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The Last Raid (part 2)

Though an Allied victory had come to appear increasingly inevitable, Spaatz' cable book for August suggests otherwise. It is chockablock with plans to rush 720 B-29s to Okinawa, along with British and Canadian Lancasters; to put wing racks on the Superfort so it could carry 22,000-pound "Tall Boy" bombs; to improve its performance and step up its production; and to bring in new air crews on a schedule extending to March 1946. These messages are mixed with pleas for transport aircraft to fly a U.S. occupation army to Japan. And all the while, the generals argued over which city to destroy with the next atomic bomb. Spaatz nominated Tokyo for the "psychological effect on the government officials," while the War Department favored Sapporo.

This was not the White Queen, believing six impossible things before breakfast; it was just the bureaucratic looking-glass, reflecting all possible outcomes. Indeed, Carl Spaatz had been installed over Curtis LeMay largely because of his administrative talents, more useful now than combat genius.

The USASTAF B-29 stand-down lasted through Monday, August 13. But even before it had ended, Navy aircraft and Army tactical bombers were on the prowl. And in Spaatz' war room on Guam, planners were at work in rumpled khakis, studying a wall-size map of the Empire and laying out what would be the last strategic air raid of World War II. When no word came from Japan agreeing to the Allies' demands, the raid was set in motion.

This was to be a "maximum effort" that would deploy every airworthy B-29 in the Marianas, and such a large mission raised a long list of concerns. The planners pondered the weather forecast and the lack of targets still intact enough to bomb. They worried about timing the launch of so many aircraft, about providing them with reliable radar images, about avoiding collisions over the target, and about bringing them home after 15 hours in the air. Out and back, each crew would be traveling a distance equal to that between New York and London.

In the end, the planners chose eight primary and secondary targets, along with some last-resort targets to give every formation at least one objective it could find by radar alone. Then they went to work with their slide rules. Depending on the likely anti-aircraft fire, a formation might be told to bomb as low as 10,000 feet or as high as 20,000 feet. Depending on whether its task was to burn a city or demolish a factory, it might carry incendiaries or explosives--and if the latter, the bombs could be anywhere from 100 to 2,000 pounds. The fuse might be the kind that produces an instantaneous explosion, so as to riddle pipes and storage tanks at an oil refinery, or a delayed explosion so the bomb would go off in the second story of a three-story building.

Lastly, each B-29 was given a fuel ration depending on its bomb load, distance to target, and place in the formation--anywhere from 6,300 to 7,000 gallons of gasoline. (Not every pilot agreed with these calculations, of course. "To hell with that!" George Bertagnoli, 26, of the 313th would tell his engineer. "Give me as much gasoline as you can. I don't want to come back here in the soup and have to circle and run out of gas.")

When historians mention the last raid of World War II, they treat it as an abomination, like the beheadings in the field outside Fukuoka. The Japanese murdered prisoners; the Americans destroyed cities. In War Without Mercy John Dower argues that Arnold "was desperately attempting to arrange 'as big a finale as possible' to end the war."

Arnold wanted to put 1,000 strategic bombers over Japan, as he had often done over Germany. He even authorized Spaatz to hurry the Eighth Air Force into combat, adding perhaps 200 Okinawa-based B-29s to the 800 available in the Marianas. ("Thank God," Spaatz replied.) Nevertheless, the image I get from the cable books, diaries, and mission reports is not one of bloodlust but of a machine gearing up for one final revolution, as it had revolved so often since the Marianas-based B-29s first bombed Tokyo in November 1944. In the bland language of the Tactical Mission Report: "At the time these missions were planned, peace negotiations were under way with Japan. The Commanding General gave orders for all Wings to be prepared to dispatch maximum effort forces on minimum time notice. Because it appeared that negotiations were being delayed by the enemy, these missions were ordered for 14-15 August."

In Tokyo, the government ministers had wasted Sunday, August 12, in argument; now Monday was following it. The civilians were ready to quit on any terms, but three military men--General Korechika Anami, General Yoshijiro Umezu, and Admiral Soemu Toyoda--wanted to fight on, believing they could make a U.S. invasion of Japan so bloody that the Americans would have to soften their terms. As Monday night wore on, Anami even considered joining a plot to seize the Imperial Palace, to save the emperor from himself.

At 4 a.m. on Tuesday, August 14, the first airplane of the 313th Wing taxied onto Tinian's North Field. (I use Tokyo time throughout. It was 5 a.m. in the Marianas; in Washington, the staff officers were still sweltering through the previous afternoon.) The pilot ran his four 2,200-horsepower Wright engines to the red line, then released the brakes. The Superfort rolled along the asphalt for a mile and a half--picking up speed, lifting off, and settling down several times--before finally struggling into the air.

Empty, the Superfort weighed 37 tons, to which had been added 20 tons of gasoline, seven tons of bombs, and three tons of "miscellaneous weight," which included 11 young Americans with flak vests and steel helmets. The B-29 was desperately underpowered for its burden, and the pilot let it skim the blue-black Pacific while the engineer attempted to lessen drag by closing the cowl flaps with a haste never imagined by the designers at Wright, a move that carried the risk of overheating the engine. ("Let the son of a bitch burn!" George Bertagnoli once yelled when an engine burst into flame. Sweet Sue couldn't climb or return on three engines, but if the crew kept the flaming engine at full power, the fire might blow out. It did, and they flew the mission.)

Other airplanes followed at 40-second intervals for more than an hour, using the two runways alternately while a molten orange sun rose over the Pacific. "As one would leave, engines groaning under the heavy load, a tornado of coral dust whirled wildly over the runway," Charlie Murphy wrote in Fortune after the war. "Then as the commotion subsided, the tall stately tail of another B-29 would come gliding through the gray obscurity, like the dorsal fin of a huge fish, while on the far side of the field, on the taxiway leading to the head of the runway, other tails moved into position."

The formation was a long, loose line, with the bombers in front flying slower than those in the rear, allowing the stragglers to catch up and "thicken the stream" as they moved north. In most cockpits, the commander turned on the autopilot and the crew settled back to talk, eat, read, or write letters. "That was a millionaire's airplane," Bertagnoli said of Sweet Sue, bound for Iwakuni in western Honshu. "It was quiet, and you sat in a big chair, and it was totally comfortable."

So ordinary had these missions become that the press release had already left the mimeograph machine. At 7 a.m., Spaatz telephoned Norstad in Washington and read from communique number 11: "More than 800 Marianas-based B-29 Superfortresses dropped 5,900 tons of demolition and incendiary bombs on Japan on 14 August and in the early hours of 15 August." He named the primary targets, adding that "173 fighter airplanes [7th Fighter Command] from Iwo Jima escorted the bombers over Osaka, and struck airfields in the Nagoya area."

Norstad saw a way to improve the language. It was true that Arnold hadn't succeeded in mounting a 1,000-bomber raid (the 200 Okinawa-based B-29s didn't participate), but he had succeeded in launching more than 1,000 aircraft. So Norstad suggested that Spaatz start the communique to the effect that "more than 1,000 aircraft of the U.S. Army Strategic Air Forces operated against Japan in the last 24 hours."

"Good idea and will change," Spaatz replied.