by Bob Drury
What neither man likely reckoned was that before the year was out they would indeed be fighting determined enemies, just not the ones they had envisioned.
4
“THE SACRED DUTY OF THE LEADING RACE”
WHEN JAY ARRIVED AT LANGLEY airbase as a green second lieutenant, the U.S. Army Air Corps was, in many respects, still in its infancy. It had become an official branch of the service only 15 years earlier, and Army traditionalists, most notably from the Infantry and Artillery Corps, often derided its pilots as nothing more than glorified mailmen. But as the United States’ entry into the conflict raging across Europe became increasingly expected, the Air Corps’ leadership realized that it had one major tool it could employ against its service rivals—publicity.
The American public at the moment was riveted by news reports out of England describing the beleaguered Royal Air Force’s last-stand heroics during the Battle of Britain. With German bombs falling literally outside the radio studios from which journalists like the CBS correspondent Edward R. Murrow and NBC’s Fred Bate and John MacVane broadcast, U.S. Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Army Chief of Staff George Marshall collaborated to use this opportunity to advocate for a stronger role for their own Army’s aviation branch. Consequently, at Stimson’s and Marshall’s decree, in June 1941 the Air Corps was redesignated the United States Army Air Forces. This specification not only provided the air arm of the service with greater autonomy but also was an attempt to curtail the increasingly divisive arguments within the Army over control of aviation doctrine and organization.
Marshall placed the gruff and versatile Gen. Henry H. “Hap” Arnold in command of this new air force. Arnold, the 56-year-old scion of a prominent Pennsylvania family known for its political and military service, proved a natural fit. In his youth Arnold had overcome his initial fear of flying to take to the air under the tutelage of the Wright brothers before becoming a barnstorming stunt pilot. Later, as a protégé of the legendary and controversial Gen. Billy Mitchell during World War I, he had overseen the expansion of what was then called the U.S. Air Service.
Like most seasoned military men of the era, Arnold—known throughout the Army as the “Chief”—had no doubt that the United States would soon be embroiled in a world war. He set his priorities for the USAAF accordingly, particularly emphasizing the rapid expansion of its training and procurement operations. He spent the summer and fall of 1941 overseeing the construction of military airfields across the country while also ensuring that the nation’s airplane factories and machine shops were adapted to a war footing. As a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Arnold knew that he would be responsible for attaining a quasi-autonomous status for the USAAF when the United States entered the hostilities. And of course this is exactly what occurred following the attack on Pearl Harbor.
It was amid this operational frenzy that in the spring of 1941 Jay and a number of other young lieutenants from the 43rd Bomb Group received orders to report to Ohio’s Wright Airfield to service-test a new twin-engine medium bomber, the B-26 Marauder, just coming on line. Jay was certified as a copilot and engineering officer aboard the Marauder—nicknamed the “Widow Maker” for its dive speed and 4,000-pound payload—and he spent the next several months in Ohio before deploying back to Langley in September. Much to his chagrin, his old Flying Fortress outfit, the 43rd, was in the process of being transferred to New England, and instead of rejoining it he was folded into a new Bomb Group, the 22nd, scheduled to receive a shipment of B-26 Marauders. Though initially conceived as a heavy bomber unit, the recently activated 22nd—soon to be known as the Red Raiders—had been allotted only one of the four-engine B-17s still only slowly trickling into service. Worse for Jay, that lone Fortress was reserved for use by the Group’s colonels and majors, while Jay and his fellow junior officers were relegated to training on the unit’s old, undersized, underpowered B-18 Bolos as they awaited the arrival of the Marauders.
In theory, Jay’s transfer to the 22nd should have been a seamless fit. He had spent months flying the stubby-winged B-26, and his experience gave him a leg up on his fellow officers in the Group. In fact, Jay was devastated, and viewed the downgrade from heavy bombers to medium bombers as something akin to a demotion. Worse, he was still rated as only an engineering officer and copilot, and seemed destined to remain so. As his superiors made clear in their field-jacket reports, Jay just did not seem to have the feel for piloting a B-26. He was not alone.
With its two powerful eighteen-cylinder radial engines, its low-drag fuselage, and the largest propellers and shortest wings of any military aircraft in the world, the Marauder was above all else designed to be flown fast. Yet the plane’s colorful nickname, Widow Maker, often cut both ways; as one of the 22nd’s more experienced navigators wrote in his diary, “It’s a very safe airplane once it gets up in the air because it’s so awfully fast and bristling with guns. But the amazing thing is, the damn airplane itself has been our most treacherous enemy.”
Takeoffs proved particularly problematic. A Marauder fully loaded with fuel and ammunition needed to attain maximum thrust practically immediately, especially on short runways. And only the smoothest of surfaces could accommodate the odd tricycle configuration of the aircraft’s landing gear. Should a B-26’s single nose wheel collide with even the smallest object as it sped down a runaway or, more likely, should it descend into an unseen rut or trough, the odds of the plane flipping were great. For that reason Marauder pilots were instructed to always leave their landing gear retracted when making a crash landing on unfamiliar terrain. Referring to the aircraft’s developer, the same navigator who had called the plane “our most treacherous enemy” added, “Sometimes I wish they were stuck up Glenn Martin’s fanny. He makes them and he ought to have to fly them.”
But it was landings that earned the B-26 a second, more pejorative nickname—the Flying Coffin. Most American bombers of the era, including the massive Flying Fortress, were designed to approach an airstrip in a semi-glide pattern. A Marauder, however, had to be brought in hot and fast at 140 miles per hour until, at the last moment, its pilot yoked back hard before touching down. Jay had never completely mastered this skill back in Ohio, and that had prevented him from attaining pilot’s status. Now, with the 22nd, this shortcoming was catching up to him.
Whenever an instructor would take Jay aloft to check him out for his pilot’s certification at Langley, he repeatedly failed to stick his landings. He would begin his approaches too early or too late. Or he would come in too fast or would be too slow and “washy,” threatening to either over-speed his props or stall out his engines. Jay later recalled that his lack of technique on approaches so “terrified” his check-ride trainers that the senior men would invariably seize control of the instruments from him and land the crafts themselves. What made Jay’s inability to handle the Widow Maker all the more mystifying was that in every other aspect of flying his competence, if not expertise, shone. Indeed, he was considered one of the most dexterous pilots in the Group behind the wheel of a Bolo bomber.
“For some reason Jay just couldn’t hack the [B-26] landing,” Jay’s close friend and fellow pilot Walt Krell recalled. Krell had been a year behind Jay at both the Glenview and the Maxwell flight schools, and considered him one of the most relaxed pilots he had ever seen. “Nothing ever seemed to bother him,” Krell noted. “No emergency could shake him. On the ground, he was the kind of guy that everyone took to.”
But once in the air, it was if Jay became another person. “Every one of us tried to check him out,” Krell reported. “We figured that someone, somewhere along the line, would find the monkey that was riding Jay’s back. But whatever it was we couldn’t find it. We kept trying, of course; everyone felt he belonged in the left seat.I But the way he’d come in would turn your hair white.”
The fact that Jay was not alone was small consolation. For all the pilots like Walt Krell, “who could just about make the B-26 sit up and sing songs to them,” there were an equal
number “who dreaded flying in the B-26 under even normal conditions.”
Perhaps most frustrating to Jay’s superiors was his seeming obliviousness to his shortcomings. After he botched a landing his trainers would quiz him on what he thought he had done wrong. To their astonishment, Jay invariably replied that he felt as if he had made a perfect approach. As time passed he could only watch in frustration as new pilots who had graduated from flight school after him were promoted to the left-hand seat.
Despite these setbacks on the flight deck, Jay considered prewar life at Langley “easy and fun.” In addition to training on the Marauders and Bolos, he also learned to pilot (and land with no problems) such disparate aircraft as tandem-seat biplanes and Catalina Flying Boats. And so avid was his curiosity about all things aeronautical that he went out of his way to befriend any Airmen from whom he thought he could pick up an edge. Still, at the end of the day he was left to gaze longingly at the lone B-17 set aside for the Bomb Group’s senior officers, a touch of melancholy clouding the corners of his eyes. If war was imminent, he wanted to be a part of it, and this was the plane he wanted to fly into it. He would get half his wish.
BY THE TIME JAY HAD settled back in at Langley in September 1941 most of continental Europe lay prostrate beneath the Nazi blitzkrieg. A year earlier the German-Soviet alliance had collapsed, and as Jay and his fellow Airmen were flying training sorties that month, Kiev was falling to Wehrmacht invaders, the siege of Leningrad had begun, and Operation Typhoon—the German march on Moscow—was just getting under way. It was also during September that CBS’s Murrow broke the news from London that in order to curb pockets of resistance against Nazi advances in Yugoslavia, Hitler had decreed that 100 civilians be executed for every German casualty. American newspapers also carried disturbing stories describing how every Jew over the age of six residing in German territories was required to wear a yellow Star of David, but it would be years before it was discovered that the same month was also the occasion for the first experiments with Zyklon-B in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
As the course of the European war became increasingly obvious it was understood by even the lowliest American buck private that President Franklin Roosevelt would never allow Great Britain to stand alone against the Führer. Even if the Soviet Union held firm—something viewed at the moment as unlikely—there was little the Russians could do to aid the English. But what Jay and Joe and their cohort could never have envisioned was that in the coming weeks they would become embroiled in combat on two fronts. For on the other side of the globe, the isolated and resource-poor nation of Japan had inched closer to its decades-long plan of subjugating its Asian neighbors in preparation for one objective—war with the United States.
Buoyed by their swift conquest of the Chinese province of Manchuria in 1931, the armies of Emperor Hirohito and Gen. Hideki Tojo began rolling into the remainder of China six years later. What Japan lacked in commercial prowess it made up for in military proficiency as well as in a deep-seated national essence often referred to as kokutai—a belief similar to the Nazis’ concept of their own racial purity. The Japanese routinely referred to themselves as shido minzoku, the leading race. Unlike Western white supremacists, however, the Japanese were far more preoccupied with glorifying themselves than belittling others, and as the coming world war progressed, this superiority complex would often be their undoing.
To Japan’s war planners, to take one example, it was a given that China’s defeat would serve as a springboard to spread the Empire’s doctrine of racial preeminence across the Far East. That military resistance from the vast Chinese interior might in fact continue never entered their calculations. In 1940 the influential Japanese politician and industrialist Chikuhei Nakajima declared, “There are superior and inferior races in the world, and it is the sacred duty of the leading race to lead and enlighten the inferior ones.” There was little doubt that he included in the latter group the “mongrel” United States.
Nakajima, the founder of an aircraft company, was a vocal proponent of building long-range bombers that could reach the American mainland. But Tokyo’s Imperial General Headquarters had other plans: specifically, to lure the U.S. Pacific Fleet westward and ambush it at some unspecified date in the future, in what senior officers predicted would be “a once-and-for-all encounter.”
The tentative location of this strategic naval battle with the United States shifted over time as Japan took advantage of advances in military technology. Within the Imperial Navy there was even bitter opposition to Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto’s plan to target Pearl Harbor. The pervading school of thought among officers of the Combined Fleet considered it a safer bet to lay a trap for the Americans by attacking Manila Bay in the Philippines and waiting in ambush for U.S. ships to sail to the rescue. But the overall Japanese purpose remained constant—to knock the United States out of the war early and entirely by destroying its ocean power.
Japan’s military planners also decided that while simultaneously going to war with the United States somewhere in the Pacific, they would—contra to Nakajima’s call to strike fast and hard at the American mainland—first direct their military might to the south in an Asian version of blitzkrieg. To that end, while the main Japanese forces would move to seize territory in a swooping arc from Burma to Thailand to the Dutch East Indies to the Philippines, a smaller military arm dubbed the South Seas Force would capture a series of peripheral island chains, including the Bismarck Archipelago and Guam in the Marianas, to serve as a picket line to protect their larger conquests. From this vantage point the South Seas Force would be situated but a short step from a near-defenseless Australia, which had already sent the bulk of its fighting men to Europe. Finally, with Australia overrun, Tokyo could turn its attention to Hawaii and, ultimately, what its leaders considered the “satanic and diabolical” United States mainland.II
During these campaigns the soldiers, sailors, and Airmen of Nippon would show no mercy; their rules of engagement consisted of not much more than the sharp point of a 15-inch bayonet. The horrific violence Japan inflicted on its conquered enemies was exhibited most explicitly during what came to be known the “Rape of Nanking,” in which historians estimate that the Imperial forces murdered between 200,000 and 430,000 Chinese, including 90,000 prisoners of war. One American Army general said that the Japanese soldier was “undoubtedly a low order of humanity” whose sole reason for going to war was to indulge a “liking for looting, arson, massacre, and rape.”
Indeed, across Asia the Japanese war machine would subject defeated soldiers and civilians alike to torture, enslavement, and arbitrary murder, which a Japanese fighter considered merely a means to a divinely mandated end. Yet that American general who saw the Japanese race as a lower order of humanity was mistaken, for there was more to these tactics than the diabolical desire to steal, burn, kill, and molest. From early childhood Japanese boys were bathed in a brainwashing Bushido mentality—literally, the Samurai’s “Way of the Warrior”—that invoked a ruthless ethos which not only cultivated brutality but celebrated it for its own sake. Conversely, to the Empire’s desensitized young men marching, sailing, and flying into combat, the idea of being taken prisoner was considered, as the Australian author Thomas Keneally noted, a chronic psychological disorder.
With few exceptions, the Japanese soldier’s goal was combat to the death, either his enemy’s or his own. That aim had the ironic effect of making him, in the eyes of his enemies, the very subhuman creature that he considered all non-Nipponese races to be. Consequently, as the war progressed through the Pacific, American GIs and Marines would resort to a kind of racist, anti-Japanese brutality that would appall their right-thinking countrymen.
Americans troops would come to think nothing of sending home severed Japanese ears and fingers as good-luck charms or souvenirs, or plucking gold-filled teeth from dead enemy soldiers. Some even boiled Japanese skulls in 50-gallon drums to use as trading chips with the sailors who transported them from island to island. T
his attitude was summed up by the war correspondent Ernie Pyle soon after he reached the Pacific Theater from the Western Front: “In Europe we felt that our enemies, horrible and deadly as they were, were still people,” wrote Pyle. “But out here I soon gathered that the Japanese were looked upon as something subhuman and repulsive; the way some people feel about cockroaches and mice.”
Jay, the frustrated fighter pilot, did not yet realize it, but his assignment to the bomber branch would soon place him in the role of exterminator.
* * *
I As in an American automobile, the pilot sat on the left-hand side and the copilot on the right.
II In War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, his exhaustive study of Japanese racial attitudes during the conflict, John Dower notes that Imperial propagandists were fond of describing Americans variously as “mercenary, immoral, unscrupulous, vainglorious, arrogant, soft, nauseating, superficial, decadent, intolerant, uncivilized, and barbarous,” among other choice pejoratives.
5
THE FORTRESS
THEY PLANNED TO CALL IT the “aerial battle cruiser.” at least that was how the executives at Boeing referred to the airship when, in 1934, they entered an open competition to design a new bomber for the U.S. Army Air Forces.
Boeing had been founded in 1916, when its designers constructed their first canvas-and-wood aircraft. Since then, the company’s engineers had been responsible for introducing a spectrum of aerial innovations into the U.S. military. Their successful implementation of an aircraft’s tough, thin aluminum “skin,” no thicker than a dozen sheets of notebook paper, was a major leap forward in aerodynamics. They were also pioneers in developing landing gear that retracted into a plane’s wings during flight, greatly reducing drag.
