Strategic Attacks Resume
In striking contrast to Japan’s declining industrial output that spring, America’s was still accelerating. Female workers personified as “Rosie the Riveter” represented only about one war worker in ten, but her robust, can-do image spoke for all Americans engaged in the headlong rush of production. Men and women, young and old, wielded rivet guns and bucking bars, torque wrenches and welders. Factories expended unprecedented efforts at reducing absenteeism, from pay bonuses to providing day-care centers. Coming off a decade-long economic depression, employees earned more money than some had seen in all their lives, and many worked as much overtime as they could manage.
But behind the enormous energy and dedication lay something stronger if subtler. Virtually every war worker had relatives in uniform: eventually nearly 400,000 families were entitled to display the gold star pennant denoting a loved one who died in their nation’s service. To thousands of workers, every bomber rolling off the production line meant the war drew incrementally closer to its end.
Unlike Japan’s factories, which were increasingly blasted into rubble or starved of essential materials, America’s remained unmolested Vulcan’s forges, churning out ever greater numbers of aircraft. Renton, Omaha, Wichita, and Marietta outproduced not only Tokyo, Yokohama, Nagoya, and Osaka, but the rest of Japan combined. No statistics better state the vast disparity between the two nations than the fact that from 1942 to 1945 America produced nearly 4,000 very heavy bombers while Japan built none. Counting all multi-engine bombers (B-17s, ’24s, ’29s, and ’32s), the score was 34,000 to ten.
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After the March fire blitz and the kamikaze diversion there still remained much to do. The Army-Navy Joint Target Group had marked thirty-three urban areas for destruction, but Japan’s aviation industry remained the top priority. LeMay decided that with a growing force he could have it both ways. He would continue the daylight “precision” attacks against aircraft factories when sorties could be scheduled within the wider bombing campaign against other target sets.
A later generation would call LeMay’s philosophy a “force multiplier.” Not only was XXI Bomber Command going to conduct a two-phase campaign, it would do so with greater efficiency than before. As already demonstrated, the low-level missions against urban-industrial areas permitted double the bomb loads with less wear and tear on often overstressed engines. Thus, more sorties could be launched to destroy the dispersed factories that eluded precision attacks. Increasing emphasis was placed upon heavy industries producing machine tools, electrical systems, and ground-combat equipment such as artillery.
In order to continue a sustained effort, the 20th Air Force required increased logistic support, especially more bombs and fuel. LeMay needed to convince Admiral Chester Nimitz that the results would justify the logistic effort, and while the Pacific Theater commander was leery of the airman’s claim that crews could fly 120 hours per month—about eight missions—he saw the potential. Despite their cool relationship, LeMay was impressed with how Nimitz and the Navy delivered. Later he conceded, “How they got the ships and the supplies out there in six weeks I don’t know.”
Nor was that all. As reports of the devastation wrought upon Japan reached the Marianas, a surging spirit grew at pierside and spread inland. The attitude was contagious: not only Army Air Forces personnel but Army engineers, Navy Seabees, and even off-duty marines pitched in hauling ordnance from the docks. With so many willing hands, the airmen began bypassing the ordnance dumps, delivering bombs straight from cargo ships to the aircraft hardstands. There the weapons were loaded directly into waiting bomb bays, fitted with fuses, and made ready for the next mission.
If simplistic, the mood was clear: the more bombs on Japan, the sooner every GI, sailor, and marine could plan on going home.
While the constant arrivals and departures of supply ships in the Marianas represented a major endeavor, it was only one part of a massive whole. Nearly every bomb, bullet, and gallon of gasoline loaded into B-29s came by sea, but Chester Nimitz also oversaw other huge undertakings. That April, newly secured Iwo Jima required continual support, while the Okinawa campaign—the largest land battle of the Pacific War—was well underway amid the heightened kamikaze crisis.
Of necessity, Pacific Theater logistics was a joint-service operation. Nimitz’s J4 chief was an Army two-star general coordinating overall logistical planning, transportation priorities, fuel allotments, even medical facilities and general construction. Even so, there were interservice hitches. LeMay’s own supply officer, a colonel, had to find ways around the turf-protecting tendencies of the Army’s Central Pacific commander, a three-star with claims on shipping allotments. Ever the pragmatist, LeMay handled a potential clash by deciding not to ask too many questions of his subordinate.
That spring the Americans sought not merely air superiority—it had already been achieved—but outright air supremacy. Japanese airframe, engine, and propeller factories were targeted in an all-out effort to ensure control of the sky over the invasion beaches of Kyushu (Operation Olympic) and Honshu (Coronet) scheduled for November 1945 and March 1946, respectively. The overall campaign, code-named Downfall, would involve perhaps 1.7 million Allied troops ashore supported by millions more afloat and serving on island bases. With 1,300 seagoing amphibious assault ships committed to Olympic alone, suppressing the kamikazes was vital.
However, even with air superiority, B-29 losses were unavoidable. For instance, April 1 was a bad day for the 498th Group, committed to a 120-plane mission against Tokyo’s Nakajima engine plant. Possum Hansell’s original Joltin’ Josie the Pacific Pioneer was lost with its crew in a ditching shortly after takeoff; two were shot down, another made a successful water landing, and a fifth was written off after returning to Saipan. Six other B-29s also were lost, three on mining sorties.
Three days later thirteen B-29s went down on two missions to Kawasaki and Tokyo. Among the 9th Bomb Group’s missing was the crew of Captain, then Lieutenant, Raymond F. Malo, who had made the first emergency landing on Iwo Jima five weeks before. Only one of Malo’s men survived the war.
On April 7, an almost cloudless day, LeMay made the most of the opportunity by sending two wings to Nagoya and one to Tokyo. More than 150 bombers left the Mitsubishi engine plant a blackened, mangled ruin, approximately 90 percent destroyed. Simultaneously 101 planes of the 73rd Wing put Nakajima Aircraft’s Musashino factory in the crosshairs, and though the facility survived, Rosie O’Donnell’s one-ton bombs inflicted heavy damage on the machine shops.
That same day B-29s enjoyed fighter escort for the first time. Two groups of P-51 Mustangs from Iwo Jima tangled with Japanese interceptors, downing twenty-six for the loss of two Mustangs. Bomber gunners eagerly claimed 100 kills versus seven Superforts destroyed, including one that crashed after takeoff.
One crew was lost to ramming as Lieutenant Takahashi Kawano of the veteran 244th Regiment got past the Mustangs and penetrated the 500th Group’s defensive gunfire. The Kawasaki Tony pilot smashed into Lieutenant Robert King’s bomber, which broke up in flight. Nearby, Kawano’s family watched spellbound as a Japanese fighter collided with a B-29, clearly visible in the spring sky. The witnesses had no way of knowing that their son and brother had just perished. The bomber’s remains smashed into a primary school in the Kumagaya district, killing a civilian and destroying two houses as well. But Kawano received a posthumous double promotion and, in an exceptional honor, the emperor heard his name.
Across the International Date Line on April 12, Franklin D. Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage. The reaction of Robert Sanders, a 40th Group pilot on Tinian, was typical. “One morning in mid-April word filtered down the ranks that President Roosevelt was dead. F.D.R. had been the country’s leader since I was 10 years old. We were so accustomed to his presence in Washington that we never thought about anybody taking his place.”
But someone had to. Roosevelt was succeeded by Vice President Harry S. Truman, a p
lainspoken Missourian who in 1943 had headed a Senate investigation of the inordinate delays in production of the R-3350 engine.
On that same date in the Pacific, more than 250 Superfortresses in three task forces attacked aircraft and industrial targets. One of 130 bombers aiming for the Koriyama chemical complex was the 29th Group’s City of Los Angeles flown by Captain George Simeral. His crew was a well-drilled team, having flown together since June 1944, including ten previous missions.
Nearing the coast, Simeral as lead pilot ordered a flare dropped to mark the assembly point for his squadron. Sergeant Henry “Red” Erwin, a redheaded Alabaman, picked up a phosphorus flare and placed it in the chute. He pulled the arming pin prior to dropping it—and his world burst into flames.
Prematurely ignited, the pyrotechnic flew backward into Red Erwin’s face. Searing 1,300-degree heat blinded him, burning off his nose and one ear. The compartment filled with white smoke, almost immediately obscuring the pilots’ view of their instruments.
A devout Christian, Erwin thought of his friends. If the phosphorus were not disposed of, it could burn through the cockpit floor into the bomb bay and detonate the ordnance. Groping blindly for the fiendish device, somehow Erwin found it and picked it up.
The twenty-two-year-old radioman walked forward, intending to throw the flare out the copilot’s window. His path was blocked by the navigator’s table, which hinged downward. But the navigator was in the astrodome taking a sighting. Erwin had the presence of mind to tuck the burning flare under one arm, raise the table by feel, and continue forward.
Though he was blind, Erwin sensed that he neared the open window and, in a providential toss, flung the device into the slipstream. Then he collapsed over the throttle console.
In a hellish few minutes the B-29 had lost nearly all its altitude. The pilots only recovered control at about 300 feet, having opened their windows to vent the aircraft. The rest of the crew did what little it could to ease Erwin’s agony, marveling that he only spoke to ask about everyone else. Meanwhile, Simeral set course for Iwo Jima.
Doctors could do little for Erwin on Iwo so he was flown to Guam with its fleet hospital. LeMay was quickly informed of the situation and, being advised that Erwin probably would die, determined to get the Alabaman the Medal of Honor, and damn the regulations.
First LeMay dispatched an airplane to Hawaii with orders not to return without a medal. The crew took its responsibility seriously and procured the only one available by breaking into a display case and taking the decoration.
Most Medals of Honor required months to be processed. But LeMay got on the wire, insisting that Sergeant Erwin’s award be approved immediately. Hap Arnold concurred and the citation was placed on Harry Truman’s desk. In one of his first acts as president, he signed the document and 20th Air Force was notified.
In an impromptu bedside ceremony, LeMay presented the nation’s highest decoration to the suffering airman merely six days after the mission. The general order formally issuing the award was not published for nearly three months.
Red Erwin astonished everyone not only by surviving, but recovering. In the next two and a half years he endured reconstructive surgery, regained his vision and the use of one arm. Discharged in 1947, he devoted nearly four decades to helping other veterans in the Birmingham VA hospital. He married, raised a family, and died in 2002, age eighty. He believed to the end that he wore the Medal of Honor for all who served.
Meanwhile, in April, Roger Ramey’s 58th Wing moved from India to Tinian and the 315th alit on Guam, fresh from the States under Frank Armstrong. By the end of the month, XXI Bomber Command was complete with one notable exception, which would arrive in July. The five B-29 wings (twenty groups with sixty squadrons) now constituted the most powerful striking force on the planet, despite larger Allied formations with less capable equipment still blasting Germany.
Almost lost amid the unrelenting pace of operations was awareness of events in Europe. The world learned at the end of April that Adolf Hitler had died in his Berlin bunker, and a week later the Third Reich surrendered. Said B-29 pilot Gordon B. Robertson, “We received the news quite calmly and without celebration. While we were certainly glad and relieved, we realized that our Pacific War was far from over.”
May Climax
By the first of May, XXI Bomber Command had made serious inroads against Japan’s aircraft industry. AAF intelligence reckoned that 70 percent of the known aero engine plants had been hit hard enough to interrupt or seriously reduce output, and assessed that Japan’s factory dispersion program would further interfere with production. Consequently, eight remaining engine or propeller plants became the priority precision targets.
Five notable missions were flown in May, including only the second daytime incendiary strike, on the 14th. It was also the first time that four wings were committed to action, with the China veterans of the 58th Wing joining the lineup. And what a lineup it was: 480 Superforts ranging over the home islands, nearly all attacking northern Nagoya. Bombing below 20,000 feet, they scorched more than three square miles.
Nagoya was home of the Tokai Army District, headquartered in the historic castle, which was destroyed in the raid. Apparently the area commander was so enraged that he had eleven captured fliers tried for “undiscriminating bombing” and executed by decapitation on July 12. Three more were retrieved from the water by the Imperial Navy and sent to prison camp where one perished.
A second mission pounded Nagoya the night of the 16th with 450 effective sorties more than doubling the damage from the previous mission for seven square miles torched. Two aircraft factories, an arsenal, and a vehicle plant were among the identified targets in the southern part of town. As the bombers winged southward, one-fourth of Nagoya’s forty square miles had been destroyed or seriously damaged.
The previous four fire raids had gutted Nagoya and destroyed some thirty-four square miles of Tokyo, but the capital’s western area, which included the Imperial Palace, remained largely intact. On May 23, LeMay dispatched a new record of 550 Superfortresses to Tokyo, bearing 3,600 tons of fire bombs and high explosives.
Crews had been briefed to spare the Imperial Palace since Hirohito was deemed, in the sterile words of command, “not at present a liability and may later become an asset.” Therefore, the pathfinders put their markers south of the palace and west of the harbor, and the heavy haulers burned out five more square miles.
The bombers reported occasional fighter attacks among 150 or more searchlights but the interceptors were largely ineffectual, accounting for only one of the seventeen missing Superfortresses.
The trailing formations found “swell fires” producing thick smoke clouds topping 7,000 feet, forcing some bombers to swerve dangerously near their companions. The aerial traffic was further complicated by the compressed schedule: more than four aircraft crossing the target every minute. As often occurred in firestorms, aircraft were jarred and thrown about by surging heat waves. Meanwhile, the orange-red glow from the burning city merged with the pale whiteness of searchlights to render the night bright as day.
Even fliers nearing the end of their thirty-five-mission tours were shaken by what they had experienced. A bombardier later wrote, “When crews returned to their bases they handed in their reports with hands that shook, with shock and horror still reflected in their eyes from what they had witnessed just a few hours before.”
Only thirty-six hours later, on May 25, the bombers were back. Some 460 Superforts razed more than seventeen square miles of the nation’s capital: the commercial-financial district and government buildings, including the Foreign Ministry, the Navy Department, headquarters of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, and even the prime minister’s residence. Quipped one flier, “Tokyo just isn’t what it used to be.”
The firestorm swirled around ordinary citizens like Fusako Sasaki, who had survived the March 10 debacle. “As I ran I kept my eyes on the sky. It was like a fireworks display as the incendiaries explod
ed. People were aflame, rolling and writhing in agony, screaming piteously for help, but beyond all mortal assistance.”
The flames swept inexorably toward the Imperial Palace. Previous damage to homes of royal family members was limited to an area outside the palace walls, but this time the emperor’s residence felt the heat, all too literally. Wind-borne embers were blown over the moat, producing uncontrollable brush fires that ignited buildings within the compound. While the emperor and empress waited out the conflagration in their underground bunker, twenty-eight palace denizens perished in flames that consumed several buildings.
Sergeant Kevin Herbert, a literate tail gunner, witnessed a bedlam of violence that night: “a netherworld scene worthy of the imagination of a Virgil, a Dante, or a Milton: roiling columns of smoke thrust up from lurid red and yellow lakes of fire; murk and haze swept along amid the darkness; random bolts of light piercing the gloom in search of victims; tracer lines, flak bursts, thermal buffetings; the pandemonium of weaponry, tornadic noise, and urgent calls to comrades; and epiphanies and vanishings of other craft, friendly and hostile, from the dim shores of this molten sea.”
By the time the raiders returned to their island roosts, half the capital’s built-up area had been reduced to a burning, smoking, stinking ash heap—the accumulated toll of all missions since November. No further fire raids were inflicted upon Tokyo. The city was no longer worth the effort.
In exchange, on May 25 the previous record B-29 loss was eclipsed when twenty-six Superfortresses were written off—the worst toll ever. It amounted to 5.6 percent of the 464 attacking aircraft, but only four or five were known lost to flak or fighters. About 100 sustained battle damage, four being lost when their crews bailed out rather than buck worsening weather over Iwo Jima.
Prior to the 23rd, the May missions had cost thirty-two bombers; now forty-three had been destroyed in just two nights, though apparently no more than ten to enemy action.
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