Dozens of American military prisoners of war died in Tokyo amid the U.S. firebombing of Japan as World War II reached a crescendo in the Pacific, and later their commingled remains were buried in the Philippines.
Now, Pentagon researchers are working to identify those airmen, decades after their tragic end in the Japanese prison housing captured U.S. troops.
In Hawaii, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency has launched the Tokyo Prison Fire Project, which is analyzing the burnt and mixed remains exhumed from the Philippines. Teams are working with a list of 62 service members killed at the prison compiled from reports of Japanese personnel and the memories of some U.S. POWs who were transferred to other prison camps before the fire.
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The difficult task of working with historical records and deteriorating remains is in the early stages — the outcome is still uncertain — but the project has opened a window into the past and shed light on the long-ago deaths of service members killed in the U.S. push for a Japanese surrender during the last world war.
On the night of March 9, 1945, the 62 U.S airmen held at the Tokyo Military Prison were among the survivors in what was by some estimates the single most devastating air raid ever conducted, surpassing in destructive power the later atomic bombings of Hiroshima and…
