Whirlwind - Barrett Tillman [74]
General Tom Power’s B-29 had fuel to spare and circled the spreading inferno for ninety minutes, radioing a play-by-play of the growing catastrophe. Because post-strike photos would not be available for a day or more, he had some cartographers onboard to plot the extent of the fires for immediate assessment back at Guam. He noted that it took just thirty minutes for the first bombs to spread into a fully developed conflagration. Actually, it was half that time. On the ground, some witnesses reported that from the moment the first firebombs struck, only fourteen minutes passed before “the hellfire began.”
A firestorm also could threaten the airmen who created it. Bomber crews over urban areas had to contend with wind shear as well as incredibly powerful thermals. With temperatures exceeding 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit, firestorms created incredibly violent cyclones and vertical winds that could toss fifty-ton bombers onto their backs.
Captain Gordon B. Robertson and his 29th Group crew flew their first mission that night, receiving a terrifying combat initiation. Caught by searchlights at 5,600 feet, nearly blinded by the glare, Robertson and his copilot fought to keep the wings level until “bombs away.” By then the attack was well developed, with incredible updrafts that lifted some B-29s 5,000 feet. It felt “like a cork on water in a hurricane.”
Abruptly Robertson’s plane rolled, its wings tilted at an angle alarmingly past the vertical. Pilots and crew were conscious of a rain of debris inside the bomber: everything from sand and cigarette butts to oxygen masks falling from the floor. The fliers realized they were upside down. It was a chilling sensation to see the fiery world “below” suddenly appear through the top of the cockpit.
Previously a flight instructor, Robertson oriented himself to the ground. In a maneuver more suited to a fighter, he allowed the huge bomber to fall nose-first through the bottom half of a loop, completing a split-S maneuver that compressed the crew into the seats under the onerous foot of gravity’s elephant. The B-29 accelerated rapidly, clocking 400 mph at the bottom—about as fast as a Superfort ever went. Fighting the heavy aerodynamic loads on the controls, Robertson expended much of the momentum to regain precious altitude. Then he called for a course for home, immensely grateful to be alive.
About ninety fliers died that night and at least six more later perished in captivity. Aircraft losses among the 299 effective sorties totaled fourteen planes downed, ditched, or demolished by enemy action or accident. That equaled 4.6 percent, right in line with LeMay’s eerily accurate prediction of 5 percent. That included two crews lost in bad weather, three bombers ditched in the sea, and one plane crash-landed on Iwo Jima.
The surviving B-29s turned southward with ashes streaked on their glass noses and appalling odors sucked inside the fuselages. Though well below the standard 10,000 feet for oxygen masks, some men strapped on their masks to escape the stench of burning flesh.
* * * * *
Tokyo’s survivors struggled to deal with the massive calamity and found no standard of comparison. Medical services were reduced to insignificance: the only military rescue unit in the capital numbered nine doctors and eleven nurses. Not even the capital’s combined civil and military emergency services could ease human suffering on an industrial scale.
One resident, Fusako Sasaki, recalled, “Stacked up corpses were being hauled away on lorries. Everywhere there was the stench of the dead and of smoke. I saw the places on the pavement where people had been roasted to death. At last I comprehended first-hand what an air raid meant.”
American intelligence monitored a Japanese radio report that said, “Red fire clouds kept creeping high and the tower of the Parliament Building stuck out black against the background of the red sky. During the night we thought the whole of Tokyo had been reduced to ashes.”
Spread by panic-driven