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How tragic was the "Li Mei barbecue" that burned 600,000 Japanese into black charcoal? Its lethality was comparable to that of an atomic bomb, and it was called the craziest revenge in the history of the US military, leaving the Japanese with an incomparably painful nightmare.
So, what is the origin of this "Li Mei barbecue", and how is its lethality comparable to that of an atomic bomb?
Next, let's take a closer look at the "Tokyo Bombing" that shocked the world in 1945.
Li Mei barbecue
March 9, 1945 was the beginning of hell for Little Japan in Tokyo.
With Li Mei's order, 334 B29 bombers, carrying a total of 1,800 tons of incendiary bombs, took advantage of the night to rush to Tokyo.
At this time, most of the people of Tokyo were asleep, and when they woke up from their sleep, they found that the whole of Tokyo had turned into a sea of fire!
1800 tons of incendiary bombs burned at the same time, what is the concept?
It is said that the temperature in the city center at that time even burned to more than 1,000 degrees, which was enough to melt all life on the surface, and even the steel bars were twisted!
For a time, the whole of Tokyo was like a purgatory and an open-air crematorium, countless houses and buildings were set on fire, and 600,000 Japanese devils wailed in the sea of fire.
There are also many people who are on fire, desperately jumping into the billowing smoke of the river, trying to escape the burning of the fire, but they don't know that in this high temperature of more than 1,000 degrees, the river water is boiling, and the Japanese who jumped into the river are directly boiled into stew!
According to the recollections of the US military pilots who participated in this mission, they could clearly feel the boiling heat wave of the sea of fire in the sky, which burned the plane to a boiling hot temperature, and the air was always filled with the stench of wood and human flesh roasted!
Even after piloting the plane out of the flames, the windshield of the plane was covered with a blood mist, and this blood mist was the Japanese who had been vaporized! As for the bombers who participated in the bombing mission, the bottom was also burned to black, emitting a foul smell.
The fire burned for several days and nights, and since then, whenever night falls, the sky over Tokyo has always been covered with striking fire and blood, and the whole city of Tokyo is strewn with corpses, even floating on the rivers with countless corpses, most of which have become charred skeletons, or bloody and distorted faces to the point that it is impossible to distinguish what they are.
According to later statistics, it was found that this bombing alone destroyed a quarter of the buildings in Tokyo, causing 80,000 people to be burned, 100,000 people seriously injured, and 1 million people homeless, and it took the Japanese government 25 days to clean up all these corpses!
However, the "barbecue master" Li Mei was not satisfied with the victory of this bombing, and he decided to direct the fire of Tokyo to the whole of Japan!
He soon sent another 317 bombers to bomb Nagoya, setting Nagoya on fire!
So Li Mei has since become a ruthless "roasting machine", and her roasting skills have become more and more perfect, and she has frantically refreshed her record:
For most of the six months from January to September 1945, he sent more than 33,000 sorties, dropped a total of 160,000 tons of bombs, bombed 98 Japanese cities, burned more than 2.4 million buildings, burned nearly 600,000 Japanese, and left 8 million Japanese homeless!
Even later, when Li Mei found out that the Japanese were rebuilding Tokyo after the disaster, she was very unhappy, so she ordered a second round of bombing of Tokyo, which had already been devastated!
Not to mention Tokyo, the whole of Japan has been "baked" by Li Mei!
According to the recollections of the US pilots who participated in the roasting of Japan, even though they had retreated to a place 200 kilometers away from Japan, they could still see the flames in the sky over Japan, as if they were looking directly at the sun.
It can be said that the damage caused to Japan by Li Mei with the barbecue was no less powerful than the two atomic bombs that the United States later dropped on Japan! It is known as the most destructive air raid in the history of mankind!
So, how did Li Mei become a "barbecue master"? To put it bitterly, before Li Mei roasted the Japanese, she actually used us Chinese people as experiments.
The path to being a barbecue master
This Li Mei, who was ridiculed as the "barbecue master" by later generations, his full name is Curtis Li Mei, who became the youngest major general in the US military at the age of 37, and he also has the title of "Cold War Eagle", just because he is cold and unapproachable, and is evaluated as long as he sits next to him, it is like sitting next to a piece of ice that has been cold for thousands of years.
Li Mei, who is known as the cold ice for 10,000 years, would actually burn 600,000 people in Tokyo, which may sound a bit contradictory, but who told the Japanese dogs at that time to jump over the wall in a hurry, in order to plunder oil resources, they did not hesitate to start a war against the United States?
Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor was directly regarded by the United States as an unprecedented national shame!
As everyone knows, the United States has always been eager to repay their talents, and little Japan has made them fall on them and cause them great shame, and the United States will certainly make the arrogant Japanese pay an extremely painful price!
In 1944, as the commander of the U.S. Air Force, Li Mei was officially dispatched to the Pacific Theater to deal with the rear of the Japanese mainland.
Li Mei, who was also ignited by the hatred of her family and country by the Japanese, spent a whole month thinking about how to achieve the greatest results at the lowest cost to herself!
You must know that although the US military has never stopped bombing Japan in the past, because the weather in Japan is changeable, sometimes dark clouds are thick, sometimes heavy rain is pouring, and the visibility of the planes is low, and the hit rate of dropped bombs is even more miserable.
What is even more annoying is that in order to cope with the US air raids, Japan has directly broken up its large arsenals into pieces and dismantled them into countless small workshops hiding in residential areas.
In order to solve this problem, Li Mei pondered for a long time. , but every imaginary revenge plan seemed to be almost meaningless, and it was not until the end of 1944, with the successful development of the M69 napalm by the U.S. military, that Li Mei got inspiration from it:
In the past, when fighting on the battlefields of Europe, because most of the European buildings were made of bricks and stones, they did not burn at all, so the tactic of attacking with incendiary bombs was rarely considered.
However, in the Asian theater, especially in Japan, in order to cope with frequent earthquakes and easy collapse of houses, Japan has built many houses made of bamboo and wood, which is simply a natural fuel, just a little bit, and burned into a piece, the destructive power is quite amazing!
As soon as he thought of this, Li Mei's eyes were suddenly dyed with excitement, in his opinion, Japan was simply born for fire attack!
As a result, the plan of "burning Japan" began to take shape in Li Mei's mind: since it was impossible to bomb accurately, then carry out carpet fire and replace all the bombers' ordinary bombs with incendiary bombs!
It's just that the assumption is that the effect of this incendiary bomb still needs to be tested in actual combat.
According to the rules, before the actual battle, Li Mei decided to test the power of this incendiary bomb first, but what was mad was that Li Mei chose to use Hankou in Wuhan, the mainland, to conduct the experiment!
The reason why Hankou was chosen is because the building materials and structures in Hankou are very similar to those in Japan, and the reference value is very large.
However, Li Mei's plan to conduct experiments in Hankou was vetoed by Stilwell, the top commander of the US military in the Chinese theater, because Stilwell was still very sympathetic to the Chinese people, so he felt that Li Mei's approach was too cruel.
But Li Mei did not give up his cruel plan because of this, and he simply sued Stilwell directly and transferred him back to the United States so that he could continue the barbecue experiment.
But what is chilling is that Chiang Kai-shek even acquiesced to Li Mei's experiment of making fun of the lives of the Chinese people, and even "intimately" sent Chen Cheng, a general of the national army, to assist the US army.
Soon, the entire Hankou of Wuhan was bombarded by 500 tons of incendiary bombs by US military planes, and 25,000 Chinese people were unfortunately turned into charcoal.
However, instead of having the slightest sympathy for the innocent Chinese people, Li Mei even raised excitement and bloodthirsty light in his eyes when he looked at the sea of fire, because he knew that his crazy plan would definitely succeed!
So three months later, the bombing of Tokyo officially began, and this was the tragic scene at the beginning.
Controversy?
It is said that during the time when Li Mei was barbecuing Japan, the Pacific Passage was full of American transport ships loaded with incendiary bombs, and even the production of napalm in the US military was almost unable to keep up with the progress of front-line dropping.
Moreover, Li Mei is also very fond of the mentality of the Japanese people, and the bombers he sends sometimes do not just throw incendiary bombs, but drop leaflets.
The leaflets would say that the United States would bomb those areas, but they deliberately did not say the specific time of the bombing, and as a result, the Japanese military factories and residents were always in a panic and had to stop production, and it was important to save their lives, and the Japanese army's logistics production line was paralyzed, and they were faced with running out of ammunition and food, which directly shook the foundation of the war.
Eventually, faced with the reality of a crushing defeat, Japan had to bow its proud head and announce its unconditional surrender.
It's just that later generations' evaluation of Li Mei's barbecue is also full of controversy like the evaluation of the two atomic bombs dropped by the United States, because both involve the most sensitive forbidden area in the war: the massacre of civilians.
Therefore, in the eyes of some people, Li Mei is the hero who brought World War II to an early end, and without him to make a barbecue, Japan does not know when it will surrender.
However, some people believe that Li Mei's indiscriminate killing of innocent civilians is a cruel and ruthless "butcher" who destroys humanity.
For example, before Japan surrendered, Li Mei was sued in a military court, accused Li Mei of "unforgivable war crimes" with blood and tears, and declared Li Mei the number one war criminal.
Germany has also publicly accused Li May of being a war criminal, because Li May used banned white phosphorus bombs against Germany on the European battlefield, and these white phosphorus bombs also caused the death of countless German civilians, which once had a negative impact on the international reputation of the United States.
However, in the face of public opinion's doubts, Li Mei calmly replied:
"If the United States had lost the war, I firmly believed that I would have been tried for war crimes, but the United States won. I know only one thing about war, and that is that it must be ended in the shortest possible time, by the most effective means, and at the lowest cost. ”
Of course, the "minimum price" here includes only the US military itself, not the civilians of Japan and Germany.
As Li Mei said, what he was most disturbed by was not how many Japanese were killed, but that the war could not end, so he didn't care how many Japanese died.
Although the US government officials are divided on how to deal with Li Mei's "war crimes," it is not difficult to see from their various behaviors of calling Li Mei an "American hero" and putting her on the cover of Time magazine that they are very sympathetic to Li Mei's barbecue.
Ironically, in 1964, in the face of Li Mei, an American general who had burned 600,000 Japanese to charcoal, the Japanese government not only did not hold a grudge against him, but even "magnanimously" awarded him Japan's highest level of the "Order of the Rising Sun" in recognition of his outstanding contributions to World War II, otherwise the death toll in Japan would definitely not be 600,000, but 50 million.
It has to be said that Japan is indeed good at "recognizing a thief as a father", and it is no wonder that there is a saying that "there is no soul under the atomic bomb."
Thinking about the Japanese civilians during World War II, it seems that they are not innocent at all, they have long been deeply brainwashed by militarism, and in order to support the evil aggression and expansion of the Japanese army, they also did a lot of extreme acts, indirectly causing unforgivable harm to the people of other countries invaded by Japan.
Not to mention the brutal crimes of the Japanese army, the extent of its dehumanization and moral degradation, Li Mei barbecue is nothing compared to them, so Japan also deserves the atomic bomb.
Throughout World War II, although both the Allied and fascist camps committed war crimes that violated international conventions to varying degrees, those who were eventually sent to the International Military Tribunal were all Japanese and German war criminals, and none of the Allied troops were actually sent to the International Military Tribunal and found even a single war crime.
Therefore, as civilians living in today's era of peace, we must always remember and be vigilant that only our own military can protect our own civilians, and we should not hope for the mercy of foreign armies at any time.