Ten-Day Wonder

The B-29 bosses had got hold of something new and good: large-scale night fire-bombing of Japan's cities. The top planning had been done in Washington under Brigadier General Lauris O. ("Swede") Norstad, chief of staff of the worldwide Twentieth Air Force. Then the details were left to Major General Curtis E. ("Old Ironpants") LeMay, who had the field command and with it, the tactical responsibility, as head of the 21st Bomber Command in the Marianas.

The new technique had caught the Japs by surprise in the first all-incendiary assault on Tokyo, and LeMay wanted to give them no time to recover. It was near-miraculous that two-thirds of the Tokyo raiders were serviced and in shape to lash at Nagoya within 48 hours; as a rule, half the heavy bombers used on a strike are ready to fly again four days later. It was downright miraculous that a high proportion of the Superfortresses used in the first two strikes were ready for use again at Osaka, again at Kobe, and in a repeat raid on Nagoya--all within ten days. Some of LeMay's ground crews on Saipan, Tinian and Guam, worked 48 hours nonstop to compass this miracle.

Area Plus Precision. In those ten days, the heart was burned out of four cities, among the six largest in Japan.* B-29 commanders insisted that this was not "area bombing" of the sort practiced by the British in Europe, but rather "precision-area bombing," with the target area outlines carefully drawn, and every effort made to drop every aimable cluster of M69 incendiary bombs within that area.

Main reason for the switch in tactics (from high-level, daylight bombing to medium-level, night bombing): it is more economical to burn out a sprawling area of small industry and homecraft war production than to bomb it out with high explosives. The fire-bomb technique is not infallible: less than two square miles of Nagoya burned in the first assault, and the job had to be done again a week later--with better results. Daylight bombing with big demolition bombs is still the prescribed dose for heavy industry, big arsenals, dockyards and the like. In future, the Japs (already evacuating all but essential civilians from five of their million-population cities) will have to reckon with both types of attack.

As a measure of Japan's disrupted civilian life--and of its leaders' fanatical will to drive the nation on to victory or ruin--the Koiso Cabinet ordered all schools above the first grade to close. Henceforth all children above six must help to produce food and munitions, join in air defense and other activities "directly concerned with the prosecution of the war."

* Still unburned: Kyoto, Japan's greatest inland city, and Yokohama, on the waterfront of Tokyo Bay.

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