Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [204]
By March 1945, the higher ranks of the USAAF were obsessed with the urgency of being seen to strike a decisive blow with B-29s. “It is air power that this Country561 has after the War that we must think of, as well as now,” a senior USAAF officer wrote to MacArthur’s air chief, George Kenney. The airmen sought to justify the huge resources committed to the B-29 programme, to prove the capabilities of independent strategic air power before the navy and army accomplished the defeat of Japan. The USAAF’s leadership was almost as traumatised by the failures of the first six months of B-29 operations as had been the RAF in 1941 by the ineffectiveness of its precision-bomber attacks on Germany. The American answer was the same as the British one had been. A USAAF report of 6 December 1944, pre-dating by months LeMay’s fire-raising operations, asserted blandly: “To date the Twentieth562 Air Force has not been capable of effectively bombing small precision targets by radar. Long-range forecasts indicate that weather will get progressively worse over the homeland of Japan until mid-summer…With the present status of radar, in order to get maximum utilization of the forces available, it may be necessary to accept area bombing for a major portion of the effort.”
If striking at cities was the best means of inflicting damage upon the enemy’s industrial base with available navigational and bomb-aiming technology, then this was what the XXth Bomber Command would do—and what American aircraft had been doing in Europe for months, albeit maintaining a notional commitment to destroying specified industrial targets. As when Britain’s Bomber Command introduced area attack against Germany in 1942, the USAAF’s new policy in the spring of 1945 was driven as much by a perception of operational necessity as one of strategic desirability. The transformation of the Pacific bomber offensive was the work of LeMay, but he faced no opposition from the USAAF’s chiefs in Washington. They simply wanted results, and were not disposed to quibble about how these were achieved. “Whereas the adoption of nonvisual563 bombing techniques in Europe signified that civilian casualties were a matter of decreasing concern,” Conrad Crane has written, “by the time such methods were applied against Japan, civilian casualties were of no concern at all.”
LeMay laconically described his policy: “Bomb and burn ’em till they quit.” His most famous—or, in the eyes of critics, most notorious—stroke was the pioneering fire-raising raid on Tokyo, Operation Meetinghouse, launched on the night of 9 March 1945. For the first time he instructed crews to attack at low altitude, where aiming accuracy was much more readily attained, and strong headwinds could be avoided. Four B-29s were designated as “homing aircraft”—what the RAF called “master bombers”—orbiting the city to direct the 325-strong main force. Crews were assigned loads of between 10,000 and 14,000 pounds, according to experience. LeMay had concluded that Japanese fighters were so ineffectual that a ton of defensive armament could be stripped out of each plane. The men briefed for the raid were appalled: “A sort of cold fear gripped the crews564…Many frankly did not expect to return from a raid over that city, at an altitude of less than 10,000 feet.” There was intense anger towards LeMay. “There were a lot of unhappy campers565 when they announced that we were to hit Tokyo—at night