded.

Before dawn on 4 April, the sirens sounded, and old people and children living nearby fled one after another into the shelter. A 250-kilogram bomb dropped by a B-29 struck near the shelter’s entrance. Everyone inside was killed. Forty-two people. The City of Tachikawa records that 32 of them were children. The ministry’s record writes that it was a heartbreaking toll, made up almost entirely of old people, women and children.

From Tachikawa Aircraft to Yamanakazaka is about two kilometres to the southwest. Tachikawa Monogatari writes that it would correspond to what recent war reporting calls a “mistaken bombing,” but that precious lives were lost in what was in effect indiscriminate bombing. On the same night, bombs also fell on the Tokyo Army Youth Signal School in Higashimurayama town, about five kilometres to the northeast. People at the school did not think they had been targeted because of any connection to Tachikawa Aircraft; they believed it was the large radio equipment they had that was the target. Those who dropped the bombs and those on whom they fell understood that night in completely different ways.

Why Yamanakazaka? The ministry’s record gives two theories. One is that there was a Chuo Line railway bridge nearby, and a bomb aimed at the bridge went astray. The other is that children going in and out around the shelter entrance were spotted in the light of flares and targeted. Both are theories; nothing is known for certain.

There is someone who remembers that night through a child’s eyes. The city’s War Experiences includes a piece by a Fujimi-cho resident who was five years old at the time. Woken by family in the middle of the night and led outside by the hand, they found “the night sky bright, though there was no moon.” The brightness faded away, then came back again. Only after starting elementary school did they learn these had been flares dropped by the US military. Led by the hand by their grandfather, they ran to the Yamanakazaka shelter, but it was already full and they could not get in, so they went into another shelter further west along the cliff.

A few days later, following the neighbourhood adults hurrying to Yamanakazaka, they saw that the shelter had collapsed and that bodies covered with straw mats lay on the slope. They remember a light rain falling, and the buds of the cherry trees along the Nekawa stream turning pink, they write.

Not getting into the shelter decided that child’s life. I read this short piece many times over. And I thought of how the cherry trees along the Nekawa that appear in that memory still bloom every April.

The raids on Tachikawa did not end on 4 April. Twenty days later, it was Sunagawa, north of the town, that suffered heavily.

24 April: the Sunagawa school burned

In the ministry’s table, 114 people died on 24 April: 89 at Tachikawa Aircraft and 25 in Sunagawa town. At the time, Sunagawa was not yet part of Tachikawa City; it was Sunagawa village in Kita-Tama district.

According to Volume 16 of Tachikawa Monogatari, factories of Tachikawa Aircraft and Hitachi Aircraft were built around Sunagawa village, next to Tachikawa Airfield, along with workers’ housing. According to an encyclopedia entry, Hitachi Aircraft’s Tachikawa plant was attacked on 17 February and 24 April together with Tachikawa Airfield and Tachikawa Aircraft; its assembly shops and other buildings were completely destroyed, and 50 percent of the plant was wiped out. The plant’s electrical substation went on being used after the war and stayed in service until 1993. Today, still marked by bullet holes, it is preserved as a cultural property designated by Higashiyamato City, inside the Tokyo Metropolitan Higashiyamato-Minami Park. The wall of a factory that bore Tachikawa’s name, scarred by bullets, still stands in the neighbouring city.

Sunagawa’s village office wrote down its own damage. Volume 10 of Tachikawa Monogatari introduces a document from the former Sunagawa village office, the “Sunagawa Village Administrative Report for 1945.” Under “Welfare – Wartime Disasters,” it lists the villagers’ losses as 25 dead, 13 injured, 115 houses burned to the ground, 34 completely destroyed and 111 half destroyed. Under “School Affairs,” it records that the Sunagawa National School was burned down in the 24 April raid, and the branch school of the Nishi-Sunagawa National School in the 2 August raid.

In the city’s War Experiences, one person wrote about the morning of 24 April. An alert was issued, word came that a large formation of B-29s was heading toward Tokyo, and the children were sent home at once. As they were hiding in the shelter, they heard a tremendous explosion. That day, the school suffered devastating damage, they write. How many lives the decision to send the children home first may have saved, the records do not say.

The same collection includes a piece by someone who was then a pupil at the Sunagawa national school. Citing Tachikawa Kushu no Kiroku (Record of the Tachikawa Air Raids), he writes that at about 8:30 a.m. on 24 April, some 120 B-29s bombed the factories of Tachikawa, Sunagawa No. 8 (today’s Saiwai-cho) and the Hitachi plant. The next day, when he was at the foot of Tenno Bridge on the Itsukaichi Kaido road, B-29s approached again; he felt a rushing sound like rain approaching and a blast of air pressure that hurt his ears. He crawled under a pile of pine roots and was safe. Those pine roots had been dug up by farmers for a nearby navy plant making pine-root oil (a substitute fuel), and national-school pupils had helped from early morning, he writes. On his way home, at the bottom of a bowl-shaped crater dug by a bomb, a cow lay on its back with its four legs spread, gasping. In a house nearby, a four-year-old child had been buried in a shelter and killed, which he learned only seventy years later, he writes. In the farming village, the raids struck people, livestock and fields without distinction.

According to a research guide compiled by the Tachikawa City Library, the centennial commemorative book of Tachikawa Municipal No. 8 Elementary School includes a diary written by the principal of the time, dated 27 June, after the raids on Sunagawa in April 1945. A record of the raids lies sleeping in a school anniversary book.

After 24 April, summer came. The last great night of the Tachikawa raids arrived together with the fire of a neighbouring town.

The night of 2 August: the southwestern sky was red

From the night of 1 August into the early hours of 2 August 1945, Hachioji was burned by a large formation of B-29s. According to an encyclopedia entry, US aircraft came in at about midnight on the 2nd, 169 B-29s dropped incendiary bombs, 80 percent of the city’s urban area burned, and about 450 people died.

From Tachikawa, that fire could be seen. In the city’s War Experiences, a Fujimi-cho resident writes: late at night on 2 August the air-raid sirens sounded, and after a while Hachioji was hit and the sky to the southwest turned bright red. When the alert was lifted, they left the shelter and crawled under the mosquito net in the main house. It was a moment of relief. But before they could fall asleep, the sirens sounded again.

According to the ministry’s table, 20 people died in Tachikawa on 2 August: 7 in Fujimi-cho, 6 in Shibasaki-cho, 4 at Tachikawa Aircraft, 2 in Sunagawa town and 1 in Takamatsu-cho.

That night, a bomb also hit the main building of Tachikawa City Hall. The “Tachikawa City Administrative Report for 1945,” introduced in Volume 10 of Tachikawa Monogatari, records that the main building of city hall was bombed in the 2 August raid but escaped destruction because members of the city hall’s defence headquarters and others put out the fire. The same report summarizes the residents’ losses in 1945 as about 300 dead, about 400 seriously or slightly injured, about 300 houses burned and about 500 houses destroyed.

And there were less than two weeks left until the end of the war.

The Tachikawa air raids by the numbers

• 13 — Air raids on Tachikawa from 16 February 1945 (ministry record).
• 340 — Total victims counted by district in the ministry’s record. Those who died at military facilities, such as inside the airfield, are not included.
• 61 — B-29s that bombed at low altitude by night before dawn on 4 April, with Tachikawa Aircraft as the main target (Tachikawa Monogatari, Vol. 8).
• 2 — Kilometres, roughly, from the target, Tachikawa Aircraft, to the Yamanakazaka shelter where 42 people died.
• 792 — The target number the US military gave Tachikawa Aircraft. The Army Air Arsenal was 2008.
• 115 — Houses in the village burned to the ground, according to the Sunagawa village administrative report for 1945.

The traveller’s detour quiz

What was the tunnel shelter at Yamanakazaka in Fujimi-cho originally dug for? (A) As an air-raid shelter for local people from the start (B) To evacuate important city-hall documents (C) To store spring water from the terrace. The answer comes at the end.

Before the raids came, the town had already begun to be cut away. We have to go back to the story of the North Exit plaza.