Whirlwind: the Air War against Japan 1942-1945 by Barrett Tillman
New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2011 ISBN 9781416584414
This was an interesting and informative book. It was also a frustrating and annoying one. While it does describe the American air war against Japan, and does have some interesting historical information to impart, it focuses too much on the American side, not enough on the Japanese, and the style is so cliche-ridden it takes away not only from the information Tillman is trying to impart, but also from the pleasure of reading.
The book starts with a brief survey of the development of strategic thinking around air power, and specifically strategic bombing, which is a useful entree into what comes later. We then move on to the Doolittle raid, before moving into the main part of the story, and the book.
The main part focuses on the B29 - its development, initial use from China, and then the raids engendered from the Marianas, before the two atomic bomb missions that ended the war. Tillman covers the initial arduous missions that originated from China, flying their bombs, fuel and equipment "Over the Hump" from India - it took seven journies over the Himalaya to transport enough fuel for one 'plane's bombing mission.
The results from these sorties were underwhelming, partly because the B29 could only reach the south of Japan, and because the American bombing strategy was not effective with the new bomber. Precision daylight bombing, which was the American way, achieved poor results in Japan. One of the issues was that, from 32,000 feet, the B29 was flying in the jetstream, which affected the fall of the bombs, the first time any 'plane had this problem. The lack of numbers of aircraft over the target was a problem as well. Before Curtis LeMay turned the whole B29 operation around, the poor serviceability of the fleet meant that many bombers never made it to the target.
Curtis LeMay, young and focused, was not satisfied with the poor results the B29s were achieving, and so he completely changed how they operated after a blitz of training and maintenance fixed the problems of navigation and serviceability. From high-altitude precision bombing, he changed to low altitude carpet bombing with incendiaries which, over the course of a few months, destroyed about 40% of the urban area of Japan's main cities. This bombing, while terrifying to the victims, was much more effective in crippling the industrial capacity of Japan than the previous strategy.
Tillman spends some chapters on the Naval contribution to the campaign - by 1945 the Japanese ability to defend against mass incursions of aircraft was limited, and so Carrier task groups could sail close enough to any part of Japan and wreak havoc, which they did mainly against airfields and naval assets. Tillman writes about the futility of some of these attacks, especially against the Japanese Navy in the Inland Sea, which had been effectively bottled up by the B29s that mined many of the waters around Japan, apart from the fact that Japan's stocks of fuel oil were practically exhausted.
The books final chapters deal with the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which covers all the bases of that story, from an American viewpoint.
So, as a work of history, Whirlwind covers the bases, and if you know nothing about the history of the Pacific War you will learn something. The main issue I have with this book is the style that Tillman has chosen to use in writing this book. It's a bit too tabloid for the kind of serious history I think he intended, and some of the metaphors and similies he's used are quite jarring and occasionally border on the offensive. Another annoyance are the seemingly endless non-sequiters which leave the reader scratching their heads trying to work out the point that Tillman was trying to make.
I was looking forward to this book, but finished it feeling underwhelmed. It could have been much more than it is. I'll keep looking for a definitive tome on this subject.
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