About 8.5 million Japanese civilians were displaced from their homes between 1943 and 1945 as a result of air raids on Japan by the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) during World War II. These evacuations started in December 1943 as a voluntary government program to prepare the country's main cities for bombing raids by evacuating children, women and the elderly to rural towns. After American bombers started to devastate entire cities in 1945[1] millions more civilians fled to the countryside.