Whirlwind - Barrett Tillman [127]
The naval-air campaign against the home islands tightened the noose around Tokyo’s shrinking neck. With vital imports severely limited by submarines and aerial mines, the nation lacked sufficient quantities of everything from food to manganese. Allied carrier aircraft made coastal shipping a perilous enterprise, further limiting enemy transport options. Had the war lasted a few weeks longer, Japan’s interior communications—especially railways—would have felt the crippling weight of American bombs. That in turn would have exerted an even greater hardship upon the badly strapped food distribution network.
Assailed from the sea and the sky—America’s unmatched way of making war—Imperial Japan faced apocalyptic destruction. But the hell-bent warlords’ zealous view from Tokyo surveyed their pitiful, starving subjects and determined that they had not yet suffered enough to warrant surrender.
Targeting
Other than Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the most cited criticism of U.S. bombing remains targeting urban-industrial areas. Yet because Japanese industries relied on cottage or “shadow” factories to produce subcomponents, it was impossible to strike them specifically—if somehow they could be identified. Small shops and even homes in urban areas surrounding industrial plants produced a huge amount of matériel, especially for aircraft and engine factories. The feeder industries passed their products to component shops, which in turn passed subassemblies to factories for completion and installation. The variety was enormous: from simple hose clamps to airframe stringers formed on wooden jigs to machined parts such as valves.
Therefore, area bombing remained the only option short of returning to “precision” attacks on major factories or abandoning the strategic air campaign. Neither the Army Air Forces, U.S. policy makers, nor American citizens were inclined to do so—especially against a savage enemy in the fourth year of an unrelenting war.
LeMay’s shift from “precision” attacks against specific targets has been denigrated as “terror bombing.” Certainly there was terror, but in many cases the argument is disingenuous because it is well known that high-altitude bombing was seldom very precise, especially with Japan’s fiercely unpredictable winds aloft that scattered ordnance far off target. Furthermore, until nearly the end of the war, the vaunted “pickle barrel” accuracy claimed for the Norden bombsight was more myth than reality. Only with arrival of the Eagle radar in mid-1945 did B-29s prove consistently able to destroy precision targets.
Nevertheless, postwar analysis concluded that, absent the B-29s, Japan’s 1945 production would have run between 50 and 60 percent of the 1944 figures, largely owing to reduced availability of raw materials. Yet in July, the last full month of hostilities, overall production in thirty-three urban-industrial areas reached just one-third of the 1944 peak. Clearly bombing made a difference.
Whatever postwar criticism in America and the West, the Japanese acknowledged the effectiveness of area bombing. Rear Admiral Toshitane Takata testified, “The fire bomb raids destroyed most of the smaller factories making aircraft parts, thus causing serious losses in production. The many small plants scattered over the cities which were destroyed caused serious loss in other material and general production. Aircraft engine production always lagged behind a safe ratio to airframe production and was frequently numerically inferior for individual types.”
Admiral Takata’s view was shared by Lieutenant General Takashi Kanaoka, commanding the First Antiaircraft Division: “From the defense point of view, plane factories were your top priority, then essential war industries. Your selection of targets was excellent.”
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