Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [198]
LeMay had gone ahead of them. On 9 December Arnold wrote to him: “The B-29 project is important to me547, because I am convinced that it is vital to the future of the Army Air Forces.” In January 1945 the young general was transferred from the XXth to XXIst Bomber Command, taking over its headquarters on Guam. It was in this role that he launched the offensive against Japan which thereafter would be indelibly associated with his name.
Curtis Emerson LeMay was born into a modest family in Columbus, Ohio, where he worked his way through college. He displayed remarkably precocious technical skills, which persisted into his later life—while air force chief of staff, he built a colour television set with his own hands. He gained an army flying cadetship in 1928, and became recognized in the ensuing decade as a master of the techniques of pilotage, engineering and navigation, a tough trainer and strict disciplinarian. The coming of war brought him swift promotion. He was effective, fearless, driven, tactically innovative. In Europe he established a reputation as one of the most brilliant officers in the Eighth Air Force, who led from the front. He was respected rather than loved: aloof in manner, coldly focused in approach, precise and blunt in speech. Rueful pilots christened him “Iron Ass.” LeMay’s men cherished a legend that he once halted his jeep beside an aircraft being refuelled, causing a sergeant timidly to remonstrate about the trademark pipe clamped in his jaw: “Sir, it could ignite gas fumes548.” LeMay responded: “Son, it wouldn’t dare.” His chilling demeanour was not softened by the paralysis of one side of his face, the result of Bell’s palsy. His ruthless assessment of the XXth Bomber Command in India, together with his rapid introduction of new training programmes and tactical methods, convinced Arnold that LeMay was the man to grasp the daunting challenge of running the USAAF’s campaign out of the Marianas.
This too had languished. As the Marines seized island after island of the group through the summer of 1944, close behind them came excavators and graders to create runways and hardstands out of rock and coral. The first wing of 180 B-29s, together with 12,000 air and ground crew necessary to operate them, arrived on Saipan while Japanese stragglers were still at large. On the day of their first mission, three Japanese were killed trying to infiltrate a chow line. After the shock of spotting an enemy soldier shooting at a sentry, one airman was sent home with “combat fatigue.” In January 1945, forty-seven Japanese were taken prisoner a thousand yards from the XXIst Bomber Command’s headquarters. For the fliers, living conditions were primitive. One wrote in dismay of his arrival on Tinian: “I had hoped to find brown-skinned549 native girls, hula skirts, coconut trees and warm sea breezes…Instead, I found sunburned GIs swarming over a desolate coral rock. I wasn’t on a paradise island—I was on a prison island.”
Lt. Philip True’s tour as a navigator with the 9th Bomb Group started badly, when his pilot halted their plane on the stands at Tinian. “Where’s the whiskey?” demanded a half-naked ground technician. “Whiskey?” exclaimed the fliers in bewilderment. There was no whiskey. Their tough, correct Iowan commander, Maj. Dayton Countryman, had vetoed illicit liquor-smuggling from California. Yet on Tinian, they discovered, almost all good things had to be purchased with crates of whiskey—Schenley’s “Black Death” being the preferred brand—shipped in the bomb bays of arriving aircraft.
They lived amid cloying humidity: “Leather began to get mouldy550 after the first few days, and most everything took on a musty odor,” wrote a pilot. Men slept in Quonset huts, ten or twenty together. Officers found themselves digging field latrines. Ground crews were unable to work on aircraft in shorts, for the