Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [201]
Crews began to relax only when the first power reduction came, maybe two minutes after leaving the ground. Cabin pressure was set to 8,000 feet. Bombardiers clambered aft, to arm the incendiary clusters in the bomb bays. Many crews tuned to Armed Forces Radio, to alleviate the boredom of the seven-hour run to Japan. The loneliness of rear gunners, in particular, was notorious. Most left their posts to share the companionship of those clustered forward in the cockpit, though because of the engine roar they could converse only through the intercom. Pacific weather extremes created moments of terror, sometimes also extraordinary visual effects. “I became aware of the sky555 above me just beginning to be light—the dimmer stars disappearing as the dawn began to break, barely illuminating the tops of the mountainous cumulus build-ups towering above us to 30,000 or 40,000 feet,” wrote one pilot:
The sea below was black and the lower bases of the clouds a dark, dull gray. Then, almost as if in response to a drum roll, there was an explosion of color: streaks of red and orange began to shoot heavenward into a pale, azure canopy high above. The intensity built to a crescendo; a silent cacophony of color until the whole eastern sky was aflame, backlighting and illuminating the cumulus. I touched the intercom button, alerting the crew, and, after a couple of moments, quietly said: “Everybody…look out the left side of the airplane.” There was a muffled response or two: “Jesus!” or “Christ!”
Throughout the flight, the navigator worked harder than any other crew member. Each aircraft was issued with a “flimsy” giving pre-set headings, position points and scheduled timings. To maintain these in darkness required taking celestial fixes, checking drift, peering into the APQ13 radar screen; in daylight, the sun was “shot” by sextant from the Perspex astrodome. It took sixteen minutes to work out where the aircraft had just been, and good navigators never let up. Iwo Jima below marked the halfway point. Thereafter, an hour out from the target, every man went to his post, donning big, heavy flak jackets. They circled an appointed assembly point until the entire formation was mustered, aided by identification symbols painted on aircraft tails—squares, circles, triangles—then began the run towards the enemy’s country. “Dear Mom,” Robert Copeland wrote home,
the thing about combat that is beginning to impress me most is the appreciation I now have for the finer things of life. The love one has for friends, the love and need for a woman and the things one wants to do with this dream girl when this thing is all over. A woman somewhere seems to be the driving force behind all men in combat. You’re so scared even 400 miles an hour doesn’t seem fast enough. The bomb run is only four or five minutes long, but it seems like hours. The bomb bay doors are only open for one or two minutes, but that seems like an eternity. It’s more like a wild horrible nightmare from which it is impossible to awaken, but nevertheless we do make it once more.
The songs which Superfortress crews wrote for themselves reflected the melancholy that afflicted most:
Oh I get that lonesome feeling
When I hear those engines whine
Those B-29s are breaking up
That old gang of mine
There goes Jack, there goes Bill
Down over Tokyo.
We all hope it’s home we go,
How soon we do not know.
On the bomb run, planes were often buffeted by flak explosions. The worst mission that gunner Fred Arner flew was his crew’s ninth. Delayed on the strip by a mechanical problem, they approached the target twenty minutes behind the main force, and fifty miles north of Tokyo found themselves meeting B-29s hurtling past in the opposite direction, “like getting the wrong way onto the beltway.” In the nose was a “guest” bombardier, flying the last mission of his tour. He yelled aloud in terror each time a plane