Barrett Tillman - Whirlwind: The Air War Against Japan, 1942-1945

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The Air War Against Japan, 19421945

Barrett Tillman

Simon & Schuster
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New York, NY 10020
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Copyright 2010 by Barrett Tillman

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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition March 2010

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Manufactured in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Tillman, Barrett.

Whirlwind : the air war against Japan, 19421945 / Barrett Tillman.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. World War, 19391945Aerial operations, American.

2. World War, 19391945CampaignsJapan. 3. Bombing,

AerialJapan. I. Title.

D790.T624 2010

940.5449730952dc22 2009049218

ISBN 978-1-4165-8440-7
ISBN 978-1-4165-8502-2 (ebook)

PHOTO CREDITS:

Authors Collection: 7, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28; Andrew Farmer: 29, 30, 31, 32; National Museum of the Pacific War: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 11, 15, 19, 33, 34, 36, 37, 38; The National World War II Museum: 35; Donald Nijboer: 20; Tailhook Assn.: 21, 22, 23; USAF via Air Force Test Center Museum: 8, 9, 10.

Dedicated to the memory of Jeff Ethell:
pilot, historian, colleague, friend.

Rock your wings when we rendezvous again
and Ill join on you.

For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.

HOSEA 8:7

D URING THE LAST year of the war in the Pacific, the U.S. Army Air Forces, Navy and Marine Corps, and British Royal Navy conducted a relentless air assault against the Japanese home islands. The attacks came from around the compass: from the west out of China, southwest from Okinawa, due south from the Marianas, northeast from the Aleutians, and from almost anywhere that aircraft carriers steamed. American B-29 bomber crews razed most of the enemys urban-industrial areas and delivered two nuclear weapons that ended the war. But there were many other significant players in the multiservice campaign: carrier-based aviators in Hellcats, Corsairs, Avengers, and Helldivers; long-range patrol bombers from the Aleutians; Mustang pilots from Iwo Jima; and almost everything in the Army Air Forces inventory from Okinawa.

Sixty-five years later, no single volume has examined the Allied air offensive against Japan in its terrible totality. Why there has been so little study of so epic a subject is difficult to explain. Certainly today, when interservice joint operations are not only common but necessary, the 194445 effort begs for detailed attention. Coordination of the various air forces, including land- and carrier-based Navy and Marine air groups, and integration of the British Pacific Fleet (BPF) into the American Fast Carrier Task Force, were substantial achievements on a scale never to be repeated.

The campaign was a long time coming, and a final test of some old theories of war making. As far back as the 1920s, airmen had postulated that strategic bombing could compel an industrialized enemy to surrender, thus avoiding the massive bloodletting of the Great War. But the airpower theorists reckoned from a false premise: that despotic regimes would take pity on their citizens plight as democratic governments were expected to do. In truth, the theory worked in neither direction. In World War II, more than 60,000 Britons died in air attacks, but the U.K.s resolve never cracked. While national resolve was mightily strained in Germany, where the death toll in bombed cities could have run half a million in five years, it held to the end. Perhaps 330,000 Japanese were killed by air attack in one-fifth that time.

The toll was terrible, but rather than fatally undermining civilian morale, bombing achieved a more subtle victory in affecting Japans ability to resist. Moreover, airpower compelled Emperor Hirohito to surrender, sparing Japan a death count that might have grown tenfold in an Allied invasion.

In 1942, Tokyo stood like an Asian colossus astride the sweep of the Pacific and deep into the Chinese mainland. Less than three years later Japan had lost control of its own airspace, and its cities lay open to attack on a scale the world had never seen. With its industry in ruins, Japans chilling policy of arming women and schoolchildren with spears reminds us of the irresistible power of the concentrated Allied assault on Dai Nippon, even as it poses moral questions that persist today.

In the course of writing more than thirty previous histories, I came to know hundreds of veterans of the Pacific War, American and Japanese alike. One thing shines through: they populated a vastly different world than today. With the rise of idealistic globalism, the context in which World War II was fought is difficult for many people to fathom.