Lemay to the Marianas

LeMay was Arnold’s choice for a successor. With the establish­ment of bases in the Marianas, the offensive from China had lost its urgency, and Arnold directed his staff in late September to study the implications of withdrawing the B-29S from Chengtu.83 A month and a half later he told LeMay to prepare to take XX Bomber Command to a new location. Arnold added, “I cannot at this time tell you where you will go or when your bases will be ready” and thus LeMay would likely have to stay put “for a mat­ter of months.”84 HanselPs dismissal changed the equation. More­over, Hansell was a brigadier general, LeMay wore two stars, and LeMay was а в-29 commander who was in-theater and avail­able.8” Arnold ordered LeMay to proceed to Guam, the new site of XXI Bomber Command, and to arrive there immediately after Norstad. Once Norstad conveyed the news to Hansell, Arnold wanted LeMay available to discuss operations with the man that he would replace.

Hansell accepted his relief with a minimum of complaint, though his ten-page, typed letter to Arnold on the eve of his departure from Guam—a highly detailed discussion of problems that he had faced leading XXI Bomber Command—typified his commu­nications with his boss. At the end of his report, Hansell stated: “I feel, on reflection, that I have erred in not passing on to you my problems in more detail. I have felt that my first consider­ation should be to solve my problems as best I could, rather than to send complaints to you. Perhaps I have overdone this concep­tion.”86 Ironically, such lengthy explanations of why he had failed to achieve success probably contributed to Hansell’s relief. In con­trast, LeMay had provided short, pithy summaries of his results directing XX Bomber Command. Those synopses usually con­tained bomb tonnages along with the amount of damage inflicted to the target—“hard” data that Arnold could show his Joint Chief counterparts to justify his control of Twentieth Air Force and its expensive bombers—and that Arnold could himself use as sol­ace that his B-29S were on their way to achieving decisive results. “Statistics of tons of bombs dropped and of sorties flown are eas­ily compiled, seem factual and specific, and are impressive. Pho­tographs of burned-out cities also speak for themselves,” Han – sell later remarked.87

LeMay fully appreciated the desire for tangible results in Wash­ington dc, but his selection to lead XXI Bomber Command stemmed as much from his flexible attitude, especially his willingness to try new bombing methods, as it did from the numbers that he actu­ally produced. The initial bombing by XX Bomber Command, in­cluding several raids after LeMay had taken charge, was partic­ularly poor. A December 1944 study of the command’s first ten missions revealed that only 269 bombs out of 5,554 fell within one thousand feet of the aiming point, followed by the comment: “A look at planes lost on these missions brings the realization that it cost us one в-29 to place twelve 500 G. P. [General Pur­pose] bombs within 1,000 feet of the target.” Arnold underlined that sentence and wrote in the margin beside it, “Oh, Lord!”88 The numbers improved as a result of LeMay’s rigorous training policies, yet LeMay—like Hansell in the Marianas—stressed pre­cision attacks against specific industrial targets.

Not until an 18 December mission against the Chinese city of Hankow did LeMay conduct an area attack. He initially opposed the raid, but ordered it in response to requests from Lieutenant General Albert C. Wedemeyer, commander of American forces in China, and Major General Claire Chennault, Commander of Fourteenth Air Force, to attack the city that was a key staging area for a Japanese offensive. Eighty-four B-29S dropped 511 tons of incendiaries that burned down half of Hankow and produced a smoke cloud that billowed three miles high.89 Even though Ar­nold had not ordered the raid, he wrote Secretary of War Henry Stimson that it provided a valid test of the “efficacy” of firebomb­ing and was significant “from a long range as well as an immedi­ate viewpoint.”90

Arnold was always looking ahead, because he knew that he had limited time to affect the outcome of the Pacific War. Hansell later reflected upon the overriding importance of achieving rapid results: “‘Time’ had become an obsessive compulsion—the time for the invasion of Japan. Washington placed great stress upon the end of the war, emphasizing that this carnage must not go on a single week longer than necessary to achieve victory.”91 The pro­gressive vision had indeed become an obsession for Arnold, who realized that the в-29 offensive from the Marianas was the Army Air Forces’ last, and best, chance to secure the ideals espoused by his friend and mentor Billy Mitchell—which included service in­dependence. “I am still worried,” he wrote Norstad on 14 Janu­ary. “We have built up ideas in the Army, the Navy, and among civilians of what we can do with our B-29S. . . and yet. . . our average delivery rate against Japan is very, very small. . . . Unless something drastic is done to change this condition soon, it will not be long before the в-29 is just another tactical airplane.”92 Three days later he collapsed with his fourth heart attack of the war. The pursuit of decisive results with air power would continue, but, during its key phase in the Pacific War, the newly minted five-star Commanding General of the Army Air Forces would no longer appear at the forefront of the в-29 campaign. Instead, the stan­dard bearer of the Twentieth Air Force’s effort to score a knock­out blow now became its Chief of Staff, Larry Norstad.

LeMay and Norstad had communicated frequently during LeMay’s tenure with XX Bomber Command, and both shared Ar­nold’s views about the b-29’s importance to the war effort as well as to future force structures. “I think we all agree that the compo­sition and size of our post war Air Force depends a great deal on the в-29 performance in the Pacific,” LeMay wrote Norstad on 16 November 1944.95 Norstad concurred, telling LeMay after his assumption of command in Guam: “I am convinced that the XXI Bomber Command, more than any other service or weapon, is in a position to do something decisive.”94 Those perspectives mir­rored Arnold’s, and his guiding hand never truly left Twentieth Air Force as he read mission reports and message traffic from his recuperation bed in Coral Gables, Florida. Still, Arnold could not actively lead the force that mattered most to him, and he would have to count on Norstad and LeMay to make his vision of rapid success a reality. “General Arnold was absolutely determined to get results out of this weapons system,” LeMay recalled.95 The new commander of XXI Bomber Command did not intend to dis­appoint his ailing boss.

LeMay soon realized that satisfying Arnold—and Norstad— would not be easy. LeMay was especially upset with the staff that Hansell had left him, which he described to Norstad as “practi­cally worthless.” He further told Norstad that Rosy O’Donnell’s Seventy-third Wing was “in bad shape” and that “you better start warming up a sub for Rosy in case we have to put him in. … I get the impression from Rosy on down they think the obstacles too many and the opposition too heavy to crash through and get the bombs on target.”96 Much as he had with XX Bomber Com­mand, LeMay started an intensive training program for his crews in the Marianas. Yet he discovered that training alone would not cure the problems that had plagued Hansell.

Like his predecessor, LeMay believed in the merits of high alti­tude, daylight, precision bombing against specific targets essential to enemy war production. That faith could not overcome the ob­stacles of wind, clouds, and distance. Jet stream winds continued

to scatter bombs, clouds frequently obscured targets, and 1,600- mile flights to and from cities like Tokyo and Nagoya tested the limits of the b-29’s range, often leading to ditchings on the way back to the Marianas. From his 20 January assumption of com­mand through the first week of March, LeMay conducted six precision raids, and all produced miserable results. A 27 January attack by seventy-six B-29S on Hansell’s nemesis, the Tokyo Na- kajima aircraft plant, placed no bombs on the target at a cost of nine Superfortresses.97