The World War II Chronicles

by William Craig

  By now even Japanese soldiers knew it. Bombarded by millions of leaflets which assured them of fair treatment, they considered the idea of laying down their arms. Many decided against it and instead committed suicide. But for the first time in the war, hundreds of tattered and dirty soldiers came out of caves and walked toward American lines with hands held high over their heads. Eventually over seven thousand Japanese surrendered.

  Inside a cave under Hill 89, General Ushijima read Allied surrender leaflets and laughed. His assistant, General Cho, relaxed with a bottle of Scotch as he listened to late reports coming in from the scattered units in the field. The front line had disintegrated. Japanese troops had become a disorganized rabble, skulking in holes and trenches, wandering through the countryside looking for food and water. They were without hope.

  In an open field near Kadena Airbase more than a hundred shrouded bodies lay in neat rows on the grass. All of them were American sailors washed ashore from the wreckage of ships blown to pieces by kamikazes. Soldiers passing by paused, many of them aware for the first time of the price paid by the Navy in supporting the foot soldier at the beaches.

  A huge cave inside the Japanese lines was serving as a field hospital where three hundred badly wounded Japanese Marines were being treated. Their commander, Admiral Ota, feared that the enemy would pour fire and gasoline into the cave before asking questions. He ordered the senior doctor to make sure that the patients did not suffer further, that they had an honorable death.

  The doctor and his assistants readied hypodermic needles and walked through long rows of sick men. With tears rolling down their cheeks, they methodically squeezed syringes into three hundred outstretched arms. Finally there was no sound in the hospital except the sobbing of the medical staff.

  Another Japanese doctor, named Maehara, had given up trying to cope with the mounting disaster and had sought refuge among Okinawan natives who were prowling through the battlefields. Maehara fell in with a group of men and women living in a series of caves gouged from the side of a hill. In these close quarters, he fell in love and shared his bed with a small, bright-faced native girl. In the midst of death, they clung together and spoke of an uncertain future.

  In the third week of June, the Americans surrounded the hill. Maehara and the girl planned to escape by one of the several tunnels burrowed through the hillside to open ground hundreds of yards away. Fearful, they delayed leaving. American soldiers stalking the enemy came eventually to the mouth of the cave and threw in satchel charges of dynamite. Maehara retreated into the deepest recesses. The girl followed. When a flamethrower shot a burst into the entrance, the Japanese doctor shouted for the girl to follow him out through one of the escape hatches. Scrambling, twisting, he reached the cooling breezes outside. Behind him, nothing stirred. Shocked, Maehara retraced his steps into the blackness and came upon a crumpled form. The girl had been caught by the searing heat of the flamethrower and died in the dirt. Maehara wandered dazedly out of the cave and surrendered to the enemy. He was beyond caring.

  On the eighteenth of June, General Simon Bolivar Buckner came to the forward positions to oversee the mop-up. Standing in an observation post, he watched the battle for the caves. Suddenly, a Japanese dual-purpose gun fired a shell which struck a rock formation above him. A jagged piece of coral flew down and hit Buckner in the chest. He died within minutes.

  On the evening of the twenty-first of June, Generals Ushijima and Cho sat down to a sumptuous meal in their home under Hill 89. Overhead the Americans walked on top of the escarpment, where Japanese soldiers continued to resist them by fighting for every rock and tree.

  The generals ate quietly. As their aides offered toasts, the two leaders drank to each other with dregs of whiskey preserved for this moment. A full moon shone on the white coral ledges of Hill 89 as a final tribute rang through the cave: “Long live the Emperor.”

  At 4:00 A.M. on the morning of the twenty-second, Ushijima, cooling himself with a bamboo fan, walked with Cho between lines of crying subordinates to the mouth of the cave. There Cho turned to his superior and said, “I will lead the way.” The two generals emerged into the moonlight. They were followed by several staff officers.

  Outside the entrance a quilt had been laid on top of a mattress. Loud firing sounded on all sides as American infantrymen, no more than fifty feet away, sensed movement. Ushijima proceeded to sit down and pray. Cho did the same.

  Ignoring the guns and grenades, Ushijima bowed low toward the ground. His adjutant handed him a knife. The general held it briefly in front of his body, then ripped it across his abdomen. Immediately his adjutant raised a jeweled sword and brought it down across his neck. Ushijima’s head toppled onto the quilt and blood spattered the onlookers. Within seconds, General Cho died the same way.

  The battle of Okinawa had ended. Over 12,000 Americans and more than 100,000 Japanese were dead. The American flag flew only 350 miles from Japan.

  TWO

  Meetinghouse

  If General Ushijima hoped that by destroying the Americans at Okinawa he would spare his homeland the horrors of war, then the Thirty-second Imperial Army’s furious defense of the island was an exercise in mass futility. Even as the fighting raged on Okinawa, the cities of Japan were burning. In the wreckage of thousands of homes, men and women sobbed the names of loved ones, buried in the debris left by Bi-ni-ju-ku, the dreaded B-29 bomber.

  Squadrons of these beautiful silver planes had come with increasing frequency from the south to terrorize the people of Japan. When they appeared over a metropolitan center, the next hours were filled with suffering for the humanity massed below. It had been that way for several months, since March, when General Curtis Lemay, commander of the Twenty-first Bomber Command in the Mariana Islands, discovered the strategy needed to knock down the cities of Japan.

  When he first inherited his job in January 1945, Lemay was faced with a paradox: the B-29, a superior weapon, available in sufficient numbers to perform the most ambitious kinds of missions against the Home Islands, was not working out as it should have. Something was wrong with the way the machine was being used by aerial tacticians. Doctrines established in the air war over Europe were not succeeding in Asia. Lemay had come to remedy the situation.

  At thirty-eight, he was a strategic bombing specialist, a “hard-nose,” a soldier dedicated to the belief that the heavy bomber could effect the destruction of any nation. A veteran of the Army Air Force, he had first joined the fledgling service in the budget-poor days of 1928. After graduation from Ohio State, Lemay became a lieutenant in an army that boasted precious little in the way of an air arm. He lived through the pioneer days, times when men feared for their lives every time they went up in rickety machines. Then he gravitated to the bombardment section of the tiny service and built up impressive experience in the primitive art of attacking an enemy with long-range aircraft.

  When the United States entered World War II, Curtis Lemay began to implement his theoretical training. From England, he flew against the German Luftwaffe and quickly learned the rude facts of modern air strategy. Forced to improvise tactics in daily combat, Lemay proved a brilliant, resourceful commander, whose bomber squadrons always penetrated German defenses to hit their targets. In spite of constant attack, the B-17’s of the English Air Force gradually began to hurt Germany’s capacity to wage war. Curtis Lemay, as leader of the Third Bombardment Division, was known as a hard-driving taskmaster, a ruthlessly efficient exponent of aerial bombardment. On the basis of this impressive record, General Hap Arnold saw him as a natural choice to tackle the problems surrounding a new bomber which had just begun to operate in the Pacific, and in June of 1944 he recalled Lemay to the States.

  The B-29 itself was an awesome weapon, capable of nearly twice the performance of the time-tested B-17 being used in Europe. Built by Boeing, the silver-painted four-engine aircraft was 99 feet long, 27 feet 9 inches high, with a wing span of slightly over 141 feet. Its armament included twelve 50-caliber machine
guns and a 20-millimeter cannon in the tail. The B-29 could operate at 38,000 feet and cruise at over 350 miles per hour. It could fly 3,500 miles with four tons of bombs. It was the answer to the Army Air Force’s search for a Very Long Range bomber. It could reach across the Pacific from great distances and strike at the enemy’s industries. It could, in short, alter the balance of the war. But so far the efforts to use it effectively in the Pacific had brought nothing but frustration.

  Lemay spent the summer familiarizing himself with the big bomber and learning to fly it. In the fall he was sent to China, where he took command of B-29 raiding missions from airfields around Chengtu. His job there was almost impossible.

  Chengtu was the wrong place for such an operation. The basic problem was one of logistics. All supplies for the raiders had to be flown in over the Hump, that formidable barrier of mountains otherwise known as the Himalayas. Gas, oil, bombs, bullets, food, incidental supplies, were brought to China by transport planes. Though more and more tonnage was moved each month by this means, it was never enough to mount a massive offensive. Rarely did more than one hundred bombers take off together on a mission. Lemay was frustrated by the failure of his planes to evidence their destructive capability. Washington, also disillusioned by the Chengtu situation, gradually began to shift emphasis away from that area, and at the turn of the year Lemay was moved to Guam. There in the Marianas, shorter supply lines would eliminate the most vexing problems of the China operation.

  Chengtu could not be called a complete failure, however. Roosevelt and Churchill had paid a political debt to Chiang Kai-shek by stationing the big bombers in his country. Disillusioned at the apparent lack of interest in his cause, the Generalissimo had been considerably heartened by the decision to mount an attack on the enemy from China. His war-weary people also were cheered by the sight of the B-29’s flying toward the Japanese homeland. From a practical standpoint, too, the China experience had value. Chengtu was a proving ground, a training base for both crew members and commanders of the new bombardment force. Lessons learned there were remembered in the Marianas as the Twenty-first Bomber Command started to fly to Japan.

  During the first two months of 1945 Lemay sent missions out to prove his theory that he could level the enemy. By March, he had accomplished almost nothing. The enemy had not been hurt badly. In fact, the morale of civilians in Japan rose markedly as they found their patterns of daily life unchanged. Even some of the Japanese leaders regained confidence as they noted that the national war machine still functioned at a high rate. So far the B-29 had not performed well, and Curtis Lemay knew it.

  Several factors combined to thwart the bombing efforts. Weather was paramount. Between the Marianas and Japan it was atrocious. Jet streams blew at two hundred miles an hour across the skies. Heavy cloud cover enveloped targets repeatedly. Bombs dropped from thirty thousand feet were scattered by the winds. In the first six weeks after Lemay arrived on Guam, only one opportunity arose for visual sighting on a city. All other raids had to be accomplished by means of radar, which was still unreliable and so caused frequent misses on aiming points. Eleven priority targets in the Home Islands were virtually undamaged despite repeated attacks. One, the Mushashino aircraft-engine plant in Tokyo, was functioning at ninety-six percent of capacity though the B-29’s had gone after it several times.

  The big planes themselves were beginning to malfunction at an alarming rate as the strain of flying at over thirty thousand feet for long distances caused engine breakdowns. The tremendous burden of climbing to rarified altitudes was showing in daily operations reports listing aborted missions, in which disabled aircraft were unable to reach targets in Japan. As March began, Lemay surveyed his domain and wondered just what he could do to effect a miracle.

  For several weeks he had had a bold plan in mind, conceived from his own observations and in conferences with other B-29 commanders in the Marianas. It was a daring thrust, a gamble for the big prize—the destruction of Japanese war production. He felt that percentages favored its success. Yet, not sure of what reaction it would receive, he chose not to mention it to General Hap Arnold, Air Corps Chief of Staff. He simply went ahead with his operation.

  Orders were cut on March 7 for implementation on March 9. Three wings, the 73rd, the 313th and the 314th, would fly the mission. The target was the northeast urban section of Tokyo, code-named Meetinghouse. Bombing runs would commence on the city just after midnight. Bombs would be released at altitudes between five thousand and nine thousand feet. All guns would be removed from the B-29’s. Only incendiary bombs would be used on the congested wooden homes of Meetinghouse.

  To crew members on the flight, the idea of flying over the most heavily defended city in Japan at five thousand feet without guns was shocking. Intelligence experts on Guam estimated that the enemy had massed 331 heavy-caliber guns, 307 automatic-firing weapons, 312 single-engine fighters and 105 twin-engine interceptors around Tokyo. Yet Lemay intended to challenge this defensive arsenal by going in low, at night and without ammunition.

  His reasoning was quite sound. The key ingredients in his plan were the night attack and the low altitude. Both struck at the Japanese in their most vulnerable spots. Japan had so far failed to develop an adequate night fighter which could shoot down the B-29. Neither had it converted its antiaircraft weapons to radar control. Thus the low-level assault would tend to confuse the manually controlled weapons surrounding Meetinghouse.

  If these suppositions were correct, Lemay had eliminated the need for guns in his own planes. By so doing, he also reduced the weight of the bombers and allowed for increased bombloads. Other bonuses followed.

  Because the B-29’s did not have to fly at great heights, less gas was needed, permitting a further increase in bombload. The lower altitude also reduced strain on the engines and decreased the probability of malfunction during and after the mission.

  Buoyed up by these positive factors, General Lemay hoped to drop over two thousand tons of incendiary bombs on the people of Tokyo and incinerate part of the Japanese factory system, which had been decentralized and flourished inside the private homes of the city.

  One danger was apparent. The Japanese might just adjust to his unorthodox tactics in time to inflict horrible losses on the defenseless bombers. If they did, the Marianas would be a land of the bereaved and Curtis Lemay proved a fool.

  The Meetinghouse flight went ahead as planned.

  On March 9, at twilight, thirteen hundred motors turned over and roared into the night as 325 massive B-29’s left their hardstands and formed a continuing line of bombers moving toward the ends of runways. One by one they lifted into the sky. Since the flight plan had eliminated the need for rendezvous, the B-29’s moved singly to the north, gaining altitude as they went.

  The first twelve aircraft in each wing were pathfinders. Their mission was to mark the target area in Meetinghouse by sowing their incendiaries in a huge X across the congested section. Hundreds of magnesium, napalm and phosphorus canisters would ignite and spread like a beckoning torch.

  The long line of planes droned toward the mainland. Over the island of Chichi Jima, in the Bonins, the Japanese sent up sporadic antiaircraft fire but found no victims.

  In the darkness, the B-29’s made landfall by radar, using checkpoints on the Bose Peninsula, southeast of Tokyo, and moving toward them for the turns to a final approach on the unsuspecting mass of humanity.

  As midnight arrived, lights were mostly out in the thousands of homes jammed into the neighborhood around the Sumida River, several miles northeast of the Imperial Palace. The moon shone coldly on the waters of Tokyo Bay. A chill, twenty-eight-mile-an-hour wind tossed paper through narrow streets.

  Though many civilians had heard on the radio that B-29’s were active that night, it appeared that they were well east of Tokyo and heading away to the north.

  The pathfinders turned west and roared in low and fast. They slipped across the darkened city and loosed a series of E-46 bombs, each of which
exploded at twenty-five hundred feet and scattered thirty-eight more pipe-like canisters into the wind. The two-foot-long projectiles fell into the middle of wooden homes and began to burn ferociously.

  As frightened civilians moved into the open streets, the pathfinders fled swiftly to the south. Behind them a blazing X marked the target for more onrushing B-29’s with their loads of incendiaries. The airplanes came individually and spewed their cargoes into a spreading sea of red and white flame. To the first crews over the target it was obvious that Tokyo would burn badly that night. “It looked like a forest fire,” one man reported. In thirty minutes the blaze was completely out of control. There was no way to stop it. It roared upward for hundreds of feet and moved rapidly outward in many directions. The high winds threw burning embers across firebreaks and pushed a solid mass of flame before them. And still the planes came in, dropping cluster upon cluster of magnesium, phosphorus and napalm. Tracer bullets arched up toward the gleaming underbellies of the bombers. Antiaircraft shells exploded among them. The sky became an unbelievable panorama of light, noise and movement.

  As the fires expanded and intensified, bombers coming in over the target began to have trouble. Violent updrafts from the whirling storm in the city tore at the fuselages and threatened to rip them apart. Instead of worrying about the antiaircraft guns, the pilots struggled to control their ponderous planes. Turbulence tossed the B-29’s several thousand feet in seconds and they went straight up or down at dizzying rates. In some ships terrified crew members crawled on their hands and knees and shouted, “Let’s get the hell out of here!” as M-47 and M-69 canisters fell out of bomb bays toward the inferno below. Battered B-29’s got out as quickly as they could.

  Above them, one plane circled the target area for a long time. It carried General Tom Power, Lemay’s Chief of Staff, Eager to observe the results of the raid, Power stayed and stayed over the awesome sight. The target sector of the city was dying beneath his feet. As artists sketched the scene, Power radioed back to Guam that the gamble had worked. Lemay had revolutionized bombing technique.