By August 1945 the Superfortresses had attacked sixty-six Japanese cities. Firebombing had made homeless a quarter of the nation’s urban population, and killed at least 300,000 people—all statistics are unreliable. The Twentieth Air Force had lost 414 aircraft on combat operations: 148 of these to enemy action, 151 to “operational causes,” 115 “unknown.” A further 87 were lost in training accidents. 2,822 aircrew were killed or missing, of whom 363 eventually returned from Japanese imprisonment. The $4 billion cost—double that of the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb—paled in
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