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By Root 1359 0

and there was smoke towering above us. The radar run was perfect and we dropped in an open spot visually. The city was a “Dante’s inferno”. One night fighter made a run on us but we turned into him and lost him.’ He added in a letter home: ‘Fires were everywhere and the destruction wrought this night could have been nothing less than catastrophe.’ The airman was right: around 100,000 people were killed, and a million rendered homeless. More than 10,000 acres of the city, a quarter of its area, were reduced to ashes. Tokyo on the morning of 10 March looked to Philippines veteran Major Shoji Takahashi ‘like the biggest and most devastated battlefield one could imagine – Leyte on a gigantic scale’. He was stunned and disgusted when, in one of many reconciliatory gestures by the post-war Tokyo government to the United States, LeMay was given a Japanese decoration.

USAAF chiefs displayed an admiration for XXIst Bomber Command’s forceful new supremo that was untinged by any moral scruple. Gen. Lauris Norstad said apologetically to LeMay’s sacked predecessor, Gen. Heywood Hansell, ‘LeMay is an operator, the rest of us are planners. That’s all there is to it.’ In the nights that followed, similar incendiary raids were launched against Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe and other cities. Even when the bombers began to strike in daylight, losses remained low, and a hundred new B-29s a month were arriving from America’s factories. The airmen reluctantly acceded to navy requests to divert some effort to offshore mining operations: Operation Starvation, which began at the end of March, achieved dramatic results, for the Japanese were as short of minesweepers as of everything else. The first nine hundred mines to splash into the seas around Japan imposed further drastic cuts on its imports; when merchantmen were ordered to brave the sub-surface menace, a spate of sinkings followed. By the war’s end, B-29s had laid 12,000 sea mines, which accounted for 63 per cent of all Japanese shipping losses between April and August 1945.

But the Superfortresses’ main effort was directed against cities. Some daylight raids against aircraft factories provoked a strong response – one formation was met by 233 fighters. But so poor was the performance of both Japanese planes and their pilots that the bombers sustained a loss rate which never rose above 1.6 per cent, negligible by European standards. After one raid the Japanese claimed twenty-eight B-29s destroyed, when the real figure was five. In their desperation, the defenders also adopted kamikaze tactics, with Japanese fighters ramming American bombers. Even this expedient was not always successful against the huge, heavily armoured Superfortresses: one plane returned after suffering a suicide attack with the loss of only an engine. Its flight engineer, Lt. Robert Watson, said, ‘There was surprisingly little jolt when the Jap hit us, and our navigator didn’t even know we’d been rammed.’ Weather and atmospheric conditions troubled crews more than did the enemy defences: thermals created freak effects – one Superfortress landed on Saipan in July with a section of tin roof flapping from a wing leading edge.

Much historical attention has focused upon the willingness of Japan’s pilots to sacrifice themselves, but by this stage of the war few of those who flew conventional fighters showed much appetite for the fray: American aircrew often remarked upon their lack of aggression. Tokyo was attacked again and again. On 5 June, when Kobe suffered once more, defending aircraft made their last significant appearance; the enemy had decided to husband his dwindling aircraft and crews to meet American invasion, when it came. On the night of the 15th, a raid on Osaka destroyed 300,000 homes and killed thousands of people. The USAAF found itself struggling to identify worthwhile targets still intact: oil refineries were bombed, though these were marginal when the Japanese had little oil left to process; bomber losses fell to 0.3 per cent.

Moral issues troubled the Superfortress crews no more than their commanders: with characteristic