WHIRLWIND: THE AIR WAR AGAINST JAPAN, 1942–1945
By Barrett Tillman
Simon & Schuster, 2010
Barrett Tillman's Whirlwind is scholarly, readable, and definitive — three qualities that rarely coexist in a single volume, and whose combination here represents one of the finer achievements in recent American military history writing. The subject is the USAAF's air campaign against Japan in the final years of World War II: from the relatively modest beginnings of Doolittle's 1942 raid through the full industrial-scale fury of LeMay's fire-bombing campaign, the B-29 aerial mining operations that strangled Japan's shipping, and the two atomic bombs that ended the war before the invasion that everyone dreaded had to be launched.
The Arc of American Air Power
Tillman traces the growth of American air power over Japan as a progression from maturity to ascendancy — a useful formulation that captures something important about the campaign's character. The early B-29 raids from China under the XX Bomber Command were conducted by an air force that was technically capable but operationally constrained: by logistics (keeping the Marianas-based aircraft supplied was a monumental undertaking in itself), by doctrine (high-altitude precision bombing against industrial targets), and by weather over Japan that defeated high-altitude precision bombing with frustrating consistency.
The pivot point is Curtis LeMay — one of the most consequential and most morally complex figures in American military history. LeMay's decision to strip the B-29s of defensive armament and bomb at low altitude with incendiaries at night was a gamble of the first order, justified by the operational logic of a campaign that was not producing results. The March 9–10, 1945 raid on Tokyo — which destroyed approximately sixteen square miles of the city and killed between 80,000 and 100,000 people in a single night — was the moment when that gamble was validated in the most terrible fashion imaginable. Tillman covers it without flinching, and without editorializing beyond what the facts require.
Both Sides, Every Level
What elevates Whirlwind above the category of competent operational history is Tillman's commitment to presenting both the American and Japanese perspectives at every level of command, from the airmen who flew the missions and the civilians who died under them to the generals and admirals who planned the campaign and the political leaders who authorized its escalating destructiveness.
The Japanese side of this story is not simply the story of victims. The Japanese military leadership's treatment of captured American airmen was a systematic atrocity — executions, torture, medical experiments, and the deliberate starvation of prisoners held in conditions that violated every standard of the laws of war. Tillman pulls no punches in documenting this record, just as he pulls no punches in documenting the destruction wrought by the B-29 campaign. The reader who wants a morally simple story — American heroes, Japanese villains, or its inverse — will not find it here.
Equally important is Tillman's coverage of the Japanese military's plans for the defense of the home islands against the invasion that American planners expected would be necessary if Japan did not surrender. The Japanese government was preparing to arm every civilian capable of carrying a weapon and use them as a human wave against the invasion beaches. The casualty projections for such a campaign — on both sides — were staggering. The atomic bombs ended the war before those projections could be tested, and any honest assessment of the bombs' use must reckon with what they prevented as well as what they destroyed.
The Mining Campaign
One of Tillman's most valuable contributions is his detailed treatment of Operation Starvation — the B-29 aerial mining campaign that laid mines throughout Japan's coastal shipping lanes, ports, and inland waterways. This campaign is consistently underrated in popular accounts of the air war against Japan, overshadowed by the dramatic destructiveness of the incendiary raids. But in terms of its impact on Japan's ability to supply its population and military with food and raw materials, the mining campaign was arguably as effective as the bombing in accelerating the conditions that made Japan's continued resistance unsustainable.
A Necessary Book for the Present Moment
I will end with an observation that Tillman makes implicitly and that deserves to be stated explicitly: there is much to be learned about the proper conduct of warfare in the present time from this history, precisely because the current tendency — to attempt to win wars through measured application of force designed to minimize civilian casualties while winning "hearts and minds" — represents a fundamental departure from the logic that defeated Imperial Japan. Air power applied with restraint, against an adversary that has no intention of surrendering, produces neither victory nor reduced casualties. It produces prolonged conflict.
The men who bombed Japan understood this, and they acted on it. Whether their methods were moral, whether the decision to use atomic weapons was justified — these are questions that the reader must answer. Whirlwind provides everything needed to answer them honestly. Essential reading.