Summary Report

The attack on Pearl Harbor was designed around surprise, the range of carrier task forces, and the power of aircraft to sink surface vessels. It was executed with the loss of 29 Japanese pilots. Two days later, the Japanese found the British battleship, Prince of Wales, and the battle cruiser, Repulse, without air cover off Malaya and sent them to the bottom with the loss of 4 Japanese Navy medium bombers. Allied air power in the Philippines, Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies was virtually eliminated, mostly on the ground, in a matter of days. Those enormous areas, once local allied air power had been eliminated, were laid open to occupation in a matter of weeks, at a cost of less than 15,000 Japanese soldiers killed, and with the loss from all causes in the entire campaign of 381 Japanese planes.

As these achievements indicate, the Japanese started the war aware of the fact that major offensive action cannot be undertaken without local control of the air. They also appreciated the vulnerability to air attack of surface objectives, both on land and at sea. The Japanese failed, however, to appreciate the full scope and complexity of the requirements for continuing control of the air. The Japanese aircraft production program at the start of the war was inadequate, as the Japanese subsequently discovered, not only in relation to that of the United States, but even in relation to the capabilities of their own economy. Their planning and execution with respect to training, maintenance, logistics, technical development, intelligence and full coordination with their land and surface forces, were limited in relation to the requirements that subsequently developed. Japan's war plans did not contemplate, nor were its capabilities such that it could have contemplated, interference with the sustaining resources of United States air power.

December 7, 1941, found the United States and its Allies provocatively weak in the Pacific, particularly in land and carrier-based air power. The Allied air groups actually in the Pacific were not only few in number but, in large measure, technically inferior to those of the Japanese. The Japanese strength had been underestimated. Ninety P-40s and 35 B-17s in the Philippines could not be expected to check the Japanese push southward. Three of our seven aircraft carriers were in the Atlantic and one training in the Gulf of Mexico. Even at that time, however, we had begun to see, more clearly than the Japanese, the full scope of the basic requirements for air power. Our programs for training, production, maintenance, logistics, and intelligence were limited, not so much by a lack of concept as by the time required for their development and fulfillment.

How the original Japanese advance was stopped, how we achieved air superiority, at first locally, but subsequently more and more generally, and over areas deep within the one-time Japanese dominated areas, culminating finally in air supremacy over the Japanese home islands themselves, and how that air superiority was exploited, is the story of air power in the Pacific war and the subject matter of this Summary Report. The role of air power cannot be considered separately, however, from the roles of ground and naval forces nor from the broad plans and strategy under which the war was conducted.