1945 Army Information Branch Newsmap Overseas Edition Map of East Asia

This is a visually striking 1945 'Army Information Branch Newsmap' map of East Asia. The map highlights the pre-atomic firebombing of the Japanese Home Islands - a largely forgotten napalm campaign that destroyed 6 major Japanese cities and multiple smaller cities.

A Closer Look

Coverage embraces from western China to the Marshall Islands and from the Soviet Union to New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. Allied Territory is shaded red and highlights the constant pressure being put on the Japanese. The Japanese Home Islands, colored black, are at the center of a shrinking sphere. A textbox situated along the right highlights actions by the Allies as they 'push closer' to Tokyo. Some are territorial moves, such as the invasion of Kume, the Australian landing at Balikpapan on Borneo, and offensives by Chiang Kai-shek's Chinese nationalists in French Indochina and along the Chinese coast. The last is the firebombing of four Japanese cities by American B-29 Superfortresses.

The Firebombing of Japan

While history remembers atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, popular memory has largely forgotten multiple earlier devastating bombings by the U.S. Army Air Forces well before Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On the night of March 9, 1945, the American napalm firebombing campaign against Japan began. More than 270 B-29s rained fire on the Japanese capital, dropping over 1,600 tons of bombs. The raid destroyed sixteen square miles of downtown Tokyo, killed an estimated 100,000 civilians, and left over one million people homeless. After a month of strategic bombings in support of the invasion of Okinawa, the firebombing campaign against Japan's other largest cities commenced in earnest in mid-April and continued through June. In those two months, the Army Air Force destroyed Japan's six largest cities, killed between 112,000 and 127,000 people, and left millions homeless. Incendiary raids against smaller Japanese cities began in mid-June and continued through the end of the war in August - many of the smaller targeted cities have never recovered.

Publication History and Census

This map was created by the U.S. Army's Information Branch and distributed to army and navy posts overseas. The Overseas Edition of U.S. Army Newsmaps are smaller and have a much higher attrition rate than the larger domestic edition, making this example a rare find. We have been unable to locate any other surviving examples of the Overseas Edition of this Newsmap.