Whirlwind - Barrett Tillman [38]
It took a while for the 73rd Wing’s four groups to settle in, but the command logged its first mission before month’s end. On October 27, the 497th and 498th Groups launched eighteen bombers on a “local” warm-up mission to Truk Atoll in the Carolines, 600 miles southeast of Saipan. Four aborted, including Hansell’s aircraft, but no planes were lost. Bombing results against a submarine base were assessed as poor. Five more practice missions followed, averaging twenty planes each prior to the first strike against Japan in November.
A New Kind of War
The Marianas B-29 operation was history in the making. For the first time ever, bombers would routinely fly transoceanic combat missions. Until then, XX Bomber Command had flown almost 600 miles over water from the China coast north of Shanghai to reach northern Kyushu—a record-setting distance in mid-1944. But from the Marianas to Japan was 1,500 miles one way; about fifteen hours round-trip. Nothing remotely comparable had ever been attempted. Hansell’s Joltin’ Josie and her stablemates truly were Pacific pioneers.
With 3,000 miles of saltwater below them, Marianas B-29 crews literally entrusted their lives to their navigators. The ordinary concern that airmen feel when flying beyond sight of land was eased by having four engines, but even when the irksome R-3350s performed well, there was always the worry of getting lost or running short of fuel. And rescue was never certain for those lost on a wide, blue sea.
Ironically, nocturnal navigation held more advantages than daytime. At night, with weather permitting, navigators could use sextants to “shoot the stars” with more accuracy than sun angles, and electronic methods were more efficient. Radio aids performed best after sunset owing to better atmospherics, and LORAN (LOng RAnge Navigation) beams could be tracked 700 miles from base during day and upward of 1,000 at night—a huge advantage when flying overcast skies.
Nevertheless, navigators remained second-class citizens in some pilots’ eyes. It says a great deal about the Air Force culture that its World War II figures show exactly 191,654 pilots trained from 1941 to 1945 versus approximately 45,000 bombardiers during the war and some 50,000 navigators from 1943 to 1945. Presumably the 1942 figures are unavailable.
Once Saipan dropped astern, the B-29ers would be on their own. If anything went seriously wrong, the best they could hope for was a controlled ditching in the ocean, for no friendly shore lay within reach. The only noteworthy land between the Marianas and Japan was the Japanese-held Bonin Islands. Largest of the Bonins was Iwo Jima, nearly eight square miles of ashy, sulfurous sand resembling “a large, gray pork chop.” With its fighters and bombers, Iwo posed a problem for XXI Bomber Command, including the advance warning it could give Tokyo every time B-29s passed overhead.
Bombers could not perform their function without target information, just as Possum Hansell had noted in drafting AWPD-1 before Pearl Harbor. Therefore, photoreconnaissance versions of the B-29 also began arriving in October. Designated F-13s, the spy planes of the 3rd Photographic Reconnaissance Squadron were equipped with six or more cameras to detect enemy installations.
On November 7, an F-13 was not only the first Superfortress over Tokyo but the first American aircraft since the Doolittle Raid thirty-one months before. The intruder drew immediate attention. The single silvery shape high in the thin air over Honshu was the target of nearly 100 Japanese fighters, only two of which got anywhere near the Boeing droning along at 32,000 feet.
The next day the Marianas command sustained