Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [195]
The Japanese people found themselves at last within range of American bombers at a time when Allied moral sensibility was numbed by kamikaze attacks, revelations of savagery towards POWs and subject peoples, together with general war weariness. Joined to these considerations was the messianic determination of senior American airmen to be seen to make a decisive contribution to victory, to secure their future as a service independent of the army. The U.S. acquired the means to do terrible things to the Japanese people many months before “Little Boy” reached Tinian.
Claire Chennault, former freelance leader of the “Flying Tigers” translated into a U.S. general commanding the Fourteenth Air Force in China, was among the early advocates of intensive bombing of Japan. With five hundred aircraft, claimed this considerable charlatan, he could “burn out the industrial heart of the Empire with fire-bomb attacks on the teeming bamboo ant-heaps of Honshu and Kyushu.” U.S. air chief Gen. “Hap” Arnold responded sternly that “the use of incendiaries541 against cities was contrary to our national policy of attacking military objectives.” By 1943, however, visitors to the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah beheld the incongruous sight of a small Japanese village, faithfully reproduced in wood, each of two dozen houses with its tatami—straw-matting floor—and furniture. This phantom community was razed to the ground by bombers, demonstrating how easily the feat could be emulated and multiplied in the cities of Japan, where housing was of the flimsiest construction.
At about the same time, air staff identified eight priority industrial target systems in Japan, Manchuria and Korea. An October 1943 study noted that just twenty Japanese cities contained 22 percent of the nation’s population. In June 1944, the bleakly named Joint Incendiary Committee assessed six urban areas on Honshu. It subsequently reported that if 70 percent of these six could be destroyed, 20 percent of Japanese production would be lost and 560,000 casualties inflicted. Arnold was told that it would be “cheap” to test the concept. The humanitarian issues involved, shrugged the researchers, were for national policy-makers to address.
It had always been a matter of course that the enemy nation which wrought the attack on Pearl Harbor should be bombed. Only the means were in question. In September 1942 the B-29 Superfortress, largest bomber the world had ever seen, made its maiden flight. This was the aircraft designated to wreak havoc upon Japan. Its size and sophistication, indeed the hubris of its very creation, represented monuments to American wealth and ingenuity. Each aircraft cost over half a million dollars, five times the price of an RAF Lancaster. The construction of a B-29 required 27,000 pounds of aluminium, over a thousand pounds of copper, 600,000 rivets, nine and a half miles of wiring, two miles of tubing. It was the first pressurised bomber in the world, with an operating radius of sixteen hundred miles, a crew of twelve and a battery of defensive armament.
The hundredth B-29 was accepted from its makers in January 1944, and a thousand were built by November of that year. Yet Tokyo was 3,900 miles from Hawaii. Until America possessed bases in the western Pacific, the only runways from which B-29s could operate against Japanese-held territory had to be constructed in India and China. The first squadrons reached India in the early summer of 1944, to encounter unwelcome squalor. “As we piled out542 of the airplane, anxious to see our new base,” wrote a crewman, “my heart sank. This was not the civilized war we had expected to fight, for there were no barracks, no paved streets, nothing but insects, heat and dirt.” Their first raid, on 5 June, against Japanese railway