Whirlwind - Barrett Tillman [1]
Sixty-five years later, no single volume has examined the Allied air offensive against Japan in its terrible totality. Why there has been so little study of so epic a subject is difficult to explain. Certainly today, when interservice joint operations are not only common but necessary, the 1944–45 effort begs for detailed attention. Coordination of the various air forces, including land- and carrier-based Navy and Marine air groups, and integration of the British Pacific Fleet (BPF) into the American Fast Carrier Task Force, were substantial achievements on a scale never to be repeated.
The campaign was a long time coming, and a final test of some old theories of war making. As far back as the 1920s, airmen had postulated that strategic bombing could compel an industrialized enemy to surrender, thus avoiding the massive bloodletting of the Great War. But the airpower theorists reckoned from a false premise: that despotic regimes would take pity on their citizens’ plight as democratic governments were expected to do. In truth, the theory worked in neither direction. In World War II, more than 60,000 Britons died in air attacks, but the U.K.’s resolve never cracked. While national resolve was mightily strained in Germany, where the death toll in bombed cities could have run half a million in five years, it held to the end. Perhaps 330,000 Japanese were killed by air attack in one-fifth that time.
The toll was terrible, but rather than fatally undermining civilian morale, bombing achieved a more subtle victory in affecting Japan’s ability to resist. Moreover, airpower compelled Emperor Hirohito to surrender, sparing Japan a death count that might have grown tenfold in an Allied invasion.
In 1942, Tokyo stood like an Asian colossus astride the sweep of the Pacific and deep into the Chinese mainland. Less than three years later Japan had lost control of its own airspace, and its cities lay open to attack on a scale the world had never seen. With its industry in ruins, Japan’s chilling policy of arming women and schoolchildren with spears reminds us of the irresistible power of the concentrated Allied assault on Dai Nippon, even as it poses moral questions that persist today.
In the course of writing more than thirty previous histories, I came to know hundreds of veterans of the Pacific War, American and Japanese alike. One thing shines through: they populated a vastly different world than today. With the rise of idealistic globalism, the context in which World War II was fought is difficult for many people to fathom.
Mindful that more than 2,000 U.S. World War II veterans die every day, Whirlwind assembles narratives from a variety of sources: official records, published accounts, and interviews with the dwindling number of survivors. Sadly, this will be one of the last books based upon interviews with those who lived the events it describes. Whirlwind represents multiple stories within a story, setting in context the most devastating air campaign in history. The human drama played out in Asian skies had been divined by European visionaries three decades before, and migrated into American consciousness during the Great War. In the ensuing period an often acrimonious debate arose concerning the theory and practice of aerial bombardment. It too is part of our tale, which traces the origins of American airpower from the fledgling, controversial days of Billy Mitchell in the 1920s, through the search for an air doctrine in the 1930s to the stunning technological advances of the 1940s. The legacy remains with us in the twenty-first century. Look closely at a B-52 Stratofortress or even a B-2 stealth bomber; look beneath the sculpted perfection of an F/A-18 Hornet or an F-15 Strike Eagle. If you peer close enough, down to the cellular level, you can glimpse