Ten 500-pound cluster bombs splattered the hospital grounds, a mile north of Kobe’s harbor, on high ground at the base of the lush Rokko Mountains. A navy dental officer, Lieutenant (junior grade) Stanley W. Smith, was in the operating room when he saw “a blinding flash.” He came to beneath a pile of timbers and debris, as fire consumed the building.9 The doctors and corpsmen freed trapped patients and carried them up the hill and placed them alongside Japanese civilians, many of them badly injured, sitting and lying along the road. The American doctors and corpsmen tended to the injured, administering shots of morphine to badly burned victims. When the flames subsided in the late afternoon, the American medical personnel returned to the blackened ruins of their hospital. Miraculously, only three Americans had been killed. Seventeen POWs suffered burns of varying degrees. And four sustained cuts and other injuries.10
In the weeks that followed, a brutal coda to the Kobe raid of June 5, 1945, played out.
One of the eleven B-29s lost on the raid was a 444th Bomb Group aircraft named Black Jack Too. The B-29 collided with a Japanese fighter, but all eleven crew members managed to parachute from their stricken bomber. One of the airmen suffered fatal head injuries during his landing and died on the night of June 5. The others were captured over the next few days and ended up at the Tokai District Army headquarters in Nagoya, about 120 miles northeast of Kobe.
On June 28, the ten surviving crew members and two survivors of a B-29 crew shot down during a May 29 raid were loaded into a military truck and driven into the nearby countryside. One by one, the eleven American airmen were led away to a secluded spot and beheaded by Japanese soldiers.11
Other Americans shot down during the Kobe raid met the same fate. The B-29 Indian Maid of the 482nd Bomb Squadron, 505th Bomb Group, was hit by flak over Kobe. Five men went down with the plane, but six bailed out and were captured. On July 20, 1945, two of the Indian Maid survivors—Sergeant James N. Fitzgerald and Sergeant Harvey B. Kennedy, Jr.—were executed by Japanese soldiers at Shinodayama Military Parade Ground near Osaka. Japanese authorities reported after the war that the other four members of the Indian Maid crew who had been captured on the ground died in captivity.12
The Japanese military had routinely treated American prisoners of war with brutal contempt since the beginning of the conflict, but the firebombing campaign had encouraged even harsher treatment of captured American airmen. Ben’s crewmates had joked with him about the welcome he could expect from the Japanese if he were ever captured. But now execution awaited captured American airman in much of Japan. No one could expect mercy.
Chapter 48
OUT OF LUCK
The fierce attacks mounted by Japanese fighters over Kobe on June 5 were a last stand of sorts. Curtis LeMay’s B-29s would never again face such resistance. The city was still burying its dead and tending to its horribly injured people when LeMay dispatched his B-29s back to Osaka Bay on June 7. In the crosshairs of Ben and his comrades of the XXI Bomber Command was the city of Osaka. The bombers of Ben’s 313th Wing and two others were loaded with M69 incendiaries while the 58th Combat Wing Superfortresses carried thousand-pound high-explosive bombs. The 58th crews had a target of particular importance: the Osaka Army Arsenal, an important ordnance source for Japanese ground forces in the home islands.
Heavy clouds kept enemy fighters out of the fight, and 409 Superfortresses attacked without a single loss to enemy fire. The cloud cover forced the B-29s to bomb by radar, but it made no difference to the unfortunate souls on the ground: 2.21 square miles of Osaka were burned to the ground. The fires destroyed 55,333 buildings, only 1,022 of which were industrial in nature.1
Eight days later, on June 15, the B-29s returned to Osaka Bay for a final attack. Once again, the Marianas wings managed to get more than five hundred Superfortresses airborne for a mission. There wasn’t enough of Osaka left to make the city the sole target, so part of the force took aim at the industrial suburb of Amagasaki, home of a major aircraft factory, large synthetic oil refineries, important power plants, and other industrial targets.2
The B-29s spent two hours and eleven minutes over Osaka and Amagasaki and didn’t see a single enemy fighter. Only one bomber was damaged by enemy fire. The Superfortresses dropped 3,157 tons of incendiaries on the mission, burning an additional 1.9 square miles of Osaka and 0.59 square miles of Amagasaki.
The June 15 raid allowed LeMay to mark off the last of Japan’s six most important industrial cities from his list of targets. Tokyo, Kawasaki, Kobe, Nagoya, Yokohama, and Osaka had been reduced to blackened ruins. Phase I of LeMay’s campaign to destroy Japanese industry and force Tokyo’s surrender without an invasion was complete.3
ON JUNE 17, LEMAY LAUNCHED PHASE II of his plan to destroy Japan’s ability to continue the war. This phase centered on the destruction of dozens of secondary cities that now assumed responsibility for much of Japan’s remaining war production efforts. The list of these cities was not only much longer, but also presented much smaller targets. As a result, LeMay intended to commit one B-29 wing to one city for each mission. For the opening act, LeMay launched attacks against four cities: Omuta, Hamamatsu, Yokkaichi, and Kagoshima.
Ben’s wing, the 313th, was assigned to bomb Yokkaichi, a small port city on Ise Bay, about eighteen miles southwest of the major industrial city of Nagoya and sixty-five miles northeast of Osaka. By the spring of 1945, Yokkaichi’s proximity to the major industrial cities of Nagoya, Osaka, and Kobe had put the local population on notice of the peril posed by B-san—Mr. B—as America’s terrifying Superfortress was known. In the early hours of June 18, 1945, Mr. B appeared in the skies over Yokkaichi. Instead of their war-weary compatriots in Nagoya, the residents of Yokkaichi were the target.
Ben and the men of Honorable Sad Saki were among eighty-nine 313th Wing crews that dumped some 584 tons of incendiaries on Yokkaichi from 1:13 a.m. to 3:05 a.m. In the resulting inferno, 736 civilians died and 1,500 were injured. Some 47,000 people were made homeless. The B-29s destroyed 1.23 square miles, or about 60 percent, of Yokkaichi in those early hours of June 18, 1945.4
On June 22, after eighty-three days of combat, organized Japanese resistance ended on Okinawa. The casualties were staggering. US forces lost 12,520 men killed or missing and 36,631 wounded in action. More than 77,000 Japanese soldiers died, and an estimated 30,000 or more Okinawan conscripts were killed after being pressed into action by the Japanese. Estimates of civilian deaths ranged from 40,000 to 150,000 Okinawans.
Planning was already underway for Operation DOWNFALL, the Allied invasion of the Japanese home islands. The first phase—Operation OLYMPIC—would begin in November 1945 with the invasion of Kyushu, in the south. The second phase was scheduled for the following spring: Operation CORONET, the planned invasion of Honshu, culminating with the capture of Tokyo. The Okinawa casualty figures underscored the importance of the air campaign if America hoped to avoid the astronomical casualties an invasion promised.
LeMay didn’t have to be reminded of this. He pushed his B-29 crews harder. The initial June 17–18 raids on secondary cities became a template for the weeks that followed. On average, the Marianas-based B-29 crews flew two incendiary raids a week, torching four cities a night, taking off in the late afternoon, arriving over their targets in the early morning, and saturating the smaller cities with tons of napalm and magnesium-based incendiaries. Within a matter of weeks, LeMay’s intelligence officers were struggling to come up with targets of sufficient size and importance.5
Arnold supplemented LeMay’s B-29 raids with attacks by other air assets in the Pacific, including the Fifth and Seventh Air Forces and the VII Fighter Command. These units attacked naval and military installations, economic targets, and smaller cities and towns. The aim was to destroy Japan’s main cities, “with the prime purpose of not leaving one stone lying on another,” as one Twentieth Air Force staff officer later said. The Allied Combined Chiefs of Staff envisioned a higher strategic goal: the destruction of Japanese society.6
With the Japanese hanging by a thread, LeMay introduced one final twist to his campaign. On the night of July 27, six B-29s took off from the Marianas with 660,000 leaflets packed into M26 bomb cases. The Superforts dumped the leaflets over eleven Japanese cities, warning inhabitants that they were going to be bombed in the coming days and that they should flee. On the following night, B-29s hit the first six cities listed in the leaflets. It was an audacious move by LeMay: announcing his target to the Japanese in advance, challenging them to stop the mighty Mr. B. On July 31, twelve cities were warned. Four were firebombed the following day by 627 B-29s. On August 4–5, the same drama played out, and another four Japanese cities were firebombed. Systematically, LeMay and his B-29s had destroyed “the Japanese mind,” as one American air commander put it. In the Phase II attacks that began on June 17, LeMay’s B-29s burned fifty-eight cities with 54,184 tons of incendiaries.7
Ben had achieved his goal of bombing Japan, but his quest to prove his patriotism had also made him a participant in what remains the deadliest air campaign in human history. The US Strategic Bombing Survey conservatively estimated following the war that the firebombing raids carried out by American B-29s in the spring and summer of 1945 had killed 330,000 people and injured 476,000. Some estimates put the death toll from the firebombing raids and two atomic bomb attacks at 1 million Japanese civilians.
AS AUGUST APPROACHED, BEN HAD nearly seven months of Pacific combat to his credit. He was closing in on the impressive thirty missions he had flown in Europe. He had just completed mission number 27 when he was asked to do an interview for a popular Army Air Forces radio show The Fighting AAF. The show was broadcast nationally across America and had made a star of the field reporter covering the B-29 campaign against Japan.
The thirty-three-year-old reporter, Technical Sergeant Harold J. Brown, was tall and lanky, and spoke in a melodious baritone that was pitch-perfect for radio. A native of Lincoln, Nebraska, Brown had moved with his family to California as a child and gotten his start in radio in California’s Central Valley before the war. He had broadcast high school baseball games in Fresno and risen to become manager and on-air announcer for station WERN in Bakersfield before enlisting in the Army Air Forces. He had taken on the B-29 assignment with gusto, and only days earlier had flown a firebombing mission to Japan while standing behind the pilot as a wall of flak rose ahead in their path. By the time he asked to interview Ben, Brown had earned an Air Medal for completing five combat missions with Superfortress crews.8
Standing near the tail of Honorable Sad Saki on the tarmac at Tinian’s North Field, Brown covered some of the familiar ground with Ben before drawing out some of his latest experiences in the Pacific. Even though Ben had flown his last Tokyo raid in April, that was the angle that the show’s producers back in New York City decided to play up for the show they were putting together with Ben’s interview as the centerpiece.
As Ben and Hal Brown chatted, a still photographer prowled around them. The image that the AAF public relations office in Guam wired back to Washington for release showed Ben in his khaki fatigues, sleeves of his blouse rolled up to his elbows, sunglasses case on his belt, and a regulation ball cap protecting his head from the tropical sun. He was speaking into a bulky black microphone that Brown held in his left hand. The backdrop of the shot was Ben’s home in the air those past months: the tail section of Honorable Sad Saki.
By the time the Fighting AAF interview aired on radio stations in America on Sunday night, August 5, Ben’s remarkable luck had run out, and his Pacific combat tour had taken a shocking turn.
Chapter 49
UNSCRIPTED ENDING
This wasn’t how Ben’s war was supposed to end.
He had flown fifty-eight combat missions on three continents, triumphed over death again and again, survived more close calls than he could count. Whether his good fortune was attributable to providence or some other cosmic force, Ben was a survivor. And then, he was on the ground, blood gushing from his head, his life hanging by a thread.1
That late July afternoon had been like any other when he wasn’t flying a mission. The men lounged around, wrote letters, played cards, shot the bull, drank beer. Ben was sitting in a Quonset hut, drinking with some of the boys, when things got a little raw. They playfully insulted each other all the time, but on this occasion one of Ben’s buddies crossed a line. The friend was a Native American airman that everyone called Chief, and the banter that he and Ben sometimes exchanged had a racial tinge to it. But Ben was no longer willing to ignore the slur that had been directed at him so often since Pearl Harbor, and Chief had not only used the slur, but questioned Ben’s courage. “You damn Nebraska Japs can’t fight anyone,” Chief said, or something like that, as Ben and other witnesses later recalled.2
Ben looked at Chief to see if he was joking, but when his friend didn’t smile, Ben blew up. “You can call Tojo a ‘damn Jap,’ but don’t call me one,” Ben retorted. Angry words followed. They went outside and talked a bit. Passions cooled, and soon they were back inside, drinking and bantering as if nothing had happened.
They were sitting around a table and Chief was slicing bread for sandwiches with a carbon-steel bayonet when Ben exclaimed, “I’m not afraid of that knife.” He didn’t mean anything by it, but Chief took umbrage. Without a word of warning, he slashed the top of Ben’s head with the bayonet. Ben fell to the floor, blood gushing from a deep gash. An airman stopped Chief from finishing Ben off while someone ran to summon the Jenkins crew officers. Bombardier Ken Neill ran into the hut and saw Ben sprawled on the floor, the top of his head laid open with a horseshoe-shaped wound.
Comrades tried to stanch the bleeding with a towel while Ben slipped in and out of consciousness. There was a short jeep ride, then an ambulance. Ben later remembered lying on a hospital operating table, plasma coursing into his body through intravenous tubes. The doctors saved his life. “I can’t believe I survived that one,” Ben later said. “If it had been a half an inch deeper or lower I would have been finished.”3
BEN WAS STILL IN THE HOSPITAL AS friends and family in Nebraska tuned in to Omaha’s KOWH radio station at 7:30 p.m. on Sunday evening, August 5, 1945 to catch his interview on The Fighting AAF. Because of the time difference, it was already late Monday morning, August 6, on Tinian. At that very moment, the Enola Gay—an enigmatic B-29 that had occupied a North Field hardstand near Honorable Sad Saki since July 6—was on its way back to the island following its epochal mission.
On forays to the North Field officers’ club in recent weeks, Jim Jenkins had bumped into some of the pilots of the 509th Composite Group, the outfit to which Enola Gay was assigned. But the 509th men kept to themselves. It was easy enough for Jenkins and his men to see that the 509th crews had some sort of special status, for their aircraft weren’t equipped with gun turrets and they didn’t fly combat missions with the other B-29s. “You guys are damn quiet about what you’re carrying,” Jenkins had remarked to the Enola Gay commander only a week or so earlier. “Why don’t you tell us?” Thirty-year-old Colonel Paul Tibbetts had evenly replied, “Oh, I couldn’t do it, couldn’t do it. Call it an island buster.”4
