Two days after the Third Fleet unlimbered its mightiest guns against Hitachi (see above), Marianas-based 6-295 dropped hundreds of tons of fire bombs on the same city (industrial area: three square miles). To the layman this might have looked like coordination between Navy and Air. Not so. The airmen frankly admitted that they had not even waited for the Navy's damage reports: Hitachi had long been on their list of targets and they had bombed it regardless of what Halsey's guns might have done.
This was a result of the divided command system (TIME, July 23) in the Pacific. The...
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