Whirlwind - Barrett Tillman [80]
However, even with air superiority, B-29 losses were unavoidable. For instance, April 1 was a bad day for the 498th Group, committed to a 120-plane mission against Tokyo’s Nakajima engine plant. Possum Hansell’s original Joltin’ Josie the Pacific Pioneer was lost with its crew in a ditching shortly after takeoff; two were shot down, another made a successful water landing, and a fifth was written off after returning to Saipan. Six other B-29s also were lost, three on mining sorties.
Three days later thirteen B-29s went down on two missions to Kawasaki and Tokyo. Among the 9th Bomb Group’s missing was the crew of Captain, then Lieutenant, Raymond F. Malo, who had made the first emergency landing on Iwo Jima five weeks before. Only one of Malo’s men survived the war.
On April 7, an almost cloudless day, LeMay made the most of the opportunity by sending two wings to Nagoya and one to Tokyo. More than 150 bombers left the Mitsubishi engine plant a blackened, mangled ruin, approximately 90 percent destroyed. Simultaneously 101 planes of the 73rd Wing put Nakajima Aircraft’s Musashino factory in the crosshairs, and though the facility survived, Rosie O’Donnell’s one-ton bombs inflicted heavy damage on the machine shops.
That same day B-29s enjoyed fighter escort for the first time. Two groups of P-51 Mustangs from Iwo Jima tangled with Japanese interceptors, downing twenty-six for the loss of two Mustangs. Bomber gunners eagerly claimed 100 kills versus seven Superforts destroyed, including one that crashed after takeoff.
One crew was lost to ramming as Lieutenant Takahashi Kawano of the veteran 244th Regiment got past the Mustangs and penetrated the 500th Group’s defensive gunfire. The Kawasaki Tony pilot smashed into Lieutenant Robert King’s bomber, which broke up in flight. Nearby, Kawano’s family watched spellbound as a Japanese fighter collided with a B-29, clearly visible in the spring sky. The witnesses had no way of knowing that their son and brother had just perished. The bomber’s remains smashed into a primary school in the Kumagaya district, killing a civilian and destroying two houses as well. But Kawano received a posthumous double promotion and, in an exceptional honor, the emperor heard his name.
Across the International Date Line on April 12, Franklin D. Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage. The reaction of Robert Sanders, a 40th Group pilot on Tinian, was typical. “One morning in mid-April word filtered down the ranks that President Roosevelt was dead. F.D.R. had been the country’s leader since I was 10 years old. We were so accustomed to his presence in Washington that we never thought about anybody taking his place.”
But someone had to. Roosevelt was succeeded by Vice President Harry S. Truman, a plainspoken Missourian who in 1943 had headed a Senate investigation of the inordinate delays in production of the R-3350 engine.
On that same date in the Pacific, more than 250 Superfortresses in three task forces attacked aircraft and industrial targets. One of 130 bombers aiming for the Koriyama chemical complex was the 29th Group’s City of Los Angeles flown by Captain George Simeral. His crew was a well-drilled team, having flown together since June 1944, including ten previous missions.
Nearing the coast, Simeral as lead pilot ordered a flare dropped to mark the assembly point for his squadron. Sergeant Henry “Red” Erwin, a redheaded Alabaman, picked up a phosphorus flare and placed it in the chute. He pulled the arming pin prior to dropping it—and his world burst into flames.
Prematurely ignited, the pyrotechnic flew backward into Red Erwin’s face. Searing 1,300-degree heat blinded him, burning off his nose and one ear.