Carriers over Tokyo

At dawn on 16 February 1945 the first waves of fighters took off from the decks of American aircraft carriers that had secretly closed to within some 200 kilometres of Tokyo. For two days the fast carrier force – Vice Admiral Marc Mitscher’s Task Force 58, operating as part of Admiral Raymond Spruance’s Fifth Fleet – attacked airfields and aircraft factories in the Kantō region, around Tokyo and Yokohama. It was the first attack of the war by carrier aircraft on the Japanese capital and on Japan’s main island, Honshu, and the first strike from the sea at the heart of the empire since the Doolittle Raid of April 1942.

Some war chronicles record under this date that American warships “shelled Tokyo and Yokohama”. That did not happen: Tokyo and Yokohama were attacked by aircraft flying from the carriers, and the force’s surface ships did not open fire on the Japanese coast. The first bombardment of a city in the Japanese home islands by American battleships came only in July 1945, when Admiral William Halsey’s ships shelled the steelworks at Kamaishi.

Covering Iwo Jima

Tokyo itself was not the object of the raid. The Marine landing on Iwo Jima – an island in the Volcano (Kazan) Islands that had for months been shelled by cruisers and bombed by army aircraft – was set for 19 February. Admiral Chester Nimitz’s planners feared that hundreds of Japanese aircraft concentrated on the airfields around the capital might strike at the invasion fleet, as Japanese aircraft had attacked the Americans off Leyte and in Lingayen Gulf. The strike on the airfields and aircraft plants of the Kantō was meant to destroy as many aircraft as possible on the ground and in the air before they could set out against the ships off Iwo Jima. There was also a psychological aim: to show the Japanese that the American fleet could operate off their coast with impunity.

At the end of January the same fleet had changed command. On 26–27 January 1945 Halsey, whose carriers had attacked Formosa and the South China Sea coast in January, handed it over to Spruance; the Third Fleet became the Fifth Fleet, and the carrier force, Task Force 38, became Task Force 58. The ships and crews remained largely the same; only the staffs changed, taking turns to prepare successive operations. Spruance sailed with the carriers aboard his flagship, the heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis.

A fleet off the coast of Japan

Task Force 58 sailed from Ulithi atoll on 10 February. According to American tallies it comprised 11 fleet and 5 light carriers in five task groups, screened by 8 fast battleships, more than a dozen cruisers and over 70 destroyers; there were more than a thousand aircraft on board. On the way the airmen rehearsed cooperation with the Marines over Tinian. Many aircrews were new and only just gaining combat experience; several carriers also carried Marine fighter squadrons flying Vought F4U Corsairs, embarked because of the kamikaze threat. One of the groups was made up of carriers equipped for night operations – USS Enterprise and USS Saratoga.

The force approached Japan under cover of a weather front, in rain and low cloud. Submarines and long-range patrol aircraft operated ahead of it, and destroyers sank any Japanese picket boats they encountered so that they could not report the fleet. According to American accounts, the Japanese did not detect the force until the moment of the attack.

16 February: fighters over the Kantō

The first waves – Grumman F6F Hellcat fighters and Corsairs – took off before dawn from a position some 60 nautical miles off the coast of Honshu. Their task was to gain control of the airspace over the Kantō airfields and destroy the Japanese fighters before the Curtiss SB2C Helldiver dive bombers and Grumman TBF Avenger torpedo bombers arrived. The weather was atrocious: low cloud, snow and strong winds made navigation and finding targets difficult, and over part of the area the ground was completely hidden.

The Japanese sent up navy and army fighters – among them Mitsubishi A6M Zeros, Kawasaki Ki-61s and the new Nakajima Ki-84. Fierce air battles were fought over the Kantō, and the American fighters strafed aircraft parked on the airfields. In the afternoon, once the airspace over the airfields had largely been secured, the bombers struck the aircraft plants. One of the targets was the Nakajima factory at Ōta in Gunma Prefecture, where Ki-84 fighters were assembled; according to American reports, some of the workshops and of the aircraft awaiting delivery were destroyed there, although the cloud made it hard to assess the results.

That same day, some 3,000 kilometres to the south-west, American paratroopers and infantry landed on Corregidor in Manila Bay, and the fire-support ships began their last three-day bombardment of Iwo Jima before the landing.

17 February: Musashino and Yokohama

On the morning of 17 February Mitscher’s aircraft returned over the Tokyo area. The main targets were Nakajima’s aero-engine works at Musashino on the western outskirts of the capital – the same complex that B-29s from the Marianas had been trying in vain to destroy since November 1944 – and the factories and airfield at Tachikawa. The aircraft also attacked shipping in the port of Yokohama and in Tokyo Bay. Among the ships sunk there was the Yamashio Maru – a tanker converted into an escort carrier for the Japanese army, which had been commissioned only three weeks earlier.

The weather was deteriorating rapidly. Around noon Mitscher called off further strikes and the force turned south towards Iwo Jima; on the way its aircraft also attacked targets on Chichi-jima in the Bonin (Ogasawara) Islands. The third day of attacks on Japan that had originally been planned did not take place. Japanese aircraft were unable to attack the American ships in Japanese waters during those days.

The toll

The American airmen claimed 341 Japanese aircraft shot down and some 160 more destroyed on the ground. As usual with such tallies, the figures were inflated: pilots’ claims often duplicated one another, and the cloud made it impossible to verify the results. Imperial General Headquarters admitted the loss of 78 aircraft in air combat without giving losses on the ground; the true figure remains uncertain. According to American data, Task Force 58’s own losses were 60 aircraft lost in combat and 28 in accidents, and some of the airmen shot down were taken prisoner by the Japanese. Later American assessments found that the damage to the aircraft factories was less than had been thought at the time – Nakajima’s production suffered, but it was not halted.

The attacks also struck the civilian population. According to Japanese tallies of the victims of air raids on Tokyo Prefecture, three people were killed there on 16 February and 196 on 17 February, most of them in the areas around the factories and airfields on the western outskirts, at Tachikawa and Musashino.

From the Japanese point of view, something else mattered most. Three years earlier the Doolittle Raid – sixteen army bombers launched in a one-off operation from the deck of USS Hornet – had been a symbolic gesture, and the carrier had had to flee at once. In February 1945 sixteen carriers operated off the coast of Honshu for two days, and their aircraft fought for command of the air over the capital. After its defeats in the Philippine Sea and at Leyte Gulf, the Imperial Japanese Navy no longer had a fleet it could throw against such a force. From then on Japan’s air defences had to reckon both with B-29s from the Marianas, which in January had attacked Nagoya, Tokyo and Akashi, and with carrier aircraft coming in from the sea.

Iwo Jima and the return to Tokyo

By 18 February Mitscher’s force was already on its way to Iwo Jima, where the next day its aircraft supported the Marine landing. The Kantō raid did not prevent Japanese attacks on the invasion fleet: on 21 February off Iwo Jima kamikaze aircraft badly damaged the Saratoga and sank the escort carrier Bismarck Sea. These attacks, however, came from other airfields and were much weaker than the planners had feared.

After several days supporting the landing, Task Force 58 turned towards Japan once more. On 25 February its aircraft again struck aircraft plants and airfields in the Tokyo area – on the same day that B-29s from the Marianas appeared over the capital dropping incendiaries. A snowstorm greatly limited the effects of both attacks, and the strike on Nagoya planned for 26 February was called off. The force sailed south and at the beginning of March attacked Okinawa.

Place in the war

The raid of 16–17 February 1945 opened a new phase of the Pacific War: from then on the American fleet operated in the waters of Japan itself. In mid-March Task Force 58’s aircraft struck airfields on Kyushu and ships lying at Kure and Kobe in preparation for the invasion of Okinawa, and in the summer the carriers and battleships of the Third Fleet attacked and shelled the coasts of Honshu and Hokkaido almost unhindered. The raid also showed the limits of carrier aviation: the bad weather over Japan, the same weather that hampered the B-29s, repeatedly forced Mitscher to break off his attacks, while inflated reports of aircraft destroyed gave a false impression of how far the enemy had been weakened – a few weeks later Japanese aviation, largely in kamikaze formations, inflicted on the American fleet off Okinawa the heaviest losses in its history.