Five hundred miles to the west, the 313th Wing made landfall at 11:31 a.m. Twenty minutes later, through gaps in the cumulus clouds, the crews were rewarded with a perfect view of the railroad yards at Iwakuni. "It was kind of a minor target," recalled pilot Warren Morris, then 21 and on his 34th voyage to the Empire. "We usually had bigger targets than that."
The wind was a scant 16 knots, and the only flak "two inaccurate, heavy bursts over the target." Of 115 Superforts setting out from Tinian, 108 actually released their bombs over Iwakuni, in clusters looking rather like confetti but weighing 776 tons.
In the Imperial bomb shelter, the ministers groaned and wept as the emperor again told them to "bear the unbearable." Himself sobbing, Hirohito volunteered to do what had never been done before: He would go on the radio to announce the surrender in his own voice, which no one outside the court and government had ever heard. When the emperor left the hot, mosquito-ridden shelter, some ministers were so stricken that they dropped to their knees.
After making his breakaway turn from Iwakuni, Morris told his navigator to plot the heading for Hiroshima, 25 miles northeast. The young pilot wanted to see the desolation for himself. "So he did," Morris said, "and we dropped down to about 3,000 feet and flew all around Hiroshima and [that part of] Japan. I didn't think I'd ever be back, and I never have." (Of all the pilots I talked to, Morris was the only one who actually remembered the August 14 mission. It was that routine, and it fell among some of the most momentous events of the war.)
Meanwhile, mine-layers from the 313th splashed their silent cargo into the Shimonoseki Straits and other watery chokepoints. The 58th Wing rained 982 tons of explosives on Hikari Naval Arsenal in western Honshu, and the 73rd Wing--escorted by fighters from Iwo Jima and flying high to avoid flak--salvoed one-ton bombs onto Osaka Army Arsenal. "Almost all the small machine shops and laboratories in central sections of arsenal were destroyed," concluded the Osaka mission report. "The large assembly type buildings and storage buildings in central and southern sections of plant were severely damaged or destroyed. Many direct hits visible on heavy machine shops at northern edge of arsenal." Nearly 95 percent of the bombs burst within 3,000 feet of the aiming point--something less than pinpoint accuracy--in Japan's second-largest city.
In its heyday, Osaka Army Arsenal had employed 60,000 workers, but with factory relocations, military conscription, and a false alarm that had delayed the commuter trains, only about 5,000 were on the job that noon, assembling cannon, anti-aircraft guns, shells, and suicide submarines for the navy. (The workers included schoolchildren and Korean conscripts, recalled Ishimura Torataro, a welder. Unskilled and using old machinery, they produced generally shoddy materiel.) The Superforts demolished the arsenal and killed about 1,000 people within and without its high circular walls.
As expected, the flak was heavy, damaging 28 Superforts over Osaka. ("The Japanese Army made a brilliant success in hitting these planes," boasted a Japanese war communique, while admitting that the bombers had done great damage to the arsenal "and civilian residences.") At 2:30 p.m., the last B-29 closed its yawning bomb bay doors, made a right turn, and took up its course for Iwo Jima.
The world, at this moment, was again swept by a rumor of peace. At 2:49 p.m. a radio operator on Okinawa logged an English-language news flash from the Domei news agency: "An Imperial message accepting the Potsdam proclamation is forthcoming soon." Though under military control like all institutions in Imperial Japan, the news agency had been a generally trustworthy source throughout the war. On Guam, the armed forces radio broadcast the report at 3 p.m., setting off riotous parties among the service personnel not otherwise occupied.
They did not include the B-29 crews that would be flying the three night missions. The first Superfort of the 315th Wing took off at 3:42 p.m., bound for Tsuchizakiminato in northern Honshu. Since they would be bombing individually, they set out in leisurely fashion over the course of four hours. (For a while, the 313th Wing on Tinian had bombers both coming and going. The first B-29 returning from Iwakuni touched down at 6:04 p.m., the crew stubbled, stinking, and weary from 15 hours in the air; 12 minutes later, the first of the night raiders took off.)
In Tokyo, the government ministers labored over the words that would end not just the war but the history of Japan as they knew it. General Anami choked on one phrase: "the war situation grows more unfavorable to us every day." If that were true, he cried, the army communiques had all been lies, and how could the emperor say such a thing? The words were changed to "the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage," perhaps the most forlorn understatement of the war.
Scribes then translated the document into the language and script used at court, so arcane that two hours were needed to brush the characters onto parchment. Not until 10 p.m. did it reach the emperor, who signed it, affixed his seal, and returned it to his ministers to be ratified.
As they understood the matter, the surrender went into effect at 11 p.m., when the last of them--the transportation minister, as it happened--brushed his signature onto the document. They dispatched coded telegrams to Bern and Stockholm but otherwise told no one. (The leak to Domei had been unofficial, by a lower-ranking official afraid that the next atomic bomb would destroy Tokyo and therefore the country's ability to surrender.) More than the bomb, the ministers feared revolt by their own army and navy. Thus it was in the utmost secrecy that the emperor sat down to record his decision for broadcast the next day.
At that moment the night raiders flew past Tokyo: the 73rd Wing bound for Isesaki, the 314th Wing bound for Kumagaya, along with some B-29s from the busy 313th. They carried white-phosphorus bombs and incendiary clusters--bomblets filled with magnesium and jellied gasoline. These were to be seeded at the rate of 225 tons to the square mile, the density that Curtis LeMay had found to yield the most destructive fires for the least expenditure. (In this respect, Japan, whose buildings were mostly made of wood, was much less costly than the sturdily built cities of Germany.)
The bombers passed close enough to set off air raid sirens in Tokyo, causing the electric supply to be shut off. The emperor's recording session was put off until midnight. It was still Tuesday morning, August 14, in the United States, and commuters were reading this headline in the New York Times, which was based on the Domei flash: "JAPAN DECIDES TO SURRENDER."
According to the men who wrote the history of the Army Air Forces in World War II, the night raiders reduced 45 percent of Kumagaya to ashes, and 17 percent of Isesaki. The job took a bit more than an hour, with the lead bombardiers using the radar return from the Tonegawa River to locate the cities--towns, really, each with fewer than 50,000 residents--while latecomers simply navigated by the flames.
Japanese accounts say that in Kumagaya 3,600 houses were burned, 234 people were killed, 3,000 injured, and 15,000 left homeless or otherwise bereft. The latter included Ozaki Kei, who to escape the heat jumped into the Tonegawa with her three-year-old daughter strapped to her back. So many burning houses fell into the river, she recalled, that even the water was hot.
The eighth "primary" was the Nippon Oil refinery at Tsuchizakiminato, and the last B-29 did not turn away from this area until 2:21 a.m. Wednesday morning. Its crew brought to 10,000 the number of USASTAF airmen who had flown to the Empire in the last 15 hours. Of those, only one failed to return: a fighter pilot shot down by flak. And the last B-29's bombs brought to 6,000 tons the weight of the explosives dropped in the last raid of World War II--a stupendous total, even by the standards of the war in Europe. Still, their destructive power equalled only half that of the bomb that vaporized Hiroshima.
In Tokyo, rebel officers murdered the commander of the Imperial Guards Division, surrounded the palace, disarmed its police, and seized technicians from the Nippon Broadcasting Company--but not the precious recordings, which were concealed in an office used by a lady-in-waiting to the empress.
In Switzerland, the Japanese envoy delivered the surrender message at 4:10 a.m. Tokyo time. Three hours passed before the Swiss got word to Washington: among other delays, their messenger was stopped by D.C. police for making a U-turn on Connecticut Avenue. In Tokyo, the sun was now rising on Wednesday, August 15, and the radio began periodic announcements that all listeners must stand by for a historic broadcast at noon, when they would hear their emperor's voice for the first time. "This is a most gracious act," the announcer reminded them.
On Guam, the news was logged at 8 a.m.: "You are hereby officially notified of Japanese capitulation." Half of Spaatz' night raiders were still in the air, strung out for 750 miles from Iwo Jima to the Marianas.
At noon, virtually every Japanese on the home islands listened to the emperor's high, metallic voice, broadcast from radios and public address systems. Some reacted violently: Military policeman chopped off the heads of American prisoners in Osaka and Fukuoka, an admiral led 11 navy aircraft in a suicide flight to Okinawa, soldiers tried to kill the prime minister, and perhaps 1,000 officers, including General Anami, cut open their bellies in the ritual of seppuku. But the vast majority only knelt and wept. The war was over, not quite four years after Japan had struck Pearl Harbor, eight years after invading South China, and 14 years after occupying Manchuria--steps on a journey that brought the Empire to such ruin as no other nation has ever suffered.
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