Fukui Air Raid

A week after the raid on Tsuruga, the first on a Sea of Japan coast city, B-29s of the 58th Bomb Wing attacked Fukui, the prefectural capital. An alert was sounded at about 22:15 on 19 July 1945; shortly before 23:00 the first incendiaries fell near the Nishi-Betsuin temple. The night was clear. A force of 127 B-29s (11 pathfinders and 116 main-force aircraft) bombed for 81 minutes, aiming at a circle of 1.2 km radius centred north-west of the Fukui Castle site.

Sources differ on the tonnage: the government summary gives both 865 tons and 953 tons of incendiaries. The US assessment put destruction of the built-up area at 84.8%, the third highest among the provincial cities after Toyama and Numazu. People sheltering in dugouts were killed by the heat, and many who jumped into the castle moat and the Asuwa River died there. At the Fukui post office telephone exchange, 20 women operators and three civil-defence men trying to rescue them were killed.

The official table records 1,576 deaths (661 male, 915 female), a further 108 who later died of their injuries, 1,210 seriously and 5,209 slightly injured, and 85,603 people and 21,992 households affected out of a pre-raid population of 103,049. Three years later the rebuilding city was struck again by the 1948 Fukui earthquake; the two disasters are commemorated together at the memorial on Mount Asuwa.