CHAPTER 43

SETTING SUN

At the beginning of the second week of May 1945, Americans had two things on their minds, but one vastly overshadowed the other. The former was that Germany had been defeated. The latter was that Japan had not.

In his “Victory in Europe” message, broadcast throughout the world, Hap Arnold reminded listeners that “to provide airpower needed for victory over the Axis partners in Europe, the Army Air Forces had to travel a long way over an arduous road,” hastening to add that “Japanese industry will have to be battered to the same chaos that engulfed Germany’s military machine. That is a campaign barely begun.”

For Bob Morgan, who had been in the Pacific since October, the war was already winding down. He flew his last Superfortress bombing mission against Japan on March 30, and his last mission in Dauntless Dotty, a weather recon flight, on April 4. He had now flown more missions in the Pacific than with the Memphis Belle over Europe.

He had expected to be part of the April 7 mission that mustered 100 bombers against Tokyo, but the new commander of the 497th Bomb Group, Colonel Arnold Johnson, wanted squadron commanders, such as Morgan, to stop flying combat missions and take up administrative work—flying desks. Two days later, Rosie O’Donnell, the 73rd Bomb Wing commander, told Morgan that he might be able to send him stateside—“if you are ready to go.”

Suddenly, it occurred to Morgan that he was ready. He looked at the color photo of his daughter, Sandra Lea, that he carried. Born at the end of November, she was almost five months old. He had never seen her.

Morgan left Saipan on April 26 with a recommendation from O’Donnell for a promotion to colonel, and two Distinguished Flying Crosses—one for leading the first Tokyo mission and one for flying 26 Superfortress missions. He reached San Francisco on the same day that Hitler committed suicide.

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Tooey Spaatz and Jimmy Doolittle were on their way home to the States shortly after VE Day, but it was to be only a stopover on their way to new assignments in the Pacific.

Spaatz almost did not make it. As his biographer, David Mets, points out, he had run out of fuel at the end of the First World War, almost ending the life of Lieutenant Spaatz. Then the same almost ended General Spaatz’s life at the conclusion of the Second World War. The Flying Fortress carrying him, his staff, and his daughter, Tattie, was en route across the Atlantic from the Azores, when they learned that their next stop, Gander, Newfoundland, was fogged in. So was Goose Bay, Labrador. They diverted again, this time to Sydney, Nova Scotia, running out of fuel as they taxied off the field. By evening, Tooey and Tattie had greeted Ruth and Carla at Washington National and everyone was home in Alexandria.

“There is no grander feeling in the world than to return to the comfort of one’s hearth and family,” Jimmy Doolittle wrote of his own post–VE Day homecoming, and the anticipation of seeing Joe and their younger son, John, who was just finishing his third year at West Point. “For the first time in too many months I was going home.”

As Spaatz had flown home with his second daughter, Doolittle came home with his elder son, Captain James Doolittle, Jr. When the two men had reconnected in England a year earlier, Doolittle had observed that his son’s presence in the theater “made me think about the future for Joe and me. Both boys wanted to remain in the service after the war, which meant we wouldn’t see much of them. John was taking flight training while a cadet at West Point and would also be going to peacetime military assignments on a worldwide basis, just as Jim, Jr., would. I wrote Joe that I thought I might like to stay in uniform until normal retirement if I were offered a commission as a permanent brigadier general. If so, I said, I would like to take an active part in the inevitable reorganization of our defense establishment and the Air Force after the war.”

Whatever the postwar world may have held for the Doolittles, Jimmy still had unfinished business in an unfinished war. His first assignment, prior to his long trip to the Pacific, was to make public appearances at rallies—such as one at the Los Angeles Coliseum that he shared with George Patton, which drew a reported million people—in which the job was to convince people that the war really was still unfinished.

Doolittle was eager to get on with the finishing. There had been a flurry of headlines and political cartoons suggesting that Japan was really doomed now that Doolittle was coming back to finish that job he started in April 1942. This publicity angered him because he thought it showed only a callous regard for all those who had fought and died in that theater to hasten an American victory.

With the Joint Chiefs of Staff having formally approved the USASTAF on July 2, its two senior commanders headed west, Spaatz to Guam, where the headquarters would be located, and Doolittle to Okinawa, where he formally established the new home of the Eighth Air Force on July 16.

It was a coincidence that one day earlier (across the international date line) the Manhattan Project had detonated its first nuclear weapon. As Spaatz and Doolittle both knew, plans were in motion for the 509th Composite Group of LeMay’s XXI Bomber Command to stand by to use these weapons to defeat Japan before operations Olympic and Coronet, which were expected to cost the United States a million casualties.

Also ongoing at that moment, in a suburb of a decimated Berlin, was the Potsdam Conference, the last Allied summit of World War II. Out of this came the Potsdam Declaration, which explicitly gave Japan one last opportunity to surrender unconditionally or face “prompt and utter destruction.”

—

On June 13, a month before Spaatz and Doolittle arrived, as part of an extended visit of the Pacific Theater, Hap Arnold had stopped by LeMay’s headquarters on Saipan. He saw, as Spaatz and Doolittle would soon see, how much the Twentieth Air Force and the strategic air offensive against Japan had grown since LeMay had taken over at the end of January. New B-29s and crews were flooding into the Marianas like B-17s had into England after Big Week.

During two consecutive nights at the end of May, the XXI Bomber Command had struck Tokyo with maximum efforts involving an average of more than 500 Superfortresses. By June it was possible to undertake a sustained strategic offensive with 400-plane missions flown whenever the B-29s were ready—and after the early maintenance anguish, LeMay kept his force ready constantly.

As LeMay explained to this author, “I had a directive which was never changed and was approved by the Joint Chiefs, a list of targets ranked by priority. When we were ready to run a mission, we would get the airplanes loaded with fuel and bombs, and the crews would be briefed and prepared. If the weather was good we’d hit a precision target that had a high priority on the target list. . . . [W]e were hitting the high-priority industrial areas just as fast as we could, bombing both at night [low-flying incendiary missions] and in the daytime [high-altitude precision bombing].”

LeMay told Arnold that he and his staff were convinced there was a chance of defeating Japan with airpower—without nuclear weapons, and without the invasions. As noted in his diary, Arnold digested what LeMay had accomplished and immediately ordered him to fly back to Washington to personally brief the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Arnold wanted this to be done in advance of a June 18 JCS meeting at which details of the November invasion of southern Japan would be discussed with President Truman.

“I believe that General Arnold always thought airpower could do the job, but he was more convinced than ever after we gave our briefing,” LeMay recalled. “The decision to go ahead with the amphibious invasion of Japan had already been made on May 25, and I think Arnold realized, when he visited us, that our strategic air offensive might be the one chance of stopping it. I imagine that he wanted to make one more effort to delay the invasion—or to stop it entirely to prevent the American bloodshed we knew would come with the invasion—so he sent me and two of the staff back to Washington.”

Flying a B-29, LeMay touched down at Washington National Airport just before midnight on July 16.

“The next morning we drove over to the Pentagon and presented our plan to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and their staff officers,” LeMay explained. “Throughout the briefing, each of them had completely blank expressions on their faces. They paid absolutely no attention to us. Marshall was sleeping or dozing through most of it. Admiral Ernest King, the chief of Naval Operations, reacted with disbelief and a complete lack of interest, just as the Navy brass always had. . . . Nevertheless, we went back to the Marianas and we did the job.”

By the time that Spaatz and Doolittle reached the Pacific a month later, the decision had been made by Truman and the Joint Chiefs to use the nuclear weapons. Part of Spaatz’s immediate mission was to brief General Douglas MacArthur and Admiral Chester Nimitz, the five-star senior officers who commanded the US Army and US Navy in the Pacific, on this decision.

On August 6, the Enola Gay, a Superfortress of the 509th, dropped the first nuclear weapon on Hiroshima. When the aircraft returned to Tinian, Spaatz pinned a Distinguished Service Cross on the flight suit of her pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets.

Having been given an idea of what was meant by “prompt and utter destruction,” the Japanese government debated their acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration until August 9, when a second nuclear-armed B-29, Bock’s Car, flown by Major Chuck Sweeney, departed Tinian for Kokura, diverted to Nagasaki because of the weather, and dropped the second nuclear weapon.

Three days later, Tooey Spaatz contacted Jimmy Doolittle to tell him that if he wanted the Eighth Air Force bombers to be in contact with the Japanese, he had “better get an operation going the next day.”

“No, the war’s over,” Doolittle told Spaatz. “I will not risk one airplane nor a single bomber crew member just to say that the Eighth Air Force operated against the Japanese in the Pacific.”

A handful of Superfortresses destined for service with the Eighth had arrived on Okinawa, but they would never fly in combat. Some of the Eighth’s P-51 escort fighters did fly a few escort missions for the Twentieth Air Force.

On August 14, with the weather clear over Japan, Spaatz and LeMay returned to conventional weapons with the Twentieth Air Force, striking targets across the country. Doolittle recalled that Arnold had wanted a “1,000-plane raid made against Tokyo” that day, and—counting the escort fighters—there were more than 1,100 USAAF combat aircraft in the sky. There were no losses to enemy fire. The following day, the Japanese government accepted the Potsdam Declaration and Emperor Hirohito ordered his armed forces to cease hostilities.

Curtis LeMay told this author many years later that he had “no doubt that the atomic bomb precipitated unconditional surrender and in so doing saved American lives. Even given that strategic bombing could have ended the war without the atomic bomb, I think it was a wise decision to drop the bomb because this action did hasten the surrender process already under way. We were losing people and expending resources every day that the war went on. The Japanese were also losing people. What guided me in all my thinking, and guided all our efforts—the reason the XXI Bomber Command worked like no other command during the war and the thing that kept us going—was the million men we were going to lose if we had to invade Japan. . . . The Twentieth Air Force got the job done before the Allied armies had to do it.”

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When the Allied armies did land in Japan, it was to accept Japan’s formal surrender. On August 29, Spaatz, Doolittle, and LeMay all boarded C-54s in Okinawa for the 1,000-mile flight to Atsugi Airport, near Yokohama. It was an eerie experience to be flying a route similar to that taken for six months by the growing fleet of Superfortresses to land on enemy soil, and be greeted by long lines of Japanese troops standing at attention against the backdrop of urban ruins created by the Superfortresses and the crews who flew the final act in the story of strategic airpower in World War II.

On September 2, these three men, two of whom had served as a commander of the Eighth Air Force, were part of the group who assembled on the deck of the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay for the final surrender. Tooey Spaatz would be remembered as the only officer present at three Axis surrenders—Reims, Berlin, and now Tokyo.

“I have no regrets whatsoever that Eighth Air Force bombers did not fly a single mission to bring the war to an end in the Pacific,” Jimmy Doolittle reflected in his memoirs. “As far as I was concerned, we had helped to prove the point in Europe. What was important now was to see that the peace could be sustained and that there would be no more Pearl Harbors.”