Whirlwind Read online

  ALSO BY BARRETT TILLMAN

  NONFICTION

  What We Need: Extravagance and Shortages in America’s Military

  Curtis E. LeMay

  Heroes: U.S. Army Recipients of the Medal of Honor

  Clash of the Carriers: The True Story of the Marianas Turkey Shoot of WW II

  The Alpha Bravo Delta Guide to the U.S. Air Force

  Above and Beyond: The Aviation Medals of Honor

  TBD Devastator Squadrons of WW 2

  U.S. Navy Fighter Squadrons and Aces of WW II

  Carrier Air War: WW II in Original Color

  Wildcats to Tomcats (with Capts. Wally Schirra, R. L. Cormier, & P. R. Wood)

  Pushing the Envelope: The Career of Test Pilot Marion Carl (with M. E. Carl)

  Sun Downers: VF-11 in WW II

  On Yankee Station: The Naval Air War Over Vietnam (with CDR John B. Nichols)

  Wildcat: The F4F in WW II

  MiG Master: Story of the F-8 Crusader

  Hellcat: The F6F in WW II

  Corsair: The F4U in WW II and Korea

  TBF-TBM Avenger at War

  The Dauntless Dive Bomber of WW II

  FICTION

  Vulcan’s Fire (with Harold Coyle)

  Prometheus’ Child (with Harold Coyle)

  Pandora’s Legion (with Harold Coyle)

  Hellcats: A Novel of the Pacific War

  Dauntless

  The Sixth Battle

  Warriors

  WHIRLWIND

  The Air War Against Japan, 1942–1945

  Barrett Tillman

  Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  Copyright © 2010 by Barrett Tillman

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition March 2010

  SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949 or [email protected].

  The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event, contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Tillman, Barrett.

  Whirlwind : the air war against Japan, 1942–1945 / Barrett Tillman.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  1. World War, 1939–1945—Aerial operations, American.

  2. World War, 1939–1945—Campaigns—Japan. 3. Bombing,

  Aerial—Japan. I. Title.

  D790.T624 2010

  940.54’49730952—dc22 2009049218

  ISBN 978-1-4165-8440-7

  ISBN 978-1-4165-8502-2 (ebook)

  PHOTO CREDITS:

  Author’s Collection: 7, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28; Andrew Farmer: 29, 30, 31, 32; National Museum of the Pacific War: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 11, 15, 19, 33, 34, 36, 37, 38; The National World War II Museum: 35; Donald Nijboer: 20; Tailhook Assn.: 21, 22, 23; USAF via Air Force Test Center Museum: 8, 9, 10.

  Dedicated to the memory of Jeff Ethell:

  pilot, historian, colleague, friend.

  “Rock your wings when we rendezvous again

  and I’ll join on you.”

  For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.

  —HOSEA 8:7

  Contents

  Preface

  Prologue

  CHAPTER 1 Before the Beginning

  CHAPTER 2 China Skies

  CHAPTER 3 From the South

  CHAPTER 4 From the Sea

  CHAPTER 5 Firestorm

  CHAPTER 6 Pacific Ponies

  CHAPTER 7 The Harbor War

  CHAPTER 8 “A Most Cruel Bomb”

  CHAPTER 9 Legacy

  Appendix A:The Unknown War

  Appendix B: Japanese Aircraft by Allied Code Names

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  Preface

  DURING THE LAST year of the war in the Pacific, the U.S. Army Air Forces, Navy and Marine Corps, and British Royal Navy conducted a relentless air assault against the Japanese home islands. The attacks came from around the compass: from the west out of China, southwest from Okinawa, due south from the Marianas, northeast from the Aleutians, and from almost anywhere that aircraft carriers steamed. American B-29 bomber crews razed most of the enemy’s urban-industrial areas and delivered two nuclear weapons that ended the war. But there were many other significant players in the multiservice campaign: carrier-based aviators in Hellcats, Corsairs, Avengers, and Helldivers; long-range patrol bombers from the Aleutians; Mustang pilots from Iwo Jima; and almost everything in the Army Air Forces inventory from Okinawa.

  Sixty-five years later, no single volume has examined the Allied air offensive against Japan in its terrible totality. Why there has been so little study of so epic a subject is difficult to explain. Certainly today, when interservice joint operations are not only common but necessary, the 1944–45 effort begs for detailed attention. Coordination of the various air forces, including land- and carrier-based Navy and Marine air groups, and integration of the British Pacific Fleet (BPF) into the American Fast Carrier Task Force, were substantial achievements on a scale never to be repeated.

  The campaign was a long time coming, and a final test of some old theories of war making. As far back as the 1920s, airmen had postulated that strategic bombing could compel an industrialized enemy to surrender, thus avoiding the massive bloodletting of the Great War. But the airpower theorists reckoned from a false premise: that despotic regimes would take pity on their citizens’ plight as democratic governments were expected to do. In truth, the theory worked in neither direction. In World War II, more than 60,000 Britons died in air attacks, but the U.K.’s resolve never cracked. While national resolve was mightily strained in Germany, where the death toll in bombed cities could have run half a million in five years, it held to the end. Perhaps 330,000 Japanese were killed by air attack in one-fifth that time.

  The toll was terrible, but rather than fatally undermining civilian morale, bombing achieved a more subtle victory in affecting Japan’s ability to resist. Moreover, airpower compelled Emperor Hirohito to surrender, sparing Japan a death count that might have grown tenfold in an Allied invasion.

  In 1942, Tokyo stood like an Asian colossus astride the sweep of the Pacific and deep into the Chinese mainland. Less than three years later Japan had lost control of its own airspace, and its cities lay open to attack on a scale the world had never seen. With its industry in ruins, Japan’s chilling policy of arming women and schoolchildren with spears reminds us of the irresistible power of the concentrated Allied assault on Dai Nippon, even as it poses moral questions that persist today.

  In the course of writing more than thirty previous histories, I came to know hundreds of veterans of the Pacific War, American and Japanese alike. One thing shines through: they populated a vastly different world than today. With the rise of idealistic globalism, the context in which World War II was fought is difficult for many people to fathom.

  Mindful that more than 2,000 U.S. World War II veterans die every day, Whirlwind assembles narratives from a variety of sources: official records, published accounts, and interviews with the dwindling numb
er of survivors. Sadly, this will be one of the last books based upon interviews with those who lived the events it describes. Whirlwind represents multiple stories within a story, setting in context the most devastating air campaign in history. The human drama played out in Asian skies had been divined by European visionaries three decades before, and migrated into American consciousness during the Great War. In the ensuing period an often acrimonious debate arose concerning the theory and practice of aerial bombardment. It too is part of our tale, which traces the origins of American airpower from the fledgling, controversial days of Billy Mitchell in the 1920s, through the search for an air doctrine in the 1930s to the stunning technological advances of the 1940s. The legacy remains with us in the twenty-first century. Look closely at a B-52 Stratofortress or even a B-2 stealth bomber; look beneath the sculpted perfection of an F/A-18 Hornet or an F-15 Strike Eagle. If you peer close enough, down to the cellular level, you can glimpse the long-ago silvery fleets of B-29s and the gloss-blue carrier planes that scourged an enemy who lived the biblical injunction: he who sows the wind shall reap the whirlwind.

  Barrett Tillman

  April 2009

  Prologue

  OFF HONSHU, APRIL 18, 1942

  REVENGE SPED TOWARD Japan at nearly four miles per minute, borne upon olive-drab wings.

  Flown by America’s finest aviator, the lone bomber approached the enemy shore at 200 feet. Three hours after taking off from the aircraft carrier Hornet, the forty-five-year-old pilot was determined to do something that had never been done: bomb Japan.

  Piloting the twin-engine B-25 was Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle, a stocky, balding flier often called a daredevil in the press but best described as master of the calculated risk. In his twenty-five years of flying he had proven both his cool head and his hot hands, winning prestigious races, setting records, and pioneering the crucial science of instrument flight. An oft-published photo showed him standing before his stubby Gee Bee racer with his Phi Beta Kappa key visible beneath his leather jacket. With a Ph.D. in aeronautics, he spoke with an engineer’s precision, saying “aeroplane” and describing friends as “chaps.”

  Four months earlier, when Japanese carrier aircraft attacked Pearl Harbor, Doolittle had been a major conducting special projects for General Henry H. Arnold, the Army Air Forces chief. America was still reeling from Tokyo’s stunning blow against Hawaii as a nonstop onslaught rolled up U.S. and Allied forces across the Pacific: from Guam to Wake Island to the Philippines, East Indies, and the Asian mainland. The nation and President Franklin D. Roosevelt called for retribution.

  Thus was born the First Special Aviation Project. Oddly, it was the brainchild of a submarine officer, Captain Francis Low. He conceived the idea of launching long-range Army bombers from an aircraft carrier and proposed a daring concept: a hit-and-run raid against Japan itself, launched well beyond the limited reach of Navy carrier aircraft. If all went well, sixteen B-25 Mitchells—named for the late airpower advocate William “Billy” Mitchell—were to land in China after bombing Japan.

  It was a high-risk operation, calling for volunteer aircrews who were told only that they would be “out of the country for two or three months.” More men stepped forward than could be used. The crews were selected from all four squadrons of the 17th Bomb Group (Medium), the first B-25 unit. Originally stationed at Pendleton, Oregon, the group had flown antisubmarine patrols along the Pacific coast. A crew of the 17th reported sinking a Japanese sub off the mouth of the Columbia River on Christmas Day 1941, but the boat (the brand-new I-25) escaped to torpedo a tanker a few days later.

  In February the group transferred to South Carolina to hunt U-boats in the Atlantic. A sub kill was claimed off the East Coast, making the 17th the first unit credited with destroying Axis submarines in both oceans.

  The volunteers went to Eglin Field, Florida, to train for the special mission. Mostly they were youngsters: twelve of the sixteen pilots were lieutenants, and only five had won their wings before 1941. Fifteen of the copilots were less than a year out of flight school. Doolittle’s crew was typical, with an average age of twenty-five. Besides Doolittle, merely two of the eighty fliers were over thirty: Major John A. Hilger and Technical Sergeant E. V. Scott in Lieutenant Harold Watson’s number nine aircraft.

  Flying a loaded Army bomber from an aircraft carrier had never been done. But during tests off the Virginia coast in February, two B-25s got off the Hornet without difficulty, demonstrating that fully armed and fueled bombers could operate safely. The plan went ahead.

  Steaming via the Panama Canal, Hornet rendezvoused with her sister carrier, USS Enterprise, north of Midway on April 12. The task force was commanded by Vice Admiral William F. Halsey, the jut-jawed seadog who would become America’s most renowned naval warrior. The “Big E,” with her regular Navy air group for protection, would escort Hornet to within 450 miles of Japan. There Doolittle’s bombers would take off, and the two carriers would turn for home. If the task force was discovered before launch, the B-25s would still take off or be jettisoned, depending on circumstances.

  On the morning of April 18, ten hours before scheduled takeoff, a Japanese picket boat sighted the task force. The vessel was sunk by the cruiser Nashville, but American radiomen overheard the Japanese sending a warning. Doolittle conferred with Hornet’s skipper, Captain Marc Mitscher, and decided to launch 170 miles east of the intended point.

  Doolittle lowered his flaps, stood on the brakes, revved his Wright engines, and watched the launch officer. With the carrier’s bow rising in the Pacific swells, the officer’s flag swept down and Doolittle released the toe brakes. Hauling the control yoke full back, he felt his bomber’s wings lift fourteen tons of aluminum, steel, gasoline, ordnance, and living flesh.

  He made it. He circled the ship to get his bearings, then set course for Japan, 713 miles away. The other fifteen Mitchells followed at an average of four-minute intervals. Fully loaded, each bomber had 1,141 gallons of fuel—enough for twelve hours or more of cruising at 5,000 feet. Stashed near Chuchow in China’s Hunan Province were 30,000 gallons of aviation gasoline and 500 gallons of oil for the Raiders—assuming they reached their destination deep in the Asian interior.

  The fliers’ intended landfall was Inubo Saki, eighty miles east of Tokyo. The twenty-meter promontory with its chalky white lighthouse provided an excellent reference point for the navigators.

  Meanwhile, advance warning of strange aircraft inbound from the sea had been radioed to various headquarters. Many Japanese had seen the Raiders but few realized they were Americans. Some farmers and villagers waved. The noontime arrival of Doolittle’s bombers coincided with a scheduled air raid practice, complete with airborne interceptors. But few defenders had any inkling of what was about to happen.

  One observer who immediately recognized the unpleasant facts was Commander Masatake Okumiya, a naval officer at Kasumigaura Airbase twenty-five miles northeast of Tokyo. Glimpsing the silhouette of a B-25 skimming past his airfield, Okumiya realized that the radioed warnings had been ignored. Japan’s air defense system—such as it was—anticipated conventional high-level bombers flying in formations, as Japanese squadrons did over China.

  At noon local time the Americans saw three V-formations, each of three Japanese fighters—the first of scores sighted over the enemy homeland. Tokyo knew that something was afoot but lacked details.

  Approaching Tokyo’s north-central industrial area at barely rooftop height, Doolittle shoved the throttles forward, climbed to 1,200 feet, leveled off, and lined up a factory complex. Antiaircraft fire burst nearby, shaking the bomber’s airframe, but doing no damage. Jimmy Doolittle had a clear shot at his target in good visibility.

  In the glass-enclosed nose, Staff Sergeant Fred Braemer checked his makeshift bombsight, which resembled a child’s toy: a protractor mounted on a stick. Mathematically accurate for a given altitude and airspeed, it could place a 500-pound bomb within blast radius of a chosen aim point. The B-25’s ordnan
ce was a mix of 500-pound M43 demolition bombs and M54 incendiary clusters, all considered “extremely satisfactory.”

  Braemer punched the bomb release, felt the Mitchell lift slightly, and became the first of a stream of bombardiers who would drop ordnance on Japan. His four incendiary clusters would provide a beacon for trailing bombers.

  Having shed his load, Doolittle pushed on the control yoke and descended to rooftop height. America’s hottest pilot was comfortable speeding at low level: he had won every air race worth entering during the 1920s and 1930s.

  The Raiders’ targets included petroleum facilities, ammunition stores, aircraft factories, steel mills, and the Tokyo Gas and Electric Company. Lieutenant Travis Hoover’s first three-plane flight went to northern Tokyo; Captain David M. Jones’s trio attacked the center; and Captain Edward J. York’s the southern urban area and northern portion of Tokyo Bay. Captain Charles R. Greening’s flight went for Kanagawa, Yokohama, and Yokosuka Navy Yard. He was intercepted by four fighters, two being claimed shot down by B-25 gunners. The fifth flight broke up, its planes attacking Nagoya, Osaka, and Kobe. The targets had been selected to spread the damage across fifty miles to prevent the Japanese government from denying that the attack had occurred.

  Probably the most worthwhile target was a ship in Yokosuka dry dock: the 16,700-ton Taigei. The former submarine tender was being converted to a carrier, and it sustained a bomb hit on the bow and several incendiary clusters. Damage was light, and she would join the fleet before year end, renamed Ryuho. Most likely she was attacked by Lieutenant Edgar E. McElroy, with bombardier Sergeant Robert C. Bourgeois.

  Antiaircraft fire was “active” but inaccurate; no bombers were seriously damaged. Doolittle’s crews attacked fast and low, preventing Japanese gunners from getting a clear shot at the B-25s. Barrage balloons—as many as five or six together—forced only one plane to divert from its briefed course.

  Travis Hoover bombed an arsenal from 900 feet, well below the recommended altitude, as explosions blew wreckage higher than his bomber. Some Raiders reported bombing a residential area containing factories, and inevitably some unintended buildings were hit: Tokyo reported six schools and a military hospital struck. In all, about fifty people were killed and some 400 injured, with ninety buildings reportedly destroyed.