D-DAYS IN THE PACIFIC

by Donald L. Miller

  These were small cylinders—weighing six pounds—filled with napalm, an insidious new weapon of warfare developed by Standard Oil and DuPont in 1944. Napalm was gelatinized gasoline that created running rivers of fire, ferociously hot fires that were nearly impossible to put out by conventional means. And napalm stuck to anything it came into contact with: animate or inanimate. It would be shatteringly effective in Tokyo, LeMay reasoned, where 90 percent of the structures were built of wood or heavy paper. Stripping the planes of guns and gunners and going in low would save on fuel. Extra gas tanks for the high-altitude missions were stored in the bomb bays. No extra tanks meant extra incendiaries.

  B-29 CREW RECEIVING LAST-MINUTE INSTRUCTIONS FROM THE PILOT (USAAF).

  The fire sticks were stored in large cylinders, which were packed together in bundles, “Molotov flower baskets,” the Japanese would call them. When these clusters were dropped, they broke apart above the target, filling the sky with dozens of containers of napalm. Each stick would ignite on contact, setting a small fire, and thousands of these small fires would merge, creating a city-consuming conflagration.

  But Curtis LeMay wanted to do more than start a big urban fire. He wanted to start a firestorm—a thermal hurricane that kills by heat and suffocation, as flames suck oxygen out of the atmosphere. He wanted to create a holocaust.

  There were precedents. In late July 1945, Britain’s Royal Air Force launched a succession of night raids against the great German city of Hamburg, killing at least 45,000 people—most of them women, children, and the elderly—and leaving 400,000 survivors homeless. It was suffering and loss never seen before in a bombing raid. In ten days, more civilians were killed in Hamburg than would be killed in Great Britain by German bombs during the entire war. And most of them died in the firestorm created by the bombs, not directly under the bombs. The brains of fire victims fell from their burst temples and tiny children “lay like fried eels on the pavement. Even in death,” said a witness, “they showed signs of how they must have suffered—their hands and arms stretched out as if to protect themselves from that pitiless heat.”25

  Then on the night of February 13-14, 1944, Air Marshal Arthur Harris’s bombers, with some help the following day from the American Eighth Air Force, started an equally vicious firestorm in Dresden, in eastern Germany. The hurricane of fire incinerated the center of the city, killing between 30,000 and 40,000 civilians, many of them refugees fleeing the Red Army, which had begun its final, furious drive on Berlin that January. The writer Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., a German prisoner of war in Dresden, survived the fire in the meat locker of a slaughterhouse. When he and his fellow prisoners were led out of the shelter the next day, Dresden was “like the moon now,” Vonnegut would write later, “nothing but minerals.” The prisoners noticed “little logs” lying on the pavements. “They were people who had been caught in the fire storm.”26

  Hoping to strike the first of a terrible succession of blows that would end the war, Curtis LeMay planned to ignite an even greater fire in flammable Tokyo.

  “We thought he was crazy,” Newell Fears, a B-29 flier, describes the reaction of the crews to LeMay’s orders to go in at low level, half as high as Mount Fuji, a marking point for earlier high-altitude raids. The men thought they would be suicide missions. As the 334 bombers were being gassed and readied in the fading afternoon light of March 9, 1945, the fliers who were not going to Tokyo that night went down to the flight line to say farewell to their friends, certain that many of them were not likely to return.

  On the morning of March 10, John Ciardi recorded in his diary a decisive change in the air war against Japan:

  THE BOYS ARE JUST BACK FROM a razzle-dazzle play over Tokio. They left a general conflagration behind them….

  The planes hit at 3 A.M. All ours got through. Reports are inconclusive, but it must have been terrific…. While Tokio burns—there’s another one called for tomorrow night [against Nagoya].

  Shortly after this, a personnel officer read a recent issue of The Atlantic Monthly with some of Ciardi’s poems in it. They needed someone at headquarters to do public relations work, and he was called in and put in charge of awards and decorations. A week or so later, his former crew was killed over Tokyo when their plane was hit and blew up in midair. “It was luck—and poetry—that saved me,” Ciardi would say years later.27

  Knox Burger, a correspondent for Yank in Saipan, describes that first low-attitude Tokyo fire raid, which he witnessed from one of the B-29s:

  ONE NIGHT IN MARCH 1945 SOME 300 B-29s, loaded with incendiaries, flew up to Japan from the Marianas to burn out the heart of Tokyo. They set fires which leveled 15.8 square miles of the most densely populated area on earth. By the next morning at least 100,000 people were dead and more than 1,000,000 were homeless. It was probably the worst fire in history.

  Subsequent incendiary attacks devastated most of Tokyo, but in this first raid, which was without precedent in air war, more people died than had been accounted for on any other mission thus far in the war….

  OFF TO THE EMPIRE (USAAF).

  The target … was a mass firetrap of flimsy frame houses and shops which housed a big percentage of the population in Tokyo…. Several large factories turned out parachutes and airplane parts, but the real economic strength of the area lay in the thousands of domestic industries that had sprung up with war. Not many of the householders had refrigerators or electric stoves—drill presses were installed instead. And a lathe had come to be a common backroom fixture.

  On March 9 a strong wind had been rattling the shaky panes in the doors and windows all day. For the past few nights single B-29s had appeared over the sky, without dropping any bombs but flying very low and setting off a riot of searchlights and antiaircraft fire. A lot of people on the ground had the uneasy feeling that something was due to happen….

  The first ships [of the raiding party] were 12 pathfinders whose job it was to light up the outer reaches of the target area for the main force. They were met by searchlights, accurate, intense flak, and strong headwinds.

  Then the rest of the B-29s came in.

  They were met by terrific flak….

  Crewmen looked out at searchlights aimlessly fingering the smoke clouds, picking up a ship, losing it again, picking up another momentarily. There were some fighters up, but most of them refused to close in and shoot. They couldn’t see the B-29s blacked out over the target.

  The long sky-train droned over the bay for three hours, pouring millions of incendiaries inside roughly patterned circles laid out by the pathfinders. During the first half-hour it was like flying over a forest of brightly lighted Christmas trees. The bombs flickered like faraway candles. Then the fires spread and merged. At the end it was like flying over a super-blast-furnace.

  Heat thermals from the fires raging on the ground hurled the bombers thousands of feet upward in a few seconds. Gusts from the inferno were so powerful that crewmen rattled around inside the ships like bones in a dice cup. Floorboards were uprooted. Because of the low altitude, the ships had not been pressurized, and the smoke and soot and smell seeped into the cabins.

  The B-29s created large-scale havoc. From 7,000 feet crewmen could see the framework of big buildings in which fires had burned away the roofs and illuminated the window holes. They could see whole blocks like this, and the general impression was of a huge bed of red-hot and burned-out embers.28

  What was it like to fly over this boiling sea of flames, every bomber feeding it with 20,000 pounds of gasoline and chemicals? Here are the observations of some of the men who were on that mission and the missions that followed it, in lightning succession, against other urban targets, five missions in all—a five-city blitz over a ten-day period.

  Captain Charlie Phillips’s plane approached the coast of Japan just after midnight, after the pathfinders had marked the target, drawing a huge flaming X with large napalm bombs on ten square miles of the city. The first wave of planes set the fire with larger incendiaries; later w
aves fed it with smaller ones. When Charlie Phillips first sighted Tokyo, it was already in flames. The fire looked to him like the scourgelike forest fires he had seen in California.

  Phillips recalls:

  NO ONE HAD ANY LIGHTS SHOWING. It was completely dark. If you got picked up by a searchlight, you were so well illuminated that you couldn’t see out of the airplane. You’d have to fly on instruments. But most of us went in and came out in the dark.

  We had designated targets. We were responsible for our own bombing, unlike daylight missions, where the lead bombardier would make the Norden bombsight run in his aircraft and all of the rest of the bombardiers would drop their bombs as they saw the bombs leave the bay of his plane. On those missions, we would bomb with concentrated destructive power because we were in a very tight formation, our wings overlapping.

  The night bombing was completely different and it was horrifying to the crews because of the danger of collisions. When you send 300 airplanes up there with no lights and you didn’t know where anybody is, it’s serious. You couldn’t see other aircraft. You just had to grit your teeth, hold your heading, drive on it, drop the bombs, and make a big, steep turn out of there and head for home.

  What surprised us was the terrible turbulence we ran into. Not being the first planes in, we flew into a dirty gray cloud reaching up to 40,000 feet. As we entered that cloud we ran into a huge updraft. [My] plane was tossed about like a leaf in a fall windstorm and it was hard to keep the wings level. You could not see a horizon, so you had to do instrument flying to keep the airplane on a level keel. And there was a monstrous thermal updraft that increased airspeed. I noticed that we were fifty miles an hour over the redline speed. When we talk about the redline airspeed, that’s when the guarantee runs out. That’s when the wings might come off. The turbulence might tear the plane apart. So I pulled the power back to idle and slowly got the airspeed reduced to below that redline.

  A JAPANESE BAKA BOMB (USAAF).

  We went into the fire cloud at 7,800 feet but came out at 14,000 feet, because of this monstrous updraft.

  “Those thermal waves would bounce your plane clear around.” observed radio operator George Gladden. “I had my flak suit on and my chair was bolted to me with the seat belt and when the wave hit it jerked the bolts out of the bottom of that thing and I was stuck against the ceiling with a chair tied to me.”

  “The turbulence was so bad our aircraft was flipped over on its back, and it was a terrific fight to get it back upright,” recalled Captain Harry George. “[Then] we looked out and saw Tokyo burning. You could smell it at this low altitude. The smell of it was putrid.

  “On the right hand side I [saw] another plane alongside of us about a half a mile out. It was, I learned later, [a small, single-seat] Jap suicide plane—a Baka bomb—with a ton of TNT on the warhead. It didn’t have any landing gear. It was dropped from a twin-engine bomber in the sky and it drew a bead on one of our planes. Luckily it didn’t hit it.

  “The incendiary bombs were in 2,000 pound clusters and each of them was small. We had twenty clusters in the bomb bays. When a cluster was dropped it would blow apart about 3,000 feet over the target. And as soon as the [thirty or so] little bombs in the clusters hit the ground they would start things burning. They were filled with napalm. If you threw water on them, they would burn more fiercely. You couldn’t stop ’em from burning.”

  “Our biggest concern was getting caught in a searchlight,” said David Farquar, a gunner with the 6th Bomb Wing. “The searchlights would crisscross the sky and as soon as they would focus on a plane you were a target for fighters, because once they had you in one searchlight fifteen or twenty searchlights would be on you. There was no place to hide, and you’re blinded by the light…. Once you’re in the lights your chances of making it through are very slim.”

  “Looking down out of the window of the plane was like looking into what I think hell would be like,” said Lieutenant Fiske Hanley. “We could smell human flesh burning at 4,000 feet.”

  “This blaze will haunt me forever,” one pilot said to himself as he made the sign of the cross. “It’s the most terrifying sight in the world, and, God forgive me, it’s the best.”29

  “I didn’t hate these people I was incinerating. I’d been in the war a long time and, damn it, I was tired of hating,” Robert Morgan recalled years later. “But that didn’t lessen my resolve to fly a perfect mission. And a perfect mission that evening over Tokyo meant killing a lot of innocent people. The problem was I hated the Japanese leaders, the guys who bombed Pearl Harbor and got us into this ugly war. And to bring them down we had to do some awful nasty things to people who maybe didn’t deserve it.

  “I will never forget the sickening smell of those roasting bodies, an odor carried up to us by violent updrafts. I later learned that some fliers gagged and vomited from this stench, and that a few had passed out.”30

  St. Clair McKelway was with Curtis LeMay at his headquarters on Guam during the night of the first Tokyo fire raid. “He had told the rest of his staff to go to bed if they wanted to, that he was going to sit this one out…. LeMay was … in the operations-control room, whose walls were covered with charts, maps, [and] graphs…. He was sitting on a wooden bench smoking a cigar. ‘I’m sweating this one out myself,’ he said. ‘A lot could go wrong.’”31

  LeMay had not informed Hap Arnold, back in Washington, about the strike until the day before his planes took off, insuring that his commander could not stop the radically risky mission. He had gambled, against the advice of his advisors, that the Japanese did not have the kind of low level flak that the Germans did, which was deadly accurate at 5,000 to 7,000 feet. If they did, he’d lose a lot of crews, and perhaps be stripped of his command. “This was General LeMay’s idea; it was his show; and he wanted to lead it,” says Robert Morgan, as he had led some of the great raids against Nazi Germany.32 He would have done so had he not been briefed about the atomic bomb. No one who knew about “the big firecracker” was permitted to fly over Japan and risk getting shot down, captured, and questioned.

  There was something else on the general’s mind. “No matter how you slice it, you’re going to kill an awful lot of civilians,” he told himself. “But, if you don’t destroy the Japanese industry, we’re going to have to invade Japan. And how many Americans will be killed in an invasion of Japan? Five hundred thousand seems to be the lowest estimate. Some say a million.”33

  LeMay told McKelway he couldn’t sleep:

  “I USUALLY CAN, BUT NOT TONIGHT…. In a war,” he said, “you’ve got to try to keep at least one punch ahead of the other guy all the time…. I think we’ve figured out a punch he’s not expecting this time. I don’t think he’s got the right flak to combat this kind of raid and I don’t think he can keep his cities from being burned down—wiped right off the map…. If this one works we will shorten this damned war out here.”

  He looked at his watch. “We won’t get a bombs away [report] for another half hour,” he said. “Would you like a Coca-Cola? I can sneak in my quarters without waking up the other guys and get two Coca-Colas and we can drink them in my car. That’ll kill most of the half hour.”

  We drove the hundred yards to his quarters in his staff car and he sneaked in and got the Coca Colas. We sat in the dark, facing the jungle that surrounds the headquarters … [until] the bombs-away message from the first B-29 formation over Tokio came in. It was decoded and shown to him. “Bombing the primary target visually,” it told him. “Large fires observed. Flak moderate. Fighter opposition nil.” … Then the bombs-away messages from other formations began coming in fast. After the first three, they all reported “Conflagration.” …

  “It looks pretty good,” LeMay said … “But we can’t really tell a damn thing about results until we get the pictures tomorrow night. Anyway, there doesn’t seem to have been much flak. We don’t seem to have lost more than a few airplanes.” [They lost twelve B-29s.] He shifted his cigar and smiled….

  Th
e following night, around twelve, we had the pictures….

  The staff officers’ five or six jeeps swept up to LeMay’s tent like so many cowboys’ horses, the officers driving them leaped to the ground, and we all got to the General’s bedroom just as the photo-interpretation officer walked in with the pictures under his arm. LeMay [was] in pajamas…. The photo-interpretation officer spread the pictures out on a big, well-lighted table and LeMay … walked up to it and bent over them.

  There was about one full minute of silence. “All this is out,” LeMay then said, running a hand over several square miles of Tokio…. “This is out—this—this—this….” We crowded in for a better look. “It’s all ashes—all that and that and that,” said [another officer], bending over the pictures.34

  In less than three hours, LeMay’s B-29s dropped almost a quarter of a million bombs on Tokyo, burning to bare ground sixteen square miles of the city, an area equivalent to two thirds of Manhattan Island. There was more destruction than any documented fire in history, including the combined earthquake and fire of 1923 in Tokyo. Knox Burger’s estimate in Yank of the number of people killed—at least 100,000—used to be considered high, but recent studies validate it, and put the number of injured at about one million. Next to Hiroshima, where approximately 130,000 people were killed by the atomic blast, this was the most destructive air attack of the entire war.35 And the human cost of the raid would have been far greater had not over a million and half people already evacuated Tokyo.36

  Before March 10, only about 1,300 people were killed in all the B-29 raids on Japan. So this raid had as cataclysmic an impact on the Japanese people as did the later, atomic bombing of Hiroshima. For the people in Tokyo that night, nothing in their history or their imaginations could have led them to believe that this was a man-made act. For the first time in the history of humanity, technology approached nature in its destructive capacity.