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U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey
UNITED STATES STRATEGIC BOMBING SURVEY SUMMARY REPORT
(Pacific War)
WASHINGTON, D.C.
1 JULY 1946
UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
WASHINGTON : 1946
Foreword
The United States Strategic Bombing Survey was established by the Secretary of War on 3 November 1944, pursuant to a directive from the late President Roosevelt. It was established for the purpose of conducting an impartial and expert study of the effects of our aerial attack on Germany, to be used in connection with air attacks on Japan and to establish a basis for evaluating air power as an instrument of military strategy, for planning the future development of the United States armed forces, and for determining future economic policies with respect to the national defense. A summary report and some 200 supporting reports containing the findings of the Survey in Germany have been published. On 15 August 1945, President Truman requested the Survey to conduct a similar study of the effects of all types of air attack in the war against Japan.
The officials of the Survey in Japan, who are all civilians, were:
Franklin D'Olier, Chairman.
Paul H. Nitze,
Henry C. Alexander, Vice Chairmen.
Harry L. Bowman,
J. Kenneth Galbraith,
Rensis Likert,
Frank A. McNamee, Jr.,
Fred Searls, Jr.,
Monroe E. Spaght,
Dr. Louis R. Thompson,
Theodore P. Wright, Directors.
Walter Wilds, Secretary.
The Survey's complement provided for 300 civilians, 350 officers, and 500 enlisted men. Sixty percent of the military segment of the organization for the Japanese study was drawn from the Army, and 40 percent from the Navy. Both the Army and the Navy gave the Survey all possible assistance in the form of men, supplies, transport, and information. The Survey operated from headquarters in Tokyo, with subheadquarters in Nagoya, Osaka, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, and with mobile teams operating in other parts of Japan, the islands of the Pacific, and the Asiatic mainland.
The Survey secured the principal surviving Japanese records and interrogated top Army and Navy officers, Government officials, industrialists, political leaders, and many hundreds of their subordinates throughout Japan. It was thus possible to reconstruct much of wartime Japanese military planning and execution, engagement by engagement and campaign by campaign, and to secure reasonably accurate data on Japan's economy and war production, plant by plant, and industry by industry. In addition, studies were made of Japan's overall strategic plans and the background of her entry into the war, the internal discussions and negotiations leading to her acceptance of unconditional surrender, the course of health and morale among the civilian population, the effectiveness of the Japanese civilian defense organization and the effects of the atomic bomb. Separate reports will be issued covering each phase of the study.
In this Summary Report the civilian officials and directors of the Survey have not undertaken to write a history of the Pacific war, nor to apportion credit for victory among the various component Allied forces. They have undertaken, as civilians, to present an analysis of the factual material gathered by the Survey and their general appraisal thereof as to the future.
UNITED STATES STRATEGIC BOMBING SURVEY
SUMMARY REPORT
The attack on Pearl Harbor was designed around surprise, the range of carrier task forces, and the power of aircraft to sink surface vessels. It was executed with the loss of 29 Japanese pilots. Two days later, the Japanese found the British battleship, Prince of Wales, and the battle cruiser, Repulse, without air cover off Malaya and sent them to the bottom with the loss of 4 Japanese Navy medium bombers. Allied air power in the Philippines, Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies was virtually eliminated, mostly on the ground, in a matter of days. Those enormous areas, once local allied air power had been eliminated, were laid open to occupation in a matter of weeks, at a cost of less than 15,000 Japanese soldiers killed, and with the loss from all causes in the entire campaign of 381 Japanese planes.
As these achievements indicate, the Japanese started the war aware of the fact that major offensive action cannot be undertaken without local control of the air. They also appreciated the vulnerability to air attack of surface objectives, both on land and at sea. The Japanese failed, however, to appreciate the full scope and complexity of the requirements for continuing control of the air. The Japanese aircraft production program at the start of the war was inadequate, as the Japanese subsequently discovered, not only in relation to that of the United States, but even in relation to the capabilities of their own economy. Their planning and execution with respect to training, maintenance, logistics, technical development, intelligence and full coordination with their land and surface forces, were limited in relation to the requirements that subsequently developed. Japan's war plans did not contemplate, nor were its capabilities such that it could have contemplated, interference with the sustaining resources of United States air power.
December 7, 1941, found the United States and its Allies provocatively weak in the Pacific, particularly in land and carrierbased air power. The Allied air groups actually in the Pacific were not only few in number but, in large measure, technically inferior to those of the Japanese. The Japanese strength had been underestimated. Ninety P40s and 35 B17s in the Philippines could not be expected to check the Japanese push southward. Three of our seven aircraft carriers were in the Atlantic and one training in the Gulf of Mexico. Even at that time, however, we had begun to see, more clearly than the Japanese, the full scope of the basic requirements for air power. Our programs for training, production, maintenance, logistics, and intelligence were limited, not so much by a lack of concept as by the time required for their development and fulfillment.
How the original Japanese advance was stopped, how we achieved air superiority, at first locally, but subsequently more and more generally, and over areas deep within the onetime Japanese dominated areas, culminating finally in air supremacy over the Japanese home islands themselves, and how that air superiority was exploited, is the story of air power in the Pacific war and the subject matter of this Summary Report. The role of air power cannot be considered separately, however, from the roles of ground and naval forces nor from the broad plans and strategy under which the war was conducted.
JAPAN'S ORIGINAL STRATEGIC PLAN
Japan's governmental structure provided no effective civilian control of her Army and Navy. In the years between the 1931 invasion of Manchuria and the 1941 attack upon Pearl Harbor, the military cliques of Japan exerted a progressively tighter control over the foreign and domestic affairs of the nation. These cliques included groups within both the Army and Navy, but because of the repeated military successes of the Japanese Army in Manchuria and China and the prestige so acquired, and because of the more ambitious and aggressive nature of the Japanese Army leaders, the political position of the Army was ascendant to that of the Navy. The final decision to enter the war and to advance into the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies, Malaya, Burma and to the southeast was, however, made with the full concurrence and active consent of all important Japanese Army and Navy leaders and of almost all her important civilian leaders.
This decision to which the Japanese were, in effect, committed by midOctober 1941 was based upon the following evaluation:
a. The threat of Russia on the Manchurian flank had been neutralized by the decisive victories of Germany in Europe which might eventually lead to the complete collapse of the Soviet Union.
b. Great Britain was in such an irretrievably defensive position that, even if she survived, her entire warmaking potential would be spent in a desperate effort to protect her home islands.
c. The forces which the United States and her allies could immediately deploy in the Pacific, particularly in the air, were insufficient to prevent the fully trained and mobilized forces of Japan from occupying within three or four months the entire area enclosed within a perimeter consisting of Burma, Sumatra, Java, northern New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, the Gilbert and Marshall Islands, Wake, and from there north to the Kuriles.
d. China, with the Burma Road severed, would be isolated and forced to negotiate.
e. The United States, committed to aiding Great Britain, and weakened by the attack on Pearl Harbor, would be unable to mobilize sufficient strength to go on the offensive for 18 months to 2 years. During this time, the perimeter could be fortified and the required forward air fields and bases established. So strengthened, this perimeter would be backed by a mobile carrier striking force based on Truk.
f. While the stubborn defense of the captured perimeter was undermining American determination to support the war, the Japanese would speedily extract bauxite, oil, rubber and metals from Malaya, Burma, the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies, and ship these materials to Japan for processing, to sustain and strengthen her industrial and military machine.
g. The weakness of the United States as a democracy would make it impossible for her to continue allout offensive action in the face of the losses which would be imposed by fanatically resisting Japanese soldiers, sailors and airmen, and the elimination of its Allies. The United States in consequence would compromise and allow Japan to retain a substantial portion of her initial territorial gains.
Certain civilian and naval groups were familiar with the United States, its industrial and technological potential, and probable fighting determination when aroused. They expressed doubts about a strategy which promised no conclusion to the war other than negotiation, and which thus might drag out interminably with consequent risk of defeat. The Navy, however, was gravely concerned about its declining oil supply after the United States and the British economic embargo of July 1941. Such civilians as were reluctant were overruled and went along with the more dynamic opinion.
None of the responsible Japanese leaders believed that within any foreseeable period of time Japan could invade the United States and dictate peace in the White House. Admiral Yamamoto's supposed boast that Japan would do so was in fact never made. These leaders furthermore felt that Japan's limited shipping would be strained to the utmost in providing logistic support for the plan adopted and would be wholly inadequate for any more ambitious program, unless the initial operations went unexpectedly well.
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PTO Contents · Japanese Mandated Islands · Japan Leaves the League of Nation · Path to WWII: Japan Widens Its Influence in Asia · Import or Die · China Speaks Japanese · Eastern Mandates · Paradise Into Hell · Softening the Marshalls · Central Pacific Campaign, 1941-1943 · Western Pacific Campaign · War Against Geography · 379-Mile Hop · Truk's Echo · Return Visit · Toward a Jap Defeat? · Guam Falls · CNMI: Wreckage Of WWII Fighter Plane Found On Pagan · Bloody Peleliu: Unavoidable Yet Unnecessary · Origin Of The Assault Amphibian · U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey · The Last Refuge of Kamikaze Ideology · Guam site of Pacific war trials
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