Freedom's Forge (51 page)

LeMay also decided daylight raids were a waste of time and planes. The attackers would come at night, not in formation but singly: each B-29 using its radar scope to hunt out a place where its ordnance load would do the most damage.

Even more shocking, LeMay decided they would go in unarmed. Unlike the B-29s, Japan’s night fighter force had insufficient radar to track and catch individual bombers flying in irregular patterns. By the time the Japanese figured out what was happening, LeMay figured, his B-29s would be safe and gone. So, taking a page out of General Kenney’s book, he ripped out all the Superfortress’s precious gun turrets except the one in the rear and got rid of the co-pilot and bombardier. As Kenney had discovered, there was no need for a bombardier at that low level. It also created room for still more M-74s.
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LeMay’s plan wasn’t just to reduce certain targets or cities to smoldering rubble, as British and American bombers were doing to Germany. It was to burn out the heart and soul of an entire nation. The goal was to save American lives by the thousands by taking away lives by tens
or even hundreds of thousands—and above all to prevent the need for a long, protracted invasion of Japan by the ruthless application of a single instrument: the B-29 Superfortress.

That was the plan. “Probably the greatest one-man military decision ever made,” as someone later put it.
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LeMay had thrown away the proverbial book. But he had also finally come up with a strategy to match the awesome new weapons at his disposal. When the planes arrived over Tokyo, he calculated, twenty-five tons of incendiaries would be raining down on every square mile of the city.
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When LeMay outlined his plan to his commanding officers, some of them called it plain murder. They weren’t thinking of Japanese civilians, but American B-29 crews coming in exposed and almost unarmed at that low level. “Sitting ducks,” they told each other with a shake of their heads, “we’ll be sitting ducks.”

LeMay thought differently. The few night fighters the B-29s couldn’t beat off with their remaining guns, they could evade with superior speed. He also felt confident that the B-29 with its magnificent airframe could absorb whatever battle damage it did incur, and still get back to base.

The first low-level raid was set for March 9, 1945. Meanwhile, Douglas MacArthur had raised the American flag over Corregidor as the liberation of the Philippines entered its final stages. Other American soldiers were getting ready to land on Okinawa, in preparation for the invasion of the Japanese homeland. Experts had told the secretary of war that the invasion would last through most of 1946 and cost upwards of a million U.S. casualties.
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LeMay had one goal: to make that invasion unnecessary.

That afternoon when the word went out to the aircrews, “You will come over the target at an altitude of five thousand feet,” there were gasps of surprise and shock. But in the 504th, its colonel, Glen Martin, heard the initial shouts of “Crazy” and “This is nuts” turn into “a roar of surprise and enthusiasm,” as he put it, once his crews realized the scope of the entire plan.
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Some 334 B-29s lumbered into the air and made the fifteen-hundred-mile flight to Japan, arriving just after night had settled over an unsuspecting Tokyo. The effect was terrifying. In LeMay’s words, “It
was as though Tokyo had dropped through the floor of the world and into the mouth of hell.”
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Two thousand tons of incendiaries rained down on the city from every direction, burning out sixteen square miles of the city and destroying more than a quarter million buildings. Some 83,000 people died in the conflagration that set entire blocks alight and boiled away the water in Tokyo’s canals. LeMay’s planes returned with their underwings and bomb bay doors blackened by the smoke and soot. Crews could smell roasting human flesh below, which lingered in their planes until they landed back at base.

It was the single most destructive air raid in history—and set an apocalyptic scale for what was to come.

News of the raid reached Bill Knudsen many thousands of miles away, in Dayton, Ohio, at the Air Force’s Wright-Patterson Field. It had been the home of the Wright brothers’ first airplane factory. It was now Bill Knudsen’s office, and his last.

With the Battle of Kansas won and the B-29 in action, there was still a lot left for him to do. The Air Force had learned that the key to airpower was logistics: how to keep all those thousands of planes in the air gassed, armed, and ready—and headed in the right direction. So in September 1944, he had been put in charge of the new Air Technical Service Command, or ATSC, the Army Air Forces’ logistical and air services.

As for airplane production, the numbers were hitting almost unimaginable heights. For 1944 it included 93,000 airplanes—almost
double
the number Roosevelt had proposed in 1940 and which everyone had pronounced impossible. In addition, America was producing a quarter of a million aircraft engines, three-quarters of a million machine guns for the Army, four and a half million rifles and small arms, and 17,500 tanks.
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Yet that was almost half the number produced in 1943, and deliberately so. The fact was the problem now was not how to speed up or even maintain production, but how to slow it down as the war’s end approached. Back in July 1943, the New Deal critics had finally gotten their wish. A new centralized agency was set up with a single czar to
oversee both war production and manpower mobilization. The czar was Roosevelt confidant and Supreme Court justice James Byrnes, and as head of the new War Mobilization Board he had so many sweeping powers, some called him the Assistant President.
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Yet from his first day in office until the end of the war, he spent most of his time trying to
de
mobilize the war effort and get American business back on track for an orderly transition to a peacetime economy. Production of civilian products had resumed in August 1944—a sure sign that Washington felt it was safe to begin to wind down mobilization. “Reconversion” became the catchphrase of the day.
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Such was the power of the production monster Knudsen had unleashed and American business had created. Certainly as far as Knudsen was concerned, he felt his job was done. He was worn out, his health strained to the breaking point. His daughter Martha remembered him sitting at home with tears streaming down his face as the radio announcer told of German cities he once knew—Hamburg, Lübeck, Cologne—reduced to rubble by the bombers he helped build. After six months at Dayton and less than a month after V-E Day, Knudsen formally resigned from the Army, on June 1, 1945. The day before, Hap Arnold had pinned the oak leaf cluster to the Distinguished Service Medal Knudsen had been awarded the previous May, “for exceptionally meritorious and distinguished services in the performance of duties of great responsibility.” Bob Patterson told the press he calculated just by being there Knudsen had single-handedly “raised America’s war production totals by 10 percent.”
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As Knudsen saluted and shook hands and set off from Dayton to rejoin his family in Detroit at last, the problem of how to finish the war had passed into other hands. It was no longer a matter of mass production. It was a matter of applying the awesome new technologies industry had developed, in the right places and in the right way.

Here Knudsen had made one final contribution.

On June 11—just ten days after Knudsen stepped down—a flight of specially modified B-29s began arriving at Tinian. The planes had been built at the Glenn Martin plant in Omaha—the plant Knudsen had turned around with the help of a pair of hard-driving managers. These B-29s were different from the others, with slightly wider bomb bay
doors and a modified cockpit with extra room for technicians and special instruments. None of the Omaha workers had known why, and even the top managers knew only that they were part of a special project dubbed Silverplate.

Silverplate’s commanding officer was a thin Air Force colonel with wavy hair and dark eyebrows. Paul W. Tibbets had been operations officer of the 97th Bombardment Group in North Africa and Europe, and commanded the first flight of B-17s to arrive in Europe. Then he had switched to B-29s, where he proved so adept at handling the tough, temperamental machines that Hap Arnold had pulled him from combat and set him to work training other pilots. There was probably no one in the entire Air Force who knew as much about the B-29 as Tibbets—and certainly no one as qualified for as nerve-racking an assignment as Silverplate.
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After months of special training in the Utah desert, and two months in Cuba teaching his crews about long over-sea flights, Tibbets was assembling his men and planes at Tinian for their final preparation. Whatever their mission would be—and Tibbetts had only been told that it would very probably end the war—he had decided that the B-29 with which he would lead the Omaha pack (serial number B-29-45MO 44-86292) would be spray-painted with the name of his mother, who had encouraged him against his father’s will to enter the Air Force.

She lived in Miami, and her name was Enola Gay.

For the rest of the summer, B-29s dropped tons of Henry Kaiser’s magnesium goop and burned out the heart of industrial Japan. Tokyo, Nagoya, Kobe, Osaka, Yokohama, Kawasaki, Toyama: all vanished in a blistering cloud of fire. LeMay’s six hundred B-29s roamed the Japanese islands almost at will. They took to dropping leaflets on Japanese cities before a raid, urging the population to evacuate before they were incinerated.
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It wasn’t until May that LeMay was told about the atomic bomb, and the imminent arrival of Colonel Tibbetts’s 509 Composite Group. LeMay had no control over what they were doing, and he didn’t like the setup at all. He certainly didn’t like the attitude of Tibbetts and his
specially trained crews. “They were the Second Coming of Christ,” or so they seemed to think, he grumbled later.
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LeMay did convince Leslie Groves that the best way to deliver the bomb was with a single B-29; that way, he said, it would be less likely to attract Japanese attention until it was too late.
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But LeMay was also not convinced that the bomb was really necessary. His strategy alone would force Japan to surrender in time, he believed, and his arguments were persuasive enough that his boss, Hap Arnold, was the only senior military or civilian leader to oppose dropping the atomic bomb.

But the truth was that by August, LeMay was running out of targets. Two of the last, the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were chosen for the final act—the one that all hoped and prayed would compel Japanese surrender. On August 1 assembly of the bomb parts unloaded from the cruiser USS
Indianapolis
began, and on the fifth, LeMay watched as it was stowed on Tibbetts’s B-29, the name
Enola Gay
flashing jauntily in the tropical sun.

LeMay couldn’t believe it. The five-ton device was so heavy it couldn’t be loaded the usual way. “The only way to load the bomb was to put it into a hole in the ground, taxi the airplane over the top of the bomb, then jack it up into the plane.”
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No one had flown with a 10,000-pound bomb before. But Claire Egtvedt and Ed Wells’s Superfortress could handle 20,000 pounds with ease, and so the next day at 2:45
A.M
.
Enola Gay
, together with two other B-29s carrying cameras and monitoring instruments, rumbled down the Tinian runway and pulled themselves up into the air and away into the darkness.

A eight o’clock Tibbetts dropped his single thirteen-kiloton uranium atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing 50,000 people almost instantly. Two days later another Omaha-built B-29,
Bock’s Car
(serial number B-29-40MO 44-279297), dropped the Hiroshima bomb’s plutonium cousin on Nagasaki, killing another 36,000. The Japanese government, fearful that there might be more such superweapons, surrendered on August 15.

The war was over.

For hundreds of thousands of American soldiers, and almost certainly millions of Japanese, it meant being spared death in a prolonged invasion and land campaign to take the islands. To Ed Wells, the B-29’s
designer, the news came with a sense of vindication, if not triumph. The plane over which he and the rest of Boeing had labored for almost five years, and which had faced cancellation more than once, had finally come through. Wells himself had spent most of March and April 1945 on Guam with a group of Boeing engineers.

They had arrived days after the first historic raid on Tokyo. Pilots and crews described with awe how thermals erupting from the burning city threw their planes into violent spins, rolls, and Immelmann turns, but the Superfortress had been unfazed. “I’ve flown a lot of Boeing Flying Fortresses,” one pilot told him, “and always thought they were fine planes. But the B-29 beats ’em all.”
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But for the future, the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki revealed something else.

Buried deep within the arsenal of democracy, beyond the piles of tires and oil drums and the stacks of steel and bags of concrete; the endless ranks of trucks, jeeps, artillery pieces, and tanks; the harbors full of ships and submarines and aircraft carriers; the skies filled with fighters and bombers; and underneath the piles of charts and graphs and sheets of statistics, was hidden a suicide note. No one consciously put it there. It had simply turned up, unbidden. A power had been unleashed that, if mishandled, could destroy modern industrial civilization itself. Yet it was also a power that, if properly harnessed, could transform the nature of that civilization for the better.

This posed a dilemma, which Bill Knudsen summed up simply and succinctly. “Progress is only made when fear is overcome by curiosity,” he said. “If you are curious enough, you will not have any fear.”
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Some might think that judgment too optimistic. But as of today, the suicide note remains unsigned.