But fear shadowed you. It was hard not to get a little nervous when you heard, at your preflight briefings, the words “fierce,” “intense,” and “accurate” to describe the flak you were about to encounter over your bombing target. Hard not to be a little apprehensive when you put on your gloves, steel helmet, jacket, Mae West, laminated flak vest, crash harness, and safety while preparing for takeoff. Hard not to feel as if an eternity were passing when the bomb bay doors were open for just one or two minutes, “because that’s when we’re most vulnerable,” wrote Copeland in a letter to his mother. But you had a job to do, you were part of an eleven-man team, and you had to lose your fear to function effectively. For most of the men in the 73rd Bomb Wing, there was no other choice. As Ciardi put it simply: “We functioned.”
Second Lieutenant Ed Keyser of the 499th Bomb Group was an exception. It wasn’t fear but conscience that made him refuse to participate in his first fire raid. S-2 (Intelligence) claimed that Japanese homes were being used to make shells and machine parts, that civilians were being turned into active enemies. Keyser didn’t entirely buy it. His grandfather had been a conscientious objector in the Civil War, living just a few miles from Appomattox. Keyser also chose to object. The only way to get out of a mission was to go to church, which he did on his first scheduled fire raid. But he saw the handwriting on the wall, and pacifism gave way to pragmatism. If he wanted to go home, he would have to complete his thirty-five missions, which meant flying on incendiary bombing raids.
Crews were as closely knit as families. It might be a day or several days between missions. They slept fitfully, maybe five, six hours a night. They attended classes in tactics, navigation, ordnance, and bombardment. When they weren’t studying, the enlisted men chugged beer, the officers drank booze, and they both played poker. From the Chamorro natives who helped guard the Japanese POW camp on Saipan, they learned how to make hooch by taking the eye out of a coconut, inserting seven to nine raisins, plugging it back up, and waiting for fermentation. They ate too much Spam and complained about the amount of Australian “laaaaaaamb,” as they called it. They played handball and baseball, went hiking, and planted gardens. At night they listened to KSAI-Radio Saipan, eyed the grass-skirted Kanaka Dancers, ogled stars such as Betty Hutton at USO shows, relished Irving Berlin’s “This Is the Army” extravaganza, or caught a movie at the open-air Surfside Theater, where they sat on sandbags or the metal crates that bombs were shipped in.
Sweltering heat and driving rains made life miserable for the ground echelon during the early days of operations, though once the weather cleared up, Saipan could be quite pleasant. A new chemical known as DDT, which eliminated mosquitoes and the consequent risk of malaria, had been field-tested in Castel Volturno, north of Naples, in May 1944. DDT made its Pacific debut on Saipan. Before that the marines had called the island Flypan, so plagued had it been with flies.
Airmen were prohibited from keeping flight logs on their person in case they were captured, but many took notes of their missions afterward. Ed Keyser kept his in Esquire’s Date Book, opposite the dates he had gone on in the prior year with Candy and Molly. John Ciardi kept a more expansive diary and wrote poems inspired by his experience on Saipan: “Poem for My Twenty-Ninth Birthday,” “Visibility Zero,” and “Elegy for a Cave Full of Bones—Saipan, Dec. 14, ’44.”
The planes were beautiful, marvels of technology nearly 100 feet long, with 142-foot wings for takeoff and landing at lower speeds, pressurized compartments, and a computerized central-fire-control (CFC) gunnery system that choreographed an armament of twelve .50-caliber machine guns and a 20mm cannon in the tail. They came equipped with a radar unit to help locate targets, boasted a maximum 16,000-pound bomb load capacity, and had a record range of 5,333 miles. Seven thousand gallons of gas—a small railroad tank car—would take you to Japan and back.
Until 1945, when the order came down to remove the nose art, the women who adorned the planes were beautiful too—outrageous, salacious, and curvaceous. Scantily clad in bikinis and diaphanous negligees or just plain naked, they had lips that invited kisses, breasts that shamelessly beckoned, and names that left nothing to the imagination: Supine Sue, Salvo Sally, Shady Lady, Helion, Stripped, and Poison Lil, who was topless and held in her left hand a martini glass with a bomb in it.
As alluring as they were, the B-29s were riddled with problems—like takeoff and landing. These birds were so big and weighed so much when combat loaded—138,000 pounds—that you held your breath as they strained to get off the ground. Isley Field on Saipan was about 500 feet above the sea, so when B-29s thundered down the runway at 160 mph, they dropped off the edge of the island so close to the ocean you could see ripples in the water from the propeller wind or feel waves slap the underbelly as you prayed your pilot maintained a steady course and built up enough speed until, after a harrowing forty seconds that seemed like a lifetime, he nudged the control column, tilted the nose up, and the plane was airborne. Some Superforts didn’t make it.
“You dreaded the takeoff more than the actual bombing,” said 1st Lieutenant Walter Sherrell, an airplane commander with the 498th Bomb Group. Two miles away the airstrip at Tinian was more like a boat ramp than a runway; every day a plane seemed to be lost before it was even airborne.
The engines overheated, the oil pumping system failed to feed the top cylinders, and valves were “swallowed,” which meant the engine had to be shut down and the propeller “feathered.” Some bombardiers considered the Norden bombsight completely ineffective at high altitudes, and blisters proved another liability. Many of the spherical windows that enabled the side gunners to see were blown out in combat, which could send a plane tumbling to earth. On one occasion a gunner was ejected into the atmosphere at 30,000 feet, dangling from an extended seat harness before he was finally hauled back inside the cabin.
Then there was the discovery of the Jet Stream. “We were on a bomb run for forty minutes where we had an airspeed of 200 mph,” said Sergeant Ronald Routhier, a top gunner with the 499th Bomb Group, “and a ground speed of 40 to 45 mph. You’d drop your bombs and miss your targets altogether. And you’d burn up a tremendous amount of fuel.” In the first mission over Tōkyō, planes were caught in a 140 mph headwind. Whenever Jules Stillman made it safely back to Saipan after a bombing run, he kissed the ground.
But modifications were continually made, kinks were ironed out, and the B-29’s idiosyncrasies became as familiar as a horse’s bad habits. Which didn’t mean that the strategy for which they were intended always yielded the desired results. Nearly a dozen raids over Tōkyō and Nagoya between November 1944 and January 1945 targeting the Japanese aircraft industry demonstrated poor bombing accuracy, unacceptable abort ratios, and steep ditching rates. The winds were tremendous, and cloud cover frequently obscured targets. Radar equipment was initially inadequate, and positions were frequently misread. In January 5.7 percent of airborne B-29s were lost. Flying at high altitudes also required a larger fuel load, and a corresponding reduction in the size of the payload. In short, high-level daylight precision bombing proved to be anything but precise.
The Japanese called the Grumman fighters kumabachi, meaning “bear wasps.” B-29s were literally B-nijku, but they would prove to have a far deadlier sting. First, however, USAAF demanded a radically new bombing strategy.
On January 21, 1945, General Henry “Hap” Arnold, the USAAF commander who had vowed to avenge the deaths of the Doolittle raiders by destroying Japan’s “inhuman war lords,” relieved General Hansell as commanding general of the XXI Bomber Command. His replacement was Major General Curtis LeMay, who arrived in the Marianas from Kharagpur, India, where he headed the XX Bomber Command in the China-Burma-India theater.
Gruff, daunting, and demanding, the Cigar, as LeMay was called for invariably chomping on a stogie, was a champion of incendiary bombing. He knew from the great fire that had devoured Tōkyō after the earthquake of 1923 that the city was an ideal target. LeMay had been in Europe a few we
eks before the bombing of Hamburg and had arrived in the Pacific theater shortly before the bombing of Dresden. Doolittle, who commanded the U.S. Army Eighth Air Force, protested that attacks against civilians were tantamount to terrorism. It was a long-simmering argument within the Army Air Force Command, but such reservations were brushed aside. If Churchill himself had scruples about bombing defenseless German cities, he endorsed the strategy relentlessly pursued by Air Marshal Sir Arthur Travers “Bomber” Harris, chief of the British Bomber Command, on the grounds “that those who have loosed these horrors upon mankind will now in their homes and persons feel the shattering strokes of just retribution.” Churchill wanted to overwhelm German civil authorities with a tide of refugees. General Carl “Tooey” Spaatz, commander of U.S. Strategic Air Forces in Europe, and “Bomber” Harris, having learned well the lesson of the Luftwaffe’s attack on Coventry in November 1940, stood ready to execute his wishes.
Many German and Japanese cities were actively engaged in war work. Dresden was celebrated for its beauty and its artistic treasures and as a manufacturer of luxury goods. But Dresden also contained hundreds of factories, the most important of which were in optical and electrical communications. On the night of February 13, 1945, Dresden went up as “a single column of flame,” said the young American POW Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., who was forced to recover bodies in the aftermath of the bombing. “Corpse mining,” his protagonist Billy Pilgrim called it in the novel Slaughterhouse Five. An estimated 25,000 to 40,000 died at the hands of the RAF and the U.S. Army Eighth Air Force. The city once known as “Florence on the Elbe” lay like a frame with its canvas burned out.
Two-thirds of Japanese industry was scattered between homes and small factories that employed thirty workers or less. Industrial targets were frequently surrounded by residential neighborhoods. Homes were made of wood, shōji (paper) screens separated rooms, and tatami mats lay on the floor like sawdust. Japan’s cities were far more combustible than those in Germany, and for the most part they were poorly defended. Model Japanese urban areas had been constructed and tested in the United States at Dugway Proving Ground and Eglin Field, Florida. The results were encouraging, according to an Air Intelligence study of October 1943. Seventeen hundred tons of incendiaries could reduce Japan’s twenty largest cities to rubble.
The bombs themselves were relatively harmless-looking. Twenty inches long, three inches in diameter, and hexagonally shaped, they weighed a mere 6.2 pounds and were known as M-69 incendiaries. They had been developed by National Defense Research Council scientists back in 1942, and their destructive capability was unique. On impact, a delayed-action fuse detonated a TNT charge that sprayed magnesium particles through gasoline gel, igniting any combustible surface within reach. When bundled in packages of nineteen, M-69s formed cluster bombs. When the bomb recipe was 5 percent aluminum napthene, 5 percent aluminum palmitate, and 0.5 percent carbon black mixed in with gasoline, it was known as napalm. Thirty-eight M-69s were clustered into a single 500-pound bomb. One B-29 was capable of carrying forty such clusters—or 1,520 firebombs.
“The primary purpose of these attacks,” explained the Air Intelligence Report, a publication of the XXI Bomber Command, “is to destroy/damage the factories making the weapons, equipment and supplies needed by the Japanese to carry on the war. . . . Unfortunately for the Japanese many of the objectives . . . lie within or immediately adjacent to known highly inflammable sections of their few principal cities.” Less unfortunate, the report suggested, was the fact that “thousands of little shops often located in a front or back room of individual residences” played a “tremendous part” in war production. Their role in that effort, whether voluntary or compulsory, “invited” incendiary attack. A Pentagon report compiled by the Incendiary Subcommittee had already concluded that successful area attacks on Tōkyō, Yokohama, Kawasaki, Nagoya, Osaka, and Kōbe would destroy 70 percent of the houses in those cities and reduce by 20 percent one year’s production of “frontline” military equipment.
LeMay wanted to test incendiary bombing at high altitudes. He chose Nagoya first and Kōbe second. For the Kōbe raid, LeMay substituted 500-pound incendiaries topped with frag clusters instead of the M-69s, which were used in Nagoya. And for the first time, B-29s from the 313th Bomb Wing on Tinian were sent over Japan in a dual-wing mission. On February 4, 1945, sixty-nine planes in a radar-directed attack bombed the industrial waterfront of southwestern Kōbe, where war production factories were concentrated. In one of the first daylight raids, 159.2 tons of incendiaries were dropped and 13.6 tons of frags from 24,500 to 27,000 feet. Despite stiff resistance from some 200 Japanese fighter planes, 1,039 buildings were damaged or destroyed. A total of 4,350 people were rendered homeless. Brigadier General Lauris Norstad, chief of staff, Twentieth Air Force, considered the results “inconclusive.” The Japanese did not. Two days later Obata Tadayoshi, a statesman well connected to the cabinet, declared: “The expression ‘sure victory’ is misleading” because it is “identical with sure death. . . . Our leaders should frankly reveal the real state of affairs, while our people on their part must be ready for any emergency.”
Precision bombing raids followed on Nakajima’s Ota aircraft assembly plant and then on Tōkyō on February 25—after American forces had landed on Iwo Jima. The assessment of the Tōkyō raid was more encouraging, but LeMay remained unimpressed. “This outfit has been getting a lot of publicity without having really accomplished a hell of a lot in bombing results,” he quipped to public relations officer and staff press censor Lieutenant Colonel St. Clair McKelway on March 6, 1945.
LeMay switched tactics: have the B-29s fly at altitudes of 5,000 to 8,000 feet, and combine M-69s with high-explosive bombs; strip the planes of guns and ammunition except tail-gun positions; bring along only the waist- and tail-gunners; eliminate the bomb-bay fuel tanks, and a B-29 could carry six tons of incendiaries. Three hundred B-29s flying over Japan was almost equivalent to 1,000 B-17s over Europe. The B-17 had a bomb capacity of only two tons on long missions. “Boys,” the word went around Saipan, “throw your oxygen masks away, for LeMay is here to stay.”
Weather conditions were better at low altitudes, winds ranged from 28 to 40 mph (compared to 140 to 200 mph at 25,000 to 30,000 feet), and radar was more effective. Automatic weapons fire tended to be ineffective above 5,000 feet, and the accuracy of flak was reduced below 10,000. True, there was a greater chance of low-level attacks from the enemy. Fall out of formation, and you risked getting rammed by kamikaze. But the risk was reduced if you carried out the raids at night. “These missions had to be completed,” said a report issued in the Marianas entitled Turning Point: General LeMay’s Great Decision, “in time for the B-29’s to coordinate their efforts with the naval strike at Okinawa,” which was scheduled to begin on March 23. The results were diabolically effective. Fire rained down upon Japan’s major cities.
On March 9, 1945, 334 B-29s took off from the Marianas on a “maximum effort” mission code-named Meetinghouse. Planes from the 314th Wing left Guam at 1735, followed by the 73rd Wing from Saipan and the 313th Wing from Tinian forty minutes later. From a blister on the Mary Ann, pilot Chester W. Marshall of the 73rd could see the battle raging on Iwo Jima below. Their altitude was low, around 2,000 feet. North of Iwo they switched off their navigation lights for fear of being spotted by enemy ships.
The lead planes, “pathfinders,” were armed with 180 seventy-pound M-47 napalm bombs. Then came the B-29s loaded with 24 five-hundred-pound M-69 clusters. Each plane carried on average 912 firebombs. Visibility was near zero. Navigators had to rely on radar to avoid midair collisions. The Superforts climbed to bombing altitude and just after midnight began to arrive over Tōkyō.
The pathfinders raced in at 300 mph, just under 5,000 feet, dropping bombs to illuminate a three-by-four-mile rectangle next to the city’s most important industrial zone. Giant searchlights scanned the sky, hoping to lock onto a B-29 for the antiaircraft gunners below. It was “a beautiful but horrifying sig
ht,” said 1st Lieutenant Marshall. “You knew that its crew could be shot out of the sky any minute, but the silver B-29 gleamed a ghostly white, and you prayed that the people inside would make it through another minute or two.” Red and white tracers exploded around the aircraft, followed by bursts of flak as the planes neared their target. But the B-29s were flying at such low altitudes that most of them eluded antiaircraft fire, and they remained out of range of small-caliber automatic weapons.
The 73rd Bomb Wing targeted Asakusa Ward, west of the Sumida River, and Honjo Ward to the east. Clusters spilled out of bomb bays and split open 100 feet aboveground, spewing napalm in a deadly bolus and branding Tōkyō with a giant flaming X. For the next three hours wave after wave of B-29s saturated the imperial city with 1,665 tons of incendiaries from 4,900 to 9,200 feet—8,333 magnesium bombs per square mile. Strong spring gusts blowing from the north and west fanned thousands of individual fires not into a firestorm but into something even more lethal—a “sweep conflagration” that soared to a temperature of 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. The searing heat softened glass, melted metal, and turned asphalt back into tar. Smoke and debris were “hurled upward to more than 15,000 feet,” said Marshall.
“Going into northwest Tōkyō at the end of the fire raids,” remarked 1st Lieutenant Vernon V. Piotter, a navigator in the 869th Squadron of the 497th Bomb Group,“the thermal drafts took you up like an elevator. The altimeter spun around, and within seconds we went from from 6,000 to 24,000 feet.” The G-force pinned airmen to their seats. “The turbulence flipped the plane on its back, then the plane dove, but our pilot was able to pull us out of it.”
The Japanese fired shells, rockets, and tracers at oncoming aircraft, hitting forty-two planes and downing nine. Hundreds of thousands of rounds poured into the sky, but many gunners died at their batteries.
Conduct Under Fire Page 51