On 18 April 1942, sixteen B‐25 bombers under the command of Army Lt. Col. James Doolittle took off from U.S. Navy aircraft carriers 650 miles off the coast of Japan. Their raid on Tokyo and other Japanese cities caused little material effect but a significant psychological one, boosting American morale while embarrassing Japanese leaders into accelerating operations that would lead to the Battle of the Coral Sea and the Battle of Midway later that year. But it would be more than two years before new American bomber aircraft returned to hit the Japanese home islands again.
In 1944–45, long‐range B‐29 Superfortresses were used to carry out the strategic air campaign against Japan. Eventually, over 1,000 were deployed in the 20th Air Force, subdivided into the XXth and XXIst Bomber Commands. The Army Air Forces (AAF) commanding general, H. H. “Hap” Arnold, retained direct command of the 20th Air Force, to prevent diversion of its resources to theater commanders. Feeling pressure to get results from his expensive Very Heavy Bomber (VHB) project, he fielded the new B‐29s even before testing had been completed, gambling that they could achieve decisive results while correcting any technical deficiencies.
In June 1944, B‐29s from Maj. Gen. Kenneth Wolfe's XXth Bomber Command staged from India to China, and began bombing Japan as part of Operation Matterhorn. Wolfe was plagued by logistics and mechanical problems, however, which grew worse when Japanese ground troops in Operation Ichigo overran advanced U.S. airfields in China. Arnold relieved Wolfe and brought in Maj. Gen. Curtis E. LeMay, the AAF's premier problem solver and the most innovative air commander of World War II. However, except for a successful incendiary raid on Hankow, even LeMay achieved poor results with Matterhorn.
Arnold's greatest hopes for victory through airpower over Japan rested with the XXIst Bomber Command, under the command of Brig. Gen. Haywood“Possum” Hansell, which began operations from the Marianas in November 1944. Hansell was one of the architects of precision‐bombing doctrine, but his operations also had little success. Poor facilities, faulty training, aircraft engine failures, cloud cover, and jet stream winds at bombing altitudes made precision methods impossible. Hansell seemed unwilling to change his tactics, and Arnold feared that he would lose control of the heavy bombers to Asian theater commanders Douglas MacArthur, Chester Nimitz, or Louis Mountbatten without better results. Arnold decided to consolidate both Bomber Commands in the Marianas under LeMay and relieved Hansell.
LeMay instituted new training and maintenance procedures but still failed to achieve useful results with daylight high‐altitude precision attacks. So he resorted to low‐level incendiary raids at night. Although area firebombing went against dominant American Army Air Forces doctrine, flying at low altitude reduced engine strain, required less fuel, improved bombing concentration, avoided high winds, and took advantage of weaknesses in Japanese defenses. LeMay's systems analysts predicted that he could set large enough fires to leap firebreaks around important industrial objectives. His first application of the new tactics, Operation Meetinghouse on the night of 9 March 1945, resulted in extraordinary destruction: 334 B‐29s incinerated 16 square miles of Tokyo, destroying 22 key targets and killing 80,000–90,000 civilians in the deadliest air raid of the war.
Once enough incendiaries were stockpiled, the fire raids began in earnest. Warning leaflets were also dropped; their primary purpose was to terrorize Japanese civilians into fleeing from cities. Eight million did so. When Gen. Carl A. Spaatz arrived in July 1945 to take command of Army Strategic Air Forces in the Pacific (including the 20th Air Force and Doolittle's 8th Air Force redeploying from Europe) and to coordinate air operations supporting the invasion of Japan, he was directed to shift the air campaign from cities to transportation. But there was too much momentum behind the fire raids—sustained by operational tempo, training programs, and bomb stocks—for strategy to change.
By the time Spaatz arrived, naval carrier strikes were also hitting key industrial objectives in Japan. More important, the navy's submarine blockade had crippled the Japanese economy, and the Russians were about to attack Manchuria. Spaatz maintained direct command over the 509th Composite Group of B‐29s specially modified to carry atomic bombs. Directed by Washington to deliver these weapons as soon as possible after 3 August, Spaatz ordered the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Along with the incendiary campaign, these different elements composed the series of blows that produced immediate Japanese surrender.
As with the atomic bomb, there is still debate over the effects and morality of the fire raids. LeMay's bombers burned out 180 square miles of 67 cities, killed at least 300,000 people, and injured over 400,000 more. His 313th Bomb Wing also sowed 12,000 naval mines in ports and waterways, sinking almost 1 million tons of shipping in about four months. LeMay remained convinced that his conventional bombing could have achieved victory by itself, without need for a ground invasion of the Japanese or the atomic bombs. He even briefed Arnold and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in July 1945 that the war would have to end by 1 October, when the 20th Air Force would run out of targets.
[See also Air Force, U.S.: Predecessors of, 1907–46; Bombing of Civilians; China‐Burma‐India Theater; Strategy: Air Warfare Strategy; World War II: Military and Diplomatic Course.]
Bibliography
- Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Cate, The Army Air Forces in World War II. Vol. 5: The Pacific: Matterhorn to Nagasaki, June 1944 to August 1945, 1953.
- Carroll V. Glines, Doolittle's Tokyo Raiders, 1964.
- Curtis LeMay with MacKinley Kantor, Mission with LeMay, 1965.
- Haywood S. Hansell, Jr., Strategic Air War Against Japan, 1980.
- Conrad C. Crane, Bombs, Cities, and Civilians: American Airpower Strategy in World War II, 1993.
- Kenneth P. Werrell, Blankets of Fire: U.S. Bombers Over Japan During World War II, 1996
