Whirlwind - Barrett Tillman [128]
However, the U.S. Navy’s obsession with the remnants of the Imperial Navy was clearly misplaced. While the admirals’ insistence in finishing off Kure’s and Yokosuka’s rusting warships may be understandable, it represented poor policy when those sorties could have been profitably aimed at coastal shipping. The latter work was routinely unglamorous, but there is no more superior example of its effectiveness than the destruction of Hokkaido’s coal ferries.
Furthermore, carrier airpower lacked the ability to affect seriously Japanese industry—a point conceded by some admirals at the time. Therefore, the naval air strikes against aircraft plants tended to duplicate the Army effort, sometimes hitting areas already scoured by B-29s. The air admirals, being both fliers and seamen, were drawn to both target sets, and no superior was inclined to reel them in.
Conclusions
Though the campaign against the home islands was broadly dictated by the Joint Chiefs in Washington, the American effort lacked unity of command. As noted, the Army Air Forces and the Navy largely pursued their own goals, each the natural product of their respective worldviews.
Absent a single theater commander, and management of the 20th Air Force from Washington, some of America’s enormous naval-air consortium was dissipated in duplication of effort and insufficient strategic focus. That lapse falls not only upon Hap Arnold of the Army Air Forces and Ernest King of the Navy, but upon Franklin Roosevelt the commander in chief, who made no effort to force a meeting of the minds. President Truman might have addressed (if not redressed) some of the Joint Chiefs’ parochialism, but he was understandably concerned with the geostrategic and political problems he inherited in the final four months.
The AAF was about strategic bombardment, still linked to the Douhet-Mitchell concept of forcing the enemy’s collapse by destroying his will to resist. Though that goal was only achieved by influencing Hirohito, widespread destruction of Japanese industry and transport severely crippled Tokyo’s ability to resist.
Thus, the Allied air campaign against Japan resembled parallel train tracks—Army and Navy—each headed for the same station. Both engines might have arrived ahead of schedule had they cooperated better, allocating their specific assets to the tasks each could best perform.
But that is after the fact. The final verdict is this: airpower forced the capitulation of a desperate, tenacious enemy and thus rendered unnecessary the ghastly prospect of the bloodiest invasion in the sanguinary history of the human race.
The Bomb
What were the American alternatives to using atomic weapons against Japan? There were only three: declare victory and withdraw; maintain a blockade to await events; invade.
The first choice was dead upon arrival. America and the Allies had demanded unconditional surrender, and their populations would support nothing less, especially since Italy and Germany had been defeated under that premise. But the underlying insistence upon unconditional surrender looked beyond the war toward an unmistakable break with the past, providing the legal basis for restructuring Axis nations so they would never again initiate aggression.
An invasion would have been horrific. The Japanese correctly guessed the landing beaches and prepared accordingly. In some places the attacker-to-defender ratio would have approached one to one, a chilling prospect that Admiral Chester Nimitz opposed because of unavoidably heavy U.S. casualties. General Douglas MacArthur,