In the predawn hours of the 12th, a flock of Japanese recon planes was mauled by Martin’s radar-equipped Hellcats, which destroyed eight without loss. Less than twenty-four hours later Essex’s detachment of night fighters preceded the daylight launch and dropped three more, keeping the pressure on Japanese fliers, who paid an increasing cost for probing the seams of American radar coverage. Nevertheless, some willingly paid the price. That month the kamikazes knocked Enterprise and Bunker Hill out of the war but they were the last fast carriers removed from the lineup.
On May 27, the Third Fleet leadership team of William Halsey and John McCain relieved Fifth Fleet’s Spruance and Mitscher. Okinawa was declared secure three weeks later, clearing the fast carriers for more work in the home islands, but by then Japan had nearly ceded its homeland airspace. Carrier pilots claimed 267 shootdowns in May, then merely twenty in June. Some second- and third-cruise aviators had fine-tuned their risk-benefit assessments. Said one double ace, “You began to realize that the war wasn’t going to end any sooner if you chased some Jap inland.”
Nevertheless, America owned Japanese skies that summer, as the B-29s and carrier-based airpower heralded America as an invincible creature of the sea and the sky. But U.S. air supremacy boded ill for the future. Tokyo’s plan was obvious: Japan was hoarding its strength for the coming invasion.
CHAPTER FIVE
Firestorm
THE CLOCK WAS running in February 1945, and Curtis LeMay counted each hour.
Hap Arnold had ordered XXI Bomber Command to support the Navy’s invasion of Okinawa, slated for April 1. That meant the B-29s would be diverted from their primary mission of destroying Japanese industry in order to beat down the Kyushu airfields within range of American ships off Okinawa. Admiral Nimitz’s immense naval forces would draw kamikazes like suicidal bees to nautical honey, and with the invasion beaches barely 400 miles from southern Japan, the threat was obvious.
LeMay was not enthused about the interruption of strategic operations but he saw the practical necessity of the interdiction mission. Therefore, he accelerated his plan to burn Japan to the ground. He could pursue that goal until the end of March.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Marine Corps presented the Army Air Forces with a precious gift that saved lives and aircraft. It was the sulfurous island of Iwo Jima, midway between Guam and Tokyo.
For many bomber crews, Iwo was a godsend. The first B-29 had landed there in early March, low on fuel. A small AAF support unit arrived soon thereafter, anticipating heavy use of the newly won field by homeward-bound bombers. The servicing and repair crews could hardly have known the task they set themselves. On one day in June more than 100 Superfortresses set down on Iwo, and at war’s end the original detachment had grown to nearly 2,000 men.
Correspondent Robert Sherrod interviewed some B-29 crews and found that the Army fliers expressed heartfelt gratitude to the marines. Eventually one pilot landed on Iwo Jima five times in eleven missions. Another said, “Whenever I land on this island, I thank God and the men who fought for it.”
Back in the Marianas, preparations continued for the upcoming blitz against Japanese cities. As with every LeMay enterprise, the bedrock was training. He huddled with his wing commanders and directed them to get their groups proficient in night bombing from unusually low altitudes—as low as 5,000 feet. The tactic ran contrary to AAF doctrine, but Curt LeMay was already known for professional heresy. He had proven that in Europe, where he demonstrated that evasive action in the bomb run only spoiled accuracy and required repeat missions to destroy a target.
LeMay would have preferred to have his four China groups available for the upcoming maximum effort, but the 58th Wing would not arrive until April and May. Therefore, the command’s existing twelve groups practiced forming up and concentrating over a target in minimum time to overwhelm the defenders. LeMay called it “compressibility.” Analyzing the tactical problems, he told his commanders, “We must seek maximum compressibility to confuse and saturate Japanese defenses.” That meant putting as many bombers across the target as possible, not only to inflict maximum damage but to reduce exposure of aircrews to flak and fighters.
LeMay went even further than adopting unorthodox tactics. Except for the tail guns, most .50 calibers were removed from B-29s to save weight. Similarly, without having to climb to 25,000 or 30,000 feet, less fuel was required, with less strain (and therefore less maintenance) on the finicky R-3350 engines. All those factors translated into extra ordnance.
Flying in the face of airpower orthodoxy, the bomber chief impressed his subordinates with his almost eerie outward calm. But despite LeMay’s stoicism, others entertained serious doubts. Recalled a 73rd Bomb Wing officer, “For almost a week most of us wondered if we were planning the greatest disaster in aviation history.”
The planning behind major bombing missions involved multiple factors, often interdependent. Timing was a major challenge, especially given the geographic distribution of the bomber bases (Guam to Tinian to Saipan was 140 miles). Furthermore, barely one B-29 could take off per minute from each runway. That translated to a 300-plane bomber stream some 400 miles long, nose to tail.
Rising from their far-flung roosts, the silvery bombers spread an aerial net over the Central Pacific. Forming up by squadrons, groups, and wings, they droned through the humid atmosphere, striving to arrive at a point in time and space where each B-29 was properly positioned for its 1,500-mile-run to Japan. In order to provide the maximum concentration of force over the target, every Superfortress needed precise navigation and skilled flying for optimum results.
Between scheduled missions to Japan, the 73rd, 313th, and newly arrived 314th Wing worked hard in February, learning more about joining up, flying, and bombing at night. The building blocks of success were formed at the most basic level: eleven men per bomber, each having mastered his own specialty and fitting into the larger entity of the crew.
The 20th Air Force planned a ten-day fire blitz, using every incendiary in the Marianas and all that the Navy could deliver in that time. In early March LeMay would start with Tokyo and work his way down the list: Kobe, Nagoya, and Osaka. The logisticians told him that no replacement incendiaries would be available before the second week in April.
The effort leading up to the Tokyo raid was immense. Orchestrating the work of as many men as a light armored division was LeMay’s operations officer, Colonel John Montgomery. In the day and a half before takeoff, some 13,000 men on three Pacific islands toiled almost without stop. Mechanics brought each plane’s four engines to the best possible condition. By hand or by truck, ordnancemen hauled bomb bodies from storage dumps to the hardstands where “bomb builders” attached tail fins, hoisted the weapons into the cavernous bomb bays, and inserted fuses. Fuel trucks drove from plane to plane, filling their tanks with 100/130-octane gasoline. According to Montgomery, preparing a combat wing for a maximum effort was “a helluva lot worse than planning a maintenance schedule for an airline.”
That was an understatement. Maintenance was the axle upon which operations turned because it dictated the number of planes airworthy for each mission. Typically, XXI Bomber Command’s in-commission rate hovered around 60 percent, meaning two in five Superfortresses were unavailable. But for the Tokyo strike Montgomery drove and inspired his “wrench benders” to a superlative effort, finally preparing 83 percent of the command’s B-29s for the forthcoming fire raid. In such numbers lay the secret of America’s success in the Pacific air war. They also reflected the ethos of industry that would drive the country forward into the booming postwar era.
Finally the preparations were complete after thirty-six hours of nonstop toil. Blitz Week began with a green flare arcing into the moist Marianas air on Friday afternoon, March 9. LeMay and his chief of staff, Brigadier General August Kissner, watched Brigadier General Tommy Power lead the new 314th Wing off Guam’s North Field. The first bombers rolled down the Guam runways at 5:36, followed by scores of others at fifty-second intervals
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Then, as the rain-wet vegetation slowly dried in the tropic air, Curtis LeMay settled down for his longest night of the war.
Playing with Fire
What is the best way to incinerate a city?
That question absorbed Allied military and scientific planners throughout the Second World War.
When the Royal Air Force discovered in 1939–40 that daylight bombing incurred crippling losses, RAF Bomber Command switched to night attacks. But finding a blacked-out city posed serious navigation problems; bombing accurately with explosive ordnance was equally difficult. Eventually the British settled on massive “area attacks”—a euphemism for carpet bombing—that produced spectacular results if a firestorm could be created. Though often condemned as terror bombing, in truth area attacks represented what could be reliably achieved with 1940s technology.
At first the Americans did hardly better, even in daylight. In 1942 then Colonel Curtis LeMay examined post-strike photographs and, counting bomb craters, found that the 8th Air Force could not account for half the ordnance it dropped. He did much to improve AAF bombing performance but Germany was one thing—Japan quite another. Incendiary raids on European cities and factories often produced marginal results owing to steel and concrete construction. Japanese cities, however, were mainly built of wood. American planners began seeking efficient means of setting Japan afire.
Probably the most innovative concept for incinerating Japan was the bat bomb. Lytle Adams, a Pennsylvania dentist, had been impressed with bats he saw in New Mexico caverns and wrote President Roosevelt in January 1942. Since bats can carry more than their own weight, Dr. Adams opined that small incendiary devices could be attached to hordes of the flying rodents, which, when released in cluster bombs over Japanese cities, would roost in rafters until the weapons ignited. Though promising, the project was canceled when some armed bats escaped at an Army airfield in New Mexico and burned the test facility to the ground.
In order to determine the best way to destroy Japanese cities, the AAF constructed buildings to Japanese standards, then tested various methods against them. A vast facility with four such ranges—“Little Tokyos”—was established at Eglin Field, Florida. Subjected to different combinations of bombs, the results were studied by ordnance experts. The fruit of the exercise was a number of terrible but important revelations. Though the standard 500-pound demolition bomb could level a house, most of the damage was inflicted by blast, leaving the surrounding area relatively untouched. But incendiaries not only destroyed what they hit—they “kept on giving” as fires increased and spread. The most effective incendiary weapon was called napalm.
Napalm was developed by Harvard chemists working under Dr. Louis Fieser, who had produced blood-clotting agents and the first synthesis of vitamin K. In 1943 his team beat industrial experts from DuPont and Standard Oil to produce an effective firebomb. The Ivy Leaguers used aluminum salts of naphthenic and palmitic acids to produce a thickening agent for gasoline. In the proper ratio, it had the consistency of applesauce and clung to whatever it touched, burning with hellish intensity. Produced by Dow Chemical, napalm was used in flamethrowers and bombs, especially in the Pacific Theater where heavy foliage concealed Japanese positions.
The chief means of raining fire upon Japan was the M69 lightweight incendiary bomb, which released napalm on impact. However, when dropped from 30,000 feet in loose packets, the six-pound weapons were strewn over miles of terrain, far from the intended target. But an “aimable cluster” (with superior ballistics), usually containing thirty-eight M69s in a finned casing, provided reasonable accuracy. Typically the cluster broke apart at 2,000 feet, spewing its submunitions over a desirable area. The ultimate M69 was the X model, which combined blast and fragmentation effects in addition to flame, either killing or deterring firemen in the immediate area.
Ordnance engineers also produced a heavier firebomb. Using the same casing as the M69, the M74 dispensed with tail fins or streamers. Its “three-way” fuses detonated whether the bomb landed on its nose, tail, or side. Upon igniting, the incendiary bombs spewed a burning stream of jellied gasoline at least 180 feet with enough momentum to penetrate typical Japanese structures.
The third incendiary weapon loaded into B-29 bomb bays was the M76, evolved from the M47 that Doolittle’s Raiders had used. Weighing 500 pounds, the ’76 was called the “block burner” because it delivered a much larger amount of napalm and ignited bigger, more visible, fires. Therefore, M76s frequently were dropped by pathfinders who marked target areas for nocturnal B-29s.
Among those urging wider use of incendiaries against Japan were both military leaders and civilian advisers. None was so forthcoming as Arnold’s deputy, Lieutenant General Ira Eaker, when he said, “It made a lot of sense to kill skilled workers by burning whole areas.”
However, some airmen were reluctant to endorse incendiaries, though apparently more for practical than ethical reasons. After all, until 1943 the U.S. military had almost no experience with such weapons. Among the most insistent advocates of fire raids was Horatio Bond, chief engineer of the National Fire Protection Association and a military adviser. After the war he recalled, “it was necessary for those of us familiar with fire destruction to keep a constant pressure on the air force and their scientific advisors to get on with the business of exploiting fire attack to bring about the end of the war.”
Another influence was William M. McGovern, a member of the Office of Strategic Services intelligence agency. Having observed Japanese at home and in China, he declared, “The panic side of the Japanese is amazing,” alluding to what he called “internal panic.” Nothing so incited that panic as fire, “one of the great things they are terrified at from childhood.”
Certainly McGovern made a strong case, and not only for Japan. The primal dread of rampant flames arose from deep within the human psyche, sowing something far beyond fear: widespread panic rooted in atavistic terror. The result could become the headlong rush of a city’s population to escape the inescapable, only compounding the death toll as people were trampled in the hundreds or even thousands.
In the twenty-first century, when any violence inflicted against civilians by a nation-state is widely condemned as immoral, the norms of 1940s warfare may appear horrifically callous at best. Certainly the military engineers who designed firebombs did not consider themselves immoral, nor did the civilians who manufactured them. Rather, they were driven by wartime patriotism melded with resignation to the immediate task at hand.
Perhaps lost in the argument is the contemporary certainty that the Second World War could not be ended without destroying the enemy’s ability (versus his will) to sustain the violence. As noted in Chapter One, bombing has never broken the morale of an entire nation, but in the 1940s the concept was too new to be evident.
The first firestorm had been inflicted upon Coventry during the German Blitz against England in November 1940. An industrial-munitions center, the medieval city was targeted by nearly 450 Luftwaffe bombers that rained fifty-six tons of incendiaries (30,000 firebombs) and more than 500 tons of explosives in an all-night deluge. As many as 200 small fires grew into one huge, raging inferno that destroyed or damaged about three-quarters of the city’s factories, leaving some 550 people dead. It was reckoned a success by the Luftwaffe, but a modest one compared to the firestorms that followed.
Owing to doctrinal and technical concerns, British retaliation was two and a half years in the making. But in July 1943, the Royal Air Force delivered many Britons’ heartfelt sentiment: “Give it them back.” More than 720 bombers set Hamburg ablaze, killing an estimated 45,000 people. In war’s ghastly ledger, the mere numbers told the progress of aerial destruction. Using Coventry as a baseline, the Germans killed barely one Briton per bomber, whereas at Hamburg the RAF killed sixty-two Germans per sortie. Subsequently Kassel, Darmstadt, Braunschweig, and Heilbronn were scoured in fire raids through the end of 1944.
Then came Dresden. In three days of February 1945
, the city was savaged in an Anglo-American night-and-day strike intended to destroy German transport and support a Soviet offensive, but critics saw the operation as terror bombing. Some 1,300 8th Air Force and RAF bombers hammered the city with almost 4,000 tons of ordnance, igniting a firestorm that left at least 25,000 dead.
Ten nights later 700 British bombers burned down 83 percent of Pforzheim, killing one-quarter of the population, some 17,000 people. The result became a matter of pride among some bombardment professionals who appreciated the extremely high ratio of area burned and the depopulation of most of the city.
It is uncertain to what extent XXI Bomber Command in the Marianas knew of the recent fire raids in Germany. As a close student of his craft, LeMay was unlikely to have lacked some preliminary information on the events half a world away. Certainly the mechanics of generating a man-made firestorm were well understood in 20th Air Force, especially given the volatile nature of Japanese cities. The challenge to air commanders was timing: placing a maximum number of aircraft over the target, compressed as closely as possible to overwhelm the defenses. Simultaneously, optimum atmospheric conditions were needed: a dry season with high winds to fan the flames and spread burning embers beyond the bomb zone.
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