Despite the effectiveness of the incendiary-heavy raid on Kobe, LeMay and his commanders promptly reverted to the high-altitude, precision attacks they knew best from Europe. The bombing accuracy was as poor as the previous attempts to cripple Japan from higher altitudes, and the Americans paid dearly with the lives of their crews.
February 10 was an especially costly day for Ben’s comrades in the 505th Bomb Group. Their target was another Nakajima Aircraft assembly plant, this one in the southern Tokyo suburb of Ota. Twenty-one 505th aircraft took off for the raid. Eighteen reached the target, but only ten returned. Two B-29s collided over the target and crashed. Another was last seen being pursued by ten or so Japanese fighters. One disappeared without a trace on the return flight. And three others ditched in the Pacific, with all members of two crews rescued and four members of the third crew, including the pilot, lost. One 505th B-29 had crashed on takeoff.
Back on the ground, Ben and a handful of other veterans of the air war against Nazi Germany felt a dark flash of déjà vu as the 505th airmen and ground crews processed the pain of their losses.
THE FEBRUARY 4 KOBE RAID HAD only intensified Hap Arnold’s interest in the use of incendiaries against Japanese cities. Eight days later, Norstad suggested to LeMay a major incendiary attack on Nagoya “to secure more planning data.”1 LeMay didn’t need an interpreter to divine the meaning of the message: Arnold was getting impatient.
February 19 proved to be an auspicious day for the B-29s. As the Marianas-based Superfortresses winged their way to Tokyo, Marines stormed the beaches of the Japanese stronghold at Iwo Jima. In Washington that same day, Hap Arnold issued a B-29 target directive that elevated incendiary attacks on the Japanese cities of Nagoya, Osaka, Kawasaki, and Tokyo to a priority level only second to precision attacks on aircraft engine factories. Underscoring the command-level interest in incendiary attacks, another “test raid” on Nagoya was ordered for February 25. Once again, bad weather forced a diversion to alternate targets around Tokyo.
As February drew to a close, Ben had logged eight missions in his Pacific tour. The long flights over open ocean were nerve-racking, but weak Japanese air defenses compensated for it. In any event, fortune had smiled on the crew of Honorable Sad Saki. From his perch in the tail compartment, Ben had seen only one Japanese fighter in his five-plus weeks of combat.
In a letter he wrote home in late February, Ben shared only the bare outlines of his latest adventure. “There are still a few of my dishonorable ancestors running loose on this island, but they don’t give us much trouble,” he reported. But his lighthearted tone grew darker as he wrote, and his words revealed a growing weariness with the strain of war. “I’m sure if more people could see the actual tragedies of battlefronts, they would be resolved to make this the last war,” he wrote.2
As Ben revealed a glimpse of his combat stress, the B-29 campaign against Japan was poised to take an especially grim turn. In his eagerness to prove his patriotism to anyone inclined to doubt him, Ben had often spoken nonchalantly about bombing Tokyo as payback for Pearl Harbor. At that very moment, far up the chain of command, planning was underway for an attack like none ever inflicted in the history of warfare. Ben would be among the eyewitnesses to Tokyo’s night of unimaginable horror.
Chapter 45
FIREBOMBING TOKYO
In the early twilight of Friday, March 9, 1945, Ben sat in his tiny tail compartment as Honorable Sad Saki rumbled along a runway at Tinian’s North Field. He was about to be part of Curtis LeMay’s radical reset of the B-29 bombing campaign against Japan.
The mission began with the planes of the 314th Wing’s two bomb groups taking off from Guam at 5:35 p.m., followed by the 313th Wing bombers on Tinian forty minutes later. The last to follow were the 73rd Wing aircraft on Saipan. In all, it would take two hours and forty-five minutes to get 334 B-29s airborne and headed north in the gathering darkness.1
As the armada thrummed through the night, the bombers encountered a wicked storm front. The B-29s disappeared into heavy clouds, heaving and pitching in pockets of turbulent air. Emerging into clear skies, the navigators finally identified the looming landfall of Japan’s main Honshu island. From there, they marked the point where they would begin their final dash to the target. The three wings of the attack force were staggered at altitudes ranging from 4,900 to 9,200 feet, which made the crews especially nervous. They now approached Tokyo at the lowest altitude, and in some of the clearest weather they had encountered in their attempts to bomb the Japanese capital.
Inside Honorable Sad Saki, tensions ran high. Many of the B-29 men were convinced that LeMay was sending them to their deaths by ordering them to attack the Japanese capital at an altitude that put them within easy reach of enemy fighters and flak. Would they be blasted from the sky by antiaircraft fire or enemy fighters? Was LeMay’s gamble a masterstroke or a death sentence? Ben and the Honorable Sad Saki crew were minutes from finding out.
LEADING THE B-29 ATTACK FORCE closing on Tokyo were trained pathfinder crews. A few minutes past midnight, they unleashed their M47 incendiary bombs over assigned aiming points within a densely populated target rectangle that roughly measured four miles by three miles. The first red blotches of fire became visible to the trailing aircraft closing on Tokyo and quickly spread in the stiffening winds. The B-29s attacked in single file, one after the other, some of them fanning out to unleash their firebombs on areas untouched by flames. Smaller fires merged into pulsing forests.2
Japanese air defenses had been surprised by the American tactics, and they opened fire in halting fashion. Searchlights scanned the skies, trying to illuminate American bombers for the benefit of ground gunners. As the bombs fell and flames spread, antiaircraft batteries were consumed by fire and the flak guns fell silent. Several dozen Japanese fighters mounted only forty attacks as the bombers rumbled overhead. Forty-two B-29s were damaged by flak and fourteen American bombers were shot down or forced to ditch at sea—far less than feared. LeMay’s gamble had already paid off.
It was 3:45 a.m. as the last B-29s passed over Tokyo. By then, a firestorm raged throughout the target zone. Boiling smoke and turbulent heat waves forced the final Superfortresses to bomb blindly through the maelstrom.
On the ground, firefighters were overwhelmed within a half hour. Before the night was out, flames had consumed 95 fire engines and killed 125 firemen. By daybreak, sixteen square miles of Tokyo had been consumed by fire. The carnage was staggering: 83,793 killed (with some estimates twice that number) and tens of thousands of people injured; 267,171 buildings destroyed and more than 1 million people rendered homeless. Radio Tokyo bitterly denounced the raid as “slaughter bombing.”3
In the light of day, American photo reconnaissance flights revealed the extent of the destruction. Curtis LeMay was triumphant. Hap Arnold, for once, was pleased.
“Congratulations,” the air chief cabled LeMay. “This mission shows your crews have got the guts for anything.”4
From his perch in the tail of Honorable Sad Saki, Ben had watched the deadliest air raid in human history unfold—with awe at first, and then shock and horror as a red glow wreathed the Japanese capital. “I was in the tail turret, so as we leave the target I swear for an hour it was just a huge red glare,” Ben later recalled. “You know, you could just see the whole city burning.”5
BUOYED BY THE TOKYO RESULTS AND the vindication of his terrifying new tactics, LeMay pressed his advantage. Barely twenty hours after his weary B-29 crews had completed their post-mission debriefings, swigged a shot of whiskey, and collapsed onto their cots, they were dispatched again to inflict the same fiery punishment on another Japanese city.
On the night of March 11–12, Nagoya was in the crosshairs of the B-29 crews. On March 14, Osaka was the target. On March 16–17, Kobe. On March 18–19, Nagoya was hit again. Over a ten-day flurry, LeMay’s B-29s flew 15,950 sorties, dropped 9,373 tons of incendiary bombs and razed thirty square miles of Japan’s four largest cities. LeMay lost only twenty-two planes on the raids.
The fighter opposition and antiaircraft fire continued to be much less than what Ben had experienced in his raids on German targets, but the danger was real. Ben and his comrades resorted to black-humor bantering when they discussed the threat of getting shot down. When Ben’s crewmates teasingly suggested that he stick close to them on the ground so they could protect him from getting shot “by some of these trigger-happy guys,” Ben had a ready retort: “Yeah, but when we get on the mission and we get shot down, you better stay close to me because I’ll bring you rice and fish heads.”6
AS THE FIGHTING IN THE EUROPEAN Theater in March 1945 culminated with the collapse of Nazi Germany, the air campaign against Japan entered a new phase. The B-29s now alternated between incendiary attacks on major cities and precision attacks on specific industrial and military targets. On March 27, the American air onslaught against Japan introduced another line of attack when Ben’s 313th Wing launched the first in a series of missions aimed at mining the Shimonoseki Straits, the vital shipping passageway that separated the Japanese islands of Honshu and Kyushu. The aim was to disrupt the flow of food to the Japanese people, and the mining raids achieved the intended effect. In April, the mining was expanded to shipping channels and harbors under the codename of Operation STARVATION.
Along with the mining raids, the 313th Wing’s operations were expanded to include raids on the southern island of Kyushu. Ben and his comrades bombed airfields that were being used by kamikaze pilots for attacks on American ships in the Okinawa campaign.
On the night of April 13–14, Ben and the crew of Honorable Sad Saki flew their third firebombing mission against Tokyo. During the raid, 327 B-29s dropped 2,120 tons of incendiary and high-explosive bombs. The raid burned another 11.4 square miles of the capital and destroyed 170,546 buildings. Civilian evacuations and improved response times by Japanese authorities limited casualties to only a fraction of those inflicted in the first firebombing raid against Tokyo, but that was little consolation to the families of the 2,459 Japanese people who died in the April 13–14 raid.
BY APRIL, BEN WAS BREAKING UNDER the stress. When he was on the ground, he feared being mistaken for an enemy soldier and shot by his comrades. When he was in the air, he feared being blown from the sky, lost at sea, or, worst of all, captured and tortured by the Japanese. The moral and ethical dimensions of his work had also begun to trouble him. In the safety of his Tinian bunk after each raid, Ben would drink a shot of whiskey to help him sleep, but sleep became increasingly elusive, and he was tormented by nightmares.7
In one of his recurring dreams, Ben was pulled from a jeep by American soldiers and accused of being a Japanese soldier in disguise. They prodded him with their bayonets as he tried to convince them he was a B-29 gunner. A sergeant demanded his identification, but Ben couldn’t find his papers. “Honest to God, I’m an American,” he insisted. “I’m from Nebraska.” “Shoot him,” one of the corporals coldly suggested as Ben pleaded for his life. A jeep driven by a friend of Ben’s rolled up, but the driver disavowed Ben. Ben was still screaming the jeep driver’s name when he awoke.8 In another dream, Ben confronted a big soldier who called him a “dirty Jap” and began punching the fellow. When Ben woke up, he was pounding his cot with his fists.9 In other dreams, Japanese soldiers armed with knives were sneaking up on his tent, and sometimes they were actually stabbing him.10
The April 13–14 Tokyo raid brought Ben to the breaking point. He became more erratic, his mind going blank at times. He remembered the broken airmen who had been aboard his ship from England and knew he needed help. He went to the squadron flight surgeon and unburdened himself. The surgeon offered to put Ben on the priority list for a rest camp, but he was concerned enough that he reported the encounter up the chain of command.
The following day, the group surgeon informed Ben that he was being removed from combat and shipped home to train crews in aerial gunnery. “You’ve done more than your share in this war,” the group surgeon said. Ben thought of all the people who had lobbied the War Department on his behalf to get him a Pacific assignment, the people he had recruited in the incarceration camps now fighting and dying in Europe, the friends whose deaths he had vowed to avenge. Ben told the medical officer, “I know what my body can take and all I need is a rest, sir.”11
The surgeon relented. Instead of a transfer back to stateside duty, he arranged a furlough for Ben and his crewmates. Escorted by his closest friends on the Honorable Sad Saki crew, Ben boarded an army transport bound for Hawaii.
Chapter 46
WOUNDED ENEMY
In Honolulu, Ben spent his first few days in a military hospital under observation and undergoing tests. Army Air Forces public relations officers now rarely missed a chance to use Ben to generate favorable publicity, and so they arranged for him to visit the offices of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin for an interview and photograph. “We bombed Tokyo a week ago,” Ben told a reporter, alluding to the April 13–14 firebombing raid, “but we’re not supposed to say anything more about that.” The Star-Bulletin ran a photo of Ben with his Honorable Sad Saki crewmate LeRoy Kirkpatrick on April 23.
