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By Root 1246 0

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 900 mines to splash into the seas around Japan imposed further drastic cuts on its imports; when merchantmen were ordered to brave the subsurface menace, a spate of sinkings followed. By the war’s end, B-29s had laid 12,000 sea mines, which accounted for 63 percent 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 percent, 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 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 airmen 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 determined to husband his dwindling aircraft and crews to await American invasion, when it came. On the night of the fifteenth, 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 percent.

Moral issues troubled the Superfortress crews no more than their commanders: with characteristic youthful facetiousness, every member of the 330th Bomb Group was presented with a certificate declaring that he, “having visited the Japanese emperor a total of … times to pay his respects with H.E., incendiaries and C-ration cans, having helped to clear the Tokyo slums and having aided in the spring plowing is hereby inducted into the royal and rugged order of EMPIRE BUSTERS.” In the fourteen months of the USAAF bombing campaign against Japan, 170,000 tons of bombs were dropped, most of them in the last six months; 414 B-29s were lost and 3,015 crew killed; about 100 Japanese died for each American flier, and 65 Japanese cities were reduced to ashes. The 1944–45 air offensive took place chiefly because the B-29, conceived in the very different circumstances of 1940, had been created to carry it out. The Superfortress programme cost $4 billion, against $3 billion for the Manhattan Project. America’s airmen were determined to demonstrate their ability to make a decisive contribution to victory. The fire-raising attacks did not match the impact on Japan’s economy of the submarine blockade, because they took place when