The Air War against Japan: Doolittle, Kenney’s Fifth Air Force, LeMay and the B-29

At 08:20 on the morning of 18 April 1942, in a gale with green water breaking over the bow of USS Hornet, Lt. Col. James H. Doolittle took the first of sixteen Army B-25 bombers off a carrier deck that had never launched one in combat. The task force had been discovered by a Japanese picket boat, and the bombers left some 650 nautical miles from Japan, much farther out than planned, with no chance of returning to the ship and little fuel to spare for China. Almost three years later, on the evening of 9 March 1945, more than three hundred B-29 Superfortresses took off from Guam and Saipan carrying incendiary bombs instead of high explosives, and flew to Tokyo at five to seven thousand feet. The first raid was a gesture that changed Japanese strategy; the second burned out the heart of the capital in a single night.

Why it mattered

The war against Japan was, for the Army Air Forces, a war of distance. In Europe the AAF flew from fixed bases in England and Italy a few hundred miles from its targets. In the Pacific and Asia it had first to get within range: by carrier, by island-hopping alongside the Navy and the Marines, by building airfields in jungle and on coral, and by flying its own fuel and bombs over the highest mountains on earth. Three very different commanders shaped how it did so. Jimmy Doolittle showed in April 1942 that Japan itself could be reached. George Kenney, in New Guinea, turned a small and battered air force into the instrument that isolated Japan’s southern garrisons. Curtis LeMay, in 1945, abandoned the high-altitude precision bombing doctrine on which the AAF had been built (Chapter 4) and sent his B-29s against Japan’s cities at night with fire.

The B-29 that carried the last campaign was the most expensive weapon program of the war, and the aircraft that delivered the atomic bombs. The campaign it waged killed more Japanese civilians than any other form of attack except perhaps the blockade, and the moral argument over it has never ended. This chapter tells the story chronologically and in plain terms, with the numbers as the records give them and with the disagreements among sources stated where they exist.

Clark Field, 8 December 1941

The war began badly for the AAF on both sides of the date line. On the morning of 7 December 1941 in Hawaii, Japanese carrier aircraft struck Hickam and Wheeler Fields along with the fleet at Pearl Harbor and destroyed or damaged much of the Hawaiian Air Force on the ground (see the Pearl Harbor collection). In the Philippines, where it was already 8 December, the news arrived before dawn. Maj. Gen. Lewis H. Brereton’s Far East Air Force had the largest concentration of American heavy bombers outside the United States, 35 B-17s, along with about 90 P-40 fighters on Luzon. Brereton sought permission to bomb Japanese airfields on Formosa at first light and was put off by MacArthur’s headquarters for most of the morning; authority to act finally came after 10:00, and the bombers that had been sent up to avoid being caught on the ground were brought back to Clark Field to refuel and load (Air Force Magazine, “Disaster in the Philippines”; Bartsch).

At about 12:40, nearly ten hours after the first bombs fell on Pearl Harbor, 108 Japanese navy bombers and 84 Zero fighters from Formosa struck Clark Field and Iba Field together. Of the 17 B-17s on the ground at Clark, 12 were destroyed and four damaged; at Iba, only two of the 3rd Pursuit Squadron’s P-40s escaped. Thirty-four P-40s were lost on the ground or in the air that day, and about half the aircraft of the Far East Air Force were gone by nightfall (Bartsch; Edmonds). Japanese losses were seven fighters. Why the bombers were caught on the ground, after so many hours of warning, has been argued over by MacArthur, his chief of staff Richard Sutherland and Brereton ever since, and their accounts cannot be reconciled. What followed, the fall of the Philippines, is the subject of the Bataan and Corregidor collection.

Thirty seconds over Tokyo: the Doolittle Raid, 18 April 1942

The idea of putting Army medium bombers on a Navy carrier came in January 1942 from Capt. Francis Low of Admiral Ernest King’s staff, who saw Army bombers making practice takeoffs from a carrier deck outline painted on a Virginia airfield. Hap Arnold gave the planning to Lt. Col. James H. Doolittle, a former racing pilot and aeronautical engineer then on his staff. The B-25B Mitchell was the only Army bomber that could take off in the length of a carrier’s deck with a useful load and fly far enough to reach China after bombing Japan. Volunteer crews came from the 17th Bombardment Group, the first group to fly the B-25, which had recently moved from Pendleton, Oregon, to Columbia Army Air Base in South Carolina. Beginning on 1 March 1942 they trained at Eglin Field in Florida, where a Navy instructor, Lt. Henry Miller, taught the pilots to get a loaded B-25 off the ground in a few hundred feet. Their aircraft were stripped of the secret Norden sight, which was replaced by a simple sight costing about twenty cents, and fitted with extra fuel tanks and broomsticks painted black in the tail to look like guns.

Hornet loaded the sixteen bombers at Alameda, California, and sailed on 2 April 1942, joining Halsey’s Enterprise group north of Hawaii to form Task Force 16. The plan was to launch about 400 miles from Japan on the afternoon of 19 April, bomb at night and reach Chinese airfields around Quzhou (then Chuchow) in Zhejiang province at dawn. At 07:38 on 18 April the 70-ton picket boat No. 23 Nitto Maru sighted the task force and radioed a warning before Nashville sank her. Halsey and Doolittle decided to launch at once. The bombers took off between 08:20 and 09:19, a day early and roughly 650 nautical miles from Japan; every one of them got off the pitching deck (Glines; Wikipedia, citing Chun and Glines).

The bombers crossed the Japanese coast singly at low level and reached Tokyo around noon, six hours after launch, in the middle of an air-raid drill. Thirteen attacked targets in Tokyo, Yokohama and Yokosuka, and the remaining three struck Nagoya, Kobe and Osaka. They bombed military and industrial targets, steel works, oil storage, factories and dockyards, with 500-pound bombs and incendiary clusters; some bombs hit residential areas and a school. Postwar Japanese figures cited by Scott give 87 dead, 151 seriously injured and more than 300 slightly injured. No B-25 was shot down. All sixteen then flew on toward China into the night and a storm, with no homing beacon waiting for them, because the alert never reached the Chinese fields. Capt. Edward York, short of fuel, turned for the Soviet Union and landed near Vladivostok, where his crew was interned for more than a year before escaping through Iran. The other fifteen crews bailed out over China or crash-landed on the coast (Glines; Scott).

Of the eighty men, sixty-nine came home. Cpl. Leland Faktor was killed bailing out, and S/Sgt. William Dieter and Sgt. Donald Fitzmaurice drowned when their aircraft came down off the coast. Two crews, eight men, were captured by the Japanese. After a show trial in Shanghai they were sentenced to death; Lt. Dean Hallmark, Lt. William Farrow and Sgt. Harold Spatz were executed by firing squad on 15 October 1942, the other five sentences were commuted, and Lt. Robert Meder died of disease and starvation in captivity at Nanking on 1 December 1943. The four survivors were freed in August 1945. Chinese civilians and soldiers sheltered the rest and led them to safety, and Japan took vengeance on them: in the Zhejiang-Jiangxi campaign of May to September 1942, Japanese forces destroyed the airfields the raiders had been meant to use and laid waste much of the two provinces. Estimates of the Chinese dead range from about 10,000 civilians in one modern Western estimate to some 250,000 in Chinese accounts, and Japan used biological weapons in the campaign (Wikipedia, citing Yamamoto, Scott and Chinese sources; Scott, Target Tokyo).

Kenney’s air war in the Southwest Pacific

The remnants of the Far East Air Force withdrew to Australia, where the command was redesignated 5 Air Force on 5 February 1942. By mid-1942 MacArthur, now commanding the Southwest Pacific Area from Brisbane, had lost confidence in his air commander, and Arnold sent him Maj. Gen. George C. Kenney. Kenney took command of the Allied Air Forces on 4 August 1942 and of the reorganized Fifth Air Force on 3 September 1942 (AFHRA lineage). He was a practical engineer with strong opinions and a gift for getting along with MacArthur, and he had a clear idea of what an air force in New Guinea was for: to win control of the air over the battlefield, to cut the sea lanes that supplied the Japanese garrisons, and to carry the Army forward. He gave the forward command at Port Moresby to Brig. Gen. Ennis C. Whitehead.

Kenney’s air force fought with what it had and modified it to suit. Maj. Paul I. “Pappy” Gunn, a former Navy pilot and airline operator, packed the noses of A-20s and B-25s with forward-firing .50-caliber machine guns, turning medium bombers into low-level gunships. Crews of the 43rd Bombardment Group, beginning with Maj. William G. Benn’s 63rd Bombardment Squadron in late 1942, practiced “skip bombing,” dropping delay-fuzed bombs from mast height so that they skipped across the water into a ship’s side. Small parachute fragmentation bombs were used against airfields. Transports did much of the Army’s moving: in January 1943 C-47s flew an Australian brigade into Wau to save the airfield, and on 5 September 1943 Fifth Air Force C-47s dropped the U.S. 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment at Nadzab, the first American airborne operation in the Pacific, opening the way to Lae. In a series of large raids in August 1943 the Fifth Air Force struck the Japanese airfields around Wewak, catching many aircraft on the ground.

The Battle of the Bismarck Sea, 2–4 March 1943

Kenney’s methods were tested in full at the beginning of March 1943. The Japanese command at Rabaul sent a convoy of eight transports escorted by eight destroyers, Operation 81, to carry about 6,900 troops of the 51st Division from Rabaul to Lae in New Guinea. Allied intelligence, warned by codebreaking, expected it. B-17s of the 43rd Bombardment Group found and attacked the convoy on 2 March in the Bismarck Sea and sank one transport. On 3 March, as the ships came within range of New Guinea, the Fifth Air Force and the Royal Australian Air Force made a coordinated attack: Australian Beaufighters strafed the ships’ bridges and antiaircraft guns at mast height, B-17s bombed from medium altitude, and B-25s of the 38th and 43rd Groups and A-20s of the 3rd Attack Group came in at low level with skip and mast-height bombing, while P-38s held off the Japanese fighters (Craven and Cate, vol. 4; Odgers).

All eight transports and four of the destroyers were sunk. Of the troops embarked, about 1,200 reached Lae and about 2,700 were rescued and taken back to Rabaul; some 2,890 soldiers and sailors died. Allied losses were 13 aircrew killed in combat and accidents, one B-17 and three P-38s shot down, and two aircraft lost in accidents. For three days afterward, Allied aircraft and PT boats attacked lifeboats, rafts and men in the water, to prevent the survivors from reaching New Guinea as reinforcements. Some airmen accepted this as a military necessity, the more readily because Japanese fighters had machine-gunned the parachuting crew of a downed B-17; others were sickened by it. It is part of the record and should be stated plainly (Craven and Cate; Odgers; Wikipedia).

China, Burma, India and the Hump

The AAF’s war on the Asian mainland was shaped by one fact: after the Japanese cut the Burma Road in the spring of 1942, everything the Americans and the Nationalist Chinese needed in China came in by air. The Tenth Air Force in India and, from 10 March 1943, the Fourteenth Air Force in China under Maj. Gen. Claire Chennault, the former commander of the American Volunteer Group, the “Flying Tigers,” fought on fuel and bombs that had been flown over the eastern Himalayas from airfields in the Assam valley of northeastern India to Kunming. The airmen called the route “the Hump.” The first Hump cargo flights, in April 1942, carried gasoline meant for the Doolittle raiders who never arrived (National Museum of the USAF).

The route ran about 550 miles over mountains rising to 15,000 feet and more, in storms, icing and winds up to 100 miles an hour, and in its early months with few navigation aids. The aircraft, Douglas C-47s, Consolidated C-87s and above all the Curtiss C-46 Commando, which could carry nearly twice the C-47’s load, climbed from near sea level to 18,000 feet. From 1943 to 1945 the Air Transport Command delivered 685,304 tons in 456,977 flights, nearly 60 percent of it gasoline; more than 500 aircraft crashed and more than 1,300 crewmen were lost by the end of 1945 (National Museum of the USAF). Under Brig. Gen. William H. Tunner, who took over the India-China Division in the autumn of 1944 and ran it with production-line discipline, the monthly tonnage rose sharply, and he would apply the lessons in Berlin in 1948 (Chapter 9).

The B-29: the three-billion-dollar bomber

The aircraft that would carry the war to Japan was ordered before the United States entered it. In December 1939 the Air Corps issued a specification for a “superbomber” able to carry 20,000 pounds of bombs, fly 2,667 miles and reach 400 miles an hour. Boeing’s Model 345 won; the company received an order for two XB-29 prototypes on 24 August 1940 and a production order for 250 bombers on 17 May 1941, raised to 500 in January 1942, long before a B-29 had flown. The first prototype flew at Seattle on 21 September 1942. On 18 February 1943 the second prototype, with an engine on fire, crashed into a meat-packing plant near Boeing Field, killing the company’s chief test pilot, Edmund T. Allen, his crew of ten, twenty workers on the ground and a firefighter (Wikipedia, citing Boeing and AAF sources).

The B-29 was the most complex aircraft built in the war. It was the first Allied production bomber with pressurized crew compartments, connected by a tunnel over the unpressurized bomb bays, and its General Electric central fire control system let gunners aim four remotely controlled turrets through analog computers that corrected for range, speed and gravity. Its four Wright R-3350 engines were powerful and prone to overheating and fires, a problem never fully solved during the war. Four main plants built 3,970 B-29s: Boeing at Renton, Washington, and Wichita, Kansas; Bell at Marietta, Georgia; and Martin at Bellevue, near Omaha, Nebraska, where the Enola Gay and Bockscar were built. The aircraft’s design and production cost about three billion dollars, more than the Manhattan Project’s roughly two billion. When the first wing was to deploy in early 1944, so many aircraft needed modification that Arnold sent his own staff to Kansas, and in the “Battle of Kansas,” from 10 March to 15 April 1944, mechanics working outdoors in freezing weather made 150 aircraft ready to go overseas.

Matterhorn: the Twentieth Air Force from India and China

To keep the B-29s out of the hands of theater commanders, Arnold had the Joint Chiefs establish a new air force under their own direct control. The Twentieth Air Force was established on 4 April 1944 with Arnold himself in command from Washington, the only numbered air force ever run by the commanding general of the AAF (Craven and Cate, vol. 5). Its first striking force, XX Bomber Command, went to India under Operation Matterhorn, with forward bases around Chengdu in Sichuan province, built largely by hand by hundreds of thousands of Chinese laborers. Every gallon of fuel and every bomb used at Chengdu had to be flown in over the Hump, much of it by the B-29s themselves, so that a B-29 might make several trips over the mountains for each mission it flew against Japan.

The first B-29 combat mission, on 5 June 1944, was flown from India against the railway shops at Bangkok, with 98 aircraft launched. On the night of 15–16 June 1944 B-29s staging through Chengdu attacked the Imperial Iron and Steel Works at Yawata on Kyushu, the first attack on the Japanese home islands since Doolittle; the damage was slight. Under Brig. Gen. Kenneth B. Wolfe and, from 29 August 1944, Maj. Gen. Curtis E. LeMay, XX Bomber Command raided Japan, Manchuria, Formosa and Southeast Asia, but the logistics defeated it, and in early 1945 its wing was moved to the Marianas (Craven and Cate, vol. 5).

The Marianas and Hansell’s precision campaign

The capture of Saipan, Tinian and Guam by the Marines and the Army in the summer of 1944 gave the AAF what China could not: bases about 1,500 miles from Tokyo that could be supplied by sea. Navy Seabees and Army engineers built enormous airfields on the islands, among them Isley Field on Saipan and North Field on Tinian, with four parallel runways, the largest airfield in the world when it was completed. Brig. Gen. Haywood S. Hansell Jr., one of the authors of AWPD-1 (Chapter 5) and a believer in daylight precision bombing, brought the 73rd Bombardment Wing to Saipan in October 1944, flying the first B-29 there himself on 12 October.

On 24 November 1944 Hansell sent 111 B-29s against the Nakajima aircraft engine plant at Musashino on the edge of Tokyo, the first raid on the capital since April 1942. Seventeen aborted, and over Japan the bombers met something no crew had trained for: winds of well over a hundred miles an hour at their bombing altitude of 30,000 feet, the jet stream, which blew bombs off target and made accurate sighting nearly impossible. Through December and January Hansell’s precision raids against the aircraft industry, flown at high altitude in daylight and usually through cloud, did little damage, while engine failures and ditchings cost aircraft and crews. Arnold, under pressure to show results from the most expensive program of the war, relieved Hansell in January 1945 and gave the command to LeMay, who took over on 20 January 1945 (Craven and Cate, vol. 5; Werrell).

Iwo Jima, halfway between the Marianas and Tokyo, was invaded on 19 February 1945, in large part to give the B-29s an emergency landing field and a base for escort fighters. On 4 March 1945, with the island still being fought for, the B-29 Dinah Might, short of fuel, made the first B-29 landing there. The Air Force counts 2,251 B-29 emergency landings on Iwo Jima by the end of the war, and from April 1945 P-51 Mustangs of the VII Fighter Command flew from the island to escort the bombers over Japan. The price was paid by the Marines and sailors of the battle: 6,821 Americans were killed taking the island (see the Iwo Jima collection). Crews who ditched at sea were rescued by Navy flying boats, destroyers and lifeguard submarines stationed along the bomber routes, a mission the submarine force flew for the carrier strikes as well (see the Submarine War collection).

LeMay and the fire raids, March 1945

LeMay had commanded the 305th Bombardment Group in England, where he developed the combat box formation and the straight-in bomb run, and then XX Bomber Command. In the Marianas he spent his first six weeks trying to make precision bombing work, with no better results than Hansell. The AAF had long studied the vulnerability of Japanese cities to fire. At Dugway Proving Ground in Utah in 1943 the Army had built and burned replicas of Japanese workers’ houses to test incendiary bombs, and on 25 February 1945 a trial raid by 172 B-29s with incendiaries had burned out about a square mile of Tokyo (Craven and Cate, vol. 5). LeMay now decided on a radical change. His B-29s would attack at night, individually rather than in formation, at 5,000 to 7,000 feet instead of 30,000, below the jet stream and where the engines worked less hard, carrying full loads of incendiaries; most of their guns and gunners were left behind to save weight. He gave the orders on 8 March. LeMay later wrote that he took the decision without asking Washington in advance, though it fitted the AAF’s long-standing plans for incendiary attack (Craven and Cate; Werrell; LeMay, Mission with LeMay).

The B-29s began taking off from Guam, Saipan and Tinian at 17:35 on 9 March; sources give the number dispatched as between 325 and 334. Pathfinders reached Tokyo shortly after midnight and marked the target, a zone of about twelve square miles in the densely populated Shitamachi district east of the Imperial Palace, with more than a million inhabitants, among them many small workshops supplying war industry. In about three hours 279 aircraft dropped 1,665 tons of incendiaries, mostly M-69 napalm bomblets released in clusters. A ground wind of 45 miles an hour or more drove the fires together into a conflagration that burned out 15.8 square miles of the city. Tokyo police counted 267,171 buildings destroyed and 1,008,005 people left homeless. Fourteen B-29s were lost, twelve of them to Japanese gunners, and 96 airmen were killed or missing (Craven and Cate, vol. 5; USSBS; Wikipedia, citing Frank and Japanese records).

The number of dead will never be known exactly. Bodies recovered and recorded after the raid numbered 79,466. The Tokyo municipal health director reported 83,600 dead and 40,918 injured; the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey used a figure of 87,793 dead; the Tokyo fire department reported 97,000; the Tokyo memorial hall in Yokoamicho Park honors at least 105,400 victims, and many bodies were never recovered. Most historians, Richard B. Frank among them, put the toll at between 90,000 and 100,000 (Frank, Downfall; Wikipedia, “Bombing of Tokyo (10 March 1945)”). It was the single most destructive air raid in history, deadlier in one night than the immediate effects of the atomic bomb at Nagasaki.

By the numbers

How many died in Tokyo on 9–10 March 1945? Estimates by source

Deaths from Operation Meetinghouse as counted or estimated by Japanese authorities and later historians. The gray bar shows the most common range used by historians.

Bodies recovered and recorded after the raid79,466

Tokyo city director of health83,600

U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey87,793

Usual estimate of historians (Frank, 1999)90,000–100,000

Tokyo fire department97,000

Victims honored at the Tokyo Memorial Hall (a minimum)105,400

Tokyo was the first of many. In the next ten days, until he ran out of incendiaries, LeMay sent his bombers against Nagoya, Osaka and Kobe, and Nagoya again. In May and June the large cities were burned out one after another, and from mid-June the B-29s turned to the smaller cities. By August the AAF had firebombed 66 Japanese cities, destroying on average about 40 percent of their built-up area (USSBS). Late in July the bombers began dropping leaflets naming cities that would be attacked and urging civilians to leave. From 27 March 1945 the 313th Bombardment Wing also mined the Shimonoseki Strait and the approaches to Japan’s harbors in Operation Starvation, laying some 12,000 mines that closed much of Japan’s remaining shipping, a campaign that finished what the submarines had begun (see the Submarine War collection). The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey estimated that nine months of air attack on Japan, the atomic bombs included, caused about 806,000 civilian casualties, of whom about 330,000 died.

LeMay never pretended that the raids spared civilians, and the debate over them, in Japan and the United States, has never closed. The case made for them at the time was that Japanese war production was dispersed into homes and small workshops among the residential districts, that precision attack had failed, and that the alternative was an invasion that would have cost far more lives on both sides. The case against them is that they deliberately made the civilian population the target. Both arguments rest on facts. The AAF’s own Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that the fire raids, the mining and the submarine blockade together had brought Japan to the edge of collapse before the atomic bombs, while Japanese records show that the military leadership was still preparing to fight on the beaches in the summer of 1945.

To the end: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the surrender

The 509th Composite Group, trained at Wendover, Utah, and based on Tinian from the early summer of 1945, flew its specially modified “Silverplate” B-29s on practice missions over Japan with single large “pumpkin” bombs while the atomic weapons were prepared. On 6 August 1945 the Enola Gay, piloted by Col. Paul W. Tibbets, dropped the uranium bomb on Hiroshima; on 9 August Bockscar, piloted by Maj. Charles W. Sweeney, dropped the plutonium bomb on Nagasaki after clouds covered the primary target, Kokura. Their story, and the decision to use the bomb, are told in the Manhattan Project collection, in Little Boy and Hiroshima and Fat Man and Nagasaki. Conventional B-29 raids continued until 14–15 August. On 2 September 1945, as the surrender was signed aboard USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, hundreds of B-29s and Navy carrier aircraft flew over the ships. Carl Spaatz, commanding the U.S. Army Strategic Air Forces in the Pacific, was there, as he had been at Reims and Berlin in May.

Timeline

The air war against Japan, 1941–1945

1. 7 Dec 1941Japanese carrier aircraft strike Hickam and Wheeler Fields and Pearl Harbor.
2. 8 Dec 1941, about 12:40Clark and Iba Fields, Luzon, are attacked; most of FEAF’s B-17s at Clark are destroyed on the ground.
3. 5 Feb 1942The Far East Air Force, withdrawn to Australia, becomes 5 Air Force.
4. 1 Mar 1942Doolittle’s crews begin training at Eglin Field, Florida.
5. 2 Apr 1942USS Hornet sails from Alameda with sixteen B-25Bs.
6. 18 Apr 1942, 08:20Doolittle takes off from Hornet; the raiders bomb Tokyo and five other cities around noon.
7. Apr 1942First Hump cargo flights from India to China.
8. 4–7 Jun 1942The Battle of Midway.
9. 4 Aug 1942Kenney takes command of the Allied Air Forces, Southwest Pacific Area.
10. 15 Oct 1942Raiders Hallmark, Farrow and Spatz are executed in Shanghai.
11. 2–4 Mar 1943The Battle of the Bismarck Sea.
12. 10 Mar 1943The Fourteenth Air Force is activated in China under Chennault.
13. 5 Sep 1943The 503rd Parachute Infantry drops at Nadzab from Fifth Air Force C-47s.
14. 10 Mar–15 Apr 1944The “Battle of Kansas” readies the first B-29s for overseas.
15. 4 Apr 1944The Twentieth Air Force is established under Arnold.
16. 5 Jun 1944First B-29 combat mission, from India to Bangkok.
17. 15–16 Jun 1944B-29s from Chengdu bomb Yawata, Kyushu.
18. 29 Aug 1944LeMay takes over XX Bomber Command.
19. 12 Oct 1944Hansell lands the first B-29 on Saipan.
20. 24 Nov 1944First Marianas B-29 raid on Tokyo.
21. 20 Jan 1945LeMay takes command of XXI Bomber Command.
22. 19 Feb 1945U.S. Marines land on Iwo Jima.
23. 4 Mar 1945Dinah Might makes the first B-29 emergency landing on Iwo Jima.
24. 9–10 Mar 1945Operation Meetinghouse: the Tokyo fire raid.
25. 27 Mar 1945B-29s begin mining Japanese waters (Operation Starvation).
26. 29 May 1945Daylight fire raid on Yokohama.
27. 16 Jul 1945The Twentieth Air Force headquarters moves to Guam.
28. 6 Aug 1945Hiroshima; Richard Bong is killed testing a P-80 in California.
29. 9 Aug 1945Nagasaki.
30. 14–15 Aug 1945Last B-29 raids; Japan announces its surrender.
31. 2 Sep 1945Surrender signed aboard USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.

Questions readers ask

Why couldn’t the Doolittle bombers land back on Hornet?

A B-25 could take off from a carrier but could not land on one: it had no tailhook, it was too heavy and fast to stop in the length of the deck, and its wingspan left no room to park. The plan was always a one-way flight to China. Had the raid been called off before launch, the bombers would have been pushed over the side so that the carrier could use her own aircraft.

What was skip bombing?

A low-level attack on ships in which a bomber, flying at a few hundred feet or less, released a bomb with a delayed fuze short of the target so that it skipped across the water like a flat stone and struck the ship’s side at or below the waterline, exploding a few seconds later. It was much more accurate against ships than high-altitude bombing, but it exposed the aircraft to the ships’ guns, which is why Kenney’s strafers went in first to suppress them.

Was the Tokyo fire raid deadlier than the atomic bombs?

It killed more people than any other single air raid, roughly 90,000 to 100,000 by most estimates. The Hiroshima bomb killed tens of thousands instantly and, by commonly cited estimates, 90,000 to 140,000 by the end of 1945; the Nagasaki bomb killed 60,000 to 80,000 by the end of 1945. Comparisons depend on which counts and time periods are used; the Manhattan Project collection gives the details.

Why was the B-29 force run from Washington?

Arnold wanted to prove that strategic air power could defeat Japan and feared that theater commanders, MacArthur and Admiral Nimitz in particular, would use the B-29s for tactical purposes. Placing the Twentieth Air Force directly under the Joint Chiefs, with himself as their agent, kept the bombers under AAF control, and it anticipated the postwar argument for an independent Air Force (Chapter 9).

Is there a North Carolina connection?

Many North Carolinians served in the Pacific air war, and the state’s Army airfields, Pope Field at Fort Bragg, Morris Field in Charlotte and Seymour Johnson Field at Goldsboro, trained crews and units for every theater (Chapter 5). The nearest Doolittle Raid connection is next door: the raiders’ parent unit, the 17th Bombardment Group, was based at Columbia Army Air Base in South Carolina when Doolittle asked for volunteers, and the crews flew from there to Eglin Field to train.

How it connects

This chapter follows The Tuskegee Airmen and the WASP, whose WASP pilots Dora Dougherty and Dorothea Moorman flew the B-29 in 1944 to show male crews it could be handled, and it overlaps several other collections. The disaster at Hickam and Clark belongs with the Pearl Harbor and Bataan and Corregidor collections. The B-29s depended on Iwo Jima, and on the Navy’s lifeguard submarines described in the Submarine War collection, whose blockade of Japan’s shipping the B-29s’ mining completed. The war in China that the Hump supplied began at the Marco Polo Bridge in 1937. The atomic missions of the 509th Composite Group are told in the Manhattan Project collection, beginning with The 509th Composite Group, Tinian and the Decision to Use the Bomb.

The next and final chapter, Independence: The National Security Act and the U.S. Air Force, 1947, follows the men of this chapter into the postwar world: Spaatz as the first chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force, Kenney as the first commander of the Strategic Air Command, LeMay in Germany at the start of the Berlin Airlift, and Tunner, who ran the Hump, running the airlift.

Remembering it today

The National Museum of the U.S. Air Force near Dayton, Ohio, displays a B-25B in the markings of Doolittle’s aircraft and the Doolittle Raiders’ goblets, the B-29 Bockscar, and exhibits on the Hump and the Southwest Pacific. The B-29 Enola Gay is at the Smithsonian’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia. The aircraft carrier USS Hornet (CV-12), which took the name of the Doolittle carrier sunk at Santa Cruz in October 1942, is a museum ship at Alameda, California, where the raiders’ B-25s were loaded. The B-29 Fifi of the Commemorative Air Force and Doc, based in Wichita where it was built, still fly.

In Tokyo, the victims of the air raids are commemorated at the Tokyo Memorial Hall in Yokoamicho Park, Sumida ward, built after the 1923 earthquake and later also dedicated to the dead of 1945, and at the privately founded Center of the Tokyo Raids and War Damage in Koto ward. North Field on Tinian, with the atomic bomb loading pits marked, and the Iwo Jima airfields are reachable only with difficulty; Iwo Jima is a Japanese military base, visited by Americans chiefly on the annual Reunion of Honor.

Sources

• Craven, Wesley Frank, and James Lea Cate, eds. The Army Air Forces in World War II. Vol. 1, Plans and Early Operations; vol. 4, The Pacific: Guadalcanal to Saipan; vol. 5, The Pacific: Matterhorn to Nagasaki. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948–1953; reprinted Office of Air Force History, 1983.
• Bartsch, William H. December 8, 1941: MacArthur’s Pearl Harbor. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2003; Edmonds, Walter D. They Fought with What They Had. Boston: Little, Brown, 1951; and “Disaster in the Philippines,” Air Force Magazine.
• Glines, Carroll V. The Doolittle Raid: America’s Daring First Strike Against Japan. New York: Orion Books, 1988.
• Doolittle, James H., with Carroll V. Glines. I Could Never Be So Lucky Again. New York: Bantam, 1991.
• Scott, James M. Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor. New York: W. W. Norton, 2015.
• Prange, Gordon W., with Donald M. Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon. Miracle at Midway. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982.
• Kenney, George C. General Kenney Reports: A Personal History of the Pacific War. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1949; reprinted Office of Air Force History, 1987.
• Odgers, George. Air War Against Japan, 1943–1945. Australia in the War of 1939–1945, series 3, vol. 2. Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1957.
• National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, “Flying the ‘Hump’: Lifeline to China.”
• Werrell, Kenneth P. Blankets of Fire: U.S. Bombers over Japan during World War II. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996.
• Frank, Richard B. Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire. New York: Random House, 1999.
• LeMay, Curtis E., with MacKinlay Kantor. Mission with LeMay: My Story. Garden City: Doubleday, 1965.
• United States Strategic Bombing Survey. Summary Report (Pacific War) and The Effects of Air Attack on Japanese Urban Economy. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1946–1947.
• “9–10 March 1945: Operation Meetinghouse.” This Day in Aviation, citing USAF, NARA and USSBS records.
• U.S. Air Force (Kadena Air Base), “Battle of Iwo Jima approaches 70” (B-29 emergency landings).
• Wikipedia articles used as guides to the sources: “Attack on Clark Field,” “Doolittle Raid,” “Battle of the Bismarck Sea,” “Boeing B-29 Superfortress,” “Twentieth Air Force,” “Bombing of Tokyo (10 March 1945)” and “Fifth Air Force.”
• Congressional Medal of Honor Society, “Richard I. Bong” and “James H. Doolittle.”

Photographs: U.S. Navy, U.S. Army Air Forces and U.S. Air Force photographs, from the Naval History and Heritage Command and the National Archives; a Japanese photograph of a captured raider, found by U.S. forces; and a photograph of Tokyo taken around 10 March 1945 by Ishikawa Koyo of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, in the public domain under Japanese law; all via Wikimedia Commons. Photographs of the dead of the Tokyo raid exist and are well known; they have not been reproduced here. Unit insignia drawn for this collection are illustrations, not official emblems.