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The Last Raid (part 1)

When word reached the island airfields that a uranium bomb had destroyed Hiroshima, the men in the conventional-bombing squadrons were upset--not by the death of a Japanese city, which after all was the work they did, but by the degree to which the new weapon seemed to diminish the effect of the bombs they carried to "the Empire."

War correspondent Charles J.V. Murphy was visiting Tinian when the Enola Gay returned from her 3,000-mile round trip into the atomic age. At a pre-dawn breakfast the next morning--Tuesday, August 7, 1945--he heard Harry Truman's taped announcement blare across the volcanic-and-coral Pacific island, one of three in the Marianas that had been transformed into monster airfields for the Boeing B-29 Superfortress. The United States had harnessed "the basic power of the universe," the president said. (Truman himself was shipboard, returning from the conference in Potsdam, Germany, that had settled the terms Japan must meet.) Surrender, Truman warned the Japanese, or face "a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth."

Murphy walked over to the packed-coral hardstand where a B-29 was taking on conventional explosives destined for Toyokawa, a small city near the Japanese capital. "With a wry smile," as Murphy recalled, the young loading officer admitted that he had trouble focusing "on a process which the atomic bomb ... had rendered humdrum and obsolete."

Troubled or not, the bomb-loaders went on with the job. A few hours later, 131 of the long silver planes with even longer wings set out for Toyokawa; 37 others went to mine the Shimonoseki Straits. ("I have listened to intelligence officers briefing pilots on how to approach Japanese cities whose names they could scarcely pronounce," Murphy mused. "In the morning those cities were gone.") On Wednesday, August 8, 412 Superforts voyaged to Yawata, Fukuyama, and Tokyo. On Thursday, 95 bombed an oil refinery at Amagasaki, and Bock's Car dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki.

By now, the morale problem was nagging Carl Spaatz, newly arrived in the Marianas to command the U.S. Army Strategic Air Forces. (USASTAF itself was new, created that August as an umbrella for the 20th Air Force in the Marianas, the Seventh Fighter Command on Iwo Jima, and the Eighth Air Force just establishing itself on Okinawa.) The newfangled bombs, Spaatz radioed, disturbed the men who had to fly "the prosaic type of operation." Would Henry "Hap" Arnold, the air force chief, please reassure them that their work was still important to the war effort?

Guided by the ferocious genius of Curtis LeMay, the Marianas-based B-29s had "scorched and boiled and baked to death" more than 200,000 Japanese, left millions homeless, and turned their cities into ash heaps. (The words are the general's, used in Mission with LeMay: My Story to describe the first and most terrible of the fire-bombing raids he launched against the Empire.) Aerially laid mines and submarine-launched torpedoes had starved them of raw materials. By August 1945, the Japanese army had a grand total of 13 million gallons of aviation gasoline on the home islands, and most of that was reserved for Ketsu-go, the operation intended to fling 10,000 suicide aircraft at the expected U.S. invasion fleet. Trainers and transports were modified to run on alcohol and pine-root oil. To conserve fuel, combat pilots were ordered to ignore enemy fighters and small formations of bombers--a policy that enabled the Enola Gay and Bock's Car to come and go without challenge. USASTAF, by contrast, had 15 million gallons of aviation gasoline on Tinian alone, an island smaller than Manhattan.

The two enemies had one quality in common though. They were both war machines, tightly wound and immensely difficult to stop. The Japanese soldier believed in fighting to the death, and even if it had been otherwise, the communications systems necessary for a quick surrender had been severely damaged. As late as Thursday evening, August 9, the government ministers in Tokyo, unable to communicate with Hiroshima by telephone or radio, were not entirely convinced that the United States had developed an atomic bomb. Such a bomb was certainly possible, and Hiroshima was certainly in ruins. But the "new type" weapon had exploded at 8:15 a.m.; perhaps it had caused breakfast cooking fires to ignite thousands of homes, causing a holocaust like the one that destroyed Tokyo after the 1923 earthquake. As for Nagasaki, they only knew that it had suffered a "severe attack of Hiroshima type," according to a bulletin handed to them that afternoon.

The ministers argued until midnight, then took the unprecedented step of asking the emperor, who was considered to be a god, for guidance. In a bomb shelter 100 feet below the Imperial Palace, they bowed their heads and listened to "the Voice of the Crane," whose family had ruled Japan for 124 generations. In his oblique fashion, Hirohito urged them to "bear the unbearable." The ministers dutifully ratified that advice, and at 7 a.m. on Friday, August 10, sent an equally oblique message to the neutral capitals of Stockholm and Bern: "The Japanese Government is ready to accept the terms enumerated in the joint declaration" of the Allied leaders at Potsdam, but no change could be permitted in "the prerogatives of His Majesty as a sovereign ruler."

On Guam, the largest of the Marianas islands and the first to be bulldozed into an airfield, Spaatz heard the news in the Quonset hut that served as his war room. Since B-29s were already loading for another voyage to the Empire, he hastily teletyped Henry Arnold's deputy, Brigadier General Lauris Norstad, who told him "to carry on with scheduled mission tonight."

Instead, Spaatz canceled the raid. Though citing unfavorable weather, Spaatz, an intelligent man, probably didn't want to risk sending bombers he might have to recall or, worse, be unable to recall in the face of a presidential order.

The New York Times featured the stand-down on its front page: "JAPAN OFFERS TO SURRENDER; B-29's, NAVY HALT ATTACKS." This posed a dilemma: If Spaatz resumed the bombing, the headline writers would conclude that negotiations had collapsed. The stand-down was therefore formalized. "All strategic air operations of USASTAF will cease at once," radioed a somewhat annoyed Arnold, "and any missions which may now be in the air en route to targets will be recalled."

As for the diplomatic response, it was delayed by hardliners in the United States, Australia, and especially the Soviet Union; the latter had just declared war on Japan and was sending armored divisions racing through Manchuria and Korea at the rate of 100 miles a day. When the telegram did go out, it conceded nothing: "the Emperor [will] be subject to the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers." Worse, the telegram seemed to imply that the god would have to stand for election, a notion even more astonishing than expecting him to take orders from a foreign general.

The ministers spent Sunday, August 12, agonizing over this latest humiliation. Meanwhile, other Japanese exacted a blood price for the raids that had destroyed their cities. In Fukuoka, a truck drove up to Army headquarters, collected B-29 crewmen who had been shot down over Japan, and drove them to a lonely field, where, one by one, a lieutenant chopped off their heads with his sword.

They were not the first to die in this manner. The Japanese had beheaded dozens of airmen and used others for bayonet and archery practice. They'd locked them in animal cages and tied them to posts for passersby to torment. They'd burned them alive, buried them alive, dissected them alive, and cooked and eaten their body parts. Such atrocities were not confined to the war's end, nor even to military prisoners. From the very first day of its 14-year war, wherever it went on the continent of Asia or in the Pacific, Imperial Japan had worked and starved and tortured its captives to death.

"We discussed it a lot," recalled Warren Morris, then a B-29 pilot in the 313th Wing on Tinian. "We wondered whether to bail out or not, because the word we had was that they were executing our fliers.... Oh, we talked about that. We knew that they were killing prisoners." Morris was 21 years old, just off the farm in Eldorado, Kansas.

President Truman spent that Sunday in his office, waiting for word from Tokyo, while crowds danced in Times Square, Piccadilly Circus, and along the Champs-Elysees. A more solemn crowd gathered outside the White House in Lafayette Park, mostly enlisted men and women in summer uniforms.

At the War Department, victory seemed so near that the generals became concerned about who would get the credit. There was the usual rivalry between Army and Navy, but in addition, Arnold wanted to justify the creation of an independent air force, answerable only to him and the president, and Lauris Norstad was particularly keen on getting that message through. "The surrender of Japan comes after the severest and most concentrated bombing campaign in history," he lectured Spaatz, who was drafting a press release. "It would be inconsistent with AAF dignity and restraint to make these statements boldly and brazenly." Still, the facts could be "woven into the piece so that no reader can fail to draw the ... inference that air power was the outstanding factor in our victory."