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The official USAAF post-war history of LeMay’s command was unstintingly triumphalist:

Highlight of the entire589 Twentieth AF blitz against Japan was the last five months of dynamic operations. In reaching this fiery perfection, which literally burnt Japan out of the war, the Twentieth came a long way from its meager 77-plane, 368-ton shakedown strike against Bangkok…on June 5, 1944…In its climactic five months of jellied fire attacks, the vaunted Twentieth killed outright 310,000 Japanese, injured 412,000 more, and rendered 9,200,000 homeless…Never in the history of war had such colossal devastation been visited on an enemy at so slight a cost to the conqueror…The 1945 application of American Air Power, so destructive and concentrated as to cremate 65 Japanese cities in five months, forced an enemy’s surrender without land invasion for the first time in military history. Because of the precedent-shattering performance of the Twentieth Air Force, no U.S. soldier, sailor or Marine had to land on bloody beachheads or fight through strongly-prepared ground defense to ensure victory in the Japanese home islands…Very long range air power gained victory, decisive and complete.

This passage seems worth quoting at length, because it highlights the extravagance of the airmen’s claims for their contribution to victory, as well as their absence of moral reservations. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey estimated that air attack of all kinds had destroyed 36.8 percent of Japan’s cars, 34.2 percent of machine tools, 20.6 percent of furniture and household goods. Some 15 million people, one-sixth of the population, had been rendered homeless, 13.2 million were unemployed, most because their places of work had ceased to function. A total of 2.51 million houses had been destroyed by bombs, a further 600,000 by the Japanese themselves, in the creation of firebreaks.

Back in 1941, the brilliant British scientific civil servant Sir Henry Tizard questioned the likelihood that, even with a massive force of bombers, the RAF could inflict damage upon German industry commensurate with the scale of aircrew lives and resources committed—ultimately almost one-third of Britain’s entire war effort. Tizard did not dispute, he said, that bombing could inflict catastrophic damage upon Germany. He simply questioned whether this would also prove decisive, surely the essential criterion to validate a bomber offensive on the scale Britain eventually conducted. Tizard lost that argument to the airmen, but the historical evidence suggests that his scepticism was prescient.

The material damage inflicted upon Japanese industry by LeMay’s offensive was almost irrelevant, because blockade and raw-material starvation had already brought the economy to the brink of collapse. Many raids burnt out factories where production was already flagging or halted. Yet no nation could regard with indifference the destruction of a large proportion of its urban housing, whatever the protestations of the Japanese military to the contrary. It seems essential to acknowledge the psychological impact of the B-29 campaign. No human being of any culture could fail to be impressed, indeed awed, by such a display of the enemy’s might and his own nation’s impotence. It seems impossible to doubt that, when Japanese surrender eventually came, it was influenced in some degree by the U.S. bomber offensive which preceded and indeed followed Hiroshima. It remains unlikely that the Twentieth Air Force’s contribution justified its huge moral and material cost to the United States. It seems absurd, however, to deny its contribution to the collapse of Japan’s will to resist.

For posterity, perhaps most important is to perceive LeMay’s campaign as setting the stage, creating the moral and strategic climate, for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A recent study has observed: “Nobody involved in the decision590 on the atomic bombs could have seen themselves as setting new precedents for mass destruction in scale—only in