Strategic air warfare against Japan

While the European theater air war in the Second World War was a clearly joint U.K.-U.S. effort, Strategic operations in the Pacific Theater of Operations (PTO) was largely an American effort. While strategic bombing is the core of WWII strategic air warfare doctrine, there were key supporting differences. In Europe, the award-winning supporting actor was the offensive counter-air process of gaining air supremacy over Europe.

Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall explained American strategy three weeks before Pearl Harbor:

"We are preparing for an offensive war against Japan, whereas the Japs believe we are preparing only to defend the Phillipines. ...We have 35 Flying Fortresses already there—the largest concentration anywhere in the world. Twenty more will be added next month, and 60 more in January....If war with the Japanese does come, we'll fight mercilessly. Flying fortresses will be dispatched immediately to set the paper cities of Japan on fire. There wont be any hesitation about bombing civilians—it will be all-out."

Technology

Strategic aircraft capable of attacking the Japanese Home Islands

Country and aircraft	Theater	Features and liabilities
U.S. B-29 Superfortress	Pacific	Heavy bombload, very long range

Allied land-based aircraft supporting the gaining of air bases

Country and aircraft	Features and liabilities	Effectiveness
U.S. B-17 Flying Fortress	Light bombload in its class, strong defense. Bombsight could not hit moving targets	Low; insufficient bombload and range even against island targets
U.S. B-24 Liberator	Moderate bombload, long range very important	Good
U.S. B-25 Mitchell	Medium bomber	Lighter than B-26, made Doolittle Raid
U.S. B-26 Liberator	Moderate bombload, long range very important	Excellent, especially low-level anti-shipping versions
U.S. P-38 Lighting	Long range with reliability of second engine	Excellent
U.S. B-29 Superfortress	Heavy bombload, very long range	Only aircraft to hit home islands

When war began the Philippine airbases were quickly lost. American strategy then focused on getting forwar airbases close enough to Japan to use the very-long-range B-29 bomber, then in development. At first the B-29's were stationed in China and made raids in 1944; the logistics made China an impossible base. Finally, in summer 1944, the U.S. won the Battle of the Philippine Sea and captured islands that were in range. </math> The flamability of Japan's large cities, and the concentration of munitions production there, made strategic bombing the war-winning weapon. Two months before Pearl Harbor Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek proposed sending Flying Fortresses over Tokyo and Osaka, "whose paper and bamboo houses would go up in smoke if subjected to bombing raids." Massive efforts (costing $4.5 billion dollars) to establish air bases in China failed. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese peasants broke rocks with little hammers and dug drainage ditches by hand. Shipping supplies around the world to equip the bases was almost impossible, and when some bases were ready in 1944 the Japanese Army simply moved overland and captured them. The Marianas, captured in June 1944, gave a close secure base, and the B-29 gave the Americans the weapon they needed. The B-29 represented the highest achievement of traditional (pre-jet) aeronautics. Its four 2,200 horsepower Wright R-3350 supercharged engines could lift four tons of bombs 3,500 miles at 33,000 feet (high above Japanese flak or fighters). Computerized fire-control mechanisms made its 13 guns exceptionally lethal against fighters. However, the systematic raids that began in June, 1944, were unsatisfactory, because the AAF had learned too much in Europe; it overemphasized self-defense. Arnold, in personal charge of the campaign (bypassing the theater commanders) brought in a new leader, brilliant, indefatigable, hard-charging General Curtis LeMay. In early 1945, LeMay ordered a radical change in tactics: remove the machine guns and gunners, fly in low at night. (Much fuel was used to get to 30,000 feet; it could now be replaced with more bombs.) The Japanese radar, fighter, and anti-aircraft systems were so ineffective that they could not hit the bombers. Fires raged through the cities, and millions of civilians fled to the mountains. Tokyo was hit repeatedly, and suffered a fire storm in March that killed 83,000. On June 5, 51,000 buildings in four miles of Kobe were burned out by 473 B-29s; Japanese opposition was fierce, as 11 B-29s went down and 176 were damaged. Osaka, where one-sixth of the Empire's munitions were made, was hit by 1,733 tons of incendiaries dropped by 247 B-29s. A firestorm burned out 8.1 square miles, including 135,000 houses; 4,000 died. The police reported: Although damage to big factories was slight, approximately one-fourth of some 4,000 lesser factories, which operated hand-in-hand with the big factories, were completely destroyed by fire.... Moreover, owing to the rising fear of air attacks, workers in general were reluctant to work in the factories, and the attendance fluctuated as much as 50 percent.

Japan's stocks of guns, shells, explosives, and other military supplies were thoroughly protected in dispersed or underground storage depots, and were not vulnerable to air attack. The bombing affected long-term factors of production. Physical damage to factories, plus decreases due to dispersal forced by the threat of further physical damage, reduced physical productive capacity by roughly the following percentages of pre-attack plant capacity: oil refineries, 83%; aircraft engine plants, 75%; air-frame plants, 60%; electronics and communication equipment plants, 70%; army ordnance plants, 30%; naval ordnance plants, 28%; merchant and naval shipyards, 15%; aluminum, 35%; steel, 15%; and chemicals, 10%. Munitions output plummeted, and by July, 1945, Japan no longer had an industrial base. The problem was that it still had an Army, which was not based in the cities, and was largely undamaged by the raids. The Army had ammunition but was short of food and gasoline; as Iwo Jima and Okinawa proved, it was capable of ferocious resistance.

Targets Fought Back

In evaluating the strategic bombing campaigns it is important to keep in mind what the targets were. The AAF (and the RAF) concentrated on the largest 75 to 100 cities in Germany and Japan. In Germany the targeted cities contained 25 million people before the war; the damage was done primarily in 1944-45 when at least 5 million people had evacuated. Of all 75 million civilians in Germany, 1/2 of one percent (300,000) were killed, another 1% were injured, 10% were dehoused, 25% deprived of gas, water and electricity for varying periods, and 100% were inconvenienced by fear, shortages and disruptions. The bombing campaigns did not target civilians outside large cities, or their food supplies. (Tactical air sometimes did strafe passenger trains; the pilots could not tell whether they carried civilians or soldiers.) The main emphasis was on large cities for several reasons. Pragmatically, the target had to be large enough to hit. Small cities or factories in the forests were extremely hard to bomb from high altitude. Big bombers flew high when it was discovered the risk from flak was near 100% at 8,000 feet, but "only" 25% at 20,000 feet. Even at great height bombers often had to zigzag and rush their bombing run lest the ground crews get their range. The RAF noticed that when flak was light, 41% of its bombs hit near the target, compared to only 32% when flak was heavy. The Luftwaffe had figured out the logic of strategic bombing, and by late 1944 used over one million men and women to operate 16,000 heavy (high altitude) guns, 50,000 light guns, 7,500 searchlights, and 1,500 barrage baloons. The extremely critical synthetic oil plants at Leuna, Ludwigshaven and elsewhere were ringed by scores of batteries each with 8 to 12 guns. The 600 guns guarding Cologne could hurl 80 tons of shells skyward every minute. The best response was to saturate the defenses by putting as many bombers over target as quickly as possible. For every 100 sorties in 1944, 25 bombers were hit by flak; most managed to hold formation and return--stragglers usually crashed or were shot down by fighters. The Pentagon did not see enemy cities as mere passive housing tracks filled with innocent civilians but rather as the nerve centers of warmaking and as active fortresses that fought back vigorously and which often inflicted more damage than they received.

Firestorms

Some raids caused "firestorms," notably Hamburg and Kassel in 1943, Dresden and Tokyo in 1945. Firestorms were very hard to start; they occurred in unpredictable situations when a number of scattered fires suddenly combined into a tornado-like inferno which sucked up all the oxygen (including the oxygen in underground shelters). At Hamburg 40,000 people suffocated inside shelters. Tens of thousands died in Dresden, but the railway yards, munitions factories and military bases were mostly undamaged. At Hamburg, full factory production resumed in a matter of weeks, but upwards of a million civilians fled the city.

Ludwigshaven

Typical was the case of Ludwigshaven, a city of 150,000 population on the Rhine River near Heidelberg. Its two giant I.G. Farben plants, covering 1200 acres and employing 40,000 workers, produced much of Germany's ammonia, synthetic rubber, synthetic oil and other vital chemicals; its railroad yards were important too, and hundreds of small shops and factories produced war materials, such as diesel engines for submarines. The Luftwaffe ringed it with 180 high-powered flak guns. Thirteen thousand Allied bombers hit the city in 121 separate raids during the war, of which 56 succeeded in hitting the Farben plant. Those 56 raids dropped 53,000 bombs each containing 250 to 4,000 pounds of high explosives, plus 2.5 million 4-pound magnesium incendiary bombs. (The bombers also dropped millions of warning leaflets, plus counterfeit ration coupons.) Clouds (or protective smoke) usually covered the target, so "pathfinder" planes identified the general vicinity with flares, and the bombardiers unloaded on the flares. This sort of "area bombing" was not especially accurate: out of 1,700 bombs dropped on January 7, 1944, only 127 hit the Farben plank. On average, 1.4 tons of bombs hit each acre of the Farben complex (but buildings covered only 25% of the ground, so most hit open land.) Bombing accuracy improved with experience; in a January, 1945, raid, 1,000 high explosive bombs and 10,000 incendiaries fell within the factory fences, starting 10 large, 30 medium and 200 small fires. Bombs that missed the factory that day ruined 354 residences and dehoused 1,800 people. The shelter system worked well, for only five people on the ground were killed. By war's end most dwellings were destroyed or damaged; 1,800 people had died, and 3,000 were injured. Local Nazi officials assisted the homeless and tried to incite the residents to hate the Allies. Most residents were fatalistic or passive, and were instead inclined to blame Berlin for their troubles. Thousands fled to villages or farms, but enough stayed behind to keep producing chemicals and to assist troop transports moving by rail to the battle of the Bulge. When draft calls removed German men, I. G. Farben replaced them with German women, with civilian "volunteers" from France or Italy, and with Polish and Russian prisoners. The foreigners worked to avoid death from starvation; the Nazis treated them brutally, and were negligent about their safety during the air raids. Systematic air attacks began in earnest in early 1944, and reduced production by half that year. Repairs took longer and longer, as spare parts were difficult to find. By December, so much damage had been done to vital utilities that output dropped to nearly zero. Followup raids every week ended production permanently. On March 1, 1945, infantry from Alexander Patch's Seventh Army ended Ludwigshaven's agony by seizing the city and liberating the slave laborers.

Target Cities Critical to War Effort

The large cities were prime targets because they contained most of the enemy's munitions factories, railroad yards, government offices and communications centers. According to Air Force doctrine, only a small fraction of the enemy population was targeted for attack--notably the centers of war production, communications, command and control. Civilians were repeatedly warned (by billions of leaflets) to evacuate those cities, or else they would be considered as willing participants in the enemy war effort. Without its cities, an enemy army would lose its munitions supply and its power of movement. As early as 1916, and certainly by the 1930s, it was a well-recognized concept that "civilians" who worked in munitions factories were as much a part of the war effort as soldiers in the front lines, and were legitimate targets. The munitions workers themselves felt that way, as they glanced at posters or listened to speeches from visiting dignitaries telling them how essential they were to the war. They were "non-peaceable" civilians. The efforts of civilian munitions workers in the cities across the globe were largely responsible for deciding who would win the war. Churchill strongly protested Eisenhower's plans to bomb French railroads before D-Day, warning that many Frenchmen would be killed (and therefore France would never trust Britain again.) Eisenhower insisted, and so too did French leader Charles de Gaulle. He wanted his homeland liberated! MacArthur, however, refused to allow bombing of Manila in 1945 because the Filipinos were American subjects.

Primary responsibility for saving the lives of people in the cities was held by the defending government, not by the attacking one according the US Air Force then (and now). Every government did in fact promote civil defense by installing sirens, building bomb shelters, teaching first-aid, assigning fire-fighters and rescue workers, establishing aid stations and support agencies, and training city dwellers on what to do when a raid was imminent. (The British took advantage of this by sending wooden Mosquito bombers over Berlin every night--6,000 sorties in all; their light bombs did little damage but the sirens and rush to shelters ruined every Berliner's sleep.)

Peaceable Civilians Evacuated

In World War Two, bombing raids were not a sudden and totally annihilating event. Anyone who wanted to be a peaceable civilian and avoid the risk of air attack could and should have left the major cities. The major nations realized this and encouraged evacuation. A year before the Blitz began the British evacuated a million and a half women, children and elderly from London. Japan and Germany evacuated non-essential civilians from their cities as well. Japan moved ten million people to the countryside, including two-thirds of the residents of the Tokyo and the five other largest cities. In Cologne, 90% of the small children were removed. Artistic treasures were safeguarded in old mines, and architectural monuments were sandbagged and given special fire protection. (The thousand-year old Cologne Cathedral thus remained standing while the rest of the city was flattened.) As for morality of bombing innocent civilians, the American position was, and is, that the local government, not the US, is responsible for protecting its civilians. If they are innocent they should be evacuated to the safe countryside. Time and again the Nazis tried to evacuate women and children from Berlin; German husbands and fathers resisted. Finally in August, 1943, as the RAF raids increased in intensity, the government removed 1.5 million children and adults not engaged in war work. Simultaneously hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war and foreign "volunteers" were moved into Berlin and other major cities to work in the munitions factories. ..Read-Fisher 120-1 e With the coming of of hydrogen bombs in the mid 1950s and intercontinental missiles in the early 1960s, cities became defenseless, for they could be annihilated within minutes, with no warning and no chance for evacuation. But that was not the case in World War Two. The peaceable civilians had the knowledge and opportunity to get out, and most of them did so. If anyone missed the message from their own government, they could not fail to catch one of the hundreds of millions of leaflets dropped by Allied planes warning them that a real raid was imminent and they should evacuate immediately. In late 1944 American intelligence discovered that in Berlin, "Evacuation has been very thorough and the city now is relatively empty." In peacetime, Berlin had four million population; now it had scarcely one million, many of them foreign forced laborers.

Total Mobilization of Civilians

In January 1943, Berlin decreed the full mobilization of every German. Civilian jobs not essential to the war effort were to be abolished. Hitler declared "total war. Goebbels intensified the propaganda barrage, and the Nazi Party, the Gestapo and the SS turned the screws. As Field Marshal von Rundstedt proclaimed:

The Fuhrer has decreed: that our conduct of war must become fanatical since the battle has touched German soil along broad sectors, and German cities and villages are being turned into battlegrounds....Every bunker, every block in a German city, and every German village must be turned into a fortress against which the enemy will either bleed to death or its garrison be buried in man-to-man combat.

All civilian men became liable for militia duty in the Volkssturm, and in 1945 many fought in the last ditches. In Japan, total mobilization had been declared as early as 1938 (when Japan was fighting China): "We must mobilize our entire resources, both physical and spiritual; it is not enough merely to provide sufficient munitions." </ref>Civilians were more tightly organized on behalf of the state than in any other nation, and American policy makers concluded there were no peaceable civilians in Japan. The AAF policy said that deliberate killing of innocent civilians was immoral, but that in Germany and Japan all workers "voluntary or involuntary" were assisting the enemy and should accept the risks "which must be the lot of any individual who participates directly in the war effort of a belligerent nation."

Dispersal of critical installations

Speer figured out the antidote to air raids in 1943-- disperse critical factories outside the major cities. The V-1 and V-2 missiles were built in caves and underground factories that were largely immune from bombs. However, many local Nazi leaders, fearful that Speer's plans to build new factories in their villages would attract air raids, dragged their feet and effectively sabotaged Speer's program. Dispersal, furthermore, made the Germans even more reliant on their fragile transportation system. With railroad yards hit every week, it took longer and longer for parts to reach underground assembly factories, and it became more and more difficult to move the final product to the front lines. The Japanese built airplane components in thousands of small shops scattered about their major cities; they did not use their small towns and villages. The U.S. Air Force answered the dispersion by burning out entire large cities (while avoiding the small towns and villages.) The Soviets carried dispersion to the logical extreme. As the Germans pushed east in 1941-42, the Russians loaded trains full of blueprints, engineers, skilled craftsmen, critical materials, vital parts, and necessary tools, and set up shop in makeshift quarters in the Urals. Often the new quarters lacked heat and the workers froze in place. A complete dispersal outside the major cities could indeed drastically limited the direct damage done by strategic bombing. However, dispersal to small, remote locations with poor transportation and communications created extremely complex management problems. It slowed everything down and multiplied the difficulties of overall coordination, of recruiting, training and housing workers, of supplying fuel and raw materials, of cross-shipping of sub-assemblies, and of final shipment to the front line soldiers. Postwar analysts in the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey who stressed the unexpectedly small amount of damage done to individual plants overlooked the vast damage done to the German and Japanese system of providing munitions to the battlefront. Germany ground forces fought hard, but after the summer of 1944 they were defeated in every battle, in large part because they had lost control of their airspace, and because strategic bombing cut the front lines off from their industrial base.

Revenge and racism played a role in the bombings. The American public demanded revenge for Pearl Harbor, and saw the Japanese as moral subhumans. (However Americans also proudly went to war to defend the morally worthy Filipinos and Chinese.) The British, having watched fifty thousand civilians die from the Blitz, were more than pleased to retaliate ten times over. Strategic bombing doctrine had always held with enough pounding, enemy morale would collapse and they would be forced to surrender. That is indeed what happened with Japan. The Germans surrendered only after Berlin was captured, but the ability to resist invasion had been blasted away by the Allied bombings that Germany was helpless to stop. The bottom line regarding strategic bombing in World War Two is that it was the only way a total war could be fought and won. The alternatives were compromise with the Nazis and Japanese, or invasions that would have killed far more people in Japan (and did kill far more Germans than the bombings did).