“The Japanese constantly told us that if Japan lost the war, we as war criminals were going to be executed,” Bill recalled. “And we believed them, no doubt about it!” “I thought I wouldn’t survive,” Charlie told me. “I thought they’d execute me with the invasion.”
The Ofuna guards who harassed Bill and Charlie probably viewed themselves as relatively benign. If the tables had been turned, the guards certainly would not have expected any better from the Americans. “I was shocked by the U.S. treatment,” Yoshio Nakajima, one of the very few Iwo Jima POWs, told me. “The U.S. treated me fairly as a human. There was a huge gap between the Japanese and American forces.” Another Iwo Jima POW, Masaji Ozawa, told me he believed he would have his head chopped off if he surrendered to U.S. forces. Instead, he found himself receiving medical treatment for his wounds and drinking Coca-Cola. “Our education was a military one,” Ozawa-san said. “We were supposed to die for the emperor. We were small things, like bugs to be squashed. We thought the Americans would treat us as bugs, just like our army did. But instead America saved my life.”
As Warren Earl passed his days in No Mans Land listening to broadcasts, Floyd Hall remained at Major Horie’s headquarters, giving English lessons. Soon the soldiers began referring to Floyd as “Horie’s pet.” Major Horie asked Captain Yoshii when Warren Earl would be returned to him, as Yoshii had promised. “Just a few more days,” the captain would always answer.
American carrier planes continued to harass the troops on Chichi Jima. And other, larger Marianas-based airplanes made their appearance also. “The B-29s would swoosh over us and drop what we thought were bombs,” said Iwatake-san. “But they were just dropping empty fuel tanks on us to say hello. Those B-29s you can never forget; they were huge.”
On the evening of March 9, Flyboys Floyd Hall and Warren Earl Vaughn heard something unusual overhead in the darkness. For hours, a long stream of more than 330 B-29s flew north at low altitudes over Chichi Jima. Usually the planes flew in smaller numbers, but their concentrated roar punctuated the night.
“As the bombers were going overhead to bomb Japan,” said Dr. Mitsuyoshi Sasaki, “the men on Chichi Jima would think of our brothers, sisters, and mothers and feel as if we were seeing them off to their deaths.” Tamamura-san told me, “We’d wire back to Tokyo about the B-29s that were on their way. We knew what they were going to do.”
But actually no one knew. No one could imagine what was about to happen during the evening hours of March 9 and the early morning of March 10. The largest slaughter of humans in world history was about to take place. The airplane, which just a few decades earlier was a frail bundle of wood most military experts judged would never be a major factor in war, would now prove itself as history’s most effective killing machine.
In 1937, when Japan bombed “defenseless men, women and children” in Chinese cities, Franklin Roosevelt had called the action “ruthless” and said it “sickened the hearts of every civilized man and woman.” In 1939, Germany had shocked the world by bombing Warsaw. Then, in 1940, the Luftwaffe had bombed Rotterdam, London, and Coventry. Roosevelt “again pleaded that all parties refrain from bombing civilians, and went on to ‘recall with pride that the United States consistently has taken the lead in urging that this inhuman practice be prohibited.’” The British foreign office condemned the “inhuman methods used by the Germans in other countries” and declared that “His Majesty’s Government have made it clear that it is no part of their policy to bomb nonmilitary objectives, no matter what the policy of the German Government may be.”
Yet when the English and Americans entered the air war in force, they proved to have few qualms about slaughtering German and Japanese civilians.
On July 8, 1940, Prime Minister Churchill wrote, “When I look around to see how we can win the war I see that there is only one sure path, and this is an absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland.” Yet the ability of an airplane traveling hundreds of miles an hour to pinpoint something as small as a factory or munitions dump proved to be impossible. “A chilling report in August 1941 documented that only about one bomb in five landed within even a five-mile radius of the designated target.” So if the Royal Air Force could not bomb the targets they wanted to, they would bomb what they could.
The civilized English slaughter from the air was distinguished from the barbaric German and Japanese campaigns by an obfuscating cloud of euphemisms. The public was told British planes sought out strictly “military targets” and civilians were only killed by “mistake.” Churchill spoke of “dehousing.” Indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas was called “area bombing.” One U.S. Army Air Force instructor noted, “Most of the European nations are definitely contemplating [area bombing, but it is] repugnant to our humanitarian principles.” Instead, U.S. Army Air Force doctrine called for “high-altitude precision bombing.” The Norden bombsight, a new high-tech aiming device, was capable of “pinpoint accuracy,” the Americans claimed, able to place a bomb down a smokestack from five miles up in the sky. This technological marvel would, it was argued, make high-altitude bombing more effective and more humane. Cities could be bombed with surgical precision, targeting only key economic sites like airplane factories and oil refineries. But the tests on the Norden bombsight had been conducted in the dry, sunny American Southwest where there was maximum visibility. Bombing conditions in foggy, rainy Germany were very different.
Even though the bombs were not hitting their marks, the U.S. military kept up the fiction of high-altitude strategic bombing for stateside Americans. As British historian John Keegan writes, “[It] combined moral scruple, historical optimism, and technological pioneering, all three distinctly American characteristics.”
But on the front lines, American Flyboys knew what was happening. “Don’t get the notion that your job is going to be glorious or glamorous,” said an American officer briefing a bomber crew. “You’ve got dirty work to do and might as well face the facts: You’re going to be baby killers.”
Bombardier Frank Clark was the son of a Wisconsin factory worker and his mission bothered him. “What I don’t like, and didn’t talk about to anyone,” he admitted after the war, “was the fact that we were bombing industrial towns that were largely populated with working people—much like the towns a lot of us came from. . . . To me the war had a human face.”
American and British bombs eventually killed more than 650,000 German civilians. (Total U.S. combat deaths in WWII were about 400,000.) Twenty percent of these—130,000—were German children. An additional 800,000 German civilians were maimed. With their homes burned to the ground, millions fled for their lives. In accomplishing these staggering statistics, many Flyboys perished. The Americans lost 18,369 planes and suffered 79,265 casualties in the European theater alone. Britain had about 80,000 Flyboy casualties. In comparison, the entire United States Marine Corps had 75,000 casualties in all of World War II.
And the earlier German air attacks that had been “odious” to Winston Churchill were tame in comparison to the monstrous raids he authorized. In firestorms like that at Hamburg in late July of 1943, the RAF killed more people in one stroke than would die in Britain during the entire war. At least 45,000 old men (the young men were in the service), women, and children were killed in the conflagration. Half of Hamburg was destroyed and 400,000 people were “dehoused.” In Hamburg, 731 RAF bombers dropped four-pound incendiaries to start fires on roofs and thirty-pound high explosives to penetrate deeper into houses and disrupt roads to hamper fire crews. The rapidly expanding fireball created a meteorological phenomenon—a firestorm that sucked oxygen into its center with “a bellows-like draft creating terrific winds that sent bodies, trees, and parts of buildings flying through air heated to 800° centigrade.” “One survivor said the sound of the wind was ‘like the Devil laughing.’”
Screaming human torches ran down streets while “tiny children lay like fried eels on the pavement.�
� Some ran to their basements or air-raid shelters. But “the fire drained these quarters of oxygen, asphyxiating inhabitants, then baking the bodies through radiant heat or, if the fire burst through collapsing walls, melting them into ‘a thick, greasy black mass’ or leaving behind what the Germans called Bombenbrandschrumpfleichen (incendiary-bomb-shrunken bodies).”
Sir Arthur Harris, who directed Churchill’s bombing campaign, later wrote:
Tell me one operation of war which is moral . . . Sticking a bayonet into a man’s belly, is that moral? Then they say, well, of course strategic bombing involved civilians. Civilians are always involved in major war.
After all, previous wars ended up in the besieging of major cities, and in besieging a city what was the idea? To cut off all supplies, and the city held out if it could until they’d eaten the last dog, cat, and sewer rat and were all starving, and meanwhile the besieging forces lobbed every missile they could lay their hands on into the city, more or less regardless of where those missiles landed, as an added incentive to surrender.
Some, including Jimmy Doolittle, opposed the indiscriminate bombing by Americans of German civilians. One air corps general wrote, “We should never allow the history of this war to convict us of throwing the strategic bomber at the man in the street. [Such activity would] absolutely convince the Germans that we are the barbarians they say we are, for it would be perfectly obvious to them that this is primarily a large-scale attack on civilians, as, in fact, it of course will be.” Another air force general protested this “baby killing plan.”
But Roosevelt told Secretary of War Stimson that the enemy had to be taught a lesson. FDR wrote that it was “of the utmost importance that every person in Germany should realize that this time Germany is a defeated nation. . . . The fact that they are a defeated nation, collectively and individually, must be so impressed upon them that they will hesitate to start any new war.”
Army air corps leaders had been dismayed when an Associated Press article somehow got by censors and informed the home front that “the Allied air commanders have made the long-awaited decision to adopt deliberate terror bombing of the great German population centers as a ruthless expedient to hasten Hitler’s doom.” One air force man warned of the “nationwide serious effect on the Air Forces as we have steadily preached the gospel of precision bombing against military and industrial targets.” But FDR, now comfortable with “barbarous” methods of air war, saw something different in these holocausts: “an impressive demonstration of what America might be able to achieve in its war against Japan.” As award-winning historian Richard Frank has written, “The most fundamental point about the history of bombing in Europe is that it had trampled down every moral barrier to the use of massive aerial firepower . . . even when it was clear that the destruction of the target would entail death for large numbers of noncombatants.”
On February 3, 1945, American bombers killed at least 35,000 civilians in Berlin. Then, on February 14, the Anglo-Americans scorched another 40,000 to death in Dresden. Kurt Vonnegut memorialized the moment in his novel Slaughterhouse-Five: “Dresden was like the moon now, nothing but minerals. The stones were hot. Everybody else in the neighborhood was dead.” Vonnegut described “little logs” lying on the pavement. “These were people who had been caught in the firestorm.”
Today, with twenty-twenty hindsight, people speak of March 1945 as “near the end of the war.” True, Germany was close to defeat. But it was a different story in the Pacific. Casualties were increasing and the fighting becoming more intense. Observed Ernie Pyle, “The Pacific war is gradually getting condensed, and consequently tougher and tougher. The closer we go to Japan itself, the harder it will be. . . . To me it looks like trying days for us in the years ahead.” Ernie didn’t say months—he said years.
Billy Mitchell had told America how to deal with Japan twenty years earlier: “Japan’s teeming cities erected of ‘paper and wood and other inflammable structures’ comprised ‘the greatest aerial targets the world has ever seen. . . . Incendiary projectiles would burn the cities to the ground in short order.’” Back in early 1940, AAF general Claire Chennault had written General Hap Arnold that five hundred American aircraft could “burn out the industrial heart of the Empire with fire-bomb attacks on the teeming bamboo ant heaps of Honshu and Kyushu.” Hap had responded that the U.S. “was only interested in the precision bombing of military targets, and the ‘use of incendiaries against cities was contrary to our national policy of attacking military objectives.’”
But the commander in chief felt differently. “Whereas Arnold and the airmen rejected the idea, Roosevelt was delighted by the proposal and ordered his top cabinet officials to work on the project.” The plan soon died as Secretary of War Stimson “had moral objections to attacks on cities and civilians,” and General George Marshall was focused more on the threat Hitler posed to his GIs. But as war with Japan loomed closer, Marshall had invited seven Washington journalists to a secret briefing on November 15, 1941. Off the record, Marshall told the opinion-makers that if war came with Japan, the United States would fight without mercy. American planes would be “dispatched immediately to set the paper cities of Japan on fire. There won’t be any hesitation about bombing civilians—it will be all out.”
In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, the U.S. had been unable to secure landing fields close enough to bomb the island nation. As a result, it wasn’t until early 1943 that the first detailed study of urban attack against Japan had been produced. It had noted that “even as small amounts as 10 tons of M-69’s [small napalm-filled pipe bombs] would have the possibility of wiping out major portions of any of the large Japanese cities.” By now, the Japanese had been so demonized that few Americans had a problem with what they had recently considered barbarous bombing. But the AAF was still concerned about appearances. A May 1943 memo about firebombing Japanese cities had included this telling sentence: “It is desired that the areas selected include, or be in the immediate vicinity of, legitimate military targets.”
Japan is a small country, about the size of California, and most of Japan is mountainous, so there is no “interior.” The largest cities hug the coastline. Manufacturing was incredibly concentrated with “about 75 percent in the half-dozen largest cities.” “A line connecting the industrialized centers of Japan . . . would inscribe an elongated S, with the upper tip at Niigata, the sinuous bends encircling the great centers of Tokyo, Yokohama, Nagoya, and Kobe, and the lower tip running through Hiroshima-Kure and Yawata.” These cities are all within 150 miles of one another. Whereas only 12 percent of Germany’s industrial workforce lived in its fifteen largest cities, 34 percent of Japan’s factory workers were crammed into its six largest cities. Berlin had 6 percent of Germany’s industrial workers; Tokyo had 14 percent of Japan’s. Hamburg had 6,000 inhabitants to the square mile, while Osaka had 45,000 and Tokyo’s Asakusa workers’ ward had more than 130,000 to the square mile.
In February 1944, Roosevelt received a plan for strategic air assault on Japan. By January of 1945, bombing studies that spoke of the “vulnerability of Japanese cities to fire” now began to consistently include the argument that cities were “a valid and eventually important military objective . . . because of the heavy dispersal of industry within the cities and within the most congested parts of them.” Many family homes were also workshops where parts were fabricated for assembly in nearby factories. “Each factory was like a tree radiating a web of roots throughout the surrounding living areas from which it drew both workers and parts.”
Elmer Davis, head of the Office of War Information, told the Joint Chiefs of Staff in February of 1945 how the American public felt: “There did not appear to be a great deal of opposition from the humanitarian point of view to the bombing of Japan but some opposition is being expressed to the continual bombing of Berlin.” Syndicated military analyst Major George Fielding Eliot called for “the complete and ruthless destruction of Japanese industry, so that not one brick of any Japanese fac
tory shall be left upon another, so that there shall not be in Japan one electric motor or one steam or gasoline engine, not a chemical laboratory, not so much as a book which tells how these things are made.” In 1945, FDR’s son and adviser Elliot Roosevelt called for bombing Japan “until we have destroyed about half the Japanese civilian population.” And the B-29 made it possible.
FDR had made America’s biggest WWII investments in airplanes. The most expensive—the costliest weapon of history’s largest war—was the B-29. The atom bomb would cost $2 billion, but many in Washington referred to the B-29 as America’s “$3 billion gamble.”
The B-29 Superfortress was far from an overnight technical success. Long before Pearl Harbor, Hap Arnold had perceived the need for a large bomber able to fly long distances to defend America against the Nazi threat. After Pearl Harbor, Hap had rushed development of the B-29. He demanded that improvements that normally would take years be completed in months. The resulting plane was plagued by mechanical problems. The engines overheated and caught fire, and famous test pilots died in fiery crashes.
Not surprisingly, nobody wanted to fly the B-29, so Hap asked Jimmy Doolittle to send him his best pilot. That man was Paul Tibbets. Tibbets had flown the U.S.’s first strategic bombing sortie against the Germans. He was just twenty-nine years old, but he was a skilled pilot and a quiet yet firm leader who inspired confidence. Tibbets soon whipped the program into such snappy shape that he became known as “Mr. B-29.”
The B-29 was to airplanes what rifles were to slingshots. It was the biggest, longest, widest, heaviest, fastest, and longest-flying airplane in history. Its four propellers were each sixteen feet long. It could carry ten tons of bombs and still fly 357 miles per hour. It could remain airborne more than sixteen hours while providing living room-like comfort to its eleven-man crew. Other planes required bulky clothes and cumbersome oxygen masks in the minus-50-degree cold at thirty thousand feet. But this “Cadillac of the skies” had pressurized crew quarters, so airmen could lounge comfortably in their regular clothes. And once the kinks had (mostly) been worked out, it became the most devastating weapon of WWII. Recalled pilot 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.”
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