TEN

TWO SIGNIFICANT EVENTS coincided on January 6, 1945. I officially took command of the 320th Troop Carrier Squadron, my first official command, and advance elements of a small contingent from the 509th were en route to the warmer climes of Cuba.

Because of the need to move men and top secret matériel around quickly to top secret locations, Paul Tibbets included in his organization an independent transport squadron under his direct command. His organic fleet of C-46s, C-47s, and four-engine C-54s freed him from having to rely on any other commander or justify his transport requirements. This unusual arrangement added to the aura of the 509th as something mysterious and special. As with everything else we did, it was a level of independence unheard of in the army air force. Tibbets’s transports ferried scientists to and from Los Alamos via Albuquerque and provided him with flexibility going to and from Wendover, Colorado Springs, Los Alamos, and Washington, D.C. Being independent also facilitated our filing of false flight plans to conceal where we were actually going, which prevented prying eyes from being able to draw any conclusions or make any connections. The transport squadron proved indispensable to moving our operations and the bomb components to Tinian rapidly and to continuing ferry services between the United States and Tinian, Guam, and Saipan. It became known as the Green Hornet Airlines.

The transport squadron had been activated on December 17, 1944, and remained under the temporary command of Major Hubert Konopacki until I assumed the post. At five A.M. on the previous day, in the dense and fog-shrouded forest of the Ardennes in Belgium, eight German Panzer divisions suddenly and furiously sliced through Allied lines along a seventy-mile front. Having concluded that the German army had no ability to wage an offensive, General Eisenhower and his intelligence staff had gravely underestimated both the fanatical resolve of Hitler to fight on, in spite of the obvious futility of continuing the war, and the will of the Wehrmacht to fight for their Führer and the Fatherland.

The high command, believing the war in Europe was just about over, transported seasoned troops to the Pacific theater and replaced them along the front in the Ardennes forest with green recruits. These young recruits ultimately faced Hitler’s most combat-hardened units, including the infamous Death Squads of the Waffen SS. The Germans moved a quarter of a million men to within a few hundred feet of the American forward positions without being detected.

Although the offensive was finally halted before the Wehrmacht could split the Allied forces and reach the sea, the Allies regained the lost territory only after a bitter, barbaric, and costly counteroffensive. Foot by foot they pushed back the Germans for the next month. In the end, more American soldiers were killed and wounded in the Battle of the Bulge than at Gettysburg, which until then had been the bloodiest battle in American history. It was a tragic miscalculation of the nature of the enemy for which ten of thousands of young Americans paid the ultimate price. As reports filtered back to us about the extent of the battle and the desperate situation, which could prolong the war in Europe, the thought crossed my mind that maybe our group might be called upon to deliver a final blow to the Nazis to stem the onslaught.

Prior to taking command of the transport squadron, I was busy training the bomber crews and testing the pumpkins. A key element of the training in the air had yet to be addressed: long-range overwater navigation. Winter had arrived early to the salt flats, and November and December had been bone-chilling. I discussed with Tibbets a plan to start long-range flights over the ocean. We would take off from Wendover and head toward—not to—Anchorage, then turn southwest toward—not to—Hawaii, and finally turn northeast back to Wendover, forming a three-thousand-mile round-trip in the shape of a triangle. The exercise would provide the necessary training for the navigators.

Tibbets listened to my plan and asked if we couldn’t accomplish the same purpose with exercises over the Caribbean. I understood immediately. If we had to train over water, why not find a warm, more pleasant base of operation to fly from? It was a master stroke by an officer concerned about the wellbeing of the men in his command. Tensions had been building within the unit. More and more of the guys were blowing off steam in the local bars in Wendover and Salt Lake. Fights, disputes, and general ill will were becoming more prevalent, a sure sign that the crews needed some release, some reward for their hard work. A change of scenery to the south would fill the bill. Tibbets found a way to reduce the stress and still keep the high-intensity training for the project on track.

Plans were made to take a cadre of five crews to Batista Field in Cuba, together with a small contingent of support personnel. Colonel Tibbets arrived at Batista Field by transport ahead of the units. Before he settled in, he saw to it that quarters were assigned for every man and that meals were ready on their arrival. Late into the night he was seen helping make beds. It was the kind of thing an enlisted man wouldn’t soon forget.

Havana was a party town, and the locals had longtime experience with people who took their reveling seriously: tourists, businessmen, politicians, mobsters. The 509th rose to the occasion. For a month, when off duty, our crews partied, swam, gambled in the casinos, took in the shows, dined, and all in all made the most of this island paradise. Some left behind stories for the locals to tell long after we were gone. This experience also had the benefit of solidifying a sense of pride among the men that they were part of the 509th Composite Group. Sprung from their penitentiary-style life at Wendover, now out and about in the general population, they saw themselves for what they were, a special and elite military unit. A corner had been turned in unit cohesion. The 509th now meant something to the men.

In January 1945 Curtis LeMay moved to Guam to take over the XXI Bomber Command of the Twentieth Air Force. Although the Twentieth Air Force was in General MacArthur’s theater, General Hap Arnold had intentionally headquartered the Twentieth in Washington, D.C., technically outside of the theater. Command protocol would be for the theater commander to have tactical and strategic control of all military units within his theater. By keeping his headquarters in Washington, General Arnold had prevented MacArthur from ordering or controlling operations of the air force in the Pacific. For the first time, the air force could develop and execute strategic missions, rather than be an ancillary force to the ground war that MacArthur was fighting. The air force could become an independent force in the Pacific theater.

LeMay was determined that his air force could win the war in the Pacific, and he was positive that the B-29 was the plane to do it. But the B-29 was having problems. The high-altitude tactics that he had perfected with the B-17, and that had proven so successful against the Germans, were failing miserably against Japan. The overall effect of the B-29 bombing raids of Japan to date had been at best inconclusive. The Superfortresses were experiencing high rates of mechanical failures, forcing a sizable number to abort missions. Bombing accuracy from 30,000 feet was abysmal. During the month of January, most of the targets in Japan bombed by B-29s had suffered little damage. Japanese production of war matériel continued unabated while Japan’s industries remained unscathed. Unless Japan’s industrial output could be disrupted and the will of its military broken, the Japanese war machine would remain robust and ready to meet the advancing American forces. Such a prospect was chilling to our commanders, who would be sending their troops to fight yet another bloody land battle against forces yet again prepared to fight to the death in defense of their territory—this time the mainland.

LeMay had a solution, which Paul Tibbets had recommended several months earlier. Instead of high-altitude bombing, he would send hundreds of B-29s in at 8,000 feet at night. Each airplane would carry thousands of pounds of incendiary bombs filled with napalm, which would incinerate entire Japanese cities and the war industries located in them. The tactic would take advantage of the mostly wooden structures built in Japan and the fact that the Japanese had concentrated their major war industries in the hearts of most of their large cities.

LeMay’s goal was not to bomb civilians. He wanted to destroy Japan’s industrial capacity. The night before a mission his pilots would drop leaflets over target cities warning civilians that the bombing was imminent and they should evacuate. If his plans were to bomb two cities, leaflets would be dropped over four. The Japanese military, however, with the assent of the political leaders, explicitly kept the civilians in harm’s way. When Kyoto first appeared on a list of bomber targets, LeMay expressed opposition. He preferred Hiroshima because of its concentration of troops and factories.

Having assembled five wings of B-29s on Guam, Tinian, and Saipan, LeMay commenced the most intense air campaign of the war against Japan starting in February. The firebombings were horrific. City after city was incinerated. The fires, started by the napalm and fueled by the burning wooden structures, consumed all the available oxygen in the area. The lack of oxygen would cause a vacuum that generated high-velocity winds that would implode, further intensifying and spreading the ever-consuming fires. Temperatures exceeded 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The napalm itself was an insidious weapon because it could not be extinguished. It splattered and stuck to any surface it struck: a building, a house, a person.

In mid-March the campaign reached its apex. On the night of March 9, 334 B-29s struck Tokyo, blanketing the city with firebombs. Tokyo was reduced to rubble. It was the single most destructive bombing in history—125,000 wounded, 97,000 dead, over a million left homeless. In a ten-day period in March, thirty-two square miles of Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, and Kobe were leveled.

The Japanese fought on.

In April it became clear that a final assault on the mainland of Japan would be necessary. The Japanese showed no inclination to surrender. In fact, as American forces drew closer to the mainland, the Japanese military became even more fanatical and suicidal. As brutal as the battle for Iwo Jima had been—leaving 21,000 Americans wounded and over 6,000 marines, soldiers, and sailors dead for an eight-square-mile hunk of rock—Okinawa revealed an even more vivid and chilling window on things to come. Just 325 miles off the coast of Japan’s southern island of Kyushu, Okinawa was the site of the last and largest amphibious invasion of the war. Defending it, the Japanese fought for almost three months in a hopeless struggle. Virtually all of the Japanese troops fought to the death—110,000 of them. Taking the island required half a million men. Almost 50,000 of them—marines, airmen, sailors, and soldiers—were wounded or killed.

The Japanese had also introduced another terror to the hell that had become the Pacific: the kamikaze, “the Divine Wind.” Young flyers willingly committed suicide by diving their bombladen aircraft into our fleet so that they could kill as many Americans as possible in one single effort. By their glorious sacrifice, they were promised eternal life. Their orders were more religious than military: ‘The death of a single one of you will be the birth of a million others. . . . Choose a death which brings about a maximum result.”

For centuries Japan had been a closed militaristic society. In five hundred years it had never lost a battle. The code of the samurai guided its destiny. During World War II not a single Japanese military unit surrendered. Bushido, “the way of the warrior,” was not only ingrained in the psyche of every Japanese fighter, it was also codified in the Japanese Field Service Regulations, which made being taken alive a court-martial offense. This was the culture and the mind-set we faced.

In the battles of Leyte Gulf, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, suicide pilots inflicted massive casualties on the Pacific fleet. At Okinawa, five thousand sailors were killed, 30 ships were sunk, and 368 ships were damaged. These actions foretold a prolonged and bloody killing field for the young Americans who would wade ashore on the Japanese mainland.

The plans for the invasion of Japan were code-named Olympic and Coronet. It would be a two-stage invasion. The southern island of Kyushu would be invaded on November 1, 1945, Operation Olympic, with a force of 800,000 men. In April 1946, Operation Coronet would commence with the invasion of the main island of Honshu, near Tokyo, with a force of over one million men. The wheels of inevitability started to grind forward with a momentum that at some point would be unstoppable—unless another way were found to end the carnage.

In anticipation of the invasion, and having predicted with extraordinary accuracy exactly where the Americans would land, the Japanese began to fortify the cliffs leading up from the beaches of Kyushu. The terrain would provide the perfect slaughterhouse for American G.I.s coming ashore. Those troops who survived the beaches and made it inland would face an intricate network of caves, tunnels, and bunkers. In this lethal battlefield matrix, American forces would be shredded as they fought for each yard of dirt. In addition, thousands of airplanes, as well as submarines, were being stockpiled for kamikaze attacks on the invasion fleet and its landing craft. Two and a half million battle-hardened troops, supported by four million able-bodied civilian military employees, were being massed on Kyushu to meet the invasion force. Thirty-two million civilians—women, children, and the elderly—were being drilled in the art of resistance and guerrilla warfare.

The southern command headquarters for coordination of the defense of Kyushu was located at Hiroshima.

President Truman and the American military planners, with the benefit of having cracked the Japanese military and diplomatic codes early in the war, and thus knowing what awaited our troops, had to confront the magnitude of the casualties our forces could reasonably expect to sustain. If Iwo Jima and Okinawa were any measure, the possibilities were unthinkable.