Target Japan

Superfortresses flying from China and Saipan opened the battle for Japan during the last half of 1944, long before Allied troops could land on the enemy shore. But there was no overconfidence this time, as there had been when the strategic bombing of Germany began. There was no talk of winning the war in the Orient with air power alone.

Starved of gasoline and everything else that an air force needs, because it all had to be flown over the Hump, the 20th Bomber Command in China and India had run up, by year's end, a tally of 23 assaults on Japan and Jap arsenals in Asia. The bombs dropped totaled about 5,000 tons--no more than a single major R.A.F. strike over Europe's shorter hauls. But in those tentative stabs, the Superfort flyers had learned to know their planes--and the Japs' defenses.

Good and Not So Good. The 21st Bomber Command, at Saipan, had started later and gained faster. In its first month of operations, beginning Nov. 24, it had dropped more than 1,500 tons on Honshu, concentrating on aircraft factories around Tokyo and Nagoya. The Japs had new interceptors of improved types (known as Jack and Irving). U.S. airmen did not underrate the threat of these planes; the factories building them were top-priority targets. The Nakajima Company's great Musashina factory on Tokyo's outskirts was hit three times before year's end. Said the 21st's commander, Brigadier General Haywood S. Hansell Jr., after the second assault: "We haven't destroyed the plant--not by a damn sight." After the third blow, he still was not satisfied. "Possum" Hansell's flyers had better luck against the two Mitsubishi plants at Nagoya. The Hatsudoki factory had 600,000 square feet (40% of its built-up area) destroyed or gutted by fire. At Kokuki, photographs showed heavy concentrations of bomb hits directly on the assembly buildings and machine shops.

China-based B295 did their best job of precision bombing on an aircraft factory at Okayama, Formosa. Lanky, blond Brigadier General Lauris Norstad, Twentieth Air Force Chief of Staff, judged this job better than any he had seen in Europe: 35 or 36 buildings that comprised this factory "just aren't there any more."

All for One. There was no more talk of burning Japan's papier-mache cities; some, like Nagoya or Osaka, never modernized (as was Tokyo after the 1923 earthquake), might be fired by overs or shorts intended for factories on their outskirts. If so, it would be incidental. After aircraft factories, highest priority targets would be shipyards, power plants and steel mills. But there was nothing rigid about the plan for bombing Japan or about the thinking of those who were doing the planning.

To coordinate #11 strategic bomber blows in the Orient, lean, affable Lieut. General Millard F. Harmon was doubling in brass as deputy commander of the worldwide Twentieth Air Force and as commander, Strategic Air Forces, Pacific Ocean Areas. For the present, he had to use his 6-243 (and occasionally some of his precious 6-295) to keep hammering at Sulphur Island (Iwo Jima) in the Volcano group, whence Jap fighters took off to harry 6-295 bombing Honshu, and whence Jap bombers took off to bomb the Superfort base at Saipan.* Later, when bases nearer to Japan had been won, Harmon could use 8-24 Liberators alongside their bigger cousins against the enemy homeland.

Harmon had no illusions about the task ahead. Said he at his Western Pacific headquarters: "This is no Gilbert-&-Sullivan war out here. . . . No one gives the Jap credit for being a resourceful enemy except those who have to fight him. . . . We expect that Japan will be on her feet and fighting in 1946."

-Last week, the Japs were still able to fly bombers off Iwo Jima after 21 consecutive days of pounding by U.S. heavies and three warship bombardments.

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