Whirlwind

The Air War Against Japan, 1942-1945

Barrett Tillman

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781416584414
• eBook ISBN: 9781416585022
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

WHIRLWIND is the first book to tell the complete, awe-inspiring story of the Allied air war against Japan—the most important strategic bombing campaign inhistory. From the audacious Doolittle raid in 1942 to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, award-winning historian Barrett Tillman recounts the saga from the perspectives of American and British aircrews who flew unprecedented missions overthousands of miles of ocean, as well as of the generalsand admirals who commanded them.Whether describing the experiences of bomber crews based in China or the Marianas, fighter pilotson Iwo Jima, or carrier aviators at sea, Tillman provides vivid details of the lives of the fliers and their support personnel. Whirlwind takes readers into the cockpits and gun turrets of the mighty B-29 Superfortress, the largest bomber built up to that time. Tillman dramatically re-creates the sweep of wartime emotions that crews endured on fifteen-hour missions, grappling with the extreme tedium of cramped spaces and with adrenaline spikes in flak-studded skies, knowing that a bailout would put them at the mercy of a merciless enemy or an unforgiving sea.A major character is the controversial and brilliant General Curtis LeMay, who rewrote strategic bombing tactics. His command's fire-bombing missions incinerated fully half of Tokyo and many other cities, crippling Japan's industry while still failing to force surrender. Whirlwind examines the immense logistics and construction efforts necessary to support Superfortresses in Asia and the Mariana Islands, as well as the tireless efforts of engineers to build huge air bases from scratch.It also describes the unheralded missions that American bomber crews flew from the Aleutian Islands to Japan's northernmost Kuril Islands.Never has the Japanese side of the story been so thoroughly examined. If Washington, D.C., represented a "second front" in Army-Navy rivalry, the situation in Tokyo approached a full-contact sport. Tillman's description of Japan's willfully inadequate approach to civil defense is eye-opening. Similarly, he examines the mind-set in Tokyo's war cabinet, which ignored the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, requiring the emperor's personal intervention to avert a ghastly Allied invasion.Tillman shows how, despite the Allies' ultimate success, mistakes and shortsighted policies made victory more costly in lives and effort. He faults the lack of a unified command for allowing the Army Air Forces and the Navy to pursue parochial goals at the expense of the larger mission, and he questions the premature commitment of the enormously sophisticated B-29 to the most primitive theater in India and China. Whirlwind is one of the last histories of World War II written with the contribution of men who fought in it.With unexcelled macro- and microperspectives, Whirlwind is destined to become a standard reference on the war, on multiservice operations, and on the human capacity for individual heroism and national folly.

CHAPTER ONE
Before the Beginning

IN 1921 ITALIAN aviation visionary Giulio Douhet proclaimed, “Aeronautics opened up to men a new field of action, the field of the air. In so doing it of necessity created a new battlefield; for wherever two men meet, conflict is inevitable.”

In that opening passage of Command of the Air, Douhet established the twin towers of his professional philosophy: evangelical aviation mated with bone-deep cynicism about human nature.

Douhet was—and remains—an intriguing character. Born in 1869, he became an artillery officer but early on grasped the violent promise of military aviation. As a technocrat—he studied science and engineering—he perceived the potential for aerial warfare almost as soon as there were Zeppelins, let alone airplanes. In 1912, a year after Italy committed aircraft against the Turks in Libya, he wrote Rules for the Use of Airplanes in War. It was among the first efforts to establish a doctrine for military aviation.

When the Great War in Europe erupted in August 1914, Douhet was a vigorous forty-five-year-old infantry colonel. Eagerly following aviation developments, he was primed and ready when Italy entered the fray against Austria-Hungary and Germany eight months later. Though not a pilot, he advocated building an aerial armada of 500 bombers capable of carpeting the enemy with explosives, presumably forcing capitulation without prolonged ground combat.

But Douhet was bitterly disappointed as a succession of Italian defeats and command incompetence spurred his sharpened pen and acerbic tongue. Certain that aviation technology could offset his nation’s embarrassing unpreparedness, he vented his spleen in all directions, haranguing anyone who would listen, and many who would not. Inevitably such sentiments breached the tolerance of officialdom, and in 1916 Douhet was imprisoned for, among other things, “issuing false news . . . and disturbing the public tranquility.”

Undeterred in his evangelism, Douhet wrote from his cell, while army commanders and government ministers remained targets for his acid ink as the war news deteriorated. Finally, in late 1917, Italy’s fortunes bottomed out with the disastrous Battle of Caporetto, which produced 300,000 Italian casualties. At that dismal point Douhet was released from prison and named director of the General Air Commissariat, responsible for coordinating Italy’s aviation plans and policies. However, it was too little too late. He found an ingrained bureaucracy unwilling to enact his plans, and he left in disgust in June 1918.

Following the war, the verdict of Douhet’s court-martial was reversed and, remarkably, he was promoted to general. However, by then he had lost faith in Italy’s government and military, and declined to return to duty.

After 1918, Douhet believed the material means of achieving his vision of airpower finally existed. His colleague Gianni Caproni had produced hundreds of large, capable bombers, some flown by Americans against targets in Austria-Hungary. Other nations also had made remarkable progress, including the firms of Vickers and Handley Page in Britain; Sikorsky in Russia; and Gotha and Friedrichshafen in Germany. Douhet was concerned that, having built an air weapon, after “the war to end all wars” Italy would neither maintain nor employ the machines as he envisioned. Consequently, he focused more on his writing, leading to publication of Command of the Air in 1921. Essentially, it advocated unrelenting bombing of enemy population and production centers—a two-prong attack on a nation’s moral and material means of resistance. Properly conducted, Douhet asserted, such a policy could win a quick decision and save millions of lives in the long run.

High on Douhet’s list of requirements was an independent air force, by 1919 a reality only in Britain. There, Douhet’s opposite number was a prewar pilot, Major General Sir Hugh Trenchard, who in 1918 had belatedly espoused strategic bombardment and established a highly capable force that raided far into Germany. Unlike Douhet, Trenchard had staying power, remaining as chief of the air staff for a decade after the war.

Trenchard had already seen the reality of heavy bombers in the Great War. Though Germany’s Zeppelin raids on London and environs gained most of the attention—the long, sleek dirigibles made great news copy—they proved too vulnerable to improved defenses. Instead, the kaiser had turned to an armada of Gothas and Riesen (giant) biplanes beginning in the spring of 1917. However, from 1915 to 1918 only some 300 tons of Teutonic ordnance fell on Britain, causing 1,400 deaths and nearly 5,000 other casualties. It represented barely two days’ sanguinary bill at the front, but the psychological impact was enormous. The appearance of German bombers in English skies led to nearly doubling the size of the Royal Flying Corps, literally overnight. It became the Royal Air Force in April 1918.

Meanwhile, in the nexus of wartime alliances, a third airpower champion appeared. He was a French-born American, Lieutenant Colonel William L. Mitchell, known to friends and to history as Billy.

As one of the senior U.S. airmen in France in 1917, Mitchell met Trenchard and established a warm personal and professional relationship. Six years junior to the Briton, Mitchell had won his wings in 1916 and was avid in his support of aviation. Rising rapidly, he rocketed to brigadier general and directed the Allied air effort supporting the huge Saint-Mihiel offensive in September 1918. Deploying nearly 1,500 planes, Mitchell crafted a remarkably effective air-ground plan in an era when aircraft voice radio was nearly nonexistent.

In his eighteen months in Europe, Mitchell made a name for himself, and enemies as well. His fiery advocacy of aviation alienated many ground officers, and his perceived flamboyance riled some of his fellow airmen. Because America lacked a strategic bombing force, his early focus was necessarily limited to tactical airpower, but after returning to America he soon raised his sights and became a disciple of Giulio Douhet.

All three men—the Italian, the Briton, and the American—faced similar postwar problems. The greatest was public and even military indifference. Conventional wisdom held that there would be no more Great Wars, especially with the emergence of the League of Nations. Consequently, vastly reduced defense funding became the fiscal bone that army and navy dogs scrapped over. With military and naval hierarchies firmly established, the upstart airmen began at a decided disadvantage, even with Britain’s Royal Air Force and then Italy’s Regia Aeronautica becoming independent services in 1923.

Mitchell faced a greater challenge than Douhet and Trenchard, as America enjoyed a 3,000-mile separation from Europe, courtesy of the Atlantic Ocean. No nation in the Western Hemisphere posed a remotely serious threat to the United States, leaving congressmen and senators to ask (not unwisely) why they should appropriate scarce funds for more flying machines.

Mitchell turned the financial argument on its head, insisting that long-range bombers could defend America’s shores more efficiently than a two-ocean navy. In attempting to prove his point, he finagled a series of tests pitting bombers against obsolete U.S. and captured German warships off the Virginia coast in 1921. The Navy agreed, mainly out of curiosity as to how modern naval vessels would withstand aerial bombardment. Ironically (in light of later developments) Mitchell sought participation of Navy aircraft as well.

Billy Mitchell may have been an irritating gadfly, but he meant business. He readily agreed to conduct the tests under “wartime conditions,” though the target vessels were immobile. Having accepted the rules, he cheated like hell. Mitchell obtained one-ton bombs that could not easily be carried aloft, and restricted the range of any aircraft that bore them. Nevertheless, in their most spectacular test his airmen scored a major triumph by using their unconventional weapons against the “unsinkable” battleship Ostfriesland. The 24,000-ton veteran of the Battle of Jutland survived the first day’s tests with minor damage, but the next day Mitchell launched his heavyweights, British Handley Page 0/400s. They scored two hits and four near misses that ripped Ostfriesland’s hull, sending her down in twenty-one minutes. The Navy was astonished—and the Army leadership embarrassed. But Mitchell’s giant bombs sank other aged battleships in additional tests, even using huge 4,300-pound weapons.

The next year Mitchell met Douhet in Europe and was captured by the Italian’s fervor and the depth of Command of the Air. Mitchell had excerpts sent to colleagues, and got banished for his trouble. Dispatched to Hawaii and then to Asia, he literally took a page from Douhet’s book and spent his exile producing a tome of his own. The result was a 324-page treatise predicting war with Japan. Published in 1925, Winged Defense insisted that the mere threat of sustained aerial bombardment would cause a collapse of enemy willpower, and that battleships were becoming obsolete as aviation technology advanced. The fact that Mitchell reverted to colonel that year probably was no coincidence.

That was bad enough. But in September, one of Mitchell’s naval counterparts died unnecessarily, following orders from nonaviators. Sent into treacherous weather over Ohio, Commander Zachary Lansdowne perished with thirteen other crew members of the dirigible Shenandoah. Fliers were outraged that “paddlefeet” controlled airmen’s destinies. Many grumbled; Mitchell exploded. Calling a press conference, he publicly accused the leaders of the U.S. Army and Navy of professional incompetence and indicted the “almost treasonable administration of the national defense.” The gauntlet had been dropped, and no one doubted that it would be retrieved and flung in the accuser’s face.

In a sensational six-week trial, Mitchell exploited his court-martial to gain a public forum for his views. He received sympathetic coverage in many newspapers but the outcome was a foregone conclusion. Undeniably guilty of insubordination, in December 1925 he was suspended from active duty for five years. Rather than live with the penalty, he resigned from the Army to continue his crusade as a civilian. He died in 1936, still insisting that America’s military future would be found in the sky.

Eventually Mitchell was proven wrong on many details but the concept of strategic bombardment outlived him. Almost before he was buried, the Army gave significant contracts to two leading aircraft manufacturers: Boeing in Seattle, Washington, and Douglas in El Segundo, California. Their commission was to build single examples of large, ocean-spanning bombers that could be flown and evaluated as prototypes of follow-on designs. In the words of a later generation, they were technology demonstrators.

First up was Boeing’s experimental XB-15. Successfully flown by test pilot Edmund T. Allen in 1937, it featured a 149-foot wingspan and 32.5-ton empty weight. Its four 850-horsepower radial engines were reliable but insufficient to achieve tactical speeds. Nevertheless, the giant’s purpose was to prove that a bomber could fly 5,000 miles, whatever the speed. Assuming a mission radius of 2,500 miles, the XB-15’s 152 mph cruising speed equaled 33.5 hours airborne—the duration of Charles Lindbergh’s solo flight from New York to Paris in 1927. Consequently, the ten-man crew required an automatic pilot, bunks, galley, and lavatory. With a 12,000-pound bomb load, the B-15’s maximum takeoff weight was 5,000 pounds greater than that of the B-17G in World War II.

The Douglas entry, the XB-19, suffered a lengthy gestation. It represented half a generation of advancement over the XB-15, with greater size and weight, and a nose wheel configuration. With costs soaring, in 1938 the company sought to cancel the contract but the Army believed the giant (212-foot wingspan) was worth procuring. When first flown in June 1941, it had already been overtaken by advancing technology. Douglas envisioned a full crew of sixteen, including nine gunners for eleven machine guns and two 37mm cannon. There were also provisions for a six-man relief crew, acknowledging the problem of crew fatigue on prolonged missions.

Douglas lost money hand over fist on the XB-19. Paid $1.4 million, the company eventually spent nearly three times as much to complete the contract. Nevertheless, the XB-19 proved the potential for huge piston-driven aircraft, as its wingspan was seventy feet more and its seventy-ton empty weight nearly twice that of the B-29 Superfortress. However, an omen of things to come involved the troublesome Wright R-3350 engines, which proved unworkable and were replaced by 2,600-horsepower Allisons. The lone B-19 was scrapped in 1949.

Meanwhile, the Army had proceeded with a truly practical design, Boeing’s classic B-17. Smaller and shorter-ranged than the XB-15 and -19, it nonetheless represented the world standard in heavy bombers when it lifted off Boeing’s Seattle runway in July 1935. Later christened the Flying Fortress, it was produced in large numbers (more than 12,700 through 1945) and, perhaps more than any other aircraft, came to embody American aviation in World War II.

Other designs also were aborning, notably Consolidated’s B-24 Liberator, first flown in December 1939. Even more widely built than the B-17, the Liberator is destined to hold the all-time U.S. production record with some 18,400 for the Army, Navy, and Allied nations. Between them, the Fortress and Liberator accounted for more than 60 percent of the world’s heavy bombers manufactured for World War II.

Producing some 31,000 multi-engine bombers was one thing; supporting and operating them was quite another. The man responsible for making it happen was a Mitchell disciple, General Henry H. Arnold, chief of the Army’s aviation branch.

Unquestionably dedicated to bombardment aviation, “Hap” Arnold was yin to Mitchell’s yang. One of the Army’s first two pilots in 1911, Arnold was a company man—a West Pointer in contrast to Mitchell’s rise from the ranks. But Arnold possessed vision, ability, and political skills. After overcoming the early taint of Mitchell’s approval, he rose to command the Air Corps in 1938, with few policy makers doubting the need for a strong, capable air force.

There had already been some progress. In 1925 Congress established the Morrow Board (under Dwight W. Morrow, later Charles Lindbergh’s father-in-law) to study military aviation. Based on that survey, barely six months after Mitchell’s trial, the Air Corps Act of 1926 granted quasi-independent status to Army aviation, with representation on the general staff, and expanded the air branch.

Despite such institutional success, airpower’s early high priests fared poorly—Giulio Douhet having been imprisoned and Billy Mitchell being court-martialed. Of the big three, only Britain’s Trenchard survived professionally.

In Search of Doctrine

Meanwhile, the great debate about aerial bombardment continued in Europe. Trenchard in particular believed that aircraft were inherently offensive so they must be used in a policy of what he called “relentless and incessant offensiveness.” But unlike Douhet, who advocated bombing enemy populations, the Briton wanted to target heavy industry because he believed that destroying the enemy’s war-making potential would erode civilian morale.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Army conducted a long search for a practical doctrine of strategic bombardment. Most of the work was conducted at the Air Corps Tactical School (ACTS) at Maxwell Field, Alabama. Between the world wars, ACTS was the closest thing to a U.S. air academy. It provided courses in leadership, command, and air doctrine and strategy, though some instructors and students recognized that until proven in combat, theory necessarily remained theoretical.

When the doctrinal search began in 1920, airmen acknowledged that aviation technology would not match airpower theory for many years. In truth, two decades passed before Douhet’s vision of long-range bombers delivering heavy loads became a reality. Consequently, in the first six years of discussion, ACTS’s focus narrowed on the primacy of bombardment over the other aviation branches, notably reconnaissance and observation, ground attack, and fighter. Experience in the Great War had conclusively proven the worth of aircraft in reconnaissance and directing artillery fire, the great killer of the Western Front. Only the Germans deployed dedicated ground attack units, but most combatant air arms used aircraft to support the infantry.

With the primacy of bombardment aviation accepted by 1926, the Maxwell theorists next evolved the concept of the self-defending bomber, which would not require fighter escort. ACTS’s second study period lasted until 1934, the dawning of the B-17 era. Though the early technological deficit was declining as more capable aircraft emerged, some important wrinkles remained to be ironed out. It is remarkable that so many knowledgeable practitioners (nearly all captains and majors) denigrated the fighter. With some exceptions, they convinced themselves that unescorted heavy bombers could not only survive but thrive in a modern air defense network. The school solution held that bombers would op...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Prologue
• Chapter 1 Before the Beginning
• Chapter 2 China Skies
• Chapter 3 From the South
• Chapter 4 From the Sea
• Chapter 5 Firestorm
• Chapter 6 Pacific Ponies
• Chapter 7 The Harbor War
• Chapter 8 “A Most Cruel Bomb”
• Chapter 9 Legacy
• Appendix A:The Unknown War
• Appendix B: Japanese Aircraft by Allied Code Names
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author
• Photo Credits