For all of those reasons, Operation MATTERHORN never fulfilled its promise. From the beginning it had been driven by FDR’s concern to keep the Allied coalition together in the CBI theater, and to preserve the possibility of drawing upon China’s bottomless manpower reserves in the final invasion of Japan. By mid-1944, it was becoming clear that the logistical and security challenges confronting matterhorn were too great to overcome. Meanwhile, a better alternative had presented itself: the Marianas, which U.S. forces seized between June and August of that year. Saipan, Guam, and Tinian offered terrain suitable for large B-29 airbases, security against enemy ground assault, and (most importantly) a seaborne rather than an airborne supply line. They lay within a 1,500-mile flight radius of Tokyo. In July 1944, the Joint Chiefs confirmed that the new 21st Bomber Command in the Marianas would receive priority allocation of new Superfortresses and supporting matériel, and after November of that year, no new B-29s flew into India or China. matterhorn closed up shop in January 1945.
Looking back on the China misadventure, LeMay concluded: “It didn’t work. No one could have made it work. It was founded on an utterly absurd logistic basis. . . . The scheme of operations had been dreamed up like something out of the Wizard of Oz.”35
Still, the difficulties presented by the Marianas were daunting. Fuel and supplies would be brought in by sea, but the maritime umbilical cord was long—5,800 miles from San Francisco Bay—and the B-29s would have to compete with hundreds of other Allied military units for scarce shipping and other resources. The heavily loaded bombers would operate from bases that had not yet been built, on islands where enemy holdouts were still fighting in the hills. From Saipan, Tinian, or (especially) Guam, targets in Japan lay near the outer limit of the B-29’s operating radius. Relatively inexperienced aircrews would have to navigate over 3,000 miles of trackless ocean, partly at night, in round-trip missions lasting fifteen hours or longer. There was not a fighter plane in the world with the range for such missions, and the Allies possessed no airfields nearer to Japan: consequently, all B-29 missions would be unescorted. In spite of its name, the Superfortress was rather lightly constructed (due to weight-saving requirements), and it made a very large flying target. Some USAAF planners warned of prohibitively high losses over Japan.
“Possum” Hansell was tapped by Arnold as the first chief of the 21st Bomber Command. Hansell had distinguished himself as a section chief on Arnold’s Washington-based planning staff, and had most recently served as chief of staff to the Twentieth Air Force. (Asked why her husband was nicknamed “Possum,” Mrs. Hansell said that it was because he looked like one. Based on the photographic evidence, she had a point.) Like most other USAAF line commanders, Hansell was a comparatively young man (forty-one) and a skilled flyer in his own right. He piloted the first B-29 into Saipan while handling the controls from the left-side seat. The Joltin’ Josie, as the aircraft was called, flew from Mather Field, California (near Sacramento) in three hops to Honolulu, Kwajalein, and Saipan, landing at Isley Field on October 12, 1944. Crowds of servicemen, most of whom had never laid eyes on a Superfortress, were gathered along the runway. As the Joltin’ Josie approached, one witness recalled, “a great cheer went up, and all work stopped as men shaded their eyes to watch the plane pass over. . . . The thrill that went through all was almost electric in effect.”36
Hansell was dismayed by the conditions he found on Saipan. Plans had called for two parallel runways, both 8,500 feet long, and eighty hardstands (paved parking areas abutting the taxiways). He found one runway, 7,000 feet long and only partly paved, and a parallel strip of land that had been cleared and graded but not yet paved at all. Only forty hardstands had been completed, and when B-29s of the Seventy-Third Bomb Wing flew in later that month, they had to be double-parked. Aviation gasoline was stored in tank trailers lined up in a nearby parking lot. The base was scheduled to receive 180 aircraft and 12,000 men by the end of the year, but there were no barracks, no administrative offices, and no warehouses. As advance echelons of the 21st Bomber Command arrived, they moved into tent cities around the edges of the airfields. Even General Hansell was quartered in a canvas tent perched on a cliff overlooking the sea to the east. The mess hall was a Quonset hut, and even the brass stood in the “chow line.” “I had no shops and no facilities except tents,” Hansell later remembered. “I had a bomb dump, a vehicle park and gasoline storage, but the rest of it was the most miserable shambles I have ever seen.”37
The delays were not for a lack of effort. Bulldozers had started working over Isley Field on June 24, when combat was still raging and the Japanese lines were only a mile north. Aviation engineering battalions had worked in shifts, around the clock, under floodlights at night, sometimes harassed by artillery or sniper fire. Bucketing rains had turned the unpaved segments of runways and hardstands into mud baths. The islands offered functionally limitless reserves of coral rock, which was crushed and converted into high-quality concrete for asphalt. But the roads linking coral pits to airfields were generally too narrow, and unpaved in many places; frequently they were jammed by traffic, or swamped by tropical downpours. Thousands of tons of crushed coral were needed to pave the runways and service areas—but first the roads had to be widened, graded, and paved, which likewise required thousands of tons of crushed coral.
Desperately short of necessary equipment and spare parts, Hansell sounded an urgent call to the mainland for logistical support. When a ship laden with vital cargo put into a dysfunctionally congested harbor in Guam, the navy harbormaster declared, “I’ll give you 24 hours to get that goddamned ship out of here.”38 In the rush to unload, the cargo was dumped in a field at the edge of the jungle, where it was exposed to rain, humidity, and plunder. Most of it was lost or judged unsalvageable. With shortages threatening to delay bombing missions, an air cargo route was opened all the way back to California. Once again, B-29s were hauling their own stores into a combat zone. It was the “hump” again, but this hump was the curvature of the earth over 94 degrees of longitude.
In the weeks following Hansell’s arrival, an average of three to five new Superfortresses flew into Saipan each day. Most were staged out of the training and modification centers of Kansas and Nebraska by their own recently trained aircrews. They followed the route taken by Hansell in Joltin’ Josie: over the mountains to Mather Field, California; over the eastern Pacific to John Rogers Field in Honolulu, formerly a civilian airport; thence across the International Date Line to Kwajalein Atoll in the central Pacific, losing a day on the calendar; and the final 1,500-mile leg to Isley Field, Saipan. The long transoceanic flight was unfamiliar to most young airmen. It was a trial by fire of their overwater navigation skills, and a worthwhile training exercise in itself. When flying above a cloud ceiling, the navigator peered down through gaps in the overcast and caught glimpses of the wrinkled blue seascape. Now and again he might see a coral reef, or a tendril of sand, and he tried to match those features to the chart on his desk. At night, the navigator tracked his aircraft’s position by taking star sightings with a sextant, like an ancient mariner. Mostly he relied on dead reckoning, keeping meticulous track of airspeed and compass heading, adding corrections for the wind, until he could pick up a LORAN signal or a radio homing beacon.
A typical B-29 aircrew comprised eleven men ranging in age from nineteen to thirty. On many planes, the captain and oldest member of the crew was a twenty-five-year-old lieutenant who had learned to fly in a single-engine trainer about eighteen months earlier. Not even youth or peak physical condition spared them the fatigue of long flights at high altitude. After a fifteen-hour mission, one pilot wrote in a letter home, “my legs and back were stiff and I can still feel it! We took off at dawn and landed several hours after dark. That’s a point lots of folks miss. Bombing the target takes only a short time. It’s that workout going to the target and returning home to your destination that gets you.”39
As new planes and airmen crowded into Saipan, Hansell judged that more indoctr
ination and training was needed in formation flying, rendezvous, communications, navigation, and precision bombing. There was no better training, he reasoned, than live combat missions against relatively weak enemy positions. On October 27, Hansell personally led a tactical bombing strike against the once-formidable Truk Atoll, targeting Japanese submarine pens on Dublon Island. (The USAAF brass was normally barred from flying combat missions; to his chagrin, this was the last such flight that Hansell was cleared to lead.) Three more break-in missions against Truk followed, and two against Iwo Jima. Hundreds of tons of bombs were dropped during these raids. Those on the receiving end might have been surprised and disheartened to learn that they were only training runs.
A Superfort specially configured for long-distance photo reconnaissance flights, designated the F-13, arrived on October 30. By a stroke of luck, the following day dawned with unusually clear skies over Tokyo and its environs. Captain Ralph D. Steakley proposed to fly a photographic mission right away, hoping to capitalize on the rare favorable weather, and Hansell agreed. The lone F-13, sardonically named the Tokyo Rose, soared over the Japanese capital at 32,000 feet, its four cameras snapping continuously. Steakley circled in lazy figure-eight patterns around Tokyo, Tokyo Bay, Yokohama, then west over Mt. Fuji to the Tōkai region and the industrial heartland of greater Nagoya. This was the first Allied airplane to penetrate Tokyo airspace since the Doolittle Raid, two-and-a-half years earlier. Japanese army fighters scrambled to intercept, but to the air defense command’s toe-curling mortification, they were unable to catch the fast, high-flying intruder. Above 30,000 feet, the Nakajima KI-44 fighters (Allied codename “Tojo”) could climb only with a significant loss of ground speed, allowing the Tokyo Rose to sail away, serene and untouchable. Antiaircraft batteries put on a dazzling fireworks show, but the bursts were low and wild.
After a fourteen-hour flight in freakishly clear weather, the F-13 touched down on Saipan with thousands of aerial negatives covering major industrial and aviation plants in the Tokyo and Nagoya regions. A photo lab unit, housed in a Quonset hut, worked around the clock for several days to turn out 7,000 high-resolution prints. These served as the basis for future mission planning. Steakley’s pathfinding flight was of incalculable value to the entire strategic bombing enterprise.40
At the time, target selection decisions were shaped by the USAAF’s recent experiences in the air war over Germany. The first step in the bombing campaign against Japan, planners believed, should be to win supremacy in Japanese skies. That meant breaking down enemy air strength at its source by targeting the aviation industry, including the major Japanese engine plants and airframe assembly centers. For years before the war, little by little, Allied military attachés and intelligence analysts had accumulated data about this secretive industry. A handful of big firms dominated: Mitsubishi, Nakajima, Kawasaki, Aichi, and Tachikawa. Most of their major plants were located in or around Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, and Kobe. It was known, for example, that an important Nakajima plant was in Musashino, a suburb of Tokyo. The Mitsubishi complex in Nagoya was said to be the second largest aircraft manufacturing plant in the world. The approximate whereabouts of many other such factories were known to the Allies. The photos taken by Tokyo Rose filled in the gaps, allowing analysts to pinpoint the sites and dimensions of high-priority targets.
Current doctrine in November 1944 favored massed, high-altitude, precision bombing raids. Missions were to be conducted in daylight, preferably in clear conditions, so that the bombardiers could aim at the targets through their bombsites. Radar-based targeting was a less desirable contingency, to be employed only in overcast conditions. Low-altitude night bombing was not yet deemed a viable alternative. Hansell wanted at least a hundred Superforts to participate in the first mission against Japan. He was reluctant to launch them until the weather was clear enough to allow for visual bombing. A massed attack in favorable weather would take full advantage of the element of surprise. On the other hand, he had committed to launch his inaugural mission against Tokyo by the end of November, so time was short. By November 18 there were enough B-29s, ordnance, and aviators on Saipan to make the flight, but the weather over Japan was overcast that day, and it remained so for a week. Night after night the aircrews attended pre-mission briefings, only to be told to stand down. It was hard on the nerves. “Talk about tension-builders!” one young airman exclaimed in his diary: “You can put this down; whoever said he wasn’t afraid, wasn’t exactly telling it like it was!”41
The weather broke on November 24, Thanksgiving Day. The airmen were out of their cots at 0300. As dawn broke, long columns of Superforts warmed their engines on the taxiways. Aiming for a publicity splash, the 21st Bomber Command had brought in twenty-four war correspondents representing every major newspaper and wire service in the United States. Film crews rolled and flashbulbs popped as Brigadier General Emmett “Rosie” O’Donnell, commander of the Seventy-Third Bombardment Wing and mission leader, climbed into his cockpit. O’Donnell’s plane, the Dauntless Dotty, was first to lift off, followed at thirty-second intervals by 110 more Superforts. They climbed into the east, over Magicienne Bay, and banked left for the long run north. Each plane was loaded to the absolute limit, 140,000 pounds. (Wright engineers had recommended that the limit be set at 120,000 pounds: they were overruled.) Straining to lift themselves to altitude while performing a running formation rendezvous, the airmen watched their engines carefully. Fires and other mechanical mishaps forced seventeen planes to turn back. The remaining ninety-four pushed on toward the primary target, the Musashino Works of the Nakajima Airplane Company at Kichijoji, west of Tokyo.
The Japanese knew of the buildup of Superfortresses on Saipan. They were expecting this raid and had taken measures to prepare for it. China-based B-29s had hit Kyushu in eight missions since June, so they were not unfamiliar with the big bomber and its capabilities. After their failure to intercept the Tokyo Rose weeks earlier, Japanese fighters were modified to improve their climbing speed and raise their service ceiling. Engine tweaks helped, as did fitting the planes with fatter propellers that provided more thrust in thin air. The most radical measure—and the most characteristically Japanese—was the creation of an air-to-air ramming squadron. Fighters in this unit were stripped of all guns, ammunition, and armor plating. That enabled them to perform well at higher altitudes, but it obviously left them with no way to shoot at the enemy. The pilots, kamikazes by a different name, had practiced high-side ramming maneuvers aimed at a Superfortress’s vulnerable tail section.
When coastal radar stations detected the incoming flight, about 125 Japanese fighters scrambled to intercept. Among them were ten Nakajima Ki-44 Shoki aircraft of the Japanese army’s Forty-Seventh Sentai air group, all dedicated to attempting ramming attacks on the enemy bombers.
Catching the high-flying Superfortresses would have been difficult in any conditions. The intruders entered Japanese air space at altitudes between 27,000 and 32,000 feet, and most of the defending fighters needed a full hour to climb to that lofty height. The jet stream was fierce that day, with 150-mile-per-hour tailwinds pushing the B-29s’ ground speed to above 400 miles per hour. Formations came apart in those buffeting conditions, spoiling any pretense of precision bombing. The Nakajima factory was obscured under a fleecy blanket of clouds. Only twenty-four planes dropped bombs on Musashino, and nearly all fell outside Nakajima’s perimeter fence. Sixty-four planes hit the Tokyo dockyards, the designated secondary target.42
Corporal Yoshio Mita of the Forty-Seventh Sentai scored the only kill of the day with a spectacular ramming attack. Approaching a formation of B-29s from above and behind, this indomitable samurai snapped into a hard diving roll and flew his Nakajima into the tail section of the “A-26,” piloted by First Lieutenant Sam Wagner. Mita’s plane exploded in a ball of fire and fell to earth trailing a long tail of smoke. “A-26” flew on, but the collision had torn away its vertical stabilizer and left elevator. Wagner tried to turn for home, but could not keep the cri
ppled bomber airborne. It crashed about 20 miles from Tokyo Bay. None of the crew survived.
For the other Superforts, the return to Saipan was a long ordeal. A low cloud ceiling blanketed the sea south of Japan, obscuring landmarks, and darkness descended when the returning planes were still several hours north of Isley Field. The runway was marked only by smudge pots. If an accident should foul up the strip, many B-29s would probably be forced to crash-land. But ninety-one landed safely, bringing the mission to a successful conclusion. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief.
Reflecting upon it afterwards, Hansell admitted that the November 24 mission to Tokyo was risky to the point of rashness. The bombing had achieved little of value, inflicting scant damage at Musashino and no direct hits on the Tokyo docks. He considered it fortunate that only three planes were lost. (Two went down in the ocean south of Honshu; submarine lifeguards searched for them but found nothing.) Hansell had dreaded failure, he later wrote, “but I was so afraid that the command situation would erode and rob us of our independent operations against the Japanese islands that I offered to go ahead.”43 In other words, Hansell had felt pressure to demonstrate the feasibility of hitting Tokyo from the Marianas—to silence the doubters, and to firm up the autonomy of the Twentieth Air Force. It was felt that so long as the Superforts fulfilled their promise to bombard the industrial heart of Japan, Hap Arnold could resist pressure to disperse them for other purposes.
A DOZEN U.S. SUBMARINES had been positioned south of Honshu on lifeguard duty. One was the Archerfish, a Balao-class boat skippered by Lieutenant Commander Joseph F. Enright. She was patrolling in waters informally called the “Hit Parade,” where other submarines (including the Tang) had found a wealth of shipping inbound to or outbound from Tokyo Bay. When a B-29 was forced to ditch at sea on the evening of November 24, Archerfish searched for three days. Finding no plane, no rafts, and no wreckage, Enright finally radioed Pearl Harbor to report “that the state of the seas was unfavorable for a water landing and it is presumed that the bomber crashed and sank quickly.”44
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