Chinese Army, had been promoting the bombing of Hankow, the riverside city on the Yangtze five hundred miles inland from Shanghai from which Japan supplied its Asian mainland armies. With a renewed Japanese drive in interior China in November Chennault pressed for a Hankow attack. LeMay resisted diverting his command from Japanese home-island targets; the Joint Chiefs had to compel his participation. B-24's and B-25's were also massing for the strike; Chennault particularly wanted LeMay to load his aircraft with incendiaries and bomb from 20,000 feet rather than from above 30,000 feet in order to sow a denser pattern. LeMay reserved one aircraft in five for high explosives. Seventy-seven B-29's took part in the raid on December 18 and burned the Hankow river district down; fires raged out of control for three days. The lesson was not lost on Washington, nor on LeMay.
At Los Alamos the same week Groves, Parsons, Conant, Oppenheimer, Kistiakowsky, Ramsey and several other leaders met in Oppenheimer's office to discuss preparing Pumpkins — they called them blockbusters — for Tibbets' 509th Composite Group. The first Fat Man design, the 1222, had already been changed because it had proved so difficult to assemble — assembly required inserting, threading nuts onto and tightening more than 1,500 bolts — and redesign meant the loss of about 80 percent of the tooling work done at the Pacific Aviation Company in Los Angeles through the autumn. The first unit of a new, simpler design, the 1291, would be ready in three days, on December 22. “Captain Parsons said that the blockbuster production for the 1291 gadget between 15 February and 15 March would require a minimum of 30 blockbusters,” the minutes of the meeting report, “so that each B-29 could drop at least two…
An additional 20 blockbusters should be produced for H.E. testing… Following that, 75 units should be produced for overseas shipment.”
Groves wanted none of it. He wanted no dummy 129l's drop-tested outside the continental United States and he saw no reason to build 75 Pumpkins for overseas target practice for Tibbets' crews. It was the end of 1944 and he was feeling the pressure of accumulating Manhattan Project delays: “General Groves indicated that too much valuable time was being taken from other problems to devote time to the blockbuster program.” Conant asked how long the blockbuster program would have to continue; Parsons answered combatively that it would have to continue as long as Tibbets' group operated so that 509th crews could maintain their bombing skills. He relented to reveal that “Colonel Tibbets' Group expected to reach peak combat training by 1 July.”
Since Parsons had not succeeded in person in convincing Groves of the importance of bomb-assembly and bombing practice he wrote the general a forceful memorandum on the day after Christmas. There were major differences, he pointed out, between the “gun gadget” and the “implosion gadget,” particularly in terms of final assembly:
It is believed fair to compare the assembly of the gun gadget to the normal field assembly of a torpedo, as far as mechanical tests are involved… The case of the implosion gadget is very different, and is believed comparable in complexity to rebuilding an airplane in the field. Even this does not fully express the difficulty, since much of the assembly involves bare blocks of high explosives and, in all probability, will end with the securing in position of at least thirty-two boosters and detonators, and then connecting these to firing circuits, including special coaxial cables and high voltage condenser circuit… I believe that anyone familiar with advance base operations… would agree that this is the most complex and involved operation which has ever been attempted outside of a combined laboratory and ammunition depot.
Parsons' simple and compelling point: the assembly team as well as the bombardiers needed practice. Groves relented; Tibbets got his Pumpkins. More conventional bombs were falling regularly now on Japan, if not yet to devastating effect. Robert Guillain, the French journalist, remembers the first night raid over Tokyo at the end of November:
Suddenly there was an odd, rhythmic buzzing that filled the night with a deep, powerful pulsation and made my whole house vibrate: the marvelous sound of the B-29s passing invisibly through a nearby corner of sky, pursued by the barking of antiaircraft fire… I went up on my terrace roof… The B-29s caught in the sweeping searchlight beams went tranquilly on their way followed by the red flashes of ack-ack bursts which could not reach them at that altitude. A pink light spread across the horizon behind a near hill, growing bigger, bloodying the whole sky. Other red splotches lit up like nebulas elsewhere on the horizon. It was soon to be a familiar sight. Feudal Tokyo was called Edo, and the people there had always been terrified by the frequent accidental fires they euphemistically called “flowers of Edo.” That night, all Tokyo began to blossom.
While Parsons and Groves were debating Pumpkins, Lauris Norstad, who had succeeded Hansell in Washington as Hap Arnold's chief of staff when Hansell moved to the Marianas, passed along word to his predecessor that a trial fire raid on Nagoya, Japan's third-largest city, was an “urgent requirement.” Hansell resisted. “With great difficulty,” he wrote Norstad, he had “implanted the principle that our mission is the destruction of primary targets by sustained and determined attacks using precision bombing methods both visual and radar” and he was “beginning to get results.” Ironically, he feared that area bombing would slacken his crews' hard-won skills. Norstad sympathized but insisted that Nagoya was only a test, “a special requirement resulting from the necessity of future planning.” Nearly one hundred of Hansen's B-29's flew incendiaries to Nagoya, at the southern end of the Nobi Plain two hundred miles southwest of Tokyo, on January 3, 1945, and started numerous small fires that resisted coalescing.
In three months of hard flying, taking regular losses, Hansell had managed to destroy none of his nine high- priority targets. His determination not to rise to the bait Washington was offering — Billy Mitchell, the Air Force's earliest strategic champion, had pointed out the vulnerability of Japanese cities to fire as long ago as 1924 — doomed his command. Norstad flew out to Guam to relieve Hansell of duty on January 6. Curtis LeMay arrived from China the next day. “LeMay is an operator,” Norstad told Hansell, “the rest of us are planners. That's all there is to it.” As if to encourage the new commander to independence, Hap Arnold suffered a major heart attack on January 15 and withdrew for a time to Miami sunshine to heal.
LeMay officially took command on January 20. He had 345 B-29's in the Marianas and more arriving. He had 5,800 officers and 46,000 enlisted men. And he had all Hansell's problems to solve: the jet stream; the terrible Japanese weather, seven days of visual bombing a month with luck and not much weather prediction because the Soviets refused to cooperate from Siberia, whence the weather came; B-29 engines that overheated and burned out while straining up the long climb to altitude; indifferent bombing:
General Arnold needed results. Larry Norstad had made that very plain. In effect he had said: “You go ahead and get results with the B-29. If you don't get results, you'll be fired. If you don't get results, also, there'll never be any Strategic Air Forces of the Pacific… If you don't get results it will mean eventually a mass amphibious invasion of Japan, to cost probably half a million more American lives.”
LeMay set his crews to intensive training. They were beginning to get radar units and he saw to it that they were able at least to identify the transition from water to land. He ordered high-altitude precision strikes but experimented with firebombing as well; 159 tons on Kobe on February 3 burned out a thousand buildings. Not good enough: “another month of indifferent operations,” LeMay calls February:
When I summed it all up, I realized that we had not accomplished very much during those six or seven weeks. We were still going in too high, still running into those big jet stream winds upstairs. Weather was almost always bad.
I sat up nights, fine-tooth-combing all the pictures we had of every target which we had attacked or scouted. I examined Intelligence reports as well.
Did actually very much in the way of low-altitude flak exist up there in Japan? I just couldn't find it.
There was food for thought in this.
There was food for thought as well in two compelling February horrors. One occurred halfway around the world, in Europe, where LeMay had flown so often before. The other began nearby. The hardbitten general from Ohio who despised failure and was failing in Japan could not have avoided learning in detail of both.
The European event was the bombing of Dresden, the capital of the German state of Saxony, on the Elbe
