Beyond Valor Read online

  Ed Shahinian, a B-29 gunner based on Saipan, explained, “The B-29 was the best airplane made at the time.6 It had remote control gun sights. It wasn’t handheld like a B-17, where it’s 65 below zero and you’ve got this heavy suit on and you’re freezing to death. We were air-conditioned and heated. My guns were 40 feet away from me. I never touched a machine gun. I had control. As long as I kept [the enemy aircraft] in the reticle of the gun sight, theoretically the computer would track it and would shoot it down.”

  During the first weeks of 1945, Red Erwin received the news he’d anxiously awaited for almost two years: he was going to war, to the very front line of combat.

  The City of Los Angeles was being sent from Kansas to the western Pacific to strike targets on the Japanese home islands.

  A B-29 Superfortress. (US Air Force)

  In February 1945, a thirty-eight-year-old general sat at a desk on an island in the western Pacific, smoked his pipe, thumbed through various military manuals, and scribbled numbers down on paper. He was thinking about bombs, guns, bullets, gravity, wind speeds, explosions, weather, timetables, and fires. He was thinking about mathematics. And he was thinking about death. His name was Curtis E. LeMay. He was Red Erwin’s commander, the chief of the Twenty-First Bomber Command.

  LeMay held much of the destiny of World War II in his hands, and he knew it. If he could just figure out the math. But no matter how many times he ran the numbers, he couldn’t get them to work. He was only a few weeks into his job, and he knew he was on the verge of being fired. After months of combat, the B-29 project was, thus far, a spectacular failure.

  When LeMay was hired, he was told by Brig. Gen. Lauris Norstad, chief of staff for the Twentieth Air Force, “You go ahead and get results with the B-29.7 If you don’t get results, you’ll be fired. If you don’t get results, also, there’ll never be any strategic Air Force of the Pacific.” Norstad added, “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.”

  Based in a corrugated-steel Quonset hut at North Field on the island of Guam that housed the US Army Air Force operations center, Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay was in a race against time.

  For nearly seven months, B-29s flying from India, China, and from the recently captured Marianas Islands of Guam, Saipan, and Tinian had pounded away at Japanese targets on two thousand missions, dropping millions of tons of bombs at military complexes, airfields, factories, docks, refineries, and chemical plants in Japan and occupied Southeast Asia.

  Since the campaign began in June 1944, almost a hundred B-29s had been lost in action to enemy fighters, antiaircraft fire, severe weather, and equipment malfunctions. And thus far the Superfortresses hadn’t fully destroyed a single strategic target. The campaign was, by any measure, a fiasco and a colossal waste of resources.

  LeMay’s predecessor, Gen. Heywood S. Hansell, who was considered by General Norstad as suffering from an “utter absolute complete and irreversible lack of competence,”8 was fired in January 1945. LeMay had been based in China as Hansell’s deputy, and then he was sent to Guam, where the main bombing effort was now based, and named as Hansell’s replacement and told to salvage the mess. But he couldn’t figure out the logistics.

  LeMay had been nicknamed “Old Iron Pants” by his soldiers, and he was the youngest two-star general in the army. A big-game hunter, he had a brilliant, ruthless intellect, just the kind you need when you’re trying to win a war. At the same time, he suffered from Bell’s palsy, a condition that partially froze the muscles of his mouth into a permanent frown, so he constantly chomped on a pipe or cigar to distract from the effect. He was as blunt as a blowtorch, and he inspired fear and awe in allies and enemies alike. “After working with that man,”9 recalled an officer, “he seems almost like a machine—or a god. Fire a thousand questions at him in an hour. If he’ll answer you, you can bet that 99 percent of the answers will be right. He doesn’t open his mouth often, but when he does you better damn well listen—and act. He means every single syllable.”

  Robert Morgan, an experienced bomber pilot, offered a vivid description of General LeMay: “With his jowly, scowling face,10 his thick dark hair, and smoldering gaze, he gave many the impression that running a bombing campaign wasn’t quite stimulating enough for him, that he wouldn’t mind taking apart a few Quonset huts with his bare hands. His speaking style—barely audible sentence fragments murmured through clenched teeth—reinforced his aura as a borderline sociopath.”

  Curtis LeMay had guts to spare. A career military man who had grown up in Ohio, he personally led a series of hazardous B-17 bombing missions over Europe as a colonel and commander of the 305th Bombardment Group of the Eighth Air Force, including an epic mission against the Nazi’s largest Messerschmitt aircraft factory at Regensburg, for which the bombers launched from bases in England and landed at bases in North Africa to avoid fighter attacks during the return leg.

  He was promoted to brigadier general in September 1943 and to major general in March 1944, and then he was sent to the China-Burma-India theater in August 1944. But B-29 operations from China were very hard to resupply by air over the Himalayan Mountains, and they could only hit targets in southern Japan.

  In the summer of 1944, after weeks of intense combat, the US Marines and Army finally captured a staging point from which the B-29s could effectively strike all of Japan: the Marianas Islands. This included Guam, a kidney bean–shaped coral island of jungle hills and ravines, measuring 10 miles wide by 30 miles long. Construction crews hardened and expanded the Japanese military runways on Guam and neighboring Saipan and Tinian Islands to accommodate the massive amount of B-29 traffic: 180 planes for each of five runways. By late 1944, the B-29s were gearing up to strike the enemy in force.

  “Hell,” said LeMay, “I’m not here to win friends.11 I’m here to win a war. And the only way to do that is for my men to drop the max weight of bombs on the target.” So far, it just wasn’t working.

  LeMay had tried, it seemed, almost everything. He sent B-29s over Japan at midday, at night, in small groups, and in two-hundred-plane formations, but reconnaissance photos always showed only minor damage.

  “I sat up nights,”12 LeMay remembered, “fine-tooth combing all the pictures we had of every target which we had attacked or scouted.”

  For days, LeMay huddled with his staff to come up with new approaches that might accomplish their goal.

  “He was around a few days, said almost nothing to anybody,13 was what, by civilian standards, would be called rude to many people,” according to an army public affairs officer who witnessed LeMay’s first weeks at Guam. “He was a big, husky, healthy, rather stocky, full-faced, black-haired man.”

  LeMay had blunt opinions on military strategy, once declaring, “In a war, you’ve got to try to keep at least one punch ahead14 of the other guy all the time. A war is a very tough kind of proposition. If you don’t get the enemy, he gets you.”

  On another occasion, he explained, “I’ll tell you what war is about.15 You’ve got to kill people, and when you’ve killed enough they stop fighting.”

  The worst problem for LeMay and his B-29s was the jet stream, a mysterious natural phenomenon that was almost unknown until November 24, 1944. On that day, a force of 110 Superfortresses took off for Tokyo and collided with a force of nature that essentially killed the American strategy of high-altitude precision bombing. This was the jet stream, and it consisted of multiple layers of unpredictable hurricane blasts of wind up to 500 miles an hour that moved from Siberia to Japan at altitudes around 30,000 feet, close to the stratosphere. Until the B-29s arrived, few planes had ventured that high.

  Until then, the Americans had been trying to conduct precision bombing raids on Japanese military and industrial targets from the high altitudes the B-29 was designed for. But only 10 percent of the bombs were hitting their targets due to constant cloud cover and an unexpectedly strong jet stream that scattered the free-f
alling bombs far from their targets.

  “When we got over Japan we found that they had terrific trade winds at 30,000 feet,” recalled B-29 crewman James Krantz. “On one mission when we went on the bombing run we were facing a headwind of 150 miles an hour and we were cruising at 200. Which meant we were only going 50 miles per hour ground speed. It took us two to three times as long as it ever did on the average bomb run. We just didn’t know about these winds.”

  Depending on how they approached it, the jet stream could push B-29s into dangerously high speeds or slow them down to zero forward motion over the ground. Regardless of how effective their cutting-edge Norden bombsights were or how skilled the bombardiers were, soon after the bombs were released, the jet stream and weather at lower altitudes would scatter the bombs off target. If any bombs connected with their objective, it was a matter of pure luck from random wind effects. Precision high-altitude bombing, the main strategy of the US Army Air Force, was impossible in these conditions.

  General LeMay wrote out countless calculations on paper, pored through bombing manuals, after-action reports, and data charts, and tried to make things work. But he couldn’t figure it out. It looked as if the B-29 project were doomed to failure.

  On February 11, 1945, in the midst of LeMay’s frustration, Red Erwin and his crew arrived on Guam in the City of Los Angeles after a 7,000-mile series of hopscotch flights from Kansas. Soon, most of the rest of the 314th Bombardment Wing arrived. They were commanded by Brig. Gen. Thomas S. Power, who reported to LeMay.

  The Bronx-born Power had flown B-24s in Italy before becoming a highly successful troubleshooter in the B-29 training program. Power was a LeMay Mini-Me who, according to one author, was “so cold, hard and demanding16 that several of his colleagues and subordinates have flatly described him as sadistic.” When LeMay was later asked if Power was sadistic, LeMay noted approvingly, “He was. He was sort of an autocratic bastard.17 He was my best wing commander on Guam. He got things done.” Gen. Horace M. Wade, who later worked for Power in the postwar Strategic Air Command, described Power as mean, cruel, and unforgiving. He added, “I used to worry that General Power was not stable.”18 For LeMay, Power was the perfect deputy.

  Red soon found out it was rough living for the B-29 crews on Guam. Rats and various exotic jungle critters were frequent guests in the barracks and the mess hall. The food was mediocre at best, but for variety, you could pick coconuts and bananas in the jungle. The weather alternated mostly between constant rain and mind-numbing humidity. They slept on hard bunks either in field tents or a steel-shelled Quonset hut.

  Some Japanese troops were still hiding in distant caves, and they occasionally harassed the Americans with small-arms fire and food robberies. The story was told of a quiet Japanese soldier who slipped into the chow line but was busted when he bowed to thank the cooks for his food.

  In their downtime, the US airmen had few options other than playing cards, reading, and watching movies at night. The post exchange offered Hershey bars and Pepsodent, and smuggled liquor was available for a price, with Schenley’s Black Label being the most popular. In Guam’s relaxed, humid climate, many B-29 crewmembers chopped off their long khaki trousers to make shorts.

  Ed Shahinian, a B-29 gunner19 on Saipan, was greeted with a macabre image his first day on the island. When shown his assigned quarters, he saw uniforms hanging in place over freshly made beds. “Hey, we can’t go there,” he protested, “this place is occupied.” The response was, “Don’t worry about it. They’re all dead.” Shahinian recalled, “That’s our first day. And I really got a little bit discouraged, you know. What the hell am I doing here? Mommy, I want to go home. The whole crew was 18 or 19. We had an old guy of 26, and we called him Pops.”

  As the radio operator aboard the City of Los Angeles, Red’s job was critical, just like that of every other crewman. He had to orchestrate coded radio communications back to the base at Guam, manage the intercom communication within the plane, and meticulously maintain the radio equipment. It was a job that demanded intense concentration, technical skill, keen judgment, and the ability to keep cool under fire, all of which Red had in spades. More than one B-29er called Red the best radio operator in the squadron. He was also the designated first-aid man for the front compartment of the plane; gunner Herb Schnipper was the first-aid man for the rear compartment.

  Red intensely studied the first-aid manuals and medical gear so he would be ready to act as a field medic in any emergency likely to happen on the plane, such as bullet and shrapnel wounds, burn wounds, blood loss, and shock. He learned to bandage gaping wounds, inject morphine, and administer plasma—whatever it took to keep his crewmates alive until the plane returned to Guam.

  When Lt. Col. Eugene Strouse, the squadron commander, sometimes rode aboard the City of Los Angeles, he observed Red, squeezed into the small radio compartment during long hours of inactivity, and noticed something unusual. He couldn’t explain it precisely, but somehow, Strouse recalled, it seemed the young airman was “in companionship with the Lord.”

  One time, when Strouse’s superior, Col. Carl Storrie, was aboard the City of Los Angeles, the notoriously profane Storrie was heard loosing a string of colorful phrases. And then Red said through the plane’s internal interphone circuit, “Lord, please don’t pay any attention to the colonel. He talks this way all the time.”

  Soon after the 314th Bombardment Wing unpacked their bags, they were ordered to prepare for their first mission: an attack on Tokyo. The raid was to be led by General Power, and it was scheduled for February 25, 1945.

  Strategists in Washington had been urging General LeMay and his predecessor, General Hansell, to use incendiary bombs in addition to conventional explosive demolition bombs in the hope of igniting fires that would destroy military targets, especially the aviation industry, and expand the firebombing into civilian areas of the cities, which housed smaller feeder factories and workshops among civilian housing.

  But Hansell and LeMay resisted, clinging to the hope they could somehow make conventional high-altitude precision attacks with demolition bombs successful. Gradually, however, LeMay became receptive to the idea of using incendiaries, because he realized high-altitude bombing just wasn’t working. He also knew if he didn’t produce better results, his days in command were numbered. In the meantime, hundreds of thousands of civilians and Allied servicemen were being killed across the Asian and Pacific theaters, and those who had been taken prisoner were suffering horrific tortures and abuses at the hands of their Japanese captors.

  “I had to do something,”20 recalled LeMay, “and I had to do something fast.” He made a momentous decision: it was time to firebomb civilian areas in Japan.

  The idea of attacking civilian areas of Japan with incendiaries was not altogether new. In a 1937 analysis for the Air Corps Tactical School titled “Japan as an Objective for Air Attack,” Capt. Thomas D. White observed, “Large sections of Japanese cities21 are built of flimsy and highly flammable materials. The earthquake disaster of 1924 bears witness to the fearful destruction that may be inflicted by incendiary bombs.” In 1939, legendary Japanese Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, architect of the Pearl Harbor and Midway attacks, admitted as much: “Cities made of wood and paper22 would burn easily. The army talks big, but if war comes and there were large-scale air raids, there is no telling what would happen.”

  LeMay was far from the first warrior to bomb cities. The aerial bombing of urban and civilian areas on a mass scale first occurred during World War I, when German Zeppelins, lighter-than-air dirigibles, bombed London and other targets in England and killed more than 500 people and injured more than 1,300. In the 1920s, British aircraft bombed and strafed military and civilian targets while battling a colonial rebellion in Iraq. The Spanish city of Guernica in 1937 was incinerated by German and Italian bombs, killing at least 250 people and inspiring Pablo Picasso’s famous painting of the city’s agony. In 1940, after German bombs accidentally hit British civilian areas, British Bo
mber Command began targeting German cities in retaliation.

  The Japanese military pioneered the grim concept of area bombing on an industrial scale. From 1938 to 1941, they initiated indiscriminate bombings of urban civilian areas from the air with 200 devastating raids on Chongqing, China, that killed more than 10,000 people, mostly civilians. Japanese aircraft expanded the carnage on the largely defenseless Chinese cities of Shanghai, Beijing, Tianjin, Nanking, and Canton. There were few industrial or military targets in China, so the bombings were solely designed to cause panic, chaos, and mass civilian casualties.

  A concentrated bombing assault on Hamburg, Germany, by British and American aircraft in late July 1943 killed some 25,000 people, and gave birth to a gruesome new spectacle: the man-made firestorm capable of devouring entire cities. In February 1945, a wave of Anglo-American air strikes on military targets around the city of Dresden ignited a firestorm that killed as many as 25,000, and ten days later British bombers killed as many as 20,000 people in attacks on the city of Pforzheim.

  Until now, the Americans had avoided large-scale bombing of civilian areas in Japan. But in early 1945 any official qualms about civilian casualties were evaporating quickly. In fact, three weeks before the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941, Gen. George C. Marshall had predicted, off the record, “If war with the Japanese does come,23 we’ll fight mercilessly. Flying Fortresses will be dispatched immediately to set the paper cities of Japan on fire. There won’t be any hesitation about bombing civilians—it will be all-out.” After three years of war, Marshall’s prediction was coming true. But B-17s were not to be the agent of destruction; B-29s would fill that role.