Whirlwind

by Barrett Tillman

  Those Westerners in Japanese hands immediately recognized that abyss, evident in matters great and small. For instance, in April 1945 a B-29 named Mrs. Tittymouse crashed in Tokyo’s Chofu district. A group of soldiers and civilians quickly gathered to examine the remains of the giant machine. The men noted the professional-quality nose art depicting a full-figured nude, which they regarded approvingly. Women were disgusted at the men’s reaction.

  The Japanese response reflected an inability to absorb the nature of the enemy. As an American historian living in Japan has said, “The gawkers were less offended by the nose art itself than by the fact that they were being bombed by people who had the cocky self-assuredness to go into battle with something so cheesy painted on their plane. It was related to the fact that no Japanese servicemen would have the self-autonomy to paint something like that on his warplane. Basically it’s rage along the lines of ‘How dare these people take war so lightly?’”

  In that brief intersection of East and West it was possible to glimpse the essential nature of the unbridgeable chasm between bitter enemies. In the mangled ruins of that magnificent machine was the tacit lesson: Japanese could only marvel at America’s destructive capacity and continue suffering beneath those crushing blows.

  Finally the emperor emerged from behind “the chrysanthemum curtain” to take command of his ministers, his military, and his people.

  The Leaders

  Strategists are essentially policy makers, and those who set policy for the air campaign over Japan resided in Washington, D.C. Once Roosevelt and Churchill had set priorities for the grand alliance in 1941, the “Germany first” strategy determined allocation of assets that lasted well into 1944. However, after Allied armies were ashore in France, the Anglo-Americans were able to focus more men and matériel against Japan. Though coincidental, the arrival of B-29s in India in June 1944 occurred within days of the Normandy invasion.

  Chief architect of the air war over Japan was of course Hap Arnold. As a visionary he had few peers, building the Army Air Forces from its 1938 doldrums into the globe-spanning entity that proved the bow wave of the independent U.S. Air Force. Probably he rendered his greatest service in the three years prior to Pearl Harbor, when he set Army aviation in motion with the infrastructure, equipment, personnel, and scientific-industrial liaison essential to ultimate success.

  The B-29 would not have existed without Arnold. In its massive, streamlined shape he saw the future of airpower and, assuming its performance matched its potential, Billy Mitchell’s realized dream of the air arm separated from the Army. He invested wholeheartedly in the Superfortress, both personally and institutionally, and earns high credit for that risky venture.

  And yet . . .

  And yet Arnold came perilously close to dropping the cerulean sword from his eager hands. He permitted himself to be stampeded into prematurely committing the world’s most sophisticated aircraft to combat in a primitive theater, beyond effective range of the enemy heartland. Roosevelt’s urgency in involving China became the engine that drove the Superfortress into an arena where it could not be supported—a mirage almost immediately obvious to the frosty brain and discerning eye of Curtis LeMay. Yet Arnold proved unable to accept the blame for his poor decisions, and he removed subordinates who strove mightily to deliver the undeliverable. His callous handling of Kenneth Wolfe especially does him no credit.

  Wolfe and then Haywood Hansell did what they could with what they had before suffering Arnold’s axe. Consequently, airpower historians shudder to speculate what might have become of the program absent the saving grace of dour, taciturn Curt LeMay with his genius for innovation and a rare willingness to question conventional wisdom. From today’s distant remove, LeMay remains the most competent, most thoroughly professional airman of his generation, of any service, any nation. Arnold’s hysterical threat, via Lauris Norstad, to remove LeMay if he failed in the Marianas demonstrates the paucity of options available to the Army Air Forces in the opening weeks of 1945. Despite LeMay’s significant improvements in the China-Burma-India Theater, the Asian B-29 project already was doomed. Without LeMay’s unconventional low-level incendiary missions against Japan’s urban-industrial areas, the B-29 could have proven an extremely expensive failure, and the postwar effects on the battle over a unified defense department may only be surmised.

  Make no mistake—Curtis LeMay not only saved the B-29 program, he also saved Hap Arnold and, with him, perhaps the future of an independent air force.

  However, even some of LeMay’s admirers fault him for waiting six weeks to switch from daylight high-altitude to nighttime low-level attacks. But the successful conversion probably could not have occurred in much less time for at least three reasons.

  First, LeMay had to settle into his new command, learning the players and their various strengths. Second, he needed a few missions to assess Hansell’s methods and evaluate their merits. Third, having decided to commit doctrinal heresy and wager a huge gamble, LeMay wanted to load the dice as much as possible. That required stockpiling enough incendiary bombs to sustain a ten-day blitz and giving mechanics time to raise the aircraft in-commission rate to a new high. LeMay’s streamlined maintenance procedures required some time to take effect. But his patience paid immense dividends, and he rode out the preparation period regardless of how it appeared in Washington.

  It was typical of the man. LeMay was as vastly unconcerned with his public image as any figure in American history. Though he would turn the postwar Strategic Air Command from a four-engine flying club into a Cold War deterrent, he remains far better known for his Vietnam-era vilification as a “caveman in a bomber.”

  LeMay’s reputation contrasts vividly with that of Admiral William Halsey, who oversaw Third Fleet operations against Japan in the final months of hostilities. As a professional airman Halsey could not begin to compete with LeMay—nor with Arnold, for that matter—and the Bull’s serious lapses attending Leyte plus the December 1944 and June 1945 typhoons only reinforced his failings as a four-star commander.

  Yet neither of the fast carrier commanders came up to LeMay’s standards, though Marc Mitscher and John McCain both outranked him. They relied heavily upon their extremely able staffs whereas LeMay directed his commands based on an intimate knowledge of his equipment and his craft. The plain fact is that the Third and Fifth Fleet carriers likely would have performed just as well without their three-star commanders, whereas XX and XXI Bomber Command would have remained an unrealized possibility absent LeMay.

  He was, in a word, indispensable.

  The Mythology

  After 1945 the contention arose that bombing did little or nothing to end the war, especially against Germany. Critics such as economist John Kenneth Galbraith claimed, sometimes based upon flimsy evidence, that the costs of the campaign exceeded the measurable benefits. But in truth, the D-Day landings could not have been attempted without Allied air superiority, which required reduction of Germany’s aircraft and oil industries. The fact remains that a combination of strategic and tactical airpower proved crucial in Europe.

  Against Imperial Japan, the opponents of airpower have even less latitude for argument. As British historian Max Hastings has written, “The myth that the Japanese were ready to surrender anyway has been so completely discredited by modern research that it is astonishing some writers continue to give it credence.” Tokyo’s repeated rejection of the Potsdam Declaration, and the war cabinet’s pleas for Soviet assistance prior to the atomic bombings, should leave no doubt as to Tokyo’s mind-set. However belatedly, only the emperor’s personal intervention ended the war. And by his own admission (“a most cruel bomb”) the atomic bombs prompted him to override his warlords.

  In dropping 161,000 tons of conventional bombs, Superfortresses burned out 40 percent of the built-up urban areas in sixty-six cities, resulting in destruction of nearly one-third of all Japanese houses. Japan’s six leading industrial cities had been marked for destruction: of their total 257
square miles, 113 had been targeted and 106 were destroyed, excluding Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  The combination of reduced imports and B-29 bombing crippled Japanese industry. Aircraft production peaked at 2,550 in November 1944, then quickly declined. The total by all manufacturers never reached 2,000 after December, dropping to barely 1,500 the following July. (In contrast, U.S. Army acceptances averaged 5,800 aircraft per month through 1944.) Unable to compete in the air, the Japanese began saving their strength to meet the impending invasion. At the end, Tokyo hoarded 10,400 aircraft (over half marked for suicide missions) and 18,000 pilots.

  The naval-air campaign against the home islands tightened the noose around Tokyo’s shrinking neck. With vital imports severely limited by submarines and aerial mines, the nation lacked sufficient quantities of everything from food to manganese. Allied carrier aircraft made coastal shipping a perilous enterprise, further limiting enemy transport options. Had the war lasted a few weeks longer, Japan’s interior communications—especially railways—would have felt the crippling weight of American bombs. That in turn would have exerted an even greater hardship upon the badly strapped food distribution network.

  Assailed from the sea and the sky—America’s unmatched way of making war—Imperial Japan faced apocalyptic destruction. But the hell-bent warlords’ zealous view from Tokyo surveyed their pitiful, starving subjects and determined that they had not yet suffered enough to warrant surrender.

  Targeting

  Other than Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the most cited criticism of U.S. bombing remains targeting urban-industrial areas. Yet because Japanese industries relied on cottage or “shadow” factories to produce subcomponents, it was impossible to strike them specifically—if somehow they could be identified. Small shops and even homes in urban areas surrounding industrial plants produced a huge amount of matériel, especially for aircraft and engine factories. The feeder industries passed their products to component shops, which in turn passed subassemblies to factories for completion and installation. The variety was enormous: from simple hose clamps to airframe stringers formed on wooden jigs to machined parts such as valves.

  Therefore, area bombing remained the only option short of returning to “precision” attacks on major factories or abandoning the strategic air campaign. Neither the Army Air Forces, U.S. policy makers, nor American citizens were inclined to do so—especially against a savage enemy in the fourth year of an unrelenting war.

  LeMay’s shift from “precision” attacks against specific targets has been denigrated as “terror bombing.” Certainly there was terror, but in many cases the argument is disingenuous because it is well known that high-altitude bombing was seldom very precise, especially with Japan’s fiercely unpredictable winds aloft that scattered ordnance far off target. Furthermore, until nearly the end of the war, the vaunted “pickle barrel” accuracy claimed for the Norden bombsight was more myth than reality. Only with arrival of the Eagle radar in mid-1945 did B-29s prove consistently able to destroy precision targets.

  Nevertheless, postwar analysis concluded that, absent the B-29s, Japan’s 1945 production would have run between 50 and 60 percent of the 1944 figures, largely owing to reduced availability of raw materials. Yet in July, the last full month of hostilities, overall production in thirty-three urban-industrial areas reached just one-third of the 1944 peak. Clearly bombing made a difference.

  Whatever postwar criticism in America and the West, the Japanese acknowledged the effectiveness of area bombing. Rear Admiral Toshitane Takata testified, “The fire bomb raids destroyed most of the smaller factories making aircraft parts, thus causing serious losses in production. The many small plants scattered over the cities which were destroyed caused serious loss in other material and general production. Aircraft engine production always lagged behind a safe ratio to airframe production and was frequently numerically inferior for individual types.”

  Admiral Takata’s view was shared by Lieutenant General Takashi Kanaoka, commanding the First Antiaircraft Division: “From the defense point of view, plane factories were your top priority, then essential war industries. Your selection of targets was excellent.”

  Partly because ships are more readily identified than factories, naval targeting policy was more easily defined than aerial, and the priority naval target was Japan’s merchant marine. Largely due to American submarines, from 1943 onward the Empire’s essential sea lanes were seriously depleted. In 1945 the eminently successful B-29 mining campaign choked off much of Japan’s remaining seaborne logistics, earning often grudging admission by Army fliers that their missions represented a wholly worthwhile diversion from urban-industrial attacks.

  However, the U.S. Navy’s obsession with the remnants of the Imperial Navy was clearly misplaced. While the admirals’ insistence in finishing off Kure’s and Yokosuka’s rusting warships may be understandable, it represented poor policy when those sorties could have been profitably aimed at coastal shipping. The latter work was routinely unglamorous, but there is no more superior example of its effectiveness than the destruction of Hokkaido’s coal ferries.

  Furthermore, carrier airpower lacked the ability to affect seriously Japanese industry—a point conceded by some admirals at the time. Therefore, the naval air strikes against aircraft plants tended to duplicate the Army effort, sometimes hitting areas already scoured by B-29s. The air admirals, being both fliers and seamen, were drawn to both target sets, and no superior was inclined to reel them in.

  Conclusions

  Though the campaign against the home islands was broadly dictated by the Joint Chiefs in Washington, the American effort lacked unity of command. As noted, the Army Air Forces and the Navy largely pursued their own goals, each the natural product of their respective worldviews.

  Absent a single theater commander, and management of the 20th Air Force from Washington, some of America’s enormous naval-air consortium was dissipated in duplication of effort and insufficient strategic focus. That lapse falls not only upon Hap Arnold of the Army Air Forces and Ernest King of the Navy, but upon Franklin Roosevelt the commander in chief, who made no effort to force a meeting of the minds. President Truman might have addressed (if not redressed) some of the Joint Chiefs’ parochialism, but he was understandably concerned with the geostrategic and political problems he inherited in the final four months.

  The AAF was about strategic bombardment, still linked to the Douhet-Mitchell concept of forcing the enemy’s collapse by destroying his will to resist. Though that goal was only achieved by influencing Hirohito, widespread destruction of Japanese industry and transport severely crippled Tokyo’s ability to resist.

  Thus, the Allied air campaign against Japan resembled parallel train tracks—Army and Navy—each headed for the same station. Both engines might have arrived ahead of schedule had they cooperated better, allocating their specific assets to the tasks each could best perform.

  But that is after the fact. The final verdict is this: airpower forced the capitulation of a desperate, tenacious enemy and thus rendered unnecessary the ghastly prospect of the bloodiest invasion in the sanguinary history of the human race.

  The Bomb

  What were the American alternatives to using atomic weapons against Japan? There were only three: declare victory and withdraw; maintain a blockade to await events; invade.

  The first choice was dead upon arrival. America and the Allies had demanded unconditional surrender, and their populations would support nothing less, especially since Italy and Germany had been defeated under that premise. But the underlying insistence upon unconditional surrender looked beyond the war toward an unmistakable break with the past, providing the legal basis for restructuring Axis nations so they would never again initiate aggression.

  An invasion would have been horrific. The Japanese correctly guessed the landing beaches and prepared accordingly. In some places the attacker-to-defender ratio would have approached one to one, a chilling prospect that Admiral Chester Nimitz opposed bec
ause of unavoidably heavy U.S. casualties. General Douglas MacArthur, likely for reasons of personal ambition, favored invasion. That left blockade.

  Depending upon duration, a blockade could have inflicted more deaths upon Japan than continued bombing. Those who advocated “starving the Japs into surrender” overlooked a critical fact: the huge majority of the resultant deaths would have been civilians, especially the old, the very young, and the enfeebled. Additionally, the long-term physical and psychological effects upon the younger generation could have been immense. As in every despotic nation, in times of hunger the army eats before the civilians, be it Kim Il-sung’s Korea or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

  A major factor widely ignored in the debate about the bomb is the American public. With troops redeploying from Europe to the Pacific, and the prospect of a horrific invasion of a fanatical enemy’s homeland, Harry Truman the president (let alone the politician) simply could not have ignored the bomb’s war-ending potential. Had the invasion proceeded without first using atomic weapons, he likely would have been impeached by politicians responding to the outraged parents of thousands of dead sons.

  So the atoms would be loosed. As Truman later wrote, “The final decision had to be made by the President, and was made after a complete survey of the whole situation had been made. . . . The Japanese were given fair warning, and were offered the terms which they finally accepted, well in advance of the dropping of the bomb.”

  Death figures for Hiroshima vary widely, as do population estimates. The most specific sources cite from 90,000 to 140,000 deaths prior to 1946, among 320,000 to 345,000 residents. An approximate toll of 90,000 slightly exceeds the acknowledged loss in the Tokyo firebombing of March 9–10.

  Figures for total radiation deaths from the two bombings vary hugely: from fewer than 800 named individuals to a claimed 100,000-plus. Partisans on both sides of the controversy have reason to manage the numbers, but scientific study leans well to the lower end—hundreds rather than thousands.