Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [199]
The first American aircraft to overfly Tokyo since the Doolittle raid carried out a photo reconnaissance mission on 1 November 1944. It was followed on the twenty-fourth by 111 bombers. They flew at 2,000 feet until they were 250 miles out from Japan, then climbed to 27,000 feet for the bomb run. Navigation and bomb aiming proved poor. Through the winter of 1944, just 2 percent of attacking aircraft dropped their ordnance within a thousand feet of aiming points. Crews struggled against four hazards: inexperience and inadequate training; continuing aircraft mechanical failures; the stresses of take-off, exceeding the manufacturers’ recommended all-up weight of 132,000 pounds; finally, most serious of all, at high altitude over Japan they encountered unprecedented headwinds, a “jet stream” exceeding a hundred knots, which played havoc with all estimates of scheduling and fuel requirements.
The appointed targets for the XXIst Bomber Command were Japanese aircraft manufacture, war industry and shipping. By January 1945, B-29s had achieved a negligible impact on any of these. Morale slumped. A pilot, Lt. Robert Copeland of the 500th Bomb Group, recorded in his diary bleak verdicts on operations out of Saipan. “3 Dec: The boys are beginning to crack. Captain Field started for the cliff last night before he was stopped and taken to the hospital…He’ll probably be sent home” “22 December: We bombed at 32,000 feet by radar and I have my doubts as to the results. I was scared to put it mildly” “28 December: Yesterday’s raid was really screwed up. They missed the primary and tried to make a 180-degree turn and hit it again but didn’t succeed and dropped their bombs in Tokyo with dubious results” “14 Jan: The mission to Nagoya yesterday seems to have been a flop…Hiat’s ship got in the prop wash over Tokyo and was flipped over on its back and split S’d from 32,000 ft to 25,000 feet and their airspeed went to 380mph.”
Another officer, Stanley Samuelson, had attended art school in his home state of Maryland before enlisting after Pearl Harbor. He flew fifty B-17 missions in the Mediterranean theatre, came home in 1943 and got married, then volunteered for B-29s. Why would a man offer himself a second time for sacrifice, after “doing his bit”? It is impossible to know, but a surprising number of pilots found that they enjoyed flying, even in combat, and were reluctant to abandon it. Samuelson, twenty-four years old, exploited his artistic skills to develop a useful sideline on Saipan, painting “nose art” caricatures on some of the wing’s B-29s, at $50 apiece.
He flew his first Superfortress mission in October 1944. In the early days of the tour he experienced some euphoric moments, such as this one approaching Japan on Thanksgiving Day: “When the clouds broke, Mt. Fujiyama552 stood out on the horizon like a beautiful painting done by a master. It was a beautiful sight, and one that very few people will ever witness during this war. It was hard to believe that below us lay one of the rottenest countries that ever existed.”
This brief idyll ended abruptly, however, a few minutes later when an engine failed. By the time it restarted, Samuelson’s plane Snafufortress had fallen behind the formation. He tried to jettison his bombs, only to find them frozen in the racks. The bomb doors refused