Pacific Skies: American Flyers in World War II

ENDGAME: Kamikazes and the Bombing of Japan

ENDGAME K A M I K A Z E S A N D T H E B O M B I N G O F J A PA N By the summer of , the endgame strategy of America’s war in the Pacific could commence, involving both sides in a different kind of war, the nature of which argued against any attempts at individualism. The issues were America’s ability to mount mass bombing raids and Japan’s unique response to this threat. Once the Imperial Navy’s carrier strength was removed in the first Battle of the Philippine Sea (June –), a key objective of the long campaign of island-hopping assaults, beginning at Guadalcanal, could be reached; when Saipan fell in July , American bombers could begin preparations for flying to Japan, for the home islands were now within range. This reality prompted a new enemy strategy: suicide flights as a last-ditch attempt to protect the emperor and his homeland. For both sides, World War II was coming down to a case of ultimacies. To win on its own terms, the United States had developed a new generation of weaponry and adopted tactics previously used by the RAF. The Boeing B- Superfortress was one-third larger than its B- Flying Fortress predecessor and was twice the plane in weight, bomb load, and range. Unlike the huge, high, and tight formations of the Eighth Air Force that had been hit1 6 7 ✪ ✪ ✪ ting Germany with high explosives, these new aircraft would eventually be used successfully in two ways new to the USAAF: in relatively low-altitude (six thousand feet) incendiary raids that reduced large parts of Tokyo and other cities to cinders (as the British had done to Hamburg in ), and in the two missions at war’s end that dropped single atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet before either approach could be developed, planners knew their bombing forces had to be within range. With the taking of Saipan in the Marianas island chain just twelve hundred miles southeast of Tokyo, that hope was fulfilled. Japan’s reaction to the occupation of the Marianas was profound . Within days of the fall of Saipan, a protectorate since World War I and a colony rich in the culture of Nippon, Prime Minister Tojo’s government fell. Some factions foresaw the war’s end and lobbied for a negotiated peace. Others, however, began calling for an endgame strategy of their own, one that might do any or all of the following: disrupt the U.S. carrier fleet to the extent that the coming invasion of the Philippines would have to be abandoned, psychologically shock American morale and resolve so thoroughly as to blunt the war effort and lead to a détente within the present situation, or, in a worst-case scenario, allow the empire’s defeat to assume heroic, even mythic proportions . This strategy created the kamikazes, suicide pilots taking their collective name from the “divine wind” that turned back Chinese invasion fleets in  and again in , frustrating Kublai Khan’s intention to dominate Japan. Looking back to the bushido tradition of a thousand years before, the kamikaze ideal would face off against the imminence of a new era, the atomic age. The first kamikaze attack against American forces took place on October , , when a plane piloted by Rear Admiral Masafumi Arima plunged into the carrier Franklin off Luzon. E N D G A M E : K A M I K A Z E S A N D T H E B O M B I N G O F J A P A N 1 6 8 Just a month before, Lieutenant Colonel Paul Tibbets of the U.S. Army Air Force had welcomed his new th Composite Group to Wendover, Utah, where its eighteen hundred men began training for the missions that would carry atomic bombs to Japan on August  and , . Hence the philosophies of two distinct ages, separated by nearly one thousand years, were set to collide head-on. Precipitating this collision was the B- itself. Rushed to production and given its final modifications in the field, it allowed U.S. strategy to be accelerated by more than a year and one half. Original plans called for a slow but steady advance from the South Pacific to the Central, with the Marianas to be taken early in . With Superfortresses flying missions from...