Engineers of Victory

by Paul Kennedy

  Supporting the carriers in all these campaigns were the ships and crews of the support squadrons. Just as Caesar needed his cook in the conquest of Gaul, the fast and wide-ranging flotillas that surged out of Pearl Harbor needed their modern equivalent, the superbly equipped fleet train of supply ships and especially the speedy and specifically designed oil tankers without which Spruance, Halsey, Mitscher, and the others would have had a much more restricted radius of action. Mini-convoys of tankers, heavily screened by destroyer escorts, were always at sea, a relatively short distance behind the major battle forces. They rarely get much attention from military historians, but these tankers, as much as any other jigsaw piece, contributed to defeat the tyranny of distance. To the embarrassment of the Royal Navy, it found that when it finally dispatched its modern battleships and carriers to the Far East in 1944–45, it had a very “short-legged” navy by comparison. Their raids on Japanese installations in Burma and the Dutch East Indies went fine, but their lack of refueling capacity (and hence their need for U.S. help) for wider operations in the Pacific allowed Admiral King to veto their operations in those waters until very late in the war. The Admiralty had, after all, designed warships to fight off the coasts of Norway and in the Mediterranean, while the Americans had been planning for wide, oceanic war—and had got that right.42

  Reducing the Japanese Homeland

  The seizure of the Marianas would not have meant so much in the Pacific War had it not been for that separate but linked American endeavor, the development of the greatest of the Allied long-range strategic bombers, the B-29 Superfortress. This extraordinary plane was the apotheosis of the Mitchell-Trenchard belief that “the bomber will always get through,” now not because it would fight its way against hostile fighters to chosen targets, as in Europe, but because it would fly higher and faster than any Japanese defending aircraft could reach. The B-29 weighed about twice as much as the B-17 or the Lancaster and, with a pressurized cabin, its crew could fly at very high altitudes at a speed of 350 mph—just catching up with it would exhaust a defense fighter’s fuel tanks—and then unload a terrible retribution of heavy, splinter, or incendiary bombs upon the hapless population below. It was not an even fight, as in the Battle of Britain; it was, rather, brutal aerial devastation. The B-29s’ most historic acts involved dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that finally induced the hard-necked Japanese military leadership to surrender, but their most destructive act was the low-flying firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945 that killed 130,000 people, shortly after the Anglo-American bombers had inflicted a similar number of casualties at Dresden. Between 1940 and 1942, often standing beside a row of burned-out houses in East London, Winston Churchill had warned the Axis powers that their turn would come. But even he, with his immense imagination, had no idea of the size of the future aerial devastations.

  Where did the B-29 come from?43 The specifications for this enormous aircraft had already been issued in 1938–39—just like so many of the weapons systems we associate with the middle years of the war: Lancaster bombers, Spitfires, Sherman tanks, landing craft, and T-34s, all of which needed time for testing and development before full deployment. By the Second World War, heavy bombers were steadily taking over the role of battleships and cruisers in placing economic pressure upon the enemy, but they were also, awkwardly, taking almost as long as a major warship to be designed and constructed. The story of the Superfortress is an example of this disturbing but natural law: the more sophisticated the instrument being built, the greater the number of teething troubles.

  The B-29’s enormous wingspan of 141 feet and huge takeoff weight of 120,000 pounds had implications for air base design and runway breadth and length. Most airfields, including all those in Europe, were simply too small to take it, so it could only be deployed on the new, artificial grounds that were being erected on Pacific atolls. But those engineering challenges for building the tarmacs did not compare with the task of constructing the beast itself. To get such a weight off the ground and then up to 35,000 feet required extraordinary technical devices—almost all untested—and stretched the ingenuity of even Boeing’s superb design and development teams. (And they were teams, dozens and dozens of them; no single super-clever designer here, like Barnes Wallis for the Wellington.) For example, how exactly did one construct a pressurized cabin for so lengthy an aircraft when it had crew in both the nose section and in the rear, but an extended central bomb bay section that should not be pressurized? It is not difficult to understand why it took a long time to figure out the compromise solution, a long pressurized “crawl tunnel” over the bomb bays. How did one perfect the revolutionary central fire control system (CFCS), directed by an analog computer that corrected for wind, gravity, airspeed, and so on?44

  The biggest problem the Boeing engineers and subcontractors faced was with the Wright R-3350 engines themselves. All the early ones were inadequate and unreliable. The contrast with the Merlin in the Mustang and the Pratt and Whitney in the Hellcat is intriguing. In those cases, a superb replacement engine solved the problem of powering a potentially wonderful aircraft. In this case, the B-29, a bold and terrific tool of war, had to overcome not only technical challenges such as cabin pressurization but the fact that it was underpowered and underperforming. The Wright engine cowling for the B-29 was wrong, the flaps were wrong, and the engines would overheat and catch fire. The second prototype had a fire during testing and crashed into a nearby meat factory, with mass casualties, including all the crew. The greater the pressure to get the plane perfected, the more numerous and serious the setbacks. Engineers at the giant Wichita plant, ordered to get four entire groups upgraded and completed, ironically referred to their work as the “Battle of Kansas.” They were not wrong. There was serious discussion of canceling the program before Hap Arnold—as we have seen, desperate about the inadequacies of Allied strategic bombing in Europe and grasping for any straw—ordered work to go on. December 1943 and January 1944 really were the hinge period for Allied strategic bombing.

  Work did go on, and the planes came through, due to hundreds of minor adjustments by the Boeing engineers. The pilots, often desperately scared, described the first twenty seconds of flight after takeoff as being “an urgent struggle for airspeed” as the crews willed their massive craft to gain altitude.45 Sometimes their prayers were not answered; several of them crashed as they left Saipan because an engine failed just as the heavily laden plane made its urgent efforts to gain altitude. In fact, it was not until after 1945 that a much better Pratt and Whitney engine solved this problem. Even the famous Enola Gay, lumbering off Tinian with its critical atomic bomb for Hiroshima in the hold on August 5, 1945, came dangerously close to failing at the end of the vast runway before wobbling slowly into the night.

  When it had gained its desired height, however, the B-29 was normally untouchable and virtually indestructible. What could get at it? Its problems were its own hypertechnological demands, and many more of this aircraft were lost to operational causes (engine failure, air pressure loss) than were shot down by the enemy. Yet once three or four air groups of Superfortresses were safely launched, inaccessible to enemy fighters, the punishment of Japan commenced.

  The biggest question Air Force planners had was where to site the giant aircraft. Roosevelt’s original instruction was to fly the planes out of bases in southern China, themselves supplied by larger bases in India. That general idea simply wouldn’t work in the case of the energy-consuming B-29s, which would have to fly from Seattle to Hawaii to Australia to Assam, over the hump to a base in Chengdu Province, and then on to bomb Japan. But then someone would also have to bring to Chengdu the bombs and fuel and machine gun shells, as well as the construction battalions, the cement, the Quonset huts, the wiring. It would be like reinforcing the Allies’ Italian campaign by flying planes from Florida to Bahia to Freetown to Capetown to Zanzibar to Aden to Cairo to Calabria. There had to be a shorter way.

  Yet in June 1944 American planners felt the
y had to try the China option. Although production problems halved the number of B-29 groups that could be based out of India, the scheme went ahead. On June 5, 1944, ninety-eight B-29s flew from India to attack Japanese railroad repair shops in Bangkok; it must have been an extraordinary surprise to local Thais and the Japanese garrison alike. And on June 15, 1944, forty-seven Superfortresses, which had indeed flown across the eastern Himalayas and refueled in Chengdu, bombed the Imperial Iron and Steel Works at Yawata—the first attack on the Japanese homeland since the Doolittle raid more than two years earlier.

  But June 1944 was also when the marines, army, and Seabees took the Marianas, thus diminishing the point of keeping up the hugely expensive, logistically tortuous campaign of bombing Japan from southern China. These B-29 attacks upon Japan out of Chengdu Province did not cease immediately; they could continue to hit the foe’s homeland for another half year before the Mariana bases were ready, and in doing so provided important operational experiences.

  So they continued to attack, though only with about two raids each month, from July until December 1944. On November 21, for example, 61 B-29s took off from Chengdu to bomb Japanese targets; but three days later 111 B-29s attacked Tokyo from the more convenient Mariana bases. The last B-29 bombing assault upon Japan from China took place on January 6, 1945, after which the squadrons were relocated to the Pacific.46 The crews had had one of the toughest aerial assignments of the war, and their very presence drove Imperial General Headquarters to order its troops farther and farther into central China, thereby pulling them away from the altogether more strategically significant American drive through the Pacific. The original American intention to station bombers in these distant places was to render support to Chiang Kai-Shek’s shaky regime and to find a smart way of eliminating Japan’s industrial base and cities. But perhaps the greatest benefit from Operation Matterhorn was to further increase the Japanese army’s “continentalist” tendency, leaving it, by 1944–45, with well over a million troops in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  The later story of the B-29 attacks upon Japan takes us out of our time frame, though even a brief synopsis of the bombing campaign from the Marianas and onward would confirm its main point. The first mission from the islands against Tokyo, on November 24, 1944, took place while Americans back home were celebrating Thanksgiving. The Japanese authorities, by contrast, were giving out instructions about conserving food and water, and forming neighborhood air raid watches. From the turn of the year onward, the aerial attacks intensified. After a while, the B-29s’ ferocious field commander, Lieutenant General Curtis LeMay, decided that their high-level bombing was inflicting insufficient pain and that it was probably unnecessary to fly at such altitudes because Japanese antiaircraft defenses were much weaker than those he had experienced in Europe. Without consulting Washington, he had the aircraft stripped of much of their heavyweight armament and of their remote-controlled sighting equipment to make more capacity for fuel and a newer type of bomb—a jelly-like incendiary deliberately designed to burn Japan’s vulnerable wooden cities.

  On March 9–10, 1945, some 333 bombers set out from the Marianas, flew over the fighting on Iwo Jima, and proceeded to devastate Tokyo in the greatest firestorm of the entire war. During the next days Nagoya, Osaka, and Kobe suffered the same fate. LeMay was certainly tearing apart Japanese industry and much else besides; in these few weeks, Toland calculates, “forty-five square miles of crucial industrial areas had been incinerated.” Two million buildings were razed to the ground overall, and thirteen million Japanese civilians lost their homes. Strategic bombing worked.47 The great moral problem, as with the Allied bombing of German cities at the same time, was that this destruction of enemy war industries was also taking the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians, chiefly women, children, and older people. By this stage of the conflict, though, not many among the victors were raising St. Augustine’s questions about proportionality in war. To a large degree, the A-bomb devastations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were epitaphs to the earlier, larger airborne devastations of Berlin, Dresden, and Tokyo.

  Building Bases Across the Pacific: The Seabees

  The story of the Seabees is about a man who created a team, which in turn created a gigantic organization that brought American military-industrial power—in the form of cement, tarmac, steel girders, electrical wire, rubber, glass, bulldozers, and lighting equipment—across the 7,000 miles of the Pacific Ocean to the outlying territories of Japan. It is a tale that is equivalent to that of Hobart and his Funnies, and that of Harker and Freeman in rescuing the P-51 Mustang from death; it ranks with Barnes Wallis and his creation of the Wellington, the “Dambuster” skipping bombs, the Tallboy and Blockbuster bombs. Ben Moreell was one of those neglected middlemen who made Allied grand strategy work.

  Moreell was a civil engineer turned naval officer who became the only noncombat serviceman in the United States Navy to achieve a full admiral’s rank.48 After majoring in engineering at Washington University, he immediately joined the navy during the First World War and showed his extraordinary talents for construction and development of military bases, catching the attention of the young FDR, then assistant secretary of the navy. In the early 1930s Moreell was sent to study at the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées in Paris, the premier place in Europe for military bridge and road construction. In December 1937 Roosevelt appointed him to be chief of the Bureau of Yards and Docks, and also the chief civil engineer of the navy, a brilliant double appointment. One of the first things Moreell did was to urge and organize the construction of two giant dry docks at Pearl Harbor. The American battleships and other craft that were damaged on that fateful morning of December 7, 1941, were thus able to be partially repaired at the home base; they did not need to be towed, powerless, to San Diego. Ships badly damaged in the Solomons, Gilberts, and Marianas could also limp into Pearl Harbor. This was a man who was thinking ahead.

  But if Moreell planned protective or defensive construction, he also thought of what would be needed to carry the fight back to the enemy. In late December 1941, he recommended to Roosevelt the establishment of naval construction battalions that would be recruited from the building trades, and whose officers could exercise authority over all lower-ranked officers and men assigned to these units. The idea of putting Civilian Engineer Corps officers over regular navy and marine units caused an immense fuss in Washington in early 1942, but Moreell got his way. Thus were the Construction Battalions (CBs)—the Seabees—born on March 5, 1942. Moreell already had their motto ready: “Construimus, Batuimus” (“We Build, We Fight”)—for he had conveniently got a ruling that these were fighting men and therefore, if they fell into enemy hands, could not be executed as armed civilian guerrillas.

  Getting skilled construction workers into the Seabees in early 1942, when every service was screaming for personnel, was a major stroke. According to the U.S. Naval Historical Center’s account, “the first recruits were men who had helped to build the Boulder Dam, the national highways, and New York’s skyscrapers; who had worked in the mines and quarries and dug the subway tunnels; who had worked in shipyards and built docks and wharfs and even ocean liners and aircraft carriers.… They knew more than 60 skilled trades.” Their average age was thirty-seven, though some of them sneaked in even though they were over sixty.49 Later in the war Moreell was not allowed to skim off America’s skilled workforce to the same degree, but by that stage he and his team had created an impressively sophisticated system of training centers and advanced base depots through which all new recruits passed before being sent off to the front lines.

  By the time peace arrived, 325,000 men had enlisted in the Seabees, and in total they had constructed more than $10 billion worth of infrastructure, from Trinidad to Londonderry, from Halifax to Anzio.e They created and manned the steel pontoons that allowed the Allied armies and their supplies to come onshore in Sicily, Salerno, and southern France. Ten thousand Seabees of Naval Construction Regiment 25 came ashore o
n the Normandy beaches, along with their U.S. Army Engineering equivalents, to demolish Rommel’s steel and concrete obstacles—German engineers had built the fabled Atlantic Wall, and American engineers took it down. Seabees manned many of the landing craft for the first waves of troops and tanks, then towed in and anchored thousands of pontoons. At Milford Haven, they assembled the extraordinary Mulberry harbors that were to shelter the Allied beachheads. Their biggest logistical challenge in the European war was to rebuild the ports of Cherbourg and Le Havre, which had been thoroughly devastated by German demolition teams—yet the first American cargoes were being landed in Cherbourg only eleven days after the capture of that city. Building the pontoons to cross the Rhine was relatively easy for them. While all this was going on, Moreell was brought in to negotiate a settlement to the national strike of oil refinery workers in 1943; a year later he was asked to be the administrator to the bituminous coal industry after it came under federal control. His organizational capacities were immense.

  The greatest achievements of the Seabees were in the Asia-Pacific theaters, where 80 percent of the entire Naval Construction Force was located. The raw statistics are staggering: in the Pacific alone, these artificers of victory built 111 major airstrips and 441 piers, tanks for the storage of 100 million gallons of gasoline, housing for 1.5 million men, and hospitals for 70,000 patients. The war stories are even more eye-opening. The first battalion ever sent to the Southwest Pacific—to the disease-ridden island of Bora Bora—had just enough time to erect the fuel tanks that were to be used by U.S. ships and aircraft during the Battle of the Coral Sea. Seabees went ashore with the marines at Guadalcanal and spent day and night repairing the bomb craters of Henderson Field as well as bulldozing Japanese emplacements. They hopped all the way with MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific Command from Papua New Guinea and the Solomons, via New Britain, the Admiralty Islands, Hollandia, the Celebes, and then the central Philippines.