In the 1930s, the U.S. Army Air Corps had poured funding into technologies for high-altitude precision bombardment—most notably, the vaunted Norden bombsight, which proponents advertised as a potential war-winner. The Superfortress had been conceived as a weapon that could fly 30,000 feet over enemy territory and drop bombs “into a pickle barrel.” In Europe, even as the RAF had pioneered nighttime area bombing and incendiary attacks, true believers in the USAAF had kept the faith with their precision-bombing orthodoxy, and B-17 Flying Fortresses had achieved a certain degree of success in bombing German industrial targets from high altitudes. When the Twentieth Air Force was set up under the aegis of the JCS, its chief mission was to employ precision-bombing techniques to destroy the “war-making industrial structure of Japan,” starting with the aircraft industry.
But clear weather was a rarity in Japan, especially in the winter months, when coastal Honshu was often concealed under thick cloud cover. The best weather forecasters in the Pacific could not predict when the skies over the target area would be clear. Reconnaissance B-29s could be sent ahead to scout the weather, but during the seven to eight hours required for a formation of bombers to reach Japan from the Marianas, conditions might change completely. High winds often scattered the northbound B-29 formations before they even made landfall. Over Japan they encountered the jet stream, a factor that had not figured in the bombing campaign over Germany. At the high altitudes flown by the B-29s in those early raids, winds typically surpassed 100 miles per hour, and sometimes reached 200 miles per hour. The Superfortresses flew downwind, pushing their ground speed above 500 miles per hour. The bombardiers despaired of correcting for the ballistic errors produced by those hurricane-like conditions.
Over Germany, the B-17s had usually been accompanied by a fighter escort. But no friendly fighters could escort the B-29s to Japan until April 1945, when P-51s began joining up from Iwo Jima. Without fighter protection, daylight missions required an ample supply of gas and guns—gas to climb to altitude, gas to fly in formation, and guns to ward off Japanese interceptors. Fuel, machine guns, and ammunition were heavy, requiring weight-saving trade-offs. In the first three months of the 21st Bomber Command’s operations, bomb loads averaged 3 tons per aircraft—less than one-third of the 10-ton bomb loads that backers of the Superfortress had been advertising for years. There was talk of radar bombing at night, a technique that promised better accuracy and higher bomb loads, but the development of radar-based bombing was slow. That was partly due to the slow adoption of the latest radar bombsight, the APQ-7—which had been issued to only one of the 21st Bomber Command’s wings, the 315th, by the end of 1944.
Japanese fighters gave the unescorted B-29s more trouble than the USAAF planners had anticipated. The B-29 missions followed a predictable pattern—the bombers repeatedly arrived in daylight over the same regions (Tokyo and Nagoya), at the same altitude (30,000 feet). In time, the Japanese army and navy fighter commands recognized these patterns and made tactical adjustments to counter the raids. As soon as their coastal radars detected an inbound strike, the fighters scrambled to altitude. Often the Japanese were able to put more than two hundred fighters into the air to meet an incoming formation of fifty to seventy-five unescorted B-29s. Air defense of the Kanto region was concentrated at Atsugi Air Base, near Yokosuka. The elite 343rd Kokutai, based at Matsuyama Air Base on Shikoku, was recruited and organized by the famous Japanese naval pilot Minoru Genda, who had developed the tactical plans for the attack on Pearl Harbor. Southern air defenses were organized under Vice Admiral Matome Ugaki, who took command of the newly activated Fifth Air Fleet, the largest remaining naval air flotilla, with headquarters at Kanoya Air Base in southern Kyushu. The navy concentrated its best remaining fighter planes and veteran flyers at these bases.3
The homeland air defense squadrons consisted of a hodgepodge of different aircraft types, including many older-model Zeros, but also a few newer designs that performed much better at higher altitudes. The Mitsubishi A7M “Reppu,” successor to the Zero, had a rate of climb rivaling that of the Hellcat and the Mustang, and a service ceiling of 40,000 feet. Its Allied codename was “Sam.” The Kawanishi N1K2-J Shinden-Kai, developed from an earlier floatplane fighter, was a fast, powerful, maneuverable aircraft with brawny defenses and almost twice the standard firepower of the Zero. The Americans had seen a few Shinden-Kais over the Philippines and Formosa, and given it the identification codename “George,” but they were not yet fully aware of the new fighter’s capabilities. The J2M “Raiden” (“Thunderbolt”) was a powerful Mitsubishi interceptor designed to take on American heavy bombers. Its speed in level flight surpassed 400 miles per hour, and it was armed with four 20mm cannon, more than enough firepower to bring down a B-29. The Allies called it “Jack.” Sam, George, and Jack were high-powered machines that needed skilled pilots, of whom only a few remained in the Japanese air corps. One of the last great Japanese aces of the war was Lieutenant Sadaaki Akamatsu, a hard-drinking hellion who lived at a brothel near Atsugi. “He often came racing to the air base in an old car,” one of his colleagues later recalled, “driving like a demon with one hand, drinking from a bottle held in the other. The sirens were screaming a warning as he bolted from the car to his fighter plane, already warmed up by the mechanics. He took off the moment the cockpit canopy was closed.”4 Logging more than 8,000 hours of stick time in China and Japan, Akamatsu was eventually credited with twenty-seven kills. Improbably, he survived the war and died in 1980, at age seventy.
For the B-29s of the 21st Bomber Command, January 1945 was the deadliest month of the war. Pilots and aircrewmen described the Japanese fighter interceptions as “hairy.” Enemy planes made head-on and high-side passes, guns blazing, apparently indifferent to the Superforts’ .50-caliber machine-gun turrets. If the Japanese flyers could not bring down a B-29 with their guns, they sometimes resorted to suicidal ramming attacks. John Ciardi, manning a .50-caliber gun on a side blister, shot down several Japanese fighters as they attempted to strike his B-29. He saw many other bombers from his squadron go down. “One of the saddest things I ever saw, when we were flying wing on a plane that got hit, was the barber’s chair gunner in the big bubble at the very top. He was right there beside us in plain sight, beginning to go down. He just waved his hand goodbye. There was nothing you could do. You couldn’t reach out to touch him. Of course, that got you.”5
So long as no major control surface was shot away, and at least two engines were running, a Superfortress had a chance to get home. But when a damaged Superfort commenced its long return flight, the tyranny of Pacific distances came into play. Until Iwo Jima fell into American hands, there was no safe runway within 1,400 miles of Japanese shores. Inexperienced crews made navigation errors in thick weather or in darkness, and had to burn extra fuel to get back on course. On nearly every mission, B-29s were seen to crash at sea, or their crews radioed to report that they were attempting a controlled water landing. But recovering the castaway crews was a low-percentage proposition. Searching for little yellow rubber rafts in those blue immensities was like trying to find a needle in a haystack, especially when the weather was less than perfectly clear. The navy floatplanes employed for air-sea rescue operations lacked the range or endurance to search thoroughly in waters so far from base. Lifeguard submarines were always stationed south of Japan, but their chances of finding downed aircrews were slight, unless the planes ditched in clear weather at designated coordinates. A damaged Superfort might fly all the way back to the Marianas only to crash on the runway, breaking apart and bursting into flames.
In January 1945, an average of four to five B-29s failed to return safely from each bombing mission over Japan, for an average loss rate of 5.7 percent. The worst-hit squadrons were devastated. The 873rd Bomb Squadron lost ten of seventeen B-29s, and eighty of the ninety-nine aircrewmen who went down on those planes had died. The USAAF had tentatively fixed a tour of duty at thirty-five combat missions. The airmen could do the math. With per-mission
losses topping 5 percent, they could expect to survive, on average, fewer than twenty missions. Worse, the pipeline of newly trained B-29 relief crews did not appear to be large enough to allow for regular rotations out of the theater, which meant that they might be required to fly more than thirty-five missions. If their loss rate did not improve, all of the B-29 pilots and aircrews could expect to keep flying missions until they died. “We were playing a lottery,” said Ciardi. “A certain number of planes had to be lost. We were just hoping that by blind chance ours would not be.”6
Morale deteriorated. The B-29 crews were conscious of having fallen short of the high expectations set for them. Bombing accuracy had been consistently disappointing, due in part to abominable winter weather over Japan. Their losses had been heavy, and they seemed to be getting worse. Hansell told his superiors in Washington that the airmen were being driven too hard; symptoms of pilot fatigue had been reported by the flight leaders and doctors. One B-29 pilot told a war correspondent: “We feel it has been worthwhile; we have to believe that. But the cost has been high. We’ve lost a lot of good men, especially key men like group and squadron commanders.”7
Between missions, the airmen did very little. Many just lay on their folding canvas cots, sleeping or staring at the ribbed steel arches of their Quonset hut ceilings. They stored up rest between missions, and they needed it. Even for young men in peak physical condition, the nervous energy they expended on a round-trip combat flight to Japan took four to five days to replenish. On nights before missions, many could not sleep at all. They lay awake, grimly wondering whether they would survive the day.
By January 1945, USAAF planners and analysts were raising doubts about the suitability of daylight precision tactics against Japan. After more than ten missions aimed at Japanese aircraft manufacturing targets, only the Mitsubishi plants in Nagoya had been seriously disrupted, and that was owed partly to the December earthquake. Nakajima, Tachikawa, and Kawasaki production centers had been attacked without evident success. A Nakajima engine plant in Musashino, Tokyo had been visited five times by Hansell’s B-29s, but remained largely intact. Hap Arnold and his headquarters planners wanted to experiment with mixing incendiaries into the standard high-explosive “iron” bombs in the payloads. Some argued for a more radical shift in tactics, employing full-scale firebombing raids on Japanese cities—that is, to burn them down, more or less indiscriminately. Such missions could be flown at night, when Japanese fighters would be less dangerous.
Hansell resisted the shift to firebombing, maintaining that precision bombing could be refined with practice: “I believed in it.”8 He argued that the situation called for patience. Time was needed to hone the techniques, to develop the airfields and supporting infrastructure, and to bring more B-29s and aircrews from the United States.
In the China-Burma-India (CBI) theater, the 20th Bomber Command had been dissolved, and was rapidly winding down. All B-29s in China and India were to be shifted to the Mariana Islands, and the commanding general of the 20th Bomber Command had received orders to shift his headquarters to Guam. Major General Curtis LeMay had previously served under Hansell in Europe, but he had since been promoted and was now senior to Hansell. Arnold decided to put LeMay directly in charge of the 21st Bomber Command; Hansell, in turn, would act as LeMay’s vice commander. Hansell was one of Arnold’s star protégés, and the USAAF chief took pains to emphasize that he had not lost confidence in him. But given the trend toward new tactics, and Hansell’s clear reluctance to implement a shift to massed incendiary raids, his relief may have been inevitable.
A disappointed Hansell swallowed his pride and expressed his full confidence in LeMay, but he declined to remain as his second-in-command, judging that LeMay “needed no second string in his bow . . . and I would have been unhappy as a figurehead.”9 Hansell flew back to the United States and took command of a B-29 training program. LeMay flew back to Kharagpur, India, to tie up loose ends in the CBI theater, then returned to Guam on January 18 to assume command of the newly consolidated Twentieth Air Force.
JAPANESE CIVILIANS REGARDED the B-29s with curiosity, fascination, and even admiration. Whenever the tiny silver crosses appeared overhead, they crowded out into the streets, craning their necks and pointing to the sky. “We went through those early bombings in a spirit of excitement and suspense,” wrote a Tokyo journalist. “There was even a spirit of adventure, a sense of exultation in sharing the dangers of war even though bound to civilian existence.”10 Police and civil defense authorities shouted at the spectators, but many were too excited to retreat into their underground shelters. They wanted to see what was happening. With a touch of irony, perhaps, civilians spoke of the “honorable visitors” and referred to the Superfortress as “B-san” (“Mr. B”). A man in Tokyo watched a “splendid” formation of B-29s through his telescope, describing details of their design and operation to awestruck neighborhood children.11 Michio Takeyama, the student and future novelist, described a formation of Superforts that flew over the capital on a late afternoon in January: “The brilliant violet shining cross shapes came floating from among the clouds, in regular patterns, beautiful. In the winter, with their tails of frozen vapor, they looked like slender jellyfish trailing transparent white tentacles.”12
The air raids presented a dilemma for the regime’s propaganda authorities. Witnessed by millions, they could not be censored out of existence. News coverage veered between competing impulses—to belittle the raids as feeble and ineffective, or to whip up popular anger. The newspapers tended to downplay the damage inflicted by the bombers, while exaggerating the number of U.S. planes shot down by antiaircraft fire or Japanese fighters. “Funeral Procession of B-29s,” shouted a front-page headline in the Asahi Shinbun on January 1, 1945. The story reported that 550 of the big bombers had gone down in flames since they had started raiding the Kanto region five weeks earlier.13 (The actual number at that point was fewer than fifty.) The damage caused by air raids was often described as “slight,” but scant detail was reported. Assurances were often given that the Imperial Palace had not been hit and that the emperor and empress were safe.
Other reports aimed to arouse the public, to incite a desire for revenge, and to inspire civilians to work harder for the war effort. According to the Mainichi Shinbun, “There is no other way to awaken the Japanese except by bombs falling dead center in Tokyo.”14 It was reported that the American bombers were targeting hospitals and schools. On January 14, 1945, a high-explosive bomb dropped by a B-29 struck near the Toyouke Shrine at Ise, one of the most venerated of all Shinto sites. The shrine had not been targeted, and was not damaged in the raid, but the Asahi Shinbun exploded in rage at the “enemy’s tyrannical barbaric behavior” and “real demonic nature.” A headline screamed: “God Damn You! From Now On Watch Out!”15
For the first time since the Doolittle Raid, almost three years earlier, citizens of Tokyo could compare the news reports to the evidence they took in with their own eyes. Peering out of the windows of passing trains and streetcars, they saw smashed and burned remnants of homes and buildings. Chinaware, clothing, and tatami mats were strewn among the debris. People sifted through the ruins, digging out their bedding, shoes, and crockery. Refugees carried their last worldly goods on their shoulders, or offered them for sale to their neighbors: hibachis, books, baskets, futon mattresses, blue and white ceramic pots. Others were made homeless by government fiat, as demolition crews razed entire neighborhoods to create urban firebreaks. A witness recalled: “The families being forced from their homes stood in small groups on the street, watching with sorrowful faces as the labor gangs ripped their homes to pieces.”16
On January 27, 1945, seventy-two B-29s were diverted from their primary targets by cloudy weather. They dropped their payloads on the heart of downtown Tokyo, and bombs fell among Saturday shoppers in the tony Ginza district, killing several hundred. For urbanites who witnessed such scenes of devastation, the regime’s appeals to “fighting spirit” inspired bitt
er sarcasm. In his diary, Kiyoshi Kiyosawa commented that “the Japanese spirit encourages the idea that when one sees B-29s, they can be dealt with [by] bamboo spears or judo.”17
After the war, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS) conducted extensive interviews with a cross-section of Japanese at every level of society. The results led the USSBS analysts to conclude that aerial bombing was the “most important single factor” in undercutting the morale of the Japanese people. More than any other development—including military reverses overseas and the reduction in food rations at home—the appearance of enemy planes in Japanese skies prompted ordinary citizens to doubt their chances of victory, and to desire an early termination of the war. Strategic bombing of Japanese cities “produced great social and psychological disruption and contributed to securing surrender prior to the planned invasion.”18 Moreover, the Japanese were more inclined to blame the air raids on their own leaders than on the enemy. “Now was the time when Japan’s history of geographical isolation, abetted by centuries of cultural isolation, became a liability,” wrote the USSBS authors. “The insularity of leaders and people, bred by isolation, was reflected in feelings of remoteness from attack, and invulnerability of the home islands. The B-29s rudely awakened them from the dream of security.”19
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