A Concise History of the US Air Force - Air Force Historical Studies ...

Hansell’s XXI Bomber Command, the combat arm of the Washington-
based Twentieth Air Force. Iwo Jima, conquered after heavy fighting in
February 1945, provided an emergency landing field for damaged B-29s
and a base for P-51 fighter escorts. After a largely futile strategic bomb-
ing effort from India and China in 1944, XX Bomber Command joined
Hansell’s growing force in the Marianas early in 1945 for the final strikes
against Japan.
Hansell, an author of AWPD/l, stayed true to high-altitude day-
light precision strategic bombing doctrine, beginning with XXI Bomber
Command’s first mission against the Japanese home islands on
November 24, 1944. His assignment was to “achieve the earliest possible
progressive dislocation of the Japanese military, industrial, and econom-
ic systems and to undermine the morale of the Japanese people to a point
where their capacity and will to wage war was decisively weakened.” He
faced technical problems (including B-29 engines that tended to burst
into flames), unanticipated 200 mile-per-hour winds of the jet stream over
the home islands, and bad weather when striking mainly at Japan’s avia-
tion industries. At high altitude bombing accuracy was minimal; only 10
percent of bombs dropped fell within 1,000 feet of a target. Twenty-two
missions disabled only one factory.
Arnold replaced Hansell with Major General Curtis LeMay in
January 1945, with orders to achieve immediate results. During January
and February 1945, LeMay’s results were no better than Hansell’s. He
then surmised that Japanese industry was too dispersed and bombing
accuracy too poor for a precision campaign from high altitude in daylight.
Recognizing that Japanese air defenses were far weaker than those he had
encountered in Germany, but still taking a great gamble to produce imme-
diate results, he ordered his crews to remove their defensive guns and fly
low (at seven thousand feet) by night to carry heavier bomb loads, and
bum down Japan’s cities with incendiaries. The initial raid against Tokyo
on March 10, 1945, burned 15.8 square miles of urban area, killed almost
85,000, wounded almost 45,000, made almost 1 million homeless, and
became the most deadly air attack in history. By August LeMay’s air
force had burned 150 square miles in 68 Japanese cities-few of signifi-
cant size remained undamaged. Faced with an implacable enemy unwill-
ing to surrender and the prospect of a costly invasion, but equipped with
a new weapon of tremendous destructive capability, President Harry
Truman ordered the first atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August
6 and a second on Nagasaki three days later. Japan surrendered on August
14 after strategic bombing had levelled all of its major cities and killed or
injured 800,000 of its people.
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