The End of the Second World War - Part 3 of 6

[OneManGang]

“Into the Air the Secret Rose …”​

It is an axiom that for everything there is a first time. So it is in war. On August 17, 1942 a B-17E Flying Fortress bearing the evocative nickname Yankee Doodle crossed the French coast leading a formation of eleven other Fortresses to bomb rail yards at Rouen. It was Mission 1 of the U. S. 8th Air Force. The Command Pilot of the this mission was a 27-year old Lt. Colonel named Paul W. Tibbets. Tibbets would go on to complete a full 25 mission tour of duty and come to be regarded as not only an excellent pilot but a gifted commander. Now, twenty-five missions may not seem like much, but the life expectancy of a bomber and its crew in 1942-43 was less than fifteen missions.

Upon his return stateside in 1943, Tibbets was assigned to the B-29 project which was in serious trouble. The B-29 was Army Air Forces Chief of Staff General H. Henry "Hap" Arnold’s personal focus and rivaled the Manhattan project in size and scope if not secrecy. The B-29 bomber was pushing aeronautical technology to its limits. It used new engines, a new wing, new cabin-pressurization technology and a remote fire-control system for its defensive gun turrets. The B-29 Superfortress built on the lessons from its predecessors: the classic Boeing B-17 and the equally classic Consolidated B-24. It would be faster, fly higher and carry a larger bomb load farther than either. As with any new and complex aircraft, the Super Fortress had a laundry list of serious problems and defects that had to be overcome before it could be deployed. Tibbets threw himself into the project and the big plane was made ready for its combat debut.

In September of 1944, Tibbets was called to Washington for reassignment. After an extensive security check he was ushered in to the office of Gen. Uzal C. Ent. Gen. Ent told Tibbets of the Top Secret project to develop the atomic bomb and that he, Tibbets, had been tapped to recruit, train and lead the 509th Composite Group. All members of the 509th would go through the same exhaustive background checks and be sworn to absolute secrecy before being allowed to join.

“My job, in brief was to wage atomic war.” Tibbets recalled in his memoirs, “It didn’t matter that I wasn’t a scientist and had very little knowledge of the strange world of neutron, proton, electrons and gamma rays. … The question that worried General Ent and the others, and which now became my problem, was how to drop a bomb of such magnitude without risking damage to or destruction of the airplane that made the delivery.”

Tibbets’ command would be the 509th Composite Group. General Groves gave him a word to use if he absolutely needed something. The code word SILVERPLATE was the sign for absolute priority, nobody and no bureaucratic folderol could interfere with a “SILVERPLATE” priority. It says much for Tibbets that he never once abused this authority.

The B-29 itself was making a less-than-auspicious combat debut. The initial combat units were deployed to China as the 20th Air Force to fulfill a rash promise from FDR to Chiang Kai-Shek that China would be the base for the American bomber offensive against Japan. There were immense problems making that happen. There were no land links from advance bases in India to the airbases in China. Every bullet, bomb and gallon of gas for the B-29s had to be flown in. This reached the point where, at certain times, it took two gallons of fuel to deliver one gallon for the bombers.

Add to that the normal problems associated with introducing a new weapon system into combat and it soon became obvious to all that the “China option” just wasn’t workable. The combat situation in China mitigated against the B-29s as well. The Chinese bases were under constant threat from the Japanese Army which still occupied much of China. Fortunately a solution was at hand.

B-29s over Japan (National Archives)

In the summer of 1944, American forces seized the Marianas Islands. The most important of these were Saipan, Guam and Tinian. All three islands were captured specifically to provide bases for B-29s. Tinian would be the main hub. Operations began on October 12th with the arrival of Gen. Hayward Hansell on board his personal SuperFort, Joltin’ Josie. Within weeks the first strikes were flown against Empire (the Japanese main islands) targets.

Once again, the results were not what they should have been. Bombing accuracy was atrocious and losses were high. B-29s operating at their assigned altitudes above 30,000 ft encountered the jet stream, of which little was known in 1944. The practical problem was that a plane flying against the stream could make little headway, while on the return trip, the tail wind could push the big planes to over 400 mph. “Hap” Arnold was most unhappy and Hansell was soon replaced by Gen. Curtis LeMay who had led the 8th Bomber Command to victory in Europe.

LeMay flew a couple of conventional mission with similar results then stood down and reconsidered. He noted that while Japanese main-assembly plants were as large as any, the subcontractors used “cottage industry” for parts and sub-assemblies. Nearly every Japanese household was engaged in some form of war production, from sewing uniforms to metal work. Most Japanese buildings were of wood and paper construction and fire was a constant hazard. LeMay ordered the defensive gun turrets removed from his planes. On March 8, 1945 he briefed his crews telling them that they would fly at low-level and drop incendiaries on the flammable Japanese cities, and they would be flying at night. The first target city: Tokyo.

Pathfinder bombers flew in first and laid out a giant blazing “X” in the middle of downtown Tokyo, then 282 following aircraft dropped 2000 tons of M-69 napalm sticks into the growing inferno. The storm Japan had unleashed at Pearl Harbor became a firestorm that killed Tokyo.

Hell had come to breakfast.

The fires fed the winds and whole blocks of houses simply disappeared. People running to reach bridges found them gone, and crowds piled up at the approaches. Others jumped into rivers and canals to escape, but some of the smaller canals were boiling. The people looked up at the B-29s with a mixture of awe, hatred, horror … and despair.
– Saga of the Superfortress

Tokyo: the aftermath

No accurate count was ever possible but somewhere between 125,000 and 175,000 Japanese died that night. Sixteen square miles of Tokyo had simply ceased to exist. On an inspection tour after the war LeMay noted grimly that amongst the ashes, in the ruins of nearly every other house, was a drill press or other machine tool.

Other cities would follow. After a visit by 20th Bomber Command one night, 99.6% of the city of Toyama was a black patch of earth. The missions went on. Massive strikes mustering 800 or more bombers against multiple targets flew out of Tinian. The war ground on.

Meanwhile the 509th Composite Group had arrived at Tinian. Tibbets’ crews practiced for atomic missions by dropping a 10,000lb practice bomb called a “Pumpkin.” All the other flyers at Tinian knew was that there was this strange group called the 509th. They lived apart, never flew Empire missions and when they did fly only three or four planes went out at a time. They also quickly discovered that if you asked too many questions, you’d find yourself guarding a bush in the Shemya National Forest in the Aleutians.

One anonymous wag decided he had it all figured out and penned a bit of verse to Explain the Whole Thing:

Into the air the secret rose,
Where they’re going nobody knows;
But we’ll never know where they’ve been.
Don’t ask about results or such,
Unless you want to get in Dutch,
But take it from one who’s sure of the score,
The 509th is winning the war.

That anonymous wit had no idea …