Whirlwind - Barrett Tillman [125]
In that brief intersection of East and West it was possible to glimpse the essential nature of the unbridgeable chasm between bitter enemies. In the mangled ruins of that magnificent machine was the tacit lesson: Japanese could only marvel at America’s destructive capacity and continue suffering beneath those crushing blows.
Finally the emperor emerged from behind “the chrysanthemum curtain” to take command of his ministers, his military, and his people.
The Leaders
Strategists are essentially policy makers, and those who set policy for the air campaign over Japan resided in Washington, D.C. Once Roosevelt and Churchill had set priorities for the grand alliance in 1941, the “Germany first” strategy determined allocation of assets that lasted well into 1944. However, after Allied armies were ashore in France, the Anglo-Americans were able to focus more men and matériel against Japan. Though coincidental, the arrival of B-29s in India in June 1944 occurred within days of the Normandy invasion.
Chief architect of the air war over Japan was of course Hap Arnold. As a visionary he had few peers, building the Army Air Forces from its 1938 doldrums into the globe-spanning entity that proved the bow wave of the independent U.S. Air Force. Probably he rendered his greatest service in the three years prior to Pearl Harbor, when he set Army aviation in motion with the infrastructure, equipment, personnel, and scientific-industrial liaison essential to ultimate success.
The B-29 would not have existed without Arnold. In its massive, streamlined shape he saw the future of airpower and, assuming its performance matched its potential, Billy Mitchell’s realized dream of the air arm separated from the Army. He invested wholeheartedly in the Superfortress, both personally and institutionally, and earns high credit for that risky venture.
And yet . . .
And yet Arnold came perilously close to dropping the cerulean sword from his eager hands. He permitted himself to be stampeded into prematurely committing the world’s most sophisticated aircraft to combat in a primitive theater, beyond effective range of the enemy heartland. Roosevelt’s urgency in involving China became the engine that drove the Superfortress into an arena where it could not be supported—a mirage almost immediately obvious to the frosty brain and discerning eye of Curtis LeMay. Yet Arnold proved unable to accept the blame for his poor decisions, and he removed subordinates who strove mightily to deliver the undeliverable. His callous handling of Kenneth Wolfe especially does him no credit.
Wolfe and then Haywood Hansell did what they could with what they had before suffering Arnold’s axe. Consequently, airpower historians shudder to speculate what might have become of the program absent the saving grace of dour, taciturn Curt LeMay with his genius for innovation and a rare willingness to question conventional wisdom. From today’s distant remove, LeMay remains the most competent, most thoroughly professional airman of his generation, of any service, any nation. Arnold’s hysterical threat, via Lauris Norstad, to remove LeMay if he failed in the Marianas demonstrates the paucity of options available to the Army Air Forces in the opening weeks of 1945. Despite LeMay’s significant improvements in the China-Burma-India Theater, the Asian B-29 project already was doomed. Without LeMay’s unconventional low-level incendiary missions against Japan’s urban-industrial areas, the B-29 could have proven an extremely expensive failure, and the postwar effects on the battle over a unified defense department may only be surmised.
Make no mistake—Curtis LeMay not only saved the B-29 program, he also saved Hap Arnold and, with him, perhaps the future of an independent