A firestorm also could threaten the airmen who created it. Bomber crews over urban areas had to contend with wind shear as well as incredibly powerful thermals. With temperatures exceeding 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit, firestorms created incredibly violent cyclones and vertical winds that could toss fifty-ton bombers onto their backs.
Captain Gordon B. Robertson and his 29th Group crew flew their first mission that night, receiving a terrifying combat initiation. Caught by searchlights at 5,600 feet, nearly blinded by the glare, Robertson and his copilot fought to keep the wings level until “bombs away.” By then the attack was well developed, with incredible updrafts that lifted some B-29s 5,000 feet. It felt “like a cork on water in a hurricane.”
Abruptly Robertson’s plane rolled, its wings tilted at an angle alarmingly past the vertical. Pilots and crew were conscious of a rain of debris inside the bomber: everything from sand and cigarette butts to oxygen masks falling from the floor. The fliers realized they were upside down. It was a chilling sensation to see the fiery world “below” suddenly appear through the top of the cockpit.
Previously a flight instructor, Robertson oriented himself to the ground. In a maneuver more suited to a fighter, he allowed the huge bomber to fall nose-first through the bottom half of a loop, completing a split-S maneuver that compressed the crew into the seats under the onerous foot of gravity’s elephant. The B-29 accelerated rapidly, clocking 400 mph at the bottom—about as fast as a Superfort ever went. Fighting the heavy aerodynamic loads on the controls, Robertson expended much of the momentum to regain precious altitude. Then he called for a course for home, immensely grateful to be alive.
About ninety fliers died that night and at least six more later perished in captivity. Aircraft losses among the 299 effective sorties totaled fourteen planes downed, ditched, or demolished by enemy action or accident. That equaled 4.6 percent, right in line with LeMay’s eerily accurate prediction of 5 percent. That included two crews lost in bad weather, three bombers ditched in the sea, and one plane crash-landed on Iwo Jima.
The surviving B-29s turned southward with ashes streaked on their glass noses and appalling odors sucked inside the fuselages. Though well below the standard 10,000 feet for oxygen masks, some men strapped on their masks to escape the stench of burning flesh.
* * * * *
Tokyo’s survivors struggled to deal with the massive calamity and found no standard of comparison. Medical services were reduced to insignificance: the only military rescue unit in the capital numbered nine doctors and eleven nurses. Not even the capital’s combined civil and military emergency services could ease human suffering on an industrial scale.
One resident, Fusako Sasaki, recalled, “Stacked up corpses were being hauled away on lorries. Everywhere there was the stench of the dead and of smoke. I saw the places on the pavement where people had been roasted to death. At last I comprehended first-hand what an air raid meant.”
American intelligence monitored a Japanese radio report that said, “Red fire clouds kept creeping high and the tower of the Parliament Building stuck out black against the background of the red sky. During the night we thought the whole of Tokyo had been reduced to ashes.”
Spread by panic-driven rumor, exaggerated Japanese accounts of the disaster had as much as 40 percent of the city destroyed. In truth, 7 percent of metropolitan Tokyo had been razed that night—sixteen square miles. But with that level of destruction inflicted in less than three hours, the capital could well be completely razed in two weeks of continuous operations.
The grimmest measure of Meetinghouse’s meaning was found in a single astonishing number. In ten previous attacks since November, Tokyo had sustained fewer than 1,300 deaths. Then, literally overnight, some 84,000 were killed and 40,000 injured. More than a quarter-million buildings were destroyed, leaving 1.1 million people homeless.
Damage to Japan’s industry was considerable. The sixteen facilities destroyed or badly damaged included steel production, petroleum storage, and public services. Probably no one could calculate the number of small feeder factories and family shops that were incinerated in the residential areas.
One of the most illuminating comments on Meetinghouse came from Major General Haruo Onuma of the Army General Staff: “The effect of incendiary bombing on the capital’s organization and the disposition of factories of Japan was very great, and, accompanying this, the main productive power was stopped. It [also] decreased the will of the people to continue the war.”
A matching civilian perspective came from Tokuji Takeuchi of the Ministry of Interior. “It was the great incendiary attacks on 10 March 1945 on Tokyo which definitely made me realize the defeat.”
The irony of the March 10 attack could not have been lost on General Onuma’s colleagues—it was Army Day, observing Japan’s victory over the Russians at Mukden forty years before.
Blitz Week
On the night of the 12th it was Nagoya’s turn.
The industrial center of Nagoya lay between Tokyo and Osaka. Home to 1.3 million people and numerous aircraft and engine plants, the city had been attacked seven times since December but effective sorties totaled only 340 B-29s. Given the size of the city (nearly forty square miles) LeMay’s planners hoped to deliver a crippling blow with 310 bombers in one night.
However, post-strike reconnaissance on the 12th showed barely two square miles destroyed. The operations order calling for a wider bomb pattern had started innumerable small fires, but they lacked the concentration to merge into a full Meetinghouse conflagration. On the other hand, interceptors were poorly equipped to handle a massed night raid and only one bomber was claimed shot down.
On Tuesday night, March 13, the B-29s went after Osaka, Japan’s third-largest city with a population estimated at 3.2 million. The mission plan returned to the close bomb intervals so effective at Tokyo: tight patterns and maximum compression of the attacking force. For the first hour, two planes crossed the target each minute, mostly attacking below 9,000 feet.
Although concentration was achieved, once again weather affected results. An undercast forced most planes to drop by radar, and the previous Friday’s high winds were absent. Nevertheless, more than eight square miles of industrial area and port facilities were razed—about 13 percent of the built-up area.
Once again incredible vertical winds pummeled the Superforts. One tail gunner was battered so violently that he received a Purple Heart. A 9th Group aircraft was flipped inverted but Captain Stanley Black coolly righted the bomber by completing a high-speed barrel roll. The maneuver cost several thousand feet, and the B-29 flew back to Tinian with warped wings, but it got its crew home. Black received a well-deserved Distinguished Flying Cross only to perish with his crew in May.
At 7,000 feet Major Ray Brashear’s 499th Group crew gaped at the spectacle below. One crewman wrote, “Looked as though the whole city was burning.” Their plane was illuminated by searchlights for an agonizing three minutes but the B-29 sustained no hits. In fact, only one of the 285 attacking bombers failed to return in exchange for more than 4,000 shops and factories destroyed.
After a record 330 Superfortresses congregated for a Meetinghouse over Kobe on March 16–17, Blitz Week ended on Sunday the 19th with Nagoya II. Attacking below 10,000 feet, nearly 300 planes centered their loads on the area called Incendiary Zone One, north of the harbor. Flying through searchlight cones, some B-29s were spotlighted for as long as fifteen minutes, but none was downed. Despite heavy flak, the bombers destroyed or damaged the freight yard, arsenal, Aichi aircraft factory, and the Yamada engineering works, though incomplete coverage permitted the Mitsubishi plant to escape serious harm.
The cost to the Americans for scorching three square miles was one bomber that splashed at sea. The crew was rescued the next day.
* * * * *
Although the four missions after March 10 each destroyed two to eight square miles of urban area, they were disappointing by Tokyo standards. But operations analysts recognized that t
he first strike had been a rarity: seldom would the same factors combine to raze sixteen square miles in one mission. Compressing the bomber stream, proper bomb release interval, and strong surface winds all were necessary to produce a major firestorm.
Overall, in five missions 1,434 sorties burned or damaged thirty square miles in four cities. In return, the blitz exacted a toll of twenty-one Superforts.
Hap Arnold sent a congratulatory message to XXI Bomber Command, concluding, “This is a significant sample of what the Jap can expect in the future. Good luck and good bombing.”
LeMay celebrated by indulging in a box of Havana cigars cadged from the Navy post exchange. His stash of pipe tobacco had mildewed in the tropic climate and he did not favor the American cigars stocked by the Army PX.
Meanwhile, XXI Bomber Command staff well knew that the blitz could not be sustained, nor was it expected to. Five maximum efforts in ten days left the maintenance crews slumped in exhaustion. Additionally, the command had depleted its stock of incendiaries, and the Navy would not deliver the next two shiploads until April 9.
The View from Tokyo
Japanese officials reeled with the implication of Blitz Week. They had seen that America’s vast resources could be massed in homeland airspace almost without limit, inflicting appalling damage while sustaining small loss. The Americans’ sudden shift to low-level attack with incendiary weapons had changed the nature of the air campaign, literally overnight. Freed of the doctrinal tether of high-altitude precision bombing, the B-29s now could sweep away factories by the dozens, rather than trying to hit them singly from 30,000 feet.
A reasoned assessment was made by Lieutenant General Noboru Tazoe, commanding the 5th Air Division. After the war he stated, “It became apparent in March 1945 that Japan could not win the war when the B-29s wrought extensive damage, especially in the case of small factories scattered throughout the cities.”
Apart from the enormous damage inflicted on Japan’s industrial infrastructure, another factor quickly emerged: absenteeism. The Swiss Red Cross reported from Nagoya, “After the first B-29 raid with fire bombs, fear became so great that workers began remaining at home merely because they were afraid to be caught in war plants when another raid might strike.”
Physically and psychologically, Japanese industry was being dismantled. But Tokyo fought on.
Meanwhile, Emperor Hirohito insisted on seeing the carnage for himself. His retainers were concerned that an Imperial motorcade would draw the Americans’ attention, so a small convoy was arranged with minimal security and no advance notice. Palace staffers had ventured far enough afield to acquaint themselves with the situation. They were appalled, returning with ghastly tales of mounded bodies melted together in barriers over two meters high. Nevertheless, on the 18th—eight days after the Tokyo calamity and the same day as Nagoya II—the emperor ventured forth.
As crown prince, the twenty-two-year-old Hirohito had ridden a horse through much of Tokyo’s rubble following the catastrophic earthquake and fire of 1923, but that sad memory faded in comparison to 1945’s appalling reality. Riding in his suitably appointed and armored limousine, Hirohito realized that relatively few of his dazed, surviving subjects noted the gold chrysanthemum pennant on his Mercedes-Benz 770, and some were too numbed to bow.
The big, two-tone auto made its way through the rubble-strewn streets at 20 mph, the emperor occasionally stopping to speak with local officials. In one ward alone, fifty houses remained of nearly 13,000, and more than 10,000 people were known dead or injured. Everywhere the heart-wrenching sights and reeking smells lingered: blackened wreckage, eviscerated buildings, broken water mains, some spewing sewage. Ultimately, four weeks would be required to dispose of at least 84,000 corpses.
On days that might have been resplendent with cherry blossoms, logjams of blackened, bloated corpses clotted Tokyo’s Sumida River. One resident remembered, “I felt nauseated and even more scared than before.”
The emperor’s thoughts must have been varied: from the incredible loss of life to irreparable damage to the city to reduction of manufacturing capacity. Apparently the last thing that occurred to him was to end the war.
Suppressing the Kamikazes
Japan’s aerial suicide threat was well established by March 1945, and it was not going away. Kamikaze squadrons had debuted in the Philippines five months before, with spectacular effect. Between late October 1944 and the end of January 1945, about 375 kamikazes sank sixteen American ships and damaged eighty-seven. The Tokkotai (suicide troops) would certainly appear at Okinawa to contest the upcoming April landings.
Complying with the Joint Chiefs directive, the 20th Air Force attacked kamikaze bases from March 27 to May 11. In those six weeks three-quarters of the Marianas B-29 missions hammered nineteen Kyushu and Shikoku airfields with nearly 2,000 sorties.
The airfield campaign resembled nothing so much as a contraceptive directed against the kamikaze hatcheries. Rather than trying to smash every potentially lethal egg, the B-29s sought to ravage each nest by destroying the bases or rendering them impotent.
Most of the attacks were conducted in squadron strength, typically with eight to twelve bombers dropping fifty tons of bombs on each field. Though hangars and workshops were targeted, the major damage was done to runways. However, the industrious Japanese proved efficient in conducting repairs, leading to frequent repeat B-29 strikes. Therefore, on some missions more than half the bombs were delayed-action—from one to thirty-six hours—to dissuade repair crews.
LeMay ran the airfield campaign in three phases, beginning slowly. Phase One involved just three operations over thirteen days, totaling 265 effective sorties against seven primary targets. The missions had little to show for their efforts. In fact, Vice Admiral Matome Ugaki, the kamikaze warlord, reckoned the effort “pinpricks.” He noted that one of the early attacks missed the target entirely and killed a lone farmer in a field.
Phase Two represented a serious effort. Between April 17 and 29 the Marianas command operated on eight of thirteen days, averaging 133 bombers each. LeMay firmly believed in a “restrike” policy, targeting some fields six or seven times to keep the bases beaten down. Kokubu, Kanoya, and Kanoya East on southern Kyushu especially drew repeated visits.
The heaviest bomber losses of the campaign occurred on April 28 when five B-29s went down. But that figure represented 4 percent of the 122 planes that attacked six bases.
Even with small losses, every statistic concealed a heartache. Outbound from Japan that day, the 39th Group’s Black Sheep saw another B-29 in extremis. Ganged by “a swarm of interceptors,” and with one engine afire, Lieutenant Alexander Orionchek’s bomber had no chance by itself. But Captain John H. Pulley, Jr., never wavered. He maneuvered Black Sheep into position to defend his squadron mate, remaining with him until ninety miles offshore.
Pulley’s crew watched the crippled aircraft execute a water landing and counted all twelve fliers in the water. Though running low on fuel, Black Sheep remained overhead, dropping life rafts, radios, and supplies to the downed crew while summoning a B-29 “super Dumbo” with more rescue equipment. Then Black Sheep lightened its load by jettisoning guns and other gear, milking every pint of fuel. It was just enough: Pulley landed at Iwo Jima, probably with insufficient gasoline for another circuit of the landing pattern.
The next day three Superfortresses were dispatched to relocate Orionchek’s men. Hours later word came that a full crew had been rescued—from another group. Nothing more was ever heard of Alexander Orionchek or his eleven crewmen.
In the third anti-kamikaze phase XXI Bomber Command scaled back the effort. Though flying on eight days between April 30 to May 11, only 390 B-29s attacked their primary targets: fewer than fifty per day.
The Japanese could do nothing to stop the airfield strikes, but they still tried, and twenty-one B-29s were lost on the ninety-one missions from March to May. On April 29, the 498th Group lost a plane and crew to air-to-air bombing—a tactic frequentl
y tried but seldom successful. However, Lieutenant Greer’s unnamed airplane was forced out of formation by conventional fighter attacks, leaving it vulnerable. Other crews from the 873rd Squadron saw a bomb strike the center of the fuselage. “Shortly afterwards the plane was seen to go into a steep dive, then a violent spin. The aircraft crashed on land and was mercilessly strafed by Jap fighters.”
Whether the serious U.S. naval losses off Okinawa would have been worse without the B-29 effort is uncertain. The three major kamikaze attacks from April 6 to 16 involved some 700 suicide sorties. The next three kikusui, or large-scale “floating chrysanthemum” kamikaze operations launched during the B-29 airfield attacks totaled 490, or one-third less. By that measure the Army Air Forces effort was somewhat successful.
However, in the forty-six days of 20th Air Force attacks on suicide bases, twenty American ships were sunk by air attack and forty damaged so severely that they never returned to action. Therefore, the naval hemorrhaging averaged 1.3 ships a day in that period, three times the rate before and after the B-29 missions. How much worse the Navy might have suffered without the Superforts at the height of the Japanese effort can only be surmised, though LeMay’s skepticism about bombing airfields apparently was borne out.
Whatever the pros or cons of diverting B-29s from the strategic mission, there was room for reflection. One Superfortress crewman summed up the AAF attitude when he said, “These airfields are certainly not a strategic target but the Navy must be hurting to divert our attention to them.”
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