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By Root 936 0

approached. There were other hazards. At least one B-29 shot itself down when over-excited gunners fired into their own engines. Attacking a fogged-in Osaka one day, Arner’s crew could find only one other plane with which to formate for the bomb run. “At high noon we were over the target, but it could have been Pittsburgh as far as I was concerned. We bombed by radar, using Osaka Castle as our checkpoint.” Sometimes they hit thermals which bounced the huge planes violently, throwing everything movable about the fuselage. In Arner’s crew, the radar counter-measures man became known as “Pisspot” Smith, after a thermal doused him in the contents of the plane’s potty.

When their loads fell away, noses lifted and aircraft surged forward, at least three tons lighter. However, on navigator Philip True’s first mission, just after bombing, “a terrible rumble and chatter startled and shook me.” Immediately behind his navigator’s seat, the four-gun upper turret began firing. True glimpsed Japanese fighters, which attacked repeatedly for ten minutes. Then the guns fell silent, and the crew relaxed. They saw the Pacific below again, and settled for the long run home. Their relief was premature. True glimpsed the altimeter. They were down to 12,000 feet, and descending. Peering out at the starboard wing, True perceived two engines dead. Fuel was streaming from a tank ruptured by gunfire. The strain on the surviving port engines was acute. They were losing about a hundred feet a minute. The pilot announced that if their fuel would not hold out to Iwo Jima, they must jump. True was terrified: “The Pacific looked ominous, gray and ugly, swirling with swells and occasional whitecaps.”

Yet an hour later, they were still holding 4,000 feet. Soon after, they found themselves approaching Iwo Jima, among a gaggle of other aircraft with problems. “We circled Mount Suribachi, our starboard wing with the two dead engines pointing down, a view that produced in me a feeling of teetering on the edge of a cliff.” The landing gear dropped. Then, to their horror, on final approach another B-29 cut recklessly across them. They lurched upwards and circled again. The pilot said: “If we can’t get in this time, I’m going to pull up and drop you guys in the ocean. Be ready to go.” In heavy cloud and rain, once again they lunged towards the strip, and heard a merciful thump as the wheels touched. They stopped with a few yards of runway to spare, clambered out, and examined the hole in their wing. They were down to their last ten minutes of fuel. A truck carried them through torrential rain to a holding area. True, like hundreds of others who felt that they owed their lives to Iwo, thought of the Marines “who had inched and crawled their way over this eroded hunk of volcanic debris…so that we could land and live.” They got back to Tinian late that night, exhausted. Nothing seriously bad happened on any of their eleven subsequent missions.

Those who made it to the Marianas, after another seven hours over the unfriendly ocean, sometimes nursing a damaged plane, bumped heavily onto the runway, taxied in and cut engines. Somebody took out the “honey bucket” for emptying. Crews stretched stiffened limbs, and climbed unsteadily out of the fuselage. Even then, the ordeal was not always over. Ground engineer Bob Mann saw a plane land with bombs still hung up in its bay. Armourers refused to touch the lethal ordnance, saying that their job was to arm aircraft, not disarm them. With infinite care, the plane’s bombardier and another crew member unscrewed the fuses.

Crews were given a slug of whiskey before debriefings, from which gunners were quickly excused, because they knew so little. Returning fliers understood that they had achieved only a brief reprieve. Stanley Samuelson wrote in January: “At present, no one knows how many missions we will have to pull. Some fellows will crack, and it is likely to be most anyone.” A thin but steady stream of men decided that too much was being demanded of them. “After about ten missions,” wrote Joseph Majeski, “our right gunner