"RAIN OF RUIN" PATH TO HIROSHIMA

At the climax of fighting in the Pacific, the USA revealed its ultimate weapon and ushered in a new era of warfare

- WORDS LOUIS HARDIMAN

The bomber will always get through; the only defence is offence,” Stanley Baldwin told the British Parliament in 1932.

Five years later during the Spanish Civil War, Hitler's Condor Legion devastated Guernica with high-explosive and incendiary bombs. Hamburg, Dresden, Cologne, Coventry and other European cities followed in the Second World War. The destructive power of aerial bombardment was also unleashed in the Pacific Theatre: hundreds of thousands died in Tokyo, Osaka, Kobe and more when incendiary bombs ignited wooden homes into unstoppable firestorms. The crescendo of this devastating strategy came when the atomic bombs Fat Man and Little Boy fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

At the outset of the Second World War President Franklin D Roosevelt implored the belligerents to avoid civilian casualties when bombing. Yet even as he made this plea, one of the USA's greatest aviation achievements and the eventual bearer of weapons of mass destruction, the B-29 Superfortress, was already in development.

“The strategy would be that machines do the fighting to save a hell of a lot of casualties. That doctrine dominated American policy even before Pearl Harbor,” says Iain MacGregor, historian and author of The Hiroshima Men. He also notes the economic significance of an aircraft programme that cost more than the Manhattan Project: “Investing that kind of money meant rejuvenating America’s economy. The aircraft industry had taken a pounding during the Great Depression. They deliberately made sure to build the plane in middle America, partly for security – no saboteur could get near it – but also because it revived entire regions of the Midwest.”