The men who carried out this dangerous operation, the crews of the 313th Bomb Wing, describe it:
“The Inland Sea’s outlet was the Shimonoseki Strait, which was comparable to our Panama Canal. All traffic that flowed from the four major Japanese islands to the Asian mainland went through it. We had to cripple it,” observes Robert Rodenhaus. “General John C. Davis was the commanding general of the 313th Wing. He chose my plane, The Lucky Strike, to lead the planes that went in. We were number one.”
“Japan was perfect for mining,” explains John Jennings. “It had very shallow waters. The Navy provided the mines. Some were 1,000 pounds, some 2,000 pounds, and they would be dropped from 5,500 to 7,500 feet at night with parachutes.” There were three types of mines: magnetic, pressure, and acoustic, and they were almost impossible “to sweep,” adds Fiske Hanley. “They lay on the bottom of these shallow waterways and would listen for noises, or feel for pressure, or for the magnetic influence from a ship. They were set so they might go off on the first ship to go over them or the tenth. They were devilish things.”
Many B-29 crewmen considered the mining missions their most dangerous duty. “We were conned immediately from both sides with searchlights,” Rodenhaus continues his story. “Powerful [radar-directed] searchlights. They were demoralizing. They are psychologically wrenching, because they illuminate completely the interior of the airplane. You gotta wear dark glasses, and as you travel they are passing you from one searchlight battery to the next. You’re never out of their sight.” As John Jennings says, “the mining missions are where we lost most of our planes and people.”
Over 12,000 mines were laid, 2,100 of them in the Shimonoseki Strait. By the end of the war, these mines had sunk or disabled 650,000 tons of Japanese shipping. As early as May 1945, however, mining operations had blockaded every Japanese shipping lane, virtually cutting off communications between Japan and the Asian mainland. Submarines, meanwhile, had severed communication between Japan and its southern resource colonies, and LeMay’s B-29s had destroyed a good part of Japan’s industrial war machine. By the end of May, the lethal combination of burning and blockade had closed the huge ports of Nagoya, Yokohama, and Tokyo.
The Japanese also used mines, to defend their shores against the expected American invasion. Finding these minefields and plotting them was one of the most harrowing and least known operations of the war. Marty Schaffer, a Navy enlisted man from Allentown, Pennsylvania, served on the submarine Polaris in the waters off Japan in the last year of the war:
THE JAPANESE MINES WERE ANCHORED TO the ocean floor, just jiggling there, swinging on a chain. Our job was to plot them, using sonar. When we went in to plot them, “silent running” was announced over the PA system. That meant four knots on the propeller screws, real quiet. Everyone who wasn’t on duty went to their bunks, sometimes for ten hours—and waited in absolute silence, in the dark, listening to the eerie “ping, ping” of the sonar. When we picked up a mine you would hear an echo. Then everybody would tense up. Sometimes I’d try to read to steady the nerves, but that didn’t work. I’d sometimes fall asleep but that was bad, because I’d have these terrifying dreams of the boat getting blown apart by a mine.
The most awful thing was the sound of the chains. You could hear the chains, or cables, that held those mines scraping the side of our boat, and that was hair-raising. Any second, you thought—kabang! you’re blown to bits. I’ll never forget that sound, that nerve-rattling scraping. I can still hear it. I don’t call myself a veteran. I call myself a survivor.
Sometimes we weren’t down very far, and the sea was so rough it would toss our boat around. And there were loose mines floating around, mines that had been torn loose by monsoons or storms. We always worried about running into those. We’d go after them when we came topside to recharge our batteries. We had a yeoman who was a sharpshooter, a good old boy. The other kids would try to get the mines with machine guns, but he’d say, “step aside, lads,” and with one shot would hit the detonator and explode the mine.
When I think about it now, we were in a hell of a mess when we went into those fields. Minefield plotting became so tight that you actually had to back out of the minefield. There wasn’t enough room to turn around. But nobody on the boat ever broke down or panicked. It was the training, the tough training we went through, and the screening. We were an elite service, all volunteers, and everyone did his job.55
Submarines participated in nearly every type of Navy operation in the war, including setting up, with Navy destroyers and long-range patrol planes, a search-and-rescue lifeline for B-29 crews, like Charlie Phillips’s, that had to ditch in the Pacific or parachute into its dangerous waters. Submarines alone rescued 247 downed airmen in the last three months of the war.
But with Japan more dependent on ocean shipping than any other major power, the main job of the silent service was commerce raiding. From the day Pearl Harbor was attacked, it was a campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare against Japan, with no warning given to enemy ships, armed or not. Navy code breakers spear headed the effort. They deciphered the Japanese shipping codes, which gave the location of every convoy in the Pacific, and guided submarines to these easy targets. By the end of the war, it was, as Marty Schaffer said, “like shooting fish in a barrel,” for there was no Japanese navy or air force to contend with.56
It had not always been this easy. In World War II, one out of every seven men in the submarine service was lost at sea. With only 2 percent of the Navy’s ships and personnel, the U.S. submarine service accounted for more Japanese shipping sunk than all other arms of the services put together. By 1945 Japan’s five great Pacific ports handled less than one eighth of their 1941 trade; and three quarters of the Japanese fishing fleet was destroyed. In the summer of 1945, Japanese planners doubted that the country could feed itself into the next year.
According to Vice Admiral Charles A. Lockwood, Jr., commander of the Pacific Fleet submarine force, American submarines sank a total of 1,256 Japanese ships, 167 combatant ships, including four carriers, and over 1,000 tankers, transports, and cargo ships. Eight million tons of Japanese merchant marine shipping was sunk in the war, over half of it by American submarines, and most of the rest by bombers and underwater mines. Most critically, the submarine service cut off oil supplies from Southeast Asia to oil-starved Japan and created desperate shortages of food and essential raw materials, including rubber, coal, lumber, iron ore, and nitrates for explosives. In the end, blockade would be far more damaging to the Japanese war economy than LeMay’s fire raids, which struck an urban economy that was already fatally wounded. But before the war against shipping strangled its economy, Japan, “a maimed but still vicious tiger,” amassed the strength for one final, furious struggle on the islands of Iwo Jima and Okinawa.57
FOR THE B-29s
On a night in May 1945, B-29 co-pilot Harry George was on a fire raid over Tokyo:
THE SEARCHLIGHTS LOCKED IN ON US…. Then the flak hit and the plane started to rock. The engineer behind me said, “I’m losing number one.” Then he said, “Now I’m losing number three.” Then the interphone went dead. No conversation at all. I used the emergency interphone and asked for a crew report. We had four men in the rear waist compartment. I waited probably ten seconds. Not a sound. Then all of a sudden the tail gunner reported he was okay. But no word from the waist compartment. So I took off my flak suit and went back there to see what happened.
I got to the tunnel—there was thirty-five feet of narrow tunnel—and I went in with my parachute on. That made it tough for me to get through, and I started to think, “If we go down and I’m caught in this tunnel…”
When I got through and stuck my head out at the other end it was an awful sight. Our left gunner was badly wounded. His jaw had been shot away by flak. He had lost the whole calf of one leg. The other gunner had a flak wound in his leg. The radar man, God bless him, was giving first aid. We had a top gunner there who also had a couple of small flak wounds….<
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As I started to help these guys, we started back to Iwo Jima, which we had captured from the Japanese a couple of months before. That was three good hours away. We went through weather. We only had two engines. The bomb bay doors were hanging open. Couldn’t get ’em closed. Finally got back to Iwo. The place was covered with fog. We couldn’t get back to Tinian, another three and a half hours, so we just said we’d circle and wait. The control command at Iwo Jima said our best bet was to ditch the airplane near the beach and we said, “No, we will not ditch because our gunner will not survive a ditching.” We had given him three pints of plasma and morphine. He thought he was going to die.
Then the engineer said, “We’re about to run out of gas.” So we had to try to land. It was light by this time, about nine o’clock in the morning. They directed us around the top of Mount Suribachi and down through the clouds. We got down to about fifty feet and didn’t see the runway. All we saw was a cemetery and we didn’t want to go there, so we pulled up around again trying to line up again over the island, which was only seven miles long….
On the third pass around, the engines started cutting out. We were about out of gas. We just had enough to pull to 1,200 feet and we rang a bell for the crew to bail out. The bombardier had gone back and they were going to dump the badly wounded gunner, Dick Neil, out the back with his ripcord tied to a rope that was tied to the plane. But even though his jaw was gone, he was able to say he would get tangled up. He said, “I’ll pull it.” And so he bailed out and pulled his own ripcord. He landed about 500 yards from a MASH [mobile army surgical hospital] unit and they saved him.
The rest of us—all ten of us—bailed out and landed on the island, except the commander, Gus, who went into the water. A Navy boat went out to find him in the heavy fog, and they only found him because he was blowing that police whistle that’s attached to the Mae West [his inflatable life jacket].
I landed in a big foxhole, a bomb shell hole. Then this big Marine comes sliding down in that volcanic dust … and he says, “Are you all right?” And I said, “Boy, am I glad to see you Marines!”
That was one of the reasons Marines had been ordered to take Iwo Jima—to help the bomber boys. After Iwo Jima was secured in late March, about 2,400 B-29s, many of them shot-up and fuel-starved, would make unscheduled landings on or near the island.58 Lives were saved. But the cemetery that Harry George’s crippled plane flew over, the largest American burial ground in the Pacific, contained almost 6,800 graves. In the sulfuric ash of barren Iwo Jima, the Marines fought their bloodiest battle ever, suffering more than 26,000 casualties.
Uncommon Valor
THE FINAL BATTLES
In the early fall of 1944, Captain William Sanders Clark of Cleveland, Ohio, was stationed with the Marines on Saipan. He had fought to take the island from the Japanese, knowing it would become a base for the B-29s, and now he eagerly awaited their arrival. “None of us had ever seen a B-29,” he wrote in his war diary, “so all hands were on the lookout for the first one.” Sanders was there when Joltin’ Josie touched down, and he was there when Possum Hansell’s crews took off on their first bombing raid against Tokyo.
“In our officers club we talked with B-29 crews who had been over Tokyo. We envied these fellows and also greatly admired them. During these early raids there were a lot of Marines who would have paid money to go along on a bombing mission. However, the losses of bomber personnel rose steadily and this early enthusiasm waned. The 3,000-mile bombing run from Saipan to Tokyo and back was [one of] the most dangerous in the world. For several months there was nothing but the enemy on Iwo Jima. The only place that planes could set down in case of trouble was in the sea! Destroyers, search planes, and submarines did a magnificent job of rescue work but the toll of casualties continued to mount. It was this condition more than anything else that made the conquest of Iwo a military necessity.”1
That was not quite true. The decision to invade Iwo Jima had actually been made before the first B-29 took off from Saipan. On October 3, 1944, the Joint Chiefs of Staff approved Chester Nimitz’s plan to avoid taking Formosa and go straight for the kill, seizing the islands of Iwo Jima, about 700 miles south of Tokyo, and Okinawa, the largest of the Ryukyu Islands, which is only 350 miles from Kyushu, the southernmost main island of Japan. The Iwo Jima landing was scheduled for February 19, 1945; Okinawa’s L-Day, or Love Day, as it was called in military code to prevent confusing it with Iwo Jima’s D-Day, would be only six weeks later, on April 1. Unknowingly, the high command had chosen the sites for the last great battles of World War II.
Okinawa, a large island with excellent harbors and airfields, would be an ideal staging base for an assault on the home islands. And Iwo Jima was seen as much more than a possible refuge station for distressed B-29s. The main reason for taking it was to provide air fields from which P-51 Mustangs could escort LeMay’s Superforts to Japan. Just after arriving in the Marianas in January 1945, LeMay met with Admiral Raymond Spruance, commander of the Iwo Jima fleet operation, and told him straight out. “Without Iwo Jima I couldn’t bomb Japan effectively.” Spruance had been having some last-minute doubts about the wisdom of taking the strongly defended island, rather than bombing and bypassing it, as he had Truk, in the Caroline Islands, but his conversation with LeMay gave him reassurance.2
Taking Iwo Jima would also allow the Navy to put a much needed air rescue station on the island, 800 miles further north from the Marianas, for distressed B-29s returning from the long over-water run from Japan. And it would stop enemy air raids on B-29 bases in the Marianas.3
In October 1944, Japanese fighter-bombers flying from fueling stations on Iwo Jima had begun a series of “vengeance raids” on Saipan. “Their first raid came as a real surprise,” William Clark recalls. “Toward dusk, several Japanese planes suddenly swooped low over Isley Field and proceeded to bomb and strafe the parked Superforts. The enemy pilots were audacious and were only fifty feet above the runways. They [took us by] surprise and left the field littered with burned and blasted B-29s.”
On later night raids, batteries of crisscrossing searchlights picked up enemy planes as they flew in tent-high over Isley Field. Clark and his fellow Marines, who were camped near the airfield, had “ringside seats” for these aerial duels. “We would cheer wildly and shout, ‘Get the yellow bastard, don’t let that goddamned son-of-a-bitch get away.’ Every man on the ground felt that he could help the gunners’ aim with a little profanity.”
In December 1944, the Japanese destroyed more B-29s on the ground in the Marianas than were lost in the air over Japan. This helped to persuade Admiral Nimitz—who was also having second thoughts about invading Iwo Jima—that the operation had to go forward.4
The battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa “sound like oft-repeated tunes,” James Jones wrote in his history of the war. “So familiar by now that the reader can just about chant them in unison with me…. The sequence of landings, moves inland, fierce resistance, head-on attacks, final splitting of the defenders into isolated pockets—they were like the choreographed movements of some classic military ballet.” But each of the two battles had its own “diabolical hardship” that set it off from each other and from all previous Pacific struggles.5
At Iwo Jima, it was an end-of-time environment of volcanic rubble and ash and the way the enemy used it to create a killing field like none other in history. It was the Marines’ costliest battle ever. In one month, they suffered one third of the total number of deaths they would incur in all theaters in World War II. The eight-square-mile island cost the Americans—Marines, Navy, and Army—28,686 casualties, including 6,821 killed. It was the first time in the Central Pacific campaign that the enemy inflicted more casualties on an American invasion force than it sustained itself.
Okinawa’s extra hardships were its size, its large Japanese population, and the unprecedented waves of kamikaze attacks—by air and sea—that would kill or wound almost 10,000 sailors. For three months, Okinawa was the scene of the greatest
air-naval-land battle in history. The Americans suffered over 49,000 casualties, more than 110,000 Japanese soldiers were killed, and 150,000 to 170,000 non-combatants died. Okinawa was a horrifying foretaste of what an invasion of the Japanese mainland would cost—for both sides.
The assaults on Iwo Jima and Okinawa took place with the war in Europe nearing its end, as the Allies began closing in on Berlin, the Russians from the east and the Anglo-American armies from the west. And the fighting on Okinawa went on for seven weeks after Germany surrendered on May 7, 1945. Americans at home watched these two epic struggles closer than they had ever watched events in the Pacific. These battles would determine how much longer this death-dealing war would last. We today, of course, know it ended in August of 1945, but at the time Americans feared that it could go on for another two to three years. For combat-battered veterans stationed in Europe, nervously reading about developments in the far-off Pacific, this was almost too cruel to contemplate.
IWO JIMA
On a harsh, rainy morning in late January 1945, William Sanders Clark left Saipan’s Tanapag Harbor with an invasion convoy headed for Iwo Jima. Like almost every man on board he knew little about the mission ahead. Back on Saipan, he and other Marines had talked to bomber crews who had been “softening up” the target. They saw no signs of life on the island. “All you’ll need is about one regiment to walk ashore and bury the dead,” a B-29 pilot assured them.6 But the commanders who planned the operation were clearly worried. The Navy’s photo reconnaissance confirmed their worst fears. The preliminary bombing had merely driven the dug-in defenders deeper underground. What had initially seemed to Nimitz and Spruance a relatively easy operation would be a bloodbath for the assault troops.
D-DAYS IN THE PACIFIC Page 28