Ellis had met Captain Wagner at the start of the briefing, which had been a more detailed breakdown of the plan LeMay had outlined to him in his office. Afterward, the B-29 officers who had attended dispersed by bus, truck, car, and jeep to their wide network of airstrips. Wagner gave Ellis a lift, and it was a forty-five-minute jeep ride—over a good, paved highway—to the 415th Bombardment Squadron area. Though it was after 2200, the roads were crowded with military traffic. But the moon was bright, too, and Ellis enjoyed the ride through the warm tropical night.
“The Japs came down out of those mountains there,” the captain explained, pointing to a ridge in the northern distance, outlined in the moonlit night. “The army chewed the shit out of them.”
“Yeah, I was on Okinawa when they did the same thing. The Australians in the trenches took a hell of a pounding for a few days there. Plus the Japs kamikaze’d the hell out of El Supremo’s HQ, among other things.”
“Crazy bastards,” Wagner said, shaking his head. “Sure, we took some hits, but it sounds like twenty, thirty of them bought it for every one of our guys.”
“Hell of a way to fight a war,” Ellis agreed.
Eventually they passed through a final checkpoint and rolled toward an area illuminated by bright electric lights. Soon Wagner was pulling up to the flight line where twelve sleek, gleaming bombers reflected the beams of the floodlights shining on the planes.
The B-29 Superfortress looked to Ellis’s prejudiced eye more like a spaceship than a military bomber. First of all, there was that silver color. Other, lesser planes might need a coat of army olive drab for camouflage or uniformity, but not these looming monsters. They practically screamed, “Look at me! Here I am!” Their lines were almost surrealistically sleek, smooth, and modern. The nose was a simple aerodynamic dome, glass panels braced in a webbing of stainless steel. The tail loomed as high as a three- or four-story building. Instead of the glass bubble turrets common on the previous generation of bombers, the B-29s had solid metal domes lying almost flat against the fuselage. Each dome was equipped with a pair of heavy machine guns, but these too looked sleek and futuristic. Ellis knew they were controlled by a gunner at a remote control station inside the aircraft.
“Well,” the captain said, indicating the forward landing gear. Ellis could just make out a narrow ladder there. “Best get ourselves aboard and strap in. We’ve got a city to burn. Catch a nap if you like. It’ll be Saturday morning before we get there.”
• SATURDAY, 9 JUNE 1945 •
HIROSHIMA, JAPAN, 0532 HOURS
Ogawa Michiyo fought back tears of despair, ashamed of the impulse that urged her to shake the squalling infant hard enough to finally quiet the piercing cries. She drew a breath and closed her eyes, trying unsuccessfully to meditate on something—anything—besides the baby’s relentless wails.
Of course little Otomi was crying. He was hungry.
Michiyo was also hungry, and her mother, and everybody else in Hiroshima, and everyone across all of Japan. Her tears flooded out, wetting her cheeks just for a moment, but she blinked them away and roughly wiped the back of her hand across her face. They were all hungry, and there was no food. That was the truth, the way it was.
She didn’t know what she had done to bring this fate upon herself, but that was the nature of life. Her offenses might have even occurred in a previous lifetime, before her incarnation as this young Japanese woman. Life, including all of its travails and suffering, was something to be faced, and endured, with strength and equanimity.
Sometimes she wondered, what had her mother done to deserve her fate? Her neighbors? All the rest? How could the whole country’s karma be so terrible? Her brother Taiki, who had led men in battle and now guarded enemy prisoners, what had he done to deserve his fate?
It was the war’s fault, of course. Everything came back to this terrible and relentless war. Fishermen were afraid to venture out to sea because so many of them had been killed—or had their boats sunk—by American submarines and aircraft. There was no fuel to run tractors or trucks, so the farms produced little, and what there was could not be shipped into the city.
Michiyo was ashamed to remember that she had actually been reduced to eating paste that she purchased from a neighbor. Tasteless and thick, it contained at least a few minimal nutrients. The thick adhesive had been intended to glue together fiber sheets to form balloons. These balloons were sent aloft affixed with bombs, whereupon—Michiyo’s neighbor had explained seriously—they were expected to drift across the North Pacific. Eventually they would land in the great forests of the American Northwest, where it was hoped they would ignite vast conflagrations. There had even been reports in the Asahi Shimbun about such fires. Michiyo alternated between pity for the people, especially the children, who would get burned, and hope that the attacks would help to bring the great United States of America to its knees.
Actually, the whole idea of burning forests by bombs carried by balloon over the biggest ocean in the world sounded absurd. Perhaps she told herself that to assuage the guilt she felt over her selfish use of precious war materiél. In any event, she hadn’t argued with the price: a small pearl from her mother’s oldest necklace in exchange for a container of paste nutritious enough to support her, her mother, and little Otomi for the better part of a week. The stuff had been bland and tasteless, but provided enough protein to dull their hunger pangs for that whole time.
She’d even had the strength to join the community labor parties, where she had worked long summer days clearing firebreaks through the crowded neighborhoods of Hiroshima. Mostly this meant widening streets and clearing burnable materials back from the rivers and canals, but in places they’d even had to knock down houses to make wide, bare paths. One old woman had refused to leave, and Michiyo and the other young women of her crew had watched sadly as apologetic fire marshals had gone into the house and carried the keening woman away. Immediately boys and old men bearing axes set to work demolishing the house, so that Michiyo’s crew could carry the debris away. It was heartbreaking work, but it might mean the difference between fire contained and fire running wild. Still, at night she found herself remembering, very vividly, the hopelessness of the old woman’s cries as she had watched her house come down.
She was expected to report back to the crew today, but how could she do that? Otomi hadn’t slept, which meant that Michiyo hadn’t slept. For a moment she allowed her resentment of Auntie Ui to bubble to the surface: Ui should be here, caring for her baby! In another instant her resentment was quelled by guilt—no, she, Michiyo, owed this to her mother’s young sister, so that both of them could make a contribution to the waging of this terrible war.
She shook her head, surprised by something, and then realized that it was sudden silence. For reasons only he knew, Otomi had stopped crying. Michiyo gratefully picked him up and cradled him against her shoulder, swaying gently as she moved about the tiny room. The baby took a breath and gurgled. She relished the quiet after the eternity of piercing wails. Dawn had broken, and sunlight spilled through the small eastern window in almost horizontal beams. It was quiet in the city, too early for many people to be up and about.
But there was a strange undertone of noise to the stillness, she realized. It was like the droning of a great cloud of wasps or mosquitoes, a sound at the edge of her consciousness. It was steady, very faint, but unwavering. Not until the piercing shriek of an air raid siren began to cycle did she realize that the distant noise was caused by airplane engines.
“The B-sans!” she gasped.
She ran outside without hesitation, still clutching the now-gurgling Otomi. The pale blue of an early morning sky yawned overhead. She looked to the east and north, up the valley of the Ota, and she could see them in the distance, sparkling in the sunlight like droplets of silver. There were dozens, no, hundreds of them, distant and tiny and arrayed across half the sky. At first they seemed to be standing still, but as she watched them, openmouthed, over the course of a minute she
realized that they were very gradually coming closer.
And still the siren wailed.
B-29 DRAGON LANCER, APPROACHING JAPAN, 0615 HOURS
Captain Wagner had been relaxed during the long flight—better than nine hours—from Luzon in the Philippines to Honshu, the largest island of the archipelago making up the Empire of Japan. Mostly they flew through the last half of the night, over a world of unrelieved blackness. The crew took turns napping, even the pilot. Ellis kept an eye on the controls, though he knew that the automatic pilot was actually flying the plane.
Ellis took the opportunity to examine the cockpit, which was filled with an array of dials and gauges that made the Mitchell or the Maurauder or even the Liberator seem positively primitive by comparison. The huge Wright Cyclone radial engines were contained in nacelles the size of a large garage. Two superchargers mounted on each engine pumped additional air into the pistons, dramatically increasing the horsepower output. Wagner had confirmed some of the stories Ellis had heard: the engines had been terribly unreliable for the first year and a half of the B-29s’ service life, with problems up to and including fires igniting on the magnesium components. Such a fire, it was not hard to imagine, could bring a plane down in a hurry.
“We’ve got most of the bugs worked out,” the captain had said with a wink. “Odds are better than even that we’ll get home with our airplane intact.”
Ellis knew that some problems remained, but had to acknowledge that no other plane in the world could have performed the missions the B-29s were called upon to do. They carried massive bomb loads over incredible distance, and they had been doing it again and again for months.
They were flying this mission at eight thousand feet, so they didn’t need oxygen, but it was amazing to realize that this entire four-engine bomber with a crew of eleven men could be pressurized. There were those gun turrets, two of them each on the dorsal and ventral sides of the fuselage, but it was still astonishing to Ellis that no gunners sat in those turrets. He could see the tail gunner position on other planes, and that looked more normal—a bubble canopy with a pair of guns jutting out. But, unlike any other bomber in service, even the tail turret of a B-29 was pressurized.
Ellis looked over his left shoulder into the compartment directly behind the pilots’ seats. The place was like a spacious office suite, at least when compared to every other aircraft interior space he had seen. The engineer sat at an elaborate instrument panel, while the navigator had a large plotting table. There were seats for the radio operator, the front gunner, and the bombardier—who would move to the very nose of the plane and run the controls during the bomb run. Beyond that compartment was a long tunnel, like a culvert, that passed through the two bomb bays and connected to the rear crew area, where four more men rode in comparative luxury. Ellis had been told they had a toilet and bunks back there, and he had no trouble believing it. The tunnel looked narrow and long enough, however, that he hadn’t been motivated to crawl into the rear of the plane to see for himself.
The bomb bays were not pressurized, and they contained the reason for the B-29s’ existence and the purpose of this great raid. There were twenty thousand pounds—ten goddamn tons—of bombs racked in there, each one filled with jellied petroleum designed to start fires that wouldn’t go out for a very long time.
He was awestruck at the aerial power represented by this mighty air fleet. Silver bombers were arrayed to the right and left of the Lancer, a formation that stretched as far as he could see in either direction. Some two dozen miles ahead of them was another vast line of bombers, the ships of the initial attack wave. That flight numbered every bit as many planes as Ellis’s group.
Immediately to starboard flew the Pacesetter. Behind, and a little below, droned the Mayfair. Other bombers trailed into the distance to the left and right, altitude slightly staggered among the three-plane Vs that were the building blocks of the great formation of B-29s, nearly four hundred strong. And those were only the bombers, he reminded himself. A glance upward showed two squadrons of land-based P-51 Mustangs flying overhead cover.
Wagner woke with the first glimmerings of light and immediately switched off the autopilot and settled back at the controls.
“Kyushu’s off to the left, there,” he said to Ellis, speaking through the plane’s intercom mike. “And this is Shikoku, another one of the Home Islands, coming up.”
Ellis saw the landmass before them, a brownish, wrinkled stretch of ground that rose steeply up from the sea. It reminded him vaguely of Southern California. He remained alert for antiaircraft or enemy interceptors, but they might have been on a peacetime training mission for all the signs of resistance he could spot around and below them.
After just fifteen or twenty minutes over land, they were again approaching open water on the far side of the island of Shikoku. “That’ll be the Inland Sea,” Wagner said. “And Honshu is just beyond.”
They droned over the placid blue water, the protected sea nestled between the two islands. Ellis didn’t see any boats or ships on the sea and took that as more evidence of American air supremacy. Soon they approached land again, and then the main island of the Japanese empire was below them. The landscape was rugged, with ridges of mountains to all sides. None of the heights rose up to anywhere near their altitude, which remained at a steady eight thousand feet.
Ellis watched as the bombers of the first wave executed a precise wheel to the left, the aircraft on the outer edge accelerating while those nearer the pivot point backed off on the throttle. As the formation flew over a high, rugged ridge, the planes started to descend very slightly. Soon the second wave of bombers duplicated the maneuver. Ellis watched as Wagner brought Dragon Lancer down to the bomb ran height of seven thousand five hundred feet. They were following a river valley. From the briefing, Ellis figured it was the Ota.
They had yet to see an enemy fighter. The 415th Bombardment Squadron flew at the leading edge of the second wave of the attack. They were to act on initiative, seeking parts of the city that weren’t already engulfed by fire. There was a third wave too, some twenty miles behind them, charged with mopping up.
Already the bombers of the first wave were turning onto the long, straight trajectory of the bomb run. They were flying southwest so that they could approach the city generally down the broad valley.
Ellis used binoculars to watch. He could see the Superfort bomb bay doors open on the first wave aircraft. He saw puffs of antiaircraft explosions erupt among the silver bombers and felt the inevitable pucker as he pictured red-hot bits of shrapnel tearing through the air, and the aircraft, and his body. He always hated getting shot at, but he felt more vulnerable than ever in his huge aircraft at its relatively low altitude. Christ, how can the bastards miss us?
As if to confirm his fears as fully grounded, a B-29 some fifteen miles ahead of him abruptly blew up, a massive fireball lingering in the sky while bits of miscellaneous junk, trailing smoke, tumbled out of the blast radius and plummeted earthward. The AA fire seemed to thicken, and he watched another bomber start to wobble, trailing smoke from both starboard engines. It banked into a dive of increasing steepness. A few parachutes popped into view, visible even to his naked eye as the planes of the 415th BS droned on.
“Poor bastards,” Wagner said, his lips compressed into a tight line.
“What?” Ellis asked, before realizing that the pilot was staring at the white parachutes gently drifting down in the wake of the crashing bomber.
“I wouldn’t want to be captured by Japs—would you?” Wagner asked, shaking his head.
“My brother was on Corregidor,” Ellis said.
“Son of a bitch. I hope he makes it.”
Ellis put the binoculars down for a minute. “Me, too,” he said, the memories of Johnny welling up again, as they did with increasing frequency these days.
Ellis took a deep breath and put the binoculars to his eyes, watching the first wave as it droned over the city. He couldn’t quite make out the individual bo
mbs falling. Somewhat to his surprise, nearly all of the B-29s in that formation made it through the bomb run intact—he counted only the two, plus one more, knocked down by the enemy ack-ack.
The Lancer’s bombardier came forward, passing between Ellis and Wagner, sliding down through a hatch in the forward armor to settle himself in the wide-open glass canopy of the airplane’s nose. He leaned forward to get a good look through the Norden bombsight.
Ellis looked down toward the sprawling city, and the effect of the first wave’s bombs immediately flared into view. The explosions were silent to him—the only sounds were the droning of the massive engines and the crackle of radio static in his earphones—but the effects were dramatic. Puffs of smoke erupted only to be immediately shot through with orange fireballs. They popped up all over, hundreds of them appearing at the same time, turning whole neighborhoods to smoke. The long lines of the river and its attendant canals stood out like bright dividers between the brown sprawl of the city. The bombs seemed to be scattering everywhere, each salvo giving life to new, surging fires.
And that was just the beginning. Those blazes immediately spread, springing from building to building with a life of their own. The strong breeze was an asset, pushing the flames along. Smoke thickened into a pall over much of the city, but even through that murk they could see many flashes of bright red flame. Tongues of fire flickered upward here and there in a mockery of a triumphant dance, surging ecstatically as if to celebrate the discovery of some delightfully incendiary source of fuel.
MacArthur's War: A Novel of the Invasion of Japan Page 43