<text id=00he1111><title>Kokura Saved by the Weather</title>
<history>US Air Force: Events History</history>
<article><hdr>Kokura Saved by the Weather</hdr><body>
<p>Kokura was the second primary target chosen for the follow-on strike; bad weather saved it and fate decreed that Nagasaki would die in its stead. On 9 August, just before noon, the blinding light of a thousand suns flashed in the skies above that city and in one primordial blast leveled its buildings, seared its vegetation, boiled its canals and streams, and killed its people.
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<p>The war had only days to go, and the B-29s continued their raids on Japan. On the night of 14 August, 160 Superforts were out burning Kumagaya and Isezaki; 132 hit the Nippon Oil Company in a 3,650-mile (5,875-km) nonstop mission from the Marianas. Mines were sown by 39 more B-29s. On the way home, they heard the news of the surrender.
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<p>The B-29s had dropped more than 91 per cent of all the bomb tonnage that struck the home islands of Japan, destroying its industrial and urban heart as thoroughly as the B-17s and B-24s had destroyed German cities and factories. In military terms, the losses were light; 343 B-29s were lost in combat.
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<p>Japan surrendered to the devastating effects of air power, with a home defense force of more than 2 million combat-ready troops and 9,000 kamikaze airplanes waiting for the invasion that was never needed. Some will point out that Japan was already defeated by blockade; its major food and fuel sources had been denied the country. They will further point out that there may well have been 9,000 kamikaze planes, but where were 9,000 kamikaze pilots going to come from? And finally, the composition of the home defense forces, as in Germany, must have included the elderly, the infirm and the invalided, and could not have been considered seriously as a fighting force.
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<p>Those arguments have a partial truth about them. The B-29s did not win the war. In the end, it was a team effort, joining the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Coast Guard and a hard-working home labor force with the new strength of the USAAF. That combination won a part of the war. There were other nations involved, for far longer and at far greater cost, and it is important to remember that.
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<p>Air power did not win World War II, but it did make a decisive contribution to the final victory and the war would have been much more costly, and would have dragged on for much longer, had it not been for the tactical and strategic air power employed so effectively by the British Empire air arms and by the United States Army Air Forces.
