DEPLOYMENT OF B-29S TO AUSTRALIA
There is a widely held view that Britain's bombing of Germany in World War II was not worth the effort. The strategy took time to develop, and was technically deficient until better aiming devices and long-range fighters brought an increase in bombing accuracy and fighting ability in the last year of the conflict. The campaign cost a great deal in lives – almost a quarter of all British combat dead – yet it failed to bring Germany to its knees on its own. Critics of bombing make the point that Germany was defeated in the end by ground forces and that German war production continued to increase until the autumn of 1944 in the face of ever heavier bombardment. The moral argument, that bombing was simply an unethical form of warfare for a liberal state, was given greater force because of the failure to attack the primary objective, German war-making capacity and morale, with any decisive strategic effect.
This view begs a great many questions, not least that of what might have happened if Britain had never embarked on a bombing offensive in the first place. What would have happened if the resources used in the campaign had been diverted to other purposes? Or if different strategic options had been chosen in 1940? In practice such an outcome was never very likely. Since World War I British statesmen and military leaders were wedded to the idea that bombing would play a major part in any future war: bombing forces would either deter an enemy in peacetime, or, if used, wear down the enemy will-to-resist through devastating attacks on his home morale and the economic resources on which his armed forces thrived. Chamberlain, to be sure, had serious scruples about using the bomber program which was another source of friction at a time when the army wanted more production to help build up its offensive forces. Yet in the event these criticisms were never clearly focused enough and bombing was allowed to continue. Nor are the arguments much clearer with hindsight. Certainly the army could have done with more tanks and equipment in the desert, though it still needed the trained men to man them. A faster rate of build-up for army materiel might have produced a quicker assault on Europe, though there were other considerations also producing delay. More shipping and fewer bombers might well have made sense; but since a great deal of shipping was coming from American yards from 1942 onwards, bomber production did not trespass damagingly on the naval effort. Indeed, a switch from producing bombers to producing something different in 1941-42 might well have disrupted British war production rather than merely re-directing it. Those who argued for more army and navy weapons exaggerated the degree of flexibility in a war economy when it has to make large-scale changes in mid-stream.
There is some case for saying that the bombing effort actually helped the general mobilization of the British economy for war by providing it with the challenge of producing in mass what were large and complex pieces of engineering. Without the pressure for increased aircraft production, we can not be sure that the government would have faced the same need to divert resources away from consumer industry to armaments; nor would the other supply ministries have been faced with supply problems so severe that rationalization and conversion of civilian plant became a necessity. In other words it did not automatically follow that fewer heavy bombers would mean more tanks and ships. Instead it might well have meant fewer sacrifices from the civilian population.3 Even if it is assumed that resources could have been used differently, it is not certain that they would have been used so productively. The large aircraft programs forced the pace in the rationalization of factory practice and labor use and dragged much of the rest of the industrial economy along with it. There were numerous technological and scientific spin-offs from the bombing program, including the search for the atomic “super-bomb.” Without the bombers the British war economy might well have been less heavily and less efficiently mobilized: tank and ship production were notoriously less efficient users of resources than the aircraft industry. As it was, heavy bombers were not only the most cost-effective bombing aircraft produced (the Lancaster required on 9½ man-months of labor per 1,000 pounds of bombs dropped against 27½ for the Wellington medium-bomber), but by the middle of the war the Ministry of Aircraft Production considered heavy bombers to be the easiest kind of production to expand quickly.
Without the heavy bombers the RAF would have looked a very different force. It might well have been supplied with larger numbers of other kinds of aircraft. What would the air force have done with them? RAF strategy in the 1930s was based on the use of a bomber strike force to attack the enemy economy, and a fighter defense force to stop him doing the same to Britain. The development of a tactical air capability was in its infancy in the late 1930s. Only too late did the RAF and the Chiefs of Staff realize that Britain had almost nothing to contribute to the joint tactical air force in 1940, no dive-bombers, a number of feeble light bombers, and fighter aircraft not trained in battlefront warfare. Without a heavy bomber program the RAF would almost certainly have remained committed to twin-engined medium bombers, which were not capable of reaching distant targets in Europe, but which might have been used in a tactical role in the Middle East, or anywhere that British and Axis troops were in contact.
What is far less certain is whether the RAF would have gone on to develop and produce in quantity fighter bombers and ground-attack aircraft instead of strategic bombers. No dive-bomber was on the books in 1939, and after the Fall of France a battlefield air force was not an obvious priority. If instead the RAF had stuck with medium bombers and fast fighters it might still have prevented invasion and facilitated the later assaults on Europe, but for much of the war it would have been left with large numbers of aircraft and not a lot to do with them. There is little evidence to suggest that the RAF and the army would have got together to produce the battlefield air armies that Germany and the USSR used on the Eastern Front. It was not simply the influence of the strategic bombing enthusiasts that inhibited the development of British tactical air power, but the fact that British strategists in the 1930s had failed to anticipate the kinds of aircraft and planning a continental war would require.
If air strategy would have looked less effective without bombers, British strategy as a whole would have looked positively anaemic for much of the war. The pre-war plans concerted with the French anticipated a war of attrition against Germany in which bombing would play a part in the blockade of Germany's economy, wearing down German resistance once allied air striking power had been sufficiently built up. The British liked the idea because it avoided the trench stalemate of the First World War. In terms of manpower and equipment the bombing offensive was regarded as a more efficient, cost-effective form of warfare. After the Fall of France bombing took on a new lease of life; it was the only way left for the British to get directly at Germany. Without strategic bombing there was no way to retaliate; without retaliation a negotiated peace might have seemed more inviting. Without bombing there seemed little prospect of a direct assault on German-held Europe. In July 1940 Churchill wrote in somber mood to Lord Beaverbrook: “When I look round to see how we can win the war, I see that there is only one sure path. We have no continental army which can defeat German military power . . there is one thing that will bring Hitler down, and that is an absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland.”4
Britain's strategic options in 1940 and 1941 were extremely narrow. Churchill's support of bombing must be understood in the context of the time. He did not know that bombing would take as long as it did to become really effective. The switch to “area” bombing in place of attacks on “precise” military and economic targets developed only slowly between 1940 and 1942. Much more was expected of bombing in the dark days of 1940 than it could yet deliver. It was hoped that bombing would disguise the obvious decline in Britain's strategic position after Dunkirk. At this critical juncture Britain was still very unsure of direct American assistance. Bombing was the only way that Britain could stay in the war with any serious purpose without America. However many tanks Britain produced, the British army could not hope on its own to carry out a successful assault on Fortress Europe. But once American and the Soviet Union were in the war the situation altered. Bombing became instead a substitute “Second Front” to show Stalin that he was not facing Hitler alone. After some initial misgivings the Soviet leadership became enthusiastic about bombing and even suggested suitable targets for Bomber Command to attack. At this delicate point in the war it was important for Britain's survival that she could show some action against Germany, for fear that Stalin might seek a separate peace and end Britain's chances of achieving her primary aim, the defeat of Hitler.
Bombing was also an essential instrument to ease Anglo-American re-entry to the Continent, by attacking German air power and isolating the invasion areas to prevent German reinforcement in the west. This was a hazardous and unpredictable enterprise. It was not what the bombing commanders thought the force was for; but the fact that a large heavy-bomber force with wide combat experience was in existence in 1944 proved a remarkable boon for a combined invasion force that lacked the battle experience of their German army opponents. If that force had not been available, D-Day in 1944 would have involved a great risk and the chances of achieving a successful Continental landing much reduced. This higher element of risk might well have played into the hands of those who wanted the Anglo-Saxon powers to attack the Germans through the soft underbelly of southern France, Yugoslavia or the Balkans. Without bombing the shape of the war in the west would have been very different.
There was also a political element behind the bombing campaign. It helped to buoy up public morale at home at a time when the war had gone badly wrong, and when German aircraft were bombing British cities. There is scant evidence of a widespread desire for vengeance pure and simple. The bombing offensive was presented to, and accepted by, the British public as a successful and scrupulous attack on German military and industrial targets. Its real limitations (and the inaccuracy of bombing in particular) were kept from the public for fear of denting the morale that bombing was suppose to shore up. It seems clear that the German failure to retaliate against allied bombing later in the war provoked widespread disillusionment, and reflected badly on German propaganda. Bombing had the big advantage that it was, above all, newsworthy. The big set-piece battles on land and sea came few and far between and were quickly over. Bombing brought regular news items and victories. It helped to remind the public of the military side of the war in the long slack times between land and sea engagements, and its propaganda effect was carefully monitored by the Air Ministry and the Home Office. The bombing campaign played the same part in the projection of Britain's image abroad. The victims of Nazi aggression and Britain's foreign friends and potential allies could clearly see Britain's continuing commitment to the war. With bombing Britain was not just a lost cause.
This fact was brought home to the Axis powers as the bombing campaign moved from its ineffectual origins in 1940 to the massive destructive power of the later war years. The effect of bombing on the Axis states helped to shape their strategy and war capability: however that effect is measured, Axis strategy would have been different without bombing. Here the case of Italy is instructive. Bombing of Italian cities led to widespread demoralization and hostility to Fascists and left the Italian economy in a state of near collapse by 1943. Bombing speeded up the dissolution of the Fascist system. It did not have such an immediate effect in Germany, but it did force changes in strategy and the allocation of resources. Bombing brought about the diversion of productive capacity and manpower from other essential activities – two million men in anti-aircraft defense, many more in the task of clearing up the destruction, hundreds of thousands of workers producing anti-aircraft equipment, which by 1944 amounted to one-third of heavy gun, optical and electro-technical production. In addition the German war economy lost a great number of man-hours from air alarms and the poorer productive performance of tired and worried workers. Bombing even in its early phase compelled the German authorities to begin a strategy of industrial decentralization to safe areas at just the time that the centralization of production was beginning to bring dividends in better productivity. The significant thing is not that German war production continued to increase, which it did, but that the increase was not substantially greater. By the end of the war bombing did produce terminal crisis in war production – in 1945 production loss in aircraft was 48 percent, in tanks 42 percent – but since 1943 there had been accumulated losses in output, disruption to long-term planning, a scramble for improvised solutions, a situation in which German managers and ministerial officials found themselves running to keep still.5 It is difficult not to accept that dropping 1½ million tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs on a sensitive industrial system will prevent it from producing its optimum.
Without bombing, German producers would have been ready to develop Germany's formidable productive potential, inside and outside Germany, to the full. More material could have been supplied to Germany's own armed forces and more manpower made available at the front and in the factories. Germany's combat effectiveness would have been considerably greater. The German reaction to D-Day is a good example. Without the heavy bombers the Luftwaffe would have been much stronger in 1944; without the interdiction and transportation plan German forces would have arrived in Normandy in larger numbers and at the right time. Without the bombing of the German homeland with ever greater intensity during the last eight months of the war, the retreat would have been much slower and the losses of western and Soviet combat forces much higher. A more numerous Luftwaffe would have meant more effective German campaigns everywhere in 1944; the German air force was pushed back onto the defensive by bombing, a role for which it had not been well prepared. The Big Week bombing attacks in February 1944 drove the German air force down to attrition levels from which it never recovered. If instead the Allied air forces had been obliged to meet the Luftwaffe head-on in a tactical battlefield contest, they would have fought much more on German terms; if the Luftwaffe had been left the freedom to stockpile aviation fuel and the synthetic oil industry had not been attacked, German forces would have been allowed another important margin at a critical stage of the war. The oil attacks left German airmen short of fuel and forced cutbacks in training which severely inhibited the performance of the force in the last years of war.
In the British case there is room for doubt about whether or not the lack of a bombing campaign would have pushed British strategy towards building a large continental army with tactical air fleets for a frontal assault on Europe – which was essentially the American plan produced in 1942. But in the German case there is little doubt that without bombing and the subsequent build-up of extensive home defense forces and equipment, German forces would have continued to fight the war they preferred, with an offensive battlefield air force, effective medium-bomber support, and large well-equipped armies. This was, after all, the strength of the German war machine in 1940. German forces were not developed to provide a defensive perimeter or umbrella, though they got better at this as the war went on. German forces during the 1939-41 period were essentially very good combined offensive forces. Bombing arguably succeeded in cutting down the margin in military effectiveness between the two sides to proportions which the inexperienced but well-equipped allied forces in the West could cope with.
On the other hand, bombing played to British strengths. It was economical with combat forces; it placed emphasis on Britain's large manufacturing capacity; it fitted with British strategic traditions of blockade and “indirect” warfare; and it made use of Britain's one area of real technical advantage, the scientific radio war. Without bombing the cost in lives and equipment for the Allies would have been greater, the outcome of the Second Front less certain, and the possibility that Stalin would have sought a separate peace with Hitler stronger. Bombing did reduce the dangerous margin in fighting power between the two sides in western Europe, while it supported the Anglo-American view of war as a war of economic resources. Given such differences in aptitude and outlook, bombing made considerable strategic sense for the western allies. It is not clear that an alternative would have produced a quicker or more effective result. Indeed, it has been plausibly argued that if strategic bombing had been carried out more effectively the war might have been shortened considerably. Strategic bombing did not win the war on its own, but it was the price the western allies were prepared to pay to reduce the risk of their defeat.
Bombing did one other thing. It became a way of demonstrating that democracies were willing, if pressured hard enough, to use any weapon in defense of the democratic way of life. It was the other side of the deterrent coin, the willingness to use the unthinkable weapon. Chamberlain fought shy of bombing; Churchill and Roosevelt had no such qualms. The moral argument seemed at the time to be clearly on the allied side; appeasement gave way to firmness. It could be argued that without the evidence of western willingness to use the bombing to break the enemy home front and destroy civilian lives en masse (Dresden or Hiroshima), the strategy of deterrence in the post-war world might not have worked. For all those who doubted western resolution in the 1930s, there was now the awesome evidence of what liberal states would do with their backs to the wall. It is a sobering thought that without conventional bombing in World War II the world might have been spared the rapid onset of a nuclear arms race. In this sense bombing not only sustained Britain's war effort and inhibited Germany's, but it also helped to transform the international military order after 1945.
The Me 262 flew for the first time in July 1942, using jet propulsion only, without the aid of an auxiliary piston engine turning a propeller. Among the pilots who tested the twin-jet aircraft was Adolf Galland, who scored 104 aerial victories during the war. On 22 May, 1943, after wringing out a prototype, Galland predicted that the turbojet interceptor would “guarantee us an unbelievable advantage during operations, if the enemy keeps flying piston-engine aircraft.” The new airplane so impressed him that he recommended cutting back on the manufacture of conventional fighters to make resources available for production of the Me 262.
In December 1943, another demonstration of the jet aircraft made a similar impression on Hitler, but the Führer decided to employ it as a fighter-bomber rather than an interceptor. He had logical reasons for his choice. D-Day for the invasion of Europe had to be fast approaching, and an assault from the west would bleed away military strength needed to fight the Red Army. Although Allied bombs were falling on the Third Reich, the Luftwaffe had not yet lost the control of the daylight skies, demonstrated earlier in the year when it inflicted crippling losses on the Bomber Command of the American Eighth Air Force, as it penetrated as far as Regensburg and Schweinfurt. Moreover, only four German cities – Lübeck, Cologne, Rostock, and Hamburg – had felt the full fury of the Royal Air Force Bomber Command. In these circumstances, Hitler concluded that the Me 262 could better serve Germany by bombing and strafing the invasion beaches than by intercepting British and American bombers.
Galland and Albert Speer, Hitler's minister of armaments, have argued that the Führer's decision prevented the Luftwaffe from acquiring the clouds of jet fighters that could have overwhelmed the P-51s and the other piston-engine fighters which began early in 1944 to drive German interceptors from the skies. Was their assessment correct? Whether correct or not, exactly what difference would this truly deadly fighter have made?
To single out Hitler's decision as the reason for the tardy appearance of the Me 262 is to overlook the difficulty of developing a radical new airplane and a revolutionary kind of engine. Indeed, Speer has acknowledged that he managed to subvert the Führer's directive and bring out an interceptor version. Problems of aerodynamics and propulsion, rather than official policy, prevented the jet interceptor from entering combat before the summer of 1944. Finding a satisfactory turbine engine posed the most difficult challenge. Two models failed, and the third, which was finally adopted, never attained the goal of 50 operating hours between overhauls.
As if the problems of aircraft development were not enough, the Luftwaffe had run critically short of pilots. Sustained aerial warfare from North Africa to Norway, from London to Moscow, had cut deeply into the corps of fighter pilots; furthermore, the bombing of oil production facilities soon began drying up the supply of fuel for training replacements. When the first operational Me 262s emerged from the factory, pilots who had been flying conventional fighters made the transition to the new aircraft. At most, they flew the jet for six hours before entering combat; at the least, they received a cockpit checkout as they waited to take off.
Suppose that the development of the Me 262 had gone smoothly, that skilled pilots were available in adequate numbers, and that the jet interceptor entered service early in 1944 in sufficient strength to battle for control of the air over western Europe. The immediate result would have been the slaughter of American bomber crews – and of their British counterparts, if a radar-equipped night fighter version was available – but the German edge in quality would not have been enough. The enemy's success would certainly have spurred the development of jet aircraft in the United Kingdom, where an experimental prototype had flown in 1941, and in the United States. Without the urgency that the early appearance of the Me 262 would have caused, Gloster Aircraft of Great Britain produced a combat-worthy fighter, the Meteor, which took to the air in March 1943 and became operational 16 months later. Lockheed, an American firm, developed a first-class jet fighter, the P-80, which went from drawing board to prototype in just 143 days and was ready for combat testing in Italy when the war in Europe ended. Although the German jet was probably the best of these aircraft, it could never have rivaled the allied fighters in numbers. American productive capacity was so overwhelming that, if the skies over Europe were indeed blackened by jets, the fighters would have been P-80s, and the resulting attrition would have worked to the advantage of the allies.
For a time, despite its short range and unreliable engines, the Me 262 could have stopped the bombing of Germany's urban industrial heartland, forcing the Combined Bomber Offensive to attack targets in Nazi-occupied Europe that the Luftwaffe did not consider worth defending with the new jets. While the Americans and British built the necessary number of P-80s and Meteors and trained pilots to fly them, an invasion of France might well have seemed too risky and been postponed, but once the Allies had gained air superiority, the amphibious troops would have swarmed across the beaches of France. The advantage conferred on the Luftwaffe by the Me 262 would have proved temporary, rather than decisive: the jet fighter could have bought time for the Third Reich, but it could not have prevented the eventual invasion of western Europe or halted the Soviet advance from the east.
The indirect postwar effects of the German jet interceptor might well have been more important than its impact on the course of the fighting. While the Me 262 was disrupting the Anglo-American timetable for invasion, Soviet troops could have fought their way farther west, although at a grievous cost in lives and suffering. Because the Combined Bomber Offensive had been redirected against targets in the occupied countries, the nations of western Europe might have emerged from the war resentful of the destruction and loss of life the bombing had caused. As a result, it would have been far more difficult to rally these nations in an Anglo-American sponsored alliance like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to meet the danger of aggression by Soviet troops poised not in eastern Germany but on the Rhine.
In the war as actually fought, the strategic bomber made its greatest contribution to the defeat of Hitler by destroying the oil industry that fueled the German war machine. In May 1944, when the oil offensive had scarcely begun, Speer warned his Führer that: “The enemy has struck us at one of our weakest points. If they persist at this time, we will soon no longer have any fuel production worth mentioning.” Because of the need to divert the American heavy bombers to help pave the way for the invasion and to neutralize the V-1 flying bomb and V-2 rocket, the allies could not follow up immediately, but the systematic bombing soon resumed, choking off the flow of fuel to airfields and battle fronts. Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, who headed the Royal Air Force Bomber Command, participated only reluctantly in the oil offensive, but he admitted that it had succeeded, comparing it to betting on a longshot and winning.
For the Americans, oil had always been a target, but not necessarily the most important one. During the summer of 1941, in response to a request from President Roosevelt for an estimate of the armaments production needed to win a possible war against the Axis, a group of Army airmen exceeded these instructions and drafted a plan for bombing Germany into submission. After seizing control of the skies from the Luftwaffe, the American bomber force would destroy 154 targets in a variety of categories, including oil production. Near the top of the list, however, immediately after the neutralization of the German fighter force, stood the nation's electric power grid, for its destruction was expected to cripple almost the entire industrial base – oil production, shipbuilding, and aircraft manufacture.
In spite of the priorities set forth in this prewar plan, neither the Eighth Air Force nor the Fifteenth Air Force, which joined the daylight strategic offensive from bases in Italy, ever attacked the power grid. The Royal Air Force Bomber Command did try to shatter three of the hydroelectric dams that supplied current to the factories of the Ruhr valley, but the main purpose was to flood the heavily industrialized region. Looking back upon this attack, which breached one dam and damaged another, Speer again talked of a missed opportunity for the allies; follow-up strikes, he believed, could have deprived the entire region of electric power. There were no further attempts at dam-busting, however, for special bombs were needed, and the highly trained squadron that conducted the first raid suffered 50 percent losses.
Speer was not alone in wondering why the attacks on the hydroelectric system did not continue until the power grid was shattered. Maj. Gen. Haywood S. Hansell, one of the officers who turned Roosevelt's request for production estimates into a blueprint for strategic air warfare, insisted long after the war that bombing could have destroyed the power network without interfering with the offensive against oil production. Rather than attack dams, he wanted to batter the generators, switching stations, and transformers. A number of factors, however, dissuaded the Americans from pursuing the kind of air campaign that Hansell championed. The generating plants tended to be compact, the largest of them measuring only a thousand feet on a side. Consequently, they were no easier to locate and hit, using radar, than the synthetic fuel plants. For best results, attacks on both the oil and electrical industries required visual aiming in cloudless skies, weather conditions that were rare during north European winters. Even so, Hansell remained convinced that roughly 7,000 bombing sorties could have severed the key links in the power grid, but the invasion had taken place and the oil offensive begun before the skies cleared and the Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces had enough bombers and escorting fighters for such an undertaking.
Despite Speer's comments and Hansell's belief that the allies had indeed missed a great opportunity, the bomber force could not have attacked electrical power any sooner or with deadlier effect than its assault upon oil production. Not only did the weather refuse to cooperate until the spring of 1944, the Americans did not have air superiority before that time, and control of the daylight skies was essential, whether battering synthetic fuel plants and refineries or the various components of the power grid. Not until the early months of that year did an ever increasing number of bombers, escorted by long-range fighters, wear down the German interceptor force so that the oil offensive could begin. The allies could not have saved time by attacking a different but equally well defended target like electricity. The need to gain control of the air, neutralize the V-1 and V-2 (insofar as bombing could do so), and support the invasion would have determined the timing and intensity of an offensive against the power grid, just as these considerations influenced the onslaught against the oil industry.
Clearly, the Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces could have gone after electrical power at the time they attacked oil. The Bomber Command of the Royal Air Force might have assisted them, assuming Harris overcame his antipathy toward “panacea targets” as he ultimately did in joining the attack on oil. The shortage of fuel, however, had a direct and almost immediate impact on military operations. Attacks on electrical power would have taken effect more slowly, since the grid, by its very nature, permitted the diversion of current from undamaged or repaired generating plants to areas served by bombed-out facilities. Germany might thus have staved off industrial collapse by manipulating the power grid to sustain for as long as possible the production of oil and armaments.
The uncertainty of when the force might enter combat operations was not the only question concerning the B-29 that faced General Arnold and the American high command. There was also the issue of where best initially to deploy the bomber. In the summer of 1943, just a few months after the crash of the second prototype, this question became a searing issue between Lt. Gen. George Churchill Kenney, commander of the Fifth Air Force, and the Allied Air Forces, in the Southwest Pacific Area, and General Arnold. Arnold was determined to use the B-29s against the Japanese homeland even if initially he had to base them in India and stage them through China. However, what if General Kenney's plan had been accepted and the B-29s were first used to strike Japan's oil producing and refining facilities in the Netherlands East Indies? Kenney was convinced that this “most decisive set of targets for bombing anywhere in the world” would have resulted in delivering a “fatal blow” to Japan.
The question of the use of the B-29s was played out against the overall strategy for the Pacific adopted by the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. In the spring of 1943, the Joint Chiefs decided upon twin Pacific thrusts. General MacArthur would pursue a southern Pacific strategy, a series of envelopments from New Guinea's north coast through the Bismarck Islands to the Philippines. Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, heading the Pacific Ocean Area Command, would direct his thrusts across the central Pacific, through the Marshall Islands to the Marianas and then to the Philippines.
By the fall of 1943, when the B-29 issue erupted between Kenney and Arnold, the allied forces in the southwest Pacific had turned the tide against the Japanese. The early New Guinea campaigns had been completed with the capture of Buna, Lae, and Salamaua; the Fifth Air Force was administering a thrashing to the enemy air forces; and in March 1943 the Japanese had suffered enormous losses in the battle of the Bismarck Sea. Kenney's forces were impressively supporting MacArthur's drive along the north coast of New Guinea.
Thus, it was in this strategic and operational context that Kenney implored Arnold to send him the B-29s. Kenney's strategy for employing the big bombers was comprehensive, as might be expected from an air leader of his intellectual and strategic capacity. Kenney informed Arnold that his plan to decimate Japan's oil capacity (“the one essential commodity which she must have to carry on the war”) would be a “war winning” strategy. General Kenney's big problem without the B-29s was simply that his B-24 Liberator bombers were limited in both range and bomb-carrying capacity. They could reach only refineries that accounted for less than one-fifth of the total capacity of the Netherlands East Indies. And over the distance required to strike Sourabaya and Balikpapan the B-24 could only carry a maximum load of 3,000 pounds of bombs.
Japan had no synthetic fuel facilities and Kenney's plan was to base the B-29s in Australia where they would have the range – and carrying capacity – to attack 90 percent of Japan's oil producing and refining capacity: “Every single oil field, oil well and refinery is within range of the B-29 carrying a minimum load of ten thousand pounds of bombs and operating from existing fields along the north coast of Australia between Broome and Darwin.” Sumatra, Singapore, Borneo, Mindanao, and Palau were all within range of the B-29 as was the huge Palembang complex in southern Sumatra, producing half the crude and over half of the refining capacity. And realizing that plans were in the making to base the bombers in China, Kenney emphasized to General Arnold that Darwin was closer to the Sarawak and Brunei oil fields in Borneo than was Kunming, China.
DEPLOYMENT OF B-29S TO AUSTRALIA
Kenney's strategy contained another dimension. This would be a blockade by the mines laid by B-29s inflicted upon the enemy's shipping lanes stretching from Singapore to Saigon and Manila to the Marianas and the Marshall Islands. Airdromes would be used not only in northern Australia but also at Dobodura and in the Markham Valley of New Guinea. By October 1943, Kenney already had five airdromes in northern Australia ready for twenty-five B-29s. He believed that approval and implementation of his plan could result in the arrival of allied forces in Mindanao in 1944. “Japan,” he informed Arnold, “may easily collapse back to her original empire by that time, due to her oil shortage alone. It is conceivable that she may be forced to sue for peace with certain overwhelming defeat staring her in the face.”
In Washington, there was no question about eventually basing the B-29s in the Marianas. The argument centered on where to operate initially. Kenney's strategy was supported by Arnold's own Chief of the Air Staff, Lt. Gen. Barney M. Giles – and also by Admiral Ernest King, Chief of Naval Operations. Giles had visited Kenney in the southwest Pacific and was impressed with his logic and preparations. King supported striking oil and Japan's shipping lanes because it would have aided the Navy's central Pacific thrust.
Arnold however, was firm in his conviction that the B-29s should be directed against the Japanese homeland. He thought that ultimately Japan could be defeated without mounting an invasion with its enormous casualties. He also wanted the Twentieth Air Force bombers to remain under his direction from Washington and not be parceled out to area commanders. Thus, Arnold decided first for the China plan, with the subsequent B-29 offensive from the Marianas.
The B-29 raids from the Marianas began in October 1944, under the command of Brig. Gen. Haywood S. Hansell, but it was not long after Maj. Gen. LeMay's arrival in January 1945, that the B-29s began to wreck Japan's cities, and with help from the blockade and the Soviet entry into the war, forced the Japanese to surrender.
What if Kenney's plan had been adopted? What might have been the result? There was no doubt that Arnold's determination to attack Japan's industrial and population centers paid off, culminating with dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is clear that Operation MATTERHORN the costly B-29 missions flown from China in the summer of 1944, were of little import. In this regard, Kenney's plan would have been far preferable. Striking the great oil refineries, mining Japan's sea lanes, and attacking her shipping would have been more effective than the China-based operations. The deployment of B-29s to the southwest Pacific would not have resulted in the “fatal blow” that Kenney had predicted, but it might well have contributed to knocking Japan out of the war earlier.
So Kenney's concept would have been appropriate for the June-October 1944 frame, but Arnold's conviction to throw the weight of the B-29 campaign against the home islands in late 1944 and 1945 was absolutely correct and played a decisive role in forcing the Japanese surrender.
THE DUTCH EAST INDIES
Of course, had B-29 deployment been delayed for more than six months due to production problems, the entire question of Kenney's plan versus Arnold's concept, would have been academic. The B-29s would have gone directly to the Marianas.
In retrospect, the really key questions related to the developmental and production phases-so-called “Battle of Kansas.” This is where the force of one man's determination made the difference. Arnold's obsession that the B-29 Superfortress should be hurled against the home islands was a crucial decision in the Pacific war and ultimately – in combination with the blockade – it spelled victory without an enormously costly invasion.
In World War II, the Boeing B-29 Superfortress very long range bomber was the only weapon bringing the destruction of total war to the Japanese home islands. The onslaught of the B-29 strategic bombing offensive from the Marianas Islands in 1945 ripped out the heart of the urban centers of Japan, resulting in awesome destruction and culminating in August 1945 with the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A long-sought goal of General Henry H. (Hap) Arnold, Commanding General of the Army Air Forces (AAF), had been achieved – the defeat of Japan without having to invade the home islands.
The defeat and surrender of Imperial Japan, of course, was due to a number of critical factors aside from the B-29 campaign. These included the Central Pacific drive that captured the islands that based the B-29s; the effective mining of Japan's sea lanes; the virtual destruction of Japan's combat and merchant navies; General Douglas MacArthur's successful Southwest Pacific offensive; and the ultimate entry of the Soviet Union into the war against Japan.
The most terrible price, however, that the Japanese people had to pay for launching the war in the Pacific was the awesome destruction visited on the homeland and the enormous loss of life resulting from the B-29 offensive unleashed by the XXI Bomber Command of the Twentieth Air Force, commanded by Maj. Gen. Curtis E. LeMay.
The inception of the B-29 development program can be traced to 10 November 1939 – two months after Hitler's onslaught against Poland – when Arnold, Chief of the Army Air Corps, in response to a recommendation of the Kilner Board, requested authority of the War Department to let contracts for experimental development of a four-engine bomber superior in all elements of performance (range, speed, bomb load) to the B-17 and B-24. A number of aircraft companies submitted proposals, but the Boeing Company's design for the XB-29 was judged by the Air Corps to be superior and the contract was awarded in September 1940.
Thus began an almost four-year stretch of frustrating ups and downs in engineering, testing, and production in which some AAF officers doubted that the program would succeed. Hitler's invasion of Poland and the Low Countries lent urgency to what became known as the Very Long Range Project. General Arnold decided to take the large risk of cutting developmental and procurement corners in order to accelerate production. In simple terms, he ordered the bomber into production before it had been sufficiently tested. Usually, it would have taken five years to put a plane into production, but with war already in Europe, Arnold was determined to shorten this cycle. The XB-19, for example, a predecessor of the B-29, had been contracted for in 1936, test-flown in 1941, but never placed into production.
Even in 1941, many B-29 developmental problems remained to be solved. There were some in the Air Corps Materiel Division who doubted that this radical project could succeed. One of the earliest questions concerned the unusually high wing loading ratio which some thought would make the B-29, like the experimental B-26, dangerously heavy for the designed wing area. A Special Committee, which included Brig. Gen. George C. Kenney and Lt. Col. Kenneth B. Wolfe of the Materiel Command, recommended that no design change be made.
Special plants were constructed to build the gigantic, revolutionary bomber with the three-story tail assembly and 2200-horsepower Wright Cyclone R-3350 turbosupercharged engines. Among other firsts to be built into the Superfortress were a radar navigation system and pressurized crew compartments. A new fire control system was also installed.
By May 1941, the Air Corps planned to purchase 250 B-29s; following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the purchase order increased to 500 and after a February 1942 production meeting in Detroit, over 1,600 were placed on order. This meeting also marked the formation of a B-29 Liaison Committee headed by Brig. Gen. K. B. Wolfe, who became a key official in the developmental program and in 1944 would lead the B-29 into combat from Chinese bases.
For over two years following the Detroit meeting, grave difficulties were encountered which earlier had prompted the program to be labeled “the three-billion dollar gamble.” The XB-29 first flew in September 1942, piloted by Boeing's distinguished test pilot, Edmund T. Allen. Between September and December 1942 however, test flights clearly indicated serious trouble with the plane's R-3350 engines which frequently failed or broke out into fires.
On 18 February 1943, disaster struck. With Allen at the controls, two engine fires broke out during a test flight from Seattle, the fire spreading into a wing. This second prototype plane crashed into a meat-packing plant three miles from the end of the Boeing runway, killing Allen, his entire crew of ten and 19 people in the building. Subsequent investigations ordered by General Arnold and Senator Harry S. Truman determined that the engines were defective and that the manufacturer's quality control was inadequate. This shocking development resulted in Arnold's creation of the B-29 Special Project under Wolfe and Col. Leonard Harman to supervise all testing, training, and production. Incredibly, a third prototype almost crashed because of crossed aileron control cables, another disaster and potential end of the program barely being averted.
Many more accidents, most caused by engine over-heating, occurred through September 1944, and the B-29 was still not operational for combat even when deployed in April 1944 to the China-Burma-India theater of operations. During a single week in April 1944, five B-29s went down near Karachi due to overheated engines, the worst week in the history of the plane's overseas deployment including the subsequent movement to the Marianas islands. The basic problem – overheating due to tremendously high ground temperatures on the subcontinent – was eventually controlled for the most part by a crash engine-cooling project designed by engineers at Wright Field and the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics.
Could the B-29 program have failed? There seems little doubt that had not these developments taken place during the intense pressure of a global conflict that the B-29 development and production program would have been halted. “In normal times,” observed General Curtis E. LeMay, “the assembly line would have been shut down.” In fact, even in early 1944, there was pressure to call a halt which was only overcome by General Arnold's iron determination to see the development and deployment through no matter what.
It is important to recall that this was in a real sense a far advanced, almost revolutionary, aircraft development program. Moreover, Arnold literally rolled the dice when he opted for concurrent experimental testing and production phases – unprecedented in the history of Air Corps development of major weapon systems. No doubt Arnold would have bulled ahead no matter how many accidents occurred and no matter how many officers had to be fired. Ironically, K. B. Wolfe, who survived development and testing, was later sacked by Arnold, who thought that Wolfe was failing to order sufficiently heavy attacks from the Chinese bases. When he replaced Wolfe with Maj. Gen. LeMay, Arnold noted: “K. B. did a grand job, but LeMay's operation made him look like an amateur.”
What if the B-29 program and deployment had been delayed by from six to twelve months? This could have happened and indeed in 1943 loomed as possible or even probable. Had the program taken the five years ordinarily required, the start of the B-29 strategic campaign against Japan would have been postponed perhaps well into 1945. This delay might have been sufficient to trigger the planned invasion of Japan with its attendant enormous toll in killed and wounded on both sides. This would have depended upon how long it would have taken the B-29 offensive to hit its peak. In reality, in 1944 and 1945 it took over six months and the replacement of Brig. Gen. Haywood Hansell with LeMay for the effort to hit peak operations.
The two-stage ground invasion of Japan had been approved in June 1945 by President Harry S. Truman. The first phase invasion of Kyushu (OLYMPIC) was scheduled for November 1945 with a second phase invasion slated for March 1946. Truman was, of course, greatly concerned about the human cost of an invasion, reflecting about a possible “Okinawa from one end of Japan to the other.” Chief of Staff Marshall told Truman in June 1945 that “airpower alone was not sufficient to put the Japanese out of the war.” Marshall was supported by General MacArthur, who urged an invasion.
Significantly, also in June, Arnold visited LeMay in the Marianas, and LeMay informed the commander of the Army Air Forces that by bombing and blockade, Japan would be forced out of the war by 1 October 1945. The B-29 offensive, intensified between March and June, had Japan on the ropes, LeMay emphasized.
In retrospect, it was a close thing that there was a crushing B-29 campaign in 1945; the big bomber itself had been on the ropes in 1943 and 1944.
1 Public Record Office, Kew, London (PRO), AVIA 9/9, Churchill personal minute to the Lord President of the Council, 7.9.1941.
2 PRO, AIR 10/3866, “The Strategic Air War against Germany 1939-1945,” report of the British Bombing Survey Unit, 36, 38-9. R. Beaumont, “The Bomber Offensive as a Second Front,” Journal of Contemporary History 22 (1987), 5-8.
3 For problems of supplying aircraft industry labor see PRO, AVIA 9/9, Sir John Anderson to Churchill. “Bomber Production,” 9.10.1941; AVIA 10/269, Ministry of Aircraft Production, “The Supply of Labour and the Future of the Aircraft Programme,” 19.5.1943, esp. 4-6.
4 Churchill to Minister of Aircraft Production, 8.7.1940, reproduced in W. S. Churchill, The Second World War: Vol. I, The Gathering Storm (London, 1948), 567.
5 PRO, AIR 10/3871, British Bombing Survey Unit, “Potential and Actual Output of German Armaments in Relation to the Combined Bombing Offensive,” 7, 11, 23.