Whirlwind - Barrett Tillman [32]
The impending end of CBI operations did not guarantee safety. At Chakulia on January 14, 1945, the 40th Group anticipated a concert by conductor Andre Kostelanetz and soprano Lily Pons. Around noon the 44th Squadron was ordered to download cluster bombs from two standby aircraft. However, the ordnance crew was concerned about handling the notoriously sensitive M47s, which were armed. The armament officer suggested expending the weapons in a practice mission but the orders stood.
In removing a cluster from the first B-29, one of the bands securing the bundle worked loose, allowing a weapon to fall. It exploded on impact. Nine men were killed, twenty-one wounded, and another B-29 was damaged beyond repair.
Minutes later a message arrived from the Army ordnance office in New Mexico, declaring the M47 unsafe and ordering its immediate retirement. Said Captain Frank Redler, group armament officer, “The barn door was locked, but too late.”
On January 27, the first Chengtu Superfortresses headed for India to begin the long trek to the Central Pacific. Kharagpur to Tinian in the Marianas is a straight-line 3,832 miles or seventeen and a half hours by B-29. It equaled the distance from Seattle to the Panama Canal.
In late February and early March the groups began preparing for the journey by air, land, and sea. Meanwhile, XX Bomber Command closed out its mission log on the night of March 29, attacking oil storage facilities at Singapore. During April the 444th and 462nd Groups departed India, followed by the 40th and finally the 468th. The wing was reunited at West Field, Tinian, during the first week in May.
The nine homeland strikes had been a tiny portion of XX Bomber Command’s total effort. In attacking Omura five times, Yawata twice, and a few miscellaneous targets, the B-29s’ Kyushu missions represented one-sixth of the command’s total sorties and less than one-tenth of the bomb tonnage dropped. Significant damage was limited to the naval aircraft plant. Meanwhile, in all operations XX Bomber Command lost 125 B-29s, but only twenty-nine to enemy action.
In retrospect LeMay remained disgusted at the convoluted scheme for operating B-29s in China. Twenty years later he wrote, “I’ve never been able to shake the idea that General Arnold himself never believed that it would work.”
If the B-29 operation in Asia left a legacy, let it be this: XX Bomber Command operated the world’s most complex but technically immature aircraft at the end of the war’s longest supply line, over the world’s highest terrain in some of the worst weather, with half-trained crews and mechanics living in an oppressive climate on primitive bases.
Nevertheless, the nascent Superfortress grew into a fully fledged weapon in China skies. During his Asian odyssey Curtis LeMay learned what he needed to know about turning the ’29 into a truly strategic weapon, one that would have a greater effect upon the Pacific War than anything in the AAF inventory.
The wind that began flowing out of China would grow to cyclonic force in the Pacific.
CHAPTER THREE
From the South
THE STRATEGY WAS known as island hopping, and it worked. But it required what Winston Churchill called “triphibious operations”—the melding of sea, land, and air forces into a nearly seamless entity focused on seizing islands from the enemy, each one representing another step on the long road to victory.
The process had begun eight months after Pearl Harbor when U.S. Marines landed at Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. Nearly two years later their seven-league boots splashed ashore in the Marianas, 2,000 miles northwest and more than half the distance from “Guadal” to Japan.
However, each leap of the triphibious frog was limited by the range of available airpower. Because air superiority ensured that no amphibious operation failed in the Pacific War, the success rate among all major landings in World War II ran over 99 percent.
Fortunately for the Allied