Tokyo is Firebombed

They bombed the whole night there one night, they bombed the whole thing. We were all out in the yard in the air raid shelters and the gutters there for protection because we didn’t want to stay in the camp but the Americans knew we were there anyway but I’d seen planes flying over there they were shooting them down too. I mean the Japs were getting some of the planes and I’d seen even the mortars falling right out of the plane, the bombers, but they’d keep that up all night they didn’t give us no peace at all, kept that all night and the next day the Japs wouldn’t let us go out at all. The guards wouldn’t leave us out at all because the civilians would’ve killed us because as far as you could see everything was flat because they didn’t have houses like we have. I call that paper shacks that they had, that would be just flattened all over the place.

Mr. Lecouffe describes the costly American air raid which leveled Tokyo. Ironically, the camp guards are forced to protect the prisoners from locals incensed by the devastation.

Lionel Lecouffe

Lionel Lecouffe was born in Campbellton, New Brunswick on March 23, 1922. His father was a First World War veteran and his mother a war bride. Mr. Lecouffe worked on the road for food vouchers before becoming a deliveryman to Easton Bakery at $2 a day. Only seventeen and already a member of the Campbellton militia, he lied about his age to enlist with the Royal Rifles at Matapedia. Ironically, after his release from a Hong Kong hospitalization, Mr. Lecouffe found himself attached to the Winnipeg Grenadiers with whom he finished the war.