From Precision to Obliteration

The bleak production dismayed LeMay, Arnold, and Norstad, who all searched for alternatives to achieve success. Three days before he had taken charge of XXI Bomber Command, LeMay asked his friend Major General Fred Anderson, the Deputy Com­mander of Eighth Air Force Operations, for information on night photography that could assist in night bombing missions. “This weapon [the в-29] has tremendous possibilities, and I do not be­lieve that we have more than scratched the surface of new devel­opments, modifications, and methods,” LeMay stated. “Certainly, I will never permit the operations of a Command to which I am assigned to become routine and if there is a means of getting more bombs on to the target I propose to find it.”98 Arnold revealed similar thinking in his scribbles on a 30 January memorandum brought to him by his deputy, Lieutenant General Barney Giles. Giles noted that Japanese fighter opposition had increased in in­tensity over Tokyo and Nagoya, and wrote: “To offset this appar­ent concentration of fighter strength, we are instructing LeMay to direct his efforts at more widely dispersed targets and to engage in night fighter operations until our long-range fighters are avail­able for employment, which should be in the latter part of Feb­ruary.” Arnold marked out the second use of the word “fighter” and put parentheses around the word “night,” and then wrote “ok” across the sentence."

Norstad’s answer to overcoming the lack of precision was the same that he had provided Hansell—area attacks on the densely populated centers of Japanese cities. He had failed to get Arnold’s endorsement for his plan to commemorate Pearl Harbor’s anni­versary with a fire raid on the emperor’s Tokyo palace, though Arnold’s response indicated that he opposed the target, not the concept of incendiary attack. “Not at this time,” Arnold wrote on the proposal. “Our position—bombing factories, docks, etc., is sound. Later destroy the whole city.”100 He had not demurred earlier when Norstad directed Hansell to attack the center of Na­goya with incendiaries, which Arnold could convey to the press and the public as an attack on Japan’s cottage industry.

That rationale still applied, Norstad surmised, after the change at the top of XXI Bomber Command. Norstad suggested firebomb­ing the most densely populated part of Kobe, and LeMay com­plied. On 4 February—one day after almost one thousand B-17S targeted government buildings in Berlin’s main residential district with 2,279 tons °f bombs—sixty-nine B-29S attacked the cen­ter of Kobe with 159 tons of incendiaries.101 Norstad deemed re­sults of the raid “inconclusive” after reconnaissance photographs showed fire damage covering 0.15 square miles of the city and three of twelve industrial targets damaged.102 Eight days later he told LeMay to prepare to create a “conflagration that is beyond the capacity of fire-fighting control” in Nagoya.103 The following week LeMay received a directive stating that aircraft engine plants remained his primary objective, but “selected urban areas for test incendiary attack” were now second in priority.104

On 20 February Norstad requested a maximum effort, telling LeMay to choose between Nagoya and Tokyo and send as many aircraft as possible from the 73rd, 313th, and newly arrived 314th

Bomb Wings. LeMay countered that he needed additional time for training. Norstad responded that “circumstances beyond our control” dictated the mission, which historian Michael Sherry suspects was the savage fight for Iwo Jima then underway. Simi­lar logic had helped persuade LeMay to firebomb Hankow, and now the effort would support his own force—the capture of Iwo Jima would eliminate Japan’s ability to attack the Marianas and would provide an emergency landing field for battered B-29S that could not make it to the Marianas after a raid.

Yet another reason likely caused Norstad to demand an attack. On 16-17 February, Navy fighters and fighter bombers of Ad­miral Marc A. Mitscher’s Task Force Fifty-eight flew almost one thousand sorties over Tokyo, despite taking off in rain and snow squalls for many of their missions. They claimed more than five hundred Japanese aircraft destroyed, plus they also attacked the Nakajima aircraft engine factory and damaged it severely.105 The carrier raids garnered headlines in the United States, including from the New York Times, which described them as “the most daring operation of the Pacific war to date.”106 Recuperating in Florida, Arnold noted the attention that the Navy attack received, as well as another headline announcing the one-thousandth в-29 pro­duced by Boeing’s Wichita plant. He commented to Giles that if only sixty or eighty B-29S could attack Japan at a time, “a change in management is certainly in order.”107

LeMay needed little prompting in the aftermath of the Navy’s attack on Tokyo. On 19 February he sent 150 B-29S against the same Nakajima factory that he and Hansell had bombed so many times—and that the Navy had now bombed successfully—and once again scored no hits on it, this time at a cost of six bomb­ers.108 On 25 February, in response to Norstad’s prodding, XXI Bomber Command mounted its largest mission to date with 172 Superfortresses using radar to bomb Tokyo’s Zone I with 411 tons of м-69 incendiaries.109 The B-29S attacked at altitudes of twenty – three thousand to thirty thousand feet, though most crews bombed individually because heavy cloud cover prevented attacks in for­mation. LeMay had originally wanted them to return to the oner­ous Nakajima factory, but the prediction of dense clouds over the target—along with the lack of success against it thus far—per­suaded him to condone the area attack. Despite the B-29S’ disper­sal, the raid was brutally effective, and the bombs—which fell in the midst of a heavy snowstorm—burned out one square mile of the city. No B-29S were lost to Japanese defenses.

In his report to LeMay following the mission, Brigadier Gen­eral Thomas Power, commander of 314th Wing that had recently arrived at Guam, posed a question: If the crews had attacked at a lower altitude with a larger bomb load, would more destruction have resulted? The vile weather forced Power to fly his в-29 at a low altitude to Japan before climbing to twenty-five thousand feet to release his bombs, and the lower altitude reduced fuel con­sumption by producing less stress on the engines—which could have permitted his aircraft to carry more bombs.110 In the mean­time, LeMay dispatched 192 Superfortresses on yet another pre­cision strike against Tokyo’s Nakajima factory, and once more the results were dire; cloud cover obscured the target and most bombs fell in the city’s urban areas.111

LeMay began to accept the reality that the high altitude, preci­sion bombing of Japanese targets was impossible. In early March he ordered twelve of Rosy O’Donnell’s crews to bomb a tiny is­land near Saipan at an altitude of fifty feet with delayed-fuse bombs to determine the feasibility of a low-level attack.112 He also wrote Norstad:

We have been having a hell of a time with the weather lately. … If

we put our formations on top of it going in, the bomb load drops to

practically nothing. To try and beat these weather conditions, I am going to try to assemble a formation over Japan itself. I think we can get away with it a few times anyway.

Another out is to try some night bombing. I don’t believe it is an efficient method of operation but this is another case of a few bombs on the target being better than no bombs at all.113

LeMay knew that this letter would likely not reach Norstad before he saw Norstad in person; perhaps he wanted to provide a written rationale to justify the radical approach that he planned to take. On 2 March Giles had notified Arnold, “I am sending Norstad out to the Pacific to discuss questions with LeMay that can be ironed out only through personal contact,” and LeMay received word of the impending visit.114 He had little doubt what it meant, or that its impetus came from Arnold. “General Arnold needed results,” LeMay recalled. “Larry Norstad had made that very plain. In effect, he had said: ‘You go ahead and get results with the в-29. If you don’t get results, you’ll be fired.’”115

Norstad’s directive to attack Zone I in both Tokyo and Na­goya had not changed, and area bombing—with incendiaries— offered the best means to inflict some damage to Japan’s war effort as well as provide photographic proof of the damage ren­dered. LeMay knew that the night, low-level area attacks that he envisioned were certain to kill thousands of Japanese civilians, yet, based upon his calculations of Japanese defenses, they also provided the best chance for his crews to survive. His goal now matched the cold-blooded thinking that rationalized the obliter­ation of German cities—an air power-induced early end of the war that would save American lives. LeMay aimed to achieve it by losing the minimum number of his own men in the process,116 and he viewed his action as ethical as well as laudatory. “Actually, I think it’s more immoral to use less force than necessary, than it

is to use more," he later wrote. “If you use less force, you kill off more of humanity in the long run, because you are merely pro­tracting the struggle.”117

Like his counterparts in Europe, LeMay’s logic presumed that increased brutality would hasten victory, and that fewer people would die from his incendiary campaign than would perish if he failed to initiate it. That projected outcome, though, remained un­certain, and many Japanese would reach a different conclusion.