Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [212]
And if survivors, instead of drifting at sea, found themselves on one of the Pacific’s uninhabited islands, they could turn to the wryly named Castaway’s Baedeker in their survival kits, which described how to make the most of the least promising circumstances. Just under half of those who tried to ditch got home sooner or later. Air-sea rescue teams displayed extraordinary courage, persistence and determination. The only B-29 crews denied sympathy were a few who chose to land in the sea because, almost incredibly, they found this ordeal less terrifying than completing a mission.
Bombing Japan never became a routine assignment. For instance, on the night of 4 June 1945, when crews of the 9th Bomb Group were told at briefing that they would be attacking Kobe next morning at 14,000 feet, a storm of furious protest erupted: “Mess kits were banged578 on the wooden benches and all around me crew members were yelling, booing and shaking their heads,” wrote a navigator. The twenty-nine-year-old group commander, Col. Henry Huglin, suppressed the uproar only by explaining that the attack height was dictated by a thick overcast to 16,000, and that it could be raised if the skies cleared over Japan. Yet back in the huts, some veteran crews were still predicting gloomily: “They’ll be out waving flags and yelling ‘Banzai.’” In the event, the mission proved relatively uneventful, but the apprehension was real enough. That same month, LeMay called for a special effort to curb the incidence of aircrew refusing flying duty. Up to 1 June, eighteen men from the XXth Bomber Command and sixty-nine from the XXIst had been relieved of operations for “anxiety reactions,” and this was deemed too many.
Facilities on the Marianas slowly improved, to make their 100,000 USAAF campers less uncomfortable. With a hundred B-29s a month arriving from the factories, the Twentieth Air Force was now poised to impose a steady rhythm of pain and destruction upon the land of the enemy. Accuracy improved dramatically. Between January and June 1945 the number of bombs landing within a thousand feet of their aiming points rose from 12 percent to 40 percent. LeMay said: “The only thing the Japs have to look forward to is the total destruction of their industries.” Arnold wrote to him on 21 March, praising the Tokyo raid as “brilliantly planned and executed.” So heady was the climate of euphoria within the air force and outside it, fed by massive publicity in the U.S., that LeMay felt obliged to calm the frenzy, telling correspondents: “The destruction of Japan’s industry by air blows alone is impossible.” This prompted a rebuke from Arnold’s chief of staff, Lauris Norstad: “Personally I have no quarrel579 with that thesis…But there is a War Department policy, stemming from last year’s orgy of predictions that the war would end before Christmas, which prohibits predictions or speculations of any kind by General Officers.” LeMay was warned to abstain in future from public forecasting, either positive or negative.
Yet the general had achieved an ascendancy which he sustained for the rest of the war. Enthusiasm was boundless for what his command had begun to do to Japan, and for the lustre which its deeds were deemed to have brought upon the air force. “Mission Number 40, the incendiary attack against Tokyo…on the night of 9–10 March is probably one of the most important ever flown by the Army Air Forces,” asserted a post-war USAAF report. “Never before or since580 has so much destruction resulted from any single bombardment mission…it pointed the way to revolutionary new tactics.” Air force chiefs hastened to endorse LeMay’s attacks. “More than ever I am convinced of the importance of the bombs dropped on Japan between now and say, three months after the fall of Germany,” Norstad wrote to him from Arnold’s office on 3 April, following the issue of a new urban target list:
This period will certainly be Japan