He had no concerns about himself. Death would be a sweet reprieve, far better than watching Japan slide endlessly toward its certain bloody destruction. The signs were already there; at the beginning of the war, at Pearl Harbor and after, one of his pilots had been worth five of the enemy. Now the enemy was equally skilled and enjoyed an endless supply of superior aircraft.
A year ago today there had been the unthinkable raid on Tokyo, not much damage, but an affront. Since then the Japanese carrier fleet had been plucked from him at Midway, and he had suffered the humiliation of the battle in the Bismarck Sea. The truth was that he'd lost any meaningful offensive capacity.
Yamamoto shifted his samurai sword, clasping it tightly in the three fingers of his left hand and threading the blade underneath his right leg. Son of a samurai and a perfect product of the Japanese naval system, Yamamoto was quite small at five-foot three-inches, paunchy at 130 pounds. His was an unlikely physique, given his robust appetites for sweets, cigars, and geishas. Especially geishas. He had close familial relations with two and enjoyed the company of others. He was liked in return. In the Shimbashi geisha district, he even received a nickname from the manicurists. A full manicure, all ten fingers, cost one yen. Yamamoto had lost two fingers fighting the Russians in 1905. There were ten sen in a yen, so they affectionately called him "Eighty-sen."
He was told that his visit would be a "shot in the arm" for the morale of the troops on Bougainville; it was all he could do nowadays. There were no more Pearl Harbors to be planned, no more Midways to be fought—it was now hang on and wait.
Yamamoto's eyes wandered around the immaculate interior of the Mitsubishi G4M1 attack plane; it was factory-new, still shining inside and out, suffused with the harsh smell of oil, fuel, and raw metal. A piece of paper was handed to him from the pilot. It read "Ballale at 07:45." He folded it and placed it in his pocket; out of the cabin window he saw the escort fighters suddenly dive away.
*
Ballale/April 18, 1943
Bandfield enjoyed the building tension as the minutes ticked away on their water-hugging flight. One plane caught its propellers on a wave, disappearing momentarily in a white sheet of foam, before struggling out the other side. Mitchell had led them through three course corrections, and now they were heading directly for Bougainville, still on the deck. Suddenly, a low controlled voice broke radio silence.
"Bogies eleven o'clock . . . high."
He saw them at once, two bombers, escorted by two flights of three Zeros each. Mitchell's navigation had been magnificent. Bandfield scanned the sky anxiously—this couldn't be all!
"Skin 'em off!"
On command, the drop tanks fell away and they began a hard climb for altitude, everything full forward, the Lockheeds quivering as they hung on their propellers. The Japanese were surprised; they had been expecting any attack to come from above, not below.
Bandfield followed Mitchell and the other Lightnings on their preplanned climb to twenty thousand feet as the four hunters roared at the bombers. He scanned the empty bright blue sky, unbelieving—there simply had to be more Japanese aircraft in the air; they couldn't have left their top man exposed like this.
The diving Zeros had reached the hunter Lightnings just as they began their attack; Bandfield could see one of the Lockheeds turn into the enemy fighters, while the other P-38s hurled themselves at the two Bettys, themselves now diving away, one toward the green sanctuary of the ground, the other out to sea. His earphones filled with the excited chatter from the four hunters.
Without waiting for orders, Bandfield rolled the Lightning on its back and dove for the island below, where the fleeting shape of the Betty was discernible above the tree line. Two Lockheeds were hot after it, and two Zeros were converging on the Lightnings. A dozen lives hung on the razor sharp balance of timing; if the Zeros could fire first, the Americans would go down, or break off the attack, and the bomber would land safely; if the Lightnings fired first, the Betty was doomed.
Bandfield ripped straight down, forgetting all the warnings about compressibility as the controls grew stiff in his hands, ignoring the unwinding instruments, intent only on solving the elegant three-dimensional trigonometry, to place himself in a position to knock the Zeros off the P-38s' tail.
One Lightning had already fired and gone past the Betty, now smoking and edging lower to the forest canopy, all trees and vines to Bandfield now, no longer just a green mass against the sea. He was too low, too fast, and damn near too late; the Zeros were gaining on the second P-38 as it sat in perfect position, firing now at the fat fuselage of the Betty. Bandfield used his maneuvering flaps as he reefed back on the wheel, winching his fighter's nose around, shooting as he came, his bullets and shells passing between the other Lightning and the two Zeros. It was close enough; the Zeros broke off.
Yamamoto had watched the Zeros drop away, then saw the silver H-shape of a twin-engine American fighter roaring past. He looked back, almost casually; this was the day he would die, and he was well prepared.
He grasped the sword tightly, then turned again to see another American fighter close behind, to the left, a shark pursuing a fat tuna, its nose lit up with cannon and machinegun fire.
The Admiral of the Combined Fleet saw shells tear a piece of engine cowling off, felt the thud of bullets entering the fuselage, and died when a . 50-caliber slug entered the base of his skull, tore through the brain that had come so close to defeating the Americans, and exited through his cheekbone. Everyone else on board was killed when the aircraft ripped through the jungle canopy to explode and burn. Yamamoto's body was thrown clear. When they found little "Eighty-sen," he was strapped upright in his seat, his sword still clasped in the three fingers of his hand, face still recognizable, his eyes closed as if dreaming of his geishas.
*
Wichita, Kansas/May 10, 1943
Major Jim Lee strolled in from the rain, almost as wet as he'd been when the crew of a Catalina had pulled him from the water off Guadalcanal. He shivered involuntarily as he walked into the brilliantly lit fluorescent cavern that was the brand new Boeing Plant II, his injured arm beginning to ache from the bulging briefcase he carried. This was just the first increment of a planned 180 acres of covered floor space dedicated to building B-29s in Kansas.
Two years before this had been a wheat field with an apple orchard on one border. Now slim steel columns supported a web-bridge structure overhead, which carried all the utilities and the miles of light fixtures. The floor was a sea of aluminum, subcomponents shipped from Seattle and a thousand other places, marching along toward completion on jigs that looked like giant erector sets. There was tooling everywhere, everything from simple drill presses to gigantic Modern Times monstrosities from the Cincinnati Milling and Machinery Company that swallowed aluminum ingots and spit out finished parts. At first glance the plant seemed to be completely automatic, free of all workers; as Lee walked through to his new office he saw that there were hundreds of people laboring like army ants under the canopy of aluminum.
The crash of the second XB-29 in February had stunned Boeing and thrown the entire program into disarray. Lee had come back from Guadalcanal in October, his arm almost healed, and was immediately sent back to the McNaughton plant. He'd donned his new oak leaves in January, happy to be test-flying the Merlin-powered Sidewinder and consulting on the new jet. Now Caldwell had temporarily assigned him to Wichita, where Boeing was in the middle of a production crisis. Lee had liked the way things were developing at McNaughton and protested the move, but, as usual, Caldwell had been firm.
As he worked with Caldwell to get Boeing back on track, for the first time Lee began genuinely to understand just how tremendous the XB-29 program was and how much it owed to Caldwell's vision.
Boeing had built more four-engine planes than any other manufacturer in the world and, in conforming to the basic specifications Caldwell had framed, had created an extraordinarily advanced aircraft that could fly higher, farther, and faster, with a bigg
er bomb load, than any bomber in the world. But, strained as the company was with B-17 production, the mass manufacture of the B-29 on a tight schedule was too much for them. Caldwell had charted the course out of building disaster with his personal system of orchestrated management. Just as he had Lee at Wichita, Roget at Dayton, and Bandfield in the field, Caldwell over the years had hand-picked dozens of other bright, independent managers, men who could grasp what he wanted and then make it happen.
The B-29 program was the epitome of the forced draft war effort, demanding an incredible variety of scarce talent in the work force, everything from spindle shapers to rivet buckers, from heat-treaters to crane operators. In a whirlwind ninety days, "Caldwell's orchestra" had created them out of bakers, housewives, schoolboys, by setting up schools to teach women from Kansas farms and men from Georgia cotton fields how to build airplanes. Many of the workers had never even seen a sheet of aluminum before, much less turned one into parts.
Caldwell's people sent recruiting teams into the field to hire engineers, machinists, and unskilled laborers; he forecast where shortages would occur—aluminum, machine tools, fasteners, instruments—and told his managers to forestall the shortages with imagination and money. Like Caldwell, the managers were supposed to use any technique to get what they wanted—cajoling, threatening, inducing, seducing, whatever it took. And when Lee looked out the window of his second-story office, there was the result: B-29s being completed, on their way to the Pacific and the skies over Japan.
At nine-thirty a weary General Caldwell strode into the room, followed by the usual entourage of Boeing and Army personnel. Shaking Jim's hand, he asked the others to leave. He gratefully accepted a cup of coffee as he lit up his tenth Camel of the morning.
"Sorry to be late. Give me a rundown on the engineering fixes."
Lee went through the agonizing list of tooling problems, engine fires, fouled-up electrical systems. Caldwell indicated approval or disapproval of proposed solutions with short nods of his head, then snapped more questions, going into details on Boeing's personnel problems, the work force, the local Army people. It was like feeding grain into a mill: Caldwell just kept accepting facts, grinding them up, spitting out ideas he didn't like. At three o'clock Jim was exhausted, but he said, "I've got some ideas for you on some other subjects, General. I wish you'd hear me out."
"Shoot, you've got five minutes."
"I think it's wrong to apply European methods to the Pacific theater. I've studied all the intelligence reports on the Japanese home defense, on their fighters and their radar. They are pitifully weak, and it doesn't make sense to send the B-29s in at high altitude, at the limit of their range, to try to hit the Japanese factories with precision bombing. It would be a lot more efficient to strip them of their armament, load them up with the max amount of bombs they can carry, and send them in low, at night. Drop mostly incendiaries, and just burn the cities out."
Caldwell, in a voice vaguely like Jimmy Durante's, said, "Everybody wants to get into the act." Then, "Is that your strategy for winning the war?"
"Yes, sir."
"Stick to ramrodding production problems. Hap Arnold has his reputation riding on the B-29 as a high-altitude precision bomber—do you think I'm going back to tell him it won't work?"
"If you don't he'll find out soon enough. This thing is close to my heart; I was in China, I studied the Tokyo raid. It's not like I'm some professor talking theory out of War College."
Caldwell thought it over. He'd made a career of getting the right advice from the field—and Lee was smart. "Okay, Major, you've got a point. You've done a good job here; maybe there's a way we can work together on this." He walked to the door and checked the hallway—there was no one in sight.
"Look, this is absolutely top secret; I could get my ass in a sling for even mentioning it. But there is a mission coming up in July that conforms to your theory—we're going to make a low-level B-24 strike from Benghazi at Ploesti, at the Rumanian oilfields. It's too long-range for conventional fighter escort, so everything will depend upon secrecy, and staying low beneath the German radar. I could get you on the mission, if you want."
"Sounds ideal—I've checked out in the B-24."
"Good. I'll send you to Killer Kane's outfit; they've got a lot of guys ready to rotate, and one of them would be glad to see you. You can make the flight as a copilot, and be back in the States by mid-August."
"What about this job?"
"You've just about finished what I needed you to do. We're going through a standby period, getting all the tooling standardized so that we're building the same thing in Wichita that we're building in Omaha and Atlanta. And this will give you a chance to see your theory in practice and give me a first-hand report."
"Okay, you're on. But one more thing. When I come back, I don't want to stay with the B-29 program. I want to work with McNaughton on the jet."
Caldwell was immediately suspicious—could Lee be interested in Elsie? "Jesus, is the rest of the war being arranged conveniently for you? Would you like to see the second front at Malibu, rather than France?"
"Come on, General, you've run me around the world working for you. I'd be of more use to you in Nashville than I would in Wichita, and I'd like it better."
"We'll see." Caldwell grabbed his brass-laden hat and bounded out the door, leaving Jim Lee thinking sad thoughts about how nice it had been working for a creampuff like Claire Chennault.
A chance to test my theory hell! It's a chance to get my ass shot off one more time.
***
Chapter 9
Cottbus/May 19, 1943
Exhaustion lay across his heavily muscled shoulders like stones from a quarry, but Bruno Hafner was supremely content as he methodically went through the shutdown drill of the Messerschmitt Bf 108 communications plane. It was wonderful to be able to fly again, even in a little crate like the Taifun. He'd had to tear out the original four-place configuration and replace it with his own special seat, tailored for ease of access. There was a jump seat and a bucket for his faithful but airsick prone bodyguard, Sergeant Boedigheimer.
Hafner relished the popping of his eardrums, the smell of hot oil, and the wheezing sounds of the airframe metal coming to rest, sounds as therapeutic to his broken body as Kersten's massaging fingers. He nodded and Boedigheimer arranged the ladder to help him out. He was strong enough now to pull himself out of the airplane by upper-body strength alone.
In the air, his bad legs made no difference, for he had lost none of his skills, nor any of his enjoyment of flight. He'd probably never fly in combat again, but then he'd been told that he'd never walk. Now he could do a half a kilometer without a cane, and his endurance was building.
He had just looped and rolled through the white clouds dotting the blue sky, embracing the glorious day in an effort to shake off the worries of the doleful war news. After all of Rommel's tremendous successes, the Afrika Korps had come to an inglorious end, with General von Arnim left to hold the bag of defeat. And the goddamn RAF had somehow blown up the Mohne and Eder dams with some devilish new kind of bomb, flooding the Ruhr Valley and severely reducing the power and water available for industry. Goebbels's Ministry, in their indefatigable efforts to show a bright side, had made much of SS General Stropp bringing the bloody fighting in the Warsaw ghetto to an end. Some victory—SS troops and tanks against a bunch of Jews armed with homemade pistols.
Hafner glanced at his watch: nine o'clock, time for the damned meeting with Josten. The more involved Josten became with the jet program, the moodier he got. Hafner wondered how he'd be to work with if things weren't going so well with the 262; as it was, he was increasingly ill-tempered.
Boedigheimer grunted as he strained to keep the wheelchair from speeding off down the long concrete ramp to the cavernous underground factory. Hafner always half expected to be met by a flight of millions of bats roiling out of the gloomy entrance below. It was another one of his "follies" turned into triumph. Everyone, from Himmler down, h
ad thought he was crazy when he laid the huge concrete block on top of solid ground, then burrowed out the factory space underneath. But Speer, a man of vision, was excited by the plant and told Hitler about it. Now they were going to build much larger structures on the same model all over Germany. It was the kind of idea that appealed to the Fuehrer, who was already demanding that caves, railroad tunnels, mines, and every other sub-surface area be used; he wanted all of his industry underground by the end of 1944 in a troglodyte world, all craters above and workers below. When Hitler had said, "Give me four years and you won't recognize Germany," he hadn't been jesting.
It wasn't going to be possible, of course, but the Cottbus method was the cheapest and the easiest. And Speer, as arrogant as he sometimes was, always gave Hafner full credit for the idea, an unusual occurrence in the Third Reich.
Always correct to the point of annoyance, Josten stood up and saluted him as he entered.
"Ach, Helmut, what is the complaint de jour?"
"Herr Direktor, what is the progress on the turbine blades?"
"Some good news, for a change. We've finally licked the welding problem. Old Fritz has come up with a totally different approach, and even mechanized it. Let's go next door."
The two men donned welder's goggles and went into the next room, where Fritz was bent over a machine. The turbine blades were being brought in one by one on a slow conveyor belt. Fritz's device, not too different in operation from the claw machines used in carnivals, had a mechanical hand that grabbed each turbine blade and with a blinding blue-white flash, electrically spot welded the clamped edges along the top.
Hafner, a gargoyle with his burnt twisted face and blue-lensed goggles, showed him a turbine blade. "Fritz toughened the ordinary steel by introducing nitrogen into the annealing process. Then he made one side of the blade longer than the other, bent the top over, and spot welded it."
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