Freedom's Forge

by Arthur Herman

  In any case, the sight of a silent, meditative LeMay didn’t surprise Smith. He was turning to leave the general alone with his thoughts when LeMay suddenly spoke.

  “No, Pinky, don’t go away. I want to talk to you. There’s something I’ve been thinking about—a new way of hitting them.” Smith sat down. For the next few minutes, LeMay laid out his plan, almost to the last detail, with occasional forays to point at the map.

  As Smith listened to LeMay’s monologue, it seemed to him “almost unbelievable.” Later he admitted it made his flesh creep. But as he listened, his airman’s instinct told him LeMay’s plan might work, for all its terrible awesomeness. It also told him LeMay knew it would work.10

  In part because he had a silent partner in Henry Kaiser.

  Even after building ships, aircraft carriers, airplanes, and steel, one industrial dream had eluded “the man from Frisco”: processing magnesium.

  That seems a strange addition to Kaiser’s wish list. But magnesium had become the new miracle metal of the modern aircraft industry. Lighter than aluminum and far more plentiful, magnesium was harder and more capable of bearing precise tooling than steel. When the British learned in the summer of 1940 that the Germans were using the metal in massive quantities for Luftwaffe parts and airframes, they immediately contacted the United States for help.

  That December it was Bill Knudsen who first learned about the vital importance of magnesium from Churchill himself. The British thought they might be able to produce 27,000 tons by 1942, if the Americans were willing to make up the difference.

  “Your figures are wrong,” Knudsen had told the prime minister. “You will not produce more than half that amount because you haven’t the facilities, and you will not have them”—certainly not in time. Given magnesium’s new importance (it didn’t even appear on the Army’s critical materials list in 1940), the United States was going to have to produce enough for both its own aircraft industry and that of its Lend-Lease ally, he decided—close to 12 million pounds of magnesium per year.11

  That had triggered a crash program for magnesium production, in the shadow of the Blitz. The one American company capable of mass-producing magnesium in that tight time frame was Dow Chemical, the biggest chemical company in the country. Its founder, Herbert Dow, had been obsessed by the light white metal. Back during the First World War when the commodity’s price kept falling, Dow had been convinced magnesium would be the building material of the future. Even though there were no customers, Dow had kept his plant in Midland, Michigan, making it, even after he retired.12

  Now, anticipating the wartime need even before the federal government did, Dow had built a brand-new plant in Freeport, Texas, at its own expense, ready to extract millions of pounds of magnesium from seawater. But Dow’s method was its own, a virtual monopoly—a nasty word in New Deal Washington. So late in 1940, Henry Kaiser had waded into the competition, determined to find a method of extracting magnesium that would break Dow’s monopoly and give him a lucrative government contract.13

  He found what he was looking for in an odd little Austrian scientist named Dr. Fritz Hansgirg. Hansgirg’s method was more like the one the Germans were using, a carbothermic reduction process that turned brucite clay into magnesium oxide, heated it up with carbon to burn off the oxygen, then cooled it with natural gas. Harry Davis, Kaiser’s man at Kaiser Permanente Cement, checked out Hansgirg and declared the idea good, at least in theory. With the Davis report in hand and his lawyer Chad Calhoun pushing from behind, Kaiser managed to squeeze a $9.2 million loan from his arch-nemesis, Jesse Jones, in the spring of 1941, to build a plant next to his cement factory in Manteca, California, deep in the San Jose Valley. Kaiser was fully launched in the magnesium business, with Dr. Hansgirg as his technical advisor.14

  It was a disaster almost from the moment they broke ground on the facility. Hansgirg proved to be a cantankerous, unreliable character contemptuous of American business methods and—even more alarming—with more-than-casual ties to the Nazi government.* Nine days after Pearl Harbor, the FBI scooped him up as a security risk and threw him in jail. Kaiser was undeterred, and kept at the Hansgirg process even though it failed to produce much magnesium and was turning positively dangerous.

  In August 1941 a fire in a retort furnace killed three Manteca workers; a few weeks later another accident killed two more. By March 1942 the head of the War Production Board’s Magnesium and Aluminum Division dubbed the entire experiment a failure, and lamented the amount of money lost thanks to Kaiser’s “too rapid push attitude without much thought or study.” He noted that the usually ebullient Kaiser looked down in the dumps, surveying the meager production numbers month after month. Time magazine had to pronounce the Manteca venture a “flop so far,” as Henry Luce wondered if this was one miracle even his hero couldn’t pull off.15 Even Bill Knudsen, no fan of Kaiser, felt free to weigh in, pronouncing Kaiser’s magnesium venture a “lemon.”

  But what Henry Kaiser lacked in patience, he made up for in persistence. Over the course of 1942, as Kaiser’s people hammered away at the problems with the Hansgirg method one by one, they also began building three other magnesium-producing facilities using other methods, including Dow’s seawater method. At the government’s request, that company had generously offered to donate its formula and technical specifications to a number of other companies, including Kaiser’s Permanente.16

  By early 1943, Time was able to report: “After many a delay, Henry J. Kaiser’s $6 million Permanente Magnesium plant is finally over the hump.” Finished ingots began to pour out of the four facilities and into factories and plants around the West Coast for making light airframes, bomb casings, and magnesium flare shells. Kaiser was still losing money. But later that year, Kaiser engineers, working with the Army’s Chemical Warfare Service, found another use for Kaiser magnesium that would alter the course of the war.

  They called it “goop.” It was a mixture of powdered magnesium, a magnesium distillate, and asphalt. Permanente chemists began making it to sweep up all the finely powdered magnesium dust floating through the plant—a highly flammable not to mention explosive hazard. Then they wondered if it wouldn’t have a wartime application.17 Both the Germans and British had developed incendiary bombs and used them with telling effect on both cities and industrial targets. The American Air Force was doing the same. But this “goop,” the Kaiser people pointed out, didn’t just burn like fire but stuck like glue. Once it started a fire, it would be nearly impossible to put it out.

  The Chemical Warfare people discovered this when they tried the goop out in the middle of the Utah desert, at the Army’s Dugway Proving Ground. There they built a complete replica of a Japanese village—just the kind of place where parts of planes and tanks were being assembled in Japan’s highly dispersed war industries. New York architect Antonin Raymond, who had lived for years in Japan, designed at Dugway a five-block site complete with industrial and residential buildings. There were even soldiers playing Japanese air raid wardens and firemen, who tried to put out the fires that the dropped goop spread—all in vain.18

  The Army was very impressed. It immediately ordered Kaiser to halt magnesium ingot production. Now everything coming out of his Manteca plant would be in the form of goop—while DuPont and Standard Oil chemists worked out how to make it safe for manufacture. That suited Kaiser, since making goop took one-fourth the time, and at 18.3 cents per pound proved profitable enough to recoup his losses and repay his loans. Even better, “this is our real opportunity,” he crowed, “to be of service to the war effort”—and final victory over Japan.

  In little more than a year, Kaiser Permanente had turned out 410,000 tons of goop—all of it to be stuffed into ten-pound cylinders together with proximity fuses and dubbed the M-74 incendiary bomb.19 And by the end of 1944, almost all of those were headed in one direction: westward across the Pacific to the Marianas and the waiting arms of Curtis LeMay, who would use them to transform his B-29 strategy.

  He fi
rst tried out the goop incendiaries on December 18, 1944, in a raid on Japanese-occupied Hankow in China. The first trial run on Japan came on February 25. It proved a bust.20 Even though Japan’s densely packed wooden houses should have burned like tinder, the bombing results had been largely ineffectual. That was the problem LeMay had been hashing out in his mind, on that rainy afternoon in March. And it was there that he realized in a flash the problem wasn’t the plane, or the M-74 that was being dropped. It was the height at which they were being dropped. If you expected to create genuine mayhem, you had to get in closer.

  Until now, no B-29 had ever attacked below 20,000 feet. LeMay decided every single one of his planes would attack at less than half that altitude, at between 5,000 and 8,000 feet.21 It was a revolutionary concept—as was its combustible corollary. Instead of carrying a mixture of bombs and incendiaries, as the British did for their attacks on German cities, LeMay’s crews would carry nothing but incendiaries. A front line of pathfinders would drop several tons of bombs and flares from about 25,000 feet in order to mark targets and get things started. Then the real fireworks would come in at a fraction of that level, all at once and without warning.

  LeMay also decided daylight raids were a waste of time and planes. The attackers would come at night, not in formation but singly: each B-29 using its radar scope to hunt out a place where its ordnance load would do the most damage.

  Even more shocking, LeMay decided they would go in unarmed. Unlike the B-29s, Japan’s night fighter force had insufficient radar to track and catch individual bombers flying in irregular patterns. By the time the Japanese figured out what was happening, LeMay figured, his B-29s would be safe and gone. So, taking a page out of General Kenney’s book, he ripped out all the Superfortress’s precious gun turrets except the one in the rear and got rid of the co-pilot and bombardier. As Kenney had discovered, there was no need for a bombardier at that low level. It also created room for still more M-74s.22

  LeMay’s plan wasn’t just to reduce certain targets or cities to smoldering rubble, as British and American bombers were doing to Germany. It was to burn out the heart and soul of an entire nation. The goal was to save American lives by the thousands by taking away lives by tens or even hundreds of thousands—and above all to prevent the need for a long, protracted invasion of Japan by the ruthless application of a single instrument: the B-29 Superfortress.

  That was the plan. “Probably the greatest one-man military decision ever made,” as someone later put it.23 LeMay had thrown away the proverbial book. But he had also finally come up with a strategy to match the awesome new weapons at his disposal. When the planes arrived over Tokyo, he calculated, twenty-five tons of incendiaries would be raining down on every square mile of the city.24

  When LeMay outlined his plan to his commanding officers, some of them called it plain murder. They weren’t thinking of Japanese civilians, but American B-29 crews coming in exposed and almost unarmed at that low level. “Sitting ducks,” they told each other with a shake of their heads, “we’ll be sitting ducks.”

  LeMay thought differently. The few night fighters the B-29s couldn’t beat off with their remaining guns, they could evade with superior speed. He also felt confident that the B-29 with its magnificent airframe could absorb whatever battle damage it did incur, and still get back to base.

  The first low-level raid was set for March 9, 1945. Meanwhile, Douglas MacArthur had raised the American flag over Corregidor as the liberation of the Philippines entered its final stages. Other American soldiers were getting ready to land on Okinawa, in preparation for the invasion of the Japanese homeland. Experts had told the secretary of war that the invasion would last through most of 1946 and cost upwards of a million U.S. casualties.25 LeMay had one goal: to make that invasion unnecessary.

  That afternoon when the word went out to the aircrews, “You will come over the target at an altitude of five thousand feet,” there were gasps of surprise and shock. But in the 504th, its colonel, Glen Martin, heard the initial shouts of “Crazy” and “This is nuts” turn into “a roar of surprise and enthusiasm,” as he put it, once his crews realized the scope of the entire plan.26

  Some 334 B-29s lumbered into the air and made the fifteen-hundred-mile flight to Japan, arriving just after night had settled over an unsuspecting Tokyo. The effect was terrifying. In LeMay’s words, “It was as though Tokyo had dropped through the floor of the world and into the mouth of hell.”27 Two thousand tons of incendiaries rained down on the city from every direction, burning out sixteen square miles of the city and destroying more than a quarter million buildings. Some 83,000 people died in the conflagration that set entire blocks alight and boiled away the water in Tokyo’s canals. LeMay’s planes returned with their underwings and bomb bay doors blackened by the smoke and soot. Crews could smell roasting human flesh below, which lingered in their planes until they landed back at base.

  It was the single most destructive air raid in history—and set an apocalyptic scale for what was to come.

  News of the raid reached Bill Knudsen many thousands of miles away, in Dayton, Ohio, at the Air Force’s Wright-Patterson Field. It had been the home of the Wright brothers’ first airplane factory. It was now Bill Knudsen’s office, and his last.

  With the Battle of Kansas won and the B-29 in action, there was still a lot left for him to do. The Air Force had learned that the key to airpower was logistics: how to keep all those thousands of planes in the air gassed, armed, and ready—and headed in the right direction. So in September 1944, he had been put in charge of the new Air Technical Service Command, or ATSC, the Army Air Forces’ logistical and air services.

  As for airplane production, the numbers were hitting almost unimaginable heights. For 1944 it included 93,000 airplanes—almost double the number Roosevelt had proposed in 1940 and which everyone had pronounced impossible. In addition, America was producing a quarter of a million aircraft engines, three-quarters of a million machine guns for the Army, four and a half million rifles and small arms, and 17,500 tanks.28

  Yet that was almost half the number produced in 1943, and deliberately so. The fact was the problem now was not how to speed up or even maintain production, but how to slow it down as the war’s end approached. Back in July 1943, the New Deal critics had finally gotten their wish. A new centralized agency was set up with a single czar to oversee both war production and manpower mobilization. The czar was Roosevelt confidant and Supreme Court justice James Byrnes, and as head of the new War Mobilization Board he had so many sweeping powers, some called him the Assistant President.29

  Yet from his first day in office until the end of the war, he spent most of his time trying to demobilize the war effort and get American business back on track for an orderly transition to a peacetime economy. Production of civilian products had resumed in August 1944—a sure sign that Washington felt it was safe to begin to wind down mobilization. “Reconversion” became the catchphrase of the day.30

  Such was the power of the production monster Knudsen had unleashed and American business had created. Certainly as far as Knudsen was concerned, he felt his job was done. He was worn out, his health strained to the breaking point. His daughter Martha remembered him sitting at home with tears streaming down his face as the radio announcer told of German cities he once knew—Hamburg, Lübeck, Cologne—reduced to rubble by the bombers he helped build. After six months at Dayton and less than a month after V-E Day, Knudsen formally resigned from the Army, on June 1, 1945. The day before, Hap Arnold had pinned the oak leaf cluster to the Distinguished Service Medal Knudsen had been awarded the previous May, “for exceptionally meritorious and distinguished services in the performance of duties of great responsibility.” Bob Patterson told the press he calculated just by being there Knudsen had single-handedly “raised America’s war production totals by 10 percent.”31

  As Knudsen saluted and shook hands and set off from Dayton to rejoin his family in Detroit at last, the problem of how to finish the war
had passed into other hands. It was no longer a matter of mass production. It was a matter of applying the awesome new technologies industry had developed, in the right places and in the right way.

  Here Knudsen had made one final contribution.

  On June 11—just ten days after Knudsen stepped down—a flight of specially modified B-29s began arriving at Tinian. The planes had been built at the Glenn Martin plant in Omaha—the plant Knudsen had turned around with the help of a pair of hard-driving managers. These B-29s were different from the others, with slightly wider bomb bay doors and a modified cockpit with extra room for technicians and special instruments. None of the Omaha workers had known why, and even the top managers knew only that they were part of a special project dubbed Silverplate.

  Silverplate’s commanding officer was a thin Air Force colonel with wavy hair and dark eyebrows. Paul W. Tibbets had been operations officer of the 97th Bombardment Group in North Africa and Europe, and commanded the first flight of B-17s to arrive in Europe. Then he had switched to B-29s, where he proved so adept at handling the tough, temperamental machines that Hap Arnold had pulled him from combat and set him to work training other pilots. There was probably no one in the entire Air Force who knew as much about the B-29 as Tibbets—and certainly no one as qualified for as nerve-racking an assignment as Silverplate.32

  After months of special training in the Utah desert, and two months in Cuba teaching his crews about long over-sea flights, Tibbets was assembling his men and planes at Tinian for their final preparation. Whatever their mission would be—and Tibbetts had only been told that it would very probably end the war—he had decided that the B-29 with which he would lead the Omaha pack (serial number B-29-45MO 44-86292) would be spray-painted with the name of his mother, who had encouraged him against his father’s will to enter the Air Force.

  She lived in Miami, and her name was Enola Gay.

  For the rest of the summer, B-29s dropped tons of Henry Kaiser’s magnesium goop and burned out the heart of industrial Japan. Tokyo, Nagoya, Kobe, Osaka, Yokohama, Kawasaki, Toyama: all vanished in a blistering cloud of fire. LeMay’s six hundred B-29s roamed the Japanese islands almost at will. They took to dropping leaflets on Japanese cities before a raid, urging the population to evacuate before they were incinerated.33