The B-29 was a gigantic leap forward in aviation technology. It was the longest, widest, heaviest airplane in the world, bigger, faster, and more formidable than its famous predecessor, the B-17 Flying Fortress. Its 2,200-horsepower engines were the most powerful yet in aviation history. It carried the biggest bomb load of any plane built, ten tons, four tons more than the B-17. Its top speed of 357 miles per hour was fifty-five mph faster than that of the B-17. And its range of 3,800 miles with a full bomb load was double that of the Fortress. It was a sixty-ton destruction machine capable of flying more than sixteen hours nonstop when fully loaded. Unlike all other aircraft, it had pressurized crew compartments, and a pressurized tube—a crawl space—connecting the front and rear sections of the plane. At altitudes up to 40,000 feet, in minus fifty degree temperatures, its eleven-man crew flew in comfort, without cumbersome heated flying suits and oxygen masks. And this Cadillac of the skies had a revolutionary remote controlled firing system. “In earlier planes, each gunner manually controlled and aimed just one set of guns,” explained Major Charles W. Sweeney, one of the first test pilots. “With the B-29, a single gunner could control several turrets with one sight and be able to direct all the fire on a single target.”5 It was truly “a super fortress, a super plane,” recalls Captain Harry George. “Shirtsleeve atmosphere. Flush rivets. Powerful engines. Big. New type of bombsight. Altitude pressurized. We loved it. It was just a beautiful, beautiful plane.”6
A FLIGHT AND GROUND CREW OF THE 504TH BOMB WING (USAAF).
The crews who serviced it, as well as those who flew it, had an almost reverential affection for the plane. “The B-29s are silvery, without camouflage paint of any kind, and the [ground] crews laboriously smooth out tiny wrinkles on the exteriors and polish the silver skins far beyond necessity,” wrote St. Clair McKelway. “Any night in the Marianas, you can find B-29 crew members fooling around a perfectly airworthy B-29, fussing with it as an older generation used to fuss with the new car out in the garage after dinner.”7
The B-29 had been in development since before Pearl Harbor, and the government would spend more money on it than on the Manhattan Project. The plane was initially plagued by mechanical problems, the most persistent being a nasty tendency for the engines to overheat and catch fire. Test pilots were killed, so, initially, nobody wanted to fly it. Air Force chief Hap Arnold asked General Carl “Tooey” Spaatz, head of American air operations in Europe, to send him the best bomber pilot he had to help make the B-29 operational, and Spaatz sent back Colonel Paul Tibbets of Columbus, Ohio. Tibbets had led the Eighth Air Force’s first strategic bombing raid of the war in August 1942 from a tiny airfield in the English Midlands. Working with aeronautical engineers in the States, Tibbets—who soon became known as “Mr. B-29”—had the plane battle-ready in early 1944.
A B-29 TAIL GUNNER (USAAF).
It still had bugs, but they would have to be worked out in combat. Arnold wanted the Superfortress in the fight as soon as possible. It was mass-produced too late to be deployed in Europe, where all the runways would have had to be length ened and strengthened. But Arnold was convinced that this tremendous instrument of war could finish off Japan without an invasion of the home islands, making the case, in the process, for the creation of a separate Air Force—independent of the Army—after the war. To ensure that he had complete control over the use of the bomber, Arnold pressed for the establishment of a new Army Air Force, the Twentieth, under his command. He got his wish, and the first B-29s were sent to India in the spring of 1944. From India they flew over the Hump—the Himalaya mountains whose jagged peaks rose to almost 30,000 feet—to bases in the Chengtu Valley in western China, where they conducted raids against coke plants, steel mills, and oil facilities in western Japan, Formosa, and Manchuria. But these China airstrips, built by local laborers who smashed stones with primitive hand tools, were out of range of Japan’s great industrial cities.
GENERAL CURTIS LEMAY (NA).
On June 15, D-Day on Saipan, the China-based B-29s made their first attack on Japan, against a steel mill on Kyushu. Sixty planes reached the target, but only one bomb hit the plant. Seven bombers were lost, six of them as a result of mechanical problems and weather. Later high-altitude daylight missions were equally ineffective. More bombs landed in rice paddies than on steel furnaces and too many planes were lost. Another problem was logistics. Since the Japanese controlled the main ports of China, “we had to fly in all our own gasoline and bombs,” recalls Wing Commander James V. Edmundson. “It took roughly fifteen trips over the Hump to get enough gasoline and bombs to fly one sortie to Japan.”8
In an attempt to turn things around, Hap Arnold sent in General Curtis E. LeMay, one of the top guns from the Eighth Air Force, the main American striking arm in the bomber war against Hitler’s Fortress Europe. At age thirty-eight, he was the youngest two-star general in the Army Air Forces and had been almost single-handedly responsible for improving bombing performance in the toughest air theater in the world, where the Eighth Air Force was taking more casualties than the Marines in the Pacific. A beefy, stern-jawed disciplinarian who bluntly spoke his mind—he was jokingly nicknamed “The Diplomat”—LeMay was a large, imposing man whose round face was frozen in a perpetual scowl. But, unknown to most of his men, that was a symptom of Bell’s palsy, which partially paralyzed the facial muscles at the corners of his mouth. His exterior toughness hid a ferocious dedication to the air crews who served under him in both Europe and Asia. He was a fanatic about discipline because he was convinced that discipline under fire saved lives. And he didn’t believe in screaming to get results; he spoke so softly he could hardly be heard from a few feet away. “His speaking style—barely audible sentence fragments murmured through clenched teeth—reinforced his aura as a borderline sociopath,” recalls one of his pilots. And his “smoldering gaze” gave the impression that “running a bombing campaign wasn’t quite stimulating enough for him, that he wouldn’t mind taking apart a few Quonset huts with his bare hands.”9
LeMay improved crew performance, if not bombing results, but from the time he arrived in China in August of 1944, he realized that his operation was doomed. “It didn’t work,” he said later. “No one could have made it work. It was founded on an utterly absurd logistics basis.”10 No air armada that had to feed its own fuel to itself over treacherous mountains could hope to be successful.
The only reason bases had been built in China, LeMay felt, was that “our entire Nation howled like a pack of wolves for an attack on the Japanese homeland.”11 Hap Arnold knew that the future of the B-29 was in the Marianas, and he had pressed the Navy to push up the timetable for their conquest. In the Marianas, Nimitz’s ships would be able to meet the bomber’s prodigious supply requirements, and from there the plane could reach the concentrated six-city complex around Tokyo that housed more than half of all Japanese industry and 20 percent of the country’s population.
As soon as Saipan was taken, China operations began to be phased out. By November, there were over 100 B-29s on Saipan and Hansell targeted the Japanese aircraft industry, hoping to destroy enemy air defenses in preparation for an American invasion of the home islands. Possum Hansell would first hit the Musashi aircraft engine factory, in a suburb of Tokyo, destroying it, he anticipated, with pinpoint precision, his bombardiers using the Air Force’s top secret Norden bombsight, the most accurate bomb-guiding device in the world. Brigadier General Emmett “Rosie” O’Donnell, commander of the only bombardment wing on Saipan at the time, flew in the lead plane, Dauntless Dotty, on this mission. His pilot was Major Robert K. Morgan, one of the first pilots in the Eighth Air Force to complete twenty—five missions, the required tour of duty in that theater, flying the Memphis Belle, the plane made famous by Hollywood director William Wyler’s wartime documentary of the same name. After returning to the States with his crew for an Air Force publicity tour, Morgan had volunteered for duty in the Pacific.
One hundred and eleven of Hansell’s silvery raiders took
off on November 24, a spectacular Pacific morning, to a target 1,300 miles away. It was an unprecedented mission. No aircraft had ever been asked to fly into battle with such loads over so great a distance, and the entire run up to Japan and back—thirteen to eighteen hours of air time—was over unfriendly waters. Merely getting off the ground could be a hair-raising ordeal. If one engine quit “you probably wouldn’t make it to the end of the runway,” recalls a B-29 crew member. “One night we didn’t fly a mission and we were down at the Quonset hut site and looked up and I could practically read a newspaper five miles from the base because of the planes burning at the end of the runway. There were four of them down there, burning up gasoline and bombs.” On returning to base, pilots had to put down these long-bodied monsters, each of them half the size of a football field, on specks of coral in the limitless Pacific, often in fast-forming tropical storms and in massively overcrowded air traffic patterns.
But Hansell was a pioneer in formulating the doctrine of strategic bombing from what the Air Force called Very Long Range, and he was confident he could train his crews to get excellent results with their million-dollar machines.12 His cocky crews, who had already begun calling themselves the Saipan Hunting Club, were in high spirits, proud to be part of the first bombing raid on Tokyo since Jimmy Doolittle’s in the spring of 1942, when America was losing the war. “That beautiful silver, gorgeous thing was just cruising through [the Japanese defenses],” recalls the pilot of Joltin’ Josie, the plane Hansell had hoped to fly, leading the mission, but was ordered not to by Hap Arnold. “My airplanes were tucked in [the formation], looking like champs. And here were those poor frustrated Japanese firing with everything they had. I just thought to myself, ‘Wow there is no way that these people can beat us. There is no way that we can’t beat them. We are too good for these people.’”13
B-29S ON A HIGH-ALTITUDE MISSION OVER JAPAN (USAAF).
That month the Saipan Hunting Club celebrated the grand opening of its clubhouse, a Quonset hut with a long bar and a few tables and chairs. “The drink of choice that night,” says Robert Morgan, a legendary imbiber, “was Purple Passion, a concoction of 180-proof grain alcohol and grape juice, and light on the grape juice, please.” Two days later, the date of their next mission, “the hangovers had begun to wear off a little.”14
One of the fliers in the Saipan Hunting Club was a twenty-six-year-old published poet named John Ciardi, a gunner who had just arrived on the island. “One of my teachers.” he wrote in his Saipan diary, “used to say that the best possible job for a writer was in the Fire Department—action in concentrated doses with long spells of musing leisure between. This life fits the requirement. I would like, though, to get over a target—even Tokio.”15 Ciardi would not get his wish until December 3, but more than a thousand other crewmen in 111 planes went up with Rosie O’Donnell and Robert Morgan on November 24. They would encounter challenges that autumn afternoon that no one had anticipated.
FEAR
Approaching Tokyo, everyone worried about the flak and the fighters. The flak was heavy but inaccurate, and the Japanese planes that came up after them fought cautiously and were fat targets for the bombers’ overwhelming firepower. It was the weather—the Siberian jet stream and heavy cloud cover—that caused most of the problems. “Over Japan, at 30,000 feet, the winds were from 150 to 200 miles per hour,” says pilot John Jennings. “So if you were coming into the wind, you were going probably thirty, forty, fifty miles an hour over the target. You were over the target so long they could shoot the heck out of you.
“All right, so we could turn around and come in downwind. That was the answer. No. Now you’re going over 500 miles per hour [sometimes up to 500 miles per hour] and the Norden bombsight couldn’t figure out when to drop those things. So … we were getting nowhere.”
The Norden bombsight failed to compensate for these demon winds, which played havoc with the bombs, and the clouds were so thick that only twenty-four of the 111 planes dropped bombs in the vicinity of the aircraft factory. The bomber fleet lost only one plane to the Japanese, but in losing it the surviving crews witnessed the depths of the enemy’s desperation. The downed B-29 was struck by a stripped down Japanese fighter that managed, without the extra weight of its guns, to reach the altitude of the B-29s. “No one who saw it was sure why it occurred,” Robert Morgan re members. “Some believed it was on purpose, a kamikaze attack, others claimed the Zero had been crippled by gunfire and collided with the Superfort accidentally.”16 If it was a deliberate ramming attack, it was the first of many, and they would grow more intense with each raid. Inspired by the kamikaze fliers, the fighter pilots would come boring in on the American bombers at closing speeds of up to 600 miles per hour. Most of them would be blown out of the sky by the bombers’ gunners before they could make lethal contact with the B-29s, but “we lost considerable planes, wings knocked off, engines knocked out … even the noses shattered,” says bombardier Ed Keyser. “After the first raid, nothing came at us from behind,” recalls John Ciardi. “The Japanese lined up across the sky and came in to ram. They would all swarm on the B-29 and finish it off.”17
Another of the enemy’s weapons was Iwo Jima, the largest of Japan’s Volcano Islands, which sat squarely astride the B-29 routes, almost exactly midway between the Marianas and Japan. The big bombers had to fly a fuel-consuming dogleg around Iwo Jima, but the Japanese could still pick them up on their radar and radio ahead to the Tokyo air defense system, giving it a two-hour warning. Fighters using Iwo’s two airstrips were also a problem. “They could pick you off coming and going,” says Edmundson. “You could be limping back from a bombing raid [with a busted-up plane], trying to squeeze your gas to have enough to get back to Tinian, and these guys would come sailing in on you and jump you out of Iwo.”
Precision bombing from the long coral runways of the Marianas never worked the way Hansell had hoped it would. Subsequent missions over Tokyo, and over the Mitsubishi Aircraft Engine Works in Nagoya, Japan’s third largest city, were only marginally more effective than the first Tokyo raid. The Japanese radio ridiculed Hansell’s precision bombing, calling it “Blind Bombing.” But for the first month or so, crew morale was surprisingly high. “I was cockeyed proud of the crew,” John Ciardi wrote after his first mission. “This is the pilot’s air corps, but it takes eleven men to fly a 29. And eleven men have to lose their fear and be sure of themselves before a crew can function. We functioned.”18
The men were not blind to the moral dimensions of their work. “We were in the terrible business of burning out Japanese towns,” Ciardi observed after the war. “That meant women and old people, children. One part of me—a surviving savage voice—says, I’m sorry we left any of them living. I wish we’d finished killing them all. Of course, as soon as rationality overcomes the first impulse, you say, Now, come on, this is the human race, let’s try to be civilized.
“I had to condition myself to be a killer. This was remote control. All we did was push buttons. I didn’t see anybody we killed.”19
Although Ciardi believed in the war against Japan, he thought of himself as a poet, not a soldier. And as he flew more missions, he began to experience doubts that he could continue to do his war work. He started to have “sudden chemical anxieties.” He was scared, scared in advance of every raid, and he couldn’t dial down the fear.
He developed little routines to try to settle himself. “Whenever my imagination runs cold and damp I go out and look at a B-29 for five minutes and I’m cured. It’s … a beautiful thing to look at, and it’s pointed the right way.” But the fear grew worse with every raid, and he began to try to rationalize it. “I find myself thinking that it’s foolish to stick my neck out over Japan when my real usefulness and capability as a person and as a unit of society is in writing what needs to be written well. … I’d frankly bow out if I knew how to. I could go to Col. Brannock tomorrow and say I quit and be busted down to private [and be put on permanent garbage detail]. But I can’t let myse
lf and won’t. All the same I know I’d grab at any reasonable excuse to save face…. If I do get killed it will be because I lack the courage to quit.”20
FIRE STICKS
In January 1945, Curtis LeMay replaced Haywood Hansell and changed bombing tactics. He experimented with firebombing, with mixed results, and had the planes go in lower, at 25,000 rather than 30,000 feet, to allow the navigators to see the target better and to cut down on mechanical breakdowns by putting less strain on the engines. Flying this low, the B-29s could also get underneath the jet stream winds and drop their incendiaries more accurately. The men objected. They saw that extra 5,000 feet as their “margin for life.” At 30,000 feet, the enemy fighters had difficulty get ting to them and the flak was far less accurate. “This 25,000 ft. business is bad stuff. … Losses are going to be heavy,” Ciardi confided to his diary. “This man I have never seen will very likely be what kills me.” That night Ciardi wrote a letter home to be mailed “in case I didn’t come back.”21
Curtis LeMay had arrived on Saipan with a reputation as a “cigar-chomping miracle worker,” but his bombing tactics were as unproductive as Hansell’s.22 “We were still going in too high, still running into those big jet stream winds upstairs. Weather was almost always as bad,” LeMay confessed later.23 In early March, under pressure from Hap Arnold to launch a maximum mission against Japan, he changed tactics radically. John Ciardi described the new approach: “He said, Go in at night from five thousand feet, without gunners, just a couple of rear-end observers. We’ll save weight on the turrets and on ammunition. The Japanese have no fighter resistance at night. They have no radar. We’ll drop fire sticks.”24
D-DAYS IN THE PACIFIC Page 25
