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发帖数: 1061 | 1 Operation
The mission was initiated at the insistence of Admiral Chester Nimitz who
wanted his naval operations augmented by an extensive mining of Japan itself
conducted by the air force. While General Henry H. Arnold felt this was
strictly a naval priority, he assigned General Curtis LeMay to carry it out.
LeMay assigned one group of about 160 aircraft of the 313th Bombardment Wing
to the task, with orders to plant 2,000 mines in April 1945. The mining
runs were made by individual B-29 Superfortresses at night at moderately low
altitudes.[2] Radar provided mine release information.[2] The 313th
Bombardment Wing received preliminary training in aerial mining theory while
their B-29 aircraft received bomb-bay modification to carry mines.[2]
Individual aircrew were then given four to eight training flights involving
five radar approaches on each flight and dummy mine drops on the last flight
.[2]
Beginning on March 27, 1945, 1,000 parachute-retarded influence mines with
magnetic and acoustic exploders were initially dropped, followed by many
more, including models with water pressure displacement exploders. This
mining proved the most efficient means of destroying Japanese shipping
during World War II.[3] In terms of damage per unit of cost, it surpassed
strategic bombing and the United States submarine campaign.[3]
Eventually most of the major ports and straits of Japan were repeatedly
mined, severely disrupting Japanese logistics and troop movements for the
remainder of the war with 35 of 47 essential convoy routes having to be
abandoned. For instance, shipping through Kobe declined by 85%, from 320,000
tons in March to only 44,000 tons in July.[4] Operation Starvation sank
more ship tonnage in the last six months of the war than the efforts of all
other sources combined. The Twentieth Air Force flew 1,529 sorties and laid
12,135 mines in twenty-six fields on forty-six separate missions. Mining
demanded only 5.7% of the XXI Bomber Command's total sorties, and only
fifteen B-29s were lost in the effort. In return, mines sank or damaged 670
ships totaling more than 1,250,000 tons.
Aftermath
After the war, the commander of Japan's minesweeping operations noted that
he thought this mining campaign could have directly led to the defeat of
Japan on its own had it begun earlier. Similar conclusions were reached by
American analysts who reported in July 1946 in the United States Strategic
Bombing Survey that it would have been more efficient to combine the United
States' effective anti-shipping submarine effort with land- and carrier-
based air power to strike harder against merchant shipping and begin a more
extensive aerial mining campaign earlier in the war. This would have starved
Japan, forcing an earlier end to the war. |
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