Whirlwind - Barrett Tillman [155]
Hellcat fighters prepare to launch from USS Randolph, one of sixteen flattops engaged in the first carrier raids against the Japanese home islands in February 1945.
Kure’s large harbor shielded most of the remaining Japanese fleet in July 1945. Carrier aircraft struck the facility repeatedly that month, sinking or neutralizing several warships but sustaining heavy losses in the process.
The Royal Navy relied heavily upon American aircraft such as the Grumman Hellcat, as sailors relax aboard a Pacific Fleet carrier in 1945. Note the nonstandard roundel with white center, rather than Britain’s usual red center, to avoid confusion with Japanese markings.
“Two navies separated by a common language” explained the differing terminologies of the U.S. and Royal Navies. This Fleet Air Arm “batsman” served the same purpose as American landing signal officers, but during joint operations off Japan, each service mostly continued using its own signals and terms.
Lacking modern carrier fighters designed for the role, the Royal Navy modified RAF aircraft such as the Supermarine Spitfire, resulting in “navalised” seagoing versions. The Seafire possessed excellent performance but, as shown aboard HMS Implacable, often lacked the ruggedness to withstand the rigors typical of flight-deck operations.
Iwo Jima from the south. Five miles long and less than three wide, the island was conquered at the expense of 6,000 American lives. Few of the 20,000 Japanese defenders survived. Halfway between the Marianas and Japan, Iwo was the only possible base for U.S. fighters to escort B-29s.
The 46th Fighter Squadron’s blue-nosed Mustangs warming up for a mission to Japan. The pierced steel planking was necessary because of Iwo Jima’s ashy surface.
A silent testament to courage. The driver of this grader drove into a burning fighter on Iwo Jima to clear the wreckage off the runway so that airborne pilots could land.
A crashed Superfortress burns on Iwo Jima, narrowly missing a squadron of Mustangs parked alongside the runway.
Brig. Gen. Mickey Moore (center) hears from two P-51 pilots just returned from Iwo Jima’s first escort mission to Japan. Captains Harry Crim and DeWitt Spain were flight leaders on the mission of April 7, 1945.
On August 9, 1945, Okinawa-based B-25s attacked the Japanese aircraft carrier Kaiyo moored in Beppu Bay, Kyushu. The lead bomber was shot down with loss of the entire crew. This sequence shows the B-25 crash, with the camouflaged carrier in the upper left background.
Dr. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the atomic research and development program at Los Alamos, New Mexico, 1943–1945. His team of physicists and scientists produced the world’s first nuclear weapons in barely two years.
Members of the Los Alamos brain trust. Left to right: Ernest O. Lawrence (1939 Nobel for the cyclotron); Italian Enrico Fermi (1938 Nobel for research on radioactivity); and Austrian-born Isidor I. Rabi (1944 Nobel for Physics).
The B-29 Enola Gay preparing to load “Little Boy,” the uranium bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. The aircraft is being backed over the loading pit where the weapon will be raised into the bomb bay.
Destined for Nagasaki, the plutonium bomb called “Fat Man” on its cart prior to loading in the B-29 Bocks Car. The 10,200-pound weapon yielded about 20 kilotons of explosive power, considerably more than the Hiroshima bomb.
Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. The distinctive mushroom cloud obscures much of the city, largely destroyed in the second atomic attack ever undertaken. Faced with such massive destruction, Japan capitulated six days later.
The gateway of a Shinto shrine is one of the few structures left standing after the B-29 Bocks Car delivered a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki.
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Preface
Prologue
Chapter 1 Before the Beginning
Chapter 2 China Skies
Chapter 3 From the South
Chapter 4 From the Sea
Chapter 5 Firestorm
Chapter 6 Pacific Ponies
Chapter 7 The