D-DAYS IN THE PACIFIC

by Donald L. Miller

  Knox Burger, who went to Tokyo after the surrender and interviewed victims of the fire, describes the panic and devastation inside the city:

  SOME PEOPLE, FOLLOWING THE DIRECTIONS GIVEN them by police and civilian fire wardens, stayed by their homes and formed bucket brigades, or transferred their families and their valuables into air-raid shelters beside the houses. Whole families were roasted as the flames engulfed these shelters, and wooden doors and supports burst into flames of terrific heat.

  Others, several hundred thousand others, with clothes and children piled on their backs, straggled off toward the rivers, the bay, or an open space—whichever happened to be the closest. The wind acted like a lid on the fire, keeping the heat low and forcing the flames to spread out instead of up. Smoke and sparks were everywhere, and white-hot gusts came roaring down narrow streets.

  TOKYO AFTER THE GREAT FIRE RAID (NA).

  As soon as the big, fluffy coverings on their backs caught fire or a kimono or a jacket started to smolder, the wearers would rip them off. Many people who hadn’t had a chance to douse themselves with water were stark naked by the time they reached safety. And safety that night was a sometimes thing. People crowded across firebreaks, hoping the broad lanes had halted the fire’s spread, but the fire ranged on both sides, so people had to fall back into the avenues themselves. They lay down in the center of the streets as far as possible from the flames on each side. The next morning, vehicles couldn’t pass because of the litter of corpses. Waves of heat had swirled across the firebreaks, and people burned to death without being touched by flame. Other blasts of pure heat killed people as they ran.

  The wind seemed to blow the fire in all directions. A wave of flame would follow the people out of a block of houses like a breaker on the beach. Then, in front of the people, it would catch a load of incendiaries, and they would be walled in. Many times the flames, lashed by cross-drafts, reversed their field. All that night the general direction of the flight across the lowlands surged one way and then another as new fires started and the ground wind shifted…. The fire commissioner of the Fugawa district, perhaps the worst hit of all, said, “Everything burned so quickly it was like a bad dream. We couldn’t stand up against the wind.”

  By dawn the wind had died and most of the fires had burned themselves out. … The next day was clear and cold. What had been the marrow of one of the world’s most congested cities was a bed of ashes. Here and there a building burned, orange against a pall of smoke and dust that overhung the city. Blackened bodies lay strewn among the embers. Charred telephone poles stood along the streets, their tips glowing like cigars. For acres the only structures that rose above the horizon were an occasional double-decked storage vault, some schools, and a few gutted factories. A forest of chimneys stood like sentinels, marking the sites where other factories had stood.

  The survivors sat or stood looking stupidly at the monstrous flatness. They were too exhausted for anger or bitterness, too stunned to comprehend what had happened. Their throats and eyes ached from smoke and wind; almost all of them had painful burns. People got in line in front of aid stations and rice-distribution centers almost automatically. There was very little noise. Occasionally a brick wall would tumble.

  The police took charge of the dead, collecting corpses in piles and burning them. The piles gave off a blue-white smoke, heavy with the stink of death.37

  Even those who had managed to get out of their tinderbox neighborhoods to the fetid canals that coursed through the Tokyo flats died. Those in the deeper water were boiled alive. Those in the shallow places, buried in muck up to their mouths, were later found dead; not drowned, but suffocated by the burning air and smoke.

  LeMay called it a strategic raid, an attack on Japanese war industries. As he wrote after the war:

  IT WAS THEIR SYSTEM OF DISPERSAL of industry. All you had to do was visit one of those targets after we’d roasted it, and see the ruins of a multitude of tiny houses, with a drill press sticking up through the wreckage of every home. The entire population got into the act and worked to make those airplanes or munitions of war … men, women, children. We knew we were going to kill a lot of women and kids when we burned that town. Had to be done.38

  Morality aside, this was not “strategic bombing.” The Japanese had the right word for it: slaughter bombing. Did “moral considerations” affect his decisions to firebomb cities? LeMay was asked by an Air Force cadet after the war. “Killing Japanese didn’t bother me very much at that time. It was getting the war over that bothered me….

  “I guess the direct answer to your question is, yes, every soldier thinks something of the moral aspects of what he is doing. But all war is immoral and if you let that bother you, you’re not a good soldier.”

  Then he added, tellingly: “I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal. Fortunately, we were on the winning side.”39

  As soon as LeMay got the damage assessments for Tokyo, and the estimates of his own losses, twenty-seven Superforts, he ordered more raids. “It would be possible, I thought, to knock out all of Japan’s major industrial cities during the next ten days.”40

  Charlie Phillips flew all five of these missions and afterward wrote to his wife that he had never been more exhausted in his life. “It was wam bam. We flew to Nagoya [Japan’s third largest city], to Osaka [Japan’s second largest city with a population of 3.5 million], to Kobe [Japan’s major port and shipbuilding center, with a population of a million], back to Nagoya again, all in ten days’ time.” In ten days, LeMay burned out half of the built-up area of four of Japan’s biggest cities, and killed at least 150,000 men, women, and children. A comparison with the bomber war against Germany points up the magnitude of LeMay’s so called achievement. In a mere five raids, he caused more physical damage than Allied bombers inflicted on the six most heavily hit German cities of the war, and 41 percent of the total destruction suffered by German cities during the entire war. This was done with less than 1 percent of the total tonnage dropped on Germany during the war and with minimal losses. In the five missions, he lost a total of only three bombers to enemy flak, none to fighters, and nineteen to mechanical failure.41

  “Then,” says LeMay, “we ran out of bombs. Literally.” Later, he gave an accurate assessment of the murderous efficiency of his raids. “The ten-day blitz of March was a turning point. The morale of the Japanese people began a steady decline, never to rise again. Industries ceased to exist, or operated at greatly reduced rates. The panic-stricken people began an exodus from the major cities. The rate of absenteeism in the war industries recorded an alarming rise…. Fire, not high explosives, did this. And we possessed no more fire with which to speed the capitulation.”42

  When the Navy brought more bombs to the Marianas, thousands of tons of scalding chemicals, the city-burning campaign resumed and intensified. Now LeMay bombed by day and night, at low and high altitudes, because there was soon nothing to fear. Japan’s air defense system had been obliterated. “We had nothing in Japan that we could use against such a weapon…. We felt that the War was lost,” said Prince Naruhiko Higashikuni, commander of Japan’s home defense headquarters.43 After the war, Japan’s Prime Minister, Admiral Kantaro Suzuki, told United States bombing assessment experts: “I myself, on the basis of the B-29 raids alone, felt that the cause was hopeless.”44

  Historian Michael S. Sherry argues that “for many Japanese, the March 10 raid and the ones to follow it triggered the plunge into a mood of desperation even more than did the apocalyptic events of August.”45

  Nine days after great parts of the capital were turned into rubble and ash, the Emperor inspected the city by car. An aide noted victims “digging through the rubble with empty expressions on their faces that became reproachful as the Imperial motorcade went by…. Were they resentful of the emperor because they had lost their relatives, their houses and belongings? Or were they in a state of utter exhaustion and bewilderment?”46 The answer is probably both, and many
of those closest to the Emperor began to be concerned about the possibility of a popular uprising against the Imperial regime. They need not have worried. “Until the very end,” as Hirohito’s principal biographer writes, “most Japanese people … remained steadfast in their resolve to obey their leaders and to work and sacrifice for the victory that they were constantly told was coming.”47

  On June 15, LeMay ended his campaign against six of Japan’s seven largest cities. (The fourth largest city, Kyoto, the ancient imperial capital, was spared by order of Secretary of War Stimson.) In the six cities of Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Yokohama, Kobe, and Kawasaki over 126,762 people were killed—according to conservative estimates—and a million and a half dwellings and over 105 square miles of urban space were destroyed. In Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya alone the areas leveled (almost 100 square miles) exceeded the areas destroyed in all German cities by both the American and British air forces (approximately seventy-nine square miles).48

  But Curtis LeMay was far from finished. From mid-June until the end of the war, he concentrated on burning out small-and medium-sized Japanese cities, hitting thirty-nine of them on nine nights. In all, the Americans bombed sixty-six cities (including Hiroshima and Nagasaki), destroying 178 square miles (43 percent) of their living space. By comparison, Allied bombing destroyed seventy-nine square miles of Germany’s urban space. In Germany, the hardest hit city was Berlin. It lost ten square miles of its built-up area; Tokyo lost nearly six times that much. As historian Kenneth P. Werrell points out, the total destruction of Tokyo, Nagoya, and Osaka exceeded the total destruction of all German cities. One quarter of Japan’s city dwellers (8.5 million people) were forced to flee their homes, and the bombing, including the atomic bombs, killed an estimated 330,000 people, about half the number that perished under the bombs in Germany.

  The cost to the United States was light by the cold calculus of modern war. In the bombing campaign against the Third Reich, the Anglo-American air forces lost over 20,000 bombers and 158,546 flying personnel. In the far shorter bombing campaign against Japan, the Twentieth Air Force, flying from the Marianas, lost 414 bombers in battle. Just over 1,000 men were killed and another 1,700 or so were listed as missing in action.49

  The fliers who had hotly contested LeMay’s initial decision to go in low suddenly became his strongest supporters. “It turned out to be the greatest strategic decision that LeMay ever made. It’s what really turned the tide and put us in control of the Japanese,” says John Jennings. “LeMay was tough and uncompromising—and more than a little frightening in his steely resolve,” says Robert Morgan, “but in my opinion he was easily the greatest Army Air Force general of the war, and one of the greatest of all American generals. It took us fliers on Saipan a while to realize this but then it all became clear: this maniac, as we called him at first, knew how to beat the enemy. And he beat him by taking big chances, not big losses. His fliers appreciated that.”50

  Harold Tucker, a B-29 gunner, believes, as LeMay did, that if the fire raids had continued, “we may not have had to drop the atomic bomb. We could have just burned them out.”

  Some of these men were stirred by revenge. Not having met the Japanese face to-face in combat, they did not have Eugene Sledge’s visceral hatred of the enemy, but they had lost friends in the war and were aware of atrocities committed by the Japanese in the Philippines and elsewhere. But it was love, not vengeance, that kept them in the fight, a passionate loyalty to the men they flew with. This and a desperate desire to end the war as quickly as possible, and by any means possible, so they could get back to their “real lives.” The crews weren’t motivated by “patriotism,” John Ciardi said forty years after the war. “I think it was a certain amount of pride. The unit was the crew. You belonged to eleven men. You’re trained together, you’re bound together. I was once ordered to fly in the place of a gunner [on another crew] who had received a shrapnel wound. I dreaded that mission. I wanted to fly with my own crew…. I did not want to run the risk of dying with strangers.”

  But Ciardi is quick to add that he knew why he was in this war. “As an American, I felt very strongly I did not want to be alive to see the Japanese impose surrender terms.”51

  While these American fliers killed, they did not think of themselves as killers. “We had to kill to end the war,” says pilot Harry George. By starting a war of aggression, and then refusing to surrender when there was no hope of victory, the Japanese militarists were responsible for the incineration of babies and grandmothers, Harry George and other B-29 crewmen insist. “We knew. We heard about the thousands of people [we killed], the Japanese wives, children, and elderly. That was war. But I know every B-29 air crewman for the next two or three years would wake up at night and start shaking…. Yes, [the raids] were successful, but horribly so.”

  Most of these men saw the war as the journalist Russell Brines did. Brines had lived in Tokyo; he knew the people, spoke the language. And he had been a prisoner of the Japanese. In a best-selling book, Until They Eat Stones, published in 1944, he explained what the Americans were up against in the final year of this war:

  “WE WILL FIGHT,” THE JAPANESE SAY, “until we eat stone!” The phrase is odd; now revived and ground deeply into Japanese consciousness by propagandists skilled in marshaling their sheeplike people…. [It] means they will continue the war until every man—perhaps every woman and child—lies face downward on the battlefield….

  American fighting men back from the front have been trying to tell America this is a war of extermination. They have seen it from foxholes and barren strips of bullet-strafed sand. I have seen it from behind enemy lines. Our picture coincides. This is a war of extermination. The Japanese militarists have made it that way.52

  Only one Medal of Honor was conferred on a B-29 flier during the entire war. The recipient was Staff Sergeant Henry Eugene “Red” Erwin of Bessemer, Alabama, a hard-muscled former steelworker who was in the habit of calling his wife, whom he wrote to every day, “Cupcake.” His act of heroism will have to stand for other brave men who, unfairly, were not decorated. St. Clair McKelway tells his story:

  ERWIN’S B-29 WAS LEADING A FORMATION to Japan on one of the first incendiary raids. He had been given the additional duty of shoving phosphorus bombs down a chute near the rear end of the forward crew compartment. These bombs were being used on that mission to spread smoke over a certain area of Japan and thereby aid the other airplanes to make an effective rendezvous. One of Erwin’s phosphorus bombs was faulty. It began to sputter and smoke as he put it into the chute. The sputtering phosphorus flew into his face, ate part of his nose away, and blinded him. The stuff splattered on his clothes, on his hands, inside his shirt…. The airplane quickly filled with smoke and fumes, and the pilot lost control of it. It went into a spin. Erwin knew what to do and he did it. A phosphorus bomb weighs about twenty pounds. Erwin pulled the sputtering bomb out of the chute, picked it up in his bare hands, and started carrying it to the nearest opening—the pilot’s windows. From where he was, this was a distance of about twenty feet. He couldn’t see, so he felt his way along the passage with his shoulders, holding the bomb in his hands.

  In a B-29 certain crew members have tables to work on during a flight, tables which, when raised, cut off this passage. The navigator’s table was raised when Erwin got to it. The navigator didn’t know what was going on, for he was blinded by the smoke and fumes, as was everybody else in the airplane, and was sitting with his back to the table, having swung around in his swivel chair. Erwin felt the table against his thighs. He held the bomb then for a few seconds in one hand, resting it against his chest, and with the other unlatched the table and lowered it so he could get by. All the time the bomb was sputtering and burning, throwing white-hot phosphorus all around. Erwin carried it to the front of the compartment. The pilot and co-pilot had opened their windows, trying to get rid of the fumes and smoke. Erwin threw the bomb out the co-pilot’s window. Then he walked a few steps back toward his post, near the other
end of the compartment, and fell.

  The pilot managed to bring the airplane out of its spin three hundred feet above land a few seconds after that [and headed back to safety]…. The rest of the crew did what they could for Erwin. His face was burned all over and his nose was half gone. The flesh around his eyes was raw, his skin was blistering, and it seemed certain to his comrades that he would never see again. His hands were burned to the bones. His shirt and pants were afire when the crew got to him and the skin under his clothes was burned away.53

  Five weeks later, in a Navy hospital on Guam, a general pinned the Medal of Honor on the bandages that covered Red Erwin’s entire body. The crew, whose lives he saved, gathered around his cot during the brief ceremony. Erwin breathed and was fed through a tube, but his eyes were all right. The rest of him was patched together by plastic surgeons back home.

  THE BLOCKADE

  The bombing raids were still going when St. Clair McKelway returned to New York on leave in June 1945. “I see by the New York papers that LeMay is throwing his B-29s at the Japs in different ways, with different tactics,” he wrote. “Flying low and only at night, specially trained B-29 squadrons have mined the harbors of Japan’s main islands, strengthening the naval blockade, and preventing the Japs from moving their war industries to Manchuria before they are entirely wiped out on Honshu.”54

  These missions had begun in late March 1945, and came at the culmination of a devastatingly successful campaign against enemy shipping by American submarines. The mining campaign was intended to bottle up Japanese harbors and major waterways, chiefly Shimonoseki Strait, between the southern island of Kyushu and the island of Honshu, the main channel from Japan’s Inland Sea to the Sea of Japan and the Asian mainland. Most of the Japanese shipping that had survived naval air and submarine attacks had to pass through this strait to reach the great ports of the Inland Sea. Mining operations, first suggested by the Navy and grudgingly supported by LeMay, were designed to cut off imports—including food and vital raw materials—from Japanese-occupied Asia; prevent the flow of supplies to Japanese armies in the Pacific; and disrupt coastal shipping. It was called Operation Starvation.