Progressive Legacies

It is a fundamental principle of democracy that personnel casualties are distasteful. We will continue to fight mechanical rather than manpower wars.

• GEN. HENRY H. ARNOLD, 1944

Only air power can frequently circumvent enemy forces and attack strategic centers of gravity directly. Other components, on the other hand, need to fight their way in— normally with large casualties. Air operations—especially with modern weapons and accuracy as used in the Gulf war—are very much likely to result in fewer casualties to either side. Air power then becomes quintessential^ an American form of war; it uses our advantages of mobility and high technology to overwhelm the enemy without spill­ing too much blood, especially American blood.

• COL JOHN A. WARDEN 111,1992

2 September 1945

Tooey Spaatz stood on the deck of the uss Missouri and watched a seemingly endless stream of B-29S pass low overhead. The spec­tacle, which also included vast formations of Army Air Forces and Navy fighters, was an awesome display of American air power fol­lowing the formal Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay. Spaatz was the only American representative present at each of the war’s ma­jor surrender ceremonies—at Rheims and Berlin in May 1945, as well as at Tokyo—and he could take grim satisfaction in know­ing that much of the devastation that he observed in the two en­emy capitals resulted from men and aircraft that he had led. As he watched on the Missouri with the other Allied representatives, he was the acknowledged commander of the world’s mightiest aer­ial strike force.

Postwar Perceptions

The American public and its political leaders also acknowledged the Army Air Forces’ contribution to concluding the Pacific War, and they viewed that contribution from a progressive perspective. Yet their definition of “progressive air power”—had they used such a term—would have now mirrored the definition that air com­manders would have given it since at least the summer of r943 in Europe and March 1945 *п the Pacific: air power designed to end the war as rapidly as possible with the fewest American lives lost in the process. Most Americans believed that the atomic at­tacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had accomplished exactly that. That conviction—along with the belief that the nation would rely on strategic bombers and atomic bombs to decide a future con­flict—enabled airmen to embrace the grail of service autonomy in September 1947. As Billy Mitchell had predicted, the new U. S. Air Force became the nation’s first line of defense, and the key to defending the country now rested on the ability to attack and de­stroy any potential aggressor with air power.

For American airmen, World War II did not perfectly fit the progressive ideals that many of them had held on the eve of the conflict. They had entered the war believing that they possessed the necessary technology and a blueprint for using it that would enable them to wage war in pristine fashion. Relying on high altitude, daylight precision bombing, they would sever the key strands of an enemy’s industrial web, bring its war-making ca­pability to a halt, and compel surrender—while at the same time they would validate the need for a separate air force. The entire process would be quick, inexpensive, and efficient—the precise destruction of a small number of vital targets would risk few air­men and would kill a small number of civilians, thus averting the carnage from a clash of armies like that generated by World War I’s Western Front.

Although the character of World War II matched that envi­sioned by Mitchell and Air Corps Tactical School instructors—a global struggle against enemies viewed as direct threats to Amer­ica’s security—the conflict soon developed its own momentum that proved difficult to restrain. “Unconditional surrender” was an outgrowth of the war’s evolution, and unconditional surren­der and rapid victory were not complementary objectives against fanatical foes like Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. The former goal demanded the destruction not only of war-making capability, but also of hostile governments and the way of life that they fos­tered, and those objectives could not be obtained quickly. In addi­tion, the aim of unconditional surrender may have inadvertently lengthened the war by causing German and Japanese leaders to fight harder than they might otherwise have done since early ca­pitulation provided them with no benefit.1 When combined with the goal of rapid victory, unconditional surrender produced such brutal applications of force as the area bombing seen in both the­aters. In the meantime, unexpected “frictional” developments fur­ther shaped the air campaigns and undercut the progressive pre­dictions of prewar planners.2 Diversions and production problems delayed the buildup of heavy bomber forces; key industrial tar­gets proved difficult to identify and destroy under wartime condi­tions; weather, wind, and climate produced constant challenges to effective bombing; and bombers, especially in the European the­ater, were much more vulnerable than anticipated.

Given the aim of rapidly destroying the fascist regimes, the aer­ial technology available, and the impact of friction on the technol­ogy’s employment, air power was not the antiseptic instrument of finite destruction that Mitchell and Tactical School instructors had forecasted, nor was it necessarily “cheap” in terms of men or money. American bomber crews in Europe paid a heavy price for their attempts to gain daylight air superiority over the conti­nent in time to permit an invasion of France in spring 1944. The в-29 was the war’s costliest weapon, which contributed to Hap Arnold’s zeal to gain a return on the investment in it. The desire to achieve quick success, and hence limit American losses, con­sistently trumped the desire to limit enemy civilian casualties— and also produced losses among civilian populations in occupied countries.

Still, many airmen during the war continued to think in prewar progressive terms. They sincerely believed that their bombing ben­efited all concerned because they were certain that it guaranteed a quicker end of the war than a reliance on surface forces alone— and the sooner the killing stopped, the better for the world as a whole. Their assertion presumed a strategic equation: a quicker end of the war = fewer deaths. But that logic was uncertain, even regarding the likelihood of saving American lives, because other outcomes were possible. For instance, reducing the incendiary ef­fort against Japan, eliminating the atomic bombs, and increasing aerial mining might, in concert with a vigorous Soviet advance in Asia, have produced Japanese surrender later than mid-August but before the i November date scheduled for Operation “Olym­pic.” Such an outcome would have likely saved more American lives by exposing в-29 crews to less danger than they endured from overflying Japanese cities, and probably would have pro­duced fewer civilian casualties. Similarly, a less intense bombing of German urban areas, and greater emphasis on close air support, might have yielded victory in more time but with fewer losses— for all concerned—than actually occurred. The faith of air leaders in the perceived progressive merits of strategic bombing—which they viewed as the surest path to service autonomy—led them to dismiss alternatives for using heavy bombers in an auxiliary role to surface forces.

For most air commanders, the great dilemma was bow stra­tegic bombing would hasten the war’s end. Assuming that they correctly identified the targets that would fatally damage the en­emy’s war effort and destroyed them, what assurances did they have that the destruction would induce rapid surrender? Curtis LeMay told Arnold in June 1945 that the war would end by 1 October because by then B-29S would have destroyed all Japa­nese industry.3 Likewise, the Committee of Operations Analysts often estimated how the loss of certain industries in the United States would impact America’s war-making capability, and then applied those projections to Germany and Japan. Such mirror­imaging presumed “rational” behavior and downplayed the ene­my’s will to keep fighting (it downplayed American will as well). Most air commanders understood that will was an essential part of the enemy’s war effort and that breaking it would produce col­lapse. Indeed, awpd-i noted that an attack against German morale late in the war might prove decisive, and both Eaker and Spaatz launched area attacks designed to break Germany’s will to fight. LeMay’s initial incendiary raids—as well as the atomic bombs— targeted Japan’s will. Yet airmen could only guess at the impact such bombing might have on speeding the end of the war, espe­cially against the fanatical opposition that they faced.

The time element had a significant impact on the conduct of the air campaigns in both Europe and the Pacific, and Arnold was al­ways conscious of a ticking clock as he pressed his commanders to achieve results independent of land and sea forces—the pur­suit of service autonomy added to the impetus for rapid results. At great cost, the Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces achieved air supe­riority over the European continent, but they could not forestall the Normandy invasion, nor could they score a knockout blow against Germany before ground forces overran much of the coun­try. Eaker and Spaatz relied on widespread radar bombing—preci­sion methods were useless for much of the weather encountered— against Germany’s war-making capability as well as its will, and radar bombing devastated the residential areas of German cities. The goal of rapid victory subsumed all other prewar progressive rationales; it sanctioned heavy losses of aircrews and civilians, and air commanders relentlessly pursued that goal convinced that it assured fewer losses than would the war’s continuation.

That logic guided the bombing of Japan as well as Germany. Against Japan, weather conditions foiled high altitude precision bombing, and the nature of Japanese industry would have made the utility of such bombing problematic even in the absence of jet stream winds. Air commanders on the Marianas could point to a nine-month campaign that was remarkably efficient from the American perspective. For the loss of fewer than 2,500 air­men, the в-29 offensive (punctuated by two atomic bombs) in­cinerated almost all of Japan’s most populous cities and helped to compel a surrender prior to an invasion of the home islands. Untold numbers of Americans—and Japanese—were spared from savage ground fighting that might have persisted for more than a year. Precluding that combat cost the lives of at least 330,000 Japanese civilians.

In the war’s aftermath, many airmen continued to view air pow­er’s contribution to victory in prewar progressive terms. Shortly after he replaced Arnold as Commanding General of the Army Air Forces in 1946, Spaatz wrote an article for Foreign Affairs that lauded strategic bombing’s ability to minimize the war’s to­tal costs:

Our land and sea forces, supported by air, could be expected to con­tain the most advanced echelons of our enemies, and gradually drive their main armies into their heavily fortified citadels. But the essen­tial question remained. How was their military power to be crushed behind their ramparts without undertaking an attritional war which might last years, which would cost wealth that centuries alone could repay and which would take untold millions of lives? . . . The devel­opment of a new technique was necessary. Some new instrument had to be found…. The outcome of the total war hung in the balance un­til that new technique had been found and proved decisive in all-out assault. The new instrument was Strategic Air Power.4

After the war, LeMay contended that his bombers had efficiently destroyed Japan’s war-making capability before Hiroshima, and noted that the atomic bomb “was anticlimactic in that the verdict was already rendered.”5 He also maintained that his bombing, in producing a quicker end to the conflict, had saved Japanese lives as well as American. LeMay further claimed—in his memoirs— that some postwar Japanese understood his motives and had re­acted positively to them.6

Ira Eaker agreed that civilian death and destruction caused by bombing was regrettable but necessary. He observed after the war that Allied leaders “deeply regretted the necessity of endan­gering ‘defenseless women and children’ in the vigorous prosecu­tion of their campaigns, but all realized that such was necessary to prevent a greater loss of human life.” Eaker also stressed that the goal of quickly ending the war dictated many of his decisions as an air commander, and he referenced the 1944 bombing of the medieval monastery at Monte Casino to make his point. “Our purpose in bombing Monte Casino was the hope that it would break the stalemate; save future U. S. and Allied casualties; and affect [sic] an earlier end of the campaign against the Germans in Italy,” he recalled. “Thus, we did not permit our knowledge that on top of Monte Casino was one of the oldest churches in Chris­tendom, prevent us from accomplishing our primary mission— the earliest end of the war.”7

Possum Hansell argued that the European war could have ended sooner if American political and military leaders had adhered to awpd-i, the plan that he had helped craft in August Г941 to guide a bomber offensive against Germany. “If we had followed the plan which was eventually approved the devastation which char­acterized Germany in March of 1945 might have been imposed by mid-summer of 1944,” he maintained. “Invasion, if it were needed under those conditions, might have been an operation of ‘occupation’ against slight resistance.”8 LeMay agreed that an in­vasion of France was not essential to produce Allied victory once the Army Air Forces had achieved daylight air superiority over the continent. “I believed that once we had the complete upper hand in the air we could have waited for an inevitable German capitu­lation,” he contended in 1982.9 Hansell remarked after the war that achieving control of the air sped victory in Europe, making it less costly for the Allies. “The air offensive did achieve the lat­ter part of the objective of awpd-i,” he wrote. “It did make an invasion feasible without excessive losses. It did achieve the de­feat of the German Air Force. Without that achievement, there would have been no invasion.”10