Flyboys

by James Bradley

  p. 267 “. . . Do you want to kill Japanese, or would you rather have Americans killed?” Coffey, Iron Eagle, 161.

  p. 267 “. . . But all war is immoral and if you let that bother you, you’re not a good soldier.” Quoted in Richard Rhodes, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 21-22.

  p. 269 “. . . but the prime target is the enemy’s industrial plant.” David O. Woodbury, “Tokyo Calling Cards,” Collier’s, April 14, 1945, 43.

  p. 269 “to give priority to production over civilian protection.” Frank, Downfall, 5.

  p. 269 . . . 3,334,000 pounds. “United States Strategic Bombing Survey Summary Report: Pacific War.”

  p. 269 “violent as a spring typhoon.” Frank, Downfall, 3.

  p. 270 they heard the song “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” Col. Robert Morgan, USAFR, Ret., with Ron Powers, The Man Who Flew the Memphis Belle: Memoir of a World War II Bomber Pilot (New York: Penguin Books, 2001), 310.

  p. 270 “The darkest hour is just before dawn.” Frank, Downfall, 3.

  p. 270 Charlie Phillips interview courtesy of Mark Natola.

  p. 270 “In this way, the bomb load of each bomber covered a strip 350 feet by 2,000 feet.” Werrell, Blankets of Fire, 168.

  p. 270 “he shifted his cigar and for the first time he smiled.” Coffey, Iron Eagle, 164.

  p. 270 . . . “Everyone there in the dugout said ‘How beautiful!’” Nihon no Kushu, vol. 3, ed. Katsumoto Saotome (Tokyo: Sanseido, 1980).

  p. 271 “. . . and where these silver streamers would touch the earth, red fires would spring up.” Frank, Downfall, 7.

  p. 271 “. . . One single bomb covered quite a big area, and what they covered they devoured.” Ibid.

  p. 271 “. . . Smoke and sparks were everywhere, and white-hot gusts came roaring down narrow streets.” Miller, The Story of World War II, 450.

  p. 271 “At one station, the fire left only a tangle of corpses around a melted fire engine.” Frank, Downfall, 8.

  p. 271 “The whole area was lighted as if it were broad daylight when we entered the drop zone.” Wheeler, Bombers Over Japan, 166.

  p. 272 “. . . panting ‘huh, huh, huh’ as they ran.” Frank, Downfall, 10.

  p. 273 “. . . killed or knocked unconscious its victims even before the flames reached them.” Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power, 277.

  p. 273 “Babies exploded on mothers’ backs, and cars on streets were ‘consumed like crumpled paper.’” Gavan Daws, Prisoners of the Japanese War: POWs of World War II in the Pacific (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1994), 319.

  p. 273 . . . “People on the outer edge of the group fell one by one, dead from inhalation.” Nihon no kushu, vol. 3.

  p. 273 “. . . I suddenly realized they were really burned bodies, still standing upright.” Lewis and Steele, Hell in the Pacific, 195.

  p. 273 “. . . No one stopped to help them.” Frank, Downfall, 11.

  p. 273 “. . . Now there wasn’t a drop of water, only the bodies of the adults and children who had died.” Ibid., 13.

  p. 275 “. . . I started to hate America from the bottom of my heart.” Nihon no kushu, vol. 3.

  p. 275 “. . . ‘That’s flesh burning.’” The World Today, March 10, 2000.

  p. 276 “swollen, contorted, blackened bodies that resembled ‘enormous ginseng roots.’” Frank, Downfall, 14.

  p. 276 . . . “Probably she gave birth just before she was burnt to death.” Nihon no kushu, vol. 3.

  p. 277 “. . . He was dead and I screamed.” Ibid.

  p. 277 . . . authorities came up with totals of 83,793 killed and 40,918 injured. Wheeler, Bombers Over Japan, 169.

  p. 277 “. . . but even these immense totals are sometimes challenged as too low.” Frank, Downfall, 18.

  p. 277 “We scorched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo on that night of March 9-10 than went up in vapor at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.” LeMay, Mission with LeMay, 387.

  Chapter 17: Enduring the Unendurable

  p. 278 “. . . to knock out all of Japan’s major industrial cities during the next ten days.” LeMay, Mission with LeMay, 353.

  p. 279 “. . . you should then have the ability to destroy whole industrial cities should that be required.” Coffey, Iron Eagle, 166.

  p. 279 “CENTER OF TOKYO DEVASTATED BY FIRE BOMBS . . . City’s Heart Gone.” Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power, 287.

  p. 279 “I not only saw Tokyo burning furiously in many sections, but I smelled it.” Ibid., 288.

  p. 279 “one of the most ruthless and barbaric killings of non-combatants in all history.” Lewis and Steele, Hell in the Pacific, 200.

  p. 279 “Guard against anyone stating this is area bombing.” Werrell, Blankets of Fire, 157.

  p. 279 “the economical method of destroying the small industries in these areas . . . of bringing about their liquidation.” Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power, 292.

  p. 279 “. . . the reduction of Japanese ability to produce war goods.” Ibid., 287-90.

  p. 280 “. . . drive inhabitants into the country and destroy their industrial utility.” Ibid., 291.

  p. 280 Radio Tokyo referred to the new U.S. policy as “slaughter bombing.” Dower, War Without Mercy, 41.

  p. 280 “. . . he and his men could do little to stop the fires.” Werrell, Blankets of Fire, 166.

  p. 280 “. . . but one could see the thought lurking behind the wooden faces.” Robert Guillian, I Saw Tokyo Burning: An Eyewitness Narrative from Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1981), 1-3.

  p. 280 “set forth in a general’s uniform and riding boots.” Frank, Downfall, 18.

  p. 281 “to shatter the enemy’s ambitions.” Quoted in Richard Wheeler, Iwo (New York: Lippincott and Crowell, 1980), 223.

  p. 282 “. . . he insisted on rolling down his own collar for the execution.” Robert L. Sherrod, History of Marine Corps Aviation in World War II (San Rafael, CA: Presido Press, 1980), footnote 15.

  p. 283 “. . . he consoled my heart and gave me comfort more than anything else could do.” Horie, Ogasawara Sendan No Saigo, 225.

  p. 284 “. . . Battalion Commander: Major Matoba.” Russell, The Knights of Bushido, 182.

  p. 288 “. . . All the other officers agreed that liver was good medicine for the stomach.” Ibid., 184.

  p. 289 List ending “Nagoaka . . . Madison.” United States Army Air Corps (USAAC), 1945.

  p. 290 “. . . Skeletons of motor vehicles, including fire engines, dotted the landscape.” Werrell, Blankets of Fire, 227.

  p. 290 Curtis destroyed more than twice as much urban area in Japan: 178 square miles. Ibid.

  p. 290 . . . damage in just two Japanese cities, Tokyo (56.3 square miles) and Osaka (16.4 square miles), nearly equaled all the damage done to all German cities put together. Ibid.

  p. 290 “conventional bombing could easily end the war.” Keith Wheeler and the Editors of Time-Life Books, The Fall of Japan (Alexandria, VA: Time-Life Books, 1983), 72.

  p. 290 “We could bomb and burn them until they quit.” Ibid., 17.

  p. 290 “by October he would run out of cities to burn.” Miller, The Story of World War II, 601.

  p. 290 Thirty percent of the urban population—9 million people—was homeless. “United States Strategic Bombing Survey Summary Report (Pacific War).”

  p. 290 “. . . The fatality rate in the training program was higher than the rate in combat.” LeMay, Mission with LeMay, 376.

  p. 290 “The rice paddies might be sprayed with oil, defoliants, or biological agents, and the production of fertilizer further attacked.” Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power, 312.

  p. 290 “Workers had to barter for food in the countryside and absenteeism rose to 40% in the major cities.” John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1999), 90.

  p. 291 “. . . We looked dumbfounded at each other, amazed that someone was worse off than we.
” Gibney, Senso, 192.

  p. 291 “Eat This Way—Endless Supplies of Materials by Ingenuity.” Dower, Embracing Defeat, 91.

  p. 291 “. . . important to avoid eating their bones since it had been demonstrated that this caused people to lose weight.” Ibid.

  p. 291 “How to Eat Acorns” and “Let’s Catch Grasshoppers.” Ibid., 94.

  p. 291 “onion existence, with the clear implication of weeping as one peeled off layer upon layer of precious belongings.” Ibid., 95.

  p. 291 “. . . because the white man’s heart was small.” Daws, 275.

  p. 292 “. . . they are resigned to all physical suffering and . . . [are] confident in their leaders.” Frank, Downfall, 107.

  p. 292 “. . . one never dies, never surrenders unconditionally.” Herbert P. Bix, “Japan’s Delayed Surrender: A Reinterpretation,” Diplomatic History 19 (Spring 1995): 214.

  p. 292 “proclaimed that Japan must fight to the finish and choose extinction before surrender.” Frank, Downfall, 95.

  p. 292 . . . These kamikaze tactics would “exchange” the life of a pilot for a military gain. Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, 480.

  p. 293 . . . to throw themselves under the treads of tanks, were called “Sherman carpets.” William Manchester, American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1978), 436.

  p. 293 Planes loaded with plague-infected fleas would take off from a submarine and contaminate San Diego. Nicholas D. Kristof, “Unlocking a Deadly Secret,” New York Times, March 17, 1995.

  p. 293 “. . . there would be room to produce a more advantageous international situation for Japan.” Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, 492.

  p. 293 “. . . We cannot allow Japan to perish because of them.” Remarks by chief, Police Bureau, Osaka, in Hosokawa, Joho tenno ni tassezu, June 21, 1945.

  p. 293 “If we are prepared to sacrifice 20 million Japanese lives in kamikaze effort, victory will be ours!” Lewis and Steele, Hell in the Pacific, 230.

  p. 293 “. . . 32 million civilians who were being trained in the use of primitive weapons in order to make a heroic last stand.” Wheeler, The Fall of Japan, 63.

  pp. 293-94 “more than the combined armies of the United States, Great Britain and Nazi Germany.” Manchester, American Caesar, 436.

  p. 294 “. . . It was a recipe for extinction.” Frank, Downfall, 190.

  p. 294 “cost over a million casualties to American forces alone.” Manchester, American Caesar, 438.

  p. 294 “. . . between 1.7 and 4 million casualties, including 400,000 to 800,000 fatalities.” Frank, Downfall, 340.

  p. 294 “. . . a million soldiers on both sides would have been killed and a million more would have been maimed for life.” Harold L. Buell, Dauntless Helldivers: A Dive-Bomber Pilot’s Epic Story of the Carrier Battles (New York: Orion Books, 1991), 306.

  p. 294 “exceeded the Navy’s total losses from all previous wars combined.” Lewis and Steele, Hell in the Pacific, 202.

  p. 294 . . . 200,000 British troops were scheduled to fight for seven months to retake Singapore. Paul Fussell, Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays (New York: Ballantine Books, 1990), 7.

  p. 294 “for the heavy losses which undoubtedly would occur.” Frank, Downfall, 127.

  p. 295 “. . . It is the aim not to allow the escape of a single one, to annihilate them all, and not to leave any traces.” Russell, The Knights of Bushido, 92.

  p. 295 “. . . wanted to see what parts of the boy’s body jumped and jerked with each turn of the knife.” Ienaga, Japan’s Last War, 189.

  pp. 295-96 On August 1, American napalm burned out 80 percent of Hachioji near Tokyo. Frank, Downfall, 154.

  p. 296 “. . . ‘the primary’s Hiroshima.’” Wheeler, The Fall of Japan, 90.

  p. 296 “. . . the place was going to be (as the Potsdam Declaration had promised) obliterated.” Fussell, Thank God for the Atom Bomb, 16.

  p. 296 “. . . Without it, our mission would have been more difficult.” Paul W. Tibbets, Flight of the Enola Gay (Columbus, OH: Mid Coast Marketing, 1989), 219.

  p. 296 “a blinding pulse of light for perhaps only a tenth of a second.” Frank, Downfall, 264.

  p. 297 “. . . no order-of-magnitude increase in destructiveness over a conventional air raid.” Frank, Downfall, 253.

  p. 297 “. . . I suppose they believe also that a machine gun is a hundred times wickeder than a bow and arrow.” LeMay, Mission with LeMay, 380.

  p. 297 “. . . We have used it to shorten the agony of young Americans.” Fussell, Thank God for the Atom Bomb, 22.

  p. 297 “When you have to deal with a beast you have to treat him as a beast.” Lewis and Steele, Hell in the Pacific, 215.

  p. 297 “. . . extraordinary shame about the Hiroshima bomb correlates closely with lack of information about the Pacific war.” Fussell, Thank God for the Atom Bomb, 12.

  p. 297 “. . . you thank God for the atomic bomb.” Ibid., 7.

  p. 297 “no intention of proceeding to the Japanese front themselves.” Ibid., 6-7.

  pp. 297-298 “. . . The Japanese people know more about that than the American public will ever know.” Richard Rougstad, “Pearl Harbor Pilot to Tibbets: ‘You Did the Right Thing,’” Sun Tzu’s Newswire, September 20, 1998.

  p. 298 “. . . had our air force continued to drop incendiary bombs on Japan’s cities.” Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power, 321.

  p. 298 Beginning in September, he was prepared to drop 115,000 tons a month. “United States Strategic Bombing Survey Summary Report (Pacific War).”

  p. 298 “. . . Therefore it cannot be said that there are no countermeasures.” Frank, Downfall, 270.

  pp. 298-299 “. . . We kept on flying.” LeMay, Mission with LeMay, 389.

  p. 299 “With luck, we will repulse the invaders before they land.” Wheeler, The Fall of Japan, 153.

  p. 299 . . . “There is no way left for us but to accept the Potsdam Proclamation.” Ibid., 152.

  p. 300 . . . “We certainly can’t swallow this proclamation.” Ibid.

  p. 300 “. . . That’s the way the whole country felt.” Cook and Cook, Japan at War, 78.

  p. 300 “. . . Then the crews came home to the Marianas and were told that Japan had capitulated.” LeMay, Mission with LeMay, 388.

  p. 301 “. . . ‘You bastards, I beat you.’” Miller, The Story of World War II, 643.

  p. 301 Now the 31,617 American POWs were free. Dower, Embracing Defeat, 54.

  p. 301 “. . . We were kids—seasoned by war, but kids.” Hyams, Flight of the Avenger, 209.

  p. 302 “. . . on the basis of the B-29 raids, felt that the cause was hopeless.” Werrell, Blankets of Fire, 240.

  p. 302 “Thinking of the people dying endlessly in the air raids I ended the war.” Frank, Downfall, 18.

  p. 302 “Fundamentally the thing that brought about the determination to make peace was the prolonged bombing by the B-29s.” Werrell, Blankets of Fire, 240.

  p. 302 “. . . The largest response for one category (over one-third) was ‘air attack.’” Ibid., 234.

  p. 302 “. . . even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.” “United States Strategic Bombing Survey Summary Report (Pacific War),” 26.

  p. 302 An astonishing 15 million people were homeless. Frank, Downfall, 334.

  pp. 302-303 . . . or about 19 percent of total losses during the Pacific war. Werrell, Blankets of Fire, 238.

  p. 303 Another 334 Superfortress crew members were listed as captured or interned, of whom 262 survived. Frank, Downfall, 363.

  p. 303 “propelled Japan onto its ultimately disastrous course of global competition with the Western powers.” Dower, Embracing Defeat, 41.

  p. 303 . . . the USS Missouri lay just four and one half miles northeast of the spot where Commodore Perry had anchored his ship. Samuel Eliot Morison, History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, vol. XIV (Edison, NJ: Castle Books,
2001), 362.

  p. 303 “Allied ships ringed the Missouri in concentric circles of power.” Philadelphia, PA, Evening Bulletin, September 4, 1945.

  p. 304 “Bill, where the hell are those airplanes?” Manchester, American Caesar, 453.

  p. 304 “. . . I stood there and felt pretty tired.” LeMay, Mission with LeMay, 390.

  p. 305 Okinawa typhoon quotes and information from Morison, History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, supp., 15-17.

  Chapter 18: Casualties of War

  p. 308 The story of Colonel Rixey’s discovering the Flyboys’ fates is from Col. P. M. Rixey, Japanese Camouflage: We Penetrate a Prepared Story in the Occupation of the Bonin Islands, Private papers of P. M. Rixey.

  p. 311 “Much of Japan’s aggression was formulated outside the cabinet in conferences involving only the military and its commander in chief.” Dower, Embracing Defeat, 325.

  p. 311 “the major war criminal.” Ibid., 326.

  p. 312 “Hirohito will have to go.” Ibid., 279.

  p. 312 “argued that Hirohito should abdicate on moral grounds.” Ibid., 321.

  p. 312 “the notion that he should somehow assume responsibility for the war.” Ibid., 320.

  p. 312 “. . . absolving his faithful ministers, generals, and admirals of responsibility for the war.” Ibid., 320.

  p. 312 “had his officials brief him on the practice of abdication in the British monarchy.” Ibid., 320.

  p. 312 “met privately with his nephew and recommended that he step down.” Ibid., 320.

  p. 312 “urged the emperor to take responsibility for defeat.” Ibid., 321.

  p. 312 “. . . People are more concerned with food and housing problems than with the fate of the Emperor.” Ibid., 305.

  p. 312 “worry about Emperor, shame for Emperor, sorrow for him.” Ibid., 305.

  p. 312 “. . . in favor of Hirohito abdicating right away or at an opportune moment.” Ibid., 327.

  p. 312 “. . . 70 percent of Americans favored executing or harshly punishing the emperor.” Ibid., 299.

  pp. 312-13 “. . . Emperor Hirohito played a highly active role in supporting the actions carried out in his name.” Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, 519.