Chapter 44
DÉJÀ VU
On February 4, 1945, Ben and the men of Honorable Sad Saki were among 129 crews that took off from the Marianas to attack Kobe, Japan’s sixth largest city and most important port. The city was a shipbuilding center, but its workers also manufactured steel, railway machinery, rubber, and munitions. Its rapid growth had occurred in more recent times, and thus much of the construction was less vulnerable to fire. But Kobe’s population density and proximity of industrial and residential areas made the city an intriguing test of Lauris Norstad’s conviction that saturating Japanese cities with incendiaries would be the best use of the B-29s.
As Honorable Sad Saki approached Kobe with Ben in his pressurized tail compartment, Japanese air defenses filled the skies with heavy and accurate flak and about two hundred fighters. The raid could have ended badly for Ben and his comrades, but the Japanese air defenses were surprisingly inept. Despite their favorable numbers, the Japanese managed to shoot down only one B-29, while damaging thirty-five. Sixty-nine B-29s reached the target, dropping 159.2 tons of incendiaries and 13.6 tons of fragmentation bombs.
The incendiary raid proved far more destructive than precision attacks by B-29s had been thus far. Fires ignited by the American incendiaries destroyed or seriously damaged 1,039 buildings in Kobe’s southwest industrial district. Civilian casualties were described by the air command as “only moderate,” but 4,350 people were rendered homeless. Five of Kobe’s major military factories sustained damage and one of its two major shipyards saw operations reduced by half. Among other industrial losses, Kobe’s production of fabric and synthetic rubber was wiped out.
For Ben and his comrades, the raid was a milestone: They had flown fifteen hundred miles across the open Pacific to rain fire and destruction on Japan’s Honshu heartland, and they had returned to their base on Tinian without a scratch.
Despite the effectiveness of the incendiary-heavy raid on Kobe, LeMay and his commanders promptly reverted to the high-altitude, precision attacks they knew best from Europe. The bombing accuracy was as poor as the previous attempts to cripple Japan from higher altitudes, and the Americans paid dearly with the lives of their crews.
February 10 was an especially costly day for Ben’s comrades in the 505th Bomb Group. Their target was another Nakajima Aircraft assembly plant, this one in the southern Tokyo suburb of Ota. Twenty-one 505th aircraft took off for the raid. Eighteen reached the target, but only ten returned. Two B-29s collided over the target and crashed. Another was last seen being pursued by ten or so Japanese fighters. One disappeared without a trace on the return flight. And three others ditched in the Pacific, with all members of two crews rescued and four members of the third crew, including the pilot, lost. One 505th B-29 had crashed on takeoff.
Back on the ground, Ben and a handful of other veterans of the air war against Nazi Germany felt a dark flash of déjà vu as the 505th airmen and ground crews processed the pain of their losses.
 
THE FEBRUARY 4 KOBE RAID HAD only intensified Hap Arnold’s interest in the use of incendiaries against Japanese cities. Eight days later, Norstad suggested to LeMay a major incendiary attack on Nagoya “to secure more planning data.”1 LeMay didn’t need an interpreter to divine the meaning of the message: Arnold was getting impatient.
February 19 proved to be an auspicious day for the B-29s. As the Marianas-based Superfortresses winged their way to Tokyo, Marines stormed the beaches of the Japanese stronghold at Iwo Jima. In Washington that same day, Hap Arnold issued a B-29 target directive that elevated incendiary attacks on the Japanese cities of Nagoya, Osaka, Kawasaki, and Tokyo to a priority level only second to precision attacks on aircraft engine factories. Underscoring the command-level interest in incendiary attacks, another “test raid” on Nagoya was ordered for February 25. Once again, bad weather forced a diversion to alternate targets around Tokyo.
As February drew to a close, Ben had logged eight missions in his Pacific tour. The long flights over open ocean were nerve-racking, but weak Japanese air defenses compensated for it. In any event, fortune had smiled on the crew of Honorable Sad Saki. From his perch in the tail compartment, Ben had seen only one Japanese fighter in his five-plus weeks of combat.
In a letter he wrote home in late February, Ben shared only the bare outlines of his latest adventure. “There are still a few of my dishonorable ancestors running loose on this island, but they don’t give us much trouble,” he reported. But his lighthearted tone grew darker as he wrote, and his words revealed a growing weariness with the strain of war. “I’m sure if more people could see the actual tragedies of battlefronts, they would be resolved to make this the last war,” he wrote.2
As Ben revealed a glimpse of his combat stress, the B-29 campaign against Japan was poised to take an especially grim turn. In his eagerness to prove his patriotism to anyone inclined to doubt him, Ben had often spoken nonchalantly about bombing Tokyo as payback for Pearl Harbor. At that very moment, far up the chain of command, planning was underway for an attack like none ever inflicted in the history of warfare. Ben would be among the eyewitnesses to Tokyo’s night of unimaginable horror.