Whirlwind - Barrett Tillman [51]
That left light flak, and it worried him. Like all airmen, LeMay retained a healthy respect for the Luftwaffe’s 20mm to 37mm flak guns. Expertly manned and scientifically arrayed to destroy whatever crossed their sights, they took a fearsome toll of Allied aircraft from 1940 onward. But almost nothing was known about Japan’s light AA weapons: neither numbers, locations, nor capabilities.
Undeterred, the bomber chief got down to details as small as intervalometer settings for spacing bombs from various heights, and came to a conclusion. Nobody had ever thought of flying four-engine aircraft over an enemy city at low level—at night. Therefore, the defending gunners would never expect it. As for night fighters, LeMay was dismissive. The few that Japan possessed were nowhere as numerous or as effective as Germany’s practiced bomber killers.
Still, it remained a major gamble. If he was wrong, LeMay stood to lose a sizable portion of his force, and with it his position, his reputation, and—worst of all—hundreds of his airmen who relied upon his judgment for their survival. But even that paled next to the looming specter of an invasion of Japan, with hundreds of thousands of American lives at stake.
Curt LeMay pondered the odds and thought deeply one more time. Then he rolled destiny’s dice.
CHAPTER FOUR
From the Sea
BENEATH LEADEN GRAY skies, skirting squall lines and snow showers, the Hellcats and Corsairs crossed the Honshu coast, cruising at high speed toward Japanese airfields. The pilots had been briefed to expect the biggest air battle of the war, a significant warning considering the scale of the largest previous tangles with enemy fliers: more than 300 Japanese had been shot down on June 19 off the Marianas and well over 200 on October 24 at Leyte Gulf.
Anticipating large, confusing swarms of friendly and hostile aircraft, the Americans had painted yellow bands on the noses of their carrier planes for quick identification. Aircrews were only informed of operation plans in four-hour increments, limiting the information they could impart if captured.
As the first fighter sweep crossed the coast with master armament switches on and gunsight rheostats turned up, the F6F and F4U pilots scanned the cloudy skies, searching for dark green planes bearing rust-red Hinomaru suns. The flattop aviators expected to shoot their way into Tokyo.
The presence of American carrier planes in Japanese airspace on Friday morning, February 16, 1945, signified far more than met the eye. The U.S. Navy’s debut over the home islands provided strategic cover for one of the most important amphibious operations of the war: the impending Iwo Jima invasion.
Sixty miles off Honshu the greatest assemblage of naval power on the planet stood by to launch follow-up strikes. Tokyo was about to confront the challenge of American carrier aviation—at once the Army Air Forces’ partner and rival in the air war against Japan.
Building an Air Navy
Thirty-four months after the Doolittle Raid, America’s huge industrial capacity had produced the Fifth Fleet, dwarfing to insignificance the pinprick attack launched from USS Hornet (CV-8) in April 1942. The fleet’s striking arm, Task Force 58, counted sixteen fast carriers (all capable of more than 30 knots) plus eight battleships, fifteen cruisers, and seventy-seven destroyers under Vice Admiral Marc Mitscher.
Mitscher’s 116 warships totaled 975,000 combatant tons with some 1,200 aircraft—probably more striking power than could be deployed by the earth’s other navies combined. Nearly all the ships were new: more than eight in ten had been commissioned since Pearl Harbor.
The fast carriers—marvels of concept, design, and construction—represented more than two decades of argument and experimentation, trial and error. But the challenge of building them was no clean-cut engineering problem to be solved solely with drafting boards