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How Did They Do It? The Japanese had more than enough planes for the first stages of their war. In the entire Pacific area the Allies probably had fewer than 1,500 combat planes, and these were widely dispersed, in small batches. Concentrating one at a time on their chosen fronts, the Japanese always had more at any given point than the Allies had.
Geography and planning gave the Japs this local superiority. If the Japanese front was fantastically wide and Jap supply lines long, the U.S. and British lines, from supply sources to the battle areas, were infinitely longer. Moreover, if the Jap fronts stretched far from home, they were nevertheless fairly close to each other. Result: the Japs could switch squadrons back & forth from one front to another, from Malaya to Java, from Java to Burma, and could usually base them near their next objective. Old crates could be used where opposition in the air was inconsiderable or nonexistent. Until last week, one such place was Japan itself.
Added to this local preponderance was the enormous value of the Japs' carrier forces. At the war's start, they had at least 20 carriers (one or two have been sunk). Nine were flying decks for land-type planes, eleven were seaplane carriers of limited capacity. Most were small: in six U.S. carriers, the Navy put about as many planes as the Jap had in all 20. But these small carriers gave the Japanese a highly mobile force, designed to concentrate quickly at the points where local superiority meant everything.
Now the air balance is shifting. Brigadier General Royce and his U.S. bombing raiders were attacked by very few Jap planes over the Philippines. Over New Guinea and Australia, the United Nations have aerial superiority for the present, and there are other signs that the Burma front and the Bay of Bengal (see p. 20) are about all that Japan's air services can handle at one time. Japan's air superiority in the Bay of Bengal is the smallest she has yet had in any important area.
The air raids on Japan, and the threat of more to come, were bound to affect Japan's strategy of local superiority. Now the Japs will have to keep more of their fighters at home. Even more important, the Jap air services have been geared to offensive war. Whenever and wherever they have had to go on the defensive, against anything like effective attackers, they have dismally failed.
Increasingly, from now on, Japan is going to be on the air defensive.