Flyboys

by James Bradley

  On June 15, 1944, China-based B-29s made their first attack on Japan, against a steel mill in Kyushu. Sixty planes flying at thirty thousand feet reached the target, but only one bomb hit the plant, and seven bombers didn’t return. These high-altitude daylight missions were abysmally ineffective. More bombs landed on rice paddies than on steel furnaces, and too many planes were lost.

  To solve the problem and prove the B-29’s ability to win the war, Hap Arnold dispatched his Top Gun out of Europe, General Curtis LeMay. Curtis was just thirty-eight years old, the youngest general in the army air force. He was personally brave and had led a number of dangerous bombing missions in Europe. He was big and beefy, but he spoke so softly it was hard to hear him from a few yards away. His round face was frozen in a perpetual scowl, the result of a mild form of Bell’s palsy. Curtis was known for his immobile, unflappable style. A subordinate said he “doesn’t appear to work much, but he thinks more than any man I have ever known.” Said another:

  Until he made up his mind about something, he was inclined to listen and say nothing. After he had made up his mind, he remained silent long enough to figure out how he could announce it in the fewest possible words. One or two sentences was his idea of a speech. Perhaps this paucity of words was by itself a factor in riveting the men around him. He had a way of sounding as if he had considered all the options, then chosen the only possible one. And by saying so in so few words, he seemed to convince everyone that, however surprising his decision might be, it was probably the right one.

  A combination of General George Patton and Vince Lombardi, Curtis was totally focused on the goal; winning was the only thing. He instructed his men “that if a crew was able to get to a target, the inability to return was no reason to abort.” As one Flyboy said about him, “Our job was to hit the target—planes and crews, it seemed, were expendable.” Curtis had a reputation as a tough taskmaster ready to accept casualties to achieve results. One airman said, “General LeMay has taken over [and] he is going to get us all killed.”

  Curtis later remembered his orders as: “You go ahead and get results with the B-29. If you don’t get results, you’ll be fired.” He wrote that he knew he was under pressure because “our entire Nation howled like a pack of wolves for an attack on the Japanese homeland.”

  With the capture of Saipan, Curtis moved the B-29 operation to the Mariana Islands. Now Flyboys were within reach of the Japanese empire.

  Curtis initially stuck to air force dogma—high-altitude precision bombing. But at thirty thousand feet over Japan, his crews were buffeted by a series of mysterious winds no one had encountered before, as if the gods were again whipping up the kaze to protect the Land of the Rising Sun. This unknown witch’s brew of winds would later be named the jet stream. Jet stream stratospheric blasts came howling out of Siberia across the Sea of Japan at 250 miles an hour. If a B-29 flew perpendicular to the wind, the plane “skidded” sideways. If the plane flew into the wind, it became a stationary target, a sitting duck for antiaircraft fire. If a pilot flew with the wind, his Surperfortress would travel at a ground speed of 450 miles an hour—much too fast to aim with Norden bombsights. The divine winds also created layers of bad weather between the planes and the targets six miles below. On one run, just 24 planes out of 111 were able to sight their targets and drop their payloads anywhere near them.

  Hap Arnold viewed the expensive B-29s—they cost $600,000 each—as magic silver bullets that could end the war. If Curtis didn’t get results from the country’s huge investment, the idea of strategic bombing would be tossed, the navy would probably commandeer the B29s, and Billy Mitchell’s dream of an independent air force would be out the window. “I had to do something,” Curtis said. “And I had to do something fast.”

  Curtis examined past AAF doctrine—daytime high-altitude precision bombing—and decided to turn it on its head. He would go in at night. He would swoop in low, below the kaze. In the darkness, there would be no precision and he would bomb indiscriminately.

  “Going in low” might sound sensible to the reader, but to the B-29 Flyboys, it sounded like suicide. The whole point of flying high was to avoid being shot. Flyboys at thirty thousand feet could look down and see fields of flak coming up at them. Now they had to conceive of flying directly into those black puffs. This was like asking a foxhole soldier to suddenly abandon his protective cover and charge toward the incoming bullets.

  But Curtis thought he had found a hole in the Japanese defenses. To some it was a wild guess, but he figured the Japanese didn’t have sufficient antiaircraft coverage between three and ten thousand feet. He would thread his planes through that seam. His flak experts told him he’d lose 70 percent of his B-29s. But his gut told him otherwise. He hoped to achieve surprise and confuse Japanese antiaircraft gunners, who would be forced to attempt adjustments in the dark. He also reasoned that Japanese fighter planes would not rise to confront his planes in the dark. So, in another daring move, he decided to take the guns, ammunition, and gunners off the B-29s, enabling each plane to carry 2,700 extra pounds of napalm.

  To test his theory, Curtis chose the biggest target—Tokyo—and decided not to tell his boss. As he wrote:

  If I do it I won’t say a thing to General Arnold in advance. Why should I? He’s on the hook in order to get some results out of the B-29’s. But if I set up this deal, and Arnold O.K.’s it beforehand, then he would have to assume some of the responsibility. And if I don’t tell him, and it’s all a failure, and I don’t produce any results, then he can fire me. And he can put another commander in here, and still have a chance to make something out of the 29’s. This is sound, this is practical, this is the way I’ll do it: not one word to General Arnold.

  On March 9, 1945, Curtis briefed his Flyboys on the mission. He spoke first of the target, the route and land-sea rescue arrangements. Then, cigar in hand, feet firmly planted, he faced the crews and announced, “I’m going to send you in at five thousand feet. And without any guns, gunners, or ammunition.”

  The boys were shocked. This was a death sentence issued by a maniac. “A sort of cold fear gripped the crews. Many frankly did not expect to return from a raid over that city, at an altitude of less than 10,000 feet.”

  “We thought LeMay was out of his mind to order anything like this,” said pilot Fiske Hanley. “At these low altitudes, four thousand to six thousand feet, the Japanese could hit us with almost any kind of flak that they had.”

  “We thought he was crazy,” echoed Newell Fears. “We just couldn’t comprehend the man. We had to strip all of our ammunition. . . . It just was unthinkable.” Bob Rodenhaus thought Curtis had lost his marbles: “It’s putting a plane in a confrontation that it was not designed for, and we couldn’t conceive of what the purpose was.” “I thought it was next to suicide,” said Loy Collingwood. “We were scared.” Joe Tucker believed he had just heard his death sentence: “We thought, ‘Oh, boy, Old Blood-and-Guts—his guts and our blood.’”

  But Curtis was focused on the awful step necessary to win this war: “No matter how you slice it, you’re going to kill an awful lot of civilians,” he told his crews. “Thousands and thousands. But, if you don’t destroy Japanese industry, we’re going to have to invade Japan. And how many Americans will be killed in an invasion of Japan? Some say a million. We’re at war with Japan. We were attacked by Japan. Do you want to kill Japanese, or would you rather have Americans killed?” Regarding the morality of an operation that would kill civilians, Curtis simply said, “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.”

  The B-29s began lumbering down Guam airstrips at 5:35 P.M. on Friday, March 9, 1945. On Saipan and Tinian, which were nearer to Tokyo, they began forty minutes later. The Flyboys ascended with heavy hearts. Many believed they were winging to their deaths. John Jennings, who remained behind on Guam, thought he would never see his buddies again. “We all went down to the fli
ght line to say good-bye to our friends,” he recalled. “Nobody’s going in at those altitudes and coming back.”

  By 8:15 P.M., 334 B-29s were in the air. They formed three 400-mile-long parallel streams that roared above Iwo Jima and Chichi Jima. Two hundred million dollars’ worth of hardware was in the air. This was at a time when $1,700 was a sufficient yearly salary to support a family of four, a Harvard education cost $1,000, and a good hotel room in New York cost three dollars a night.

  To test napalm’s potential on “industrial” Japan, the army had built a “Little Tokyo” at Dugway Proving Ground, eighty-seven miles southwest of Salt Lake City, Utah. Carpenters and designers who had worked in Japan had constructed two dozen Japanese-style homes, using authentic Japanese wood. Japanese floors—tatami mats—were hard to come by, but some were found in Hawaii and shipped in. Authentic furniture was placed in the rooms. To simulate real living conditions, clothes were hung in closets.

  Throughout the summer of 1943, the army air force had dropped different mixtures of napalm on Utah’s Little Tokyo. The winner was a new bomb called the M69. The M69 didn’t look like a bomb; it looked like a section of pipe twenty inches long and three inches in diameter, and was not round but hexagonal with blunt ends. Inside the pipe was napalm packed in cheesecloth bags. The entire assembly weighed just six and a half pounds. This pipe bomb was dropped from a plane and floated to earth attached to a three-foot-long streamer that slowed its descent, preventing it from falling so fast that it would go right through a building and into the basement.

  When the M69 hit the ground, it lay still for about five seconds—just an inert pipe. Then, with a bang, it shot out the cheesecloth bags. If there were no obstructions, the bags traveled a distance of a hundred yards. If the cheesecloth bag struck an object, its projectile force burst the bag and the flaming goo broke into hundreds of small chunks and splattered up to fifty feet in all directions.

  Other incendiaries burned intensely, but they burned in one place. An old-fashioned incendiary might crash through your roof and start your floor afire, but the fire was localized and you might be able to put it out. The M69 didn’t start one fire, it started hundreds. And they kept burning.

  The popular Collier’s magazine highlighted the perfection of the M69 napalm bomb in a breezy article entitled “Tokyo Calling Cards.” Accompanying the article was a colorful illustration of Little Tokyo on the barren Utah salt flats. The article said the M69 was first tested against civilian homes. “Having proved itself in the comparatively simple job of demolishing houses, the bomb had to be capable of doing an equal job on industrial buildings, too, or the Army didn’t want it. During an incendiary bomb attack some houses do get burned—by accident—but the prime target is the enemy’s industrial plant.” The article did not question why, if industrial targets were the priority for destruction, meticulously constructed homes were the first targets of the tests.

  For decades the Japanese government had known its cities were uniquely vulnerable to firebombing. But if the Spirit Warriors admitted this vulnerability to the populace, their prestige might be questioned. So even after the fall of Saipan, the Spirit Warriors elected “to give priority to production over civilian protection.”

  As a result, the entire city of Tokyo had only eighteen concrete air-raid shelters. These had room for five thousand of the city’s six million inhabitants. Only eight thousand firemen were available. The standard method of protection for the people of Tokyo was little dugouts beside their houses. Yoshiko Hashimoto, a twenty-four-year-old mother living with her parents and sisters, remembered that her family’s dugout was built up above ground because of the high water table around their home. “I wondered if it would protect us,” she told me decades later.

  Neighborhood associations of ten to twenty families each were organized into an air-raid defense network. “The military instructed us civilians,” Yoshiko Hashimoto said. “They would toss a mock bomb that generated smoke. We threw water on it. We had bucket brigade practice. We learned how to care for the wounded, how to put them on stretchers.”

  Against 334 $600,000 bombers winging to Japan with 3,334,000 pounds of deadly napalm, Tokyoites were armed with wet mops, sandbags, and buckets of water.

  March 9, Hashimoto-san remembered, was “very windy and cold.” A north wind was blowing over fifty miles an hour, “violent as a spring typhoon.” As the leading B-29 “pathfinder” planes winged toward the empire, radiomen tuned in to Tokyo Rose. Crewmen glanced at one another as they heard the song “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” Just before midnight, a spokesman for Imperial General Headquarters went on the radio to remind Tokyo residents that Army Day would be celebrated the next day, March 10. There would be a big parade in the center of Tokyo. As he signed off, he encouraged his listeners to keep their chins up. His last words were “The darkest hour is just before dawn.”

  Minutes later, the pathfinder planes came whooshing over Tokyo at a height of only five hundred feet. Releasing their jellied gasoline, they seared a flaming X across the city.

  “They took the most experienced crews and put them up about forty-five minutes before the bulk of the bomber stream arrived,” pilot Charlie Phillips said about the pathfinders. “They drew a fiery X on the ground. That formed four quadrants. We would have a designated quadrant to put our bombs into as we arrived.”

  Then the bombers arrived in groups of three, homing in on the flaming X. The B-29s had timing devices called intervalometers that planted the five-hundred-pound clusters of incendiaries every fifty feet. “In this way, the bomb load of each bomber covered a strip 350 feet by 2,000 feet.”

  The 334 B-29s dropped 8,519 bombs weighing 500 pounds each. These bombs burst open 2,000 feet above Tokyo and released a total of 496,000 individual 6.2-pound cylinders containing jellied gasoline. The cylinders floated down slowly with their little parachutes.

  Back on Guam, General Curtis LeMay sat in the control room smoking a cigar.

  “I’m sweating this one out myself,” he told an aide. “A lot could go wrong. I can’t sleep. I usually can, but not tonight.”

  Finally, the first bombs-away message arrived: “Bombing the primary target visually. Large fires observed. Flak moderate. Fighter opposition nil.” Curtis wouldn’t know much detail until reconnaissance planes returned with photos the next evening, but out of a corner of his mouth, he mumbled, “It looks pretty good.” Then “he shifted his cigar and for the first time he smiled.”

  Seventeen-year-old Miyoko Takeuchi had jumped into the family dugout when the alert sounded. “I saw American planes dropping incendiaries like a shower, like a Niagara Falls of fireworks,” she said. “Everyone there in the dugout said ‘How beautiful!’” From the distant hills of the Jesuit Sophia University, Father Gustav Bitter thought the scene of falling cylinders with their parachutes resembled “a silver curtain falling like . . . the silver tinsel that we hung from Christmas trees in Germany . . . and where these silver streamers would touch the earth, red fires would spring up.” Danish diplomat Lars Tillitse later said the incendiaries “did not fall, they descended rather slowly, like a cascade of silvery water. One single bomb covered quite a big area, and what they covered they devoured.”

  Thousand of fires sprang to life. “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.” Individual fires merged into whirlwinds of flame that lashed out like dragons’ tongues. Within thirty minutes, the fire department was completely defeated. “At one station, the fire left only a tangle of corpses around a melted fire engine.” Recalled one pilot, “The whole area was lighted as if it were broad daylight when we entered the drop zone.”

  Curtis’s hunch had been correct.

  “It turned out that the Japanese had built a great deal of antiaircraft fire that went up to about 5,500 feet,” said Flyboy John Jennings. “They had quite a bit of medium that went from a
round 10,000 up to 20,000 and then from 20,000 to 30,000, but they had built nothing between 5,500 and 10,000. Who would be crazy enough to come in at those altitudes?”

  Yoshiko Hashimoto was asleep with her one-year-old son and three sisters, mother, and father when the attack began. Her husband was away on duty. She heard the air-raid siren. She ran with her baby to the family’s dugout for protection. Her mother and father and sisters—Chieko, nineteen; Etsuko, seventeen; and Hisae, fourteen—came next.

  Her father immediately sensed that this raid was different from the smaller ones Tokyo had already endured. “It’s dangerous to stay in the dugout, let’s run away!” he shouted to his wife and daughters.

  “I tied my baby on my back and covered him with a big maternity cover,” Hashimoto-san told me. “I carried diapers, milk, and important family documents.” She didn’t yet grasp that this night would be a flight for survival.

  The family took shelter underneath an elevated railway. But in just seconds, her father yelled again, “Let’s go!”

  “I looked to the west—it was red like the sun setting,” Hashimoto-san said. “I saw many pillars of fire sprouting from the ground. Many B-29s were dropping bombs. They were flying so low I wondered if they’d hit the utility poles. They were so large and their bellies were red from the reflected fire.