GENERAL CURTIS LEMAYS B-29S OVER JAPAN

I have read recently how effective the fire bombing of General Lemays B-29s were on the japanese
cities virtually leveling to ashes parts of Tokyo and many other cities. If the war had continued his
bombers would have leveled most of the cities in Japan and there wouldnt have been many buildings
left standing much more misery would have happened to the Japanese people.
The Japanese people were treated very well and encouraged to form a democracy. At the same
time the Japanese were responsible for murdering 30,000,000 chinese.

gusord

 

I'm not sure what point you are trying to make here, but I'll add that I feel LeMay was one of the best air commanders in history. Every major city in Japan (with the exception of Kyoto, which was spared for its historical value) was bombed, and most were reduced to ashes. LeMay decided to use firebombs against Japan while others were using normal high-explosives. LeMay also changed the bomber tactics to make raids by the new B-29s high effective: prior to LeMay's assumption of command, B-29s flew at high altitude and attempted percision bombing of military targets. While virtually invulnerable to AA fire and most interceptors at altitudes of 30,000+ feet, the bombing was highly innaccurate. After taking command of the 21st Air Force, LeMay stuck his neck out and ordered a massive raid on Tokyo to be flown with incendiaries, dropped by B-29s spread out in a 15-minute long wave flying at just 5000 feet and stripped of all defensive gun turrets. The raid was hugely successful, saw few American losses, and is considered by many Japanese to have been a turning point in the war. This routine was repeated on most major Japanese cities, from Sendai in the north to Sasebo in the south. The bombing deeply touched Hirohito, and he began to consider a peace agreement after this. As a side note, Hap Arnold asked LeMay when he expected the Japanese to surrender (without the atomic bombs). LeMay replied "October 1st" because by then there would be no major Japanese cities still standing. Additionally, LeMay and the Navy's mining campaign dramatically damaged Japanese shipping around the home islands.

It is a shame that LeMay was eventually viewed as a thermonuclear warmonger after the 1960s.

 

My view of LeMay is very similar.

Sort of like the Air Corps version of William Tecumseh Sherman. Sherman, like LeMay, was much maligned postwar. Georgia and South Carolina have neither forgotten nor forgiven him.

LeMay's treatment was quite similar, with accusations of mental instability, which Sherman was accused of both before, during AND after the war!

 

Let's not forget that he played a key part in Operation Starvaton:

 

Bombing during WWII was a different time and era, civilian casualties were looked at as collateral damage I believe. While today every effort is made to minimize civilian casualties, it was an acceptable result of strategic bombing during WWII. Some of the firebombings in Germany had people question the legitimacy of the practice. Lemay saw the ineffectiveness of the high altitude bombing with conventional bombs and made the decision to change or adapt new methods to produce the results desired. In my opinion, LeMay did what was necessary to cripple Japan's industry in the best method he knew that could produce the desired effects but also minimize the casualties to his airmen. I also agree with the previous posts about the distinguished career that LeMay had and feel that too many in the public cannot possibly understand the tough decisions that commanders undertake during times of war. LeMay took charge and was going to do whatever it took to achieve his goals.

 

Lemay thought if a war was justified, you should fight to win as quickly as possible. In 1950 he recommended fire bombing selected cities in North Korea and that was rejected as being too extreme. Lemay said that after three years of proportional response, every city in North & South Korea had been destroyed plus we had three years of casualties instead of a few months. He also had some quote about how people thought it was wrong to kill someone with an atomic bomb but okay to bash his head in with a rock.

 

Lemay revolutionized low level night bombing raids. For awhile the B-29's bombing was highly inaccurate until lemay went with the low level tatic to account for the jet stream. An interesting quote by Lemay and I don't recall it word for word but he said if the allied hadn't won the wor he would have been hung as a war criminal. It's very interesting to look at how much damage and destruction him and his B-29's caused. Although the Japanese with resilient and fanatical and were willing to fight to the last man,woman,and child.

 

Didn't the Doolittle Raid use fire bombs as well?

 

According to Wikipedia, each aircraft carried three HE and one incendiary bombs.

I have read one account of Doolittle's B-25 carrying 4 incendiaries, though, so a more reliable source would be nice.

 

I've read that too. The original plan was that they would fly over Japan at night and arrive in China in daylight; this was fouled up by the need to launch early when they encountered Japanese picket boats. Supposedly Doolittle had all incendiaries so as to start fires and help later planes find the target area; most of them (13?) were assigned to Tokyo.

I've thought it might have been useful to spread the attack over more cities, so as to let more of the Japanese people see how their military had failed to protect them. It was as much a morale as a physical effort.

 

By attacking at night you spread the whole force over Japan, and the likelihood that all or most planes will find and attack their targets diminishes greatly, therefore spreading the force out all but guarantees that several planes will miss their targets. By focusing on one target, and with one aircraft flying as a "pathfinder"(Doolittle), all but insures that all of the aircraft will be able to attack their assigned target. Japan's morale will not be affected if most of the bombs fall in forests, fields, lakes, etc. As an anecdote, author Richard Rhodes tells that the Japanese had joked that the Americans were trying to drown them, when bombs aimed at an aircraft factory 10 miles away from Tokyo fell into Tokyo Bay.

EDIT: Link to Hyperwar's edition of Doolittle's after action report on the raid http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/AAF/rep/Doolittle/Report.html

 

What made Lemay's approach different is that is was low level during the day and a lot of the guns were taken out to increase the speed. Lemay was the first high level bombing leader to admit that precision bombing was not practical.

 

Day? I think you mean night. Low level day missions were not flown until sometime later.

 

I've never understood why Lemay doesn't get the criticism that Harris does. The tactics/aim/results were very similar and Lemay probably killed as many civilians in a much shorter time. The fire bombings of Tokyo killed as many if not more than Dresden. Ideas?

 

In Germany, the conditions for a "firestorm" were not likely to occur very often, that is why there are only two, Hamburg & Dresden, that are remembered. Japan, however, had a vastly different infrastructure than German cities, which made them much more susceptible to "being put to the torch." Also, the fire raids proved to be highly effective at taking out many "precision targets" in one shot. IIRC, the "Great Tokyo Fire raid" took out some twenty-two "precision targets" that each would have required a separate mission to destroy(and that is probably very optimistic). Then you have to consider how the war in the Pacific began(Pearl Harbor), and that the vast majority of American would considered the "fire raids" to be appropriate for the "sneaky Japs"(so, there is also the likelihood of possible racist undertones too). Let's face it, after December 7th, 1941, it would not take much to incite the American population into an anti-Japanese fervor.

 

A lot of the revisionist crowd has gone after LeMay, so its not a matter of him not being criticized. Industry in Japan was often extensively spread out in residential areas, often in small shops (there's a good line in Tillman's "Whirlwind" about this and there's a picture of the ruins of a residential district in Yokohama with a mechanical press standing above the ruins of almost every house on the street). Destroying Japanese industry meant that not only the big factories had to be destroyed, but also the affiliated 'cottage industries'. This meant that destroying the entire area was necessary to have a lasting impact. This wasn't always the case with Harris' operations.

I'm not saying that destroying industry was the only motivation behind LeMay's campaign (there's a variety of them, including his 'end the war as quick as possible with the least amount of US casualties' philosophy), but in my opinion this has shielded him from some of the criticisms leveled at Harris.

 

Let's not hasten to forget
1) the Rape of Nanjing
2) the treatment of PoWs, even civilians in conquered countries.
3) Unit 731

If you're going to train your troops to be brutal, sadistic thugs with little regard for any human life, don't be surprised when the free world does everything in its power to shorten the war.

This brutality by Japanese forces was seen already in the early 1930's.

Consider that the Japanese officialdom had so grossly misrepresented the fate of prisoners in Allied hands, that women in Okinawa killed their own children, and the costs in human life of any invasion of the Japanese mainland would have vastly outweighed any number of fire bombings.

 

The "cottage industry" was mostly done away with by the time the fire raids began in early 1945, as the USBSS had shown(whether this would have been known to the Air Force high brass remains a question). By then, the naval blockade had been taking it's toll on Japanese imports of raw materials for the war effort, and the remaining industries were being starved of resources. Still, the fire raids took an exceeding toll on the factory workers, as they were left without shelter or supplies and were forced to move further away from the centrally located factories. We should also mention the near breakdown of their transportation net due to lack of fuel.

 

This was not what LeMay said in his memoirs (if memory serves me right). I guess that shows the USBSS did not communicate this to the USAAF 'brass'.

 

Or he was unwilling, in this regard, to accept their findings.