Whirlwind - Barrett Tillman [84]
The most egregious sanctioned murders occurred at Western Military District headquarters in Fukuoka on August 15, immediately after the emperor’s radio speech announcing the end of hostilities. Seventeen B-29 crewmen were dragged from their filthy cells, made to kneel outside, and their heads were severed from their bodies. Some perpetrators were imprisoned but no death sentences were carried out.
That left 283 Americans and seven Britons alive after the surrender, a survival rate of barely 50 percent versus about 99 percent in German hands. Concluded more than one survivor, “The time to get captured by the Japs was when they were winning.”
Return Visits
Unprecedented losses on the two previous missions convinced LeMay to shift tactics again. Ignoring Tokyo, which was already 51 percent destroyed, he sent his air fleet to Yokohama in daylight on May 29. Escorted by 100 Mustangs, 475 bombers wiped out nearly seven square miles of the business district and waterfront containing twenty specific targets. Most of the firebombs were dropped above 20,000 feet, and left a pall of smoke nearly reaching that height.
Some of the fifty-plus airborne interceptors got through the P-51 pickets and hacked down five B-29s, one by ramming. But in a sixty-five-minute brawl the Mustang Jockeys gunned down twenty-eight defenders, and the bombers staked a claim to six more. Though three more B-29s were lost in accidents, attrition had been conquered; from June onward it averaged less than one percent.
In a very short time—from late February through May—XXI Bomber Command had inflicted catastrophic damage upon the Japanese homeland. In May alone one-seventh of the nation’s built-up urban area had been devastated, raising the overall total to 36 percent. That amounted to a staggering ninety-four square miles, including more than 100 priority targets.
Despite the appalling evidence, many Japanese officials and citizens insisted that the misery befalling themselves and their nation was somehow illusory. In some cases reality kicked in only after the May fire blitz, when Home Affairs Minister Iwao Yamazaki conceded that civil defense was “considered to be futile.” About that time a police liaison officer with the Japanese Army Air Force admitted that the public increasingly regarded Dai Nippon’s defenses as “useless.”
Nevertheless, Tokyo’s cabinet insisted that the war would continue.
CHAPTER SIX
Pacific Ponies
The 1,500-Mile War
From B-29 bases on Guam, a glance at the map showed the next stepping-stone to Japan: the Bonin Islands, midway between the Marianas and Honshu, some 750 miles south of Tokyo. In early 1945 they also presented an excellent emergency field for stricken Superfortresses and put the home islands within range of the long-legged North American P-51D Mustang. With the Bonins in American hands, B-29s could have fighter escorts anywhere over southern Japan.
In February, Iwo Jima, the largest of the Bonins with three Japanese airfields, was taken by three Marine Corps divisions at enormous cost: 6,821 Americans killed and some 19,000 wounded. It ranked among the highest casualty rates sustained by U.S. forces in the twentieth century.
On March 4—two weeks before Iwo was declared secure—a B-29 named Dinah Might landed nearly out of gasoline on Motoyama Number 1, the southernmost field. The 9th Bomb Group’s Lieutenant Raymond Malo made the first of some 2,400 emergency stops that Superforts would log over the next five months. Most of the landings were precautionary, but if 10 percent of the crews were saved, that