Piercing the Fog - Air Force Historical Studies Office

Piercing the Fog
Arnold, telling him on January 2, 1945, of an incendiary test set for the near
future.‘6 That test, made by Hansell the next day, proved inconclusive; clouds
and smoke obscured the scene from photoreconnaissance and from the
intelligence officers on Guam for some days.
Summoned from China to Guam early in January, Curtis LeMay found he
was to replace Hansell. Arnold, pressed by the JCS to get results with the B-29s
and increasingly frustrated with what he viewed as a lagging effort, had decided
on a new commander. Because Arnold did not wish to fire Hansell himself,
Norstad carried the message to both men in the Marianas. Within a few days,
Arnold suffered a serious heart attack and was temporarily removed from
participation in the course of the decision. For his part, LeMay knew full well
that he was expected to find success, and to do so soon. Although incendiary
attacks occurred only after much discussion in Washington, the final decision
resulted from a chain of circumstances. LeMay, seeing little chance of success
for precision bombing because of the winds aloft and heavy cloud cover over
Japan, decided to use night, low-level delivery of incendiary bombs, beginning
with a March 9/10, 1945, raid on Tokyo. That decision, though LeMay’s in
form, had a much different substance. In April 1945, LeMay wrote Arnold that
“. . . during my first six weeks [at M I Bomber Command in the Marianas] we
had one operational shot at a target.” LeMay added that he found the poor
weather, which nullified any chance for precision, high-altitude bombing by
almost constantly obscuring the targets, to be his “. . . worst operational
en ern^.'''^ LeMay well understood the stress under which Arnold operated as
commander of the Washington-controlled Twentieth Air Force, a radical
departure from the rule that the theater commander would control all military
assets in the area. Both men desired intensely that the strategic air force succeed
in its mission of forcing Japan’s capitulation before the scheduled November
1945 invasion of Kyushu, Japan’s southernmost main island.
Reading the COA and A-2 analytical studies of the layout and composition
of major Japanese cities, LeMay believed that incendiary attacks would
succeed. The test bombing of January, although inconclusive, had yielded some
encouraging results along the lines predicted, supporting the work in Washing-
ton and at the proving grounds in Florida and Utah. Local intelligence analysis
of Japanese flak defenses indicated to LeMay that they were much lighter and
less accurate than those he and his men had faced over Germany. By opting for
a night attack, LeMay further reduced the risk; intelligence studies and the air
OB summary, produced from ULTRA by MIS, indicated that Japan had a
negligible radar-directed night-fighter capability. General LeMay believed that
he could afford a low-level approach that stood a good chance of success, yet
one that did not depend upon the poorly developed art of long-distance
meteorology. LeMay’s decision seized upon the clearest course of action, one
long spelled out in studies of targets and Japanese defenses that both the Air
Staff and his staff on Guam had made. The first major fire raid on Tokyo
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