When it comes to putting eight .50’s on an aircraft instead of four little .303’s it’s a winning approach. 
air over japan in 1944 was a lot like the air over germany in 1945. hardly any opposition and allied air strenght byt then was overwhelming. if the US had tinian air base in 1942 and attempted to bomb japan, it would have been a different story.
It lacked the range of the P-38 and P-51, but it could go pretty far (substantially farther than Spitfires and the German Bf-109s and FW-190s) and get into a lot of scraps. One US bomber pilot was quoted as saying he felt the Thunderbolt pilots were the bravest escorts he ever watched.
One poorly-understood feature of air combat is that the same plane can perform very differently at different altitudes. The Jug had a terrific engine and supercharger, and in addition to its high ceiling, this actually gave it more maneuverability than any German plane…at very high altitudes. Coupled with its speed and diving ability, ruggedness and heavy hitting power, it was a nightmare to have above you. Its main weakness was its lethargic climb rate, especially compared to the most excellent climb rate of the Bf-109.
Speaking of the engine, the jug was built around the Pratt & Whitney R-2800 Double Wasp, one of the two greatest aircraft engines of the war. The R-2800 also powered the F6F Hellcat and the F4U Corsair, also famously effective fighters, and a number of bombers and night fighters as well.
The other greatest aircraft engine of the war? The Rolls-Royce Merlin, which powered the Hurricane, the Spitfire, the P-51 Mustang, and the wonderful Mosquito multirole aircraft, as well as many of the great British bombers, including the super-heavyweight of the European theater, the Avro Lancaster.
One measure of “success” in the American bombing campaign against Japan is what was viewed as a low or “acceptable” rate of loss of aircraft.
According to one book on the subject (“Flyboys”?), LeMay reasoned at the outset of his big bombing campaign that while the Japanese had a good amount of flak capability for low altitudes and for much higher ones, there was a gap in which their coverage was poor to nonexistent. So he made plans for bombers to come in low but above the low-level flak, which the pilots thought would be suicidal but turned out to be very effective.
the b-29 was not invincible. its directional firing system was very effective and more than 100 japanese interceptor fighters (mainly light unarmored zeros) were shot down with them. but improved japanese fighters like the shiden and raiden, which were armored and armed with 4 20mm cannons, blasted several b-29s over japan. that’s why the US had to send p-51 mustangs in to tackle the interceptors.
The Brits (who also flew them) used to say that evasive manoeuvres in the P-47 involved undoing your seat harness and running around the cockpit!
This is just an opinion from my reading.
–The Japanese high tech industrial base was less developed than in Europe and less spread out. Japanese military industry often farmed out small parts manufacture to cottage industry, i.e., people turning out parts virtually in their back yards. Disruption of transportation of these parts or the places where they were assembled would be a factor.
–Japanese air defenses, while by no means non-existent, were nothing approaching that of Germany. They did have some excellent high altitude fighters.
–Curt LeMay’s firebombing of essentially paper and wood Japanese cities using B-29s was devastating. Read: “A Torch To the Enemy.” Stunning. That’s a bit hard on cottage industry.
All of these combined to produce a stronger strategic bombing effect on Japan then in Europe, IMO. My understanding (without reading the strategic bombing survey kindly provided by our querent, upon challenge) is that strategic bombing was not nearly as effective as its prewar advocates had predicted, and, in fact, was not really worth the effort invested in it and the losses incurred. Planes might better have been invested in long range anti-submarine warfare in early and mid-war. I’m sure someone will object to that assessment.
The Japanese, however, were well knocked about by the end of the war, and had it continued, though I’m certain they would have surprised us with their ingenuity, I think it likely they would have been reduced to producing only the simplest crude weapons (like STEN guns and Panzerfausts) to oppose our invasion (not to suggest these wouldn’t have been effective, properly used). It is my understanding from my reading, again, that they had a large store of “suicide weapons” that would likely have been a serious problem for us. The end result would have been the same.
Note of interest: A few years ago friend cleaning out the basement of his old family home found some Japanese grenades and mortar bombs his father had collected on Attu in the Aleutians in WW II. They were stored in a cardboard box. He called the local police and asked what to do with them. They had him take them slowly and carefully out to his driveway and leave them in the center of it, away from his neighbor’s homes. A special U.S. military team collected and destroyed them later. These might be typical products of Japanese cottage industry, I think.
they had HIM take the stuff out? that’s not very professional of them.
I can reduce the answer to a very simple, short explanation.
The Japanese, starting ca. 1941, didn’t really think the situation through to its logical conclusion and weren’t prepared for the followup to Pearl Harbor.
There was once a bomb threat at the Library where I worked.
The cops had us look through the stacks for the damned thing, and waited down the street in a patrol car until the threatened time of detonation was passed.
Whenever a military munition is found (as opposed to just garden variety home made explosives or industrial stuff), they always try to call in EOD crews from a nearby military base, since they would be more familiar with it. A couple guys I knew at my last base made the local news when they got called in to recover a WWII-era mortar shell that someone’s grandpa had been keeping in a sock drawer (hope he never slammed that drawer!)
I don’t think that the startegic bombing of Japan was as significant as the US Navy submarine force. By 1945, US submarines had sunk virtually the entire Japanese merchant marine. No raw materials meant no capacity to make planes, guns, tanks…plus, the japanese were reduced to eating weeds and roots.
That said, Gen. LeMay was focussed on his goal-burning doen the japanese cities. He did this extremely well-by war’s end, there was very little left of housing standing.
Had the war continued, there would have been mass starvation in Japan.
Grave of the Fireflies. < – Superb film on that topic. (Warning, may induce tears.)
We didn’t go in for as few as four .303s on anything much after the Gloster Gladiator; the earlier Spits and Hurris had eight (some later Hurricanes had twelve). Too bad the lovely Westland Whirlwind never quite worked out - it was beautiful to look at, fast for a 1938 aircraft, and sat the pilot directly behind four 20mm cannon. All that said, the Jug’s battery of .50s were something you didn’t want to be on the wrong end of - ISTR hearing they could literally saw the wing off a plane. :eek:
Flying Tigers pilots reported seeing .50 cal tracer rounds from their P-40s (which sported six of them) going clean through Japanese destroyers. Those things are pretty fearsome.
anyone knows that a .50 cal round penetrating a .25-inch steel plate is iffy and penetrating .50-inch of steel is close to impossible.
strategic bombing is supposed to weaken a country’s strategic capacity to make war. even mitchell and douhet, who couldn’t have imagined WW2 conditions, didn’t envision that bombing alone will destroy a country so as to render its fighting capability non-existent.
the effectiveness of strategic bombing for germany is still under debate. at its height in 1944, german arms makers were celebrating their most productive year in the war. more tanks, planes and u-boats were launched in 1944 than in any other year. had strategic bombing continued, it would have reduced germany into an economic wreck sometime 1946-1947 and the final conquest in those years would have been a walkover compared to the still difficult final conquest in may 1945.
for japan in 1945, it’s true that its naval and air power had been reduced to a non-factor status due to military attrition. its production was seriously curtailed by the destruction of its merchant fleet. but it was far from being a defeated nation. despite all the bombing, morale of both civilian and military population was still there; and its army and militia, intended for home defense, was largely intact. lemay was overly awed by the sight of a city burning just as hitler was in 1940.
so, did bombing break japan’s productive capacity? almost and you have to qualify it to factor in its broken supply lines. in any case weapons were still being cranked out and stockpiled as late as july 1945. did bombing demoralize the population enough for them to demand a halt to the fighting? no. would macarthur have done a walkover if he invaded the main islands? no. he would have lost at least 100,000 soldiers.
One thing to factor in as far as the bombing campaigns went was secondary effects. Not just what they broke or blew up, but what did their campaign force the Germand and Japanese to do?
All of those German troops manning AA guns and interceptors based all throughout Europe? They weren’t defending the beaches of France, or fighting the Russians on the Eastern front. Or invading England, for that matter. I’m having a hard time finding numbers, but there were a lot of German troops and pilots that got tied up fighting the RAF and the USAAF over Europe. Granted, there were a lot of Allied pilots that got similarly tied up fighting the Germans over Europe.
^
ah, those are tactical advantages gained from strategic bombing.