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to close, causing drag which reduced speed still further. The intercom began to buzz with terse warnings of enemy aircraft from the gunners: “Three pursuit—five o’clock low. Four pursuit two o’clock high. Two pursuits twelve o’clock level.” Samuelson wrote: “Things got hotter than hell, and the guns began to crackle in all directions.” Enemy fighters attacked persistently for thirty minutes, terrifying the crew. It took them seven lonely, unremittingly tense hours to nurse the plane home, 1,400 miles across the Pacific. The bombardier crawled down the fuselage to the bomb bay and ditched their ordnance by hand. After landing, Samuelson slept for twelve straight hours.

This experienced combat pilot found himself, like most of his comrades, bitterly dismayed by the experience of operating B-29s. “There is no getting around it,” he wrote in December, “we are all scared and scared plenty. This stuff of losing crews on every mission is a hard pill to swallow. It wouldn’t be quite as bad if our losses were just because of the enemy, however planes ditch out in the middle of the Pacific because of engine failure and other mechanical troubles. The thought of landing a $600,000 plane and twelve men on a rough ocean at night, a thousand miles from nowhere, makes men out of boys and puts gray hairs on the men…One day is like another round here…no one has or wants a calendar. We all just live from day to day and raid to raid. There was some talk about Christmas being only two days away, however no one seemed to get too enthusiastic about it.” A gunner wrote in his diary in January 1945: “We’re all of us poor soldiers553…too full of personally staying alive and wishing we were working in a defense plant.”

In some theatres of war, aircrew were pampered. In the Marianas, no comforts were to be had. Joseph Majeski, a nineteen-year-old gunner with the 6th Bomb Group on Tinian, found himself living in a pup tent, queuing among a hundred other naked men for a shower—and always hungry. He persuaded his father to mail him jars of Gerber’s baby food—apple sauce, pears and peaches—because these were nutritious and portable. Majeski contrived an illicit visit to an uncle aboard a ship anchored offshore: “I showered with hot water for the first time in months,” he wrote. “The food served on the ship was great. Compared to the garbage we were eating on Tinian, I was sorry that I had not joined the Navy.” Ashore, men washed their own clothes in aviation gas, or devoted leisure hours to building primitive washing machines with windmill propellers set in barrels. Gardens sprang up between huts. Many fliers found inactivity almost as distressing as combat. They lay under the unyielding sun, nursing dreams about when it was all over. “I had a nice talk with Wray and Cutter554,” Stanley Samuelson wrote on 4 January, recording a gossip with two of his crew. “Wray is a very smart lad and has his ambitions. He intends to get an International Harvester Agency in his own town and go into business for himself. Cutter just plans to get out of the army and tell everyone to go to hell if he so pleases.”

On mission days, there was little talk in the open trucks on the way to the flight line. A Red Cross van came round, distributing coffee and doughnuts as crews waited for the word to go. Pilots talked to the ground crew chief, who had almost invariably worked all night with his men, readying the aircraft. They checked the 41B maintenance book. Then fliers helped mechanics pull down the props, two men per blade, to clear accumulated oil from the lower cylinders. Little “putt-putt” generators in the aircraft were started, to provide electricity for engine turn-over. One by one, in the order 3, 4, 2, 1, the Wrights coughed, spewed smoke, settled to a steady roar. Most take-offs were made to the east, because of the prevailing wind. Crews found these unfailingly frightening, as co-pilots called out the rising speed: “70–80–95–110–135.” Each laden monster took fifty seconds to get airborne, from the moment a pilot posted halfway down the runway flashed a green light,