Such philosophical concerns collided head-on with two unbending realities. First, cities were where German weapons were forged, in factories operated almost entirely by civilians, who lived in urban areas surrounding the plants. Therefore, a halt to strategic air operations on moral or any other grounds would have produced a unilateral Allied cease-fire until Anglo-American armies were landed in France. But D-Day could not have been achieved absent Allied air superiority, which was gained only by round-the-clock bombing and daylight air battles that eroded the Luftwaffe’s strength.
Second, despite some airmen’s assertions to the contrary, there was seldom such a thing as precision bombing. The British government was flat-out duplicitous on the matter, insisting to the end that Bomber Command only attacked military targets (amid occasional admissions that declining enemy morale was a desirable by-product). But for much of the war, the RAF could not reliably put more than one-fifth of its tonnage within damaging distance of any factory, hence the resort to area bombing. In the words of British historian Max Hastings, “It was preferable to attack anything in Germany than to attack nothing.”
The airmen of all nations faced a moral and pragmatic contradiction. While few but Douhet openly advocated terror bombing, none could admit that 1940s technology and tactics mostly limited them to area attacks. It was one thing for the RAF to insist that it did not target civilians, yet another for the Americans to concede that their precision doctrine remained an ambitious goal rather than a routine reality.
To some combatants, the controversy attending strategic bombing appeared odd in the extreme. The Italian philosophy was well established, courtesy of Douhet, who died in 1930, but the Regia Aeronautica had little opportunity to test his theories by attacking major cities. The German record is checkered, from the controversial 1937 bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, to the attempt to recall the unnecessary mission against Rotterdam in 1940. However, if there was ever any discussion of the matter in Germany, there was probably none at all in Japan.
Prior to 1942 the world’s most sustained, most ruthless, and bloodiest air campaign was conducted by Emperor Hirohito’s bombers over China. In Tokyo’s attempt to control the Asian landmass, more than fifty cities were attacked from 1937 onward. Japanese bombers killed as many as 4,000 Chinese at a time, most notably at Chungking in 1941. But faced with immense distances and an enemy army that usually refused to concentrate, the Japanese were forced into much the same position as the Anglo-Americans in 1942–44: bomb something or do nothing. The essential difference lay in each side’s relative objectives: the Allies, victims of aggression, sought to cripple German industry, whereas the Japanese aggressors found precious few industrial targets and therefore resorted to an undisguised terror campaign.
Without realizing it, Tokyo’s warlords handed their enemies a powerful weapon: a moral certitude that the Japanese nation and its population had earned the firestorm that lurked beyond the broad sweep of the Pacific Ocean.
The View from Tokyo
In 1941, while American planners focused their efforts on a war with Germany, the least likely enemy posed an unappreciated threat. By then Japan’s 73 million people were personally and culturally inured to war in China. Based upon previous acquisitions, another 30 million subjects lived under Japanese rule, primarily in Korea and Formosa. The empire’s combined population enabled Tokyo’s propagandists to speak of a people 100 million strong.
Japan had largely been unified for 1,500 years and, in an astonishing national sprint, raced from essentially a feudal economy to near military parity with the Western powers in barely seventy years. Tough, disciplined, and enormously hardworking, Japanese were trained from childhood to serve the nation. Since 1890 students had been required to “offer yourselves courageously to the State.”
Beginning in the nineteenth century the ages-old Bushido warrior’s code had morphed into a European-style fascist ideology mated to the Shinto concept of emperor worship. The pillars of Bushido were loyalty, honor, and skill at arms, but Japan’s increasingly militarist governments succeeded in displacing the moderate samurai values with far harsher attitudes. The leavening ethics of Confucianism and Buddhism were increasingly replaced, with Shintoism becoming the state religion during the Meiji era of modernization from the 1860s. However, changes under Emperor Meiji did not extend to plain speaking, ultimately with disastrous long-term results. Japanese culture still abhorred American-style candor—far better to tolerate a poor situation than to offend people, especially one’s superiors.
Based on a homogenous population, the Ministry of Education touted inborn national character traits that lent moral authority to any enterprise. It was the same attitude found in the Japanese Serviceman’s Code of Conduct, a rigid, brutal compulsion to obedience framed as “sublime self sacrifice.” Yamato damashi, the Japanese fighting spirit, was exulted as mind over matter; flesh over steel.
Still, there were ironic foreign influences. The Imperial Navy absorbed the British Royal Navy’s values at the cellular level, to the extent of printing some texts in English, treasuring a lock of Horatio Nelson’s hair, and adopting bridge as a pastime. But more typical was Dai Nippon’s contempt for Western values. A British historian quoted a Japanese army document stating that American men “make money to live luxuriously and over-educate their wives and daughters who are allowed to talk too much” (a sentiment doubtless shared by some American males). The propaganda piece excoriated the United States as a murderous land, conveniently overlooking Japanese militants who assassinated government ministers during the 1920s and 1930s.
From the early 1930s, Japan was increasingly dominated by the military, with active-duty or retired generals and admirals in the nominally civilian posts of war and navy minister. But the nation had no central command comparable to the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, and there was little coordination between diplomatic and military actions. Raised in a pervasive atmosphere of racial and cultural superiority, generations of Japanese assumed that because they dominated Asia, the same must apply globally.
Historian Dr. M. G. Sheftall notes that many ultranationalists adhered to a form of thirteenth-century Nichiren Buddhism popular in prewar Japanese literature. Their worldview was dominated by the concept of a multigenerational confrontation between East and West, climaxing in an apocalyptic victory bringing peace on earth. That view fit nicely with the ideology of “eight corners of the world under one roof.”
Whatever the guiding philosophy, Japan’s war policy was largely determined by the Supreme Council, known as “The Big Six,” comprising the prime minister, foreign minister, army minister and chief of staff, and navy minister and chief of staff. As per the 1889 constitution, the emperor was nominally supreme commander and, though he sanctioned laws, he was not head of government. Prince Hirohito had assumed the throne as Emperor Showa (Enlightenment) in 1926, and when he died in 1989 he had been the twentieth century’s longest-serving head of state.
Imperial General Headquarters had been established in 1938, responsible for overseeing the undeclared war with China. That same year the civilian population was brought more fully into the constant state of conflict with gasoline rationing and occasional rice shortages. The government tightened its control of industry; press censorship was administered by the Home Ministry; and military training became compulsory in schools.
Despite the increased war footing, Japan tangled with the Soviet giant in 1939. Tokyo controlled Manchuria but sought more, leading to a Mongolian border dispute known as the Battle of Nomohan. It ended in a decisive Russian victory after four months of fighting.
Nevertheless, Tokyo set its geopolitical sights on most of China and even India. But the army and navy had very different agendas. The army, most influential in government circles, favored not only continuing but expanding Japan’s conquests on the Asian mainland. The navy, naturally more worldly, had a better concept of what lay beyond the horizon. Essentially, the navy wanted a secure source of oil to fuel t
he fleet. That meant the Dutch East Indies. The army wanted China. Resolving the differences took enormous effort, especially given the services’ long-standing disagreements that often boiled into outright animosity. Nevertheless, the generals had their way, and 7.1 million uniformed Japanese served the cause of expanding what the Japanese termed the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.”
Once set upon a collision course with America and the West, Japan counted on its offensive policy to acquire a Pacific moat spanning thousands of miles. Given the immense distances involved, the state of aviation technology, and the superiority of the Imperial Navy, Tokyo’s ramparts appeared safe from significant risk of attack.
It was a fatal miscalculation based upon the willing consumption of a toxic cocktail, equal parts national inferiority complex, institutional arrogance, and racial pride. A generation of Japanese would learn that a more bitter concoction had never been brewed.
CHAPTER TWO
China Skies
Bombing Japan
Serious American discussion of air attacks against Japan predated Pearl Harbor by at least two years. In January 1940 a retired naval officer delivered sensitive documents to the Navy Department for unofficial discussion. The messenger was Bruce Leighton, a former naval aviator representing Intercontinent Corporation and Central Aircraft Manufacturing Company (CAMCO), which operated in China.
Leighton met with Marine Corps Major Rodney Boone of the Office of Naval Intelligence. They proposed “an efficient guerrilla air corps” to assist China, which had been fighting Japan since 1937. The proposed American aid would go to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists, as the Chinese Communists lacked the strength and alliances to field an air force.
Eight months later, in September 1940, Lieutenant Commander Henri Smith-Hutton, the U.S. naval attaché in Tokyo, reported that Japan’s “fire fighting facilities are willfully inadequate. Incendiary bombs sowed widely over an area of Japanese cities would result in the destruction of the major portions of the cities.” The attaché noted that the few bomb shelters also were inadequate, and he was preparing a list of “important bombing objectives,” including military, government, and industrial targets. “Willfully inadequate” was an apt description. No less an authority than Billy Mitchell had noted Japan’s sustained vulnerability to fire bombing seventeen years before.
During the winter of 1940–41 the Roosevelt administration approved formation of a clandestine fighter group to aid China, staffed by discharged U.S. military personnel. Anticipating eventual Allied bombing of Japan, China’s Chiang Kai-shek had bomber bases constructed in the remote Chengtu area about that same time. A year passed before the First American Volunteer Group (AVG) became operational over China and Burma, entering history as the fabled Flying Tigers, led by former U.S. Army officer Major (later Major General) Claire Chennault. In the months after Pearl Harbor, the AVG’s shark-nosed P-40s presented the most effective opposition to Japanese airpower on the Asian mainland.
A second AVG was formed with the intention of bombing Japan. Equipped with twin-engine Lockheed Hudsons and Douglas Bostons, the unit’s 440 pilots and staff began departing the United States in November 1941. However, by the time most of the men and some of the aircraft reached Asia, America was fully at war and covert operations were unnecessary.
Other prewar plans had envisioned bombing operations against Japan from Wake Island, Guam, the Philippines, and the China coast. With those options rapidly lost in 1941–42, more ideas emerged.
In March and April 1942, the Army Air Forces sent thirteen heavy bombers to China with the mission of attacking the Japanese homeland. They were led by Colonel Caleb V. Haynes, who fetched up in India, awaiting events as his progress was barred by both the Japanese and Nationalist Chinese. The Japanese surge into Burma posed logistics problems for Haynes’s unit, and Chiang Kai-shek worried that attacking Japan from eastern China would invite retaliation against the population. However, “C.V.” Haynes remained in Asia, becoming Chennault’s 14th Air Force bomber commander.
Meanwhile, the third plan went ahead. It was dubbed Halpro (for Halvorsen Project), led by colorful, hard-drinking Colonel Harry A. Halvorsen, who had helped develop air-to-air refueling in 1929.
Halpro’s thirteen B-24 Liberators departed Florida in May 1942, winged across the South Atlantic from Brazil, and headed for China via North Africa. But they were sidetracked in Egypt, where the bombers were needed owing to pressure from the German Afrika Korps, which dominated the campaign for control of North Africa. Thus, the B-24s were sent to bomb Ploesti, a major source of Nazi oil in Romania. The mission was launched from Egypt in June 1942 with a notable lack of success. Fourteen months later a vastly larger mission was undertaken, pitting 177 Libya-based Liberators against several Ploesti refineries and incurring spectacular bomber losses.
After the Doolittle Raid, and after Haynes and Halpro faltered, the next proposal arose within China itself. In July 1942, shortly after disbanding the AVG, Chennault informed Army Air Forces chief Hap Arnold of the desire to increase the new China Air Task Force to forty-two bombers and 105 fighters supported by sixty-seven transport aircraft. Chennault claimed that with such an assembly he could drive the Japanese air force from China skies, paralyze enemy rail and river traffic in China, and bomb the home islands. Furthermore, with 100 P-47 Thunderbolt fighters and thirty B-25 Mitchell bombers, he pledged to destroy “Japanese aircraft production facilities.”
Nor was that all. Three months later Chennault assured Roosevelt that with 105 of the latest fighters and forty bombers (including a dozen B-17s or B-24s) he would “accomplish the downfall of Japan . . . probably within six months, within one year at the outside.” He added, “I will guarantee to destroy the principal production centers of Japan.”
That a professional airman like Chennault truly believed such puffery is hard to accept. Among other things, he knew from experience that the Japanese had failed to destroy Chinese cities with far larger forces over a period of years. But however his grandiose claims were received in Washington, he remained the U.S. air commander in China for the rest of the war.
Subsequently it took hundreds of B-29 Superfortresses fourteen months to realize Claire Chennault’s fantasy. In fact, when Chennault wrote Arnold that summer of 1942 the Superfortress was not yet a reality.
A Very Heavy Bomber
If any individual invented the B-29, it was Captain Donald Leander Putt. Virtually unknown today, the native Ohioan won his wings in 1929 and achieved a superior reputation as a test pilot and aeronautical engineer. Having helped develop the B-24, he was chief of the Army Air Corps Experimental Aircraft Bombardment Branch at Wright Field, Ohio, when he was brought into the next project in 1939.
The new design was to fly twice as far as the B-17 with a greater payload, hence the designation “very heavy bomber.” Putt looked at what was technically feasible and produced the initial concept: a range of over 5,300 miles and a top speed of 400 mph. With Britain facing the threat of Nazi invasion in 1940, an aircraft possessing such performance appeared increasingly desirable: it might reach Germany in the absence of bases in the United Kingdom.
Actually, Boeing already had a design in mind. So confident was the firm’s management that Boeing began drafting the super-bomber before government funds had been allocated. In fact, the May 1941 contract for 250 B-29s was doubled immediately after Pearl Harbor. However, the need was so pressing that the Army took the almost unprecedented step of approving volume production before the aircraft was test-flown. Boeing had orders for 1,644 B-29s before the first flight in September 1942.
Even allowing for the prewar one-off XB-15 and XB-19 (see Chapter One), there had never been anything quite like the B-29. Its size alone generated awe: a 141-foot wingspan, ninety-nine-foot length, and a towering tail reaching nearly thirty feet off the ground. Though it didn’t fully match Donald Putt’s vision, no other bomber equaled its 390 mph top speed and 3,200-mile combat range. More than an evolutionar
y step up from the B-17, the Superfortress combined several new technologies or features in one streamlined silvery shape. Unlike the B-17, the B-29 was fully flush-riveted, enhancing its speed and range. Pressurized crew spaces and remote-controlled gun turrets were even more significant features. The Superfortress boasted four remote-controlled turrets (two upper, two lower) and a manually operated tail position. Three turrets each mounted two .50 caliber machine guns while the top forward turret housed four. The central fire control (CFC) gunner and two waist gunners directed the turrets as needed, though the bombardier could control both forward turrets. The tail position originally contained two .50 calibers and a 20mm cannon but the heavier weapon proved troublesome and eventually was removed.
Upon sighting an inbound fighter, a gunner placed his illuminated sight on the target, and began tracking. The rest of the process was automatic, with the mechanical fire-control computer compensating for ballistic drop, altitude, closing speed, and deflection angle. No other bomber possessed such a capability, providing a high volume of fast, accurate defensive fire, especially in multi-plane formations.
There were bound to be numerous problems for so large, complex, and advanced a design. The remote turrets posed serious challenges, and pressurization required some work. Among the new bomber’s unique features was a forty-foot pressurized tunnel connecting the front and rear of the airframe, affording fliers a shirtsleeve environment. But if an observation blister blew out, which could happen at altitude, the gunner at that position would be sucked into space, probably minus a parachute.
The B-29’s main problem was the four Wright Cyclone engines. They were huge, each with eighteen cylinders producing 2,200 horsepower. (The B-17’s nine-cylinder engines were rated at 1,200 horsepower.) But the twin-bank configuration caused serious cooling problems, leading to in-flight fires in the rear row of cylinders. Since several engine components were made of virulently flammable magnesium, many fires became uncontrollable. The onboard extinguisher system proved inadequate, unable to cope with 87 percent of reported fires.
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