Whirlwind

by Barrett Tillman

  Years later Sakai described his reason for the attacks, stating, “While Japan did agree to the surrender, we were still a sovereign nation, and every nation has the right to protect itself. When the Americans sent over their B-32s, we did not know of their intentions . . . by invading our airspace they were committing a provocative and aggressive act. . . . It was most unwise for the Americans to send over their bombers only a few days after the surrender announcement! They should have waited and let things cool down.”

  On August 25, while Navy planes searched for POW camps, two Army pilots became the first Americans to land in defeated Japan. Lieutenant Colonel Clay Tice had fought the Japanese in 1942–43 and the Germans in 1944. Upon returning to the Pacific he led the high-scoring 49th Fighter Group from Okinawa. On the morning of the 25th, he headed six P-38s on armed reconnaissance up the Kyushu coast. After inspecting Nagasaki and other cities, Tice had been airborne more than three hours when he learned one of his pilots was critically short on fuel, which had siphoned out in flight. Flight Officer Douglass C. Hall had only about 240 gallons remaining—insufficient to make Okinawa.

  Tice had to work fast. He contacted a rescue B-17 and said he would lead his wingmate to Nittagahara on Kyushu’s east coast, 450 miles from their base. The Americans could only hope for a hospitable reception.

  The two Lightnings landed at noon, finding the airfield largely deserted. Hall was understandably nervous, fingering his pistol, but his CO enforced calm. An hour later the B-17 landed, much to the bemusement of the Japanese army personnel who had arrived. Tice reported, “We were greeted in a friendly manner,” contrary to what he may have expected. Having fought both Axis powers, he respected the Germans but held little regard for the Japanese. Nevertheless, the Nittagahara delegation began with a lone bicyclist and ended with the local mayor in top hat and tails.

  With help of the B-17 crew, enough fuel was transferred to Hall’s P-38 for the two-hour return flight to Okinawa. There Tice was beset by correspondents eager to relate the drama of the first Americans to land in Japan. (They were three days ahead of General MacArthur’s advance team coordinating the surrender.) Tice recalled, “I started off by saying . . . it was a routine fighter mission with no highlights that made it newsworthy. I was promptly put in my place by being informed that my business was to fly airplanes, and it was their business to decide what was newsworthy. The interview continued.”

  Naval aviators were not to be outdone. Two days later, on the 27th, a Yorktown fighter pilot landed at Atsugi and, vastly exceeding his authority, ordered the Japanese to erect a banner: “Welcome to the U.S. Army from the Third Fleet.” The Japanese complied, and American paratroopers saw the greeting the next day.

  September 2

  On September 2—six years and a day after Germany invaded Poland—Japan’s formal surrender occurred aboard the battleship Missouri anchored in Tokyo Bay. General of the Army Douglas MacArthur headed the U.S. delegation of eighty-nine officers including thirty-nine generals and thirty-four admirals or commodores wearing a galaxy of 171 stars. That did not include forty-three other officers from eight Allied nations.

  American airmen were represented by those wearing wings: at least seven with Army silver and nine with Navy gold. Regardless of rank, perhaps the most prominent were Jimmy Doolittle, who started the bombing of Japan, and Curt LeMay, who ended it.

  Admiral Chester Nimitz signed for the United States, flanked by Halsey and Rear Admiral Forrest Sherman, who had contributed significantly to American Pacific strategy. Other naval aviators present were Jack Towers, Ted Sherman, and Slew McCain. Only Pete Mitscher was missing.

  Present but little recognized was Rear Admiral Donald B. Duncan, who as a captain had helped plan the Doolittle raid.

  No sooner had MacArthur intoned “These proceedings are closed” than the air was split with an enormous roar. Operation Airshow was underway as some 450 carrier planes and 462 B-29s thundered overhead. Leading Yorktown’s fighters was Lieutenant Malcolm Cagle, whose pilots had endured the last dogfight over Japan on August 15. In the crowded airspace over Tokyo Bay, the honor of participating in the historic flyover was diminished by the risk of collision. Cagle described it as “a full throttle-off throttle formation with no real order or organization.”

  Postwar Missions

  When the shooting stopped, another campaign immediately began: locating and supplying POW camps in Japan, China, and Korea. An interim measure of large-scale air drops was quickly instituted to sustain starving Allied personnel until ground forces reached them. On August 17, Spaatz tossed the ball to 20th Air Force, which gladly assumed responsibility for feeding 154 known camps in August and September.

  Massively supplied from the Philippines, XXI Bomber Command modified B-29s to carry maximum loads of provisions. A standard package was developed, containing three days of food, plus clothing and medical kits with instructions. Some 12,000 bundles were dropped by parachute in the first phase. Follow-up drops contained rations for a week, then ten days, but only about half the camps needed the latter owing to rapid advances by liberating troops. Some fliers managed to insert special touches including beer and even ice cream amid the extra food and plasma.

  In three weeks following August 27, B-29s flew almost 1,000 relief sorties, dropping nearly 4,500 tons of supplies to as many as 63,500 prisoners. However, the rescue efforts exacted a toll as eight B-29s crashed with seventy-seven dead.

  While B-29s conducted mercy flights, fighter pilots relished buzzing Japan, flying with impunity at low level and high speed. One was Marine Captain Jefferson DeBlanc, who had broken into combat at Guadalcanal in 1942. The exuberant Louisianan recalled the excitement of those August days: “Now with the advent of peace, a complacent attitude prevailed. I even touched my wheels on an airfield in Japan and bounced back into the air without landing as a gesture of defiance. I could not see fighting the Japanese for four years and not ‘landing’ on their soil. It was a weird feeling, especially as this was one of the very airfields I had strafed only days before. Maybe this was pushing my luck, but at 24 years of age, I still had a little daring left.”

  Thus perished the Second World War, the voracious global monster whose sulfurous breath seared three continents and consumed at least 50 million human beings. Like most wars, its immense violence was only extinguished by the massive application of greater violence: a combination of strangulation by sea, conquest by land, and ruinous rain by air. In the final extremity, beneath a heap of ashes in the chilling shadow of radioactive clouds, at length the beast was slain.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Legacy

  THE BOMBING OF JAPAN either averted the most horrific battle of all time, or it was one of the greatest atrocities ever committed. Six decades later, advocates on both sides of the question cling fiercely to their positions even as emerging scholarship sharpens the focus.

  Whatever the conflicting attitudes toward strategic bombing, some of the campaign’s basic aspects apply to all students of the subject. How a vital, industrious nation-state brought itself to such ruin will still be studied long after World War II passes from living memory. Therefore, the bombing of Japan raises three questions: how the nation tried to defend itself against overwhelming air attack; why Tokyo persisted in such an obviously losing effort; and how history currently evaluates the air campaign. We shall start with the first.

  Defending the Homeland

  Japan’s ability to repel an American bombing campaign began with very few prospects in 1942 and sharply declined thereafter. Yet an enduring question is why Tokyo squandered more than two years after the Doolittle Raid, and why so little interservice coordination was attempted once B-29s appeared in homeland skies. The answer lies in the Japanese psyche more than in its military institutions.

  In defending its airspace, Japan’s army and naval forces were tasked with a nearly impossible mission. Nonetheless, they failed massively in even approaching their nation’s potential to ameliorate the effects of the Al
lied onslaught.

  Japan’s only prospect for staving off aerial immolation was to inflict unacceptable losses upon B-29s. Because of the Superfortress’s exceptional cost—some $600,000 each—a downed B-29 represented the financial equivalent of nearly three B-17s or B-24s, plus an invaluable crew. Development of ramming units demonstrates that some Japanese understood the value of a one-for-one or even two-for-one tradeoff, but the tactic largely failed for technical and organizational reasons. Therefore, defense of the home islands reverted to conventional means: flak guns and ordinary interceptors.

  The resulting failure was systemic, crossing all boundaries of government and military-naval leadership. Probably the major cause was Japan’s national psychology: a collectivist culture possessing a rigid hierarchy with unusually strict protocols that inhibited breakout thinking and instilled extreme reluctance to express contrary opinions. Japan poses an intriguing puzzle for sociologists and political scientists: how an extremely well-ordered society permitted itself to make a series of disastrous decisions, each threatening its national existence. Ironically, the situation was partly explained by the atmosphere of gekokujo (“pressuring from below”) in which strident subordinates often influenced their superiors.

  If interservice rivalry constituted a “second front” in Washington, D.C., it was a full contact sport in Tokyo. The postwar United States Strategic Bombing Survey concluded, “There was no efficient pooling of the resources of the Army and Navy. Responsibility between the two services was divided in a completely impractical fashion with the Navy covering all ocean areas and naval targets . . . and the Army everything else.”

  In June 1944, the month of the first B-29 attack, Imperial General Headquarters combined army and navy assets in an air defense command but the navy objected to army control. A compromise was achieved with naval air groups at Atsugi, Omura, and Iwakuni assigned to the respective army district. Phone links from JAAF command centers were provided to each of the three naval units, but operational integration was seldom attempted. In fact, throughout Japan, the two air arms operated jointly in only three areas: Tsuiki on Kyushu plus Kobe and Nagoya.

  A major part of the problem was astonishingly sparse allocation of fighters to air defense. As late as March 1945, Japan allotted less than one-fifth of its fighters to home defense, and the actual figure only reached 500 in July. By then very few were flying, as Tokyo hoarded its strength for the expected invasion.

  In the crucial realm of radar, Japan got a jump on the world—and almost immediately lost its lead. The efficient Yagi-Uda antenna had been invented in 1926, the product of two researchers at Tohoku Imperial University. Professor Hidetsugu Yagi published the first English reference two years later, citing his nation’s work in shortwave research. But such was military secrecy and interservice rivalry that even late in the war few Japanese knew the origin of the device that appeared on downed Allied aircraft.

  The Allies rated Japanese radar as “very poor,” and fighter direction remained rudimentary. While land-based radar could detect inbound formations perhaps 200 miles out, the data included neither altitude nor composition. Consequently, picket boats were kept 300 miles at sea to radio visual sightings—of marginal use in cloudy weather. However, what radar systems did exist were easily jammed by American radio countermeasures—aircraft dropping aluminum foil that clogged enemy screens.

  Furthermore, the Japanese army and navy established separate warning systems, and seldom exchanged information. Even when unit-level pooling was attempted, navy officers generally refused orders from army officers.

  Civilian observers were spread throughout Japan to report enemy aircraft, but predictably there was no unity. The army and navy established their own observer corps, and neither worked with the other.

  Japanese navy doctrine contained an internal contradiction for air defense. A 1944 manual asserted, “In order to overcome the disadvantages imposed on fighter plane units when the enemy raids a friendly base—that is, getting fighter planes airborne on equal terms with the enemy airplanes—full use must be made of radar and other lookout methods. . . . These must be employed in the most effective manner.” But as noted, use of radar remained rudimentary.

  Some pilots dismissed the state of their nation’s electronics. “Why do we need radar? Men’s eyes see perfectly well.”

  Excluding mobile radar sets, at least sixty-four early-warning sites were built in the homeland and offshore islands: thirty-seven navy and twenty-seven army. But the rare assets often were squandered by duplicating effort: at four sites on Kyushu and seven on Honshu, army and navy radars were located almost side by side. The southern approaches to Kyushu and Shikoku were covered by some twenty installations but only two permanent radars are known on all of Shikoku.

  Though the huge majority of Japanese radars provided early warning, some sets directed AA guns and searchlights. But apparently there was little integration of the two: some B-29 crews returned with harrowing tales of ten to fifteen minutes in a searchlight’s probing beam with minimal or no flak damage.

  Apart from inadequate radar, some of Japan’s technical focus was badly misdirected. From 1940 onward, the military devoted over five years to a “death ray” intended to cause paralysis or death by very short-wave radio waves focused in a high-power beam. The nonportable unit was envisioned for antiaircraft use, but the only model tested had a range much less than firearms.

  Tactically, the lack of army-navy cooperation hampered the already limited potential of Japan’s interceptors. With unit commanders conducting their own localized battles, there was little opportunity to concentrate large numbers of fighters against a bomber formation as the Luftwaffe repeatedly achieved.

  Overall, Japanese fighters were spectacularly ineffective against B-29s. From more than 31,300 Superfortress sorties over the homeland, only seventy-four were known lost wholly to interceptors and perhaps twenty more in concert with flak guns. Japanese pilots logged their best performances in January and April 1945, each with thirteen bombers downed. But during fifteen months of combat, losses to interceptors amounted to merely 0.24 percent of effective B-29 sorties.

  The Strategic Bombing Survey concluded, “The Japanese fighter defense system was no more than fair on paper and distinctly poor in practice. One fundamental matter stands out as the principal reason for its shortcomings—the Japanese planners failed to see the danger of allied air attacks and to give the defense system the requisite priorities.”

  Lieutenant General Saburo Endo of Army Air Force Headquarters stated, “Those responsible for control at the beginning of the war did not recognize the true value of aviation . . . therefore one defeat led to another. Although they realized there was a need for merging the army and the navy, nothing was done about it. There were no leaders to unify the political and the war strategies, and the plans executed by the government were very inadequate. National resources were not concentrated to the best advantage.”

  In short, in Japan’s military, parochialism trumped efficiency at every turn.

  A Losing Proposition

  Why Tokyo persisted with a losing war for so long remains an enduring question. The closest comparison is found in Nazi Germany, which received about 1.3 million tons of bombs in the Heimat (homeland) and slightly more throughout the greater Reich. In contrast, Japan itself was subjected to “merely” 161,000 tons of conventional ordnance plus the equivalent of some 35,000 tons in two atomic weapons. At least 330,000 Japanese died by bombing whereas Germany’s toll (inflicted over five years versus fourteen months) might run almost twice as much. The salient point is that neither regime in Tokyo or Berlin ended the war out of concern for massive civilian suffering until excruciating pain and unprecedented destruction had been inflicted.

  How then to explain Japan’s insistence upon apocalyptic ruin?

  A recurring theme in statements of military and civilian leaders is the profound belief that defeat equaled an end to Japan’s national existence. In his memoir, onetime
foreign minister Mamoru Shigemitsu wrote, “Day by day Japan was turned into a furnace from which the voice of the people searching for food rose in anguish. And yet the clarion call was accepted. If the emperor ordained it, they would leap into the flames.”

  Vice Admiral Takejiro Onishi, father of the kamikazes, provided insight to the warped perception of the Japanese high command. In March 1945, a month before the invasion of Okinawa, he issued a statement from Taiwan. He conceded that “the enemy’s offensive operations are drawing ever nearer to the home islands, and air raids . . . are getting more severe by the day . . . [and] the logistical situation . . . has become dire.” However, in the same paragraph he asserted, “I can guarantee absolutely that Japan will not lose . . . the war is just beginning.”

  Onishi further stated that the expected Allied invasion would be repelled with “acceptable” Japanese casualties of 3 to 5 million, though he allowed that eventually 20 million might perish. Nevertheless, with sufficient “Japaneseness of spirit” the struggle might be maintained for years or even decades.

  Nor was Onishi a lone voice. Historian Alvin Coox quoted a staff officer who served at Imperial General Headquarters in 1945: “we must fight in order to glorify our national and military traditions; that it was an engagement which transcended victory or defeat.”

  Against an enemy who seemed bent upon extinction, there was precious little middle ground for the Allies. The cultural divide between Japan and the West represented far more than a gap: it was a vast chasm.