The WHIRLWIND WWII Air War on Japan: Book Review

The story of the World War Two campaign against the Japanese home islands that peaked with the Japanese surrender in 1945. The book follows the B-29 air strikes initially from China, later the Marianas, along with the efforts by aircraft carrier task forces which, incidentally, did include some British carriers assigned to the American dominated-task in the Pacific.

Naturally, there is the account of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear attacks. There is even a brief account of airstrikes from Alaska on targets in northern Japan.

Author Barrett Tillman provides a thorough story of the campaign against the home islands, which he says has not really been addressed before, bringing up a number of rarely-discussed issues and offerign solid information as well as his own conclusions on aspects of the campaign.

He makes a solid argument that however barbaric, the firebombing of Japan did end the war, with the atomic bomb providing the punctuation. High-level bombing was ineffective, in large part due to the jet stream over Japan. Low-level attacks with incendiaries triggered firestorms that swept cities literally built of wood and paper. It did kill hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese...which bothered the Japanese leadership not at all...but destroyed the countless small backroom machine shops that turned out parts for strategic goods such as aircraft and tanks.

England did not surrender despute massive bombing, although that was a popular view held by early bombing proponents and, regrettably, a lesson that needs to be relearned every generation. More to the point, like Hitler's Nazis, the Japanese high command was ready to let the country be turned into a nuclear-fired glassy landscape with absolutely no regard for the suffering of their people who were dying in droves around them. They were willing to die and bring everything and everybody down with them. Only Hirohito's willingness to overrule the military, which he had never done before, led to surrender. Even then, fanatic military officers tried to stage a palace coup that would keep the emperor's recorded statement of surrender from being broadcast over the radio.

The author lingers a couple of pages on a campaign that often isn't acknowledged. It has been shown that World War Two's most-cost effective and also most efficient means of sinking enemy vessels was the sowing of mines in the sea lanes. General Curtis LeMay, reluctantly obeying orders from above, discovered this for himself when he detached planes to drop mines off the Japanese coast. It caused many sinkings. The commander of the Japanese navy's minesweeping program admitted that sowing mines earlier in the war may have shortened it.

Japan-bound aircrews dreaded capture. The survival rate for POW's in the hands of the Japanese was 50%. Airmen were often beheaded by their captors or turned over to civilians who beat them to death. When Hirohito announced the surrender, a Japansese military headquarters pulled more than 20 POWs from their cells and beheaded them. No one was ever charged. The camps themselves were operated by the kempetai, the Japanese military counterpart to the civilian Thought Police, a gang of thugs on the order of the Nazi brownshirts and Gestapo. If you've seen The Great Raidabout the rescue of American POWs at Cabanatuan prison camp in February 1945 in the Philippines, keep in mind that the treatment the Japanese subjected prisoners to was vastly underplayed in the film.

For those modern observers who fault the US for using the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Tilllman says that we saved the lives of perhaps a million or more GIs scheduled to hit the beaches. That's a figure everyone is familiar with. However, in addition, he notes the thousands of POWs who would've been executed on orders of the high command. That would've meant the instantaneous death of thousands of American POWs used as slave labor in Japan, equal to a measurable percentage of those who died at Hiroshima.

That's not all, however. Tilmman says about as many Chinese would have died monthly due to starvation, disease, or famine for each month of further delay in arriving at peace as died at Hiroshima.

In his mealy-mouthed surrender statement in which he noted the war wasn't going like it should, Hirohito cited the atomic bombs as the reason for his decision.

Revisionist historians generations removed claim there would have been minimal casualties following an invasion, despite the careful hoarding of planes and pilots for suicide missions...so much so that opposition to American and British air attacks died off as the air siege of Japan grew.

President Harry Truman believed that had he decided not to use the atom bomb, he would have been impeached.

Tillman notes the controversay that continues today, emplified by the insane decision a few years ago to exhibit the Enola Gay, which dropped the A bomb on Hiroshima, with a legend that ignored the lengthy, bloody war the Japanese engaged in with the slaughter in nations all around the Pacific Rim, to blithely claim that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings were direct retaliation for the attack on Pearl Harbor.

A good overview of its subject, well organized to cover different phases of the air war against the home islands without lingering overlong on any one campaign.