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went to the colonel and said: ‘I don’t care if you shoot me but I will never set foot in that airplane again.’” The man was stripped of his rank and given a ground assignment. Most aircrew persisted, however, recognising that war service as a flier was less dreadful than as an infantryman. “We knew how rough it was on the ground,” said Philip True. Ben Robertson, who started a tour out of Guam in February, decided after gossiping with some Marines about their experience on Iwo Jima that he was better off: “In our situation, it was pretty much556 a case of returning from a mission or not—there usually was not much in between.” A steady drain of bomber losses continued. Stanley Samuelson’s B-29 went down over Japan on 19 February. “Every day I get to hate this stinking rotten war more,” he wrote, the week before he died. Robert Copeland was killed when his plane crashed near Kobe on a mission on 17 March. Just two of his crew survived as prisoners.

HERE, then, was the force which Curtis LeMay inherited in January 1945 from Maj.-Gen. Haywood Hansell, who had led the XXIst Bomber Command for five months. Hansell declined an offer to remain on Guam as LeMay’s deputy. He was harshly treated, for his efforts had begun to improve the command’s performance. But the ruthless replacement of unsuccessful officers was characteristic of American wartime policy, and by no means mistaken.

LeMay’s initial verdict on his new appointment was even less indulgent than had been his view of the XXth Bomber Command in India. He wrote to Washington: “Maybe the road ahead557 always looks worse than the road behind, but after 10 days here this job looks much tougher than the one I just left…The staff here is practically worthless.” He submitted a long list of requests for named officers to join his headquarters. He complained that some unit commanders might be competent aviators, but lacked leadership skills. Robert Ramer, who arrived in the Marianas in January with a replacement crew for the 497th Bomb Group, recorded: “Morale was terrible…Nothing worked558.” LeMay introduced a stringent training programme, and also threw himself into devising new tactical methods, focusing especially on the use of incendiary bombs. In his first few weeks, the XXth Bomber Command flew eight missions against Japan, including two experimental incendiary attacks. On three of these, not one bomb hit the primary target, though he increased each aircraft’s load to three tons by dumping armament and equipment. It was evident to LeMay, though not immediately to his men, that the weak Japanese defences were the least of the Americans’ problems; that the huge weight of guns fitted to the Superfortresses was almost redundant. An airman wrote laconically: “General LeMay has taken over559 the Bomber Command, and he is going to get us all killed.” On 3 March, the new commander wrote to Arnold’s chief of staff: “I am working on several very radical methods of employment of the force. As soon as I have run a few tests, I’ll submit the plans to you for comment.”

2. Fire-Raising

LONG BEFORE Pearl Harbor, Japan’s greatest strategist, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, predicted that when war came, “Tokyo will probably be burnt to the ground.” While LeMay seized upon the potential of using incendiary bombs to destroy Japanese cities wholesale, he did not invent the concept. Before he had even taken up his post in the Marianas, a USAAF report declared: “vulnerability of Japanese cities to fire is still a tempting point for argument…That cities are a valid important military objective is certain…because of the heavy dispersal of industry…within the most congested parts of them.” As early as September 1944560, at a meeting of the Committee of Operations Analysts in Washington, Cmdr. William McGovern of OSS argued strongly for exploiting incendiary attack: “The panic side of the Japanese is amazing…[Fire] is one of the great things they are terrified at from childhood.” McGovern, like most of his colleagues, was “all in favour of Japanese area bombing.”

The fire-raisers got their way.