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By Root 1065 0

supremo of Pacific strategic bomber forces in July, LeMay retained executive control as his nominal chief of staff. By August 1945 the Superfortresses had attacked sixty-six Japanese cities. Firebombing had made homeless a quarter of the nation’s urban population, and killed at least 300,000 people—all statistics are unreliable. The Twentieth Air Force had lost 414 aircraft on combat operations: 148 of these to enemy action, 151 to “operational causes,” 115 “unknown.” A further 87 were lost in training accidents. 2,822 aircrew were killed or missing, of whom 363 eventually returned from Japanese imprisonment. The $4 billion cost—double that of the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb—paled in comparison with the $30 billion which the United States spent on European bomber operations, or with the $330 billion total cost of America’s war effort.

THE HISTORY of the Twentieth Air Force’s campaign reflects some critical truths about modern conflicts in general, and the Second World War in particular. First, the U.S. in 1945 was a prisoner of great industrial decisions taken years earlier, in quite different strategic circumstances. In 1942, the commitment to build the B-29 long-range bomber was entirely rational. The programme reached technological maturity and large-scale production too late to make a decisive impact on the war. Yet it was asking far too much of the U.S., never mind of its senior airmen, to forgo the use of these aircraft, at a time when the enemy was still resisting fiercely, and killing many Americans. In the circumstances then prevailing—an essential caveat for any historian to emphasise—the B-29s were bound to be employed. When precision bombing failed, as continued to be the case even when attempted under LeMay’s direction in the spring of 1945, the cities of Japan were doomed to suffer the same fate as those of Germany. Rather than the will of commanders, it was the existence of a specific weapons system, the B-29 Superfortress, which impelled the incineration of several hundred thousand Japanese.

And so to LeMay himself. His name is forever associated with the firebombing of Japan, just as the RAF’s Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris is identified with the area bombing of Germany. It seems quite mistaken to nominate either officer as a sin eater for the mass slaughter of civilians, a policy for which responsibility rightly belongs to their superiors. LeMay was a much more innovative and technically dynamic commander than Harris, not least because in Europe the American had acquired much experience of leading a bomber force in the air. Yet in character they had more than a little in common, including remarkable powers of leadership and determination, carried to the point of obsession. Neither was a cultured man. Their brutal choice of words, contempt for human suffering displayed during and after the war to justify their commands’ actions, taste sour, even foul, to later generations.

But much of the criticism which has fallen upon LeMay and Harris ignores the qualities indispensable to those who fight wars on behalf of any nation, whether democracy or tyranny. In one of his letters home from the Pacific, Lt.-Gen. Robert Eichelberger cautioned his wife against badmouthing commanders merely because they did not seem nice men: “I imagine if one knew Napoleon585 or Julius Caesar, or any of the great leaders of history, there would have been a good many personal characteristics one would not have liked.” Relatively few successful warriors are sensitive men or congenial fireside companions. Most possess an elemental commitment of an intensity happily unusual in civilised societies. They must daily give orders which bring death upon their own people, as well as the enemy. It is understandable that generations reared in peace, in the privileged circumstances of our twenty-first-century lives, should feel a revulsion towards the personal characters of Harris and LeMay. Yet such men are useful, indeed indispensable, in a war of national survival. Not every successful warrior needs to be an Attila,