"This Victory is Partly Ours": How the Bombing of Japan Built Post-WWII Seattle

Abstract

On August 10, 1945, the Seattle Daily Times credited Seattle for a part in an emerging victory in the Pacific war. That morning, the Japanese government had communicated to Allied leaders its intention to surrender. Surrender would not be official until early September, but the Times reported that the people of Washington state should be "justifiably proud" of producing "the three most spectacularly destructive weapons of the Second World War-the atomic bomb, Flying Fortress, and its big brother, the B-29." Radioactive material for the top secret Manhattan Project had been produced at the Hanford complex on the bank of the Columbia River since. 1943, and both the B-17 Flying Fortress and the immense B-29 Superfortress bombers had been designed and constructed in Seattle. Yet the article looked beyond the accomplishments of the moment toward the future, asking what kind of "profound and enigmatic effect" Seattle's wartime growth would have on the state as its industries reverted to peacetime operations. By the time of Japanese surrender, wartime operations had already transformed the city. War had also transformed many of Japan's cities. The B-29 bombers that Boeing's engineers and workers in Seattle had produced-so crucial to the city's wartime growth-dropped 147,000 tons of bombs as well as two atomic bombs on Japan's urban centers. Through Boeing, the intensive bombing campaigns of the Pacific theater that destroyed Japanese cities contributed to the growth and transformation of Seattle. Production of the B-29 and other wartime industries led to higher monetary investment in the city, population growth, and greater inter-racial and inter-ethnic integration in Seattle, resulting in significant social transformation. Wartime industry also necessitated the construction and reorganization of housing and the acceleration of transportation reform in Seattle, physically restructuring the city and its outskirts. Thus, as Boeing built the B-29, it also built postwar Seattle. Up through the present moment, scholarship on the B-29 Superfortress has been dominated by the field of history of technology and focuses on the plane's engineering and performance in war rather than the process of its production. Similarly, historians have treated the wartime bombing of Japan almost exclusively as a matter of military and political history. This paper aims to demonstrate that the massive bombing campaign over Japan and the dropping of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki did more than destroy Japanese cities and Japanese lives. The planes that delivered destruction to Japan had tangible and lasting impacts on US cities as well.