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By Root 1074 0

heart was indeed being gnawed—by fire. It was not only that the Americans were getting close enough to do real damage, they had also changed their ideas of how to do it. The man chiefly responsible for this was an irascible cigar-chewing flier named Curtis LeMay. Taking over the bombing effort against Japan early in 1945, he decided on major shifts of tactics. The B-29s would bomb at night, they would come down to 7,000 feet to do it, and they would use incendiary bombs in far greater proportions than had been done previously. The results were spectacular—and terrible. On the night of March 9 more than 200 Superfortresses dropped 1,600 tons of incendiaries and burned out the center of Tokyo; by the next dawn sixteen square miles of the city were gone. The bombers moved on to other cities: Yokohama, Nagoya, Kobe, Osaka. They bombed by night and by day. They brought their fighter escorts with them from Iwo Jima, and they took on the Japanese home defense squadrons and chased them out of their own sky. In two months they had virtually destroyed the five major cities of Japan; more than three million were homeless in Tokyo alone. Like the navy, the bombers now began to search for targets and they started hitting the smaller cities as well. Already suffering severe shortages, their sons and husbands gone to distant battles from which they never returned, the Japanese were slowly beginning to weaken. By late July and early August the Americans were sending over 800 bombers at a time, and army and navy planners were working up for the invasion of the home islands.

Initial planning called for an invasion of the southern islands in the fall, perhaps about the first of November. Then the Joint Chiefs of Staff estimated that in early 1946 they could invade the main island of Honshu, probably near Tokyo itself. There were major problems to all of this. Both the British and the Russians wanted to be involved. The Americans reluctantly conceded to British requests; the British had worked amicably with the U. S. Fleet in the Okinawa campaign, but there were occasional problems. The attitudes and usages were different, and the whole British Far Eastern Fleet was only large enough to serve as a task group in the 5th Fleet. To a certain extent the Americans did not want to be bothered with the British; to a rather larger extent than has generally been realized, they were hesitant about doing anything that would give the British a greater claim on the postwar settlement of affairs of east Asia. Few Americans were deeply aware of what the British had done in Burma but they were highly aware of what they, the Americans, had done in the western Pacific.

The Russians presented an even thornier problem. As early as 1943 the Joint Chiefs had insisted that a Russian declaration of war, and active participation in Manchuria at the very least, was a prerequisite for full victory against Japan. They still held this view in the early months of 1945, and it was largely American desire for Russian assistance against Japan that led them to make major concessions to Russian territorial ambitions in Europe as the war was ending there. By the beginning of the summer, however, things looked different; the bombing campaign was now achieving satisfactory results, and the earlier desire to base B-29s in Siberia was given up. Russian behavior in Germany had not made them appear unqualifiedly desirable as allies. Still, the general estimate was that it would cost the invaders one million casualties to overrun the home islands. It was obviously highly desirable that at least some of those casualties should be incurred by Russia rather than the United States. As August began, the matter of Russian intervention was still undecided.

When Harry S Truman became President of the United States, he inherited something of which he had so far been totally ignorant: one of the first things he was told was that the United States possessed a new weapon that was almost ready for action. It was a new type of bomb, whose power was created by the splitting of the atom. American