The Battle for Iwo Jima 1945 E-Book

Derrick Wright

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 407

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Iwo Jima was the United States Marine Corps' toughest ever battle and a turning point in the Pacific War. In February 1945, three Marine Divisions stormed the island's shores in what was supposed to be a ten-day battle, but they had reckoned without General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, the enemy commander. 'Do not plan for my return,' wrote Kuribayashi in one of his many letters to his wife, Yoshii. He knew that he and his garrison could not defeat the Marines, but he was determined to exact a fearful toll in American casualties. In the 36-day battle for Iwo Jima, which eclipsed all that had gone before, the Marines lost nearly 6,000 men and the Japanese garrison was virtually wiped out.

Leseprobe

This book was first published in 1999 by Sutton Publishing Limited

This paperback edition first published in 2003

Reprinted in 2007, 2019

The History Press

97 St George’s Place,

Cheltenham, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

Copyright © Derrick Wright, 1999, 2003

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher and copyright holder.

Derrick Wright has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7509 9407 1

Typeset in 11/14.5pt Sabon.

Typesetting and origination by

Sutton Publishing Limited.

Printed and bound in England by

TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

For Bert Clayton

Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface

Maps

  1   No Sparrows and No Swallows

  2   Superfortress

  3   Operation Detachment

  4   ‘Our Most Redoubtable Adversary’

  5   ‘A Great Day to Die’ (D-Day)

  6   The Jaws of Hell (D+1–D+2)

  7   Corpsmen: ‘Jewels of the Battlefield’

  8   ‘The Flag Is Up!’ (D+3–D+5)

  9   ‘The Meatgrinder’ (D+6–D+8)

10   ‘Oh God, Not Another Ridge’ (D+9–D+11)

11   Stalemate (D+12–D+15)

12   On To the Sea (D+16–D+19)

13   The Last Round (D+20–D+26)

14   Epilogue (D+27–D+36)

Appendix 1: Medal of Honor Winners

Appendix 2: The Flag-raising

Appendix 3: US Command and Staff List

Appendix 4: US Task Force Organization

Appendix 5: Japanese Command Structure, Iwo Jima

Appendix 6: US Task Organization

Appendix 7: 20th Air Force Command Structure, April 1944–July 1945

Appendix 8: Casualties

Select Bibliography

Acknowledgements

In writing a book about a battle of over half a century ago, the author had to rely heavily on the good will of the veterans of that battle to supply information and personal accounts. This was something I approached with considerable trepidation, expecting some rebuffs from Americans who would query why a British author was examining their military history. Thankfully, my doubts were soon dispelled: everywhere, my requests for information were greeted with courtesy and enthusiasm, truly ‘Semper fi’.

I am particularly grateful to Col. Charles Waterhouse, USMC Ret., for permission to reproduce some of the superb paintings from his great book, Marines and Others. Many thanks go to Mr Taro Kuribayashi for unique information and photographs of his father, to Mr Joe Rosenthal for a definitive account of the famous flag-raising on Mt Suribachi, to Gen. Paul W. Tibbets for information on the bombing campaign against Japan, and to Dale Worley for allowing me to quote from his moving ‘unofficial’ Iwo Jima diary.

For permission to quote from their books on the battle, I am indebted to Maj. John Keith Wells, ‘Chuck’ Tatum, John Lane and Mary Hartman. For valuable information on the role of Navy Corpsmen, and for reviewing Chapter 7, many thanks to Stanley E. Dabrowski. For personal accounts of their experiences on Iwo Jima, and for interesting information about the battle, my thanks go to the following:

William A. Almond, Col. Joseph H. Alexander, Bill Alexander, Travis L. Budlong, Capt. Clifton J. Cormier, Roland Chiasson, Clayton N. Chipman, Herman J. Dupont, Ross Doll, Robert R. DeGeus, Eric L. Doody, Col. E.J. Driscoll Jr, Chuck Davis, Isidore Finkelstein, Richard A. Fiske, George J. Green, Frank V. Gardner, Marshall Harris, Dr Sam J. Holman, Capt. Teruaki Kawano, Joe Kobylski, Al Kirtley, Dr Michael F. Keleher, Bill Konop, Col. Jim Leffers, Russell J. Lacher, Arthur E. Light, William L. MacAllister, Edward Maffei, Elbert Phillips, Vaughn B. Russell, Robert M. Rennie, Walt Sandberg, Col. Shelton Scales, Peter Santoro, John Spencer, Robert F. Tindall Jr, Roland S. Tolles, Alan Wood, Peter M. Walker and Cy Young. Special thanks to my two most consistent and accommodating American contacts, Bert Clayton, Editor of the 5th Division’s Spearhead News, and John Lane, author of the fine book, This Here is ‘G’ Company.

The wartime photographs of Iwo Jima are reproduced courtesy of The National Archives, Washington DC, the United States Marine Corps, the US Navy, or as credited in the text. Maps and other drawings are by the author.

Preface

‘How do you remember that far back?’ several people have asked.

‘That is not the problem,’ I tell them – ‘the problem, is how do I forget?’ (John Keith Wells)

As the final hours of 1944 ebbed away, a mood of mounting optimism was sweeping the free world. After five years of bitter conflict and oppression in Europe, no one realistically doubted that Hitler’s evil empire was on the point of collapse.

The cream of the German Army lay dead in the vast expanses of Russia, and the victorious Red Army was sweeping across Poland in the north and encircling Budapest in the south. In Italy, the Allied armies had advanced to the Gothic Line, and despite appalling weather, were pushing towards the River Po and Milan. In the west, Hitler’s last mad gamble, the breakout in the Belgian Ardennes, had fizzled out in December with severe losses. The American 3rd Army of Gen. Patton was driving towards the Rhine at Mannheim, while the British and Canadian forces in the north had just liberated Antwerp on the Belgian coast. In the air, the USAAF and the RAF enjoyed total command of the skies, as the pathetic remains of the Luftwaffe and its demoralized crews were grounded through lack of fuel.

From Britain, the US 8th Air Force pounded the Nazi oil industry by day as the RAF hammered German cities by night, culminating in a devastating attack on Dresden in February 1945 which created a firestorm in which 136,000 people perished. As the noose grew tighter, the demented Führer continued to issue bizarre battle strategies to non-existent armies until he finally retired to his Berlin bunker with his mistress, Eva Braun, where they committed suicide on 30 April 1945.

In the Pacific, the Japanese had been rolled steadily back to the limits of their defensive perimeter around the homeland. The heady days of conquest at Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, Singapore, Burma and the East Indies were now a fading memory as the Japanese Army faced defeat on all fronts.

At sea, the picture was even bleaker, as the Americans, now in possession of the largest Navy the world had ever seen, hounded the remains of the Imperial Navy to the very shores of Japan. Gen. MacArthur fulfilled his promise to return to the Philippines, and by the end of 1944 his troops were advancing through the island of Leyte. In Burma, British and Commonwealth forces of the 14th Army had pushed the Japanese back from the borders of India and were advancing on Mandalay, while in the east, Adm. Chester Nimitz’s Marines had blasted a trail from Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands to Eniwetok, Peleliu and Saipan, Guam and Tinian in the Mariana Islands, where huge airfields were being carved out of the jungle for the assault on the Japanese mainland by B29 Superfortress bombers.

While no one doubted that Japan would be defeated, what was in doubt was the cost in human lives. The Shinto religion practised by the Japanese decreed that death was merely a transitionary event, not to be feared, in which the spirit moved from one plane to another, where it would be reunited with those of its ancestors. Courage, honour, loyalty and self-sacrifice were lauded, together with a contempt for death. The divinity of the Emperor was a paramount belief, and in battle, the ultimate disgrace was to surrender or be taken prisoner – far better to die or commit suicide.

The Americans were fully aware of the resilience and commitment to ultimate self-sacrifice of the Japanese soldier. At Tarawa, of a garrison of some 4,700, only 17 Japanese allowed themselves to be captured, and at Peleliu, only 406 survived from a total of 11,000 – and many of these prisoners were Korean labourers who did not share the Japanese death wish. The Joint Chiefs of Staff viewed the impending invasion of the Japanese mainland with horror. The prospect of a drawn-out campaign of attrition against the Japanese – both military and civilian – in which every town, village and field would be defended to the death was appalling. Marine planners had already calculated a 60–70 per cent casualty figure for the first waves of assault troops, and a well-known general had privately suggested that these men should all write farewell letters to their families, to be left with the postal service for later despatch.

Air Force General Curtis LeMay had made a trip to Washington to plead his case for increased area bombing of Japanese cities – he was firmly convinced that a few more months of his incendiary raids would see the government bowing to civilian demands for an end to the war. Nevertheless, plans for the invasion continued to be implemented, while at the highest levels of government, the Manhattan Project – the manufacture and testing of an atomic weapon – was pushed forward at a frantic pace.

As the American bombing campaign grew in intensity, a tiny island roughly halfway between the Marianas and the Japanese mainland had now assumed tremendous importance. Iwo Jima – Sulphur Island – was the only island on the B29 bombers’ route to Japan that was capable of housing airfields. For the Americans, it was a thorn in the side of the 20th Air Force: Japanese fighters could attack the Superfortress bombers on their flights to and from Japan, and the radar station on the island gave the homeland two hours’ warning of an impeding raid. In US hands, these threats would be eliminated, and the Air Force would have the added bonus of an emergency landing site for damaged planes returning from their very long missions, and a base for the long-range P51 Mustang fighters to escort the bombers to the heart of Japan.

For the Japanese, Iwo Jima, part of the prefecture of Tokyo and therefore officially Japanese territory, was the last line of defence before the mainland. The military knew that the Americans would attempt to occupy the island, and were equally determined that they would extract a huge price in Marine casualties that would possibly make the US Government have second thoughts about an invasion of Japan. Therefore, on Monday 19 February 1945, Iwo Jima, some 660 miles south of Tokyo, became the scene of one of the bloodiest battles of the Second World War. Three Marine divisions landed in what the planners had expected to be a ten-day operation, but for thirty-five days they were locked in a deadly war of attrition with a Japanese force for whom surrender was not an option.

Commanded by a brilliant general and entrenched in an amazing labyrinth of underground tunnels, chambers, gun emplacements and command posts, the Japanese, forewarned of the American invasion and resigned to dying at their posts, were determined to take as many Marines with them as possible. ‘Do not plan for my return,’ wrote the commander of the island, Lt.-Gen. Kuribayashi, in one of his last letters to his wife. His words would also prove a prophetic epitaph for many thousands of US Marines. Five weeks later, 6,766 US personnel lay dead, and nearly 20,000 were wounded. Of the Japanese garrison of 21,060, only 1,083 remained alive at the end of the battle.

Maps

One

No Sparrows and No Swallows

In the beginning, Iwo Jima was just an unknown island in the north Pacific Ocean. In the end, it was to become the island of death. The Nanpo Shoto is a chain of bleak islands stretching for 750 miles into the Pacific from the edge of Tokyo Bay. With the exception of a few barren outcrops, the three principal groups are the Izu Shoto, the Bonin Islands, and at the end of the chain, the Volcano Islands. The islands aroused little interest over the centuries, although it is recorded that in 1543 a Spanish captain called Bernard de Torres visited the Volcano Islands, and the Bonins were briefly explored by Sadayori Ogasawara, a Japanese mariner, in 1593. Much later, in 1673, an Englishman called Gore set foot on Iwo Jima and named it Sulphur Island after the foul-smelling clouds of gas he saw rising from the earth. He professed an intense dislike of the place, and rapidly departed – an action that would have met with the US Marines’ approval nearly three hundred years later.

Over the years, there were brief attempts at colonization, the most successful being in the 1830s, when a strange group consisting of British, Portuguese, Italians, Hawaiians and a sole American called Nathaniel Savory of Massachusetts sailed to Chi-Chi Jima and claimed the island on behalf of the British Crown. By 1891, the Japanese had asserted sole authority over the whole of the Nanpo Shoto, and began a discreet colonization of the inhabitable islands, finally bringing them under the jurisdiction of the Tokyo prefecture.

When in 1941 the Japanese Empire launched its attack on Pearl Harbor and America and Japan went to war, the population of Iwo Jima numbered 1,091. The islanders occupied a number of small villages, the capital, Motoyama, Nishi, Kita and Minami being the largest. The principal industry was the refining of sulphur, the only natural commodity, although this was supplemented by a small sugar cane plantation and some fishing. A great deal of the food for the island was brought in by ship, and water was a constant problem – there was no natural supply, and a system of concrete cisterns had to be constructed to collect rainwater, but even so, water was still imported.

Iwo Jima is 660 nautical miles south of Tokyo, and 625 miles north of Saipan in the Mariana Islands – almost halfway, a location that was to give the island immense importance later in the war. From the air, Iwo Jima has been described as resembling a pork chop, others see an ice cream cone: For the Marines who fought there in 1945, it simply looked like Hell: ‘I don’t have to worry about going to Hell,’ said one veteran, ‘I’ve been there already.’

The island is some 4½ miles long, with its longest axis running from south-west to north-east; it tapers from 2½ miles wide at the northerly section to a mere ½ mile in the south, giving a total land area of around 7½ square miles. At the base of the island lies Mt Suribachi, a 550 ft high dormant volcano – a strategically important feature with commanding views over most of the island. The beaches that stretch north and north-east from Mt Suribachi are terraced at various heights and widths by storms and constant wave action. There is no harbour or anchorage on the island, and the surf conditions, even in good weather, are not particularly conducive to landing operations.

In the centre of this lower part of Iwo Jima lay Airfield No. 1 (the Japanese used the prefix Motoyama for the three Airfields on the island, but for simplicity, they will be referred to in this book as ‘Nos 1, 2 and 3’). Airfield No. 1 was constructed on a plateau, and had three runways, together with taxiways and revetments. Further north, at the wider part of the island, a second plateau, roughly a mile in diameter, housed Airfield No. 2, and a little further north lay the as yet unfinished third airfield.

The ground that slopes away from this northern plateau is a mass of gorges, valleys, ridges and hillocks – perfect ground for defensive fighting. At various points all over the island, foul-smelling clouds of sulphurous vapour are vented from fissures in the earth. The north-easterly shore of Iwo Jima, between Kitano Point and Tachiiwa Point – a distance of some two miles, is a mass of steep cliffs leading to barren, rocky shores. The climate is variable – cool from December to April (63–70˚F), and warmer from May to November (73–80˚F), and the annual rainfall is around 60 in. The poor soil allows only coarse grass and stunted trees to grow – Army Major Yokasuka Horie wrote to his wife: ‘It has been written in the geographical books that this is an island of sulphur, – no water, no sparrows and no swallows.’

As early as March 1944, reinforcements were on the way to Iwo Jima. The Japanese High Command watched with increasing alarm the inexorable progress of Adm. Nimitz’s Marines across the Pacific from Tarawa to the Marshall Islands and on to Peleliu, Saipan, Tinian and Guam. They knew that with airfields in the Marianas, the Americans would be looking to Iwo Jima, the only island in the whole of the Nanpo Shoto range capable of housing major airfields, as a halfway haven for their Superfortress bombers. After centuries of obscurity, the island had assumed a position of major strategic importance.

In May 1944, Lt.-Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi was summoned to the office of Gen. Tojo, the Japanese Prime Minister, and informed that he would be the next commander of the garrison on Iwo Jima. Whether by accident or design, the appointment was a stroke of genius. Kuribayashi, descendant of a long and distinguished military line, was also a Samurai, the warrior caste of Japan that has its origins in the middle ages. At 53, he could look back on a career spanning thirty years, including a spell as an attaché in America.

Like another great Japanese commander, Adm. Yamamoto, he had witnessed at first hand the vast industrial potential of America, and was of the opinion that war with it was futile. Kuribayashi had followed the progress of the war with growing dismay. The heady days of victory in 1941 and 1942 were over, and the forces of the Empire were being rolled back on land and sea – he knew that an Allied victory was now inevitable. Certain in the knowledge that the Americans would eventually secure Iwo Jima, he viewed the appointment as both a challenge and a death sentence: ‘Do not plan for my return,’ he wrote in one of his frequent letters to Yoshii, his wife.

Kuribayashi had carefully studied the tactics of the Japanese commanders on the various islands that had fallen to the US Marines in the Pacific – Tarawa, Kwajalein, Peleliu and the Marianas – and realized that previous methods of defence had failed. Nowhere had the attempts to thwart an invasion on the beaches worked, even at Tarawa, where shallow water on the reefs surrounding the island of Betio had forced large numbers of the invaders to wade hundreds of yards to the beach under murderous fire, and he regarded the traditional banzai charge as little more than frenzied suicide.

He was intrigued by the battle for Peleliu in the Palau Islands, where the Japanese commander had conducted a fighting retreat into the Umurbrogol Mountains and waged a suicidal battle of attrition among the caves valleys, gorges and rocks. This was a different concept – as the commander had put it: ‘It is most urgent to lead the enemy to confusion and destruction by concentrating firepower from our strongpoints remaining in his midst, even though partially trampled under foot by landings, and to carry out strong counter-attacks from previously planned and prepared positions.’ Kuribayashi approved of this strategy – the enemy would not be defeated, but they would pay heavily for every inch of Iwo Jima.

Once he had arrived on the island, Kuribayashi lost no time in implementing his strategy despite opposition from Gen. Osuga and Col. Hori, two of the Army staff who had been with the original reinforcements sent out in March. His first order was for the return of all civilians to the homeland – their presence would serve no useful purpose, and they would be a drain on the limited supplies of food and water. With the arrival of more troops and Korean labourers, a massive programme of tunnelling got under way. Cave experts were flown in from Japan to advise the Army on important aspects of the programme, such as reinforcement of strongpoints, ventilation and direction.

The tunnellers had an important advantage, since most of the sub-surface of the island was made up of soft pumice-like volcanic rock which could be cut relatively quickly with hand tools. In the nine months available to the defenders before the invasion, an astonishing complex of tunnels, caves, gun emplacements, pillboxes and command posts was constructed. It was found that the volcanic ash mixed well with cement, and provided a cheap and convenient building material – when reinforced with steel wire, the Japanese were able to provide their bunkers with up to four feet of defensive protection. Many of the tunnels and all of the command posts, some of them up to seventy-five feet underground, were wired for electricity, and in the northern part of the island in particular, the tunnels linked positions that were up to half a mile apart. Tunnels were built above other tunnels, and ‘spidertraps’ (covered pits in the ground) were arranged so that during the battle, Marines often found themselves destroying one position only to find the same enemy sniper popping up minutes later from another position fifty or sixty yards away. Many Marines, resting during the night, reported hearing voices and movement coming from the ground beneath them, and after the capture of Mt Suribachi at the southern end of the island, many of the defenders joined the troops fighting in the north by by-passing the Marine lines through one or other of the labyrinth of tunnels.

The tiny ‘Grasshopper’ spotter planes used to locate enemy positions often returned with the news that they hadn’t seen the enemy at all, only groups of Marines. Private First Class (Pfc) Jesse Cass, a BAR man with the 4th Division, writes:

I landed on Iwo on the fourth day. I was assigned to cover three flamethrowers and we spent two days burning out Jap positions near the quarry. On the third day we were closing in on a cave when a mortar shell landed among us. One of the flamethrower guys was killed and I got a piece of metal in my face – they carried me away and I was on a hospital ship before night. During the whole of my time on Iwo Jima I never saw a Jap.

A new command was based in Iwo Jima – the 109th Infantry Division, which was supplemented by troops originally destined for the defence of Saipan. By the time of the American victory in the Marianas in July, the defences of Iwo Jima were formidable. Supplying the island was a problem: with no harbour of its own, the transport ships were compelled to dock at Chichi Jima in the Bonin Islands, where supplies, weapons, troops and ammunition were transferred onto small vessels for the 150-mile trip to Iwo Jima.

This route soon attracted the attention of the Americans, and became a target for bombers and submarines operating from the Marianas. An early casualty was the 26th Tank Regiment, deployed from Yokahama on 14 July, which fell victim to the submarine USS Cobia when it sank the transport Nisshu Maru with the loss of twenty-eight tanks. Aware of the Japanese build-up on Iwo Jima, the US Navy sent a Task Force under Rear-Adm. Joseph J. Clark to attack the island on 15 June. Aircraft from seven carriers pounded the airfields and engaged the Japanese fighter force in fierce dogfights in which ten of the Japanese planes were shot down. The following day, the Japanese failed to intercept the Americans, and the Navy planes bombed and strafed the island at will, destroying a number of aircraft on the ground, and taking many photographs of the installations and terrain which were of great value when compared with later shots to evaluate the progress of the build-up of the Japanese defences. Clark made a third visit on 24 June, and this time the enemy responded by sending up their entire fighter force of eighty planes, but the pilots were young and inexperienced, and only fourteen of them escaped the Hellcats and Corsairs of the Navy.

In June, Maj. Yoshitaka Horie was sent to Iwo Jima to become a member of Gen. Kuribayashi’s staff. As an officer who knew and had served under the General and survived the war, his observations are of great value. Horie was aware of the tunnels that were being constructed throughout the island: ‘In order to connect with each defensive position we planned to make 28,000 metres of underground tunnels, and began this work in December 1944, but by the time the American forces landed on Iwo Jima, we had only made 5,000 metres.’ However, in view of the masses of subterranean workings that were discovered after the battle, this is a major underestimation.

Gen. Kuribayashi issued a document to his troops called the ‘Courageous Battle Vows’, in which he explained what was expected of them:

We shall dedicate ourselves and our entire strength to the defence of this island. We shall grasp bombs, charge enemy tanks, and destroy them. We shall infiltrate into the midst of the enemy and annihilate them. With every salvo we shall, without fail, kill the enemy. Each man will make it his duty to kill ten of the enemy before dying. Until we are destroyed, to the last man we will harass the enemy with guerrilla tactics.

With his defences prepared and his men ready to fight to the finish, Kuribayashi waited serenely for the approaching American invasion force: ‘I sing some songs and go to bed by six,’ he wrote to his wife.

Two

Superfortress

The stories of the battle for Iwo Jima and the bombing campaign waged by the 20th Air Force against the Japanese mainland are irrevocably linked. Prior to the invasion of Saipan, Tinian and Guam (the three largest islands in the Marianas group) by the Marines of the 2nd, 3rd and 4th Divisions, the B29 Superfortress bombers had been limited to carrying out raids on the southern islands of Japan from bases in central China. Beleaguered by problems – including the need to fly all their aviation fuel over thousands of miles of inhospitable country, poor navigation by inexperienced crews, and the limitation of small bomb loads – the offensive had proved to be ineffective. Now, with the establishment of five huge airfields 1,500 miles south-east of Tokyo, the way was open for a massive offensive against the whole of the Japanese mainland.

The main obstacle to these missions was Iwo Jima. Situated halfway between Japan and the Marianas, it had two active airfields, with a third under construction. The B29s heading north were constantly under attack from fighters on the island, and the radar station on Mt Suribachi, primitive as it was, was capable of giving the homeland two hours’ warning of an impending attack.

As the airfields on the Marianas took shape, Japanese bombers flying from Iwo Jima made frequent raids, destroying aircraft and installations. It was obvious that Iwo Jima had to come under American control, not only to neutralize the enemy attacks, but to provide a forward refuge for damaged bombers, as a base for air–sea rescue operations, and for P51 Mustang fighters to escort the Superfortresses on the second leg of their long trip to Japan.

A number of years before the outbreak of the Second World War, far-sighted planners within the Air Force had explored the concept of a ‘super-bomber’. Working on the assumption that Germany would overrun Europe in a future war, the Air Force chiefs envisaged an aircraft with a range of 5,000 miles or more, a top speed of 400 m.p.h., and a large bomb load. The outbreak of the war in 1939 gave the programme an added impetus, and specifications were given to the four largest aircraft manufacturers – Boeing, Consolidated-Vultee, Lockheed and Douglas. By early 1940, the choice had narrowed to two, Boeing and Consolidated, and both were given contracts worth over $85,000 to proceed with wind tunnel tests. Concurrently, the Wright Aeronautical Corporation was commissioned to produce a larger and more powerful version of its Cyclone radial engine which had proved to be so successful in the B17 Flying Fortress. In September 1942, the Boeing option, the B29, made its maiden flight in Seattle, and the world’s most advanced bomber was born.

The revolutionary design produced a number of ‘firsts’: the first bomber to have pressurized areas for the crew, allowing the plane to fly at very high altitudes, and the first to have a remotely-controlled gunnery system. The only manned gun was in the tail, the remaining four low-profile turrets were controlled by gunners operating computers that calculated target speed, distance, altitude and direction.

To give the aircraft the speed the specification demanded, the B29 was designed with long, narrow wings, a feature known as high wing loading, common on modern airliners, but novel in the 1940s. High wing loading results in high landing speeds – which was to provide difficulties for the first crews – and, of course, high landing speeds means long runways, an added task for the Seabee construction crews hacking the wartime airfields out of virgin jungle.

Unfortunately, the Superfortress programme did not proceed as smoothly as the Air Force or Boeing had anticipated. The new Wright Cyclone R-3350 engines were prone to overheating problems – indeed, the second B29 prototype crashed into a meat-processing factory on the edge of Boeing’s airfield near Seattle with one of its engines blazing, resulting in the death of the chief test pilot, Edmund T. Allen, and ten members of the project development team, and the whole programme was delayed for many months. In their attempt to make the huge engines as light as possible, the manufacturers had compacted the front and rear rows of cylinders and made wide use of magnesium in place of the usual aluminium in the construction of a number of the components. With an inadequate air flow, the engines overheated, and the combustible magnesium burned through the engines and into the main wing spars. To alleviate the problems, the oil flow to the exhaust valves was increased, cowl flaps were redesigned to increase the flow of air, and baffles were installed to redirect the air flow through the nacelles. Despite the improvements, fire remained a serious problem for a long time, even when the bombers became operational in the Marianas.

The production of the Superfortress was spread over four massive plants – the Boeing works at Renton in Washington, Glen Martin’s works at Omaha in Nebraska, and two new facilities specially constructed for the B29 project, at Wichita in Kansas and Marietta in Georgia. Additional sub-contract work for items such as gun turrets and undercarriages was given to companies previously unconnected to aircraft production, the Chrysler Car Company, the Fisher Body Division of General Motors, the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, and a host of smaller manufacturers.

Even before the Marines had completely liberated the islands of the Marianas, the bulldozers of the Army Air Force engineers and the Seabees were busy carving great swathes out of the jungle and scrubland to provide the airfields for the Superfortresses. Five huge sites were constructed, two on Guam, two on Tinian and one on Saipan. Each airfield was virtually a small town, apart from the usual workshops, administration facilities and communication centres, shops, banks, post offices and cinemas sprang up to service the large numbers of air and ground staff. On Guam, at the height of operations in 1945, there were 65,000 Air Force and 78,000 Navy personnel alone.

The five Wings of the B29 force, the 21st Bomber Command, came under the direct supervision of the Commanding General of the Air Force, Gen. Henry ‘Hap’ Arnold, in Washington, and the first local commander was Brig.-Gen. Haywood S. Hansell Jr – ‘Possum’ to his friends. Upon his arrival on 12 October 1944, Hansell, very much aware of the very limited experience of his new B29 crews, initiated an intense training programme which culminated in a raid on the Japanese base at Truk on 28 October. The bombing results were not encouraging, and three of the eighteen planes taking part failed to locate the target. Further training raids were carried out on the two airfields on Iwo Jima in preparation for the first major raid on the Japanese mainland.

Hansell was an advocate of daylight precision bombing. Having served with the 8th Air Force in Britain and witnessed the excellent results the B17 Flying Fortresses had achieved in virtually wiping out the German oil industry, he was confident that similar methods would devastate the Japanese war industry. Following a photo-reconnaissance flight over the capital on 1 November, plans were laid for the first attack on Tokyo since the famous ‘Doolittle’ raid of 1942.

As dawn broke on 24 November, 110 Superfortresses thundered down the runways of Isley Field on Saipan and headed north. Led by Gen. O’Donnell in ‘Dauntless Dotty’, the crews settled down for their 7½-hour flight to the Japanese mainland. In the back of their minds, they were aware that their chances of recovery were slim should they have to ditch their aircraft in the vast areas of ocean between the Marianas and Japan – what would befall them should they have to bail out over the Japanese mainland was something they tried not to think about.

The target for this first raid was the Nakajima aircraft engine works in the Tokyo suburb of Musashino. Warned by the radar station on Iwo Jima, the enemy put up a heavy anti-aircraft barrage, and forty fighters made some rather cautious interceptions. Once the bombers had formed up on their bombing run at altitudes of 27,000–33,000 ft, the crewmen were astonished to find themselves approaching the target at speeds of over 450 m.p.h. Bombardiers struggled with their bombsight calculations as the target area raced towards them – a task that was not helped by heavy cloud conditions.

What the B29 crews had discovered was the jet stream, the sub-stratospheric wind that blows between the troposphere and the stratosphere, which was virtually unknown at that time. As a result, the raid was a failure, eight bombers were damaged and one shot down, and the bombing was scattered, few bombs hitting the target.

Three days later, a force of eighty-one Superfortresses returned to Musashino, but this time the jet stream raced the bombers over the target at over 550 m.p.h., and it remained unscathed. All the evidence showed that daylight precision bombing under these conditions was impossible. In subsequent raids, the jet stream and stiffening Japanese opposition played havoc with Hansell’s strategy. Other targets were selected, and some improvements were forthcoming, but ‘Possum’ was becoming disillusioned, and in a bitter attack on his crews he announced: ‘In my opinion you people havn’t earned your pay over here. Unless you do better, this operation is doomed to failure.’ Under mounting pressure from the 20th Air Force HQ in Washington for better results from the attacks on the principal Japanese cities, controversy arose between Hansell and the policy makers in Washington, led by the 20th Air Force Chief of Staff, Lauris Norstad, over the issue of area bombing versus precision bombing.

The start of 1945 saw morale in 21st Bomber Command at a low ebb. Of the 188 crew members who had died so far, 116 of them had been lost at sea when damaged aircraft had been forced to ditch in the Pacific with no refuge on the 1,500-mile return trip. A complex rescue network had been assembled – submarines between Japan and Iwo Jima, and destroyers and flying boats elsewhere – but with such vast areas of water to cover, the success rate was depressingly low.

By mid-January 1945, the chiefs in Washington had decided that Hansell must go. His replacement was Curtis Le May, a brilliant tactician who had formerly been in command of the 3rd Division of the 8th Air Force in England, where his tough stance had earned him the nickname ‘Iron Arse’. The cigar-chewing General surveyed the problem in his cool, logical way – daylight high-altitude precision bombing did not work, so why not try a completely different approach.

On 9 March, the crews assembled for their briefing and were left speechless by what they heard. They were to attack Tokyo at night, at altitudes of 6,000–10,000 ft, and as if that were not enough, all bomb bay fuel tanks were to be removed (they would not need the extra gas if they did not have to climb to the usual 30,000 ft), all guns and their operators were to go, apart from the tail-gunner who was retained for observation purposes only, and the bomb load was to be all-incendiary.

There was talk among the crews of a ‘suicide mission’, and some pilots who had not served under Le May before openly doubted his sanity. Le May’s answer was forthright: ‘If this raid works the way I think it will, we can shorten the war.’ But privately, he knew his career was on the line, and he admitted to a colleague: ‘I was very nervous about the mission.’

Le May’s great gamble paid off. Guided by Pathfinder planes, 334 Superfortresses saturated a three-mile by five-mile area of Tokyo with napalm-filled incendiaries, and a firestorm soon developed. At its centre, the temperature reached a staggering 1,800˚F. Gen. Thomas S. Power, who led the raid, climbed to 20,000 ft to survey the scene: ‘It was a hell of a good mission,’ he later told Le May.

Only fourteen aircraft were lost, and of these, five crews were recovered by the air–sea rescue services. Reconnaissance pictures showed that nearly 16 square miles of the city had been totally destroyed, and the official death count was 83,793 killed and 40,918 injured. Eager to capitalize on his success, Le May launched a series of similar raids on major cities like Nagoya, Osaka and Kobe, with equally devastating results.

By now, the Japanese airfields on Iwo Jima had been captured by the Marines after bitter fighting, and bombers damaged during the raids on the mainland had a halfway refuge on their return. By April, squadrons of P51 Mustang fighters were operational, and could escort the bombers on the last leg of their missions. Forming up behind the B29s, the Mustangs were guided to Japan, and provided excellent cover. The statistics showed a dramatic reduction in bomber losses.

There was little respite for the Japanese as city after city was engulfed in flames. So frequent were the attacks that at one time Le May’s planes ran out of incendiary bombs, and only a mammoth effort by the Navy replenished their stocks. The kamikaze attacks on the amphibious forces off the shores of Okinawa caused Adm. Nimitz to request the bombing of all nearby Japanese airfields, but once this task had been completed, Le May swiftly returned to the task of devastating Japan.

In conjunction with the firestorm raids on Japan’s major cities, 21st Bomber Command, at the request of Adm. Nimitz, began OPERATION STARVATION, the mining of most of the routes used by Japan’s merchant shipping. Beginning on the night of 27 March, the 313th Wing, operating from North Field, Tinian, began the systematic mining of the harbours of Tokyo, Kure, Hiroshima, Sasebo, Tokuyama and Nagoya, together with strategic areas of the East China Sea, the Sea of Japan and the Inland Sea. The results were dramatic: from an initial 18 ships sunk in April, the count rose to 83 in May, and 85 in June. Despite frantic minesweeping operations, major ports were paralysed for up to ten days at a time: ‘You were eventually starving the country,’ said the commander of the minesweeping force after the war. The 313th Wing dropped a total of 12,053 mines, the largest operation of its kind ever undertaken, and earned the warm praise of Adm. Nimitz.

Meanwhile, Le May’s relentless bombing campaign continued unabated, and city after city virtually disappeared in flames. As the enemy fighter opposition was gradually driven from the sky by the Iwo Jima-based Mustangs, the B29s took to dropping leaflets to warn the civilian population of the next target for destruction.

Civilian morale was near breaking point as thousands fled the cities for the open countryside. In one three-month period alone, the Superfortresses had wiped out 105 square miles of the centres of Japan’s six major cities, and the Minister of Home Affairs considered defence measures ‘a futile effort’. Le May never wavered in his belief that his bombing campaign would end the war, even to the point of going to Washington to tell the Joint Chiefs of Staff of his conviction that Japan could be burned into surrender.

In June, a mysterious unit called the 509th Composite Group arrived at North Field on Tinian, and was assigned a compound that was isolated from the other Bomb Groups. The crews were given training missions to fly, and did not partake in the regular bombing missions assigned to the other units. None of the crews talked about their work. In fact, few of them, apart from their commander, Col. Paul W. Tibbets Jr, knew exactly what they were expected to do. This all changed on the morning of 6 August, when Col. Tibbets, piloting ‘Enola Gay’, dropped a single bomb into the centre of Hiroshima – eight days later, the war was over.

Bombing Japan was a hazardous business. Not only were the distances involved wearing on the crews, but the ever-present dangers of ditching in a cold and remote area of the North Pacific in an 80-ton bomber meant that the chances of survival were poor. Even worse was the prospect of bailing out over Japan: many crews were known to have been beheaded, and the lucky ones were imprisoned in grim POW camps. After the war, horrific cases of airmen being displayed in cages and even buried alive were verified.

As soon as the fighting had ceased, many Superfortresses were sent on missions to Japan to drop food and other supplies for camps known to hold allied POWs. The 444th Bomb Group was employed on a number of these missions, and Chuck Davis, a navigator with the Group recalls one in particular:

On 23 August 1945, we flew to nearby Saipan to have supplies loaded with parachutes and packed into our bomb bays. Then, back to Tinian – we had a briefing as to where we were to go and what to look for, because the Japanese had been instructed to paint the roofs of each camp with big letters ‘PW’. We and another B29 from our Group were given the longest mission of all.

Our target was a camp deep in the mountains of northern Hokkaido, along a canyon on the Ishikari River. We were told that the prisoners worked in coal mines in this area. Our route to Hokkaido began at 4.00 a.m. and took us over Iwo Jima and to the coast of northern Honshu at Sendai. I must mention that not all Japanese were aware that the war was over, and some planes had been shot at, and one was even brought down, so we were apprehensive as we crossed the coast and flew north over Japan from there.

When we reached the gulf north of Honshu and neared Hokkaido, we had to fly close to the water because a typhoon had just entered the area, and we had to navigate by sight if we were to see our designated landmarks. In fact, we were so low that as we crossed the beach, a small boy threw a rock at us! So when we came to the major Hokkaido city of Sapporo at a few hundred feet off the ground we must have spooked the inhabitants no end, because people were running in all directions, and trucks, cars, and locomotives were heading out of town.

We picked up our river north of the town, and snaked along with the hills along each side getting steeper as we went. The clouds were getting lower and rain was beginning to fall as we saw the tell-tale ‘PW’ on a roof beside the river. We were elated, not from our skill in getting there, but that there was a camp there after all and some of our guys may be in it. We had to fly up and around into another canyon so that our drop path into the camp area came from the same direction as our first pass.

This time, we could see people running and waving as we opened our doors and jettisoned the cargo. Unfortunately, the wind blew some ‘chutes over the river, but that didn’t seem to bother those on the ground, because we could see them crossing the river in pursuit. By this time, the typhoon had caught up to us in buckets of rain and visibility near zero. We were left with two choices: fly through the mountains or get above the storm. We chose the former, and after what seemed like an eternity, we reached the coast. What a beautiful sight the ocean was, even with the typhoon still going strong.

The other B29 Superfortress caught up with us about twenty miles out of Iwo Jima, when they lost an engine and requested priority landing status. By now Iwo were streetwise and knew that B29s have no trouble landing with one engine out, so they denied the request.

Seconds after, it called Iwo again to say that a second engine had stopped and they wanted a straight approach. Still Iwo was adamant, and told them to make a standard approach. By this time, we were about to call for landing instructions, but decided to let our sister ship have first choice. It was then that we heard them call Iwo that they had lost the third engine – this got Iwo’s attention!

By then they were a couple of miles out, and Iwo cleared them for a direct approach, but alas it was not to be. Their next transmission was a Mayday call saying that they had lost their fourth engine because they were completely out of fuel. We were circling overhead and could watch the entire drama unfold. Their plane made a wheels-up ditching, and came to a stop. As it bobbed in the ocean, we could see a rescue boat heading for them. Then crewmen began scrambling onto the fuselage and wings. By the time the boat arrived, we could see that all had exited the plane and were making their way to the boat. Don’t ask why, but they then attached a line to the plane and began towing it to shore.

By then, it was about a mile offshore, but as expected, it began to sink, and the tow was abandoned. However, all the crew were saved and returned safely to their home base. Our stay on Iwo Jima that time was much more leisurely, and we were able to see some of the island.

The crews of the 20th Air Force were eternally grateful to the Marines for taking Iwo Jima. It has been estimated that the lives of 24,761 Superfortress crew were saved during the bombing campaign because of its availability.

Chuck Davis is one of those crewmen who sings the praises of the liberators of Iwo Jima, and recalls his introduction to the island:

It was a bright, clear day, one of those days one could stay in bed or head for the beach. However, we were up long before the sun, being briefed for our next mission, a medium-level daylight run up the Inland Sea to Osaka. Our and another Group’s target was the Sumitomo aircraft parts plant. Our Wing, along with Wings from Guam and Saipan, was part of an all-out effort of 600 planes hitting the Osaka–Nagoya area that day.

Everything was uneventful until we joined formation of perhaps 70–100 planes to make the first run. At that point, the lead plane developed engine trouble and fell out of formation. As the deputy leader took over, he radioed (over clear air) that we were to change altitude, and gave the new altitude over the air! The plane off our left wing was immediately hit by anti-aircraft fire and broke in two. Several in the formation were seriously damaged and crews injured after our altitude was gratuitously given.

We received our share of holes, but fortunately no one was hurt, but one of our engine’s fuel lines was knocked out and leaking, which meant that we were heading for our first visit to Iwo Jima, along with more than one hundred other B29s carrying over 1,100 crewmen.

Along with our apprehension over the engine problem, we discovered to our great delight that one of the 500 lb demolition bombs had stuck up in our bomb bay. We could just imagine the delight the Iwo tower would also feel when we told them what we had to land with!