Air Raids on Japan

Press, Volume LXXX, Issue 24446, 21 December 1944, Page 4

Air Raids on Japan

What General Harmon said a day or two ago about Japan’s war potential is not essentially new, and his purpose is no different from that of numerous other Allied spokesmen. General Harmon and Mr Churchill, for example, are at one in expecting Japan still to be fighting in 1946; and General Arnold and Mr Forrestal are among the American leaders who have said, with General Harmon, that this “ resourceful" enemy is alert to the menace of the air offensive against the home islands, which will not be reduced only by “the burning of flimsy “houses’’. But General Harmon says these things again because it is fatally easy to conclude that certain victory means easy victory. It is appropriate that he, as the director of the expanding air assault from Saipan, should also say them. The “ New York Times ” correspondent on Saipan recently complained that American newspapers use' their ad-

jectives too liberally when they present news of Superfortress operations to the public. He reported, too, that no one is more anxious to prevent excessive public optimism than General Hansell, who commands the Saipan bomber forces; and. that the command’s accounts of damage are worded conservatively and as accurately as limited 'observation permits. But so long as communiques speak of “substantial”, “sizable”, or “ large ” attack forces and say nothing of bomb tonnage, the American public is in no position to judge whether its newspapers read too much into the communiques. For the last week the public has known that “sizable” can be a synonym for “more than 100”. It has yet to be told, however, what distinction there is among “ sizable ”, “substantial”, and “large”. Bomb tonnage discharged, too, is still a matter for speculation; and it will remain speculative so long as details of Superfortress. performance are kept secret. In these circumstances General Harmon may say with some truth that “ no one gives “ the Japanese credit for being “resourceful enemies, except those “who have.to fight them”. Current events on the Western Front underline the danger of crediting the enemy with too little resource, as the hurried recasting of the reconversion programme in the United States emphasised it a few weeks earlier. On December 7, 1941, when President Roosevelt predicted “the " inevitable triumph ”, he postulated the nation’s “ unbounded ” determination. Determination, however, is no longer unbounded when complacency and over-optimism restrain it. Once more General Hansell, as reported yesterday, deprecates facile optimism. But the fault he decries can be more effectively attacked. A public that has long been told the bomb-weight dropped by scores of thousands of tons month after month on Germany would not lapse into dangerous assumptions if it were also told that in a “sizable” raid on Japan from Saipan the tonnage dropped is, say, 500.