Bullets Falling on Burnt Ruins: Memories of Machine Gun Fire (Summer 1945)

Bullets Falling on Burnt Ruins: Memories of Machine Gun Fire (Summer 1945)
At the end of the Pacific War, in the summer of 1945, the Japanese archipelago was not only bombed by low-flying U.S. aircraft, but there were also numerous reports of machine gun fire directly targeting civilians. One recollection, "A friend of mine was killed by Grumman machine gun fire," is inscribed with a vivid description of the war's intensity. Silver planes circled, a hail of bullets ripped through the dust and smoke, and fleeing children and passengers on evacuated trains were hit one by one. These scenes were not recorded in numbers or statistics, but were memories of a "small battlefield" that had been erased from the contours of daily life.
During this period, machine-gun fire by U.S. aircraft was said to be strategically used as part of "cutting traffic lines" and "preventing enemy retreat," but in reality, in many cases it was directed at civilians, causing much damage in regional port cities such as Hiroshima, Kure, and Ishinomaki, for example.
In the 1970s, memories of the war surfaced rapidly in Japanese society, and cultural and documentary efforts made progress. In this context, highly individualized records of damage, such as these "machine-gun fire" records, once again came to the forefront of attention. Compared to symbolic incidents such as urban bombings and atomic bombings, machine gun shootings in rural areas have not been systematically covered, and the 1970s was also a period of rediscovery of "forgotten battlefields.
What this record represents is a perspective that sees war not as a collection of dramatic events, but as the deaths of friends and physical wounds. The death of a friend was the key to the truth of the war.