Whirlwind - Barrett Tillman [121]
September 2
On September 2—six years and a day after Germany invaded Poland—Japan’s formal surrender occurred aboard the battleship Missouri anchored in Tokyo Bay. General of the Army Douglas MacArthur headed the U.S. delegation of eighty-nine officers including thirty-nine generals and thirty-four admirals or commodores wearing a galaxy of 171 stars. That did not include forty-three other officers from eight Allied nations.
American airmen were represented by those wearing wings: at least seven with Army silver and nine with Navy gold. Regardless of rank, perhaps the most prominent were Jimmy Doolittle, who started the bombing of Japan, and Curt LeMay, who ended it.
Admiral Chester Nimitz signed for the United States, flanked by Halsey and Rear Admiral Forrest Sherman, who had contributed significantly to American Pacific strategy. Other naval aviators present were Jack Towers, Ted Sherman, and Slew McCain. Only Pete Mitscher was missing.
Present but little recognized was Rear Admiral Donald B. Duncan, who as a captain had helped plan the Doolittle raid.
No sooner had MacArthur intoned “These proceedings are closed” than the air was split with an enormous roar. Operation Airshow was underway as some 450 carrier planes and 462 B-29s thundered overhead. Leading Yorktown’s fighters was Lieutenant Malcolm Cagle, whose pilots had endured the last dogfight over Japan on August 15. In the crowded airspace over Tokyo Bay, the honor of participating in the historic flyover was diminished by the risk of collision. Cagle described it as “a full throttle-off throttle formation with no real order or organization.”
Postwar Missions
When the shooting stopped, another campaign immediately began: locating and supplying POW camps in Japan, China, and Korea. An interim measure of large-scale air drops was quickly instituted to sustain starving Allied personnel until ground forces reached them. On August 17, Spaatz tossed the ball to 20th Air Force, which gladly assumed responsibility for feeding 154 known camps in August and September.
Massively supplied from the Philippines, XXI Bomber Command modified B-29s to carry maximum loads of provisions. A standard package was developed, containing three days of food, plus clothing and medical kits with instructions. Some 12,000 bundles were dropped by parachute in the first phase. Follow-up drops contained rations for a week, then ten days, but only about half the camps needed the latter owing to rapid advances by liberating troops. Some fliers managed to insert special touches including beer and even ice cream amid the extra food and plasma.
In three weeks following August 27, B-29s flew almost 1,000 relief sorties, dropping nearly 4,500 tons of supplies to as many as 63,500 prisoners. However, the rescue efforts exacted a toll as eight B-29s crashed with seventy-seven dead.
While B-29s conducted mercy flights, fighter pilots relished buzzing Japan, flying with impunity at low level and high speed. One was Marine Captain Jefferson DeBlanc, who had broken into combat at Guadalcanal in 1942. The exuberant Louisianan recalled the excitement of those August days: “Now with the advent of peace, a complacent attitude prevailed. I even touched my wheels on an airfield in Japan and bounced back into the air without landing as a gesture of defiance. I could not see fighting the Japanese for four years and not ‘landing’ on their soil. It was a weird feeling, especially as this was one of the very airfields I had strafed only days before. Maybe this was pushing my luck, but at 24 years of age, I still had a little daring left.”
Thus perished the Second World War, the voracious global monster whose sulfurous breath seared three continents and consumed at least 50 million human beings. Like most wars, its immense violence was only extinguished by the massive application of greater violence: a combination of strangulation by sea, conquest by land, and ruinous rain by air. In the final extremity, beneath a heap of ashes in the chilling shadow of radioactive clouds, at