Guest Post by Takuma Goto
In a previous blog, I discussed our University Libraries’ ongoing Japanese maps project. Today, I’d like to share another interesting map I’ve encountered: a World War II U.S. Army Air Forces’ (AAF) “target chart” of Tokyo, Japan.
Historical Background
Soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 8, 1941, the United States quickly mobilized for the Pacific War. The following April, the AAF’s aerial campaigns against Imperial Japan began with the Doolittle Raid on the Tokyo Metropolitan Area. This small-scale air raid would become the first of hundreds of Allied bombings throughout World War II until Japan’s surrender in August 1945.
AAF Target Chart Japan. Washington, D.C.: Army Map Service, 1942.
Handbooks for Bomber Pilots
The Bombardiers’ Information File (BIF), written and published by the AAF, was a handbook and general reference for bomber aircrewmen. This handbook included special briefings and documents, such as target folders and target charts like the one above. It also contained aeronautical charts with navigation instructions as well as supplementary maps, sketches, and photographs to help the crew locate and identify targets. The purpose of the target chart was to simplify a potential bombing target to its most basic and salient features. For instance, per the BIF itself, “the shapes of cities [were] shown but the crisscross designs of their streets [were] not…” (BIF, 8-3-3).
A target folder prepared for the Eighth Air Force engaged in operations in the European Theater of World War II (1939/41-1945). From Army Air Forces Collection Website.
In recent years, research libraries have been digitizing many of these target maps and making them available online. As these examples from Stanford Library show, the target charts for Japan typically focused on major ports and industrial centers like Osaka and Nagoya. Many of these target sites often required multiple charts — presumably distributed to different bombardiers to ensure that one of them hit their mark without fail.
Read more about WWII air raids on Japan with materials from our collections:
The AAF Against Japan by Vern Haugland (Harper, 1948).
Blankets of Fire: U.S. Bombers over Japan during World War II by Kenneth P. Werrell (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996).
Bombs, Cities, & Civilians: American Airpower Strategy in World War II by Conrad C. Crane (University Press of Kansas, 1993).
Death from the Skies: How the British and Germans Survived Bombing in World War II by Dietmar Süss (Oxford University Press, 2014).
Flames over Tokyo: The U.S. Army Air Force’s Incendiary Campaign Against Japan, 1944-45 by E. Barlett Kerr (D.I. Fine, 1991).
Pacific Skies: American Flyers in World War II by Jerome Klinkowitz (University Press of Mississippi, 2004).
External links to scholarly articles and databases about WWII air raids on Japan:
Japan Air Raids.org: A Bilingual Historical Archive
“Place Annihilation” by David Fedman (National Endowment for the Humanities, 2021).
“A cartographic fade to black: mapping the destruction of urban Japan during World War II” by David Fedman and Cary Karacas (Journal of Historical Geography 38, no. 3, 2012).
“The Firebombing of Tokyo and Its Legacy: Introduction” by Bret Fisk and Cary Karacas (The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 9, iss. 3, no. 1, 2017).
