Piercing the Fog - Air Force Historical Studies Office

Planning the Defeat of Japan
JTG did all of its work in the name of Arnold as Commanding General, AAF.
A special panel of consultants stood ready to offer advice. This consultative
group comprised several people from the COA, including Colonel McCormack
of G-2 whose unique sources Of ULTRA information would be most important.
In charge of the panel was Dr. Edward Bowles, Arnold’s science advisor, who
had contributed greatly to the design and use of airborne radar bombing aids and
other electronic warfare advan~es.~’
The services saw the JTG as an organization created for a specific
task-assessing information for the aerial attack on Japan. The group had no
table of organization; its member agencies, primarily from the AAF and Navy,
contributed personnel at the request of the AC/AS, Intelligence. The group was
an analytical body charged with making recommendations on Japanese targets
and giving advice to field commanders; it could not direct any actions, but
Samford could keep contact with any service or office he felt appropriate. The
group’s organization and functional authority left it a creature of AAF
headquarters and a true staff extension of the AC/AS, Intelligence, with General
Arnold and his intelligence chief as, in effect, executive agents overseeing the
JTG’s operation. For Arnold and the AAF, the importance of the JTG’s creation
and position was a clear recognition of air power’s importance and of the AAF’s
and the B-29’s key roles in air warfare plans of the United States.
The JCS directive gave the JTG a broad selection of responsibilities and
functions including preparation and distribution of a list of all air targets
important to Japan’s general economic and military strength; production and
distribution of strategic target information; listing the priority of target systems
and specific targets in each system; recommending the most suitable munitions,
fuzing, and loads for targets; and indicating the forces to be used against each
target. The JTG was charged with preparation of damage assessment reports and
reports on the repair and reconstruction of damaged targets; the creation of
special studies; and the liaison with using agencies to ensure adequacy and
acceptability of the group’s work. Among the JTG’s first projects were the
organization and distribution of the Air Target Index Japanese War, and the
adjunct air target system folders, which covered each target or collection of
targets described in the index. Because the JTG lacked extensive information
on Japan, the European experience in analyzing bomb damage, especially that
which the Germans had inflicted on London, became vital to studies of Japanese
targets. The JTG’ s Physical Vulnerability Section, for example, tried to quantify
the areas of effectiveness of bomb blast and bombing patterns on industrial
areas, industrial structures, and urban areas to form the basis of a comparative
analysis applicable to Japan. Many of the people who worked in the Physical
Vulnerability section were veterans of the similar British organization in
London called R.E.8. Many had also done extensive bomb damage analysis
work for the RAF and Eighth Air Force between 1940 and 1944. It was largely
from the studies done in Washington that the group devised its recomrnenda-
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