When Brig.-Gen. Haywood Hansell, Jr., flew the first super-fortresses across the Pacific to Saipan, to take charge of the 21st Bomber Command, he found it a hot, rainy, fly-blown, muddy tropical island.
His men were setting up their camps in cane fields of the long island’s flat southwestern shore, just below the plateau where engineers were laying the white coral surface of the longest, broadest, strongest runway the Pacific had ever seen.
The airdrome construction was such a gigantic task that engineers couldn’t spare the time for building living quarters for fliers and ground personnel, so the flying and ground crews chipped together and set up their own tents, mess halls and showers.
The Japanese radio predicted it would take almost a year to get the superforts operating from Saipan, which was invaded in June, 1944. Hansell, eager to give the enemy as rude a shock as possible, had 100 giant planes ready by November 19, for the first raid.
But extremely heavy winds and rains, both over the Marianas and Japan forced a postponement for several days. Meanwhile, a B-29 named “Tokyo Rose,” commanded by Capt. Ralph D. Steakley, of Jefferson, Ohio, had become the first over Tokyo, making a photo reconnaissance flight Nov. 1 and twice again within the next two weeks.
Thanksgiving Day arrived and still the weather was too bad to fly, but it cleared that afternoon. Crews were summoned to final briefings and told the first Tokyo target—a giant aircraft plant—would be hit the next day, Nov. 24, which was Thanksgiving Day in the U. S.
Before daylight the great silvery planes, all fueled and bomb-loaded, began taxiing toward the single takeoff runway, in a great deafening parade.
Many hundreds of khaki-clad men who had helped bring this day about lined the runway to see each heavy-laden plane into the air. The first fort, the “Dauntless Dotty,” with Lt.-Col. (then Major) Gobert K. Morgan at the controls, roared down the white pathway, which was not yet as long as it would be when engineers pronounced it completed, but the big ship pulled itself into the air at its far end, skimmed some bushes beyond, dipped low over the water, and soared off into the north.
Riding with Morgan was Hansell’s No. 1 man, Brig.-Gen. Emmett O’Donnell, commander of the 73d Wing, to which all the raiding planes belonged.
At one minute intervals, other planes came threshing down the coral lane. One blew a tire as it started its run, another lost an engine a short distance down the runway. Both managed to grind to stops before reaching the far end. There were a few more “aborts,” but in all approximately 100 B-29’s took off on this first mass strike against the heart of Japan.
The planes had two hurdles to worry about, traversing the target itself and the long haul home. For an hour after the last superfort departed, Saipan went on an air alert. A P-38 shot down a snooping Jap plane near Tinian.
That first raid was much more successful than anyone dared hope, both from the standpoint of results achieved and enemy interference. One plane was lost over the target and one was ditched returning home, but it was just a small sample of what was to come.
The second Tokyo raid, by force not quite so large, came three days later. That same day the Japanese made the most strenuous attempt they ever were able to launch, to halt the Saipan operations.
Two or three Jap planes struck shortly after midnight, while the airfield was jammed with planes filled with bombs and gasoline, ready for their Tokyo mission. Bombing, strafing Japs set three planes afire and damaged several others. One burning plane exploded, damaging a number in that area.
But despite the blackened wreckage, O’Donnell’s men took off on schedule at dawn for their second Tokyo attack.
The Japanese, with remarkably poor timing, came in that afternoon when the airfield was almost bare. A dozen low-flying enemy bombers and strafers swept back and forth across southern Saipan for 15 minutes. Three of the intruders were destroyed in the air and a fourth crashed into some parked B-29’s. Altogether three superforts were destroyed in this raid but it was the last real effort the Japanese ever were able to make. Thereafter Saipan’s defenses were so strong that the base never again was threatened with serious damage.
At the end of the first month, Hansell took stock of O’Donnell’s wing: 100,000 pounds of bombs a day on Japan’s urban industrial centers; more than 3,000,000 pounds dropped on the targets altogether; only two B-29’s lost over targets; operational losses at sea in no sense heavy.
O’Donnell began tests to increase the wing’s efficiency; he tried lower levels and different approaches in attacks, different ack-ack and fighter evasion tactics, and closer formations. The fliers worked out a buddy system, escorting each other home.
A leader in the tests was a squadron commander who followed unorthodox methods, Lt.-Col. Robert (“Pappy”) Haynes, former barnstorming racer and one time Canadian airforce pilot for the Duke of Kent. He had piloted a B-17 in the African, Sicilian and Italian campaigns. En route to the Pacific, he flew his B-29 deliberately into clouds to test icing conditions.
At one time, when most pilots wanted all the fuel they could carry for leeway on the 3,000-mile Tokyo round trip, Haynes started carrying 640 gallons less than any other ship, thereby reducing the weight more than 4,200 pounds. He stripped the plane of its accessories, took out the armor plate, armor glass, removed one of the bomb bay fuel tanks, even eliminated flak suits, because the ack-ack was comparatively less hazardous than in the European theater.
During one raid a Jap fighter, attacking Haynes’ plane, shot the outside blister of another B-29. James R. Krantz, the crippled plane’s left gunner was sucked out of the opening but was held by the harness strap around his ankle. He dangled there at 30,000 feet, in a temperature minus 27 degrees, centigrade, with a 200-mile-an-hour wind blowing his oxygen mask and gloves off. His teammates managed to pull him back in the plane. His badly frost-bitten left leg and hands were the extent of his injuries.
Every bombing mission was productive of some story of heroism, of struggling against terrific odds. The B-29’s would fight their way through clouds of enemy fighters; some would have to ditch in enemy waters; many crews spent long hours in the seas before being rescued.
One B-29 carried two cases of whiskey over Japan on 13 missions; the crew was too busy to unload the liquor before the first mission, and thereafter kept it aboard for good luck. Badly shot up by flak and enemy fighters on the 13th trip, the plane barely returned to base, too seriously damaged to fly again, but the whiskey was recovered intact.
Another plane crew ditched near Jap-held Alamagan Island in the northern Marianas and was rescued just before Alamagan volcano erupted, starting fires the four mile length of the island.
At New Year, Hansell moved the 21st Bomber Command headquarters to Guam, to prepare for two new wings. Meanwhile Tinian also was being built into the greatest air base in the world; its flat terrain lending itself to eight strips, if needed. Later in the month, having completed the task of getting the superfort campaign in the Marianas in full swing, Hansell left for a new post in the States.
His command was yielded to hard-driving Major-Gen. Curtis LeMay, “Old Ironpants,” the youngest two-star general in the Army, who had worked out the close formation tactics that proved so effective against the Luftwaffe.
Under LeMay, the 21st Bomber Command grew rapidly and graduated from strategic into tactical use. Starting March 10, 1945, the majority of the raids were medium altitude missions and were flown with such rapidity that in July the average number of combat hours per aircraft was 114, creating unprecedented maintenance problems.
On March 30th, the 20th Bomber Command ceased operations from Asia. Its planes came to the Marianas, as a wing under Brig.-Gen. Roger Ramey. On July 16, the 21st Bomber Command headquarters became the 20th Airforce headquarters, while the personnel of the inactivated 20th Bomber Command was absorbed into the Eighth Airforce headquarters.
Both air forces, under LeMay and Gen. Jimmy Doolittle, became part of Gen. Carl Spaatz’s Strategic Airforces, but war ended before the Eighth Airforce’s B-29’s could start functioning from Okinawa.
A secret B-29 unit dealt with the atomic bomb, dropping just two of those violent weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki before the Japs surrendered.
A month later when I visited Hiroshima, street cars rattled along the streets where not a single building stood. Block after block contained only a thin covering of rusting tin, a few stones and some broken bricks.
The twisted frames of less than a dozen buildings stood alone in the midst of ruin that was once touted as Japan’s most modernized city.
For its size, no city in the world was so completely wiped out by bombs as was this war-swollen metropolis of 400,000 whose heart was smashed completely by a single application of atomic power.
By contrast, Bremen, Hamburg and Berlin seemed almost untouched.
Japanese newspaper men who had visited the city shortly after the leveling told me that the residents of Hiroshima “hate you and think you the most fiendish, cruel people on earth.”
Hirokuni Dadai, chief of the police prefecture, said the death toll was expected to pass 80,000.
A Japanese physician said any of the survivors who had been shocked by the atomic bomb were in danger; that even slight scratches or burns become infected, inducing fevers and both internal and external bleeding and that many died of apparently minor burns.
The atomic bomb that hit Nagasaki far outpowered the one dropped on Hiroshima; it made clear what the War Department meant when it announced that the first bomb was already obsolete. It turned half of Nagasaki—a city of 250,000 population—into a desert of rubble.
The smell of death still was heavy over the city and smoke rose from fires started a month before by a single bomb. Authorities expected the death toll to reach 40,000.
One prisoner of war said four Allied prisoners were killed and that two others died 20 days later from peculiar symptoms—jaws locked, throats swelling, high fever and pulse and skin hemorrhages.
When LeMay went to Tokyo to witness the surrender, he flew low over well-hammered targets he had come to know so well, and said:
“Japan impresses me as a country that’s just barely breathing.”
★★★
Vern Haugland was awarded the Silver Star for fortitude in a 43-day struggle through New Guinea jungles, after bailing out of a bomber… he was the first AP correspondent to reach Australia from America after Pearl Harbor and has been covering the Pacific ever since… born in 1908 in Litchfield, Minn…. entered AP service in Salt Lake City in 1936… now on roving assignment in the Orient.