Whirlwind - Barrett Tillman [78]
The next day three Superfortresses were dispatched to relocate Orionchek’s men. Hours later word came that a full crew had been rescued—from another group. Nothing more was ever heard of Alexander Orionchek or his eleven crewmen.
In the third anti-kamikaze phase XXI Bomber Command scaled back the effort. Though flying on eight days between April 30 to May 11, only 390 B-29s attacked their primary targets: fewer than fifty per day.
The Japanese could do nothing to stop the airfield strikes, but they still tried, and twenty-one B-29s were lost on the ninety-one missions from March to May. On April 29, the 498th Group lost a plane and crew to air-to-air bombing—a tactic frequently tried but seldom successful. However, Lieutenant Greer’s unnamed airplane was forced out of formation by conventional fighter attacks, leaving it vulnerable. Other crews from the 873rd Squadron saw a bomb strike the center of the fuselage. “Shortly afterwards the plane was seen to go into a steep dive, then a violent spin. The aircraft crashed on land and was mercilessly strafed by Jap fighters.”
Whether the serious U.S. naval losses off Okinawa would have been worse without the B-29 effort is uncertain. The three major kamikaze attacks from April 6 to 16 involved some 700 suicide sorties. The next three kikusui, or large-scale “floating chrysanthemum” kamikaze operations launched during the B-29 airfield attacks totaled 490, or one-third less. By that measure the Army Air Forces effort was somewhat successful.
However, in the forty-six days of 20th Air Force attacks on suicide bases, twenty American ships were sunk by air attack and forty damaged so severely that they never returned to action. Therefore, the naval hemorrhaging averaged 1.3 ships a day in that period, three times the rate before and after the B-29 missions. How much worse the Navy might have suffered without the Superforts at the height of the Japanese effort can only be surmised, though LeMay’s skepticism about bombing airfields apparently was borne out.
Whatever the pros or cons of diverting B-29s from the strategic mission, there was room for reflection. One Superfortress crewman summed up the AAF attitude when he said, “These airfields are certainly not a strategic target but the Navy must be hurting to divert our attention to them.”
Strategic Attacks Resume
In striking contrast to Japan’s declining industrial output that spring, America’s was still accelerating. Female workers personified as “Rosie the Riveter” represented only about one war worker in ten, but her robust, can-do image spoke for all Americans engaged in the headlong rush of production. Men and women, young and old, wielded rivet guns and bucking bars, torque wrenches and welders. Factories expended unprecedented efforts at reducing absenteeism, from pay bonuses to providing day-care centers. Coming off a decade-long economic depression, employees earned more money than some had seen in all their lives, and many worked as much overtime as they could manage.
But behind the enormous energy and dedication lay something stronger if subtler. Virtually every war worker had relatives in uniform: eventually nearly 400,000 families were entitled to display the gold star pennant denoting a loved one who died in their nation’s service. To thousands of workers, every bomber rolling off the production line meant the war drew incrementally closer to its end.
Unlike Japan’s factories, which were increasingly blasted into rubble or starved of essential materials, America’s remained unmolested Vulcan’s forges, churning out ever greater numbers of