What’s the black thing on the left, in front of the building?
What was left of Namba Station. The black is the tracks leading into the terminal.
Railroad remains, I think.
Trainstation
Yeah, gonna need a source on this one. The streets are clear, there’s no fires, seems less like “one night” and more “after an entire campaign of terror bombing”. But if you really want to see what the strategic bombing campaigns were capable of, look up the aftermath of cologne. The re were only a handful of buildings that surived, I think in the double digits though I’ve seen people say it was everything except the cathedral (we didn’t bomb that because we were using it to orient the bombing runs).
Japan had a lot more wood-only city buildings back then compared to the colder climate in Europe, where more massive stone architecture was common. In Europe, cellars are also common/default, unlike in Japan.
During high heat firestorms, most of the wooden material burns up and the ash gets carried away. The photo definitely shows cleanup and very likely was not taken the day after the bombing, but a single firestorm definitely can produce these results, much like other examples in Cologne, Hamburg, Dresden, Würzburg,… Except those had much more stone rubble standing afterwards.
Japan had a lot more wood-only city buildings back then
Wood, and worse, paper. The US made mock-ups of civilian Japanese buildings when we were testing napalm for use in the terror firebombings of 1945. It was… very effective against the mock-ups.
English: Osaka City Air Raid after the bombing which occurred on March 13, 1945. On March 13, 1945, for about three and a half hours, indiscriminate bombing of residential areas in Osaka Prefecture was carried out by the US military. A total of 1,733 tons of incendiary bombs were dropped from 274 B-29s, burning down the city center, resulting in 3,987 dead and 678 missing. You can see Nankai Namba Station on the far left, Matsuzakaya Osaka store (now Takashimaya Higashi Annex) in front on the right, and Osaka Kabukiza in the center.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Osaka_after_the_1945_air_raid.JPG
Basically any larger German city was turned into rubbles. The website trolley-mission.de (! The different language versions don’t show identical content !), named after the documentary mission of the USAF, shows interesting photographies of the aftermath, here some pictures of Cologne.
They fire bombed at night. Picture in the day. Lots of wood structures burned fast. Couldn’t bomb during the day because AA forced the planes too high for accurate drops.
