Halsey's carriers over Tokyo

On the morning of 10 July 1945 waves of American carrier aircraft appeared over the Kantō Plain around Tokyo. They had taken off from the carriers of Task Force 38 – the main striking force of Admiral William Halsey’s Third Fleet, under the direct command of Vice Admiral John S. McCain. According to American figures, more than a thousand aircraft were sent over Japan that day, attacking airfields in the capital region. The airmen claimed the destruction of about 340 Japanese aircraft on the ground and two in the air – figures that come from combat reports and, as usual in such cases, were probably inflated. Something else was more striking: the Japanese did not send up a single fighter in defence.

The statement found in war chronologies that on 10 July aircraft of Task Force 38 took part in attacks on Tokyo “for the first time” needs qualifying. The same fast carriers, operating at that time as Task Force 58 under Admiral Raymond Spruance and Vice Admiral Marc Mitscher, had already attacked the Tokyo region on 16–17 February and again on 25 February 1945. What was new on 10 July was that the fleet numbered 38, under Halsey and McCain, struck the airfields around the capital for the first time – and that this was the beginning of its last, unbroken campaign against the Japanese home islands.

One fleet, two numbers

From 1944 the US Navy used an unusual arrangement in the Pacific: the same ships served alternately under two staffs. When Spruance was in command, the fleet was called the Fifth Fleet and its carrier force Task Force 58; when Halsey took over, it became the Third Fleet and the carrier force Task Force 38. The staff not currently conducting operations spent the time planning the next ones. This allowed the ships to operate almost without a break, and for a while the Japanese believed they were facing two separate fleets.

On 27 May 1945, during the Battle of Okinawa, Halsey relieved Spruance, and soon afterwards McCain relieved Mitscher. The first weeks of the new command were not happy ones: at the beginning of June the carriers attacked kamikaze airfields on Kyushu, and on the night of 4/5 June the fleet ran into the middle of a typhoon for the second time in half a year – Typhoon Connie – which ended in a court of inquiry and criticism of both admirals. On 10 June Task Force 38 left for the anchorage off Leyte in the Philippines, where the ships were refitted and the crews rested.

On 1 July the fleet sailed from Leyte for Japan. Task Force 38 then comprised nine fleet carriers and six light carriers with nearly a thousand aircraft, screened by battleships, cruisers and destroyers. Halsey sailed in the battleship Missouri. His task was to destroy Japanese air power, the remnants of the navy, shipping and industry ahead of the planned invasion of the home islands (Operation Downfall), the first stage of which – the landing on Kyushu – was scheduled for November 1945.

An empty sky over Kantō

The strike of 10 July was intended above all to destroy the aircraft concentrated on the airfields of the Tokyo region. The American airmen, however, met no opponent in the air. This was not for lack of machines – Japan still had several thousand, including many trainers adapted for suicide attacks – but the result of a command decision. Under the Ketsu-gō plan for the defence of the home islands, Imperial General Headquarters had decided to husband aircraft and fuel for the moment when the invasion fleet approached the coast. Then mass kamikaze attacks were to sink as many troop transports as possible. Until then the aircraft were hidden, dispersed to small airstrips and camouflaged, and losses on the ground were accepted.

For the Americans this posture was both advantageous and worrying. The fleet could operate right off the Japanese coast almost with impunity, but it could not draw the Japanese air forces into battle and destroy them before the invasion. Aerial photographs taken on 10 July also brought an important discovery: at the Yokosuka naval base lay the battleship Nagato, once the flagship of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto at the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Halsey regarded her destruction as a matter of prestige.

Hokkaido and northern Honshu

After the strike on Tokyo the fleet sailed north and on 14–15 July attacked Hokkaido and the northern part of Honshu – areas beyond the reach of the B-29 bombers from the Marianas and until then practically untouched by the war. The main targets were the train ferries crossing the Tsugaru Strait between Aomori and Hakodate, which carried coal from Hokkaido to the factories of Honshu. According to post-war studies, the aircraft sank eight of the twelve ferries and damaged the rest, and also destroyed dozens of small sailing colliers. According to the same figures, coal shipments fell by about 80 per cent; some historians regard this action as the most effective strategic air strike of the Pacific War. Towns on Hokkaido were also bombed – according to Japanese estimates, about 2,900 people were killed there on 14 and 15 July.

At the same time Halsey for the first time sent battleships against Japanese towns. On 14 July Rear Admiral John Shafroth’s group, with the battleships South Dakota, Indiana and Massachusetts, bombarded the ironworks at Kamaishi. According to American and Japanese sources, 424 civilians were killed, as well as five Allied prisoners working at the plant. The next day, 15 July, Rear Admiral Oscar Badger’s battleships Iowa, Missouri and Wisconsin shelled the steelworks at Muroran on Hokkaido. Halsey, who was aboard Missouri, later recalled that the hours spent within sight of the shore were among the longest of his life – and the absence of any reaction from the Japanese air forces confirmed his belief that the enemy was saving its aircraft for the invasion.

The British alongside the Americans

On 16 July the main body of the British Pacific Fleet, operating as Task Force 37 under Vice Admiral Bernard Rawlings, joined Task Force 38; all British forces in the Pacific were commanded by Admiral Bruce Fraser. On 17 July the carriers of both fleets attacked targets north of Tokyo together for the first time, although bad weather limited the scale of the raids. On the night of 17/18 July American battleships together with the British King George V shelled industrial plants in the Hitachi area. On 18 July carrier aircraft attacked Yokosuka and badly damaged Nagato, which nevertheless stayed afloat.

To the last day of the war

The campaign that began on 10 July continued, with breaks for refuelling and to avoid typhoons, until Japan’s capitulation. In the last days of July the carriers attacked the naval base at Kure and the ports of the Inland Sea, where the last large ships of the Imperial Japanese Navy lay, and then Maizuru. In August they struck the airfields of northern Honshu and the Tokyo region again. On the morning of 15 August a first wave of aircraft was still attacking targets around the capital; the second was recalled when word came that Japan had accepted the surrender terms.

Significance

The strike of 10 July 1945 was not the first carrier attack on Tokyo, but it opened the last chapter of the naval war in the Pacific. For five weeks American and British carriers operated right off the coast of Japan, and battleships shelled its towns, meeting almost no resistance in the air. This revealed both the scale of Allied superiority and the strategy of the Japanese command, which instead of defending the skies over the country was hoarding aircraft and fuel for a decisive battle against the invasion fleet. That battle never came – the carrier offensive, the B-29 raids and the naval blockade combined to create a situation in which Japan’s fate was decided in August 1945 without a landing on Kyushu.