by Bob Drury
So when the USAAF put out a bid to design a new, multi-engine bomber that could fly a minimum of 250 miles per hour, reach a ceiling of 25,000 feet, and remain airborne for six to ten hours continuously, the planners at the Seattle-based manufacturer intuitively recognized that they were being asked to build not only an aircraft that flew superbly, but a winged weapon to fulfill an international need. They also realized they were putting themselves at serious financial risk in the midst of the Great Depression. The young company had only $500,000 in its treasury, and it was committing more than half of that to build a single plane, which might not measure up to the ambitions of the USAAF. It went ahead anyway.
One new wrinkle Boeing initiated was to reconfigure the flight deck. To this point the cockpits of all bombers had been built flush with the plane’s propellers. In order to improve the pilot’s visual awareness, the developers of the prototype moved the cockpit forward ahead of its four engines. Then there was the problem of meeting the Army’s speed specifications. At 75 feet long, with a wingspan of over 100 feet, the plane was a behemoth in terms of aerodynamic drag coefficient despite its thin skin and retractable landing gear.
In order to streamline the ship even further against wind resistance, Boeing introduced a bomb bay that, for the first time in aeronautical history, was moved inside the fuselage between the two wings. This allowed the plane to carry a maximum of 5,000 pounds of ordnance for an incredible 1,700 miles or, on longer round-trips of over 2,000 miles, a still-walloping 2,500-pound load.
Adding to the unique design was the tail, which went through several iterations. In earlier models it tapered into a bullet-like shape sporting a sleek, relatively small “shark fin.” But this left no room for a backward-facing gun mount, virtually inviting enemy aircraft to attack from the rear. Later designs solved this problem by enlarging not only the tail gunner’s position but the vertical fin itself to a towering 15 feet, prompting some Airmen to dub the plane their “big-ass bird.” In any case, the aircraft now had more lateral stability at altitude as well as a lethal stinger in its tail.
By the time Boeing won the Army’s competition and the first B-17s were introduced into service in 1938, they had already picked up their iconic designation as Flying Fortresses. The name, attributed variously to admiring Boeing hard-hat workers or newsmen astounded by the aircraft’s five cupola gun stations, was more than appropriate—from the beginning it was obvious that the B-17 would completely revolutionize aviation warfare.
At first the B-17s rolled off the Boeing assembly lines at an agonizingly slow pace. When Hitler’s forces invaded Poland in September 1939 there were only 13 operational Fortresses in service. But once the craft, destined to become one of the most powerful airplanes ever built, proved itself during trial runs, production went into overdrive. All told, nearly 13,000 Flying Fortresses would be put into action during World War II, and Airmen would come to love the plane for its inexhaustible ruggedness and its ability to absorb massive battle damage while remaining aloft. Further, given its maximum speed of close to 300 miles per hour—faster than most fighter planes of the era—flight crews were confident that they could outrun bogeys as well as outpace the sighting mechanisms of anti-aircraft gunners. Even if they could not, the plane had a ceiling of 35,000 feet—10,000 higher than the government had stipulated—and few weapons in any potential enemy’s arsenal could reach that height. As a pilot of a B-17 would say in the years to come, “This was an airplane you could trust.”
It was also badly needed. In June 1939 the United States had just under 2,500 total military aircraft in service, compared with Germany’s 8,000 and Japan’s 4,000. Eventually, as Fortresses began being produced by the thousands, the B-17 became almost every bomber pilot’s object of desire. Jay Zeamer was no exception. His fascination with the B-17 remained sizable enough to need a tugboat escort.
WITH HIS OLD OUTFIT THE 43rd Bomb Group and its B-17S long since departed for New England, Jay resigned himself to flying B-26 Marauders out of Langley with the 22nd Bomb Group. Still, when the 22nd deployed on maneuvers—first to Texas, later to Georgia—he prowled the southern airbases seeking out Airmen who could teach him something, anything, about the Flying Fortress. He found most success among the maintenance crews. The wrench jockeys were accustomed to repairing and, on occasion, overhauling the planes, and some of them seemed to know even more than the flight crews about the aircraft’s idiosyncrasies.
Jay was particularly curious to learn more about the latest version of the tachometric Norden bombsights just then being installed in Flying Fortresses. Before Joe Sarnoski had left for Maine, Jay remembered him practically swooning over the Norden’s efficiency when the 43rd had been one of the first Bomb Groups to receive an early prototype of the Norden. Jay had been skeptical when Joe told him that the bombsight was so secret that the Army had instructed its bombardiers to use their .45-caliber handguns to destroy it in the event of a crash or ditch. He had since learned that this was indeed the case. The Norden bombsight was the kind of invention whose mechanical design would naturally captivate an M.I.T.-educated engineer.
The basic mechanics of the new bombsight, designed and developed by the Dutch engineer Carl Norden, had been around since World War I. But only recently had it been perfected to the point where the Army Air Corps had begun to boast of its ability to sink fast-moving ships, a valuable poker chip in the service’s ongoing budget battles with the Navy. In the simplest terms, the key to the Norden’s accuracy was a gyroscope-mounted analog computer that constantly calculated a bomb’s trajectory based on current flight conditions. This allowed a bomber’s autopilot to react quickly to changes in the wind and weather outside the plane and ensure greater accuracy.
As it happened, once aircraft equipped with the Norden were deployed in actual combat conditions, pilots and bombardiers discovered that the real-world vagaries of an enemy shooting back at them threw off several of the bombsight’s calculations, and the precision of its targeting—the “circular error probable”—enlarged from 75 feet to 1,200 feet. But for the moment, bombardiers who operated the Norden remained delighted by what they perceived as its pinpoint accuracy: Jay recalled how during those early beta missions out of Langley with the 43rd, Joe had been known to hone his aim by lobbing Hershey chocolate kisses onto his parents’ farmstead after persuading his pilots to buzz the Pennsylvania property. His delighted siblings knew their brother was near whenever the sky rained candy.
Now, cozying up to ground crews while accompanying the 22nd on its southern deployments, Jay found his knowledge of the B-17’s characteristics and quirks increasing well past his familiarity with the Norden. Sometimes he would invite the local maintenance boys to pile into one of the 22nd’s old Bolos as payback for sharing their insights. Then, under the guise of “navigational training,” he would take them up for a joyride or even ferry them to a nearby town to stand them to beers at a local tavern.
Once the 22nd returned to Langley, Jay got into the habit of flying to Boston on weekends with a passel of his new buddies, eager to show them his old college haunts. It was toward the end of one of these frolics when, nearly 6,000 miles away at just past seven a.m. local time, a different type of bomber pilot unobtrusively cruised his carrier-based torpedo plane down the leeward slope of the Koolau mountain range that formed the eastern shore of the Hawaiian island of Oahu. Banking west, the dive-bomber with the Rising Sun painted on its wings cruised over the remains of an ancient shield volcano called the Wai’anae as the sleepy city of Honolulu hove into view. When the aircraft approached Pearl Harbor its senior officer, a decorated commander in the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service, counted 86 warships anchored in the snug lagoon, including eight battleships, the sum total of the American Pacific Fleet’s battlewagons. To his consternation, the Japanese naval officer saw no aircraft carriers. Finally, as his aircraft swept over Hickam Airfield, he peeled back the canopy behind the pilot’s seat and spun a green flare into the nearly cloudless sky.
&nb
sp; Thirteen minutes later the dive-bomber’s radio operator transmitted the code words “Tora! Tora! Tora!” The message was picked up by the 180 enemy aircraft trailing in his wake. Back in Japan, a fortunate confluence of weather and atmospherics allowed Adm. Yamamoto, the commander of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s Combined Fleet and the mastermind behind the assault, to hear the signal for the attack.
DECEMBER 7, 1941, WAS A sunny, cold Sunday afternoon in Boston, the temperature hovering just below freezing, when Jay lifted his Bolo into the air for the return trip to Langley. He was somewhere above Rhode Island when a news bulletin flashed over the radio. At first it was hard to decipher amid a loud buzz of crackling static, but when the Bolo’s radio operator held a lead pencil near his signal gauge to boost the electronic arc the broadcast reception became clearer. Even at that Jay and his passengers could not digest it.
It was common knowledge among senior American military officers that the Japanese had for years been preparing for war. Tensions between the Empire and the United States had only heightened the previous summer when the Roosevelt administration imposed a trade embargo on Japan, denying the country in general and its Imperial Navy in particular vital oil shipments in a fruitless attempt to halt its march of aggression on China. But to someone like Jay the attack seemed unreal. He found it impossible to conceive that an island nation slightly smaller than the state of California had picked a fight with the United States. If he had been familiar with the term he probably would have agreed with the American ambassador to Tokyo, who called the prospect of war with America a form of “national harakiri.”
But perhaps what stunned Jay the most was the decision by the Japanese to stage their initial assault at Pearl Harbor. It had been drilled into Airmen like Jay, as into the rest of the American public, that the naval base there was impregnable. Only a few months earlier a reporter for Collier’s magazine had filed a story from “the fortress of the Hawaiian Archipelago,” and that very adjective was used in the story’s title—“Impregnable Pearl Harbor.” Toward the end of his dispatch the author, a seasoned foreign correspondent named Walter Davenport, concluded, “You’ve got to be pretty pessimistic to envision any invader. Singly and in concert they’d come to swift grief where the Koolaus and the Waianaes rise starkly from the ocean. They’d have to sink our fleet and smash our last plane.”
The Japanese came very close to doing just that. Within hours the simultaneous attacks on Oahu and the Philippines had sunk or badly damaged all eight American battleships (along with three cruisers and three destroyers) and knocked out an incredible 350 of the United States’ 526 combat aircraft stationed in the Pacific.
Yet so ingrained was the idea of “impregnable Pearl Harbor” that Jay’s lingering reaction was that this was a hoax similar to the alien invasion the actor and radio personality Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre group had dramatized on Halloween three years earlier. The reality of the attack finally set in after Jay put down at Langley. Every vehicle attempting to leave the airbase was stopped at the flight line’s exit gate, and each Airman was ordered to return to his squadron’s hangar. Jay and his Bomb Group worked until midnight installing armored panels on their airplanes.
JAY DID NOT RETURN TO his quarters just off Langley until after one a.m. He fell into bed, a million thoughts racing through his mind. His sleep was fitful, and when his telephone rang at three a.m. he nearly lurched for his sidearm. It was his squadron commander ordering him back to the airfield. The 22nd was deploying in two hours. Its destination was top secret. Jay threw his kit into a barracks bag, and by five a.m. he and the rest of the Bomb Group were in the air. His unit was not to return for years; some of Jay’s comrades would never come back. A few weeks later his younger brother Jere picked up his car and drove it back to New Jersey.
Once aloft the Airmen were told that their destination was California. Jay, in the copilot’s seat of his Marauder, was crossing the Mississippi River when President Franklin Roosevelt’s clipped voice broke the radio silence. The crew fell silent as Roosevelt intoned his famous phrase about the date, as the president put it, which would live in infamy. By the time his plane vaulted the Rockies and touched down at Muroc Dry Lake in the Great Basin of the Mojave, America was officially at war. The following day the 22nd took its first casualties when its commanding officer and his entire crew were killed when their B-26 crashed during takeoff. It would not be the last time, Jay wrote, that it struck him that the Roman poet had been mistaken. Though he could understand the decorum in pro patria mori, the dulce of the sacrifice eluded him.
6
THE WINDS OF WAR
OVER THE NEXT SEVERAL WEEKS the 22nd Bomb Group’S planes rose from the desert each morning to vector low over the Pacific coast of Southern California and northern Mexico in search of Japanese submarines. As December progressed there was the occasional all-points alert—Point Conception shelled by a Japanese submarine; a lumber vessel torpedoed outside Long Beach Harbor; another merchantman damaged by one of the nine enemy submarines that had taken up positions along America’s West Coast.I
Most of the flight crews felt the screening runs were a waste of time, effort, and aviation fuel. Bombardiers often dropped their ordnance on anything that looked like an enemy sub running just below the surface. Most of the Airmen believed they were actually targeting whales.
Jay and his fellow Airmen were housed by squadron in canvas pyramid tents set up in the Mojave, four officers to one billet, six enlisted men to another. The desert was a mélange of odd weather, and it was not unusual to wake to a blanket of snow being washed away by a hard winter rain that in turn ushered in wind gusts that kicked up a breathtaking sandstorm. Jay did remark, though, that he had never before seen such beautiful sunrises and sunsets. Meanwhile, as one long daylight flight rolled into another, Jay came to recognize the dusty contours and landmarks of the Baja peninsula by heart. He feared that this could be his home indefinitely—that he could be “left on the beach,” in the military parlance of the era—while other Airmen were shipping off to fight. Worse, to Jay’s everlasting disgust, he was still “frozen” in the copilot’s seat.
The ennui he felt was relieved toward the end of December when the 22nd was issued new wool and leather clothing and transferred to the Sacramento Air Depot. There the men were ordered to disassemble and crate their bombers for shipment from San Francisco via two separate convoys which would carry the Group’s ground personnel directly to Australia while the planes and their crews sailed for Hawaii. Most of the officers were peeved that the unit’s new commanding officer, Col. Dwight Divine, refused to permit them to install temporary fuel tanks in their Marauders in order to make the 2,500-mile jump to Hickam Field. But someone up the chain of command had decided that since the 22nd had never trained with extra fuel tanks it was safer to deploy the aircraft by ship. Soon enough, however, the 22nd’s Airmen would get their chance to fly long distances over the endless Pacific.
The early days of 1942 were a perilous time for the Allies. Guam, Malaysia, and the rich oil fields of the Dutch East Indies had already fallen. In a few short weeks the banner of the Rising Sun would fly over 30 million square miles, about 15 percent of the earth’s surface, from steamy Burmese jungles to snowbound Aleutian Islands to tropical Papua New Guinea. It was from the last of these that Imperial forces planned to invade and conquer Australia before turning the might of their war machine toward the mainland of the United States. For Jay, however, these concepts were abstract at best. He had only one thought on the morning of February 8 as he climbed the gangway of the troop transport USS Grant bobbing in the cool waters of San Francisco Bay: at last he would be seeing action. Below him, on the piers, men hugged and kissed sweethearts and wives, some hastily married only hours before; many no doubt were wondering if they would ever see the Golden Gate Bridge again.
Precisely 76 years earlier, Jay’s grandfather Jeremiah had also stood at a ship’s rail, not far from this San Francisco pier, likely contemplating his j
ourney much as his grandson was now. It had taken Jeremiah nearly a year to reach California from Pennsylvania. He’d worked in the farm fields in what was then the far west of Illinois, and followed the Platte River by wagon train through the Indian Territory of Nebraska and up and over the Colorado Rockies. Jeremiah had passed through the new Mormon enclave fanning out from the big Salt Lake and traversed the Nevada Territory by stage. He’d paused at Virginia City to cut wood to replenish his grubstake before hopping an old side-wheeler down the Sacramento River and across the bay to San Francisco. And then when he’d finally reached his destination, he decided to return to Pennsylvania after all. He wanted to go home. Home was where Jeremiah’s heart was.
Not Jay. For while Jeremiah had looked east to home and family, Jay’s gaze was focused west. West to Hawaii, and from there to wherever the winds of war would take him.
THE USS GRANT—IRONICALLY, ORIGINALLY A German ocean liner seized by the United States during WWI—was part of a small convoy that took eight days to steam the 2,300 miles to Hawaii. Three destroyers provided security for the line of ships, the gunboats zigzagging from port to starboard and back again on the lookout for Japanese submarines. Despite one false alarm—an Airman on a seaplane tender reported seeing a torpedo wake—the voyage was uneventful, consisting mainly of boat drills, queuing for inoculations, and endless card games and chess matches.
Jay thought he had battled rough seas off the coast of New England in his little dinghy, but he was not prepared for an ocean voyage across the Pacific. He often found himself squeezed between squad mates at the ship’s rail, contemplating the Spam sandwiches served morning, noon, and night as the men regurgitated them into the sea. Finally, on the morning of February 15, the Airmen awoke to the sight of lush, cloud-crowned mountains rising on the western horizon. Within hours the Grant was steaming past the fabled cliffs of Diamond Head.