20th Air Force

A Solitaire Game of the Strategic Bombing Campaign against Japan: 1944-1945

On April 18, 1942, Jimmy Doolittle led a squadron of carrier-based B25 Mitchells on a daring surprise raid on Tokyo. The raid, conducted as revenge for the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor four months earlier, caused little damage but was a harbinger of the destruction from the air that was destined to befall the islands of Japan…

By 1944, US forces had seized island bases in the Marianas close enough to Japan to employ the new long range B29 Superfortresses in a high-stakes strategic bombing campaign against Japanese industries and cities. So began the short (late 1944 until August 1945) but incredibly destructive life of the United States Army Air Force’s (USAAF’s) 20th Air Force.

Your objective as you take command of the 20th Air Force in September 1944 is nothing short of reducing Japan’s cities, large and small, to smoldering rubble! To do it you’ve got the powerful and sophisticated B29, in ever increasing numbers and with flight crews improving in combat and navigation skills, and a research effort you direct to develop more and more sophisticated weapons. While initially you must focus on clearing the sky of Imperial Japanese Army Air Force (IJAAF) fighters and blasting Japanese war industries with high explosive bombs, eventually you will develop incendiary bombs which rapidly reduce Japan’s combustible wooden and paper cities to ashes, and their dispersed war industries to ruins. Simultaneously, demolish her ports and kamikaze bases, and mine her waters. In the meantime, research marches on, perhaps you will obtain the ultimate weapon, the Atomic Bomb? Hopefully you will, because you are in a race against time – if Japan can hold out long enough the US will have to launch “Operation Olympic”, the costly planned invasion of Japan, and your strategic bombing campaign will have failed.