Zero

by Masatake Okumiya

  Between the evening of June 15 and the following morning, the same day when the Americans launched the beachhead operation to take Saipan, more than forty-five B-29s flew over northern Kyushu from a staging base at Chengtu in China. (Editor’s note: Sixty-eight planes took off on the mission, forty-seven arrived in the Kyushu area, and five were lost because of operational mishaps.) The planes attacked the steel center of Yawata, but the bomb­ing was ineffective and only a small number of civilian structures suffered damage. Despite its lack of destructive results, however, the first Yawata attack had a grave psy­chological effect on the Japanese people. Where they regarded the Doolittle raid as a nuisance, the Yawata assault promised tremendous bombing raids in the future. All Japan discussed what might happen when the Ameri­cans increased the severity of their raids. The iron chain the enemy was closing on the homeland was becoming ever tighter.

  On July 8 and on August 11 and 20, the B-29s flew from their China mainland bases to attack our southern cities. Every bombing followed a certain pattern from which we could determine in advance of the attack how many planes would make the raids, when the attack would come, and other details of the missions. Because of this advance information, our mainland air defenses were able to have their fighters in the air waiting for the bombers as they arrived for their bomb runs.

  Our first information came two or three days before the attacks. American transport planes increased their shuttle flights between a British air base near Calcutta, India, and the B-29 fields in China, ferrying gasoline and other materials for the big planes. Our Navy radio listen­ing stations in Tokyo caught the details of every coded communication which, we determined, were from the American planes reporting the exact times of their arrivals and departures. These radio communications were so clear that we could calculate the exact number of planes flying the China missions.

  Two or three days later, a similar number of B-29s would arrive over Japan. We never failed in these bombing forecasts, which received corroboration from Army and Navy units scattered widely in China. These reports were dispatched at once to Tokyo. Within ten minutes every antiaircraft battery and every fighter base was informed of the estimated time of arrival of the American bombers.

  Despite the remarkable good fortune of anticipating the enemy attacks in detail, our defenses proved ineffective. The Superfortress made their first three attacks during the night. We had few Navy fighters available for interception, and they proved of little value against the large and pow­erful enemy planes. Even the Army found itself handi­capped in night interception, and Army fighters attacked only a limited number of planes. On the evening of August 20 Navy fighters made our first effective interception. Approximately sixty B-29s attacked targets in Kyushu, Chugoku, and western Shikoku. Intercepting Navy fighters shot down one B-29 and damaged three others; Army fighters damaged several other bombers. These attacks were always extremely dangerous, for the B-29s carried the remarkable defensive armament of at least twelve heavy machine guns in power turrets.

  One of our night fighters under Lieutenant Endo demonstrated the effectiveness of the twin-engined night fighter Gekko (Irving) during this attack. An experienced night-fighter team which had fought against B-17s and B-24s over the Solomons and Rabaul, Endo’s crew shot down the B-29 we confirmed as destroyed. He brought his fighter plane directly beneath the tail of a B-29 over Sasebo and, flying almost with the bomber’s speed, fired the 20-mm. cannon which was fixed in an oblique position behind the pilot’s seat. The upward-firing cannon pored shells into the huge airplane, which burst into flames and fell from the sky. Several minutes later Endo slipped beneath another Superfortress and heavily damaged the airplane. Another Gekko fighter piloted by one of Endo’s men repeated the maneuver and shot up a third B-29. Following the August 20 attack, the B-29s did not return to attack Japan proper until late October.

  Five days before this last bombing raid I was appointed as the Air Staff Officer, Japan Homeland Defense, Navy Section, at Imperial General Headquarters. To my disap­pointment I discovered that we had only 192 planes of all types assigned exclusively for air defense. Of these, the majority of the day fighters were Zeros and the remainder, a small number of Raidens (Jacks) and Shidens (Georges). The night fighters were all Gekkos. These fighters were distributed to three areas; forty-eight day and twenty-four night fighters to Yokosuka; forty-eight day and twelve night fighters to Kure; and forty-eight day and twelve night fight­ers to Sasebo. The Army had available for homeland defense some two hundred planes of all types, and assigned one hundred and ten planes to Tokyo, sixty to north Kyushu, and thirty to Osaka. In addition to these planes there were available in Japan nearly four hundred additional Army and Navy fighter planes assigned to such special missions as escorting bombers for attacks against enemy ships. But they cooperated with the homeland defense force in special emergencies.

  On August 16 two B-29s, which we believed were based at the new Saipan airfields, flew a reconnaissance mission over the Bonin Islands. On October 30 there no longer was any doubt as to the use of Saipan as the B-29 base; eight of the giant bombers attacked the naval base at Truk.

  At 1:30 P.M. on November 1 the first B-29s appeared over Tokyo. Aircraft spotters were astonished suddenly to discover the two huge planes on a reconnaissance mission high over the city. They dropped no bombs and left shortly after their arrival, but their appearance was a great shock to the military personnel charged with the mainland defense. Until these planes were sighted directly over the city, we had no idea that the airplanes were over Japan. Our patrol planes and ships had failed to sight the bombers and, despite the excellent flying weather, our interceptors could not catch the enemy planes. Within the next two weeks additional B-29s flew over Nagoya on reconnais­sance missions, again with impunity.

  On November 24 Saipan-based B-29s raided Tokyo for the first time. For approximately three hours during the afternoon some seventy bombers attacked the Tokyo area, concentrating their missiles on the Musashino Works of the Nakajima Airplane Company at Kichijoji, a vital engine factory. The bombings killed and injured 260 peo­ple, and destroyed at least a hundred civilian homes. Those losses were immaterial; what mattered was that the B-29s had wrought tremendous destruction in the critical fac­tory, causing a loss of more than 50 per cent of normal production.

  Five days later the B-29s bombed Tokyo proper for the first time, setting great fires in the Kanda and Nihonbashi areas in the heart of the city. Some twenty-five hundred homes were destroyed; one hundred people died and some fifteen thousand were made homeless. By now every Japanese citizen realized that the American air attacks would cause devastation and misery on a scale they had never anticipated. The future was ominous. The first raids also made it evident that the B-29s would strike not at mil­itary establishments, but at strategic industrial plants and civilian homes. For the first time our people knew the meaning of fear from air attack.

  The B-29s ranged across half of Asia, attacking facto­ries and other targets in Manchuria, Korea, Formosa, and other areas. On October 25 the bombers from China returned to the Kyushu area, and a total of at least one hundred and fifty B-29s smashed most of the Navy’s Twenty-first Air Arsenal at Omura, twenty-five miles south of Sasebo. Seventy fighters, including Zeros, Raidens, and Gekkos, made intercepts, and our pilots reported they had either shot down or damaged at least nineteen planes. The losses and damage sustained by the enemy were meaningless compared to the effect of their bombs.

  The B-29s had proven deadly opponents to our fighter planes in air combat, and the light losses sustained by these airplanes, as well as the terrible damage to our facto­ries, prompted our pilots to discuss Kamikaze attacks against the huge airplanes. On November 21 Lieutenant Mikihiko Sakamoto dove his fighter into a B-29 over Sasebo, giving up his life to destroy the enemy bomber. The aerial death struggles continued steadily until early January of 1945, with the B-29s constantly increasing the severity of their attacks. We learned finally that the Amer­icans had abandone
d their China mainland bases to con­centrate their attacks from Marianas installations.

  On December 13 the Marianas-based Superfortress for the first time attacked the great Nagoya Aero Engine Works, and five days later smashed the Nagoya Aircraft Works. From late 1944 until early February of the follow­ing year they repeatedly attacked the aircraft factories in the Nagoya area in daylight raids and, on night missions, bombed the civilian areas in Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka, and Kobe. The B-29s made the limited attacks against aircraft plants in the Kwanto and Kobe area. Our aircraft plants were smashed wreckage, for the high explosive and incen­diary bombs had shattered machinery, broken steel supports, burned out vast factory sections, and killed hundreds of workers. Mitsubishi’s Nagoya aircraft and engine facto­ries, Kawasaki’s Akashi engine plant west of Kobe, and Nakajima’s Ohta aircraft factory forty-five miles northwest of Tokyo all sustained great damage. Each of these facto­ries were vital centers of airframe and engine production for both the Army and the Navy, and the B-29 attacks caused a drastic reduction in their production.

  To bolster our air defense, the Navy assigned about one hundred serviceable planes of all types, including Raidens, Zeros, Shidens, Gekkos, and Gingas (remodeled night fighters), to Atsugi air base. To my disappointment there were only fifteen Zeros at the Meiji air base twenty miles southeast of Nagoya, and thirty Zeros at the Naruo air base to defend the Osaka and Kobe areas. The Army, on the other hand, stationed in the Tokyo area for both day and night air defense some two hundred fighters, including Hayabusas, Shokis, Hiens, Hayates, Toryus, and remodeled Dinahs. There were in the Nagoya area eighty fighters, and fifty planes to defend Osaka and Kobe.

  During the early stages of the B-29 attacks our fighters generally proved ineffective against the fast, high-flying, and powerfully armed B-29s. Enemy losses were remarkably low, and the B-29s exacted a stiff toll from our fight­ers. By the time the B-29s were concentrating their attacks against the aircraft plants we had greatly improved our air-defense system. Three battle incidents reflect the increased effectiveness of our pilots.

  On December 3, 1944, our fighters intercepted an esti­mated eighty B-29s raiding Tokyo, and pilots reported that they had shot down thirteen planes and probably destroyed another seven. These losses included three B-29s which were destroyed by Army fighters which rammed the bombers. Two pilots succeeded in bailing out before the collisions.

  On the afternoon of December 27 antiaircraft guns and fighters were reported to have destroyed nine out of an estimated fifty bombers, probably destroyed five others, and damaged twenty-seven.

  On the afternoon of January 27, 1945, fighters and antiaircraft reputedly accounted for twenty-two out of seventy-five B-29s which raided the Ginza and Hibiya areas in the heart of Tokyo. The majority of Army and Navy officers ridiculed the reports of twenty-two B-29s destroyed on this date as being impossible. However, on the twenty-ninth we received a wireless report from Zurich, Switzerland, which stated that during the raid in question the B-29s encountered unexpectedly heavy fighter opposition, and that thirty planes failed to return to their home bases. One plane staggered into its airfield after flying more than sixteen hundred miles on two engines. The losses actually incurred, then, appeared to exceed our reports of twenty-two planes destroyed.

  (Postwar investigation revealed that we, as well as Zurich, had greatly overestimated the effects of the fighter planes during this attack. The B-29s bombing Japan were from the Army Air Force’s 73rd Wing, and their pilots reported that they had met “fighter opposition of unpar­alled intensity.” The American crews reported that our pilot’s “pressed their attacks right down the formations’ stream of fire, dove into formations to attempt rammings, and sprayed fire at random.” The American losses for Jan­uary 27 amounted to five bombers destroyed over the target, two bombers ditched on the way home, and thirty-three planes badly shot up.)

  The majority of B-29 attacks had been daylight raids, which gave our fighters the best opportunities to intercept the enemy planes. Lieutenant Teramura, the squadron leader of the 302nd Navy Air Corps (at Atsugi) describes the intercept mission on February 2, 1945, over Tokyo:

  “At 28,000 feet I found a nine-plane formation of B-29s. I flew parallel to the bombers in an attempt to get in front of them and, finally, pulled ahead of the enemy planes, which kept up a constant fire at my fighter. I could see only a few tracers which drifted slowly toward me in parabola, and felt little danger.

  “About three thousand feet ahead of the B-29s I turned sharply and picked up speed in a shallow dive, dropping below the bombers and then pulling up for the attack. I opened fire against the first B-29 in the formation, attack­ing from the lower front side of the airplane. As the two planes closed rapidly I did not have the opportunity to maintain a long burst. The nose turrets of three B-29s sur­rounded my fighter with tracers. I opened fire and watched the tracer shells of my four cannon coverage on the bomber ahead of me. When I was extremely close to the giant bomber I kicked right rudder and pushed the control stick forward and to the right, dropping away from the B-29 in a diving turn. My shells had hit, for one of the B-29 engines was burning fiercely.

  “‘I got it!’ I shouted to myself. One of my pilots, Harukawa, followed my plane and executed the same attack. Taking advantage of our diving speed, we turned and climbed to attack the bombers from below and behind. One of the B-29s dropped out of the formation, trailing a thick plume of white smoke from under the outer left engine. Jettisoning its bombs, the airplane took a southeast course, toward the Pacific Ocean, steadily losing altitude in an attempt to escape our attack. I continued firing but soon exhausted my cannon-shell supply. Our Raiden fighters, however, were equipped with a single 20-mm. cannon mounted to the left and behind the pilot’s seat, fixed to fire upward at a thirty-degree angle. Diving to attack from the right and behind the bomber, I closed the distance between our planes. By this time Harukawa had expended his ammunition and was returning to base.

  “The enemy gunners kept up a steady defensive fire. I continued to pursue the bomber until I reached the ocean; by then my fuel was almost gone. When finally I turned to head for home, the B-29 was still trailing heavy smoke and descending almost to sea level. I doubted whether it could return to its base.

  “I made an emergency landing at Kohnoike Naval Air base, where the mechanics discovered that enemy bullets had damaged my plane’s engine and oil cooler.”

  As was so effectively demonstrated before the war’s end, even our most strenuous air defense efforts failed to keep the evergrowing fleets of B-29s from carrying out their missions to destroy our industries and our cities. We reached the height of our air defense measures on the night of May 25–26 in 1945, during the American’s “Mission 183” against Tokyo’s urban area. Of the 498 planes dis­patched for the attack, 464 bombed their primary target over Tokyo. Our fighters and antiaircraft racked up their greatest single mission total of the air defense period, destroying twenty-six of the sixty-five-ton airplanes. One hundred bombers, 21.3 per cent of the attack force, were shot up by antiaircraft and fighters. We paid an even heav­ier price, for the B-29s burned out nearly nineteen square miles of the city.

  By the close of 1944 the Americans actually had com­mitted only a minor portion of their B-29 strength against Japan. In 1944 no more than one hundred B-29s ever bombed their targets on a single operation; in early August of 1945, however, the enemy sent more than eight hundred of the great raiders on a single night’s operation over the mainland. This was not the entire picture, of course. In November of 1944 the B-29s carried an average bomb load of 2.6 tons per airplane; in July of 1945 this figure had increased to 7.4 tons. Our best interception and destruction ratio, assisted by antiaircraft fire, occurred during the month of January, 1945, when the enemy lost 5.7 per cent of his attack force. By July of the same year the Americans enjoyed an unprecedented safety factor for bombing mis­sions, losing only 0.4 per cent of the raiding planes. Greatly responsible for the lowered loss ratio, of course
, was the new ability of the B-29s to bomb at any time of the day or night and in almost any weather. In July of 1945, the record month of B-29 attacks, the Americans dropped more than 75 per cent of all their bombs by radar.

  On the night of March 9–10, 1945, Major General Curtis Le May instituted a new and devastating method of B-29 attack. In every previous attack, night or day, we had never encountered the B-29s below twenty-four thousand feet, and we could expect to meet the airplanes at this height or above. On the night of March 9, Le May sent in more than three hundred unarmed, stripped-down B-29s to attack Tokyo from an average height of only seven thousand feet. Each of the planes carried from six to eight tons of new jelly-gasoline fire bombs, and swept low over the city in flights which caught our defenses by surprise. The Americans in this daring raid lost fourteen bombers, but they also carried out what was then the most destructive air attack in history, burning out more than sixteen and a half square miles of the city. The enemy pilots reported that Tokyo “caught fire like a forest of pine trees.”

  Thirty minutes after the attack began the fires were out of control, fanned by a high ground wind. It was impossi­ble to combat the racing conflagration. As one of our newspapermen reported: “The fire clouds kept creeping higher, and the tower of the Diet Building stood out black against the red sky. The city was as bright as at sunrise; clouds of smoke, soot, even sparks driven by the storm, flew over it. That night we thought the whole of Tokyo had been reduced to ashes.” Estimates of the dead and missing ranged from eighty to three hundred thousand; the final figures will never really be known because of the destruc­tion of vast housing areas and the chaos which followed.

  In all missions the great B-29s dropped 157,000 tons of bombs, of which nearly 100,000 tons of incendiaries were directed against sixty-six target cities, ranging in size from Tokyo to Tsuruga with a population of thirty-one thousand. The Americans burned out more than one hundred and seventy square miles in these incendiary attacks.