The Offensive Begins from the Marianas

The August coa study went not only to Arnold, but also to Han – sell, the Twentieth Air Force’s Chief of Staff. As an early disciple of high altitude, daylight, precision bombing, Possum Hansell took its progressive message to heart. He had taught strategic bomb­ing theory at the Air Corps Tactical School during the 1930s; he was a principal architect of awpd-i and the primary architect of AWPD-42, both of which called for precision bombing offensives to forestall an invasion of Europe and knock Germany out of the war; and he had put theory into practice as commander of Eighth Air Force’s First Bomb Wing from 1 January to 30 June 1943. He had also served as de facto commander of Twentieth Air Force when Arnold had been incapacitated with his third heart attack. Arnold’s selection of Hansell to lead XXI Bomber Command from the Marianas came as no surprise. When he landed on Saipan at the controls of Joltin’ Josie, the Pacific Pioneer on 12 October, Hansell prepared to initiate the main в-29 offensive against Japan that Arnold had long counted on to produce decisive results.

From the Marianas, XXI Bomber Command could attack most of Japan’s major cities, but Hansell faced an array of problems before a raid against them could occur. Tokyo was the obvious choice for the first attack, and the coa had designated the Naka – jima aircraft engine plant at Musashino, in the northwest part of the capital, as the initial target in a series of raids designed to de­stroy the aircraft industry. Hansell, though, possessed only one partially finished runway on Saipan while Army engineers strug­gled to complete complementary airfields on Tinian and Guam. The prospect of constant long-range, high altitude attacks in for­mation also presented challenges. In stateside practice missions, flown from Kansas to Batista Field in Cuba (the same 1,400-mile distance as from Saipan to Tokyo), engines had caught fire after exhaust valves burned out, and the gunners’ plastic viewing bub­bles had frosted over above twenty-five thousand feet. Hansell had asked to fly his bombers from the United States to Saipan in for­mation to gain additional experience. Air Transport Command denied his request, he later observed, “on the grounds that the air­plane lacked the range to fly from Sacramento to Hawaii in for­mation, even without a bomb load and in good weather. The dis­tance was 2,400 miles. We would have to fly 3,200 miles, with a bomb load, in the face of enemy fighters, without weather report­ing or navigation aids.”51

Besides the difficulties encountered in long-range formation fly­ing, Hansell faced a dearth of target information, plus he also had to deal with crews and aircraft unprepared for the missions ahead. His initial orders were to destroy Japan’s aircraft industry, but he had no target folders to guide his mission planning. “Our strate­gic air intelligence was simply non-existent in regards to Japan,” he recalled.52 Not until the 1 November arrival of two B-29S spe­cially modified for photographic reconnaissance did Hansell ob­tain the needed targeting clues; the aircraft took seven thousand photographs from thirty-two thousand feet, beyond the range of

Japanese flak.53 More reconnaissance missions followed. Han – sell and his staff then had to review the photographs and prepare for the first raid, which Arnold wanted by the middle of Novem­ber.5’1 Hansell scheduled it for the seventeenth. In the meantime, the Seventy-third Wing, originally slated for General Wolfe’s XX Bomber Command in China and trained in radar bombing at night, had begun arriving at Saipan at the rate of two or three aircraft per day. Japan’s aircraft factories were precision targets that demanded visual bombing with the Norden bombsight. The Seventy-third’s B-29S had APQ-13 bombsights designed for radar attacks and ill-suited for precision bombing.55 Limited time was available for training, and with the first mission looming, several crews would fly against Tokyo without any practice flights in the combat theater at all.

Arnold’s impatience for a rapid start to the Marianas offensive stemmed in part from high-level developments in the orchestration of Allied strategy. At Quebec’s Octagon Conference in September 1944, the Combined Chiefs of Staff foreshadowed an invasion of Japan’s home islands by stating that the Allied mission in the Pa­cific included seizure of “objectives in the industrial heart of Ja­pan.”36 Once the invasion began, Arnold would lose his chance to score “decisive” results with air power in the Pacific. He knew that the clock had begun ticking for the B-29S to achieve indepen­dent success—much as it had for Eighth Air Force in May 1943 after the Combined Chiefs of Staff selected a projected date for Overlord. Three weeks before Hansell took XXI Bomber Com­mand from its training location in Colorado Springs to the Mar­ianas, Arnold wrote him:

As you well know the original conception of the в-29 was an air­plane that would carry tremendous loads for tremendous distances. We have not to date fulfilled this promise. We have flown great dis­tances but we have not carried any sizeable bomb loads. In fact we have not carried any more bombs and in most cases considerably less than the B-24S and в-17s carry. One of the greatest factors in the de­feat of Japan will be the air effort. Consequently every bomb that is added to each airplane that takes off for Japan will directly affect the length of the war. . . .

1 know that you, in your position as commander of one of our great striking forces, will do your utmost to help accomplish the ear­liest possible defeat of Japan. This can only be done by making the best possible use of the weapon at your disposal.57

In November, the Joint Chiefs of Staff approved a tentative plan for invading Kyushu in September 1945. Hansell’s race against the clock had officially begun.

On 24 November hi B-29S took off to attack Tokyo’s Naka – jima aircraft engine factory, responsible for an estimated 30 to 40 percent of all Japanese combat aircraft engines.58 Brigadier Gen­eral Emmett “Rosy” O’Donnell, the Commander of the Seventy – third Wing, led the mission, with Major Robert K. Morgan, who had commanded the famed Memphis Belle in the European the­ater, flying as his co-pilot. Vile weather had compelled Hansell to cancel the mission five times. Shortly before it finally occurred, he received a portent that it might not go well. O’Donnell, a Brooklyn native who had commanded а в-17 squadron in the Philippines after Pearl Harbor, and who had also served as a favored colo­nel on Arnold’s Advisory Council, came to Hansell with a hand­written letter. It concerned the forthcoming mission and warned that “the hazards and the lack of training produced risks which exceeded the limits of prudent military judgment.” O’Donnell thought that the raid could produce a “disaster,” and urged Han­sell to forego a daylight attack and instead bomb at night “until the command had a chance to build up its competence.”59 Han­sell thanked Rosy for his views, and then burned the letter in his presence to prevent misinterpretation if the raid succeeded.

The attack was far from successful, though not for the reasons that O’Donnell had suspected. Only twenty-four B-29S bombed the engine factory, while another sixty-four dropped their bombs on the city and its docks. An additional seventeen aborted en route to the target, and mechanical difficulties prevented the re­mainder from bombing at all.60 The chief problem encountered was unforeseen—jet stream winds of more than 150 mph that whipped through the high altitudes above Tokyo and tossed the bombs randomly across the city. Out of more than one thou­sand bombs dropped, only forty-eight landed within the Naka – jima plant’s boundaries.61 Two bombers were lost, one to a Jap­anese fighter that rammed it, and the other ditched after running out of fuel on the trip back.

On 27 November eighty-one bombers again took off for the Nakajima factory, but clouds obscured the target and none hit it; on 3 December seventy B-29S attacked it, again with dismal re­sults. Hansell’s crews had few answers for the jet stream, which pushed the Superfortresses along at a staggering 445 mph over the ground—much too fast for the Norden bombsight to compensate for its effects.62 If the crews flew perpendicular to the winds, they still could not correct for the wind velocity. If they flew into the winds, they risked flying so slowly that they would become easy prey for antiaircraft batteries. Hansell tried flying upwind during a 13 December raid against the Mitsubishi aircraft engine factory at Nagoya and had thirty-one bombers damaged by flak, although bombing accuracy showed marked improvements.63