The carrier bombers had taken the Tachikawa plant off line and demolished about 60 percent of the structures at the Nakajima airframe plant in Ota. Task Force 58 had lost sixty carrier planes in combat and twenty-eight in operations, but the carriers and screening ships were unscratched. The strikes were held up by naval aviators as Exhibit A in their ongoing meta-argument with the USAAF. The navy had argued that dive bombing and low-altitude strafing and rocket attacks could hit targets on the ground more reliably than the high-altitude precision bombing practiced by the Superfortresses. The
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