Unlike Europe where something like 150,000 airmen died and it did not have a war winning effect, the campaign against Japan was a major success, it destroyed most major Japanese cities, levelled their industry and in the words of Curtis LeMay (in the World at War) they were in danger of running out of target?
The question is why? I understand the B-29 packed a punch and European experience had taught the USAAF, but in about 8 months bringing a major industrial power to its knees?
Didn’t the Japanese lose most of thier air force in the Pacific? I thought that while the Pacific naval battles were still going on the Japanese were already forced to use untrained pilots becuase they had lost so many already. Or am I mistaken?
If that’s actually true then lack of any real opposition would make it fairly easy to bomb the hell out af a country that can’t do anything about it.
Here’s my guess: the Japanese had not planned for a bombing campaign against the home islands, because they did not expect the U.S. to get bases close enough to do it. So they didn’t have fighter aircraft or anti-aircraft guns available to defend their cities and factories. Their plans were for a war out in the Pacific islands and southeast Asia, and when that war started turning against them, they had nothing left to use against planes bombing the home islands.
The largest part of the Japanese airforce (and army) was always committed to China and to a lesser extent Burma. At least from China it would not have been difficult to transfer the required forces.
One thing - LeMay didn’t realize that the Jaanese were making a massive effort to move factories underground - The targets were there, he couldn’t see (or get to) them.
Also - Japan farmed a lot of piecework out to cottage industries and small shops all over the islands - considerable production continued well after the major factories were largely obliterated.
BUT - to answer the question:
Part of the answer was technological gap - The US airforces had mostly superceded the Japanese in technology at that point, and a relatively small gap can have major impact - The Japanese had a hard time shooting down enough bombers to make a difference. The B29 flew very high, and was a hard plane to kill - Not that the Japanese didn’t dfo their level best, with some success.
Another part of the answer was sheer numbers - Not enough Japanese fighters rising to face the bombers / far too many bombers to stop all but a tithe of them. Likewise, not enough anti-aircraft batteries available.
Yet another part of the issue was training - an entire generation of highly-trained, experienced, and skilled fighter pilots were wiped out. Those that remained, were frequently used in a wasteful manner (training suicide pilots), or simply overwhelmed in their dual duties to train new pilots and fight off the bombers.
Last, there is the nature of construction of Japanese cities at the time - Factories were often quite modern, but the surrounding neighborhoods were highly flamible. Even in modern factories, you could sometimes find things like bamboo framing. Thus, the 8th Airforce used a lot of incendiaries, and if they couldn’t set the factory on fire directly, they could fire the city around it, and burn it down that way, not to mention killing or rendering homeless the workers who supported the factory.
It was LeMay’s decision to stop targeting factories that caused the destruction to be so widespread. Instead of the relatively-ineffective high-level precision bombing of factories, LeMay advocated for, and conducted, a campaign of low-level area-bombing raids drenching Japan’s cities with incendiaries. LeMay’s purpose was to kill people and to “de-house” population, not to target machinery.
I am not defending or addressing the morality of area bombing, just pointing out that moving production facilities underground was fairly immaterial to LeMay’s campaign. That campaign destroyed the city centers of Japan’s 60 largest cities in a few months.
Edit: I agree with you about the Japanese cities’ construction rendering them peculiarly vulnerable to fire.
LeMay really didn’t have much choice but to go after the workers, I suppose - One, ‘precision’ bombing wasn’t very, really, and two, Production was still continuing, even after most factories were blasted - the fact that Japan didn’t ever completely run out of fighters indicated that some production was continuing. If you can’t find or destroy the factories, go after the workers and (presumably) you’ll nail the production facilities at the same time.
Aside from the factors already mentioned, I don’t believe the Japanese had any significant night fighter force to combat the B-29’s once Lemay switched them to night bombing (from lower altitudes). Combine that with shoddily-built planes with poor alloys, few planes built overall (tho they had a very solid theoretical design in the Ki-84), inadequate training exacerbated by fuel shortages, and a lack of a preexisting doctrine, and they didn’t have much of a chance of stopping the USAAF.
I know that the IJN had radar by war’s end, but I don’t recall if they had shore installations linked in some form of early warning network like the British had in '40. Did they?
I’ve read accounts that at some stages of the air war against Japan, people would take the incoming bombs directly from the ships to the planes to be used. Non of this taking it to ammunition dumps. The crews flew more often than their counterparts in Europe. Obviously this is only a small part of it. Plus I also think Japan was planning for more of a “suicide defense” once Allied troops landed. They trained civilians to conceal knives and stab soldiers when they got close enough. They moved industry and planes underground for kamikaze attacks. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a Luftwaffe kamikaze attack but in Japan it was considered a great honor to die that way.
A huge factor was that Japan’s philosophy of pilot training emphasized spending a LOT of time training each pilot. It was an elite corps of specialists, and the system produced pilots very slowly. Eventually they were forced by the all-consuming war to rush pilots through rudimentary traininig, but at no point did they use the kind of systematic organization the US used to mass-produce capable pilots. That’s one reason American aces tended to have lower individual kill totals than those of the Axis countries; the Americans identified skilled pilots and thought “let’s get these guys back home to train more like themselves!” and the Japanese identified skilled pilots and thought “let’s send this guy on all our most dangerous missions.”
Manned V-1s never got into action, but the insane scheme to ram American bombers with piloted aircraft did conduct one full-scale mission.
Another factor was the extreme shortage of gasoline in Japan. Barely enough to fuel fighter; certainly not enough to allow many training flights.
This was largely due to the efforts of the Allied submarines, which had devastated Japanese shipping, especially tankers. Toward the end, many submarine captains were making the same complaint – there aren’t any targets to torpedo! The Japanese began shipping small amounts of fuel in wooden junks; the American submariners began surfacing and sinking them with their deck guns – not worth ‘wasting’ a torpedo on such small, wooden ships.
One point is that Japan was not a major industrial power in the same league as Germany. It did not have the resources to establish the sort of air defence network Britain and Germany developed as well as undertaking its programme of aggression. Right through from the earliest British attacks in 1940 through to 1944 Germany had the resources, the technology, and the will and need to establish a strong air defence system, taking a significant toll on both British and American bomber forces while at the same time conducting their war in the east. By 1945 this resistance was collapsing and the Allied bomber forces were taking much lower losses and causing ever greater devastation but the ground war was already defeating Germany.
Japan on the other hand was not seriously attacked from the air until 1944 when it had already been ground down by the American advance across the Pacific. By this stage it was too late - as others have detailed - Japan did not have resources to establish an effective air defence. It was the lack of an effective air defence system that allowed the low altitude fire bombing that did the damage to the much more vulnerable Japanese cities.
The art of using incendiaries for bombing wasn’t really perfected until early '45. The four months between VE day and VJ day pretty much means that Japan endured twice as much Dresden level firebombing as did Germany.
I remember reading (sorry, no cite) that there was one entire month in the summer of 1945, or there abouts, when **NO KNOWN **ships made to a Japanese port.
As they have no oil everything had to be imported. By 1945 this had been reduced to no more than a trickle.
No fuel means there’s no way to train pilots and even when you do get some trained they can’t put enough planes in the air to do anygood.
This is probably as big a reason as any as to why they couldn’t defend their cities.
Really? Was it like the Americans on the western front? Most of the German soldiers were in the USSR, so we beat a smaller force. Was it the same way in China vs the Pacific Islands and Philippines?
There is an excellent book Samurai! by Saburo Sakai, one of Japan’s top pilots. I was going to relate some reasons from it but everyone else already touched on them.
No you are comparing apples and oranges. The war against Japan was in four theaters or sectors.
China; a Chinese effort. Took most of the land forces.
Burma; British Empire, took the other major chunk of land forces
Central Pacific; American effort, a mostly Naval War
South Pacific; Joint US/Australian effort, most Naval forces supporting amphibious assualts.
The Americans are the ones who engaged and defeated the Japanese Navy, which considering Japan was like Britain a major maritime power the most crucial in defeating Japan. The American fought one large land campaign (the Philippines) while the rest of the battles were (admittedly very vicious and bloody) small unit actions (with the possible exception of Okinawa where a field army was involved). The nature of the American fronts meant that they would not meet Japanese ground and air forces in number like the Chinese or the British did.