The Snapshots in Time Collection
Panoramic View of Firebombed Japanese City with Surviving High-Rise Building, 1945
This 1945 photograph offers a panoramic view over a Japanese city almost entirely destroyed by Allied incendiary bombing, with a distant mountain range providing a striking contrast to the leveled urban landscape below. A large reinforced-concrete building survives largely intact at right, while in the foreground a corrugated-tin shelter has already been built amid the ruins, an early sign of residents beginning to rebuild their lives in the war's immediate aftermath. Project: 218465