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ground-based aircraft deployed there, the U.S. Navy was at last free to launch an air offensive against the Japanese home islands, which began on 10 July 1945. The first raids were exploratory, probing resistance as American planes struck at strips in the Tokyo plain. Thereafter they attacked with increasing confidence, against ineffectual Japanese defences. The most devastating missions were launched on 14–15 July, against the sea links between Honshu and Hokkaido islands. Of twelve rail ferries, eight were sunk outright and the remainder badly damaged. Shipments to Honshu of coal, lifeblood of Japanese industry, were more than halved overnight. The Japanese had no means of replacing the ferries.

Between air strikes American battleships, joined by the Royal Navy’s King George V, bombarded coastal industrial installations. Flat-trajectory naval gunfire was much less effective than incendiary attack by B-29s, but drove home to the Japanese that they could now be struck with impunity from the sea as well as the air. Hundreds of planes were destroyed on the ground by carrier strikes, though many more remained camouflaged and dispersed miles from any airfield, awaiting MacArthur’s invasion. Inshore shipping was ravaged at will. American aircraft mounted an average of two sorties a day apiece, for a cumulative daily total of more than 2,000. Weather was the chief impediment to Halsey’s operations, with thick fogs and heavy seas often frustrating ships’ refuelling as well as flying. Isolated kamikaze attacks on the fleet were intercepted and broken up, while the Americans maintained standing fighter patrols—“the big blue blanket”—over mainland airfields, to frustrate enemy take-offs. When the Japanese mounted night counter-attacks, Halsey withdrew his ships further offshore, not from fear that they might be sunk, but because his pilots needed their sleep.

Beyond destruction of the Hokkaido ferries, a critical contribution to the paralysis of Japanese industry, substantive damage inflicted by the carrier planes—“the little ones,” as civilians called them—was limited. But the spectacle of Halsey’s airborne host overhead, often flying so low that civilians could see pilots’ faces, made a deep impression on morale. Hunger and despair were eroding the spirit of the Japanese people, however strong the residual commitment of their soldiers. At Osaka University, students routinely ate locusts boiled in soy sauce and sake. Lunch might consist of twenty or thirty insects, half a potato and a salted plum. Yoshiko Hashimoto, who had survived the March Tokyo air raid in which her parents died and her sister Etsuko was terribly burned, said of this time: “In the last months, the food situation became worse and worse. The black market became an open, public institution.” Yoshiko had to feed two sisters, of whom one was desperately injured. She struggled to get medicines for Etsuko, until such things could no longer be bought for any money. All the girl’s burns eventually healed except those on her hands, which never received the treatment that might have restored them. To the end of her life, in company Etsuko concealed her hands behind her back.

Col. Saburo Hayashi acknowledged the growing unpopularity of the military, still privileged people among the civilian population: “There was disorderly behaviour820 by officers and men occupying billets in towns and villages; the military were especially selfish in their attitude to food. Their actions, which provoked intense public hostility, can be attributed to the poor quality of manpower now reaching the armed forces because of the scale of national mobilisation.” So desperate was Japan’s lack of fuel that millions of civilians, including many children, were committed to digging out pine roots, from which oil might be extracted. Some 37,000 local distillation units produced 70,000 barrels, yielding just 3,000 barrels of aviation spirit.

Each night when Petty Officer Kisao Ebisawa finished duty at Yokosuka naval base, he walked home to a doctor’s house in town, where he shared a billet with