The trail of grief did not end here. As the limited number of airplanes came off the disorganized production lines, many of them remained on the ground, while the others were flown only on short and usually meaningless flights. There was a total lack of gasoline with which to fly these machines except on the briefest flights; even those airplanes flown on test hops were liable to encounter enemy fighters and bombers which daily defied our weak air resistance and flew where they pleased. After the fall of the Mariana Islands to the enemy, the entire aircraft industry labored under the shadow of inevitable defeat. By May of 1945, several months before the capitulation of Japan, we despaired of ever increasing our production. Personal effort was now meaningless, for the factories were on the verge of collapse for lack of parts and materials. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki contributed absolutely nothing to this industrial disintegration; it was complete long before August 5 and 9, 1945.
To their credit, the Navy’s officers never ceased their attempts to obtain through qualitative gains what we no longer could hope to accomplish with our outnumbered planes. In the final months of the war our engineers feverishly pushed the development of jet propulsion, rocket-powered guided missiles, rocket-powered interceptors, and similar projects. Japan started late in this work, and American engineers later considered our progress, in the face of a tardy beginning and ceaseless destruction of our planes, as “amazing.” The need for haste naturally resulted in the appearance of inherent technical defects in the new equipment. Given sufficient time, these defects would have been eliminated and the new jet and rocket aircraft and missiles might have been developed successfully. The time, of course, was not to be had.
When the occupation forces came ashore on Japanese soil, the enemy’s technical intelligence officers soon visited our research and development centers. They paid special attention to the Yokosuka Naval Air Research and Development Center, where we had conducted the bulk of our aeronautical engineering activities. The scene which greeted the American technicians was not one of which we were proud, for our leading research installation was by then a confused collection of thin-walled wooden and stucco buildings. Lack of repairs had allowed the green and brown camouflage paint to peel from the riddled aircraft hangars. Those airplanes still on the field were in terrible condition, desperately in need of maintenance. Many of the planes were scarred with bullet and cannon-shell holes from the strafing of the American fighters. Equipment lay haphazardly on the ground, left by the disheartened engineers and crewmen.
The surface picture did not tell the entire story, for much of our research work went on within the security of the Yokosuka limestone hills. In these subterranean chambers we had set up aircraft hangars, machine shops, assembly lines, storage facilities, and living quarters. The underground installations were actually complete experimental aircraft factories.
Here, too, the misery and dissolution of a hopeless battle were evident, for the once-efficient and neat workshops had given way to filth and uncertain routine. Our work had become disorganized and, as defeat became ever more inevitable, even haphazard. The loss of supplies, machine tools, and vitally needed materials meant that our technicians must obtain their “precision parts” through the use of hand benches and tools, and by painstakingly hammering out the thousands of small items of equipment which go into the modern airplane.
This was the engineering and technical status of the air force which only four years before had dominated more than seven thousand miles of Pacific and Indian oceans.
Technical and Administrative Factors Which Hampered Production
1. The urgent needs of the combat air corps forced the Army and Navy to place in production several types of experimental aircraft which lacked the required test flights and design modifications. Airplanes were rushed from the experimental hangars to the production line, with the result that the planes were dispatched to the front lines before we could determine the missions which they could most effectively perform. Our engineers lacked the time necessary to prepare maintenance manuals and texts; thus the front-line mechanics, plagued with primitive working conditions, were forced to service airplanes about which they understood little. The confusion of the maintenance crews inevitably caused equipment malfunction and breakage on a prohibitive scale. Typical of these planes were the Raiden, Shiden, Shiden-kai, Ginga, Tojo, and the Type 4 fighter.
Shortages in raw materials and aviation fuel contributed primarily to the final collapse of the aircraft industry. The items most in demand were aluminum and the alloy steels. The allocation of aluminum for aircraft production decreased from a 1942 figure of 6.5 tons per airplane to 5.3 tons in 1943 and, in 1944, to only 3.8 tons. By late 1944 the industry was slowing down because of the scarcity of alloy steels. The use of substitute materials for vital engine parts further slowed production, as our workers were forced to pay more attention to heat treatment, forging, and final assembly. We suffered a sudden increase in the failure of crankshafts, gears, and other critical engine parts. The inadequacies of the Material Mobilization Plan made it impossible to alleviate the situation.
Our natural crude oil resources, compared to our national requirements, are barely worth mention. Consequently an extended war in which our sea routes were cut—as happened in 1944 and early 1945—could only mean critical fuel shortages. By July of 1944 we found ourselves severely handicapped by a lack of aviation fuel. Pilot training was cut drastically, and commanding officers on the front were ordered to send their planes out on only the most essential missions. Engineers were forced to reduce the bench-test time for new engines and consequently ordered those same engines into production even when they were plagued with operating difficulties. The best example was the Homare (Ha-45) power plant used in several Navy and one Army combat plane. Despite their aerodynamic configurations and high power, constant engine trouble and long hours of maintenance consistently grounded the airplanes.
3. Throughout the war the aircraft industry labored under the unrealistic demand that it manufacture an excessive number of production types; that it slow production in order to build numerous prototypes, and that it effect far too many modifications to aircraft already on the assembly lines. These military requirements severely overburdened the small group of competent engineers available to the industry; the endless attrition of engineering manpower eventually resulted in great confusion between the drafting rooms and the production line. The fundamental sources of the trouble were the Army and Navy; the two organizations lacked a fundamental understanding of the actual nature of engineering, and were given to making unreasonable demands. The engineers further aggravated the situation by failing to take a determined stand against these constant orders from military headquarters; had they done so, many of their problems could have been obviated.
4. Japan’s generally low industrial capacity always proved detrimental to our attempts to realize mass production of precision equipment. Engine production, for example, never equaled the output of airframes, causing a surplus of the latter. Frankly, Japan did not meet the European technical standards of such basic industries as those which processed raw materials and produced the machined tools necessary for the aircraft factories. Another great fault was that our plant managers never mastered the techniques of controlling the sprawling aircraft plants. Naturally, the inefficiency which inevitably arose indirectly cost us many airframe and engine units.
Management inadequacies were highlighted when war broke out and the government called for a substantial increase in production. Not only did the major plants suffer from their own deficiencies, but they were forced to accept parts produced by subcontractors which were clearly of inferior quality. These subcontractors were small machine shops scattered throughout the cities and towns; there did not exist a single criterion of quality for the thousands of small shops. As a result, the major plants were forced to destroy a great deal of the material received.
5. The majority of
our engineers were handicapped from the beginning of their design programs. Anxious to acquire the world’s leading fighters and bombers, the military services issued performance specifications clearly beyond the capacity of our industry. Attempting to meet these unrealistic demands, engineers often overextended themselves and produced designs which, while admittedly modern, actually lay outside the realm of sound engineering. Impressed perhaps by the performance results of prototype aircraft, the government ordered new planes, engines, and equipment into mass production. We paid for our rashness in time, material, and energy, for the production machines had to be sent to modification centers for extensive alterations. Production likewise suffered as the engineers repeatedly modified their products to eliminate many of the technical “bugs.”
6. Our industry never filled its minimum requirements for qualified technicians and skilled factory workers. This unhappy situation resulted from the nation’s general low industrial standard; furthermore, the aircraft factories could borrow from other industries only a handful of able technical personnel. In this respect, the military services seemed bent on increasing our difficulties for, except on rare occasions, they refused to consider individual cases in the conscription program, and we watched our experienced men drift away to war along with the unskilled laborers.
7. Japan paid heavily for her failure scientifically to plan the location of aircraft factories, and by 1942 our airframe, engine, instrument, and equipment factories had become concentrated in and around large cities. This failure to disperse enabled the enemy B-29s to perform their task of destruction with little difficulty in finding targets; the massed factories literally invited the rain of bombs. We paid heavily to prepare facilities in outlying areas when the government ordered plant dispersal; but not until we began to suffer heavy damage was the dispersal order given. We never managed to return our plants to normal operation after the air attacks commenced. An added crippling blow was the Tokai area earthquake in December of 1944. Not only were the great Mitsubishi and Aichi airframe plants paralyzed completely for at least a month, but they never overcame fully the effects of the devastating earthquake.
CHAPTER 26
Defense of the Mainland: The B-29 Appears
WHEN JAPANESE SHIPS AND planes swept over more than six thousand miles of the Pacific and Indian oceans to launch the Pacific War, the government had a specific plan of defense for the homeland. We would capture every enemy air-base outpost within bombing range of Japan to deny the Americans or the British the installations from which to mount air attacks; further, we would destroy the majority of enemy aircraft carriers so that their smaller planes would not be able to bomb our cities. It was chiefly for this reason that the Japanese Navy occupied Wake Island, Guam, and air bases in the Philippines and along the sea coast of China. Even the Pearl Harbor attack was planned, to a great extent, with the defense of the Japanese mainland in mind.
These early operations achieved their objectives, but only to a limited extent and for a limited period of time. We occupied every air base we had intended to, but the Pearl Harbor attack failed to catch any of the American carriers we wished to sink. And, on April 18, 1942, the first American planes flew over Tokyo in what was admittedly a raid essentially for morale-boosting and propaganda purposes. Eventually B-29 formations were to blacken our skies and reduce our cities to charred wreckage, but this still was far in the future.
The details of the air attacks upon Japan which culminated in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are known to every Japanese, and have been more than adequately described in the United States. There are certain aspects of this aerial strangulation, however, which have not previously been presented, and are here made available. Some material appearing in these pages cannot, of course, be entirely unknown to the student of the Pacific War, but the air war against the Japanese mainland cannot be overemphasized, for its effects were beyond the comprehension of both the Japanese and the enemy.
At the time of the Doolittle raid on Japan I (Okumiya) was an air staff member of the 11th Combined Air Flotilla with headquarters at the Kasumigaura Air Corps base approximately twenty-five miles northeast of Tokyo. I was able to witness part of the raid, watching a B-25 skimming low near our headquarters.
We knew that “something was up” in the Pacific. Since April 10 the wireless communications of the American Pacific fleet indicated that a carrier task force might approach the Japanese mainland. It seemed that sometime after April 14 the Americans would launch a carrier-plane attack against the main island of Honshu. Admiral Yamamoto ordered immediate countermeasures. He alerted all the patrol vessels in the Pacific Ocean within six hundred nautical miles of the mainland to make special daily patrols of the sea east of Japan and, at the same time, ordered all available Navy planes to assemble in the Tokyo area.
At 6:30 A.M. on April 18 Tokyo headquarters received a flash warning from our patrol boat No. 23, Nitto-Maru, which was on regular duty in the specified danger area. The boat’s captain radioed that he had sighted three American aircraft carriers six hundred nautical miles east of Inubo Point; we never heard from the ship after the first report. Obviously the carrier escorts had destroyed the vessel. Several hours later, at 9:45 A.M., a Betty patrol bomber confirmed the existence of enemy planes in the area; it had sighted two enemy bombers between five and six hundred nautical miles east of Tokyo.
On the basis of the original patrol vessel report, the commander of the Yokosuka Naval Station and the Army commander of the Tokyo area issued an air-raid warning at 8:30 A.M. Their respective fighter planes were ordered to be in the air by twelve noon. By the noon hour three Type 96 (Claude) fighters from the Kasumigaura Air Corps circled at ten thousand feet, and two other fighters waited at the air base for take off orders. None of us at Kasumigaura expected the enemy air attack before the late afternoon at the earliest, since the American carriers had only single-engine bombers.
We could not know, of course, that Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle’s sixteen bombers aboard the Hornet would be fast, twin-engined North American B-25s, or that the attack had been planned so that the B-29s would leave the carriers four hundred miles from Japan. The patrol vessel sighting forced the Americans to launch their planes six hundred and twenty miles off the coast, which consequently meant they would arrive over their target several hours earlier than we expected. Actually, Doolittle’s men left the Hornet ten hours ahead of schedule.
The enemy bombers flew toward Japan at a height of only fifteen to twenty feet. At approximately 1:00 P.M. we received word that American planes, flying very fast, low, and not in formation, were over the mainland. The enemy’s tactics were superb. Their “on-the-deck” flight had completely fooled our air-defense system, and the three fighters circling ten thousand feet over the Flotilla base never even saw the B-25s. Since we were a primary training unit, we did not have available a single Zero fighter at any of the four bases around Kasumigaura. When the B-25s bombed Tokyo, not a single anti-aircraft gun fired at the bombers and not a single fighter plane went in pursuit. The sixteen B-25s scattered their hits and struck at north, central, and south Tokyo, Kanagawa, Yokohama, Yokosuka, Kobe, Osaka, and Nagoya.
When the sixteen B-25s attacked Honshu, the Navy had already completed its plans for the Midway Operation, but not without serious opposition from some high-level Navy quarters. The Doolittle attack served Yamamoto’s needs in that the bombing thoroughly silenced the dissenting voices. Fortunately, the public was well aware that this type of sporadic air attack could not cause serious damage and was little disturbed. We understood, however, that the Americans had accomplished their primary purpose of boosting the morale of their own people—then apprehensive because of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the loss of so many islands and ships in the Pacific—with this single raid.
The Doolittle raid spurred plans to strengthen Japan’s homeland defense against future bombings. Ever since the start of the war homeland defense had been
the Army’s responsibility, with the Navy relegated strictly to cooperate with the Army at the latter’s convenience. The April 18 attack brought forth a government order that henceforth both services would take every measure to create an effective air defense.
Passive defense measures were considerable, but little actually was done to increase the number of fighters and interceptors for mainland patrol against bombers which might not appear for long months or years. The disastrous plane losses incurred at Midway, the air battle at Guadalcanal, and the unexpected attrition of planes in the Solomons and Rabaul areas had steadily drained our available fighter strength. Neither the Army nor the Navy had anticipated such devastating defeats, and the requirements of the frontline forces dictated that every available fighter plane and anti-aircraft weapon originally assigned to homeland defense be shipped to the Pacific. In later months, with the war steadily approaching the home islands, the people called for increased defenses against impending enemy air attacks. We could do little to answer these pleas, for we desperately needed every plane along our shrinking defense lines.
In the summer of 1943 we obtained for the first time accurate information concerning the new Boeing B-29 bomber, the Superfortress, which reputedly had a radius of action far in excess of that of the Consolidated B-24 Liberator. On June 15, 1944, the B-29 appeared over the mainland for the first time. The Americans had opened the final battle for Japan.
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