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bombs struck the flight deck, prompting a huge explosion below: “The planes just behind the elevator were spotted, ready for take-off, engines going, fully loaded with Tiny Tim [rockets], 500- and 1000-pound bombs. Sheets of flame came up and then we really started to smoke … Men were jumping off the flight deck … Two destroyers were picking people up out of the sea directly behind us … a lot of them injured, burned … We were exploding and on fire until the middle of the next afternoon.” Father O’Callaghan, the ship’s Catholic chaplain, was giving extreme unction to a dying man when a Tiny Tim rocket ignited and flew over his head. Most of the 4,800 crewmen on the Franklin were evacuated in the first hours after the attack, but 772 stayed aboard, waging an epic struggle to keep the ship afloat. The U.S. Navy had learned much about damage control since 1941, and all of it was put to use saving the carrier. As ever, some men behaved wonderfully well—and others less well.

Stephen Juricka said: “I was amazed [when] some of our big, good-looking officers whom you would expect to be towers of strength turned out to be little pipsqueak people who needed bucking up all the time, and some other little nondescript 135-pounders turned out to be real tigers … It was the little people who really came through … Seven officers left the Franklin over the highline [a breeches-buoy link to the cruiser Santa Fe] in spite of orders to return to the ship, and Captain Gehres reported every one of them and recommended court-martial.”

As early as 1939, the USAAF’s Gen. Carl “Tooey” Spaatz had anticipated using America’s B-29 Superfortress bomber, then only in the early stages of development, to attack Japan. Sporadic air raids took place in 1944, some launched from India, others from fields constructed at huge cost and in the face of painful local difficulties in China. A combination of technical difficulties with the early B-29s, the distance to Japan, together with shortcomings of leadership, navigation and bomb aiming, caused the USAAF’s efforts to make little impact. Only in 1945 was the offensive dramatically transformed and intensified, first, by establishment of a huge network of bases on the Marianas; second, by large deliveries of aircraft; and finally, by the ascent of Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay to leadership of the XXI Bomber Command.

LeMay was the architect of the first great fire-raising raid on Tokyo on 9 March 1945. He dispatched 325 aircraft to attack by night at low level—between 6,000 and 9,000 feet. Torrents of incendiaries fell and exploded with their characteristic sharp crackle. Only twelve bombers were lost, most destroyed by updrafts from the blazing city. Forty-two suffered flak damage, but the Japanese defences were feeble. A pilot wrote laconically next day: “We took off last night at 1835 and after a dull trip hit the coast of Japan at 0210. Even before we made landfall we could see the fires at Tokyo. We were at 7,800 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 a Philippines veteran, Maj. 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 postwar Tokyo government to the United States, LeMay was given a Japanese decoration.

The USAAF chiefs displayed an admiration for the XXIst Bomber Command’s forceful new supremo who was untinged by any moral scruple. Gen. Lauris Norstad said apologetically to LeMay’s sacked predecessor, Gen. Haywood Hansell, “LeMay is an operator,