Numazu Air Raid

Numazu lies on the north-eastern shore of Suruga Bay and in wartime had a naval arsenal and a number of small and medium-sized munitions factories. Because it lay directly beneath the route B-29s from the Marianas took northward toward Mount Fuji, it was attacked repeatedly from January 1945. Numazu was raided eight times between 9 January 1945 and the end of the war. The attack in the early hours of 17 July 1945, known as the Great Numazu Air Raid, was by far the most destructive.

Japanese Wikipedia, drawing on US records, describes the force as 130 B-29s of the 58th Bombardment Wing, Twentieth Air Force (119 in other sources), which dropped 9,077 incendiary bombs weighing 1,039 tons from about 01:00 until about 03:00, from roughly 3,200 metres over the city centre. The MIC page describes the attackers only as more than 70 aircraft dropping over 9,000 incendiaries, so the aircraft count differs between sources.

The raid killed 274 people and injured 505, burned 9,523 houses and destroyed 89.5% of the city's built-up area (the US figure); the fourth-generation Numazu Station building was also burned. For all eight raids the MIC gives 318 dead, 631 injured, 44,387 people and 9,700 households affected, while Japanese Wikipedia gives 322 dead and 634 injured, 11,756 houses wholly or partly burned and 127 wholly or partly demolished.

The raid was one of the night incendiary attacks that the Twentieth Air Force carried out in rotation against small and medium-sized provincial cities from mid-June 1945; several other cities were hit on the same night. A memorial service for the city's war dead and air-raid victims is held every 15 August. The sources consulted here did not give verifiable details of monuments or exhibitions on the raid in the city.