TWELVE
POPULAR PERCEPTIONS of the Second World War identify the August 1945 atomic bomb attacks on Japan as a unique horror. Yet the fate of Hiroshima and Nagasaki can only properly be understood against the background of the air campaign which preceded the nuclear explosions, killing substantially larger numbers of people before the grotesque nicknames of “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” imposed themselves upon the consciousness of the world. In the early years of the Pacific war, save for the single dramatic gesture of the April 1942 Doolittle raid, launched from aircraft carriers, Japan was not bombed because it could not be reached. Meanwhile, in 1942 and 1943 the U.S. Army Air Forces in Europe devoted itself to precision attacks on industrial and military installations. This was partly because these were deemed the most useful targets; partly because America’s political and military leadership proclaimed fundamental moral objections to area bombing, as practiced by the British.
As the war advanced, however, scruples faded. Dismissing “psywar ops” against the Japanese, Admiral Leahy, personal chief of staff to Roosevelt and later Truman, said: “The best psychological warfare540 to use on these barbarians [is] bombs.” Likewise a contributor to the British Spectatormagazine, writing in September 1944: “No Archbishop is likely to cry out against the bombing of Japan when it comes, for it will be difficult to ask mercy for an enemy that shoots airmen unfortunate enough to bale [sic] out over its sacred soil, and perpetrates atrocities of revolting perversity in China.” It was the Japanese people’s ill-fortune that it became feasible to bomb them just when American squeamishness about killing civilians was eclipsed by ruthlessly pragmatic assessments of how best to exploit available technology to injure the enemy and enhance the credibility of strategic air power.
Such critics as John Dower suggest that racial hatred towards the Japanese people caused them to receive harsher treatment at Allied hands, especially in the matter of aerial bombardment, than the Germans. This view seems to represent a misreading of events in Europe in 1944–45. A large proportion of all German civilians killed by Allied bombing perished in the last months of the war, when huge air forces operated with advanced technology against negligible defences. American airmen knew perfectly well that the effects of USAAF radar bombing of precision targets in urban areas was no more discriminatory than British area attacks. The destruction of Dresden is widely seen as a unique example of “frightfulness.” In truth, of course, every day the Allied air forces aspired to inflict similar destruction, even if Americans enfolded themselves in a mantle of public regret about civilian casualties. Britain devoted almost one-third of its entire war effort to the strategic air campaign, while the USAAF’s bomber forces consumed 10 percent of comparable American expenditure. War in some degree blunts the sensibilities of all those engaged in waging it. This was certainly true of those who made Allied bombardment policy.
It has been suggested above that few belligerents in any conflict are so high-minded as to offer to an enemy higher standards of treatment than that enemy extends to them. In the last phase of World War II, impatience overtook the Allies at every level. From presidents and prime ministers to soldiers in foxholes, there was a desire to “get this business over with.” The outcome was not in doubt. The Axis retained no possibility of averting defeat. It therefore seemed all the more irksome that men were obliged to continue to die because the enemy declined to recognise the logic of his hopeless predicament. Any means of hastening the end seemed acceptable. In Europe, despite the misgivings of some senior officers, the USAAF participated in explicitly terroristic air operations against civilians, such as Operation Clarion in February 1945, designed to persuade the German people of their absolute vulnerability by attacking small communities and road traffic, military and civilian alike, killing many thousands.
The Japanese people found themselves at last within range of American bombers at a time when Allied moral sensibility was numbed by kamikaze attacks, revelations of savagery towards POWs and subject peoples, together with general war weariness. Joined to these considerations was the messianic determination of senior American airmen to be seen to make a decisive contribution to victory, to secure their future as a service independent of the army. The U.S. acquired the means to do terrible things to the Japanese people many months before “Little Boy” reached Tinian.
Claire Chennault, former freelance leader of the “Flying Tigers” translated into a U.S. general commanding the Fourteenth Air Force in China, was among the early advocates of intensive bombing of Japan. With five hundred aircraft, claimed this considerable charlatan, he could “burn out the industrial heart of the Empire with fire-bomb attacks on the teeming bamboo ant-heaps of Honshu and Kyushu.” U.S. air chief Gen. “Hap” Arnold responded sternly that “the use of incendiaries541 against cities was contrary to our national policy of attacking military objectives.” By 1943, however, visitors to the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah beheld the incongruous sight of a small Japanese village, faithfully reproduced in wood, each of two dozen houses with its tatami—straw-matting floor—and furniture. This phantom community was razed to the ground by bombers, demonstrating how easily the feat could be emulated and multiplied in the cities of Japan, where housing was of the flimsiest construction.
At about the same time, air staff identified eight priority industrial target systems in Japan, Manchuria and Korea. An October 1943 study noted that just twenty Japanese cities contained 22 percent of the nation’s population. In June 1944, the bleakly named Joint Incendiary Committee assessed six urban areas on Honshu. It subsequently reported that if 70 percent of these six could be destroyed, 20 percent of Japanese production would be lost and 560,000 casualties inflicted. Arnold was told that it would be “cheap” to test the concept. The humanitarian issues involved, shrugged the researchers, were for national policy-makers to address.
It had always been a matter of course that the enemy nation which wrought the attack on Pearl Harbor should be bombed. Only the means were in question. In September 1942 the B-29 Superfortress, largest bomber the world had ever seen, made its maiden flight. This was the aircraft designated to wreak havoc upon Japan. Its size and sophistication, indeed the hubris of its very creation, represented monuments to American wealth and ingenuity. Each aircraft cost over half a million dollars, five times the price of an RAF Lancaster. The construction of a B-29 required 27,000 pounds of aluminium, over a thousand pounds of copper, 600,000 rivets, nine and a half miles of wiring, two miles of tubing. It was the first pressurised bomber in the world, with an operating radius of sixteen hundred miles, a crew of twelve and a battery of defensive armament.
The hundredth B-29 was accepted from its makers in January 1944, and a thousand were built by November of that year. Yet Tokyo was 3,900 miles from Hawaii. Until America possessed bases in the western Pacific, the only runways from which B-29s could operate against Japanese-held territory had to be constructed in India and China. The first squadrons reached India in the early summer of 1944, to encounter unwelcome squalor. “As we piled out542 of the airplane, anxious to see our new base,” wrote a crewman, “my heart sank. This was not the civilized war we had expected to fight, for there were no barracks, no paved streets, nothing but insects, heat and dirt.” Their first raid, on 5 June, against Japanese railway workshops in Bangkok, was farcical. Of 122 aircraft, 10 proved unserviceable, 14 failed to take off, 2 crashed immediately, 13 returned early. Of the remainder, in poor weather 77 attacked the primary target from heights between 17,000 and 27,000 feet. Just four tons of bombs even came close. One B-29 was hit by enemy fire. Another crashed on landing. Through the months that followed, with huge exertions and lamentable accuracy, further small loads of bombs and mines were dropped, making slight impact on the Japanese.
Meanwhile, extraordinary doings were afoot in China. Half a million labourers laid B-29 runways with rock crushed and hauled to the sites by human sweat, then levelled by giant rollers, each dragged by five hundred men and women. Scores of coolies died in accidents. The airstrips never properly matched the bombers’ requirements. In April 1944, however, the first B-29 landed in China. By August, modest numbers were attacking Japan from the new fields. The logistics were amazing, and appalling. Each B-29 sortie required 20 tons of fuel, munitions and supplies. These were carried to the Chinese bases by B-29 transports, each of which burnt 28 tons of fuel to shift a 4.5-ton payload. The shuttle was soon taken over by C-109 aircraft, to spare the bombers. Flying the Hump airlift to Kunming was one of the most dangerous and unpopular missions of the war, involving a cumulative loss of 450 aircraft. Crew efficiency and morale were notoriously low. Airmen obliged to bail out found themselves in some of the wildest country in the world, populated by tribesmen who sometimes spared their lives, but invariably seized their possessions. One crew walked 250 miles in twenty-nine days before reaching friendly territory.
This Herculean effort enabled B-29s to attack Japan out of China, but at mortal risk and with negligible results. At that time it was not the enemy’s fighters and flak guns which posed the major threat to crews’ survival, but their own aircraft. In the words of their best-known commander, the B-29 “had as many bugs543 as the entomological department of the Smithsonian.” Hydraulics, electrics, gun turrets, and above all power plant proved appallingly fallible. The four Curtis Wright R-3350 engines were “a mechanic’s nightmare,” prone to burst into flames during flight. Magnesium parts were liable to burn and fuse, alloy components to fail. “The airplane always felt like it was straining every rivet to be up there when you had it over 25,000 feet,” recorded one flier, Jack Caldwell. Added to the B-29s’ problems were the inexperience and shortcomings of their crews. The USAAF acknowledged that the problems of training men to fly this “battleship of the skies” were “monumental.” On a typical raid on 19 August 1944, 71 aircraft set out for the Yawata steelworks, 61 by day, 10 by night. Five were destroyed by enemy action; 2 crashed before or during take-off; a further 8 were lost due to technical failures. Just 112 tons of bombs were delivered, for the loss of $7.5 million worth of aircraft, together with their precious crews.
Maj. Richard McGlinn and his crew of the 40th Bomb Group became unwilling protagonists in an extraordinary adventure. Flak damaged an engine just after their aircraft bombed. The flight engineer reported that they could not hope to reach base. They threw out everything loose and headed for Russia—America’s ally in the war against Germany, though still neutral in the conflict with Japan. With radar and navigational equipment malfunctioning, McGlinn’s aircraft became lost in clouds and darkness. They glimpsed below a city which they could not identify, flew northwards for a further forty minutes, then bailed out. All eleven Americans landed safely in tundra. They began to march north in three groups, each man carrying sidearm, survival manual and equipment. Mosquitoes plagued them in the swamps. Emergency rations were soon gone. They resorted to a diet of mushrooms, frogs, grouse, snails, mice, berries, leaves and moss.
One party, reaching a river, built a small raft. Its three strongest members set off downstream to find help, braving white waters and logjams. On 10 September they met a child, who took them to her village. Its inhabitants proved to be Russian, sure enough. By sign language, the bedraggled Americans communicated their plight. Over the days which followed, Soviet aircraft located the other fliers and dropped them welcoming notes: “Good day, comrades, you are in the USSR,” together with supplies and instructions. When boats finally reached the desperate men, one rescuer described them as “emaciated and bearded, wearing ragged and tattered overalls that hardly covered the knees. One wore a leather jacket and battered shoes while the other had a foot covered by rags while the other foot was tied into a pistol holster. Their faces and bodies were so lacerated by midges that sores and contusions had formed.” The Russians interned McGlinn and his men, along with the crews of thirty-six other American aircraft which landed in Siberia. The first fliers were returned home only in January 1945. The Soviets retained all U.S. aircraft which fell into their hands.
THE USAAF was embarrassed by the deluge of Stateside publicity accorded to the new giant bombers, which caught the public imagination. Commanders knew how little, in reality, the planes were achieving. So did their British allies. In August Gen. Henry Pownall, Mountbatten’s chief of staff, urged withdrawal of the B-29 groups from China. He pointed out that two and a half tons of supplies could be sent to the Chinese Nationalists for each ton being delivered to support the USAAF, “but they continue with these futile operations544 on a scale of attack that can’t affect the course of the war at all.” Radar bombing, in chronic poor weather over Japan, was accurate only to two miles. Enemy action accounted for a third of B-29 losses; the remainder were technical or self-inflicted. On 14 December, before a mission against a Bangkok bridge, pilots questioned the risks of dropping mixed loads of five-hundred-and thousand-pound bombs, which seemed liable to overtake each other and collide in the air. They were overruled and threatened with court-martial if they did not fly. Over the target, bombs indeed exploded amid the American formations. Four aircraft were lost. On other occasions, gun blisters blew out, engine failures persisted. Aircrew morale plumbed new depths.
It was evident that matters could not continue in this way, and they did not. On 29 August 1944 Curtis LeMay, youngest major-general in the service, flew to India to assume direction of the XXth Bomber Command. On 8 September he accompanied a B-29 mission as an observer. Fresh from Europe, where he had established a formidable reputation, he was dismayed by what he now saw. He quickly reported to Washington about the XXth. “They are very poor545 as a combat outfit,” he wrote to Arnold’s chief of staff on 12 September. “…They lack combat experience. Everyone is working like hell on the wrong things. In other words, they are finding out how to fight the same as our first outfits did at the beginning of the war, by the trial and error method. I don’t think we can afford to operate our B-29s in that manner.” In another letter a week later, he lamented the poor quality of both aircrew and staff officers, and demanded combat-experienced personnel: “The B-29 outfits are being filled546 with people who have spent the war behind a desk in the U.S.” He noted that crews were far more frightened by the perils of overladen take-offs from poor strips than by those of meeting the enemy. With key airfields in China lost to the Japanese Ichigo ground offensive, LeMay concluded: “The operations of this Command under the conditions existing in this theater are basically unsound.”
Initially, senior officers recoiled from accepting the blow to U.S. prestige involved in abandoning B-29 missions from China. Not until late in December did Gen. Albert Wedemeyer bow to the inevitable. Only in March 1945 did the XXth Bomber Command begin to pack up in India to move, with its aircraft and cargoes which included pet monkeys and a black bear cub, to join other units of the Twentieth Air Force already operating out of the Mariana Islands. At last the U.S. possessed Pacific bases from which the Japanese mainland was accessible.
LeMay had gone ahead of them. On 9 December Arnold wrote to him: “The B-29 project is important to me547, because I am convinced that it is vital to the future of the Army Air Forces.” In January 1945 the young general was transferred from the XXth to XXIst Bomber Command, taking over its headquarters on Guam. It was in this role that he launched the offensive against Japan which thereafter would be indelibly associated with his name.
Curtis Emerson LeMay was born into a modest family in Columbus, Ohio, where he worked his way through college. He displayed remarkably precocious technical skills, which persisted into his later life—while air force chief of staff, he built a colour television set with his own hands. He gained an army flying cadetship in 1928, and became recognized in the ensuing decade as a master of the techniques of pilotage, engineering and navigation, a tough trainer and strict disciplinarian. The coming of war brought him swift promotion. He was effective, fearless, driven, tactically innovative. In Europe he established a reputation as one of the most brilliant officers in the Eighth Air Force, who led from the front. He was respected rather than loved: aloof in manner, coldly focused in approach, precise and blunt in speech. Rueful pilots christened him “Iron Ass.” LeMay’s men cherished a legend that he once halted his jeep beside an aircraft being refuelled, causing a sergeant timidly to remonstrate about the trademark pipe clamped in his jaw: “Sir, it could ignite gas fumes548.” LeMay responded: “Son, it wouldn’t dare.” His chilling demeanour was not softened by the paralysis of one side of his face, the result of Bell’s palsy. His ruthless assessment of the XXth Bomber Command in India, together with his rapid introduction of new training programmes and tactical methods, convinced Arnold that LeMay was the man to grasp the daunting challenge of running the USAAF’s campaign out of the Marianas.
This too had languished. As the Marines seized island after island of the group through the summer of 1944, close behind them came excavators and graders to create runways and hardstands out of rock and coral. The first wing of 180 B-29s, together with 12,000 air and ground crew necessary to operate them, arrived on Saipan while Japanese stragglers were still at large. On the day of their first mission, three Japanese were killed trying to infiltrate a chow line. After the shock of spotting an enemy soldier shooting at a sentry, one airman was sent home with “combat fatigue.” In January 1945, forty-seven Japanese were taken prisoner a thousand yards from the XXIst Bomber Command’s headquarters. For the fliers, living conditions were primitive. One wrote in dismay of his arrival on Tinian: “I had hoped to find brown-skinned549 native girls, hula skirts, coconut trees and warm sea breezes…Instead, I found sunburned GIs swarming over a desolate coral rock. I wasn’t on a paradise island—I was on a prison island.”
Lt. Philip True’s tour as a navigator with the 9th Bomb Group started badly, when his pilot halted their plane on the stands at Tinian. “Where’s the whiskey?” demanded a half-naked ground technician. “Whiskey?” exclaimed the fliers in bewilderment. There was no whiskey. Their tough, correct Iowan commander, Maj. Dayton Countryman, had vetoed illicit liquor-smuggling from California. Yet on Tinian, they discovered, almost all good things had to be purchased with crates of whiskey—Schenley’s “Black Death” being the preferred brand—shipped in the bomb bays of arriving aircraft.
They lived amid cloying humidity: “Leather began to get mouldy550 after the first few days, and most everything took on a musty odor,” wrote a pilot. Men slept in Quonset huts, ten or twenty together. Officers found themselves digging field latrines. Ground crews were unable to work on aircraft in shorts, for the metal burnt their skins. As everywhere in the Pacific, there was resentment of the navy’s superior food, quarters and facilities. The Japanese mounted night harassing raids, which caused widespread grief, besides inflicting a total of 245 casualties, destroying eleven aircraft and damaging forty-nine. One Japanese aircraft crashed onto a shelter, injuring forty men. “Everyone was on edge the rest of the day551 and many days to come,” wrote Captain Stanley Samuelson. After each raid, scores of Americans were treated for cuts and bruises, having dashed for cover in the darkness, usually naked, across the sharp, unyielding coral. It was a cruel business for aircrew to face the strain of flying operations when they received so little respite on the ground.
The first American aircraft to overfly Tokyo since the Doolittle raid carried out a photo reconnaissance mission on 1 November 1944. It was followed on the twenty-fourth by 111 bombers. They flew at 2,000 feet until they were 250 miles out from Japan, then climbed to 27,000 feet for the bomb run. Navigation and bomb aiming proved poor. Through the winter of 1944, just 2 percent of attacking aircraft dropped their ordnance within a thousand feet of aiming points. Crews struggled against four hazards: inexperience and inadequate training; continuing aircraft mechanical failures; the stresses of take-off, exceeding the manufacturers’ recommended all-up weight of 132,000 pounds; finally, most serious of all, at high altitude over Japan they encountered unprecedented headwinds, a “jet stream” exceeding a hundred knots, which played havoc with all estimates of scheduling and fuel requirements.
The appointed targets for the XXIst Bomber Command were Japanese aircraft manufacture, war industry and shipping. By January 1945, B-29s had achieved a negligible impact on any of these. Morale slumped. A pilot, Lt. Robert Copeland of the 500th Bomb Group, recorded in his diary bleak verdicts on operations out of Saipan. “3 Dec: The boys are beginning to crack. Captain Field started for the cliff last night before he was stopped and taken to the hospital…He’ll probably be sent home” “22 December: We bombed at 32,000 feet by radar and I have my doubts as to the results. I was scared to put it mildly” “28 December: Yesterday’s raid was really screwed up. They missed the primary and tried to make a 180-degree turn and hit it again but didn’t succeed and dropped their bombs in Tokyo with dubious results” “14 Jan: The mission to Nagoya yesterday seems to have been a flop…Hiat’s ship got in the prop wash over Tokyo and was flipped over on its back and split S’d from 32,000 ft to 25,000 feet and their airspeed went to 380mph.”
Another officer, Stanley Samuelson, had attended art school in his home state of Maryland before enlisting after Pearl Harbor. He flew fifty B-17 missions in the Mediterranean theatre, came home in 1943 and got married, then volunteered for B-29s. Why would a man offer himself a second time for sacrifice, after “doing his bit”? It is impossible to know, but a surprising number of pilots found that they enjoyed flying, even in combat, and were reluctant to abandon it. Samuelson, twenty-four years old, exploited his artistic skills to develop a useful sideline on Saipan, painting “nose art” caricatures on some of the wing’s B-29s, at $50 apiece.
He flew his first Superfortress mission in October 1944. In the early days of the tour he experienced some euphoric moments, such as this one approaching Japan on Thanksgiving Day: “When the clouds broke, Mt. Fujiyama552 stood out on the horizon like a beautiful painting done by a master. It was a beautiful sight, and one that very few people will ever witness during this war. It was hard to believe that below us lay one of the rottenest countries that ever existed.”
This brief idyll ended abruptly, however, a few minutes later when an engine failed. By the time it restarted, Samuelson’s plane Snafufortress had fallen behind the formation. He tried to jettison his bombs, only to find them frozen in the racks. The bomb doors refused to close, causing drag which reduced speed still further. The intercom began to buzz with terse warnings of enemy aircraft from the gunners: “Three pursuit—five o’clock low. Four pursuit two o’clock high. Two pursuits twelve o’clock level.” Samuelson wrote: “Things got hotter than hell, and the guns began to crackle in all directions.” Enemy fighters attacked persistently for thirty minutes, terrifying the crew. It took them seven lonely, unremittingly tense hours to nurse the plane home, 1,400 miles across the Pacific. The bombardier crawled down the fuselage to the bomb bay and ditched their ordnance by hand. After landing, Samuelson slept for twelve straight hours.
This experienced combat pilot found himself, like most of his comrades, bitterly dismayed by the experience of operating B-29s. “There is no getting around it,” he wrote in December, “we are all scared and scared plenty. This stuff of losing crews on every mission is a hard pill to swallow. It wouldn’t be quite as bad if our losses were just because of the enemy, however planes ditch out in the middle of the Pacific because of engine failure and other mechanical troubles. The thought of landing a $600,000 plane and twelve men on a rough ocean at night, a thousand miles from nowhere, makes men out of boys and puts gray hairs on the men…One day is like another round here…no one has or wants a calendar. We all just live from day to day and raid to raid. There was some talk about Christmas being only two days away, however no one seemed to get too enthusiastic about it.” A gunner wrote in his diary in January 1945: “We’re all of us poor soldiers553…too full of personally staying alive and wishing we were working in a defense plant.”
In some theatres of war, aircrew were pampered. In the Marianas, no comforts were to be had. Joseph Majeski, a nineteen-year-old gunner with the 6th Bomb Group on Tinian, found himself living in a pup tent, queuing among a hundred other naked men for a shower—and always hungry. He persuaded his father to mail him jars of Gerber’s baby food—apple sauce, pears and peaches—because these were nutritious and portable. Majeski contrived an illicit visit to an uncle aboard a ship anchored offshore: “I showered with hot water for the first time in months,” he wrote. “The food served on the ship was great. Compared to the garbage we were eating on Tinian, I was sorry that I had not joined the Navy.” Ashore, men washed their own clothes in aviation gas, or devoted leisure hours to building primitive washing machines with windmill propellers set in barrels. Gardens sprang up between huts. Many fliers found inactivity almost as distressing as combat. They lay under the unyielding sun, nursing dreams about when it was all over. “I had a nice talk with Wray and Cutter554,” Stanley Samuelson wrote on 4 January, recording a gossip with two of his crew. “Wray is a very smart lad and has his ambitions. He intends to get an International Harvester Agency in his own town and go into business for himself. Cutter just plans to get out of the army and tell everyone to go to hell if he so pleases.”
On mission days, there was little talk in the open trucks on the way to the flight line. A Red Cross van came round, distributing coffee and doughnuts as crews waited for the word to go. Pilots talked to the ground crew chief, who had almost invariably worked all night with his men, readying the aircraft. They checked the 41B maintenance book. Then fliers helped mechanics pull down the props, two men per blade, to clear accumulated oil from the lower cylinders. Little “putt-putt” generators in the aircraft were started, to provide electricity for engine turn-over. One by one, in the order 3, 4, 2, 1, the Wrights coughed, spewed smoke, settled to a steady roar. Most take-offs were made to the east, because of the prevailing wind. Crews found these unfailingly frightening, as co-pilots called out the rising speed: “70–80–95–110–135.” Each laden monster took fifty seconds to get airborne, from the moment a pilot posted halfway down the runway flashed a green light, indicating the way clear for the next plane to go. “Take-off seemed to run on for ever,” said Fred Arner, “and those engines ran so damned hot.”
Crews began to relax only when the first power reduction came, maybe two minutes after leaving the ground. Cabin pressure was set to 8,000 feet. Bombardiers clambered aft, to arm the incendiary clusters in the bomb bays. Many crews tuned to Armed Forces Radio, to alleviate the boredom of the seven-hour run to Japan. The loneliness of rear gunners, in particular, was notorious. Most left their posts to share the companionship of those clustered forward in the cockpit, though because of the engine roar they could converse only through the intercom. Pacific weather extremes created moments of terror, sometimes also extraordinary visual effects. “I became aware of the sky555 above me just beginning to be light—the dimmer stars disappearing as the dawn began to break, barely illuminating the tops of the mountainous cumulus build-ups towering above us to 30,000 or 40,000 feet,” wrote one pilot:
The sea below was black and the lower bases of the clouds a dark, dull gray. Then, almost as if in response to a drum roll, there was an explosion of color: streaks of red and orange began to shoot heavenward into a pale, azure canopy high above. The intensity built to a crescendo; a silent cacophony of color until the whole eastern sky was aflame, backlighting and illuminating the cumulus. I touched the intercom button, alerting the crew, and, after a couple of moments, quietly said: “Everybody…look out the left side of the airplane.” There was a muffled response or two: “Jesus!” or “Christ!”
Throughout the flight, the navigator worked harder than any other crew member. Each aircraft was issued with a “flimsy” giving pre-set headings, position points and scheduled timings. To maintain these in darkness required taking celestial fixes, checking drift, peering into the APQ13 radar screen; in daylight, the sun was “shot” by sextant from the Perspex astrodome. It took sixteen minutes to work out where the aircraft had just been, and good navigators never let up. Iwo Jima below marked the halfway point. Thereafter, an hour out from the target, every man went to his post, donning big, heavy flak jackets. They circled an appointed assembly point until the entire formation was mustered, aided by identification symbols painted on aircraft tails—squares, circles, triangles—then began the run towards the enemy’s country. “Dear Mom,” Robert Copeland wrote home,
the thing about combat that is beginning to impress me most is the appreciation I now have for the finer things of life. The love one has for friends, the love and need for a woman and the things one wants to do with this dream girl when this thing is all over. A woman somewhere seems to be the driving force behind all men in combat. You’re so scared even 400 miles an hour doesn’t seem fast enough. The bomb run is only four or five minutes long, but it seems like hours. The bomb bay doors are only open for one or two minutes, but that seems like an eternity. It’s more like a wild horrible nightmare from which it is impossible to awaken, but nevertheless we do make it once more.
The songs which Superfortress crews wrote for themselves reflected the melancholy that afflicted most:
Oh I get that lonesome feeling
When I hear those engines whine
Those B-29s are breaking up
That old gang of mine
There goes Jack, there goes Bill
Down over Tokyo.
We all hope it’s home we go,
How soon we do not know.
On the bomb run, planes were often buffeted by flak explosions. The worst mission that gunner Fred Arner flew was his crew’s ninth. Delayed on the strip by a mechanical problem, they approached the target twenty minutes behind the main force, and fifty miles north of Tokyo found themselves meeting B-29s hurtling past in the opposite direction, “like getting the wrong way onto the beltway.” In the nose was a “guest” bombardier, flying the last mission of his tour. He yelled aloud in terror each time a plane approached. There were other hazards. At least one B-29 shot itself down when over-excited gunners fired into their own engines. Attacking a fogged-in Osaka one day, Arner’s crew could find only one other plane with which to formate for the bomb run. “At high noon we were over the target, but it could have been Pittsburgh as far as I was concerned. We bombed by radar, using Osaka Castle as our checkpoint.” Sometimes they hit thermals which bounced the huge planes violently, throwing everything movable about the fuselage. In Arner’s crew, the radar counter-measures man became known as “Pisspot” Smith, after a thermal doused him in the contents of the plane’s potty.
When their loads fell away, noses lifted and aircraft surged forward, at least three tons lighter. However, on navigator Philip True’s first mission, just after bombing, “a terrible rumble and chatter startled and shook me.” Immediately behind his navigator’s seat, the four-gun upper turret began firing. True glimpsed Japanese fighters, which attacked repeatedly for ten minutes. Then the guns fell silent, and the crew relaxed. They saw the Pacific below again, and settled for the long run home. Their relief was premature. True glimpsed the altimeter. They were down to 12,000 feet, and descending. Peering out at the starboard wing, True perceived two engines dead. Fuel was streaming from a tank ruptured by gunfire. The strain on the surviving port engines was acute. They were losing about a hundred feet a minute. The pilot announced that if their fuel would not hold out to Iwo Jima, they must jump. True was terrified: “The Pacific looked ominous, gray and ugly, swirling with swells and occasional whitecaps.”
Yet an hour later, they were still holding 4,000 feet. Soon after, they found themselves approaching Iwo Jima, among a gaggle of other aircraft with problems. “We circled Mount Suribachi, our starboard wing with the two dead engines pointing down, a view that produced in me a feeling of teetering on the edge of a cliff.” The landing gear dropped. Then, to their horror, on final approach another B-29 cut recklessly across them. They lurched upwards and circled again. The pilot said: “If we can’t get in this time, I’m going to pull up and drop you guys in the ocean. Be ready to go.” In heavy cloud and rain, once again they lunged towards the strip, and heard a merciful thump as the wheels touched. They stopped with a few yards of runway to spare, clambered out, and examined the hole in their wing. They were down to their last ten minutes of fuel. A truck carried them through torrential rain to a holding area. True, like hundreds of others who felt that they owed their lives to Iwo, thought of the Marines “who had inched and crawled their way over this eroded hunk of volcanic debris…so that we could land and live.” They got back to Tinian late that night, exhausted. Nothing seriously bad happened on any of their eleven subsequent missions.
Those who made it to the Marianas, after another seven hours over the unfriendly ocean, sometimes nursing a damaged plane, bumped heavily onto the runway, taxied in and cut engines. Somebody took out the “honey bucket” for emptying. Crews stretched stiffened limbs, and climbed unsteadily out of the fuselage. Even then, the ordeal was not always over. Ground engineer Bob Mann saw a plane land with bombs still hung up in its bay. Armourers refused to touch the lethal ordnance, saying that their job was to arm aircraft, not disarm them. With infinite care, the plane’s bombardier and another crew member unscrewed the fuses.
Crews were given a slug of whiskey before debriefings, from which gunners were quickly excused, because they knew so little. Returning fliers understood that they had achieved only a brief reprieve. Stanley Samuelson wrote in January: “At present, no one knows how many missions we will have to pull. Some fellows will crack, and it is likely to be most anyone.” A thin but steady stream of men decided that too much was being demanded of them. “After about ten missions,” wrote Joseph Majeski, “our right gunner went to the colonel and said: ‘I don’t care if you shoot me but I will never set foot in that airplane again.’” The man was stripped of his rank and given a ground assignment. Most aircrew persisted, however, recognising that war service as a flier was less dreadful than as an infantryman. “We knew how rough it was on the ground,” said Philip True. Ben Robertson, who started a tour out of Guam in February, decided after gossiping with some Marines about their experience on Iwo Jima that he was better off: “In our situation, it was pretty much556 a case of returning from a mission or not—there usually was not much in between.” A steady drain of bomber losses continued. Stanley Samuelson’s B-29 went down over Japan on 19 February. “Every day I get to hate this stinking rotten war more,” he wrote, the week before he died. Robert Copeland was killed when his plane crashed near Kobe on a mission on 17 March. Just two of his crew survived as prisoners.
HERE, then, was the force which Curtis LeMay inherited in January 1945 from Maj.-Gen. Haywood Hansell, who had led the XXIst Bomber Command for five months. Hansell declined an offer to remain on Guam as LeMay’s deputy. He was harshly treated, for his efforts had begun to improve the command’s performance. But the ruthless replacement of unsuccessful officers was characteristic of American wartime policy, and by no means mistaken.
LeMay’s initial verdict on his new appointment was even less indulgent than had been his view of the XXth Bomber Command in India. He wrote to Washington: “Maybe the road ahead557 always looks worse than the road behind, but after 10 days here this job looks much tougher than the one I just left…The staff here is practically worthless.” He submitted a long list of requests for named officers to join his headquarters. He complained that some unit commanders might be competent aviators, but lacked leadership skills. Robert Ramer, who arrived in the Marianas in January with a replacement crew for the 497th Bomb Group, recorded: “Morale was terrible…Nothing worked558.” LeMay introduced a stringent training programme, and also threw himself into devising new tactical methods, focusing especially on the use of incendiary bombs. In his first few weeks, the XXth Bomber Command flew eight missions against Japan, including two experimental incendiary attacks. On three of these, not one bomb hit the primary target, though he increased each aircraft’s load to three tons by dumping armament and equipment. It was evident to LeMay, though not immediately to his men, that the weak Japanese defences were the least of the Americans’ problems; that the huge weight of guns fitted to the Superfortresses was almost redundant. An airman wrote laconically: “General LeMay has taken over559 the Bomber Command, and he is going to get us all killed.” On 3 March, the new commander wrote to Arnold’s chief of staff: “I am working on several very radical methods of employment of the force. As soon as I have run a few tests, I’ll submit the plans to you for comment.”