Case Studies in the Achievement of Air Superiority - Air Force ...

AIR SUPERIORITY
ority over the strategic zone called the Inner Defense Perimeter by the
Japanese.
Background
If the Japanese threat had not been so underestimated in 1941, and if
Japan had been located geographically closer to North America, perhaps
American war planners before 1941 would not have agreed that the strategic
emphasis in case of war involving the United States must be on the
Atlantic rather than the Pacific theater. The Americans were also unenthusiastic
about defending British, Dutch, or French interests in Asia, and
were averse to committing themselves to war in the Far East unless or
until the objectives of the Japanese became entirely clear. Sympathy for
beleaguered China, however, and revulsion at Japan’s behavior there,
engendered some remarkably aggressive private thoughts among administration
officials in Washington. When Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau
tried to influence Secretary of State Cordell Hull in favor of the
Chinese Nationalist Government a year before Pearl Harbor, Hull asserted
that “what we have to do, Henry, is to get 500 American planes to start
from the Aleutian Islands and fly over Japan just once. . . . That
will teach them a lesson.” Hull then volunteered an even more startling
hope: “If we could only find some way to have them drop some bombs on
Tokyo.”’
In addition to being impolitic and premature, Hull’s personal comments
scarcely alluded to fundamentals that would long hamper United
States air operations in the Pacific: the relatively short reach of existing
Army and Navy planes, as against the enormous distances that had to be
traversed. To compensate for the weaknesses in range, U.S. aircraft were
being ferried in 1941 to outposts as far away as the Philippines.’ But the
transoceanic routes were truly daunting. It is 2,100 miles from San Francisco
to Oahu, 4,770 miles from Pearl Harbor to the Philippines, 1,400 miles
from Manila to Japan. From Panama to Japan it is 8,000 miles. The Great
Circle route via Alaska therefore attracted some attention, but even the
Kuril Islands’ approaches to Japan involve enormous distances: Paramushir
is 1,200 miles north of Tokyo, 650 miles west of Attu in the Aleutians,
over 1,000 miles west of Kiska. From Seattle to Tokyo via Hawaii, the
distance is 6,600 miles but, even by the Great Circle, it is still about 4,900
miles from Seattle to Tokyo via the Aleutians.
While technological and geographical limitations thus thwarted any
realistic American notions about contesting the skies in the Western Pacific
at an early stage, “American racism and rationalism [in the words of
384