Air forces kept careful books, but they kept them differently. A Japanese aircraft “lost” might have crashed on a training flight; an American aircraft “lost on a combat mission” might have run out of fuel on the way home; an enemy aircraft “destroyed” might have been a claim that no wreck ever confirmed. This chapter sets out the most reliable figures for the air war in the Pacific and in Europe and explains what each one counts.

How many aircraft did Japan lose?

The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, which sent teams to Japan in late 1945 to interview officers and read surviving records, estimated that the Japanese army and navy air arms lost about 50,000 aircraft from all causes during the Pacific war. Its summary report attributed less than 40 percent of those losses to combat and more than 60 percent to training, ferrying and other noncombat causes. The survey also estimated that Japan produced about 65,300 aircraft in the same period. Monthly output rose from an average of 642 in the first nine months of the war to a peak of 2,572 in September 1944, while monthly losses rose from about 500 early in the war to more than 2,000 in the latter months of 1944.

The high share of noncombat losses is a statistic about skill. As experienced pilots were killed in 1942–43, Japan shortened its training programs and sent less experienced pilots to the front, who crashed more often in training, in transit and on landing. Aircraft also had to be ferried long distances over water to island bases, and many were lost on the way. The survey counted 2,625 tactical aircraft on hand when the Pacific war began and about 5,000 at the surrender, with another 5,400 assigned to kamikaze use. Those are inventories at two moments, not measures of what happened between them.

For the United States in the Pacific, the same survey estimated about 27,000 aircraft lost, roughly 8,700 of them on combat missions. That figure excludes training losses inside the United States, and its “combat mission” category classifies losses by the type of flight rather than by cause, so an aircraft that crashed on takeoff for a combat mission counts as a combat-mission loss. The American and Japanese figures are therefore not perfectly parallel, but the overall ratio of nearly two to one is not in doubt.

Three battles that changed carrier aviation

Three Pacific battles show how quickly air power could be destroyed. At Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, Japan launched 353 aircraft from six carriers and lost 29, while 188 U.S. Navy, Marine Corps and Army aircraft were destroyed, most of them on the ground. At Midway in June 1942, Japan lost all four of the fleet carriers engaged and the 248 aircraft aboard them; the United States lost 150 aircraft. In the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June 1944, the Naval History and Heritage Command estimates about 476 Japanese aircraft destroyed, counting carrier aircraft, scouts and land-based aircraft, against about 123 American aircraft lost from all causes, only 42 of them in combat.

Many of the 123 American aircraft lost in the Philippine Sea went down not to Japanese fighters but in the dark on the evening of 20 June, when aircraft returning from a long-range strike ran out of fuel or crashed while landing on carriers at night. That night accounts for a large part of the 81 American aircraft lost to causes other than combat. Midway, by contrast, cost Japan its carriers and their maintenance crews, but many of Japan’s veteran pilots survived the battle. The Navy’s battle history describes a longer attrition over Guadalcanal and the Solomons later in 1942, where Japan lost more than 1,000 aircraft.

Over Japan itself

The U.S. Navy’s 1946 report Naval Aviation Combat Statistics, compiled by the Office of Naval Intelligence, separated enemy aircraft credited as destroyed in the air from those destroyed on the ground. For the Japanese home islands in 1945, it records 21,933 action sorties by Navy and Marine aircraft, 20,499 of them from carriers. They were credited with 1,008 Japanese aircraft destroyed in air combat and 1,823 on the ground. In the same operations the Navy and Marines lost 581 aircraft on action sorties: 327 to antiaircraft fire, 91 to enemy aircraft and 163 to operational causes.

By 1945, the main danger to American aviators over Japan came from the ground, not from Japanese fighters. Japan was holding back its remaining aircraft for kamikaze attacks against the expected invasion, and the carrier strikes of July and August 1945 found most of them dispersed on airfields. In those two months, the final carrier campaign was credited with 1,102 Japanese aircraft destroyed on the ground and 120 in the air. In February, the first carrier strikes on the Tokyo area had produced the opposite pattern: 420 credits in the air and 228 on the ground. “Credits” are pilots’ and units’ claims accepted by the Navy after review, and they are generally regarded as less reliable than counts of losses by the side that suffered them.

From the Marianas to the home islands

The Army Air Forces’ strategic campaign against Japan was flown by the Twentieth Air Force, first from bases in China and India and from late 1944 from the Marianas. On 24 November 1944, 88 B-29s from the Marianas bombed Tokyo on the first mission from those islands against Japan’s home islands, according to the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force. Over the whole campaign, the AAF digest records 38,808 airborne combat sorties by the Twentieth Air Force, including fighters, and 494 aircraft lost on combat missions.

The largest category is “other causes”: mechanical failure, fuel exhaustion on the 3,000-mile round trip, weather and accidents on takeoff and landing. Enemy action, by aircraft and antiaircraft fire together, accounts for fewer than two in five of the losses. The change in tactics in March 1945 shows up in the loss rate. Through 8 March, B-29s flying high-altitude daylight missions from the Marianas lost an average of 3.6 percent of aircraft per combat mission, according to the Strategic Bombing Survey. In the ten days beginning 9 March, when they switched to low-level night incendiary raids on Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka and Kobe, they flew 1,595 sorties, dropped 9,373 tons and lost 22 aircraft, about 1.4 percent of sorties by this collection’s calculation.

Europe’s bomber offensive

The combined bomber offensive against Germany and occupied Europe was the largest air campaign of the war. As summarized by John T. Correll in Air Force Magazine, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey found that Allied air forces dropped about 2.7 million tons of bombs, 54.2 percent of them by the U.S. Army Air Forces. Bombers flew about 1.44 million sorties and fighters another 2.7 million, mostly in support of the bombers. About 40,000 Allied aircraft were destroyed, roughly 22,000 of the RAF and 18,000 of the AAF, and nearly 160,000 airmen were killed, almost evenly divided between the two air forces.

Within those totals, the U.S. Eighth Air Force flying from England was the largest single command. Air Force Global Strike Command’s history credits it with more than 440,000 bomber sorties, 697,000 tons of bombs, over 5,100 aircraft lost and more than 26,000 personnel killed. That is more than the 24,511 deaths of the entire Marine Corps in the war. RAF Bomber Command lost 55,573 aircrew, according to the Royal Air Force’s memorial history, a figure that includes men from across the Commonwealth and from occupied Europe who flew with the command.

The same survey divided the bombing by target. According to Correll’s summary, transportation targets received 32.1 percent of all bombs dropped and oil targets 9.3 percent. The oil campaign of 1944 had the most measurable effect on German operations. German synthetic aviation gasoline output fell from 175,000 tons in April 1944 to 30,000 in July and 5,000 in September, according to the survey’s European summary, before a partial recovery late in the year. Aircraft factories, by contrast, recovered quickly after raids by dispersing production, and German aircraft output reached its peak in 1944.

The European air war began long before the American bombers arrived. In the Battle of Britain, an Air University study gives 1,733 Luftwaffe aircraft lost in the daylight campaign of 1940, against RAF wartime claims of 2,692. In the AAF digest, the European Theater of Operations alone accounts for 1,034,052 combat sorties and 11,687 aircraft lost on combat missions, with the Mediterranean tabulated separately. Chapter 4 compares these with the war against Japan, and the Army Air Forces collection follows the commands that flew them.

The people beneath the bombs

Air power’s victims on the ground are counted in other chapters, but their scale belongs here. The Strategic Bombing Survey’s Pacific report estimated that nine months of air attack on Japan, including the atomic bombs, caused about 806,000 civilian casualties, of whom approximately 330,000 died. In Britain, Imperial War Museums records 43,685 civilian deaths in the Blitz of 1940–41. In Germany, the historical commission appointed by the city of Dresden concluded in 2010 that up to 25,000 people were killed in the raids of 13–15 February 1945, far fewer than the figures of 100,000 or more that circulated for decades. Chapter 9 sets these and other estimates side by side.

The Dresden figure is a lesson in how numbers change. A wartime and postwar inflation of the death toll, encouraged by German propaganda in 1945 and repeated in later books, was corrected only when historians systematically matched burial records, police reports and missing-person files. The same caution applies to Tokyo, where the National WWII Museum publishes both about 80,000 and more than 100,000 deaths for the raid of 9–10 March 1945 in different articles.

Reading air-war numbers

Three rules help with any air statistic. First, distinguish losses reported by the side that suffered them from claims made by the other side; in 1940 and again over Japan in 1945, claims exceeded confirmed losses. Second, check whether “losses” include accidents, training and aircraft written off after damage; Japan’s 50,000 includes all of these, the AAF’s “lost on combat missions” includes some of them, and pilots’ claims include none. Third, check the period and the command. A figure for the Eighth Air Force is not a figure for the AAF in Europe, and a figure for B-29s over Japan is not one for the whole Twentieth Air Force.

Behind every aircraft lost was a factory that had to build its replacement. Chapter 6 turns to aircraft and tank production by country, where the American and Soviet advantage that made these losses sustainable becomes visible in the numbers.

Gallery · 7 photographs · select to enlarge

Building the air forces

Sources and further reading

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