Momentum Builds

The Japanese refused to succumb to the massive March bombings, and LeMay lacked the capability to continue constant incendiary attacks. Despite the terrible toll of civilians killed and the enor­mous destruction rendered to their cities, the Japanese kept fight­ing w’ith the same intensity they had demonstrated before raids. American Army and Marine forces invaded Okinawa on i April and did not control the islands until 21 June—at a cost of almost fifty thousand American casualties, of whom more than twelve thousand were killed or missing.135

The mounting losses in the fight for Okinawa intensified the de­mand for an air power-generated victory that would forestall an invasion of the home islands. LeMay’s March attacks had expended most of his supply of incendiaries, and, with the exception of two mid-April raids against Tokyo and another against Kawasaki, no more firebombing occurred until mid-May after the Navy had re­plenished his incendiary stocks. In the meantime, he returned to precision methods with high explosive bombs to strike new tar­gets that he received from Norstad. Those targets consisted of air­craft engine plants, oil, chemical production facilities, and, after 16 April, airfields to support the Okinawa invasion.136 The B-29S also conducted extensive aerial mining operations in the Sea of Japan that severely restricted movement among the home islands and ultimately sank or disabled eighty-three ships.137

Arnold was eager to reignite the incendiary campaign, which, unlike mining, produced immediate empirical evidence of the dam­age inflicted. He urged LeMay to “put the maximum weight of ef­fective bombs on Japanese targets” and noted that the Army Air

Forces “alone are able to make the Japanese homeland constantly aware of the price she will pay in this futile struggle.” Observing that LeMay would control almost a thousand B-29S by July (he had received XX Bomber Command’s Superfortresses when Jap­anese troops threatened Chengtu early in 1945, and newly manu­factured aircraft continued to arrive in the Marianas), Arnold as­serted: “Under reasonably favorable conditions you should then have the ability to destroy whole industrial cities should that be required.” Arnold left no doubt that it would be. Yet he persisted in emphasizing attacks on industry, remarking that “it is apparent that attacks similar in nature to that against Tokyo have a most significant effect on industrial production.”1,8

LeMay returned to his incendiary campaign on 14 May with a daylight assault on Nagoya. A follow-on night attack against the city on 16 May was so successful that it no longer appeared on the Twentieth Air Force target list.139 Fire raids against Tokyo, Osaka, Kobe, and Kawasaki followed, and by mid-June a total of 105.6 square miles in Japan’s six largest cities were smoldering ru­ins with an estimated 112,000 civilians in them dead.140 The dev­astation came at a price—in May alone eighty B-29S were lost, though many more made it to the emergency landing field on Iwo Jima.141 Meanwhile, the Japanese kept fighting.

New president Harry S. Truman called a meeting with the Joint Chiefs on 18 June to determine, “Can we win the war by bomb­ing?”142 Marshall answered that the United States could not, based on the example of the European war, and outlined the plan for an invasion.143 At the gathering—which Arnold missed because of touring Pacific bases—Truman expressed his intention “of econo­mizing to the maximum extent possible in loss of American lives” and that “economies in time and money [were] relatively unim­portant.”144 Time, however, was vital to Arnold. He sent LeMay to Washington DC in his stead to brief Marshall and the Joint

Chiefs on the progress of the в-29 campaign and its prospects for eliminating an amphibious assault on Japan.145 LeMay told the Chiefs, as he had told Arnold on Guam, that by 1 October B-29S would have destroyed all Japanese industrial facilities and Japan could not continue fighting with its reserve supplies wrecked.146 Marshall fell asleep during his briefing.147 Preparations for Oper­ation Olympic, the invasion of Kyushu scheduled for 1 Novem­ber, continued.

When LeMay returned to Guam he intensified his campaign against Japan’s urban areas. He began incinerating twenty-five of Japan’s smaller cities, often with as many as five hundred B-29S on a single raid. Arnold fully backed the effort, telling LeMay, “We have the Nip where we want him.”148 On 16 July Superfor­tresses attacked Oita, a town of sixty thousand that contained no industry and only “a vital naval air depot” that was not a tar­get.149 LeMay complemented his offensive in late July by having his B-29S drop leaflets that warned of attacks on potential target cities and urged surrender. The ability to announce future attacks and then conduct them made a powerful impression on the Japanese, and actually contributed to achieving the prewar progressive aim to avoid civilian casualties—many people who read the notices survived LeMay’s onslaught by evacuating the cities listed.1-50

While the B-29S mauled Japan, a debate over the viability of the incendiary effort raged in Washington DC between members of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (ussbs), a largely civilian research team analyzing the impact of American air cam­paigns, and the Joint Target Group (jtg), an intelligence organi­zation created by the Joint Chiefs in September 1944 to identify and evaluate Japanese air targets.151 Based on their examination of European bombing, the ussbs members argued that attacks on Japan’s transportation network, especially rail and watercraft traffic, would produce the most benefit, followed by raids on oil, chemical production, and electric power. They discounted the ef­fectiveness of the incendiary attacks, which they compared to the raf’s effort against German morale, and recommended that Twen­tieth Air Force return to precision bombing.152