Professor Robert Citino has posted that there was a degree of uniqueness about the war in the Pacific. One area where theis was certainly the case was in the conduct of the strategic air offensive against Japan that was inexorable linked to General Henry ‘Hap’ Arnold’s desire to create an independent air force. In many respect it represent the apogee of strategic air power for the United States Army Air Force during the course of the Second World War. Key to this was the formation of the Twentieth Air Force that was equipped with the new Boeing B-29 Superfortress. Arnold had personally overseen the development of the Superfortress as he saw it as the key to the conduct of the campaign against Germany and Japan and therefore central to the achievement of independence. Key to the production the B-29 was the support that Arnold received from President Franklin Roosevelt who hoped to support the Chinese with B-29s based in that country. The Twentieth Air Force was formed on 4 April 1944 under the direct command of Arnold himself with responsibility to the Chiefs of Staff. This presaged the role that Strategic Air Command would play in the post-war defence set-up. XX Bomber Command was deployed to China under the command of Brigadier General Kenneth Wolfe. However, the results achieved from China were disappointing and it would eventually withdrawal to India. At the same time, Major-General Curtis LeMay had replaced Wolfe. In April 1944, XXI Bomber Command had been formed and by August 1944, it was deployed to the recently recaptured Marianas Island. From here, B-29s were to attack Japan. Initially commanded by Major-General Haywood Hansell, who had been Chief of Staff to the Twentieth Air Force in Washington, he would be replaced by LeMay when the later moved from XX Bomber Command. The key reason for this replacement was due to the ineffectiveness of Hansell precision targeting policy against Japanese targets. LeMay would radically change the targeting policy to one of area bombing using firebombing tactics with a directive that was issued on 19 February 1945. The firebombing of Tokyo in February and March 1945 most notably represented this. Ultimately, the use of air power to deliver the first atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki reinforced the strategic role of USAAF and set a pattern for its central role American post-war nuclear deterrent force. Arnold had played an important role in the coordination of the bombs development and it’s eventually implementation.
The strategic direction of the campaign of the campaign from Washington represented the peak of strategic air power for Arnold. It placed USAAF on a co-equal footing with both the army and navy in the pacific theatre as rather than reporting to a theatre commander as General Carl Spaatz did in Europe; Twentieth Air Force reported directly to Washington. It was well recognised that this amounted to an independent air force for USAAF. Arnold was also keen to avoid cooperating with the RAF who planned to deploy its own strategic bombing force, Tiger Force, to the Far East once the war in Europe was complete. Here they expected a similar command set-up as to that which had existed in Europe where through Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal both Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris and Spaatz reported to the Combined Chiefs of Staff, however, they were rebuked on this point when it was made clear that the Twentieth Air Force would only report to the US Chiefs of Staff; a clear indication that this campaign belonged to the Americans. A final reorganisation of operations took place on 16 July when Spaatz took command of the US Strategic Air Forces in the Pacific due to the impending deployment of the Eighth Air Force to Okinawa. Lieutenant General Nathan Twinning would command Twentieth Air Force while Eight Air Force was still commanded by Doolittle. Arnold continued to act as the executive agent for the strategic air forces and issued directives on behalf of the US Chiefs of Staff.
 On LeMay see; Curtis LeMay with MacKinlay Kantor, Mission with LeMay (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1965); Thomas Coffey, Iron Eagle: The Turbulent Life of General Cutis LeMay (New York, NY: Crown, 1986)
 William Ralph, ‘Improvised Destruction: Arnold, LeMay, and the Firebombing of Japan’, War in History, Vol. 13, No. 4 (November 2006); Mark Seldon, ‘A Forgotten Holocaust: US Bombing Strategy, the Destruction of Japanese Cities, and the American Way of War from the Pacific War to Iraq’ in Yuki Tanaka and Marilyn Young (Eds.) Bombing Civilians: A Twentieth-Century History (New York, NY: Free Press, 2009).
 On the diplomacy of this issue see; Nicholas Sarantakes, ‘The Royal Air Force on Okinawa: The Diplomacy of a Coalition on the Verge of Victory’, Diplomatic History, Vol. 27, No. 4 (September 2003) pp. 479–502. More generally see; Nicholas Sarantakes, Allies and the Rising Sun: The United States, the British Nations, and the Defeat of Imperial Japan (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2009).
 Wolk, Cataclysm, pp. 160-161.