Category German Jets, 1944-1945

Mitchell’s prophecy not only endured among air leaders, it also was the fundamental underpinning of the Air Corps Tactical School (acts), the focal point of American air power study during the in­terwar years.55 The school provided an intense, nine-month, air power-focused curriculum to the Air Corps’ top mid-level officers, and graduated 261 of the 320 generals serving in the Army Air Forces at the end of World War II.56 Initial classes were small. An average of 22 students attended while the school was located at Langley Field from 1920 to 1931, and they learned “the air tactics and techniques necessary for direction of air units in cooperation with other branches of the armed forces.”57 By 1926 the curricu­lum’s focus had begun to shift to independent air operations, and by 1935 it stressed the bomber as a war-winning weapon.58

In concert with the new emphasis, the school moved to Max­well Field, Alabama, and also acquired more students: the aver­age increased to fifty-nine in 1931, and jumped to one hundred in 1939, when a series of four twelve-week courses began.’9 Mitchell had been instrumental in founding the school, and his bombing manual still served as a textbook in 193 9.60 Many of the school’s officer-instructors were his proteges. Sherman, Dargue, George, Olds, and Walker—the latter two had served as Mitchell’s aides— filled key positions on the faculty, and all promoted Mitchell’s vi­sion of independent air power founded on the bomber.

From the student perspective, the Tactical School opened new vistas in air power thought. Laurence S. Kuter, who left the Forty- ninth Bombardment Squadron at Langley Field to begin school in the class of 1934-35 as a new first lieutenant (and the second youngest member of the class), later commented that “imagina­tions were released, aroused at Maxwell, when they were dormant at Langley. I think I’m speaking for all of my generation at the time. We had our first introduction to any sort of air strategy.”61 Major Ira C. Eaker, a distinguished pilot sporting a Southern Cal­ifornia journalism degree who graduated from the Tactical School in 1936, remarked: “If military education may be likened to a bad pill, it is not too much to say that a very satisfactory sugar coat­ing is put on it at Maxwell Field.”62

Students attended classes Monday through Friday from 0900- 1200, with afternoons reserved for flying and Wednesday after­noons off. For much of the 1930s horsemanship was a mandatory course, although most of the curriculum explored more serious subjects. Between 1931 and 1938, courses the first half of the year focused on specific branches of the Army, such as the infan­try, cavalry, and artillery, while naval topics also received atten­tion. The study of air power dominated the second half of the curriculum. The Department of Air Tactics and Strategy was re­sponsible for that instruction, and the “Air Force” section was its primary subdivision. Other branches included “Observation,” “Attack Aviation,” “Pursuit,” and “Bombardment,” with the most hours devoted to “Bombardment.” A faculty and staff consisting of twenty-two officers in 1935 oversaw the school’s program. Of that total seventeen were in the Air Corps.63

The Air Corps officers serving on the Tactical School faculty played an enormous role in shaping air power convictions. Most students arriving at Maxwell needed little convincing that Air Corps autonomy was a worthwhile goal, although the notion of a separate air force did not receive an overriding emphasis in fly­ing squadrons.64 Entering students also likely agreed that the inde­pendent application of air power was the key to achieving separa­tion from the Army. What the Tactical School—“the only common location of experienced air corps officers who had enough time for creative thinking”65—provided them was a distinctive meth­odology for applying air power to achieve victory independently of surface forces, and hence a rationale for service autonomy. The officers who developed the unique approach were an eclec­tic group, possessing disparate backgrounds and large amounts of flying time. Lieutenant Kenneth Walker, who began teaching the “Bombardment” course in 1929, had developed bomber forma­tion tactics just before his arrival at Maxwell while serving as the Second Bombardment Group’s operations officer; Major Donald Wilson, who taught the “Air Force” course from 1931 to 1934, had worked for American railroads before entering the military. Walker and Wilson typified those who passionately believed in an independent air force and who openly debated its merits in the kitchens of student and faculty quarters late at night over ma­son jars of moonshine. Yet in the classrooms—which contained a smattering of students w’ho were not airmen—the appeal for air autonomy rested on the logic of the school’s unique approach to bombing.66

No instructor made that pitch better than Major Harold Lee George. Before teaching at the Tactical School, George flew day bombers in World War I, helped Billy Mitchell sink the Ostfries – land and testified at his court-martial, and served as a bomber test pilot at Aberdeen Proving Ground. He directed the school’s Bombardment section from 1932 to 1934, and then doubled for two years as the director of Air Tactics and Strategy and its “Air Force” subdivision. The holder of a George Washington Univer­sity law degree and winner of a national competition in typing and shorthand, he played a major role in structuring the curriculum that formed the basis of America’s World War II strategic bomb­ing doctrine. His progressive views on the nature of war and air power paralleled those of Mitchell—with whom he corresponded frequently—and were manifest in his opening lecture for the “Air Force” course. He began by telling his students:

The question for you to consider from today onward, to have con­stantly before you as you continue your military careers, is substan­tially this:

Has the advent of air power brought into existence a method for the prosecution of war which has revolutionized that art and given to air forces a strategical objective of their own, independent of ei­ther land or naval forces, the attainment of which might, in itself, ac­complish the purpose of war; or has air power merely added another weapon to the waging of war which makes it in fact only an auxil­iary of the traditional military forces?67

George then outlined the probable answer. “Modern inven­tions” such as the machine gun and rapid-fire artillery signifi­cantly increased the power of defensive land warfare, he asserted, and a conflict similar to the world war “might mean a breakdown of civilization itself.” Yet he also argued that achieving victory did not require defeating an enemy’s army. Pointing to 1918, he stated that Germany surrendered because its populace lost the will to resist, not because its army had been destroyed. Overcoming hostile will was the true object of war. “The continuous denial of those things which are essential, not only for the prosecution of war but to sustain life itself” compelled the German people to yield. The Allied blockade threatened Germany with starvation, but George did not believe that such drastic measures were nec­essary to cause national will to collapse. “There is plenty of indi­cation that modern nations are interdependent,” he maintained, “not so much for the essentials of life as for those ‘non-essentials’ needed to conduct their daily lives under the existing standards of living.” Because most aspects of modern society were not self – sufficient—for example, many workers in large cities depended on public transportation to get to work, and many factories and homes received electric power from distant locations—eliminat­ing the interdependent features of normal life might suffice to crack civilian morale.68

Moreover, George insisted, the key elements that sustained nor­mal life were the same ones that enabled a nation to wage modern war. Interrupting this economic web would likely defeat a nation, and air power could attack it directly, preventing an exhaustive ground campaign or a time-consuming sea blockade. “It is possi­ble that the moral collapse brought about by the break-up of this closely knit web would be sufficient fto cause defeat],” he pos­tulated, “but connected therewith is the industrial fabric which is absolutely essential for modern war. To continue a war which is hopeless is worse than an undesirable peace, because the lat­ter will come soon or late anyway; but to continue a modern war without machinery is impossible.”69

Despite his obvious conclusion, George stopped short of say­ing that air power could win a war single-handedly. He noted that the prospect remained “an academic question,” but added: “That the air phase of a future war between major powers will be the decisive phase seems to be accepted as more and more plausible as each year passes.”70

The belief, widely shared among Tactical School instructors, that the industrial apparatus essential to a state’s war-making ca­pability was also necessary to sustain its populace was a funda­mental tenet of the school’s “industrial web theory.” In brief, its main points were: (i) in “modern warfare,” the military, polit­ical, economic, and social facets of a nation’s existence were so “closely and absolutely interdependent” that interruption of this delicate balance could suffice to defeat an enemy state; (2) bomb­ing, precisely aimed at these “vital centers” of an enemy’s industrial complex, could wreck the fragile equilibrium and hence destroy the enemy state’s war-making capability; and (3) such destruction would also wreck the enemy nation’s capacity to sustain normal day-to-day life, which would in turn destroy the will of its pop­ulace to fight.71 Those notions would guide American strategic bombing for the next half century.

Although seemingly straightforward, the industrial web the­ory stemmed from a hodgepodge of ingredients, and the Tactical School cooks who stirred them together sometimes added more of one item than another. Clausewitzian frameworks and Marxist economics, set against the backdrop of World War I’s totality, fla­vored the instructors’ thoughts on war. George’s lecture echoed a 1926 school publication that viewed the objective of war as “un­dermining the enemy’s morale, his will to resist,”72 yet George also noted that destroying the capability to fight might be the key to wrecking will. The school attempted to differentiate between the “national” objective of wrecking will and the “military” aim of destroying “the enemy’s material and moral means of resis­tance,” but the multi-layered goals overlapped and distinctions between them were subtle—especially when discussing air power that promised victory in one fell swoop.73

According to the Tactical School, the capability to fight mod­ern war stemmed from a nation’s economic prowess, and eco­nomic concerns generated war’s impetus. А Г934 lecture asserted that “world conflicts arise over outlets for over-production”; an­other added that modern wars “are essentially economic wars, caused by the clash of rival production machines.”74 Using air power to destroy those machines would eliminate the motive for conflict—hence removing the will to keep fighting. “Air power is the only means of waging war which has the capability of strik­ing directly at the will to resist of a hostile nation, by paralyzing its economic structure and threatening its very existence,” con­cluded a school text.75 Instructors further elaborated: “The prin­cipal and all important mission of air power, when its equipment permits, is the attack of those vital objectives in a nation’s eco­nomic structure which will tend to paralyze that nation’s ability to wage war and thus contribute directly to the attainment of the ultimate objective of war, namely, the disintegration of the hos­tile will to resist.”76

Besides Clausewitz and Marx, the industrial web theory hear­kened to Nap Gorrell and Billy Mitchell. In 1935 the mustachioed Lieutenant Kuter, now an instructor in the school’s Bombardment section after graduating first in his class, discovered a copy of Gor – rell’s plan and decided to devote an entire lecture to it. He con­tacted Gorrell—who had become president of the American Air Transport Association—to verify that the lecture conveyed the es­sence of the 1917 proposal, and Gorrell invited him to his Chi­cago office to discuss it. When Kuter arrived he found that the re­tired colonel had distributed copies of the lecture to many senior officers from the First World War. All expressed satisfaction that it accurately represented the past, as did Gorrell himself.77 An in­vigorated Kuter then returned to Maxwell. “No principle or doc­trine in the Confidential Air Force text that is being written today was missed in that plan,” he proclaimed to his students. “We may return to our steel desks considerably refreshed by the knowledge that our school plans and our theories are not only supported by, but identical with the plans of the level-headed commanders in the field when the grim realities of actual war demanded effec­tive employment.”78

Like both Gorrell and Mitchell, most Tactical School instruc­tors equated the will of the nation to the will of its populace. They also presumed that civilian will was fragile, and that bombs could crack it without killing large numbers of people. Air power would instead break morale by putting people out of work. “The effects of an attack against the industrial facilities on the social life of a nation can not be overestimated,” stated a 1934 text. “The psy­chological effect caused by idleness is probably more important in its influence upon morale than any other single factor.”79 Un­employment further offered a gauge to determine when civilian will was on the verge of collapse. “The effectiveness of an air of­fensive against a nation may find its yard stick in the number of people which it will deny work,” a 1936 lecture asserted. “Idle­ness breeds discontent—and discontent destroys morale.”80

Tactical School instructors considered the prospect of destroy­ing enemy will by attacking the populace directly, but dismissed the idea because they believed it less effective than an attack on key industries. In addition, many thought that such an approach was inhumane. Major Muir S. Fairchild, like George a veteran of World War I day bombers, told students in 1938 that “the direct attack of civilian populations is most repugnant to our humani­tarian principles, and certainly it is a method of warfare that we would adopt only with great reluctance and regret. . . . Further­more, aside from the psychological effects on the workers, this at­tack does not directly injure the war making capacity of the na­tion.” Fie also argued that it was difficult to determine the amount of bombs needed to terrorize a population to such a degree that it forced its government to surrender. Thus, Fairchild advocated at­tacks on the industrial web, which would have “the great virtue of reducing the capacity for war of the hostile nation, and of ap­plying pressure to the population both at the same time and with equal efficiency and effectiveness.”81

To George, efficient bombing was the overriding concern. He rejected the direct attack on populations, “not because of the fact that it might violate some precept of humanity,” but because at­tacking the industrial web promised greater dividends, and prom­ised them sooner, than killing civilians. Railroads, refineries, elec­tric power, and key industries were his targets of choice; “no highly industrialized nation could continue existence” without them. Yet George also provided a caveat that left the door ajar for attacks that did more than just disrupt normal life. He remarked that “any sane nation” would capitulate once the key threads of its indus­trial web were severed. If surrender did not occur—implying that the enemy was not rational—as a last resort the attacker might de­stroy the enemy’s water supply system. George acknowledged that doing so would have grave implications. “The results and conse­quences of such an attack are too terrible for any nation to bring about unless it offered probably the only means in which it could be successful in the prosecution of the war,” he cautioned.82

Much like Mitchell, the Tactical School instructors presumed a uniform code of rationality for both the government and the pop­ulace of any modern nation attacked from the air. The government would “sense” the discomfort of its people and would act to end their pain. Accordingly, the attacker should avoid bombing gov­ernment centers, because “the political establishment must remain intact if the attitude of the people at large is to be rapidly sensed and given appropriate consideration.”83 Instructors expected the attitudes of a beleaguered government and its populace to resemble

those projected for “the greatest industrial nation in the world— the United States.” Major Fairchild observed that America’s vul­nerability to a well-conceived air offensive mirrored that of other industrialized powers. He asserted that the key elements of Amer­ican production were 11,842 “critical” factories, almost half of which were located in New York, Pennsylvania, and Massachu­setts. Destroying the factories in those three states, or the trans­portation or power systems linking them, would “apply tremen­dous pressure to our civilian population while at the same time seriously imparing [sic] our ability and capacity to wage war.”84 Tactical School instructors thought that such destruction would fatally affect American morale. “With life unbearable or perhaps not even supportable, it seemed that even the sturdiest people in our own Northeast country with their army and navy could soon be persuaded to yield to the will of an enemy with effective inde­pendent air action,” Kuter remembered.85

The school devoted much time to determining which particu­lar elements in the industrial web would have the greatest impact if destroyed. Here too, the United States served as the predom­inant example for the theorizing. Fairchild noted that without adequate raw materials and the power to drive machinery, the American industrial complex could not function. A precarious balance held the system together even in peacetime; a strike in a small factory producing door latches for automobiles had halted production in many automobile factories across the country. The demands of war strained that balance to the utmost, as could be seen from the failure of American industry to provide more than token support to the Allied cause in 1917-18.

“A careful and complete scientific analysis” would identify the proper targets, Fairchild insisted.86 The key was to pinpoint ba­sic commodities essential for both public services and war-fight­ing. Once identified, air power could attack them in a variety of

ways. Factories manufacturing essential commodities were usually found in specific locales, adjacent to raw materials, markets, la­bor, or lines of communication. They were generally large enough to allow easy identification from the air and too numerous to al­low “an efficient local defense.”87 Examples included the steel in­dustry in Pittsburgh and Birmingham, and the brass industry in Connecticut. Besides destroying the factories, air power could eliminate essential commodities by attacking the raw materials needed to produce them. Removing either coal or iron ore would prevent the production of steel. A school text concluded: “Air power could thus defeat a nation by depriving it of just one com­modity, [such as] steel, because no nation can successfully wage war without it.”88

Because Tactical School instructors based the industrial web theory on American projections, they have since been criticized for “mirror-imaging”—substituting America’s economic and social make-up for that of all other industrialized nations. Kuter later remarked that they had little choice. A small number of officers (seventeen total) from Britain, Canada, Mexico, Spain, Sweden, and Turkey attended the school, and their presence prevented in­structors from focusing their analysis on potential enemies Ger­many and Japan. “It would have been unthinkable in peacetime to have U. S. Army Air Corps officers estimating the national fab­ric of an industrial nation, searching for critical and vulnerable elements and concluding how many long range heavy bombers would be required to overcome their will to resist our objectives,” Kuter recalled. “Not only would it have been politically unthink­able to assume that another nation was our enemy, but at the acts it would have been downright embarrassing.”89 Haywood S. Han – sell, a first lieutenant fighter-pilot-turned-bomber-advocate who taught with Kuter in the Bombardment section, remembered that instructors deemed target selection a problem for industrial econ­omists. Since the school had none, it “did the best it could. It rea­soned that other great nations were not unlike our own, and that an analysis of American industry would lead to sound conclu­sions about German industry, or Japanese industry, or any other great power’s industry.”90

Yet in the final analysis, Hansell, Kuter, and their compatriots did not project American characteristics onto the socioeconomic infrastructure of their potential enemies. They instead replicated their perceptions of the United States, and those perceptions in all likelihood did not conform to reality. Like Billy Mitchell, the in­structors assumed that the American populace had a low thresh­old of pain, that it would demand surrender once key industrial centers in the Northeast were destroyed, and that the government would acquiesce to the request. Such assumptions ignored—as had Mitchell—the nature of the enemy and its war aims, and Amer­ica’s own goals in the conflict, which may have been that high – priced survival was preferable to occupation. Those assumptions also underestimated the resilience of industrial complexes and the possibility that dispersal and deception might keep them running in spite of bombs. In short, the enemy state portrayed by the Tac­tical School was a generic one, stripped of fundamental elements like culture and ideology. Overcoming its “will to resist” became a straightforward goal with quantifiable results.91

The instructors realized that their vision of the future rested on theory rather than fact, but countered that the lack of proof for their claims was no certainty that air power could not achieve them.92 To bolster their convictions they relied on large doses of progressive philosophy. “Air power is the natural enemy of a well-organized state,” they asserted in 193 5.93 Technological ad­vance had made the various facets of a modern state interdepen­dent, linked together by strands of a delicate web. Air power was the ideal means to severe those threads quickly. “The more speed­ily a war is over and the world can revert to its normal peace­time pursuits, the better it is for the entire world,” George re­marked.94 Mitchell had said much the same, and so had Douhet, whose translated works were available at Maxwell.95 Yet neither Mitchell nor Douhet placed the overriding emphasis on accurate bombing that came from the Tactical School. Although Mitchell stressed precision attacks against a hostile fleet, he also advocated the development of “aerial torpedoes,” self-propelled, remotely controlled bombs accurate enough only to “hit great cities.”96 For Douhet, population centers were legitimate targets, and victory would come from terrorizing the enemy populace into demand­ing peace. Tactical School instructors believed that such random bombing could not rapidly snip away the key strands of the in­dustrial web.

In 1930, the school shunned night bombing as inefficient; texts stated that daylight was necessary to pinpoint key targets.97 But attacking in daylight exposed aircrews to enemy defenses, forc­ing them to attack at high altitudes to avoid anti-aircraft artillery (aaa) and in formation for mutual protection against enemy fight­ers. High altitude bombing was also inherently more inaccurate than that conducted at lower levels, and in 1930 the Air Corps did not possess a bombsight that assured a reasonable degree of precision. Nor did it possess a bomber that could deliver a sub­stantial bomb load against an enemy’s economic web. Neverthe­less, Tactical School instructors continued to refine the industrial web theory, confident that air technology would ultimately pro­vide them with a means to implement it without suffering crip­pling losses.

In the days before radar, air maneuvers appeared to show that even antiquated bombers could attack targets in daylight and emerge relatively unscathed. The defending fighters often failed to locate the bomber formations, and if they did so, it was often too late to intercept them. Major Walter H. Frank, the Tactical School’s Assistant Commandant, remarked after watching Г929 air maneuvers in Ohio: “There is considerable doubt among the umpires as to the ability of any air organization to stop a well – organized, well flown air attack.”98 Mitchell’s former aide, Lieu­tenant Kenneth Walker, echoed this sentiment as a Bombardment instructor from Г929 to 1933, and the notion found its way into Tactical School texts. Most instructors believed that the defensive firepower of tight formations would ward off any fighters that happened to intercept a bomber attack. Still, they considered the possibility of an escort fighter that could accompany bombers to target, but dismissed the notion for two reasons: (r) they could not envision an aerodynamic design that successfully melded a fighter’s speed and maneuverability with a bomber’s range; and (2) money for both fighter and bomber development simply did not exist during the Depression, and fighters were not going to gain the independent victory that would lead to an autonomous air force.99 Major Claire Chennault, who directed the Tactical School’s Pursuit section from Г934 to Г935, adamantly opposed using fighters as escorts—in his mind, their sole mission was air defense.100 Dogmatic views also prevailed regarding anti-aircraft artillery. Kuter recalled teaching that “anti-aircraft gunfire may be important but should be ignored.” He also remembered that in classroom exercises instructors deemed “bombing inaccuracy”— not enemy defenses—the greatest threat to a successful air offen­sive. “Nothing could stop us,” he reflected. “I mean this was a zealous crowd.”101

The confidence displayed by faculty and students at the acts would intensify during the decade with the development of the four-engine в-17 “Flying Fortress” and the sophisticated Norden bombsight. Together, those technological marvels seemingly of­fered the means to validate the industrial web theory. Yet before that theory could be put to the test, the Army’s leaders had to en­dorse it. A difficult challenge loomed for the believers in progres­sive air power—one that was far more demanding than Mitchell faced in sinking the Ostfriesland.

On 16 December 1944, the Germans demonstrated in convinc­ing fashion that they still possessed both the capability and will to continue the war. The Ardennes offensive stunned Allied lead­ers, most of whom had assumed that Germany was on the brink of collapse. Spaatz shifted usstaf’s focus from oil to transporta­tion centers west of the Rhine, and Eighth Air Force flew only one mission against oil targets between 16 December and 8 January.86 By 28 January the “Battle of the Bulge” claimed eighty-one thou­sand American casualties—making it the bloodiest engagement in American military history.87 Soon after it began Eisenhower con­sidered asking for ten additional divisions. Although he decided against the extra manpower, he ordered the first American execu­tion of a deserter in eighty years to stiffen the resolve of his troops against the German onslaught.88 Intelligence appraisals now esti­mated that the war might last until 1946, while the Selective Ser­vice upped draft quotas for January and February 1945 from sixty thousand to eighty thousand.89 In early January, Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall stated: “We now face a situation requiring major decisions to prevent this war from dragging on for some time.” He asked for Eisenhower’s “broad personal esti­mate of the resources required and the steps to be taken to bring this war in Europe to a quick conclusion.”90

As Allied losses mounted the progressive rationale originally presented for Thunderclap became more and more appealing: an aerial Armageddon might actually wreck Germany’s will to fight, end the war, and save Allied lives. Arnold had expressed similar sentiments in waxing about how America would approach fu­ture conflicts to scientist Theodore von Karman a month before the Bulge attack. “It is a fundamental principle of democracy that personnel casualties are distasteful,” Arnold opined. “We will continue to fight mechanical rather than manpower wars.”91 The European struggle now threatened to become an extended battle of attrition on the ground, and the bomber seemingly offered the mechanical means to stop the slaughter in one fell swoop. More­over, the goal of unconditional surrender dictated the destruction of the Nazi government and its administrative apparatus, and that government appeared more than capable of continuing the con­flict. The planned air assault would wreck key Nazi offices in Ber­lin. Their location near the city’s main residential area guaranteed that the civilians supporting that government would feel the full fury of a raid that illustrated the bankrupt nature of the Nazi re­gime. Marshall agreed, and also recommended that a similar at­tack on Munich “would probably be of great benefit because it would show the people that are being evacuated to Munich that there is no hope.”92

In the meantime, the Red Army’s advance in the East had reached the point where it would benefit directly from the destruction of transportation hubs like Berlin—and Arnold wanted to demon­strate the impact of American air power to the Soviets.93 He was dismayed over bombing’s failure to defeat Germany on its own, writing to Spaatz that despite a five-to-one superiority in the air, and “in spite of all our hopes, anticipations, dreams and plans, we have as yet not been able to capitalize to the extent which we should. We may not be able to force capitulation of the Germans by air attacks, but on the other hand, with this tremendous strik­ing power, it would seem to me that we should get much better and decisive results than we are getting now.”94 Arnold further de­spaired over the paltry results achieved thus far by the в-29 offen­sive against Japan—stress that would help trigger his fourth heart attack on 17 January. The proposed attack on Berlin promised independent success that could overshadow the meager perfor­mance in the Pacific. A bombing-induced German collapse would not only save a multitude of Allied lives, it would cause political and military leaders around the world to acknowledge air power as the source of salvation. Thunderclap thus offered the chance to satisfy numerous concerns. A 31 January 1945 directive made selected cities in eastern Germany, “where heavy attack will cause great confusion in civilian evacuation from the east and hamper reinforcements,” the Combined Bomber Offensive’s highest pri­ority targets after oil.9S

Those factors, together with the abundance of bombers avail­able, led Spaatz to attack Berlin, Leipzig, and Dresden in February 1945. Yet the magnitude of the 3 February Berlin assault did not approach Thunderclap proportions.96 The expectation of clouds over the city precluded precision attacks on oil targets and made transportation facilities and an array of government buildings— both of which had larger “footprints” than individual synthetic oil plants—the primary objectives for radar attacks. Once over Ber­lin, however, crews found the skies predominantly clear, and most bombed visually. Almost one thousand B-17S dropped 2,279 tons of bombs on the city, causing heavy damage to the Reichschancel – lery, Air Ministry, Foreign Office, Ministry of Propaganda, and Gestapo headquarters, as well as to many railroad marshalling yards.97 The raid may have killed as many as twenty-five thou­sand people.98 Against Leipzig and Dresden, the Eighth Air Force again attacked rail yards. In the 14-15 February raids on Dres­den, clouds obscured the target, and crews mistakenly dumped their bombs on Dresden’s main residential district, which had been heavily bombed the night before by the raf. Refugees fleeing the Russians clogged the city, and between twenty-five thousand and thirty-five thousand civilians perished in the multiple assaults.99

Technically, the attacks on Berlin and Dresden were aimed at military objectives. Two days after the Berlin mission, Spaatz re­vealed that he had little faith in the notion that a single, mas­sive bombing raid could compel German surrender, telling Ar­nold: “Your comment on the decisiveness of results achieved by air power leads me to believe that you might be following the chimera of the one air operation which will end the war. I have concluded that it does not exist. I also feel that in many cases the success of our efforts is unmeasurable, due to our inability to ex­ploit the decisive results achieved.”100 Nevertheless, Spaatz showed that he had viewed the Berlin assault as more than simply an at­tempt to destroy German war-making capacity. When asked by Doolittle before the raid if he wanted “definitely military tar­gets” on the outskirts of Berlin hit if clouds obscured oil installa­tions, Spaatz replied: “Hit oil if visual assured; otherwise, Berlin— center of City.”101 Dresden’s marshalling yard bordered the city’s major residential district, virtually guaranteeing that bomb misses would kill civilians.

Moral qualms and the conviction that attacks aimed at war­making capability were more productive than those aimed at the enemy populace combined to prevent American air leaders from launching a wholesale campaign to kill German civilians. Air com­manders maintained that the essence of German morale was pub­lic support for the war, and that such support was fragile, but they agonized over how best to attack it. While Eaker, with ra­dar bombing in late 7943, and Spaatz, with the 3 February raid on Berlin, attacked civilian morale directly, it was not their pref­erence to do so. They, as well as their counterparts, believed that attacking civilians indirectly—by terrorizing people rather than killing them, or by depriving them of needed goods and services— was the answer to breaking their will.

Yet the difference between attacks intended to terrorize and those intended to kill was a fine one, and the distinction blurred as the war progressed. The impetus to end the war quickly led to the selection of targets—like Dresden’s rail yards—that would also have a maximum impact on civilian morale. When Secretary of War Henry Stimson learned of Dresden’s devastation, he re­quested information on the attacks and asked that “the City be thoroughly photographed to establish that our objectives were, as usual, military in character.” Arnold received the request while recuperating in Coral Gables and scribbled across it: “We must not get soft—War must be destructive and to a certain extent in­human and ruthless.”102 By 1945, German civilians had no argu­ment with Arnold’s assessment. For them, no distinction existed between the raf Bomber Command’s area attacks and American raids against specific targets in or near cities.

For Eighth Air Force, the 3 February raid on Berlin was the tenth against the German capital. More than 600 bombers had attacked it on several occasions; on zi June 1944 935 heavies had pummeled the city; and on 26 February 1,100 more would strike it.103 Spaatz understood that whether his crews bombed ur­ban targets using the Norden bombsight or radar, they would kill many civilians, and “dehouse” many more. To him, though, in­tent mattered. Why counted more than how in evaluating success, and the purpose of the raid provided criteria by which to judge re­sults. With photographic reconnaissance and Ultra intercepts, he could calculate the damage rendered to Germany’s oil producing capability caused by bombing a specific synthetic oil plant. What he could not do, however, was translate those figures into an ac­curate estimate of when Germany’s oil supply would cause it to quit fighting—and the time factor was the ultimate judge of suc­cess. He had faced a similar dilemma the previous spring in trying to determine when his bombers and fighters might gain daylight air superiority, and resorted to aerial attrition to achieve his goal in the time allotted. Now, in the aftermath of Hitler’s Ardennes offensive, the impetus for quick success—in this case, quick vic­tory—helped to mold the intent of his actions.

The desire for a rapid end to the war courtesy of American air power was nothing new to Spaatz—or Arnold—or any Army Air Forces commander. They entered the war with that goal in mind, but they also sought to dictate when the war ended, and the de­mands of the ground war had upset their calculations. Ideally, they had wanted to build an enormous bomber force and then pound the key nodes of German industry with it for six months, after which they thought Germany would surrender. The diversion of bombers to support ground advances in the Mediterranean, fol­lowed by requirements to support the Normandy invasion, not only prevented air commanders from testing their theory, but also from estimating when bombing would end the war. While rapid victory remained the airmen’s goal, they wanted an air power – induced success, and the opportunities for that result diminished the closer Allied troops came to Berlin.

In early 1945, whh the Anglo-American armies poised to ad­vance into Germany, Spaatz was uncertain that his oil campaign could stymie Germany’s capability to fight before those forces ad­vanced deep into the Reich. His 3 February Berlin raid may have mirrored his other attacks against the city in terms of conduct, but his intent paralleled Eaker’s desire in late 1943 to win the war by shattering German morale through radar bombing.104 As for the attacks on Dresden ten days later that achieved much more noto­riety, statements made afterward by Spaatz and other American air leaders were closer to the mark—those raids were little differ­ent in either conduct or intent from American bombing missions that began more than a year before.

Gradually, though, the mindsets of American air commanders morphed into a mentality that viewed radar bombing in the same vein as precision raids. Regardless of the equipment used, the em­phasis remained on the targets attacked rather than on the meth­ods used to attack them. American air leaders retained their con­victions regarding the importance of Germany’s industrial web and devoted considerable attention to pinpointing the key connections in it—even though they knew that they lacked the capacity to at­tack those strands with true precision bombing. What they did not lack were numbers. By fall 1944 Spaatz could regularly send one thousand bombers against a particular target, and did so.

The demand for rapid results—part of which stemmed from the airmen’s own desires to demonstrate that they could achieve “in­dependent” success—pushed them relentlessly onward, and the overriding war aim of unconditional surrender condoned the mas­sive destruction that followed.105 Arnold had told his command­ers in June 1943,“We are not in a position to ignore the costs and win by brute force.”106 A little more than a year later, Spaatz and usstaf could try to do exactly that. Throughout their portion of the Combined Bomber Offensive, American airmen failed to note that the emphasis on rapid results distorted the progressive ideals of efficiency and economy at the heart of their beliefs about the virtues of bombing. American bomber crews paid a heavy price for achieving dominance in the European skies, and radar bomb­ing wreaked a terrible toll on the German civilian populace. Still, the public statements of air leaders, as well as much of their pri­vate correspondence, often sounded as if their efforts were be­yond reproach.

In private, though, they also frequently agonized over the pros­pects of using brute force to secure victory—especially in terms of the legacy that it might foster. Eaker, who contributed the heavy bombers of Fifteenth Air Force to Spaatz’s campaign against Ger­many, commented at length on the dilemma. Spaatz had requested his views on “Clarion,” a plan designed not only to disrupt trans­portation links in small towns, but also to showcase the might of Allied air power to German citizens unfamiliar with its fury. Eaker did not mince his words on the proposal:

It [Clarion] will absolutely convince the Germans that we are the bar­barians they say we are, for it would be perfectly obvious to them that this is primarily a large-scale attack on civilians as, in fact, it of course will be. Of all the people killed in this attack over 95% of them can be expected to be civilians.

It is absolutely contrary to the conversations you and [Air Secre­tary] Bob Lovett had with respect to the necessity of sticking to mil­itary targets. . . .

If the time ever comes when we want to attack the civilian popu­lace with a view to breaking civil morale, such a plan as the one sug­gested is probably the way to do it. I personally, however, have be­come completely convinced that you and Bob Lovett are right and we should never allow the history of this war to convict us of throwing the strategic bomber at the man in the street. I think there is a better way we can do our share toward the defeat of the enemy, but if we are to attack the civil population I am certain we should wait until its morale is much nearer [the] breaking point and until the weather favors the operation more than it will at any time in the winter or early spring.107

Eaker—who had himself attempted to subdue German morale with bombs—did not completely dismiss the possibility that air power might break civilian will, but he thought that the current odds were low. Despite his concerns, Operation Clarion transpired in early 1945. On 22 February more than two thousand usstaf bombers, with heavy fighter escort, roamed over Germany bomb­ing and strafing railroad stations, marshalling yards, and bridges. The raf supported the effort with intense attacks on lines of com­munication in the Ruhr. The pattern was repeated the next day and produced a temporary halt to rail traffic throughout much of the Reich. Yet it did not significantly affect the morale of the pop­ulace. The bland statement appearing in the Army Air Forces’ of­ficial history, “Nothing in particular happened after the German people beheld Allied warplanes striking towns which usually es­caped bombings,” made a fitting epitaph for the operation.108

The remainder of America’s contribution to the Combined Bomber Offensive continued with the same intensity that Spaatz had displayed since taking command of usstaf a year before. Oil and transportation remained the two top targets. Winter weather made attacks on both difficult, but the magnitude of the air of­fensive ultimately made a difference. Every day between 19 Feb­ruary and 4 March Eighth Air Force attacked targets in Germany with more than one thousand bombers; Fifteenth Air Force heav­ies raided Germany on twenty days in February. Germany’s syn­thetic oil production fell from thirty-seven thousand tons a month in January to thirteen thousand in February, less than 4 percent of the production total for January 1944.109

usstaf actually dropped more bombs on transportation targets than it did on oil, with 54,000 tons out of the 74,400 dropped in February going to roads, bridges, rail lines, and marshalling yards.110 Marshalling yards in particular received an abundance of ordnance, most of which fell via radar bombing during peri­ods of poor weather.111 Those attacks produced telling results be­cause the sheer amount of bombs dropped disrupted rail traffic to such a degree that trains could not deliver loads of coal to Ger­man factories—and most industries, including synthetic oil pro­duction—operated by burning coal.

Coal delivery emerged as the truly vital strand of Germany’s industrial web, and the attacks against transportation lines and marshalling yards eliminated what remained of Germany’s indus­trial capability more by happenstance than design.112

To understand Air Power, it must be realized that the airplane is not just another weap­on. It is another means, operating in another element, for the same basic purpose as the application of Military Power or Sea Power—the destruction of the enemy’s will to fight. The true object of war has never been merely to defeat an army or navy. Such defeat is only a means to an end. That end is the destruction of the enemy’s will.

The fundamental difference between Air Power and Military Power is that Air Power can be applied directly against the objective sought, without first having to overcome bar­riers and obstacles such as swamps, rivers, mountains, and enemy surface forces.

• MAJ. GEN. FRANK ANDREWS, 15 OCTOBER 1936

I do not believe that air attacks can be stopped by any means known….The best defense is a strong offense. We must have an airforce capable of going out and meeting an ene­my before he can get under way.

■ MAJ. GEN. FRANK ANDREWS, 20 MAY 1937 12 May 1938

Army Air Corps First Lieutenant Curtis LeMay felt his stomach churning as he trudged through a heavy morning downpour toward the в-17 bomber designated “Number 80” and parked at Mitch – el Field, Long Island. LeMay was a handpicked member of three в-17 crews who would fly their bombers as “blue force” aircraft in the Army’s spring maneuvers against a fictional “black force” invasion fleet bound for the northeastern United States. The Navy, participating in a simultaneous exercise in the Pacific, had been unable to provide any ships for the black fleet. To remedy that problem, the enterprising Lieutenant Colonel Ira Eaker, Chief of Air Corps Information, had devised an intriguing substitute. He learned that the Italian luxury liner Rex, traveling from Gibral­tar to New York City, would be roughly seven hundred miles east of New York on 12 May, making it a superb double for an ene­my aircraft carrier. The Air Corps had received permission from General Malin Craig, the Army Chief of Staff, as well as from the Italian cruise line to intercept the vessel. LeMay, as lead naviga­tor for the mission, was to guarantee that the three B-17S found the Rex in the Atlantic Ocean at the appointed time.

The idea of intercepting the Rex before its theoretical aircraft would be in range to attack the east coast delighted Major Gen­eral Frank Andrews. As Commander of the General Headquar­ters (ghq) Air Force, the Air Corps branch containing all com­bat aircraft, Andrews touted the merits of the в-17 as the nation’s first line of defense to all who would listen. The Rex intercept would emphatically demonstrate the bomber’s ability to thwart an invading carrier force far from American shores, and Andrews aimed to assure that it received maximum publicity. The Navy had downplayed the successful results of an “attack” on the battle­ship Utah by seven в-17s during maneuvers the previous August. For the Rex mission, an nbc radio crew would ride in “Number 80” and broadcast the event live to millions of listeners across the country, while newspaper reporters, including the New York Times’s Hanson Baldwin, would also fly in one of the bombers. In addition, Major George Goddard, the Air Corps’ ace photog­rapher, would record the scene using a specially modified Graf – lex camera.1

Shortly after 8:00 a. m. on 12 May, the aircrews and journalists crowded into the three B-17S on Mitchel Field. Sheets of rain cas­caded across the runway, and clouds clung just above the frothing Atlantic Ocean. Besides the vile weather, the Rex had not updated its position from the day before, causing the thirty-two-year-old LeMay to want “to go somewhere and hide.” General Andrews had emphasized the mission’s importance to his crews before they boarded their aircraft, telling them that the Navy had buried the results of the Utah bombing last year, and that the American pub­lic needed to understand bomber capabilities. As the crews de­parted the operations building, Andrews looked directly at LeMay and said, “Good luck.”2

Fortunately for LeMay, an update of the Rex’s position arrived just before takeoff, allowing him to revise his calculations as he bounced along through turbulence so severe that the aircraft’s al­titude often shifted by more than five thousand feet in a matter of seconds. He found that his original estimate placed the ship much closer to shore than was actually the case; now the intercept would occur more than 750 miles out to sea. Moreover, an intense headwind slowed the projected ground speed of the в-17s. Before takeoff LeMay estimated sighting the Rex at 22:25 p. m., and nbc decided to begin its live radio broadcast based on that prediction. But like any good navigator—and LeMay was deemed the best in the Air Corps—his original estimate contained a time cushion. At t2:2i the aircraft entered a squall. Two minutes later the clouds began giving way to patches of sunlight. Dead ahead was the Rex. “It was all a movie. It was happening to someone else, it wasn’t real, wasn’t happening to us,” LeMay recalled.3

The impact of the intercept was immediate. Goddard’s photo­graph of two B-17S flying past the liner at mast level appeared on page i in newspapers around the nation. Hanson Baldwin’s fea­ture in the New York Times noted that the в-27s “roared through line squalls, hail, rain and sunshine today in a r,300-mile overwa­ter flight unprecedented in the history of the Army Air Corps.” The mission was “a striking example of the mobility and range of modern aviation.”4 Andrews was elated, yet realized that most officers on the Army’s General Staff—who saw bombers only as vehicles for providing close air support to ground troops—would probably view the episode differently. “I notice from some press reports that there is a tendency to indicate that the Army ghq Air Force is planning to fight a war by itself. I would like to correct that impression,” he diplomatically remarked to journalists af­ter the flight. “We must realize that in common with the mobili­zation of the Air Force in this area, the ground arms of the Army would also be assembling, prepared to take the major role in re­pelling the actual landing forces…. I want to ask that you do not accuse us of trying to win a war alone.”5

On 26 April 1945, with Anglo-American armies across the Rhine and Berlin ringed by Soviet legions, American heavy bombers flew their last mission in the Combined Bomber Offensive. More than 70 percent of almost 2,700,000 tons of bombs that the Army Air Forces and raf dropped on Axis Europe fell during the war’s last nine months.113 Most of the destruction to German industry oc­curred during that span, aided by factories finally producing at peak capacity and without slack to compensate for the damage. The nine months of intense bombing after achieving daylight air superiority paralleled the six-month requirement forecasted by awpd-i, AWPD-42, and Eaker’s April 1943 CBO plan, though none of those plans anticipated the substantial diversion of the heavy bomber effort to battlefield support, raf Bomber Command made sizable contributions to the air campaign, dropping 67,000 tons of bombs alone in March 194 5.114 The destruction of Germany’s ability to fight accelerated after Eisenhower released control of Bomber Command and usstaf in September 1944. By December, bombing had destroyed half of Germany’s supply of all petroleum products. The attack on German transportation lines, which be­gan in earnest in September 1944 and generally received second billing to oil targets, reduced the volume of railroad car loadings by 75 percent in February 194 5.115

The clamor for fast results removed the emphasis on efficiency that was a hallmark of American air power’s prewar progressive notions. When combined with the overarching objective of un­conditional surrender, the impetus for speed had dismal conse­quences for the attacker as well as the attacked. The requirement for total victory “with minimum suffering and loss for the victors… could justify almost any action that accelerated triumph,” re­marked historian Michael Sherry.116 The Combined Bomber Offen­sive killed 305,000 German civilians, wounded at least 780,000, destroyed the homes of 1,865,000, forced 4,885,000 to evacu­ate, and deprived 20 million of public utilities. By the third quar­ter of 1944 the air offensive had tied down an estimated 4.5 mil­lion workers, almost 20 percent of the non-agricultural labor force, in air raid-related activities.117 The goal of rapid success, though, impelled Spaatz and, to a lesser extent, Eaker to wage a campaign of aerial attrition that produced enormous losses for American airmen in the skies over Hitler’s Europe. By the end of the war Eighth Air Force had suffered 26,000 fatal casualties— more than the entire United States Marine Corps.118 All told, the Army Air Forces in the European and Mediterranean theaters lost almost 36,000 men killed.119 Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces combined lost 8,759 heavy bombers.120 raf Bomber Command, which fought for almost three years more than the Americans, had 55,888 men killed, a majority of whom lost their lives to the Luftwaffe’s formidable night fighter force.121

The United States Strategic Bombing Survey, produced after the conflict by a team of primarily civilian analysts, concluded that “Allied air power was decisive in the war in western Eu­rope.”122 It further surmised that had Allied armies not overrun Germany, bombing would have halted its armament production by May 1945, resulting in the collapse of resistance a few months later.121 Yet air power did not produce an independent victory in the European war, and the vast efforts of Allied armies and navies were essential to destroying the Third Reich’s capability and will to fight. The Survey acknowledged that strategic bombing com­plemented those efforts by achieving air superiority and reduc­ing the quantity, and quality, of materiel that the Germans could bring to the battlefield.

Though the dream of a distinctive “victory through air power” remained unfulfilled in Europe, American airmen would have one more chance to make it a reality. As Spaatz signed Germany’s un­conditional surrender to the Soviet Union in the smoldering Ber­lin suburbs just before midnight on 8 May, half a world away, the crews of 302 B-29S of Hap Arnold’s Twentieth Air Force pre­pared for missions against Tokuyama, Otake, and Amami-O – Shima. They had been burning Japan’s cities for two months. An­other massive effort to achieve a rapid, independent victory with air power was underway.

By the mid-i930s many air power advocates believed that aerial technology had finally begun to catch up to air power theory. The outdated Keystone в-4, a two-engine, fabric-covered biplane that served as the Army’s primary bomber when the decade began, gave way to all-metal monoplanes, the Boeing в-9 and Martin b-io. The open-cockpit в-9 could fly at 186 miles per hour at six thou­sand feet, which made it 60 miles per hour faster than any cur­rent Air Corps bomber when it first flew in April 1931. At above twenty thousand feet—the estimated maximum range of antiair­craft artillery—it was faster than the Air Corps’ primary fighter aircraft, the P-26! The b-io was faster still, recording a speed of 207 miles per hour at twenty-one thousand feet in 1932, plus it sported internally carried bombs, enclosed crew compartments, and a retractable landing gear.6 Both aircraft had only two en­gines, however, which precluded them from carrying heavy bomb loads for long distances.

To overcome this deficiency, Air Corps Chief Major General Benjamin Foulois submitted a request to aircraft manufacturers for a design capable of flying 2,000 miles with a ton of bombs at a speed of 250 miles per hour. Three companies responded to the request, and one, Boeing, built a four-engine model designed for an eight-man crew. That prototype, the хв-17, could reach 250 miles per hour at fourteen thousand feet, could operate as high as thirty thousand feet, and could carry 2,500 pounds of bombs 2,260 miles or 5,000 pounds for 1,700 miles.7 For airmen it was the manifestation of nirvana. Hap Arnold recalled that the в-17 was “the first real American air power…. Not just brilliant proph­ecies, good coastal defense airplanes, or promising techniques; but, for the first time in history, Air Power that you could put your hands on.”8 The Air Corps wanted to purchase sixty-five B-17S, but the prototype’s crash in October 1935, stemming from locked flight controls—and the War Department’s desire for a bomber better suited for supporting ground troops—limited the order to thirteen. They began arriving at Langley’s Second Bombardment Group in March 1937.

Complementing the в-17 was a device that significantly im­proved bombing accuracy—the Norden bombsight. In October 1931 Air Corps observers witnessed use of the Navy’s new bomb – sight, the Mark XV. Carl L. Norden, a civilian consultant, and Navy Captain Frederick I. Entwistle had developed the device, and in 1932 Foulois requested twenty-five of them for the Air Corps. The main feature of the black metal bombsight was a gyro – stabilized, motor-driven telescope. The bombardier looked through it during the bomb run, after having inserted the wind speed, al­titude, and bomb ballistics information into the bombsight. Its primitive computer updated the aircraft’s speed over the ground, which enabled the bombardier to control lateral aircraft move­ments via an autopilot. Meanwhile, he synchronized the telescope’s vertical and horizontal crosshairs on the target. If he had inserted the proper data and aligned the crosshairs over the proper spot, the bombsight would identify the correct point to release bombs and drop them automatically. Under ideal conditions at twenty – one thousand feet, he might place one bomb out of all those that he dropped into a hundred-foot-diameter circle surrounding the center of the target, although conditions in combat would rarely be ideal. Still, the Norden bombsight dramatically increased the possibility that an air offensive could sever the strands of an in­dustrial web. In 1933 the Air Corps ordered seventy-eight more of the devices, and by the late 1930s the Tactical School had its stu­dents estimating the number of Norden-equipped bombers needed to destroy particular targets. The bomber type used in those ex­ercises was the в-17.9

Japan, 1944-45

Results of incendiary attacks have been tremendous. The first areas assigned were select­ed on the basis of a compromise between industrial importance and susceptibility to fire. With a greater respect we now have for our fire-making ability and the greater weight that we are able to lay down, these new areas which have just been sent to you repre­sent more nearly the top industrial areas. They also appear to be most susceptible to fire attack, but they do not represent any compromise.

• BRIG. GEN. LAURIS NORSTAO TO MAJ. GEN. CURTIS LEM AY, 3 APRIL 1945

I am influenced by the conviction that the present stage of development of the air war against Japan presents the aaf for the first time with the opportunity of proving the pow­er of the strategic air arm.

• MAJ. GEN. CURTIS LEMAY TO BRIG. GEN. LAURIS NORSTAO, 25 APRIL 1945

Night of 9-10 March 1945

As midnight on 9 March passed into the wee hours of the next day, Major General Curtis LeMay could not sleep. Instead, he paced back and forth through the Quonset hut that served as the oper­ations control room of Headquarters XXI Bomber Command on Guam, nervously smoking his trademark cigars. The thirty-eight – year-old LeMay had reason to be anxious. That afternoon he had watched 54 в-29 “Superfortresses” take off from Guam for To­kyo, to be joined by 110 B-29S from Tinian, and another 161 from Saipan.1 As the Commander of XXI Bomber Command in Twen­tieth Air Force, LeMay had ordered the raid, and every aspect of it contradicted the fundamental tenets guiding the American ap­proach to strategic bombing: the heavy bombers would attack at night, without any defensive armament, at extremely low al­titudes between 4,900 and 9,200 feet, and they would target the most densely populated part of the world’s most populous city with an enormous amount of incendiary bombs.

About an hour before the first bombing results were to arrive, Lieutenant Colonel St. Clair McKelway, the public relations offi­cer of XXI Bomber Command, wandered into the Quonset hut. LeMay had given McKelway notice of the raid only a few days before and, in fact, had not notified General “Hap” Arnold, the Commander of Twentieth Air Force as well as Commanding Gen­eral of the Army Air Forces, until less than thirty-six hours before the attack.2 LeMay grimaced at McKelway through cigar-clenched teeth, which was actually his way of smiling—an attack of Bell’s palsy years earlier had frozen the corners of his mouth so that he could not raise them. After rhetorically asking McKelway why he was still awake, the man who had found the Rex in the At­lantic, designed the Eighth Air Force’s formation tactics, and led the grueling August 1943 mission against Regensburg, admitted: “I’m sweating this one out myself. A lot could go wrong.” Yet LeMay also believed that his new approach would pay dividends that made the risks worthwhile. “If this raid works out the way I think it will,” he told McKelway, “we can shorten this war. .. . I think we’ve figured out a punch he’s not expecting this time. I don’t think he’s got the right flak to combat this kind of raid and I don’t think he can keep his cities from being burned down— being wiped right off the map…. I never think anything is going to work until I’ve seen the pictures after the raid, but if this one works we will shorten this damned war out here.”3

LeMay’s progressive desire to end the Pacific War quickly and decisively with air power mirrored that displayed in Europe by Tooey Spaatz. Like Spaatz’s 3 February attack on Berlin, LeMay’s raid a month later against Tokyo was an attempt to speed the end of the war by obliterating the center of the enemy’s capital city.

The progressive notion that bombing would limit enemy civilian casualties had faded after more than three years of war; “pro­gressive” now meant hastening the war’s end and saving Ameri­can lives in the process. LeMay still believed that the precise de­struction of the key elements of enemy industrial power would end the war more quickly—and inexpensively in terms of Ameri­can lives lost—than any other approach. “If you don’t destroy the Japanese industry, you’re going to have to invade Japan,” he re­flected. “And how many Americans will be killed in an invasion of Japan?”4 Unlike Germany, though, targeting Japan’s industry posed a much different problem. Japanese cities contained few factories set apart from residential districts. Instead, a multitude of “cottage industries,” each employing fewer than 250 work­ers, spread throughout most urban areas. Despite this blending, Army Air Forces planners divided Japan’s largest cities into sep­arate zones that they thought contained the most factories, the most residences, and the most commercial enterprises.

In Tokyo, the city’s most densely populated residential district, not its primary industrial area, was the target for the B-29S on the night of 9 March. That guidance came from Brigadier General Lauris Norstad, who served from the Pentagon as the Twentieth Air Force’s Chief of Staff.5 Arnold had vetoed Norstad’s plan to firebomb Tokyo’s Imperial Palace on 8 December 1944 as retribu­tion for Pearl Harbor, though he disagreed more with the choice of target and its political ramifications than with the desire to bomb Japanese urban areas intensively. Since Arnold’s heart at­tack on 17 January, and his subsequent recuperation in Florida, much of the real power driving Twentieth Air Force operations now came from Norstad. When Arnold’s impatience with poor bombing results had led him to relieve LeMay’s predecessor, Brig­adier General “Possum” Hansell, from command in early January, he had sent Norstad to Guam to convey the news. On the night of 9 March Norstad was on Guam once again, asleep in LeMay’s quarters after having arrived from Washington DC that morning. LeMay viewed the visit as a threat since his own bombing had thus far produced results mirroring Hansell’s.6 “There are plenty of wolves around who were looking for the job—Norstad one of them,” LeMay recalled.7 In the meantime, Norstad and Arnold had called for a “maximum effort” against Japan, and LeMay planned to provide it. He would attack the target that he had re­ceived with as much strength as he could muster, although, as he informed Norstad, he would continue “working on several very radical methods of employment of the force.”8

Many of LeMay’s crews—who had regularly flown high altitude, daylight missions—were dumbfounded upon learning of his “rad­ical” tactics at their pre-mission briefing on 9 March, but as they began arriving over Tokyo shortly after midnight, Japanese time, they gained an appreciation for his approach.9 For the next three hours the 279 B-29S reaching their target dropped 1,665 tons °f incendiaries on a city constructed largely out of wood.10 The crews at the end of the two-hundred-mile-long bomber stream beheld an awesome sight—from more than one hundred miles away, the ho­rizon glowed a bright yellow. The B-29S razed sixteen square miles of Tokyo, including the area of the greatest population density, and, with the help of 30 mph winds, created a firestorm so intense that glass melted and water boiled from temperatures in excess of five hundred degrees.11 At least eighty-three thousand people died and more than one million survivors lost their homes.12 Sev­eral crewmen reported the smell of charred flesh in the cabin; the assault remains the world’s most devastating air attack.

Yet the comparative cost of rendering such massive destruction was much less than many airmen had feared. While LeMay had dismissed the negligible Japanese night fighter force, his antiair­craft experts and several squadron commanders had estimated that low altitudes might result in the loss of 70 percent of his bombers to flak.13 LeMay disagreed, contending that the heaviest amount of Japanese antiaircraft artillery was the high altitude variety, and that the remainder was ill-suited for aircraft flying between five thousand and ten thousand feet. His instincts proved correct, and flak claimed only two B-29S, with another twelve lost to reasons other than enemy defenses.14

LeMay and McKelway received initial word of the attack’s progress via radio from Brigadier General Thomas Power, the 314th Wing Commander, who orbited Tokyo at twenty thousand feet and colored in areas of a city map as fire consumed them. LeMay, his staff, and Norstad met Power at his aircraft and com­plimented him upon his return to Guam, but LeMay waited for more definitive results from в-29 photoreconnaissance aircraft dispatched to Tokyo on 10 March before proclaiming success. When the post-strike photographs arrived, LeMay and Norstad reviewed them and confirmed the enormity of the destruction that the B-29S had inflicted.

LeMay then issued a press release exemplifying his conviction that air power was the key to a rapid defeat of Japan: “I believe that all those under my command on these island bases have by their participation in this single operation shortened this war…. They are fighting for a quicker end to this war and will continue to fight for a quicker end to it with all the brains and strength they have.”15 Norstad added his praises as well. “After study of post at­tack photographs, it is very apparent that this last operation was most successful,” he wired Arnold. “The results far exceed my optimistic expectations.”16 Arnold notified LeMay: “I am excep­tionally well pleased with the March Ninth attack upon Tokyo. This mission, flown under the most difficult operating conditions, proves again the courage and efficiency of your command.”17

The great raid against Tokyo set the pattern for the next week of bombing, with the emphasis on incinerating the main residen­tial areas of Japan’s four largest cities. Coming on the heels of the Eighth Air Force’s pounding of Berlin and Dresden, LeMay’s at­tacks resembled Spaatz’s in terms of fury and destructiveness. They also demonstrated a willingness to target civilians directly rather than relying on the complementary pain caused by targeting nearby government offices (Berlin) or rail yards (Dresden). Norstad noted that in the Japanese case, the target “areas assigned were selected on the basis of a compromise between industrial importance and susceptibility to fire.”18 He would later provide LeMay with targets that stressed industrial production, yet for now, Norstad thought that destroying urban areas would wreck Japan’s will to fight and produce victory in the shortest amount of time.

While the revenge motive missing from the European war might have contributed to the targeting shift, the main reason for it was the same one that had led Spaatz to demolish the center of Ber­lin—the desire for a rapid end to the war.19 Despite their “preci­sion bombing” rhetoric, air commanders did not aim the Tokyo raid and those that followed in its immediate aftermath at Japa­nese industry. Their intent was to kill people and destroy homes, which would indirectly affect industrial production—an argu­ment that stood one of the chief bombing tenets of Maxwell Field’s Air Corps Tactical School on its head. Air commanders believed that the attacks would demonstrate to Japanese leaders that they could not stop the urban annihilation and cause them to end a futile conflict. If they failed to yield, the devastation would con­tinue unabated until bombing wrecked any remaining capacity to resist. Either way, air commanders surmised, air power prom­ised to save American lives.

To guarantee that promise, though, air chiefs had to produce rapid success—and produce it quickly enough to prevent the in­vasion of Japan. “The factor of time was taking on a new insis­tence,” Hansell reflected. “The invasion of the Japanese home is­lands—whose necessity had become an obsession with the Army planners—had been agreed upon. If air power was to end the war without a massive bloodletting on the ground, its applica­tion could not be delayed.”20 Victory via bombing would not only save American lives, it would also go a long way toward vindi­cating the quest of Army Air Forces leaders to make their orga­nization an independent service. The emphasis on speed, when combined with the overarching goal of unconditional surrender, would again produce enormous suffering for those on the receiv­ing end of American air power.

Still, the prewar progressive belief endured that destroying key elements of production would collapse the dominos connecting the enemy’s war effort. While targeting Japan’s densely populated districts, air leaders never abandoned their conviction that the precise destruction of industry would yield the quickest, most in­expensive path to success. McKelway referred to the Tokyo raid as “pin-point incendiary bombing from a low level, designed not simply to start fires or destroy a single factory but to start one great conflagration whose fury would double and redouble the destructive force of the bombs.”21 LeMay continued to stress the damage to industry even though Tokyo and the four raids that followed primarily targeted residential districts. Indeed, the tar­get description given to crews on 9 March referred to the “Tokyo Urban Industrial Area” and highlighted that the average popu­lation density of 103,000 people per square mile was “an aver­age probably not exceeded in any other modern industrial city in the world.”22

The Air Corps’ emphasis on the bomber’s independent mission continued despite the Army’s growing opposition to it. In the early 1930s, the Air Corps received some promising signals that the Army might support long range bomber operations. In 1931 Chief of Staff General Douglas MacArthur obtained from his naval counterpart, Admiral William V. Pratt, an agreement that the Air Corps would conduct the air defense of the United States and its possessions. Two years later, following Lieutenant Colo­nel Hap Arnold’s nonstop flight of five b-ios from Alaska to Se­attle, the War Department endorsed an Air Corps request for a bomber with a five-thousand-mile range, two-hundred-mile-per – hour speed, and two-thousand-pound bomb load that could take off from American soil to defend Hawaii, Alaska, and Panama.10 In 1936 the War Department also approved a request for a bomber with an eight-thousand-mile range.11

The War Department’s failure to sanction the в-17, however, indicated that the Army’s fundamental view of air power had changed little from the Mitchell era. The Air Corps received a har­binger of Army sentiments in late December 1934, when Brigadier General Charles Kilbourne, chief of the General Staff’s War Plans Division, sent a proposed Air Corps doctrinal manual to General

Foulois. Drafted by General Staff officers, the manual stated that success on the battlefield was the decisive factor in war and chal­lenged the notion that air power could win an independent vic­tory. “The effectiveness of aviation to break the will of a well – organized nation is claimed by some,” the manual observed, “but this has never been demonstrated and is not accepted by mem­bers of the armed services of our nation. So far, well-organized na­tions have surrendered only when occupied by the enemy’s army or when such occupation could no longer be opposed.”12

Foulois sent the document to Maxwell for comment by the Tac­tical School. Its faculty responded that the proposed doctrine was neither “reasonable” nor “progressive,” and returned aphorisms of industrial web theory to the War Department.13 Most General Staff officers dismissed such maxims, but when word reached them in 1936 that the school advocated strategic bombing free from ground commanders’ control, an Army team came to Maxwell to investigate. Led by Brigadier General Lesley J. McNair, the offi­cers received detailed briefings from Harold George, Larry Kuter, and other instructors on the Tactical School approach to proper bomber employment. McNair concluded that the presentations went far beyond the scope of instruction at other Army schools but refused to revamp Maxwell’s curriculum.14

Rather than trying to curb the airmen’s desire for independent operations, War Department officers restricted the airmen’s ca­pability to conduct missions other than Army support. Between October 1935 and June 1939, the Air Corps requested 206 B-17S. Only 14—one more than the original number approved by the War Department in 1935—were in service when Hitler’s Ger­many attacked Poland on 1 September 1939.13 Major General Hugh Drum, the Army’s Deputy Chief of Staff in 1934, reflected the views of many Army senior officers by stating that he saw no reason why an airplane’s range should exceed “three days’ march by the Infantry.”16 Drum’s successor, Major General Stanley D. Embick, was even more vocal in his opposition to heavy bombers such as the в-17. Together with his like-minded Assistant Chief of Staff, Brigadier General George R. Spaulding, Embick in October 1937 persuaded Secretary of War Harry H. Woodring to prohibit further procurement of four-engine bombers. Spaulding decreed that the Army would purchase only equipment that supported a current Army mission, and the в-17—which could be used defen­sively against a naval force, or offensively against an enemy’s vital centers—did not fit that criterion. He dubbed the proposed eight – thousand-mile-range bomber “a weapon of aggression.”17

Much like the European air war, the shift away from precision bombing against Japan resulted more from happenstance than de­sign. Despite Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall’s No­vember 1941 warning that Americans would “fight mercilessly” in the event of war, and that B-17S from the Philippines would “be dispatched immediately to set the paper cities of Japan on fire,” Marshall intended his admonition to deter Japanese mili­tary activity rather than to provide a blueprint for American ac­tions.25 The United States had only thirty-five B-17S on the Phil­ippines when Japan attacked on 8 December, and by March 1942 had fewer than thirty “Flying Fortresses” in Australia.24 The dra­matic raid by Lieutenant Colonel “Jimmy” Doolittle’s sixteen b – 25s, launched from the aircraft carrier Hornet on r 8 April 1942, was an effort to bomb specific industrial and military targets in Tokyo even though most of the bombs fell on residential areas. Hap Arnold and his Army Air Forces commanders intended to conduct a sustained, high altitude, daylight, precision bombing campaign against Japanese industries once they could place a sub­stantial bomber force within range of Japan’s home islands. The guiding strategy for a bomber offensive, Arnold insisted, would be the “destruction of Japanese factories in order to cripple pro­duction of munitions and essential articles for maintenance of eco­nomic structure in Japan.”25 Yet Arnold and his cohorts had lit­tle information on the nature of the Japanese industrial complex and its key components.

To fill that void, in March 1943 Arnold asked the Committee of Operations Analysts (coa) to identify the appropriate targets for an air campaign against Japan that “would knock [it] out of the war.”26 The coa, composed of civilian “experts” that included bankers and economists, as well as Army Air Forces officers, had directed their previous efforts to dissecting the key war-making components of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. The committee mem­bers began their examination of Japan in similar fashion by listing industrial linchpins that, if destroyed, would negate Japan’s capa­bility to fight. By November, they determined that steel was a key strategic target, and noted that the destruction of six coke plants, essential to the production of steel, would “cause a reduction of 30 percent of total Japanese steel capacity for several months un­til new sources of fuel could be found.” Moreover, “the immedi­ate effects upon the industrial process would be substantial. . . . It is believed that Japan’s power to wage war effectively would be gravely impaired probably within six months and certainly within one year after the destruction had occurred.”27

Steel was one of the six most important strategic targets iden­tified by the coa; others included merchant shipping, aircraft fac­tories, ball bearing plants, radar and radio facilities, and urban industrial areas. The coa did not stress one set of targets over the other, and the inclusion of “urban industrial areas” recognized the important contribution made by cottage industries to Japan’s war production—as well as the susceptibility of those areas to fire. “Japanese war production (aside from heavy industry) is pe­culiarly vulnerable to incendiary attack of urban areas because of the widespread practice of subcontracting to small handicraft and domestic establishments,” the coa report stated. “Many small houses in Japan are not merely places of residence, but workshops contributing to the production of war materials.”28 The coa rec­ommended attacks against urban industrial targets between De­cember and May to take advantage of probable weather condi­tions such as high winds that would maximize the damage from firebombs. The analysts also noted that striking many urban ar­eas simultaneously might “overwhelm the relief and repair facil­ities of the country as a whole.”29

At first glance, the coa recommendation of “urban industrial areas” as targets appeared inconsistent with the notions of strate­gic bombing that had guided America’s initial planning for World War II air campaigns. Both awpd-i, developed before the United States entered the war, and AWPD-42, designed soon after the Eighth Air Force had begun bombing Hitler’s Europe, stressed precision attacks against key centers of production to wreck Axis war-mak­ing capability. Army Air Forces planners intended those raids to achieve rapid, efficient results once the bomber force received the desired number of aircraft, crews, and logistical support. Japan’s industrial pattern, though, did not match Germany’s, and both awpd-i and AWPD-42 focused on the European war. The coa de­termined that Japan’s cottage factories were an important part of its industrial complex, and the only way to attack that compo­nent successfully would be through area bombing, awpd-i had not completely dismissed area attacks, and in fact had stated that such raids might occur late in the European war when German morale reached the breaking point.

By the time of the coa report on Japan, Ira Eaker’s Eighth Air Force—with Hap Arnold’s blessing—had begun using radar to area bomb German cities in attacks ostensibly aimed at industrial targets but actually designed to break German morale. In the case of Japan, the primary purpose of the coA-recommended attacks would be to wreck industry, although the raids would also kill large numbers of civilians. If the bombing worked as intended, it would provide the most efficient means possible to eliminate a key element of Japan’s production capability.

While the coa tried to identify Japanese targets, Brigadier Gen­eral Orvil Anderson, the chief of the planning section of Arnold’s air staff, asked the intelligence branch to investigate how the Army Air Forces might best attack them with incendiary bombs. The subsequent October 1943 report compared German cities to those in Japan, observing that Japanese cities were more congested than their German counterparts and that Japanese residences were much more flammable. Combustible material in residential construction could serve as “kindling” for attacks that would also destroy fac­tories and other necessities of war. The report created three cate­gories of vulnerability that applied to Japan’s twenty major cities:

Zone I—Most Vulnerable Zone, the commercial center of the in­ner city containing the most residential congestion, greatest mix of residences and cottage industries, and an average population density of ninety thousand people per square mile; Zone II—Less Vulnerable Zone, less congested residential areas containing port facilities, rail yards, warehouses and some completely industrial areas with a population density of fifty-four thousand people per square mile; and Zone III—Non-Incendiary Zone, the suburban residential, park, and completely industrial areas, containing fac­tories vulnerable to incendiaries but with fire-resistant business districts and low population density.30

aaf intelligence officers also estimated how many tons of bombs were required to destroy the two incendiary zones. They calcu­lated that six tons of incendiaries per square mile would suffice to destroy Zone I completely, while the total destruction of Zone II would require ten tons per square mile. They did not consider Zone I more important than Zone II, because Zone II contained more factories that would affect war production. Zone I, though, contained more people, and its destruction would produce a sig­nificant indirect effect on Japan’s war effort by killing and dislo­cating its work force.31 The recommended instrument of destruc­tion was the м-69 incendiary bomb, a 6.2-pound gasoline gel device tested against simulated German and Japanese residences at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah, between May and Septem­ber 1943.32

Despite the attention given Japan’s “Urban Industrial Areas” as potential targets in late 1943, they were only one of many possible target categories, and the emphasis remained on precision bomb­ing with that marvel of air power technology created by Ameri­can engineering prowess, the в-29 “Superfortress.” The в-29 was the war’s most expensive weapon system at $3 billion, compared to the next costliest arms project, the $2.2 billion atomic bomb.

The Superfortress traced its roots to a 1939 Army Air Corps pro­duction board that had included Charles Lindbergh. Board mem­bers called for a heavy bomber with twice the range of а в-17, while Arnold demanded an aircraft that could attack targets two thousand miles away from its home base. Boeing won the con­tract and took two years to build a prototype, which first flew in September 1942.

The в-29 suffered from production delays and design prob­lems, including four Wright R-3 50 engines prone to overheating, but contained unique features that made it a truly revolutionary design. The bomber sported the world’s first pressurized cabins (it had three—the cockpit, gunners’ compartment, and tail gun­ner’s compartment), enabling its eleven-man crew to fly at alti­tudes in excess of twenty-five thousand feet without having to wear the cold weather gear required by crews on B-17S or B-24S. The high operating altitude made the в-29 difficult for slow-climb­ing Japanese fighters to intercept. It had a top speed of 3 50 miles per hour, and a combat radius of 1,600 miles with twenty thou­sand pounds of bombs (roughly three times the bomb load of a в-17), which allowed it to attack targets in Japan from bases in the Marianas. It further possessed four gun turrets, remotely con­trolled via four General Electric analog computers, containing a total of twelve.50-caliber machine guns, plus a high-velocity 20 mm long-range cannon in the tail.33 awpd-i and AWPD-42 had both envisaged the в-29 for the European war, flying against Ger­many from bases in the United Kingdom and Egypt. The need for a heavy bomber that could fly the vast distances required to bomb Japan, combined with lagging в-29 production and the build-up of B-17S and B-24S in Europe, relegated the Superfortress to the Pacific theater.

There, the в-29 formed the mainstay of the Twentieth Air Force, created in April 1944 and directed from Washington DC, by Flap

Arnold. Arnold later claimed that the genesis for an independent bombing force in the Pacific under his command stemmed from his visit to bases in the region in autumn 1942.. “There was noth­ing else I could do, with no unity of command in the Pacific,” he contended. “It was something that I did not want to do.”34 That admission rang hollow, however. Arnold had no intention of al­lowing Army generals and Navy admirals to direct his high-priced bombers as auxiliary support for surface forces and divert them from their primary mission of destroying Japan’s vital centers.

The prospects for the B-29S to accomplish that independent goal received a substantial boost in late 1943 at the Sextant Con­ference of the Combined Chiefs of Staff. At this Cairo gathering, the Combined Chiefs approved the “Overall Plan for the Defeat of Japan,” which outlined grand strategy for the conclusion of the Pacific War. The document noted “the possibility that the inva­sion of the principal Japanese Islands may not be necessary and the defeat of Japan may be accomplished by sea and air block­ade and intensive air bombardment from progressively advanced bases.” Planning for a possible invasion would continue “if this should prove necessary.”35 Arnold was determined that it would not be. After several discussions with his Joint Chief counterparts— including a session with the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Ernest J. King, in which Possum Hansell argued for an independent в-29 force36—the Joint Chiefs sanctioned the Twentieth Air Force. The new air force would operate directly under the Joint Chiefs with Arnold serving as “executive agent” to implement their di­rectives. In actuality, the Army Air Forces Commanding General had secured control over his prized B-29S with minimum oversight, and had gained for himself his first ever combat command.

While he received limited interference from the Joint Chiefs in directing Twentieth Air Force, Arnold did have to contend with one higher authority—Franklin Roosevelt. In February 1943, the president proclaimed his progressive hope that air power might provide a relatively inexpensive victory in the Pacific. He called for the bombing of Japan to begin soon to prevent an American advance “inch by inch, island by island” that “would take about fifty years before we got to Japan.”37 Arnold promised that B-29S would begin bombing from China no later than March 1944, but that deadline did not satisfy Roosevelt. On 15 October 1943 the president wrote Marshall that he was “pretty thoroughly dis­gusted with the India-China matters. The last straw was the re­port from Arnold that he could not get the B-29S operating out of China until March or April next year.”38 Roosevelt contin­ued to press for an air campaign against Japan from China that he thought would bolster the Chinese war effort. At the Sextant Conference in late November, the president formally committed American support to Chiang Kai-shek and his Chinese army, and the impetus for а в-29 campaign from Chinese bases increased. However, production delays and logistical difficulties shifted the new proposed start date for bombing to 1 May 1944.

Arnold was desperate to fulfill Roosevelt’s wishes, not just be­cause they came from the president but also because he believed that the в-29 could make the decisive contribution to ending the Pacific War. His preference was to begin bombing from the Mari­anas once the Navy and Marines secured those islands. Roosevelt, though, had promised Chiang that American bombers would soon head his way. Until the capture of the Marianas, China offered the only friendly location from which B-29S could attack Japan—and even then, they had the range to strike only Kyushu, the south­ernmost main island.

When Arnold briefed Roosevelt in February 1944 on “Opera­tion Matterhorn,” the projected в-29 assault on Japan from China, as well as on his plans to bomb from the Marianas, he noted that Japanese cities were especially vulnerable to fire. Yet he also re­marked that he aimed to do more than simply create “uncontrol­lable conflagrations in each of them.” “Urban areas are profitable targets,” he observed, “not only because they are congested, but because they contain numerous war industries.”39 Roosevelt ap­proved Arnold’s plan, as well as the provision that would make the Army Air Forces leader the Twentieth Air Force Commander.40 The president’s action heightened the increasing momentum to get the Superfortress into combat—and to obtain rapid results with it once it finally began operations. But as with the European war, the desire for fast results would ultimately overcome the progres­sive desire to minimize casualties among enemy civilians. From the perspective of those on the ground, a quick victory did not necessarily equate to fewer lives lost.

Despite Arnold’s zeal to begin bombing, numerous difficulties delayed the start of “Matterhorn.” Mass production of B-29S had finally begun in autumn 1943, yet deliveries occurred slowly, and many of the new bombers suffered from problems because of con­stant design changes. Only sixteen of the ninety-seven B-29S pro­duced in January 1944 were flyable.41 To remedy the situation, Arnold created an array of “production modification centers” in central Kansas where design updates occurred en masse to the newly produced bombers; Boeing provided six hundred mechan­ics to assist. Once the B-29S received the necessary modifications to make them operational, their combat crews arrived and flew them to India—where they faced a new set of challenges to pre­pare them for their missions against Japan.

Brigadier General Frank Andrews, the newly minted commander of the ghq Air Force, had no intention of allowing the attitude of Embick and Spaulding to prevail. Handsome, athletic, and artic­ulate, Andrews graduated from West Point in 1906, served in the cavalry for eleven years before transferring to the Air Service, and directed the Air Service’s postwar European contingent for his fa- ther-in-law, General Henry Allen, who commanded American oc­cupation troops in Germany. The Allen connection gave Andrews an inside track into Washington DC social circles, and he used it to further his advocacy of an independent air force. After com­pleting the Air Corps Tactical School in 1928, he served in Wash­ington dc as Air Corps Chief of Training and Operations, where he befriended Florida Congressman Mark Wilcox, a fellow sup­porter of air force autonomy. Andrews then attended the Army War College and commanded the First Pursuit Group at Selfridge Field, Michigan. While at Selfridge he was a ghostwriter for Wil­cox, producing a pro-air power op-ed for the congressman that appeared in the Washington Star. n In 1934 Andrews returned to Washington DC to help draft plans for the ghq Air Force. Douglas MacArthur liked his work and selected him to command the new force that would contain all of the Air Corps’ combat aircraft— with a jump in grade from lieutenant colonel to brigadier general. General Drum concurred with the appointment. Ironically, he de­scribed Andrews as an efficient flyer who “has been in harmony with all the War Department has been trying to do.”19

In many respects, Andrews’s fight for air force autonomy par­alleled Billy Mitchell’s. Andrews had not been in Mitchell’s inner circle, but after Mitchell left the service Andrews became one of his closest confidants.20 Both men believed that the bomber was the key to obtaining service independence, and both jumped the chain of command and appealed directly to the public to secure a bomber-oriented air force. Andrews was perhaps the more re­strained of the two. Initially, he refused to proclaim his ideas too loudly, and he also developed contacts who helped him convey his message. In December 1936 he told General Embick that the heavy bombers under development were for defensive purposes only and that it was “utterly absurd to consider them as anything else.”21 One month later he provided Army Chief of Staff Gen­eral Malin Craig with a poker-faced endorsement of Representa­tive Wilcox’s bill advocating an autonomous air force—when in fact Andrews had drafted the proposal himself.22

The ghq Air Force Commander possessed ties to the govern­ment’s executive branch as well as its legislative. In late 1937 An­drews sent copies of confidential Navy reports complimenting в-17 bombing accuracy to Colonel Edwin M. “Pa” Watson, military aide to President Franklin Roosevelt. Andrews pleaded to Watson for additional B-17S, noting that the two engine b-i8s lacked suf­ficient range for coast defense.23 Ultimately, Andrews’s zeal for the в-17 resulted in a Mitchell-like banishment to an obscure Texas assignment. But unlike Mitchell, Andrews found support for his beliefs from among the Army hierarchy, and that backing rekin­dled his air power crusade.

Shortly after taking charge of the ghq Air Force at Langley

Field, Virginia, Andrews told his staff that unified Air Corps ac­tion was essential to convince the public that his new organiza­tion was viable; he desired “publicity that can’t be beat.”24 The creation of the ghq Air Force severed the Air Corps into two dis­tinctive units, with reduced authority for each air commander. The Chief of the Air Corps was now responsible only for supply and procurement, and developing doctrine. Meanwhile, Andrews reported directly to the Army Chief of Staff (or the theater com­mander in time of war), commanded all Air Corps combat air­craft in the United States, and assumed responsibility for training his forces. Those forces consisted of three wings: the First, com­manded by Brigadier General Hap Arnold at March Field, Cali­fornia; the Second, commanded by Brigadier General Conger Pratt at Langley; and the Third, commanded by Colonel Gerald Bryant at Barksdale Field, Louisiana. Each wing contained a mixture of bomber, fighter, and ground attack aircraft; observation units re­mained assigned to ground commanders.

Yet establishing a new command did not mean that it possessed its full complement of airplanes. The authorized strength of ghq Air Force was 980 aircraft, but Andrews complained to newsman Lowell Thomas in a 1936 national radio broadcast that his com­mand had only 350 combat airplanes, of which 190 were obsolete. The aircraft that Andrews desperately wanted were в-17s. After the crash of the хв-17 prototype in October 1935, he persuaded Brigadier General Augustine W. Robins, Chief of the Army’s Ma­terial Division, and Major General Oscar Westover, Chief of the Air Corps, to secure War Department approval to buy thirteen B-17S on an experimental basis. Andrews viewed the в-17 as the epitome of American air power, and on radio he voiced views on bomber invincibility that parroted those of the Tactical School. “I do not believe that air attacks can be stopped by any means known,” he told an nbc audience in May 1937. “The best defense is a strong offense. We must have an air force capable of going out and meeting an enemy before he can get under way.”25

Like Mitchell, Andrews stressed the bomber’s ability to de­fend America against a seaborne invasion, and he also revealed a progressive mindset regarding the bomber’s capacity to trans­form war. “The four-engined bombardment airplane, as a coast defense weapon, is one of the greatest steps forward in our air­plane development in recent years,” he told Air Corps Tactical School students in September 1937.26 One month later at the Army War College, he elaborated on how air power could best accomplish coast defense—by attacking the enemy “as far from our shores as we can reach him.” Only bombers such as the в-17 could accomplish that goal. “Bombardment aviation is, and will always be, the principal force employed in independent air opera­tions,” he remarked. “The measure of air power of a nation is re­ally that of its bombardment. It is the striking arm—the arm with punch.” Andrews then noted that the application of air power “was a new and entirely different mode of warfare” that sought the same objective as land or sea power—“the destruction of the enemy’s will to fight.” Given his audience, he avoided saying that bombers could independently achieve victory by destroying en­emy morale. Instead, Andrews observed that they could attack enemy will directly, without having to tackle austere terrain or enemy surface forces.27

Andrews repeated this mantra to Secretary of War Woodring soon after the start of the new year. He further told Woodring that the Army and Navy “have an important requirement for auxil­iary aviation to complete their combat teams, but… it must be remembered that the airplane is more than just another support­ing weapon.” Andrews called for the development of additional bombers as well as auxiliary aircraft for the Army and Navy. “Bombardment is the basic element of air power,” he insisted.

“Air power is as vital a requirement to the military efficiency of a great nation as land power and sea power, and there is no hope for victory in a war for a nation in which it is lacking.” He con­cluded by observing: “I cannot escape the conviction that the pro­gram I have proposed as a compromise to expediency, instead of being too progressive, is really not progressive enough.”28

Besides preaching the Tactical School’s gospel of air power, An­drews displayed his faith through flying demonstrations. He sent part of his fledgling в-17 force to the West Coast to participate in an August 1937 Army-Navy exercise simulating a seaborne in­vasion of the United States. In it, seven of his bombers success­fully attacked the battleship Utah by flying underneath a thick fog. When Navy umpires complained that the overcast prevented sailors from seeing the в-17s and taking evasive action, the bomb­ers attacked in clear weather at altitudes between eight and eigh­teen thousand feet. They scored hits with 12 percent of the bombs dropped—a higher percentage than Navy aircraft had scored in tests from lower altitudes.29

Andrews also used his bombers to convey political messages. In February 1938 Lieutenant Colonel Robert Olds led six B-17S to Buenos Aires for the inauguration of Argentine President Rob­ert Ortiz. The flight demonstrated America’s resolve to uphold the Monroe Doctrine in light of fascist encroachment in the area. De­spite strong General Staff opposition, Andrews secured the mission by having a journalist friend recommend it to Assistant Secretary of War Louis Johnson, а в-17 proponent. Afterward, the General Staff reiterated its opposition to further long-distance в-17 flights, and General Craig vetoed a request from the Army commander on Hawaii to fly bombers there from the West Coast.30

Such resistance did not keep Andrews from striking a blow for air power if the opportunity arose, and the Rex intercept in May Г938 was a notable opportunity. The morning after the flight, he received a telephone call from Craig, who told him that future flights over water by the ghq Air Force would not exceed a dis­tance of one hundred miles from land. The spark for Craig’s ac­tion perhaps emanated from Navy Secretary Claude Swanson. The Navy had downplayed the success of Andrews’s bombers in attacking the Utah, and the final report of those maneuvers drafted by Swanson and Secretary of War Woodring discounted the B-i7’s ability to navigate in clouds or accurately bomb a tar­get.31 The Rex intercept portrayed—for the whole world to see— a surface fleet at the mercy of long-range bombers despite das­tardly weather. That vision might cause the American public to question—as had Mitchell seventeen years earlier—the Navy’s viability as a first line of defense. If such logic produced an inde­pendent air force, the sea service could expect to lose not only its foremost mission, but also a large chunk of its budget.

Such rationale might also cause the Army to lose its air support for ground troops. An autonomous air force founded on strate­gic bombing as a war-winning instrument would provide little in­centive to devote money to ground support. Soon after the Rex incident, Secretary Woodring directed that no B-17S in produc­tion would be procured during fiscal year 1940. Instead, the Air Corps would confine its 1940 projections to light, medium, and attack bombers. General Embick barked that “our national pol­icy contemplates preparation for defense, not aggression…. The military superiority of… а в-17 over the two or three smaller planes that could be procured with the same funds remains to be established.”32 Embick asked for a joint Army-Navy board to study the whole issue of heavy bombers and to recommend lim­its “beyond which Army planes should not be developed.”33 In the spring of 1938, with the Great Depression continuing to rav­age America, neither the Navy nor the Army could be complacent about any issue that might affect service budgets. Thus, the im-

petus for Craig’s directive to Andrews may have stemmed solely from within the General Staff.

The first B-29S began arriving at Indian bases near Kharagpur in April 1944, and from there they would fly east for one thou­sand miles to their advanced airfields at Chengtu, China, the site of four 8,500-foot runways that more than three hundred thou­sand Chinese peasants had constructed by hand. Major General Kenneth “К. B.” Wolfe commanded the force of roughly one hundred Superfortresses, their crews, and support personnel that comprised the XX Bomber Command of Arnold’s Twentieth Air Force. Wolfe, a pilot from Denver and one of the Army Air Forces’ top engineers, had supervised в-29 flight tests and had organized, trained, and led XX Bomber Command from its inception. Still, he never anticipated the logistical nightmare that he would face to get his bombers positioned to raid Japan. To provide the nec­essary fuel and munitions, c-46 cargo aircraft typically carried one thousand pounds of gasoline and three thousand pounds of bombs on resupply missions across the “Flump” of the Himala­yas. B-29S had to shuttle fuel as well, and required seven flights from India to China just to build up the needed gasoline for one flight from Chengtu against Japan.42 As Twentieth Air Force Com­mander, Arnold tried to provide as much assistance as he could from his office half a world away. The stress took its toll, how­ever, and helped trigger his third heart of attack of the war on 10 May. For the next month Possum Hansell, who served from the Pentagon as Twentieth Air Force Chief of Staff, provided Wolfe with guidance while Arnold recuperated.

On 15 June 1944, after a preliminary raid from Indian bases against a Bangkok rail junction, XX Bomber Command finally launched the aptly named “Operation Matterhorn.” The attack against the Yawata Iron and Steel Works on Kyushu revealed that the beginning of the bomber offensive did not mean the end of adversity for the в-29 force. To conserve fuel the Superfortresses attacked at night in a bomber stream flying one behind the other; formation flying in daylight would have burned more gasoline. Ninety-two B-29S departed India for Chengtu; seventy-five made it to China; sixty-eight managed to get airborne for the 1,600- mile flight to attack the Yawata factory; of those, only forty-seven dropped their bombs against it—and most of the bombs missed. Darkness, smoke, and haze combined with inexperienced в-29 radar operators to produce the inaccuracies. Only one bomber fell to enemy defenses, though various malfunctions claimed an­other seven.43

Matterhorn continued, but persistent logistical difficulties and dismal weather caused it to occur in fits and starts. Most attacks occurred against steel production facilities, the only significant targets in range from the Chinese bases. Not until 7 July did XX Bomber Command again bomb Japan, and only fourteen bombers completed the mission. The next major raid did not transpire until 29 July, an attack on coke ovens at the Showa steelworks in An – shan, Manchuria, responsible for a third of Japan’s steel supply.

Arnold was grateful for the positive response that the B-29S raids elicited from the American press and public, especially in the aftermath of the acclaim received by the Army and Navy for the Normandy invasion, but he could not tolerate a feeble effort that produced minimal bombing results.44 He decided to replace Wolfe with an innovative bomber commander from the Euro­pean theater who had a sterling reputation but whom Arnold had never met—the Army Air Forces’ youngest major general, Curtis LeMay. Wolfe possessed an excellent engineering background, yet he lacked combat experience. Arnold wanted a combat leader—an “operator”—and LeMay ably fit the bill. He took control of XX Bomber Command on 29 August. A week later, he participated in a renewed attack against the Showa steelworks at Anshan by ninety-five B-29S that produced significant damage.

LeMay was not impressed by the success and instituted a rig­orous training program for his crews. It included daylight forma­tion tactics similar to those he had devised for Eighth Air Force, with an emphasis on “lead crews” to guide the formations and signal the remaining crews when to drop their ordnance. To as­sure that such “pattern bombing” could occur in all weather con­ditions, both the bombardier and radar operator in the lead air­craft monitored the bomb run so that either could take control of the aircraft depending on the amount of visibility present over the target. By carefully managing his supplies, LeMay increased the frequency and intensity of XX Bomber Command raids. He also increased bombing accuracy. “We are now ten times more efficient than we were in August,” he boasted to Arnold at the end of November.45

Pleased by the results, Arnold wrote Tooey Spaatz in Europe: “With all due respect to Wolfe he did his best, and he did a grand job, but LeMay’s operations make Wolfe’s very amateurish.”46 Ar­nold’s letters to LeMay transitioned from a salutation of “Dear LeMay” on 2.2 September to “Dear Curt” on 17 November.47 A month later, Arnold complimented LeMay for a recent attack on Singapore that placed 41 percent of the bombs within one thou­sand feet of the aiming point. “I follow the work of the XX Bomber Command in far greater detail than you probably think,” Arnold remarked. “The в-29 project is important to me because I am con­vinced that it is vital to the future of the Army Air Lorces.” In a handwritten note at the end of the letter, he added: “Tell all con­cerned how much the good work being done is appreciated.”411

By December 1944, questions of “where” and “how” to ac­complish good work against Japan loomed large. Ten months ear­lier the coa had examined target possibilities for Chengtu-based B-29S, and listed shipping concentrations, coke and steel produc­tion, aircraft factories, radar and radio installations, petroleum facilities, and urban areas. The coa cited seven urban areas in Kyushu, with a total population of 1,182,000, and noted that in raids against them, the “essential public utilities and thousands of small plants, as well as a number of large plants, would be destroyed.”49

In August 1944, though, coa members changed their minds. Based on their examination of attacks against German “urban in­dustrial areas,” they concluded that “the economic consequences of attack upon such areas [in Japan] are not likely to be large.” Acknowledging an inability to estimate the psychological effects of area raids, they pointed to “the successful results achieved in Europe by concentration upon precision target systems,” and rec­ommended that the в-29 force do the same. “Attacks upon ur­ban industrial areas should be postponed until ample forces are available after completing the attack on precision targets,” the coa advised. “The attack should then be concentrated upon the most important industrial areas which are Tokyo, Kobe-Osaka and Nagasaki.”50