Whirlwind

by Barrett Tillman

  But not everyone found a target. Lieutenant Everett “Brick” Holstrom’s crew met “severe” fighter opposition. In evading the interceptors he bypassed Tokyo, proceeded to a secondary target, but was intercepted again. Frustrated, Holstrom dropped his bombs in the water and headed southwest for China.

  Edward “Ski” York bombed Tokyo but knew he could not reach China. Before leaving the West Coast his carburetors had been “adjusted” by civilian mechanics. Burning 30 percent more fuel than normal, he diverted 600 miles northward across the Sea of Japan, landing north of Vladivostok in the Soviet Union.

  Thirteen hours after launch, somewhere over the China coast, hundreds of miles from Chuchow, the other planes began running out of fuel. Doolittle ordered his crew to bail out, then jumped from 8,000 feet—his third parachute descent. He landed in a field fertilized with human waste.

  The next morning, filthy and despondent, Doolittle sat on the wing of his wrecked bomber, pondering the failure of his mission. His gunner, Staff Sergeant Paul Leonard, snapped the CO’s picture, then sat beside him and asked, “What do you think will happen when you go home, Colonel?”

  “I guess they’ll court-martial me and send me to prison,” Doolittle gloomed.

  Leonard shook his head. “No, sir. They’re going to make you a general. And they’re going to give you the Congressional Medal of Honor.” Paul Leonard was right.

  Of the eighty fliers on the mission, three died in crashes or attempted bailouts over the China coast. Eight were captured and taken to Tokyo. Four months later, they stood a mock trial in which no charges were revealed to them. All were declared guilty of war crimes, but for obscure reasons five were spared, leaving Lieutenants Dean E. Hallmark and William G. Farrow and Sergeant Harold Spatz to die. They were returned to China and, outside Shanghai one morning in October, they were made to kneel before three crosses, and were shot by Japanese soldiers. Another captured Raider starved to death in prison and fourteen others also would perish in the war.

  In terms of actual damage, the Doolittle Raid amounted to little more than a pinprick. But its psychological effect was profound on both sides of the Pacific. The Doolittle Raiders had given American morale a boost unlike any other in the twentieth century. Newspapers crowed “Doolittle Do’oed it!” even while the Philippines were overrun by Japanese forces and U-boats prowled almost unmolested in American waters. Meanwhile, the Japanese Imperial Navy saw the raid as proof that the U.S. Pacific Fleet must be destroyed, adding impetus to Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto’s determination to force a major engagement at Midway in June. The disastrous outcome of that battle for Japan ensured America’s ability to take the offensive later that summer.

  As Nationalist Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek feared, China paid the heaviest price for the raid’s success. In May the Japanese swept through Chekiang and Kiangsu Provinces, seizing Chinese airfields to prevent further missions against the homeland and scourging villages suspected of assisting the Raiders. The toll will never be known, but the Chinese estimated perhaps a quarter-million people were killed in retaliation for America’s own retaliatory strike.

  Metropolitan Japan would remain immune to American bombs for the next twenty-two months, until June 1944. But a terrible warning had been delivered, and a foretaste of impending cataclysm.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Before the Beginning

  IN 1921 ITALIAN aviation visionary Giulio Douhet proclaimed, “Aeronautics opened up to men a new field of action, the field of the air. In so doing it of necessity created a new battlefield; for wherever two men meet, conflict is inevitable.”

  In that opening passage of Command of the Air, Douhet established the twin towers of his professional philosophy: evangelical aviation mated with bone-deep cynicism about human nature.

  Douhet was—and remains—an intriguing character. Born in 1869, he became an artillery officer but early on grasped the violent promise of military aviation. As a technocrat—he studied science and engineering—he perceived the potential for aerial warfare almost as soon as there were Zeppelins, let alone airplanes. In 1912, a year after Italy committed aircraft against the Turks in Libya, he wrote Rules for the Use of Airplanes in War. It was among the first efforts to establish a doctrine for military aviation.

  When the Great War in Europe erupted in August 1914, Douhet was a vigorous forty-five-year-old infantry colonel. Eagerly following aviation developments, he was primed and ready when Italy entered the fray against Austria-Hungary and Germany eight months later. Though not a pilot, he advocated building an aerial armada of 500 bombers capable of carpeting the enemy with explosives, presumably forcing capitulation without prolonged ground combat.

  But Douhet was bitterly disappointed as a succession of Italian defeats and command incompetence spurred his sharpened pen and acerbic tongue. Certain that aviation technology could offset his nation’s embarrassing unpreparedness, he vented his spleen in all directions, haranguing anyone who would listen, and many who would not. Inevitably such sentiments breached the tolerance of officialdom, and in 1916 Douhet was imprisoned for, among other things, “issuing false news . . . and disturbing the public tranquility.”

  Undeterred in his evangelism, Douhet wrote from his cell, while army commanders and government ministers remained targets for his acid ink as the war news deteriorated. Finally, in late 1917, Italy’s fortunes bottomed out with the disastrous Battle of Caporetto, which produced 300,000 Italian casualties. At that dismal point Douhet was released from prison and named director of the General Air Commissariat, responsible for coordinating Italy’s aviation plans and policies. However, it was too little too late. He found an ingrained bureaucracy unwilling to enact his plans, and he left in disgust in June 1918.

  Following the war, the verdict of Douhet’s court-martial was reversed and, remarkably, he was promoted to general. However, by then he had lost faith in Italy’s government and military, and declined to return to duty.

  After 1918, Douhet believed the material means of achieving his vision of airpower finally existed. His colleague Gianni Caproni had produced hundreds of large, capable bombers, some flown by Americans against targets in Austria-Hungary. Other nations also had made remarkable progress, including the firms of Vickers and Handley Page in Britain; Sikorsky in Russia; and Gotha and Friedrichshafen in Germany. Douhet was concerned that, having built an air weapon, after “the war to end all wars” Italy would neither maintain nor employ the machines as he envisioned. Consequently, he focused more on his writing, leading to publication of Command of the Air in 1921. Essentially, it advocated unrelenting bombing of enemy population and production centers—a two-prong attack on a nation’s moral and material means of resistance. Properly conducted, Douhet asserted, such a policy could win a quick decision and save millions of lives in the long run.

  High on Douhet’s list of requirements was an independent air force, by 1919 a reality only in Britain. There, Douhet’s opposite number was a prewar pilot, Major General Sir Hugh Trenchard, who in 1918 had belatedly espoused strategic bombardment and established a highly capable force that raided far into Germany. Unlike Douhet, Trenchard had staying power, remaining as chief of the air staff for a decade after the war.

  Trenchard had already seen the reality of heavy bombers in the Great War. Though Germany’s Zeppelin raids on London and environs gained most of the attention—the long, sleek dirigibles made great news copy—they proved too vulnerable to improved defenses. Instead, the kaiser had turned to an armada of Gothas and Riesen (giant) biplanes beginning in the spring of 1917. However, from 1915 to 1918 only some 300 tons of Teutonic ordnance fell on Britain, causing 1,400 deaths and nearly 5,000 other casualties. It represented barely two days’ sanguinary bill at the front, but the psychological impact was enormous. The appearance of German bombers in English skies led to nearly doubling the size of the Royal Flying Corps, literally overnight. It became the Royal Air Force in April 1918.

  Meanwhile, in the nexus of wartime alliances, a third
airpower champion appeared. He was a French-born American, Lieutenant Colonel William L. Mitchell, known to friends and to history as Billy.

  As one of the senior U.S. airmen in France in 1917, Mitchell met Trenchard and established a warm personal and professional relationship. Six years junior to the Briton, Mitchell had won his wings in 1916 and was avid in his support of aviation. Rising rapidly, he rocketed to brigadier general and directed the Allied air effort supporting the huge Saint-Mihiel offensive in September 1918. Deploying nearly 1,500 planes, Mitchell crafted a remarkably effective air-ground plan in an era when aircraft voice radio was nearly nonexistent.

  In his eighteen months in Europe, Mitchell made a name for himself, and enemies as well. His fiery advocacy of aviation alienated many ground officers, and his perceived flamboyance riled some of his fellow airmen. Because America lacked a strategic bombing force, his early focus was necessarily limited to tactical airpower, but after returning to America he soon raised his sights and became a disciple of Giulio Douhet.

  All three men—the Italian, the Briton, and the American—faced similar postwar problems. The greatest was public and even military indifference. Conventional wisdom held that there would be no more Great Wars, especially with the emergence of the League of Nations. Consequently, vastly reduced defense funding became the fiscal bone that army and navy dogs scrapped over. With military and naval hierarchies firmly established, the upstart airmen began at a decided disadvantage, even with Britain’s Royal Air Force and then Italy’s Regia Aeronautica becoming independent services in 1923.

  Mitchell faced a greater challenge than Douhet and Trenchard, as America enjoyed a 3,000-mile separation from Europe, courtesy of the Atlantic Ocean. No nation in the Western Hemisphere posed a remotely serious threat to the United States, leaving congressmen and senators to ask (not unwisely) why they should appropriate scarce funds for more flying machines.

  Mitchell turned the financial argument on its head, insisting that long-range bombers could defend America’s shores more efficiently than a two-ocean navy. In attempting to prove his point, he finagled a series of tests pitting bombers against obsolete U.S. and captured German warships off the Virginia coast in 1921. The Navy agreed, mainly out of curiosity as to how modern naval vessels would withstand aerial bombardment. Ironically (in light of later developments) Mitchell sought participation of Navy aircraft as well.

  Billy Mitchell may have been an irritating gadfly, but he meant business. He readily agreed to conduct the tests under “wartime conditions,” though the target vessels were immobile. Having accepted the rules, he cheated like hell. Mitchell obtained one-ton bombs that could not easily be carried aloft, and restricted the range of any aircraft that bore them. Nevertheless, in their most spectacular test his airmen scored a major triumph by using their unconventional weapons against the “unsinkable” battleship Ostfriesland. The 24,000-ton veteran of the Battle of Jutland survived the first day’s tests with minor damage, but the next day Mitchell launched his heavyweights, British Handley Page 0/400s. They scored two hits and four near misses that ripped Ostfriesland’s hull, sending her down in twenty-one minutes. The Navy was astonished—and the Army leadership embarrassed. But Mitchell’s giant bombs sank other aged battleships in additional tests, even using huge 4,300-pound weapons.

  The next year Mitchell met Douhet in Europe and was captured by the Italian’s fervor and the depth of Command of the Air. Mitchell had excerpts sent to colleagues, and got banished for his trouble. Dispatched to Hawaii and then to Asia, he literally took a page from Douhet’s book and spent his exile producing a tome of his own. The result was a 324-page treatise predicting war with Japan. Published in 1925, Winged Defense insisted that the mere threat of sustained aerial bombardment would cause a collapse of enemy willpower, and that battleships were becoming obsolete as aviation technology advanced. The fact that Mitchell reverted to colonel that year probably was no coincidence.

  That was bad enough. But in September, one of Mitchell’s naval counterparts died unnecessarily, following orders from nonaviators. Sent into treacherous weather over Ohio, Commander Zachary Lansdowne perished with thirteen other crew members of the dirigible Shenandoah. Fliers were outraged that “paddlefeet” controlled airmen’s destinies. Many grumbled; Mitchell exploded. Calling a press conference, he publicly accused the leaders of the U.S. Army and Navy of professional incompetence and indicted the “almost treasonable administration of the national defense.” The gauntlet had been dropped, and no one doubted that it would be retrieved and flung in the accuser’s face.

  In a sensational six-week trial, Mitchell exploited his court-martial to gain a public forum for his views. He received sympathetic coverage in many newspapers but the outcome was a foregone conclusion. Undeniably guilty of insubordination, in December 1925 he was suspended from active duty for five years. Rather than live with the penalty, he resigned from the Army to continue his crusade as a civilian. He died in 1936, still insisting that America’s military future would be found in the sky.

  Eventually Mitchell was proven wrong on many details but the concept of strategic bombardment outlived him. Almost before he was buried, the Army gave significant contracts to two leading aircraft manufacturers: Boeing in Seattle, Washington, and Douglas in El Segundo, California. Their commission was to build single examples of large, ocean-spanning bombers that could be flown and evaluated as prototypes of follow-on designs. In the words of a later generation, they were technology demonstrators.

  First up was Boeing’s experimental XB-15. Successfully flown by test pilot Edmund T. Allen in 1937, it featured a 149-foot wingspan and 32.5-ton empty weight. Its four 850-horsepower radial engines were reliable but insufficient to achieve tactical speeds. Nevertheless, the giant’s purpose was to prove that a bomber could fly 5,000 miles, whatever the speed. Assuming a mission radius of 2,500 miles, the XB-15’s 152 mph cruising speed equaled 33.5 hours airborne—the duration of Charles Lindbergh’s solo flight from New York to Paris in 1927. Consequently, the ten-man crew required an automatic pilot, bunks, galley, and lavatory. With a 12,000-pound bomb load, the B-15’s maximum takeoff weight was 5,000 pounds greater than that of the B-17G in World War II.

  The Douglas entry, the XB-19, suffered a lengthy gestation. It represented half a generation of advancement over the XB-15, with greater size and weight, and a nose wheel configuration. With costs soaring, in 1938 the company sought to cancel the contract but the Army believed the giant (212-foot wingspan) was worth procuring. When first flown in June 1941, it had already been overtaken by advancing technology. Douglas envisioned a full crew of sixteen, including nine gunners for eleven machine guns and two 37mm cannon. There were also provisions for a six-man relief crew, acknowledging the problem of crew fatigue on prolonged missions.

  Douglas lost money hand over fist on the XB-19. Paid $1.4 million, the company eventually spent nearly three times as much to complete the contract. Nevertheless, the XB-19 proved the potential for huge piston-driven aircraft, as its wingspan was seventy feet more and its seventy-ton empty weight nearly twice that of the B-29 Superfortress. However, an omen of things to come involved the troublesome Wright R-3350 engines, which proved unworkable and were replaced by 2,600-horsepower Allisons. The lone B-19 was scrapped in 1949.

  Meanwhile, the Army had proceeded with a truly practical design, Boeing’s classic B-17. Smaller and shorter-ranged than the XB-15 and -19, it nonetheless represented the world standard in heavy bombers when it lifted off Boeing’s Seattle runway in July 1935. Later christened the Flying Fortress, it was produced in large numbers (more than 12,700 through 1945) and, perhaps more than any other aircraft, came to embody American aviation in World War II.

  Other designs also were aborning, notably Consolidated’s B-24 Liberator, first flown in December 1939. Even more widely built than the B-17, the Liberator is destined to hold the all-time U.S. production record with some 18,400 for the Army, Navy, and Allied nations. Between them, the Fortress and Lib
erator accounted for more than 60 percent of the world’s heavy bombers manufactured for World War II.

  Producing some 31,000 multi-engine bombers was one thing; supporting and operating them was quite another. The man responsible for making it happen was a Mitchell disciple, General Henry H. Arnold, chief of the Army’s aviation branch.

  Unquestionably dedicated to bombardment aviation, “Hap” Arnold was yin to Mitchell’s yang. One of the Army’s first two pilots in 1911, Arnold was a company man—a West Pointer in contrast to Mitchell’s rise from the ranks. But Arnold possessed vision, ability, and political skills. After overcoming the early taint of Mitchell’s approval, he rose to command the Air Corps in 1938, with few policy makers doubting the need for a strong, capable air force.

  There had already been some progress. In 1925 Congress established the Morrow Board (under Dwight W. Morrow, later Charles Lindbergh’s father-in-law) to study military aviation. Based on that survey, barely six months after Mitchell’s trial, the Air Corps Act of 1926 granted quasi-independent status to Army aviation, with representation on the general staff, and expanded the air branch.

  Despite such institutional success, airpower’s early high priests fared poorly—Giulio Douhet having been imprisoned and Billy Mitchell being court-martialed. Of the big three, only Britain’s Trenchard survived professionally.

  In Search of Doctrine

  Meanwhile, the great debate about aerial bombardment continued in Europe. Trenchard in particular believed that aircraft were inherently offensive so they must be used in a policy of what he called “relentless and incessant offensiveness.” But unlike Douhet, who advocated bombing enemy populations, the Briton wanted to target heavy industry because he believed that destroying the enemy’s war-making potential would erode civilian morale.