The last raids on Japan

On 14 August 1945 American strategic air power carried out its last great operation against Japan. Over that day and the following night 828 Boeing B-29 Superfortress bombers and 186 escort fighters took off – more than a thousand aircraft in all. Their targets were arsenals and railway junctions in western Honshu, the refinery at Tsuchizaki near Akita, and two small towns north of Tokyo, Kumagaya and Isesaki. The last bombs fell during the night of 14–15 August, a few hours before Emperor Hirohito announced on the radio that Japan accepted the terms of surrender.

In English-language chronicles 14 August is sometimes described as “the last day of combat for the United States armed forces”, after which all units “froze in place”. That is a simplification. The bombers were still returning to base on the morning of 15 August, that same morning the carriers of Task Force 38 sent another wave of aircraft over Tokyo, and air combat continued even several days later. The order to cease offensive operations was issued on 15 August, after the acceptance of the Japanese reply had been announced; American units were not “frozen”, however, but went on patrolling, covering the fleet and flying reconnaissance.

A pause in the bombing

After the atomic bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and on Nagasaki and the USSR had entered the war, on 10 August the Japanese government declared its readiness to accept the Potsdam Declaration on condition that the prerogatives of the Emperor were preserved. President Harry Truman then forbade the use of another atomic bomb without his express permission, but at first allowed conventional raids to continue. During the night of 9–10 August B-29s attacked an oil target, and in daylight on 10 August an industrial plant in Tokyo.

On 11 August the B-29s did not take off because of the weather. Journalists read a remark by General Carl Spaatz, commander of the US Strategic Air Forces in the Pacific, as heralding a ceasefire. Truman judged that resuming the raids in these circumstances might be taken in Tokyo as breaking off the talks, and ordered strategic bombing to be halted. The same day Spaatz issued a new directive in case it was resumed: fewer attacks on cities, more on transport.

On 13 August, instead of bombs, B-29s dropped millions of leaflets over Japanese cities. At the initiative of American psychological warfare specialists, they carried the text of the Japanese note of 10 August and of the Allied reply signed by Secretary of State James Byrnes. Until then the Japanese public had not known that the government was negotiating a surrender. The Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, Kōichi Kido, feared that the leaflets would provoke a violent reaction in the armed forces before the Emperor had time to settle the matter. According to his account, on the morning of 14 August he persuaded Hirohito and Prime Minister Kantarō Suzuki not to wait but to convene an Imperial Conference that same day, at which the final decision to accept the terms was taken.

On the American side the reply from Tokyo was slow in coming. The Supreme Council and the cabinet deliberated late into the night of 13 August without reaching a decision, and radio monitoring picked up increased traffic in Japanese military and diplomatic communications, which Washington read as a possible sign of preparations to fight on. Truman therefore ordered attacks to be resumed at maximum strength in order – as it was put – to convince Japan’s leaders that the Americans “meant business”. The Chief of the Army Air Forces, General Henry Arnold, wanted to send a thousand aircraft over Japan.

A thousand aircraft

The operation of 14 August was the largest and longest bomber operation of the Pacific war. According to the official history of the US Army Air Forces, 828 B-29s of General Nathan Twining’s Twentieth Air Force and 186 fighters were dispatched, and not one aircraft was shot down. The preparations were coordinated by Spaatz’s chief of staff, General Curtis LeMay, the architect of the night-time incendiary raids that in the spring had burned out most of Japan’s large cities, including Kobe and Nagoya. The Eighth Air Force, which was just then moving from Europe to Okinawa, took no part: its commander, General Jimmy Doolittle, judged that the war was practically over and did not intend to risk his airmen’s lives in its final hours.

By day the B-29s carried out precision attacks on military targets in western Honshu: the naval arsenal at Hikari in Yamaguchi Prefecture, the army arsenal in Osaka and the Marifu marshalling yard at Iwakuni. According to Japanese figures, 738 people were killed at Hikari, most of them civilian arsenal workers and mobilised schoolchildren. In Osaka bombs also hit the crowded Kyōbashi station near the arsenal; the number killed there is estimated at several hundred.

During the night of 14–15 August more than 130 bombers of the 315th Bombardment Wing flew a record-breaking mission – some 6,000 kilometres there and back from Guam – to the Nippon Oil refinery at Tsuchizaki, the port district of Akita on the Sea of Japan. It was the last large refinery still operating in the country. The bombing lasted from 10.30 p.m. until about 3.30 a.m.; the refinery and the port were destroyed, and the fire spread to neighbouring buildings. According to Japanese estimates, more than 250 people were killed.

At the same time other groups of B-29s dropped incendiaries on Kumagaya in Saitama Prefecture and Isesaki in Gunma Prefecture. Kumagaya, a town of some 45,000 inhabitants, was of little military importance – it had factories belonging to subcontractors of the Nakajima concern and an army flying school. The American correspondent Homer Bigart, who flew in one of the bombers, wrote that none of the crews wanted to die over a “pitifully small town”. The raid lasted from 12.23 to 1.39 a.m. on 15 August; about three-quarters of the built-up area burned down, and according to Japanese figures 266 people were killed and more than 3,000 injured. On Isesaki bombs fell from 12.08 to 2.15 a.m.; local records speak of 29 dead in the town and more than a dozen in the surrounding villages, and of almost 2,000 houses destroyed. Fire and bombs also struck nearby Ōta and Takasaki.

As the crews were returning to the Marianas, an attempted coup by young officers seeking to stop the surrender was already under way in Tokyo, and the recording of the Emperor’s broadcast was hidden in the palace.

The carriers: the morning of 15 August

The fleet was in action at the same time. Admiral William Halsey’s Task Force 38, supported by British carriers, struck the airfields around Tokyo again on 13 August, where there was much air fighting. On 14 August the ships refuelled, and at dawn on 15 August they sent further waves of aircraft over the capital.

The first wave reached its targets. The news that Japan had accepted the terms arrived when the second was already on its way; Admiral Chester Nimitz ordered air operations to stop, and the aircraft were recalled and told to jettison their bombs over the sea. It was just then that six Hellcats of squadron VF-88 from the carrier Yorktown were attacked by more than a dozen Japanese fighters near Atsugi. Only two pilots returned; four were killed. The historian John Wukovits calls them the last Americans killed in aerial combat in the war. A British Seafire pilot from the carrier HMS Indefatigable, Sub-Lieutenant Fred Hockley, shot down over Chiba Prefecture that morning, was taken prisoner and in the evening, a few hours after the Emperor’s broadcast, was murdered by Japanese soldiers; two officers responsible for the crime were sentenced to death in Hong Kong in 1947.

Halsey then ordered vigilance to be maintained. According to an often-quoted account, he told his pilots to shoot down Japanese aircraft approaching the fleet “not vindictively, but in a friendly sort of way”. According to American reports, several Japanese aircraft that approached the ships were shot down during the day.

After the broadcast

At noon on 15 August Japanese time Hirohito announced on the radio the acceptance of the surrender terms; in Washington Truman had announced the same on the evening of 14 August. That day American commands ordered offensive operations to cease. This did not, however, mean an end to all fighting. Vice Admiral Matome Ugaki, commander of the Fifth Air Fleet, after listening to the broadcast led a last suicide flight from Kyushu towards Okinawa; neither he nor most of his airmen returned. At Atsugi airfield some naval officers called for several days for the war to continue.

On 17 and 18 August Japanese fighters attacked American Consolidated B-32 Dominator reconnaissance bombers photographing the Tokyo area from Okinawa. On 18 August one of the aircraft was badly damaged; Sergeant Anthony Marchione was killed, and in many publications he is named as the last American killed in aerial combat in the war. Among those said to have taken part in the attack was the fighter ace Saburō Sakai, who later claimed that the pilots feared a new raid. After this incident the Americans demanded that the propellers be removed from Japanese combat aircraft, which began on 19 August.

Significance

The raids of 14 August had no effect on the outcome of the war: the Emperor had taken the decision to surrender that morning, before the bombers reached their targets. For the inhabitants of Kumagaya, Isesaki, Tsuchizaki, Hikari and Osaka, however, they were the last act of a campaign in which, according to various estimates, at least several hundred thousand civilians had been killed – counting the victims of the atomic bombs – and most of the large cities lay in ruins. Whether resuming the bombing in the days when the surrender was being decided was necessary as a means of pressure, or superfluous, remains an open question in the literature.

The last days of the war also showed that the surrender was not a single moment. The Emperor’s order had to reach millions of soldiers scattered from Manchuria to Indonesia, and on the Soviet–Japanese front fighting continued for several more days. From 15 August bombing ceased to be the main task of American air power in the Pacific – it was replaced by reconnaissance, shows of force and food drops for prisoner-of-war camps, while Halsey’s and Spaatz’s aircraft prepared to cover the occupation of Japan.