30,000 feet through their Norden bomb-sights at progressively smaller target circles limed on the ground. Crews that had flown in cloudy Europe wondered why they were training in visual bombing; an odd evasive maneuver instructed them at least in the explosive potential of the unknown weapon they would carry. Tibbets briefed no one on the atomic bomb but directed his crews to nose their aircraft over into a sharp 155-degree diving turn immediately after bomb release. Diving the huge bombers rapidly increased their airspeed; by perfecting the maneuver the crews could escape ten miles from the delayed explosion, “safe from destruction” by a bomb of 20,000 tons TNT equivalent, writes Groves, “by a factor of two.” Before they practiced their diving turns they dropped bombs of concrete and bombs filled with HE. These crudely riveted Fat Man imitations, painted bright orange for visibility, they called Pumpkins. The 509th worked hard; the winter wind howled over the Wendover reservation, trapping tumbleweeds on the barbed-wire fences; crews careened into Salt Lake City on weekends to blow out. Tibbets opened their mail, bugged their telephones, had them followed and shipped off those who broke security to the secure but miserable Aleutians for the duration of the war. He held authority over 225 officers and 1,542 enlisted men. With his silverplated requisitions he commandeered from around the world the best pilots, bombardiers, navigators and flight engineers he could find.
One of them, Captain Robert Lewis of Brooklyn, New York, stocky and blond, twenty-six years old, an abrasive but gifted pilot whom Tibbets had personally trained, had spent part of the summer of 1944 at Grand Island, Nebraska, teaching a senior officer with hundreds of combat hours behind him to fly B-29's. Thus checked out, Major General Curtis LeMay rode a C-54 to India late in August to take over the 20th Bomber Command, based in India with forward airfields in China from which it was attempting with fewer than two hundred B-29's to bomb Japan. The bombers had to ferry their own fuel and ordnance from India to China over the Himalayas before each mission — seven supply flights for each bombing strike, up to twelve gallons burned for each one gallon delivered. “It didn't work,” LeMay writes in his autobiography. “No one could have made it work. It was founded on an utterly absurd logistic basis. Nevertheless, our entire Nation howled like a pack of wolves for an attack on the Japanese homeland.”
Curtis LeMay was a wild man, hard-driving and tough, a bomber pilot, a big-game hunter, a chewer of cigars, dark, fleshy, smart. “I'll tell you what war is about,” he once said bluntly — but he said it after the war — “you've got to kill people, and when you've killed enough they stop fighting.” Through most of the war he seems to have held to the preference for precision bombing over area bombing that had distinguished the U.S. Air Force from the British since Churchill's and Cherwell's intervention of 1942. Sometimes in Europe precision bombing had served, though never decisively. Over Japan, so far, it had failed. And failure was LeMay's
His father had been a failure, an odd-job drifter, forever moving his family around. The LeMays lived all over Ohio, in Pennsylvania, out in the wilds in Montana, in California. Curtis Emerson LeMay, born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1906, was the first of seven children. The two memories of early childhood he chooses to offer in his autobiography are linked. Of first seeing an airplane and chasing it madly: “I wanted not only the substance of the mysterious object, not only that part I could have touched with my hands. I wished also in vague yet unforgettable fashion for the drive and speed and energy of the creature.” And of compulsively running away from home: “truancy” that “bordered on mania,” his mother told him. “I had to grow older,” LeMay writes, “and be burdened with a lot of responsibilities, and begin to nourish ambition — I had to do these things before I could manage to control my temper and discipline my activities.”
He delivered telegrams and packages and boxes of candy. He delivered newspapers, sold newspapers, wholesaled newspapers to delivery boys, supporting himself and sometimes his family: “When the grocer hesitates about putting that latest basket of groceries on the bill, then you'd better be ready to come up with cash in hand. Very early in life I was convinced bitterly of this necessity… The larder was a vague mystery which Pop didn't bother to penetrate.” LeMay resented the missing childhood but moved on. He paid his own way through Ohio State by working nights at a steel foundry. ROTC in college led to the Ohio National Guard because the Guard had higher priority on Army flying-school enrollments than the Army Reserve. He won his wings in 1929 and never looked back: mess officer, navigation officer, General Headquarters navigator, B-10's, B-17's. In England in 1943 and 1944 he worked night and day to improve precision bombing. He won quick promotion.
Arnold sent him to the Pacific because he needed someone who could get the job done:
General Arnold, fully committed to the B-29 program all along, had crawled out on a dozen limbs about a thousand times, in order to achieve physical resources and sufficient funds to build those airplanes and get them into combat… So he finds they're not doing too well. He has to keep juggling missions and plans and people until the B-29s
The B-29 had to be used, that is, successfully used, or men who had staked their careers and their convictions would be shamed, resources squandered that might have aided elsewhere in the war, lives lost futilely and millions of dollars wasted. The justification recurs.
The first B-29 to arrive in the Marianas landed on Saipan on October 12, 1944. Brigadier General Haywood S. Hansell, Jr., assigned to lead the 21st Bomber Command, flew it. As Arnold's chief of staff Hansell had helped formulate the doctrine of precision bombing and believed strongly in its central premise — that wars could be won by selectively destroying the enemy's key industries of war. A stream of new bombers followed the new commander out to the Marianas; the first U.S. aircraft to fly over Tokyo since the Doolittle raid of 1942 was a B-29 on November 1 soaring high and light on a photoreconnaissance mission. A French journalist living in Tokyo at the time, Robert Guillain, remembers his sense of anticlimax:
The city waited. Millions of lives were suspended in the silence of the radiant autumn afternoon. For a moment, antiaircraft fire shook the horizon with a noise of doors slamming in the sky. Then — nothing: the all-clear was sounded without sight of a plane. The radio announced that a single B-29 had flown over the capital without dropping any bombs.
That seemed a reprieve and for a time only reconnaissance missions disturbed the ill-defended city. “One day the visitor finally appeared, flying at 35,000 feet,” Guillain continues; “he even left his signature chalked on the blue sky: a line of pure white like some living thing that seemed to nose an almost imperceptible silver fly ahead of it.” Back in the Marianas Hansell was teaching his men to navigate together, to fly in formation; they had trained in the United States only as individual crews.
Hansell received his first target directive on November 11. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had approved it and it reflected their conviction that bombing and naval blockade alone could not bring the Pacific war to a timely end. In September the Combined Chiefs — British and American together — had established a planning date for the end of the war: eighteen months after the defeat of Germany. The U.S. Joint Chiefs judged an invasion of the Japanese home islands essential to achieve that goal. The target directive Hansell received therefore gave first priority to the precision bombing of the Japanese aircraft industry (to cripple Japanese air defenses before an American invasion), second priority to supporting Pacific operations (MacArthur was even then reoccupying the Philippines, returning as he had promised he would) and third priority to testing the efficacy of area incendiary attacks. These priorities, putting precision bombing first, suited Hansell's own.
His crews flew their first raid on Japan from Saipan on November 24. Their target was the Musashi aircraft engine factory north of Tokyo ten miles from the Imperial Palace. A hundred planes began the mission. Seventeen aborted; six were unable to release their bombs. Flak was heavy and the target buried in undercast. But totally unexpected at the high altitude at which the bombers flew was a 140-mile-per-hour wind. They were blown with it over the target and their ground speed was therefore nearly 450 mph, impossible for the bombardiers. As a result only twenty-four planes managed to bomb the factory area — the rest scattered their loads over the docks and warehouses around Tokyo Bay — and only sixteen bombs hit the target. “I did not anticipate the extremely high wind velocities above thirty thousand feet,” Hansell said later, “and they came as a very disagreeable surprise.” The Air Force had discovered the jet stream.
LeMay was then still working with his 20th Bomber Command out of India and China. Supporting the indifferent military campaigns of Chiang Kai-shek was an activity he abhorred but was sometimes forced to perform. For six months Claire Chennault, the leathery Texan who headed the U.S. air staff assigned to the Nationalist
