Transcript
We were bombed out. It was a fantastic sight. Unbelievable, I'll never see fires like it again. Kobe is a big mountain range, it goes right through from Osaka to I don't know how far south it goes. When the Americans come over, they bombed, they come over and they bombed with 500 pound oil bombs first. The next wave they'd come over and drop incendiary bombs. On the mountains it looked like lava running down the mountain, the incendiaries lighting up the oil bombs when they exploded and filthy oil everywhere.
And it was just like lava running down the mountainside. Then they used to bomb in a circle. And all the houses in Kobe was two and three stories high, weatherboard, pine wood. Inside was all mats and stuff, so you can just imagine those poor civilians had their air raid shelters dug in the houses and in the laneways and they just got cooked. Flames were shooting thousands of feet into the air.
We were able to see this because we were in a warehouse that the windows had steel bars and a big steel shutter, so it could be shut up so no weather could get in when it was raining and snowing. And we could look out and see what was going on. And the poor civilians, there must have been thousands was killed, cooked. Terrible.
