Whirlwind

by Barrett Tillman

  In late February and early March the groups began preparing for the journey by air, land, and sea. Meanwhile, XX Bomber Command closed out its mission log on the night of March 29, attacking oil storage facilities at Singapore. During April the 444th and 462nd Groups departed India, followed by the 40th and finally the 468th. The wing was reunited at West Field, Tinian, during the first week in May.

  The nine homeland strikes had been a tiny portion of XX Bomber Command’s total effort. In attacking Omura five times, Yawata twice, and a few miscellaneous targets, the B-29s’ Kyushu missions represented one-sixth of the command’s total sorties and less than one-tenth of the bomb tonnage dropped. Significant damage was limited to the naval aircraft plant. Meanwhile, in all operations XX Bomber Command lost 125 B-29s, but only twenty-nine to enemy action.

  In retrospect LeMay remained disgusted at the convoluted scheme for operating B-29s in China. Twenty years later he wrote, “I’ve never been able to shake the idea that General Arnold himself never believed that it would work.”

  If the B-29 operation in Asia left a legacy, let it be this: XX Bomber Command operated the world’s most complex but technically immature aircraft at the end of the war’s longest supply line, over the world’s highest terrain in some of the worst weather, with half-trained crews and mechanics living in an oppressive climate on primitive bases.

  Nevertheless, the nascent Superfortress grew into a fully fledged weapon in China skies. During his Asian odyssey Curtis LeMay learned what he needed to know about turning the ’29 into a truly strategic weapon, one that would have a greater effect upon the Pacific War than anything in the AAF inventory.

  The wind that began flowing out of China would grow to cyclonic force in the Pacific.

  CHAPTER THREE

  From the South

  THE STRATEGY WAS known as island hopping, and it worked. But it required what Winston Churchill called “triphibious operations”—the melding of sea, land, and air forces into a nearly seamless entity focused on seizing islands from the enemy, each one representing another step on the long road to victory.

  The process had begun eight months after Pearl Harbor when U.S. Marines landed at Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. Nearly two years later their seven-league boots splashed ashore in the Marianas, 2,000 miles northwest and more than half the distance from “Guadal” to Japan.

  However, each leap of the triphibious frog was limited by the range of available airpower. Because air superiority ensured that no amphibious operation failed in the Pacific War, the success rate among all major landings in World War II ran over 99 percent.

  Fortunately for the Allied cause, America had invested early and heavily in development of aircraft carriers. In June 1944 the U.S. 5th Fleet brought fifteen fast carriers to the Marianas, resulting in the greatest flattop duel in history. Three of Japan’s nine carriers were lost, and with them most of its carefully hoarded cadre of trained aircrews. The battle went into legend as “The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot,” and the ensuing victories ashore provided B-29 bases within range of Tokyo.

  Masatake Okumiya, the Imperial Navy officer who had glimpsed some of Doolittle’s Raiders skimming the rooftops in 1942, recognized the Superfort’s potential. He recalled, “There was good reason to believe that the Marianas conflict might give the enemy the final advantage necessary to defeat Japan. Should American troops successfully occupy the islands, then the Japanese homeland itself would fall within the effective bombing range of the U.S. Army Air Force’s new B-29 bomber, which could well cripple our production.”

  Between June and August 1944 the Americans seized three Japanese-held islands in the Marianas, 1,500 miles south of Tokyo. Saipan, Guam, and Tinian were remade by incredibly efficient engineers, providing runways, housing, and support facilities for the 20th Air Force’s growing bomber fleet. The Army and Navy both fielded engineering and construction crews, though the sailors got by far the most ink. The Navy Seabees were so popular that they featured in a John Wayne movie; nobody ever made a film about the Army’s aviation engineers.

  The Pacific Theater was the largest of World War II. It dwarfed any conflict before or since, not merely in size (3,800 miles from Honolulu to Tokyo; more than New York to Paris) but in unprecedented challenges. For airmen it was especially daunting, requiring the routine reliability of a commercial airline for lengthy combat missions, new operating procedures, and unerring navigation on flights spanning hundreds of miles over open water.

  The Pacific also required more bases than had ever been built. In less than four years Army aviation engineers and Seabees provided more than 100 airfields in that vast expanse, from Hawaii to New Guinea to the Marianas to Okinawa. The preferred runway material was asphalt, but Pacific Theater engineers encountered the conventional wisdom that blacktop was unsuited to the hot, humid climate. Until that was disproven, the construction crews managed with packed dirt, coral, gravel, and PSP: pierced steel planks. As always, solutions placed a premium upon innovation, and the engineers never lacked that invaluable commodity.

  Airbase construction represented as great an advantage to the United States as aircraft production. Commander Mitsugu Kofukuda wrote, “A world of difference existed between the ability of the Japanese and Americans to construct air bases in combat theaters. Basically, we relied upon primitive manpower to clear jungles and pound out airstrips for our planes, while the Americans literally descended in a mass mechanical invasion on jungle, coral, and rock to carve out their airbase facilities. This difference . . . undeniably and seriously affected the air operations of both belligerents, much to the benefit of the Americans.”

  The U.S. Army and Navy arrived at similar structures for their construction units. A typical aviation engineer battalion included a headquarters company and three engineer companies. The first two battalions, formed in 1940, each numbered twenty-seven officers and 761 enlisted men operating an astonishing array of equipment. The gear included 146 vehicles plus 220 other items: air compressors, asphalt and concrete pavers, bulldozers, cement mixers, graders, pumps, rock crushers, rollers, mechanized shovels, scrapers, trucks, and tractors. There were also small arms to repel enemy attacks and machine guns for air defense.

  Most Seabee battalions included a headquarters company and four construction companies, each with platoons specializing in construction, maintenance, road blasting and excavation, waterfronts, and tanks and pipes.

  Construction units of either service were always in short supply. In December 1944, Hap Arnold sent two engineer battalions to the Marianas before either had completed training. But even that was insufficient. From January to June 1945, twenty-one more battalions were hurriedly shipped to the Pacific. Consequently, individual and unit training frequently suffered; the constant, increasing worldwide demand simply overwhelmed the Army’s ability to get battalions through a full training cycle.

  From June 1944 to August 1945 some fifteen Army engineer battalions (six “colored”) worked on Saipan alone. At least two—the 34th and 152nd—landed before the island was secure. Most passed on to other jobs, especially on Okinawa, but on V-J Day four were still needed on Saipan.

  Whether construction crews or aircrews, everyone lived in the same oppressive environment. Most of the Marianas lie within 15 degrees of the equator, and one veteran recalled, “It would rain for a brief, heavy downpour and usually about four times a day followed by bright sunshine. The temperature never varied more than 15 degrees the year round (from 70 to 85) and the humidity stayed so high all the time we had ear and feet fungus and everywhere else fungus. Dengue Fever was rampant and could lay you low.”

  Most men lived in tents; the fortunate ones enjoying a wood floor to reduce the mud. Sixty years later, veterans of the Pacific Theater of Operations still grind their teeth over the cinematic images of a balmy climate, Quonset huts, and decent food.

  The Saipan invasion began on June 15, and Army aviation engineers went ashore the next day, starting to improve the captured Aslito air
strip on the island’s south coast. Previously a Japanese fighter base, Aslito was renamed in honor of Commander Robert Isely, a naval aviator killed in the conquest of the Marianas. However, due to a clerical error, the field became “Isley” and remained so throughout its existence.

  Not counting smaller airfields, the engineers had to shoehorn six B-29 bases with eleven runways onto three islands with a total area of 297 square miles. When work began at Saipan, Guam’s first bomber field was six months from completion; Tinian’s last runway was eleven months downstream.

  On Saipan the construction process began by leveling two coral mountains and crushing the material with bulldozers. Then the coral was loaded into 100 trucks, each carrying four tons, shuttling repeatedly from the “quarry” to the airfield site. There the longest runway in the Pacific was laid out, awaiting the expertise of engineers who relished the challenge of doing what some said could not be done.

  Though stateside experts insisted that asphalt could not be used in an equatorial climate, the aviation engineers paid no heed. They shipped in drums of hardened asphalt and, like their Seabee counterparts, got on with the job. Some GIs found an abandoned sugar boiler and set about rebuilding the Japanese facility. They welded a tall smokestack from empty oil drums and built their own asphalt melting plant. It proved an inspired idea: the plant provided 700 tons of liquid asphalt a day for the final runway surface over the coral base.

  Guam

  If Saipan was a big job—and it was—Guam was bigger. After the initial landings on July 21, a three-week slogging campaign was conducted with far better Army-Marine cooperation than on Saipan. When the island was declared secure on August 10, hundreds of Japanese stragglers remained at large, occasionally harassing the Americans but more often seeking food. According to one popular tale, an uncommunicative soldier wearing a mismatched set of fatigues made it through a darkened chow line but was apprehended when he bowed in appreciation.

  Meanwhile, construction continued apace. North and Northwest Fields became operational in January and April 1945, while Depot Field housed a heavy maintenance facility. Depot was renamed for Lieutenant General Millard F. Harmon, commander of U.S. Pacific Air Forces, who disappeared over the Pacific in February 1945.

  Recreational facilities were scarce at first but the Yanks provided their own amusement. On Guam the shore was mostly ringed by rocky cliffs, though Tumon Bay offered a sandy beach where some improvised boats were fashioned from discarded aircraft fuel tanks. However, the tropic scenery could prove deceptively inviting, and Americans soon learned to spend no more than twenty minutes in the water to avoid serious sunburn.

  Eventually, living conditions improved for many airmen who moved from tents into Quonset huts. On Guam there was a post exchange (PX) offering familiar items such as Hershey bars and Pepsodent toothpaste sold by “some matronly ladies who worked there,” recalled William R. Thorsen, a seventeen-year-old Seabee. Some men augmented chow hall and PX fare with bananas and coconuts from the remaining jungle, though most carried weapons on such expeditions, knowing of Japanese stragglers. Thorsen said that he never went anywhere without his M1 rifle and a bandolier of ammunition.

  The real currency was liquor, especially whiskey. Enterprising aircrews stuffed their planes with as much liquid barter as they could manage before leaving the States or Hawaii, anticipating a scandalous profit in the Central Pacific. Their entrepreneurial foresight was universally proven. Among the most popular was Schenley’s Black Label, which went for $40 or more a fifth. For a case of good (or at least acceptable) booze, almost anything was available, from an ice machine to a personal jeep.

  Tinian

  The obscure island of Tinian—just south of Saipan—became perhaps the least appreciated engineering feat of the twentieth century. The island was destined to host six runways, the largest aviation complex on earth.

  The Seabees went ashore practically cheek by jowl with the invading Marines in late July 1944. In order to accomplish the task, the Navy formed the 6th Construction Brigade, eventually comprising three regiments each with multiple Seabee battalions. Most of the actual airfield work was completed by the 30th Construction Regiment while the 29th provided vital support infrastructure including roads, housing, public works, and fuel and ordnance dumps.

  Tinian required nearly everything involved in constructing Pacific island airfields: clearing jungle and cane fields, uprooting large trees, leveling hills, filling ravines, moving and crushing coral. But that was just the preliminary work before actual runway construction could begin. All the while, Seabees dug and scraped and drilled and blasted and rolled and paved their way to completion.

  The enormity of the job was summarized in the statistics: 11 billion cubic yards of dirt and coral went into the six fields: enough to fill a line of dump trucks stretching the 940 miles from Washington, D.C., to Kansas City. The grind never let up, as crews went through twelve tons of dynamite and nearly 5,000 blasting caps every day.

  Seabee officers computed that the construction material equaled three Boulder Dams. That much work required 770 cargo and dump trucks, 173 wheeled pans, 160 tractors, sixty graders, eighty power shovels, forty-eight rollers, ninety drill rigs, and dozens of water wagons, welders, cranes, and other heavy equipment. Men and gear toiled twenty hours a day with two crews working ten-hour shifts, leaving only four hours for maintenance and repair.

  After the surface was scraped clear and the runway beds established, the compacters went to work. Huge rollers were run up and down the 8,500-foot lengths and 400- to 500-foot widths, chuffing smoke and crushing coral into ever denser packs. Then the Seabees called upon their hand-built asphalt plant that provided 700 liquid tons a day. For each runway they poured a layer of asphalt two and a half inches thick. Finally they rolled that layer, compressing it to two inches to accept the bulk of Superfortresses taking off and landing.

  However, it wasn’t just about laying a long, wide strip across the island: in the tropic environment rain was ever present, and drainage was a critical factor. Engineers carefully computed the proper gradient for each runway—the crest of a 500-foot-wide strip could be four feet higher than the sides, with drainage ditches dug and maintained to handle the runoff.

  Aside from the enormous size of the job, the greatest tribute to the Seabees’ “Can Do” motto was that, with one exception, every field was completed on schedule or earlier, none in more than fifty-three days. West Field’s second runway took twenty days longer because the plans were altered partway into the project, doubling the size of the job.

  Early on, some Easterners insisted that Tinian’s shape resembled Manhattan. (Only vaguely; at thirty-nine square miles, Tinian was 70 percent larger and nowhere as skinny.) A New Yorker—Captain Paul Halloran, skipper of the 6th Seabee Brigade—christened the main north–south road Broadway; an east–west thoroughfare became 42nd Street; and others were Fifth Avenue and Riverside Drive. Before long the north end of the island was being called the Bronx while the southern portion was the Battery. (“The Bronx is up and the Battery’s down.”) Those familiar names might have eased a bit of homesickness among construction crews, but the best they could do for Central Park was a bomb dump in the middle of the island.

  When the Tinian complex was completed in May 1945, North Field had four bomber runways while West Field had two more. But that was only part of the job. Before all six runways were finished, the construction crews produced eleven miles of taxiways and hardstands for some 450 Superfortresses. That did not include the roads, housing, and storage facilities that a modern air force required.

  About 15,000 Seabees had produced the world’s largest airport but the chore was ongoing. When the first B-29 took off from North Field in January 1945, some Seabees expected to move to other islands. But the enormous facility required regular maintenance, and several battalions remained on the islands for the rest of the war.

  Regardless of their duty, for island-bound soldiers and sailors, morale often turned on mail. A
ny contact with home was avidly received, but there were hitches. Officers could censor their own mail while enlisted men and noncoms had to submit correspondence for security review. Clashes were inevitable. In just one instance a thirty-three-year-old sergeant had been rebuked by a twenty-two-year-old lieutenant for the steamy contents of a graphically composed love letter. Said a squadron mate, “The lieutenant was infuriated and offended because the sergeant had gone into lengthy, minute, explicit, meticulous, specific and exquisite detail.” When the ninety-day wonder demanded an explanation, the sergeant asked, “Why not? She’s my wife!” The letter was forwarded as written.

  Targeting

  With B-29s in range of Honshu, the main island, Japan belatedly began dispersing its industry much as Germany had done. With major factories in Tokyo, Nagoya, and Ota, the centralized nature of Japan’s aviation industry invited attack, as Nakajima built 37 percent of the country’s combat aircraft, trailed by Mitsubishi’s with 23 percent. Nobody else was close.

  Meanwhile, in November 1944 American targeting priorities had been established by the Joint Chiefs of Staff: four principal aircraft engine factories, then five airframe manufacturers and assembly plants. Secondary and “last resort” targets included major ports followed by thirteen urban-industrial areas. By concentrating first upon the aircraft industry, American planners expected to defeat enemy airpower in its nest—a prerequisite for the expected invasion.

  Looking back, Commander Masatake Okumiya said, “The Americans chose their targets wisely, for [Tokyo and Nagoya] were the most critical centers of the entire nation. Nagoya was Japan’s aircraft manufacturing center, one great factory at Daiko-cho alone produced 40 percent of all our aircraft engines, and the sprawling plant at Ohe-machi assembled 25 percent of our aircraft. Tokyo, of course, was our military and political center. The incessant raids rapidly disorganized internal functions, and government activities practically reached a standstill.”