General Leemy’s Circus E-Book

Earl A. Snyder

• Herausgeber: The P-47 Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

General Leemy's Circus: A Navigator's Story of the Twentieth Air Force In World War II is the action-packed account of the fearless men who flew the Superforts, the B-29 bombers of General Curtis Lemay's XXI Bomber Command.

Leseprobe

General Leemy’s Circus

Earl A. Snyder

Published by The P-47 Press, 2020.

Copyright

––––––––

General Leemy’s Circus: A Navigator’s Story of the Twentieth Air Force In World War II by Earl A. Snyder. First published in 1955.

Revised edition published by The P-47 Press, 2020.

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-67811-114-4.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Prologue

1 - Umbriago Leaps

2 – Umbriago Squats

3 – Flat-Chested Women

4 – Stinking “Kwaj”

5 – I Say, Mate!

6 – Saipan or Bust!

7 – It’s a Struggle

8 - Target Tokyo!

9 – Whew!

10 – A Cook’s Tour

11 – Anchors Aweigh

12 – Air Raid!

13 - Iwo Jima and Christmas

14 - Now, If You’re Captured...

15 - General Leemy Moves In

16 – God Bless ’Em All

17 – Nagoya and Return

18 – Air Combat’s No Romance

19 – Tokyo Again?

Epilogue

Further Reading: Billy Mitchell: Founder of Our Air Force and Prophet Without Honor

Prologue

THE SUN WAS GLEAMING down brightly on the huge, drab Quonset that served as Major General Curtis E. LeMay’s headquarters on hot, humid Guam. Major Ralph Nutter, a navigator in the XXI Bomber Command, stepped in the rear door and hustled to the general’s office. Men with papers in their hands and harried expressions on their faces darted back and forth across the corridor in and out of rooms. Nutter hurried on, his attention only momentarily diverted from the mission he had in mind.

Quickly he grabbed off his floppy air force hat and stepped softly into a spacious office whose walls contained maps and charts with hundreds of multicolored pins sticking out and tens of different-hued tape streamers stretching hither and yon between them.

Behind the desk sat a stocky, well-built man with a round, almost cherubic face, a pointed, jowly chin and a hawk-like, sharp nose. His face was tanned and hardened from the wind-whipping it had received in open-cockpit airplanes; the soft, yet foxlike eyes had a steely squint bordered by myriads of crow’s-feet put there by peering anxiously into the black night searching hurriedly for the glint of moonlight on a wing or fuselage.

Major Nutter saluted sharply. “General, we need radar sets and we need them bad. And we need men to teach us how to use them better and how to maintain them. Some people around here tell me we can’t get them because we don’t have the money. If you got any confidence in what I’m trying to do, please try to get them for me.”

The general slowly pulled his cigar out of his mouth. His penetrating eyes bored into Nutter. His thoughts were veiled, but he spoke slowly, deliberately, with authority: “Major, I know your problems. I want you to tell A-4 to get them and I’ll worry about the money. I’ll get an order out on it this afternoon.”

That was General LeMay, famed World War II commanding general of the XXI Bomber Command. To the Japs in their English-speaking news broadcasts, he was “General Leemy.”

He was the General Leemy who ran General Leemy’s Circus.

To me, General LeMay is a fabulous military airman. Any general who tells an air force major, as, it was related to me, LeMay once did, “Sit down, Major, that looks like damn poor leadership,” has the makings of a unique personality. Any general whose creed, as expressed by a plaque over his desk in his office on Guam, was, “Will your proposition put more bombs on the target?” and who made that creed stick and, what is more important, made it work, has, to my mind, the makings of a unique personality.

Any general whose men facetiously called him Old Ironpants, The Cigar, General Leemy, and other names unprintable, but nonetheless respected and admired him, has the makings of a unique personality. Any general who will take what is known in wartime as a calculated risk—a known bloodletting in which the progenitor stakes his reputation as a commander on the theory that the damage wrought on the enemy will more than justify the blood spilled—and comes out successfully time after time, has to me the makings of a unique personality.

Abraham Lincoln once said, in substance, “If I come out all right in the end, the things I have done reaching that end will not matter. If I come out wrong in the end, ten angels swearing that I did things right will not change matters any.” LeMay must have had a soothsayer’s knowledge of Lincoln’s reasoning. He came out all right in the end. Other generals took calculated risks similar to LeMay’s and they didn’t come out all right in the end. They are not heroes.

I never knew, and still don’t profess to know, what went on in the mind of LeMay. To attempt to fathom it would be a flight into the realm of pure conjecture. As a captain in his command, I do know some of the things that happened to my friends and others that I fought and flew with. Those were the simple, untold incidents that make this book. Those were the flamboyant scenes and the somber realities, the tensed, nervous people, the big, inert planes, the raucous merriment and the sober thought that make up the words that go into this story.

This is not LeMay’s story or a story about him. Only he can tell that adequately. This narrative is partly a history of B-29 Superfortresses and the way they were used in the air offensive against Japan. In these days of stratojet bombers, flying wings and comet-like jet-propelled fighters, the B-29 takes on, even after only a relatively short time, almost a semi-historical quality.

At the time the events humbly depicted in this yarn took place, B-29s were the hottest things in air combat. They were known in code as Dreamboats, and this was supposedly descriptive of the way others felt about them.

If, at times, this story seems like a patchwork quilt, bear in mind that life in combat was often of the same pattern. I will try to stick to facts as closely as humanly possible and I will try to keep prejudice, maudlin sentimentalism and fanciful flights into the dramatic out of this chronicle. A lot of water has passed under the bridge in the years since these events took place. Even such a relatively short space of time has dimmed my memory somewhat as to exact dates and incidents. Saipan in wartime was no place to pose as a third-string Boswell with notepad and pencil poised. I lived these incidents not to write of them but, like a host of other men and women of my generation, because fate thrust them upon me.

Curtis Emerson LeMay (1906–1990)

1 - Umbriago Leaps

I STOOPED LOW AND FONDLY patted the hard-concrete apron. Jokingly, twelve other men followed suit, and someone wryly remarked, “It may be only California, but still it’s the ‘Newnited States.’ God only knows that I hope we all live to see it again.”

We were the combat crew of Umbriago Dat’s My Boy, a beautiful, huge, sleek B-29 Superfortress, and we were on our way to combat after months of mulling around here in the States. As for our plane, we thought there was none better; only a few short months before had technical experts, after many consultations and much rehashing with combat personnel, decided that the familiar, dull olive-drab covering that had been the mark of all Army Air Force aircraft need no longer be used. Umbriago shone like a pewter dollar in a mudhole, even under the very early morning California moonlight.

Our take-off from Mather Field near Sacramento, California was scheduled so that we would get to Honolulu a little before midmorning. Hence we had been told to report to the flight line at midnight, and take-off was scheduled as shortly thereafter as we could get ready and the weather cleared away so that we could get off CFR (contact flight rules).

We were thirteen men ready, even eager, but only one of us had any idea what we were ready and eager for. Bob Handler (not his real name), a New Yorker, had flown twenty-five missions as a bombardier in the Eighth Air Force in Europe. He was the only one of us who had been to combat. He was the squadron bombardier and had been assigned to ride over with the crew of Umbriago in order to get out to the theatre of operations. All the rest of us had a job to do.

When I was funneled into the slot as navigator, I knew I had a fairly rough job ahead of me. Kelley, the bombardier on the crew, but who, like myself, was rated both navigator and bombardier, had some good long laughs.

“Don’t worry, brother,” I countered weakly, “you’re going to be up there shooting some stars for me. In fact, you do all the shooting and I’ll plot the fixes.” I rushed on before he had time to protest, “It’s a deal.”

I had flown out from our staging base in Kansas as a sandbagger on another crew, happy, content to just ride along and enjoy my flying for once. A working navigator gets very little time to enjoy flying; he is constantly working the computers, plotter, dividers, compass, sextants and other navigational paraphernalia that make up his tools. I had had time to look at the Rocky Mountains from the best viewpoint imaginable, to see Reno, Nevada and Salt Lake City, Utah as we had flown serenely along into California’s murky weather. I had even had beautiful visions of a pleasant ocean-crossing to Hawaii—I would arrive there, not dog-tired from twelve or thirteen hours of work, but fresh enough to go out and see what made Honolulu tick.

But all that had been rudely shaken off when flight control had instructed me to “report at once for assignment to a combat crew.”

I squawked! A man doesn’t like a job as a furnace-tender in a luxury liner when he can go first class. It did no good. The overseas-operations officer told me, “I don’t know what your previous overwater navigation experience has been, but a Pacific crossing is the best experience that a navigator can get.”

He was right. And I didn’t tell him that my previous overwater navigation experience was nil.

So I was assigned to Umbriago Dat’s My Boy “vice” (the Air Force always assigns you “vice”_____ [somebody else] when you replace him) 2nd Lieutenant Herbert Post, who had let the medics at Mather Field catch him with a hernia. Post would have an operation and join us later at our destination. I rather suspected that he wasn’t too bitterly disappointed at being held over. And I didn’t blame him. He had been married just before he left Kansas, and this meant a little respite during which he could have his wife come out and enjoy an interlude of married life before he went overseas.

I was Umbriago’s navigator.

“A beautiful, huge, sleek B-29 Superfortress.”

2 – Umbriago Squats

EVERYTHING HAD BEEN extremely hush-hush since the moment we hit Mather Field. We unofficially knew our destination—Saipan!—but no one even whispered it. Funny, the way we found out where we were going.

When the squadron commander talked to us prior to leaving our training base at Salina, Kansas, he had said, “I can’t tell you where we’re going, but I will tell you this. Several thousand Marines gave up their lives to take the island in the bloodiest Pacific battle yet. Their buddies are still out there on that island resting up for their next engagement. They’ve had it rough, plenty rough—and they deserve a lot of respect. We’re supposed to be a pretty hot outfit, but I don’t want any man shooting off his mouth to anybody over there about what we can do until we have proven ourselves.”

I think the CO. had a good point there. One of the few good points he had in the year I knew him.

We scurried around to the latest magazines and finally settled on Saipan as being the only place which fit the description. Then we understood how these brand-new B-29s were going to be used. We understood why we had made all the simulated bombing flights from Kansas to Cuba. It was the absolute maximum range for B-29s with a reasonable bomb load!

We understood a lot of things, but we still couldn’t understand where in the hell the commanding officer at Mather Field got the idea for as much secrecy as he had instituted. True enough, the B-29s were going to real combat for the first time, and Uncle Sam wanted them as a surprise for Japan, but at Mather it seemed to us that Uncle Sam’s nephew, Colonel Somebody-or-other, overdid it

Our mail was strictly censored. We could not mention where we were or what we were doing; in fact, our topics were limited to greetings, the weather (but that had to be handled carefully, deftly) and I’m-fine-how-are-you stuff. No long distance calls; one officer was court-martialed for trying to sneak one out to his wife, and no leaving the airbase.

Possibly the greatest handicap was the no-leaving-the-base ban; and largely because we were unable to go into town and stock up on liquor to cache away in our plane. It would have come in mighty handy later to lighten our darker moments on Saipan. This important pre-take-off duty—procuring liquid spirits—was formerly accomplished by the Red Cross director at the field, may God bless him. But since the night that one combat crew had imbibed too freely and couldn’t make it out of bed the next morning when they were surprised with instructions to go to Honolulu, the commanding officer had even stopped that.

We had a sneaking suspicion as we stood around Umbriago chatting easily, waiting tensely, that all the secretive restrictions imposed by this eager-beaver colonel were largely hogwash. Later events were to bear us out.

I stood there in the night talking to myself.

“Let’s see now, the pilot’s gonna fly the airways till we get to the coast, so no worries there. We pass right over San Francisco—I wanna get a good look at the Golden Gate Bridge—then’s when I begin to work. I’ll take my departure from there—then we pass over this little island and kiss the U.S.A. goodbye. There are three ships stationed along our route about six hundred miles apart and I’ll be able to tell whether we’re on course or not by their radio. Between times, I’ll shoot some two or three star fixes and do D.R. (dead-reckoning navigation). That should just about...”

Kelley thumped me on the back joyfully, and laughingly said, “Snyder, you already act like you’re flak-happy, and you haven’t even left the States. Are ya worried?”

When I let my mouth fall ajar, preparing to speak what was on my mind, he slapped me on the back again. “Listen, I’ll tell ya what I’ll do. You navigate the first half of the trip while I get some sleep, then I’ll relieve you while you get some, then you come back and bring us on into Hawaii. Roger?”

“Brother, you’re on. I’m not in such a hurry to be a hero that I won’t share some of the joy of it with someone else. I’ll wake you up about six or seven hours out and you can take over for a while.”

But I was still worried. And the ditching discussions we had had while standing out on the ramp didn’t help my frame of mind any. I felt, and probably justly so, that if we had to ditch because of some navigational difficulty I would undoubtedly be chopped into little pieces to bait the hooks and fishing lines with which each of the rubber life rafts was equipped. We had carefully explained, in the presence of each other, just what our duties were in case of ditching. Being the navigator, mine was to gather up all my navigational equipment and hie myself on the right wing into a life raft.

Handler, our sandbagging bombardier with twenty-five missions over Germany, was the only one who had never been straightened out as to just what he was to do in case we ditched. He had always seemed to prefer to stay in the club, shooting the breeze or sopping up a beer whenever we had our ditching confabs. I felt it in my bones that, if we ever had to ditch, friend Handler would trample over whales, sharks, men and B-29s getting into the life raft. Fortunately, he was never put to the test.

Our briefing by ATC at Mather had been good—in fact, too good. We were told so much so explicitly that when it was over I was a little confused with all the data. I had a beautiful Loran set (an electronic navigation device) right behind me that would have helped considerably had I had more experience in using it. But then, even if I had, I couldn’t have used it because there was no maintenance personnel at Mather that knew how to calibrate it for use in the Pacific. Then, too, I had a radar scope right in front of me. With it I should have been able to see an island at night through an undercast at least half an hour before I could see it with the naked eye. But nobody was too sure of it either.

“Sherm,” I asked Lieutenant Sherman Wantz, the radar operator, “do you think we can get some use out of the radar set?”

“I dunno, Earl,” he replied, shaking his head woefully, “it’s been acting up lately, and I’m afraid we can’t depend on it too much.”

The B-29 was equipped with the finest, most modern equipment in the world, but we just hadn’t had enough time to learn how to maintain and use it properly. I mentally patted my sextant affectionately.

“What’s holding us up?” I asked the pilot when he walked by me about the fiftieth time.

“Weather—the usual stuff. Just as soon as the field clears up we’ll be off like a herd of turtles. Why? You gettin’ anxious?”

“Well, I’d just as soon be on my way as sitting around here. By the way, let’s hit altitude before we get to ’Frisco so that I can start out ‘even Stephen.’”

“O.K.,” the pilot replied, as a jeep drove up. He walked over to the jeep.

When he came back a few minutes later, he said, “O.K., men, we’re cleared for take-off—let’s get aboard. Is everything else in the plane? We don’t wanna leave anything because there is no forwarding service. You’ve got your feet on U.S. soil for the last time in quite a while, so enjoy it for a few seconds.”

San Francisco was beautiful as we passed over it; I still don’t know whether it was the Golden Gate Bridge or the Treasure Island one, but whichever one it was, it left you with a lot of lights strung out in a long line in your mind’s eye.

I settled down over my desk in the blackness as I heard the pilot call into the radio on the little island. “Code red, code red, this is one-nine-six-four-seven. We are now over your station, altitude eight thousand feet, airspeed one-nine-five. We are checking out.”

“Roger, one-nine-six-four-seven, this is code red. Checking out and good luck.”

Umbriago’s motors whirred on sweetly. It was warm, I was comfortable, I was at a desk with a nice gooseneck lamp, and all I had to do was get seventy tons of airplane and thirteen people to Hawaii. I turned to my compass for solace and direction, and it gave me both.

Some five or six hours after we left the coast I woke Kelley. “She’s all yours. You can find our latest position and time from the map and the log. There are Benzedrine tablets on the table if you get sleepy. I’m going to crawl up in this tunnel and get some shut-eye myself.”

Kelley reluctantly rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and yawned lazily. He didn’t appear too eager to move up to the desk. With a few persuasive tugs, I convinced him it was the proper thing to do.

Sleep came to me easily, quickly, with the low drone of the motors and my fatigue.

Sunlight streaming through the astrodome into the tunnel awakened me hours later. Kelley looked up happily, grinned broadly and threw up his hands in mock despair.

“We’re lost!” he shouted.

But it wasn’t long until the main island of the Hawaiian group—Oahu—loomed into view. In the gray-blue haze of the distant horizon, it jutted out of the placid, green Pacific like a rough-cut diamond in a tourmaline setting. Lazily, a few large, heavy birds winged by the window near my desk and rolled over prettily, down out of view. I wondered if they were Hawaiian harbingers of good or evil, like the albatross in the “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

As we descended nearer the Pacific’s surface, its green took on a lighter hue and the gentle swells rolled high and then dissipated themselves into swirling, eddying whitecaps and large air bubbles. Tossed about on the crest of the swells, then plunged down into the depths of their troughs, was debris of one sort or another; pieces of wood, sides of boxes, wooden crates and cartons—all the flotsam and jetsam of an ocean, and the backwash of Hawaii.

I found it difficult to believe that less than three short years before this had been a scene of utter confusion and chaos, of gross unpreparedness and stark reality, of swift death and quick heartrending tragedy. Its security and safety today belied its vulnerability on December 7, 1941.

The familiar landmarks came up—Koco head and Diamondhead promontories, then Waikiki Beach, which looked rather small from our altitude. We flew low over many ships in the harbor, turned in, heard the co-pilot’s happy “wheels and flaps coming down” break the stillness and the pilot set her down a mite roughly on John Rodgers Field’s long east-west runway.

We were as far as Hawaii, at least.

3 – Flat-Chested Women

ATC (AIR TRANSPORT Command), which had charge of us from the time we landed at California until we got to Saipan, had innumerable restrictions.

All our mail was censored, we had to eat at such-and-such a place, to drink nothing stronger than beer, and, worst of all, there was no leaving the base. How one outfit could think up so many restrictions was beyond us. So many restrictions invited escape and, true to form, ATC had no means of enforcing them. There was no need for them, anyhow. Immediately Handler and I headed for Honolulu. We merely walked out the gate at the edge of the base and caught a bus for Honolulu.

The town was infested with droves of flat-chested women, the like of which I had never seen previously. They looked about as inviting as the average adolescent boy in high school. After a few lousy drinks in several different bars in downtown Honolulu, we made posthaste for Waikiki Beach.

We had no idea where to go when we got there, and we knew no one who could tell us. We were out strictly for fun for this was to be our last fling in a civilized town before we got out in the sticks. When the driver told us we were paralleling Waikiki, we got off at some little side street that didn’t look too promising.

It was the best we could conjure up at the moment.

We started pell-mell for the beach, when we spied a short distance off to our right a number of tables around which a lot of army and navy and marine officers and a few rather attractive native girls were gathered—and on which appeared to be beverages of alcoholic content. We walked no farther; suddenly we felt tired.

This spot proved to be a small hostelry—the Willard Inn—lately taken over by the army and serving real honest-to-God whiskey drinks. They had a rather novel idea for the serving of the drinks, too. No orders were asked; waiters circulated constantly with trays full of drinks. The patron merely grabbed off the number of drinks he desired along with the mixer and threw some change on the tray in their places. Out in those parts whiskey was whiskey, no questions asked. It struck me as an excellent way to throw off the cares of the day.

A five-piece native band enthusiastically beat out island rhythms on several leather-covered hollow logs and assorted other nondescript instruments. It was the sort of thing that drove you to drink more and more in self-defense. We defended ourselves.

My attention was finally drawn to an unusually attractive native lass who sat with a table full of naval officers. She had cocoa-colored skin, sparkling brown eyes and coal-black wavy hair. Her cheeks were smooth and round. Her lips were full and pouted with all the suggestive wickedness of the proverbial South-Sea-island belle. Her body bespoke a lithe suppleness that came from generations of toiling, athletic ancestors. Her breasts were round and full and up-pointed. She was an incorrigible little flirt, I guessed, as she sat there with her soft, shapely legs crossed.

Secretly, out of the corner of my eye, I watched her as she cast her impish glances toward a tall, bronzed marine officer who sat at a distant table bandying words with his marine friends and eyeing her interestedly.

“Careful, buddy,” Handler cautioned me, “you’re a married man, you know.”