Fire from the Sky

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