Allocation of resources and labor support aroused constant acrimony between Admiral Nimitz’s CINPAC headquarters and General LeMay’s Twentieth Air Force. Since LeMay was outside Nimitz’s chain of command, their disputes were often bucked up to the Joint Chiefs for resolution. LeMay took the view that the Marianas had been captured in order to launch a B-29 campaign against Japan, and that all construction and development efforts should be channeled to that end. The navy countered that the Marianas were also a staging base for the huge amphibious invasions to come in 1945. Resources were scarce all around, requiring difficult tradeoffs that satisfied no one. Spring brought tropical downpours—sixteen wet days in March alone, when 6.5 inches of rain fell on the island, causing the engineers no end of grief at the airfield construction sites.40 When the island command transferred two aviation engineer battalions from construction on Northwest Field to other projects of “higher priority,” the reverberations reached Washington immediately.
LeMay was exasperated by the lavish recreation and entertainment facilities he found on southern and coastal Guam. “They had built tennis courts for the island commander; they built fleet recreation centers, marine rehabilitation centers, dockage facilities for inter-island service craft, and every other damn thing in the world except subscribing to the original purpose in the occupation of those islands.” He joked that Guam would probably have a “roller-skating rink” before 21st Bomber Command had a proper headquarters.41
Shortly after his arrival, LeMay was invited to dinner at Nimitz’s house on the Fonte Plateau, a hill overlooking Apra Harbor. The fine white house had four bedrooms, a spacious screened porch, and a dining room suitable for entertaining ranking officers and visiting VIPs.42 The grounds had been handsomely landscaped, planted with flowers and native shrubs, and a horseshoe court had been built for Nimitz’s recreation. The dinner was attended by many other senior army, navy, and marine officers stationed on Guam. “I went in to find chandeliers glowing and all the lights ablaze, the dinner table set with the white tablecloth, sparkling silverware, and so forth,” LeMay wrote in his memoir. “Everyone was standing around in starched white uniforms having a drink.”43 They were served cocktails in highballs and hors d’oeuvres “such as you might find at an embassy in Washington.” A multicourse dinner included soup, a fish course, a beef roast, and dessert, followed by demitasses, brandy, and cigars.44
In the story he never tired of telling, LeMay reciprocated by inviting the navy brass to dinner at his camp, where they stood in line at a Quonset hut mess hall and ate canned rations. That got the point across, “and eventually they came up with the facilities we needed.”45
Feeling intense pressure from the JCS, Nimitz took steps to accelerate the B-29 airbase program. He granted Hap Arnold’s request to ship new aviation engineer battalions into the islands, even if they arrived in advance of their heavy equipment.46 The Seabees were obliged to transfer a certain amount of their equipment, forcing a reordering of other priorities. Shipping was a critical bottleneck, including such prosaic considerations as berthing time at the cargo loading docks. On March 28, Pacific Fleet headquarters ordered a “sharp curtailment” of shipping into the Marianas for all other purposes, in order to free up cargo space for the materials needed by the Twentieth Air Force. Cargo allocations would henceforth be reserved “to the maximum practicable limit for munitions and other supplies needed for the Superfortresses.”47 The order aroused resentment in many other quarters of the navy and Marine Corps. Admiral Richard S. Edwards, King’s deputy in Washington, observed that General Arnold “wants to run the whole thing [the Twentieth Air Force] from Washington until his people in the field get into trouble, then expects the theater commander to rush in and save the situation.”48
There was some compensation in the discovery that the island of Tinian, which was largely flat, would be able to accommodate as many as eight B-29 runways, rather than the four that had been planned before the capture of the island. Six naval construction brigades were put to work taking down about half of a long coral ridge, with the double purpose of leveling the ground and mining the rock within. Four operational runways were built at North Field, Tinian, a base that was completed and made operational more quickly than any other in the Marianas. In January 1945, it was decided to push forward with the development of Tinian’s West Field as well, which would allow this smallest of the three occupied Mariana islands to accommodate two full bombardment wings. The first runway at West Field was activated on March 22, 1945. Meanwhile, the surveyors discovered that Isley Field on Saipan could be expanded to accommodate four groups of the Seventy-Third Bombardment Wing on two parallel 8,500-foot runways.
Taking stock of his command in early March, General LeMay was not pleased, and he did not mind who knew it. High-altitude precision bombing missions were consistently failing to achieve their hoped-for results. Of the eleven top-priority Japanese aircraft plants targeted by the USAAF, none had been destroyed (although production had been cut significantly at several). Eight missions had attempted to bomb the Nakajima engine plant in Musashino, but recent reconnaissance photography indicated that the complex had suffered only 4 percent damage. Due to operational problems, including engine failures and navigational problems, the Twentieth Air Force was failing to put enough planes over Japan. There were now 350 B-29s operating from the Marianas, but in an average mission, only 130 planes were actually crossing into Japanese airspace.49
To LeMay’s chagrin, American newspapers were giving the impression that the B-29s were inflicting tremendous punishment on Japan. That was not necessarily the fault of the USAAF press offices, which had stuck closely to the facts in their press communiqués. The American papers seemed to want to tell their readers what they dearly wanted to hear—that the Superforts were spreading biblical carnage from one end of Japan to the other. On March 6, 1945, General LeMay told his public relations officer, Major St. Clair McKelway: “This outfit has been getting a lot of publicity without having really accomplished a hell of a lot in bombing results.”50
Since taking over in January, LeMay had been considering a revolutionary change in tactics: low-altitude, high-intensity nighttime incendiary attacks. Such missions would involve sending the B-29s over their targets at night, at an altitude of 5,000 to 7,000 feet, far below their typical operating altitudes of 25,000 to 30,000 feet. They would avoid the jet stream and the strain on the engines created by the long climb to altitude. The fuel savings would allow for a higher bomb load—6 to 8 tons, whereas previous missions had averaged 3 to 4 tons. By scattering napalm incendiary clusters over a wide area, bombing accuracy would be moot. The Japanese fighter defenses were considered far less dangerous at night. Assuming that the B-29s would not encounter much resistance in the air, all .50-caliber guns and ammunition could be removed from the planes. That would save weight, and “at least our folks won’t be shooting at each other.”51 With the element of surprise, LeMay reasoned, the Americans might get away with it.
LeMay, a natural-born self-promoter, later gave the impression that the low-altitude firebombing attacks were his idea. In fact, planners at the USAAF headquarters in Washington had already shown a great interest in incendiary attacks on Japanese cities, and had debated the potential advantages of sending the Superforts in at night and at lower altitudes. General Arnold, acting for the JCS, had issued orders for a series of “maximum effort” B-29 missions over various urban centers of Japan. (A “maximum effort” mission was defined as one in which every single airplane that the maintenance personnel had said was fit to fly would fly.) For the first time since the B-29s had begun operating from the Marianas, stockpiles of incendiary bombs were sufficient to allow for about five or six max-effort missions. The Seventy-Third Bombardment Wing had already received extensive training in night operations, with the intention of bombing by radar at night. At the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, a model “Japanese Village” had been erected, duplicating the known materials and techniques of Japanese construction.
Bombing tests employing a mix of napalm and magnesium incendiaries had quickly burned the model to the ground. Japanese cities were known to be much more vulnerable than German cities to firebombing, because the population densities were higher, and the close-built wooden houses were more susceptible to fire.
The workhorse of the firebombing raids was the M69 napalm incendiary submunition, clustered in a 500-pound E46 cylindrical finned bomb. Nearly all had been produced at a remote and secret plant in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, about 15 miles inland from Atlantic City. Each M69 submunition or “bomblet” was essentially a cheesecloth sock filled with jellied gasoline, inserted into a lead pipe. Thirty-eight M69s were clustered together in an E46, bound by a strap that burst open on a timed fuse. The clusters were timed to open at 2,000 feet above the ground. Three-foot cotton gauze streamers trailed behind each bomblet, causing them to disperse over an area with a diameter of about 1,000 feet. On impact with the ground, a second fuse detonated and an ejection charge fired globules of flaming napalm to a radius of about 100 feet. Whatever these globules hit—walls, roofs, human skin—they adhered and burned at a temperature of 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit for eight to ten minutes, long enough to start raging fires in the teeming, close-built wood and paper neighborhoods at the heart of all Japanese cities.
In the 1930s, and in the early years of the Second World War, American leaders had staunchly opposed the practice of bombing cities from the air. In September 1939, as Europe had plunged into war, President Roosevelt had called upon all belligerent nations to forswear “the bombardment from the air of civilian populations or of unfortified cities.”52 Even within the ranks of the Army Air Corps, there were persistent objections to the “area bombing” of cities. In 1940, Hap Arnold had avowed: “The Air Corps is committed to a strategy of high-altitude, precision bombing of military objectives. Use of incendiaries against cities is contrary to our national policy of attacking only military objectives.”53 Five years of global savagery, and the behavior of the Axis nations, had prompted a gradual revision of these views. The Japanese and Germans had been the first to launch aerial attacks on civilian populations—the Japanese in raids against Shanghai, Nanjing, Chongqing, and other Chinese cities, and the Germans against Rotterdam, London, Coventry, and many other English cities. The Luftwaffe’s “Blitz” of 1940 provoked British demands for retribution, which the RAF Bomber Command began supplying that year.
Indiscriminate terror bombing of German cities had culminated in the firebombing of Dresden on the night of February 13–14, 1945, killing an estimated 35,000 German civilians. Dresden prompted a certain amount of criticism in the American press, and even in the British House of Commons, as the bombing seemed to have no obvious military purpose. An Associated Press story reported: “Allied air commanders have made the long-awaited decision to adopt deliberate terror bombing of the great German population centers as a ruthless expedient to hasten Hitler’s doom.”54 But Secretary Stimson denied the AP report, and justified the bombing of Dresden as a military necessity. He added: “Our policy never has been to inflict terror bombing on civilian populations . . . our efforts are still confined to the attack of enemy military objectives.”55
Even now, in the late stages of a war of unprecedented brutality, American leaders were loath to admit that they had abandoned their policy against terror bombing. Firebombing Japanese cities demanded a plausible military pretense. USAAF target selectors argued that much of Japanese industrial production occurred in residential districts, where a cottage industry of small “feeder” or “shadow” workshops produced components for major plants. These were said to be the real target of the mass incendiary raids. But after the burning of Dresden, which occurred just three weeks before the first big firebombing raid on Tokyo, the moral objections seemed rather quaint. If the Germans had invited such retribution, so had the Japanese. Later, LeMay acknowledged that Japanese war crimes had provided a justification, at least in his own mind: “I was not happy, but neither was I particularly concerned, about civilian casualties in incendiary raids. I didn’t let it influence any of my decisions because we knew how the Japanese had treated the Americans—both civilian and military—that they captured in places like the Philippines.”56 It was no coincidence that the world learned of Japanese atrocities in Manila just two weeks before the start of the firebombing campaign.
The new tactic entailed heavy risks. A bombing mission flown at 5,000 feet over Germany would draw devastating fighter attacks and heavy antiaircraft fire—as LeMay put it, “a low-level formation like this would have been cut to ribbons by the Luftwaffe.”57 But he was willing to gamble that the Japanese night fighters were not skilled or numerous enough to shoot down the B-29s in darkness, and that the flak would be wild and ineffective, especially given the element of surprise. Japanese radar-directed AA guns were thought to be crude and inaccurate in comparison with those in Germany. But that was an unproven supposition; no B-29 mission had flown over Japan at lower than 8,000 feet, and the only missions that had flown that low were those over the Yawata steelworks in Kyushu. The antiaircraft batteries defending Tokyo, Nagoya, and Osaka were more numerous, and possibly more advanced. It was known that the Japanese had trained at least two night-fighting squadrons. If LeMay was wrong, the price could be catastrophic losses of airplanes and aircrews.
According to Major McKelway, the press officer, flak experts from the various bombardment wings warned LeMay that he was courting disaster. They told him that Tokyo’s antiaircraft batteries would shoot the low-flying bombers down like plywood ducks in a shooting gallery. Even Japanese machine guns on the ground might be able to hit the planes. One predicted losses of seven out of ten Superforts. “If you are right,” LeMay replied, “we won’t have many airplanes left if we go in low.”58 LeMay was one of history’s most prolific killers, but he felt a “natural inborn repugnance” against sending his airmen to their deaths. He would have liked to lead the mission in person, but Washington had barred officers of his rank against flying over enemy territory. Losing aircrews to inevitable circumstances was bad enough, but losing them to poor tactical decisions by a ground-based commander was different: “That’s when it really comes home to you.”59 If the mission failed, LeMay was likely to be relieved of his command, and could have been reduced to his permanent rank. He might have ended his career in the USAAF as a humble captain.
Critically, however, LeMay won the backing of his wing leaders, the brigadier generals who piloted lead aircraft for each of the 21st Bomber Command’s three bombardment wings—Emmett “Rosie” O’Donnell, Thomas S. Power, and John H. Davies. The three brigadiers were quick to see the advantages of the proposed mission. The ferocious jet stream winds would be far above them. Winds at 5,000 feet would be no more than 25 to 30 knots, so bombing drift would not be a problem. The most capable and veteran pilots and crews (including the wing leaders) would fly the lead “pathfinder” planes, which would drop their incendiaries in an “X” pattern to mark the target. Those initial fires would serve as aiming points. For the planes that followed, navigation would be a cinch. The land-sea contrast of the Japanese coastline showed up clearly on airborne radar scopes, so that even the least experienced aircrews would have no trouble navigating to Tokyo Bay, regardless of visibility. At that point, they would simply “turn on the heading we give them, continue so many seconds, and pull the string.”60
For the first time in the B-29 campaign, weather would not be a factor. As LeMay put it, “We could say forget the weather. We’ve proved that even the stupidest radar operators can get us over that land-water contrast up there at Tokyo. If we send some veterans in ahead, they’re bound to get on the target, and they’re bound to start the fires. We really get a conflagration going, the ones that come in later can see the glow. They can drop on that.”61
The area to be targeted was Tokyo’s Shitamachi district, the “lower city” or “undercity” of the Sumida River basin, a predominantly working-class district of close-built neighbor
hoods. In selecting this part of Tokyo, USAAF planners had consulted maps produced by the Office of Special Services (OSS)—predecessor agency to the CIA—which had ranked Tokyo’s thirty-five wards by their susceptibility to fire. The OSS analysts had considered the density and nature of construction, and had even collected risk assessments produced by Japanese fire insurance companies before the war. The Shitamachi was chosen, in short, because it would burn better than any other part of the capital.62
The pilots and aircrewmen were briefed the day before the mission, in crowded Quonset huts at the various airbases throughout the islands. For purposes of secrecy, none had received advanced word of the new tactics. As the operations officers spelled out the particulars, silence fell over the gatherings. One colonel told his pilots: “We are throwing away the book. This time we will not fly formations.”63 They would carry much larger bomb loads, but leave their .50-caliber guns and gunners on the ground. According to a pilot of the 498th Bombardment Group on Saipan, “a dead silence” followed the news that they would be hitting Tokyo at night. But when the briefers told them that they would fly over the heart of Tokyo at altitudes of between 5,000 and 7,000 feet, “a huge gasp was then heard from the crew members.”64 Compared to past missions, that was nearly 5 miles closer to the ground.
Taking their cues from the wing commanders, the operations officers explained why the new tactics had been chosen, and why they were expected to succeed. Tactical surprise would be the Americans’ friend, and it would permit them to get through the flight without excessive losses. Not all the airmen were persuaded, however, and as they returned to their quarters that night, some predicted losses of at least one-third of all planes on the mission. With that happy thought, they crawled into their cots and tried to get a decent night’s sleep.
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