• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1108 0

members set off downstream to find help, braving white waters and logjams. On 10 September they met a child, who took them to her village. Its inhabitants proved to be Russian, sure enough. By sign language, the bedraggled Americans communicated their plight. Over the days which followed, Soviet aircraft located the other fliers and dropped them welcoming notes: “Good day, comrades, you are in the USSR,” together with supplies and instructions. When boats finally reached the desperate men, one rescuer described them as “emaciated and bearded, wearing ragged and tattered overalls that hardly covered the knees. One wore a leather jacket and battered shoes while the other had a foot covered by rags while the other foot was tied into a pistol holster. Their faces and bodies were so lacerated by midges that sores and contusions had formed.” The Russians interned McGlinn and his men, along with the crews of thirty-six other American aircraft which landed in Siberia. The first fliers were returned home only in January 1945. The Soviets retained all U.S. aircraft which fell into their hands.

THE USAAF was embarrassed by the deluge of Stateside publicity accorded to the new giant bombers, which caught the public imagination. Commanders knew how little, in reality, the planes were achieving. So did their British allies. In August Gen. Henry Pownall, Mountbatten’s chief of staff, urged withdrawal of the B-29 groups from China. He pointed out that two and a half tons of supplies could be sent to the Chinese Nationalists for each ton being delivered to support the USAAF, “but they continue with these futile operations544 on a scale of attack that can’t affect the course of the war at all.” Radar bombing, in chronic poor weather over Japan, was accurate only to two miles. Enemy action accounted for a third of B-29 losses; the remainder were technical or self-inflicted. On 14 December, before a mission against a Bangkok bridge, pilots questioned the risks of dropping mixed loads of five-hundred-and thousand-pound bombs, which seemed liable to overtake each other and collide in the air. They were overruled and threatened with court-martial if they did not fly. Over the target, bombs indeed exploded amid the American formations. Four aircraft were lost. On other occasions, gun blisters blew out, engine failures persisted. Aircrew morale plumbed new depths.

It was evident that matters could not continue in this way, and they did not. On 29 August 1944 Curtis LeMay, youngest major-general in the service, flew to India to assume direction of the XXth Bomber Command. On 8 September he accompanied a B-29 mission as an observer. Fresh from Europe, where he had established a formidable reputation, he was dismayed by what he now saw. He quickly reported to Washington about the XXth. “They are very poor545 as a combat outfit,” he wrote to Arnold’s chief of staff on 12 September. “…They lack combat experience. Everyone is working like hell on the wrong things. In other words, they are finding out how to fight the same as our first outfits did at the beginning of the war, by the trial and error method. I don’t think we can afford to operate our B-29s in that manner.” In another letter a week later, he lamented the poor quality of both aircrew and staff officers, and demanded combat-experienced personnel: “The B-29 outfits are being filled546 with people who have spent the war behind a desk in the U.S.” He noted that crews were far more frightened by the perils of overladen take-offs from poor strips than by those of meeting the enemy. With key airfields in China lost to the Japanese Ichigo ground offensive, LeMay concluded: “The operations of this Command under the conditions existing in this theater are basically unsound.”

Initially, senior officers recoiled from accepting the blow to U.S. prestige involved in abandoning B-29 missions from China. Not until late in December did Gen. Albert Wedemeyer bow to the inevitable. Only in March 1945 did the XXth Bomber Command begin to pack up in India to move, with its aircraft and cargoes which included