When I was reporting this book, I had dinner with the then chief of staff of the US Air Force, David Goldfein. It was at the Air House, on the grounds of Joint Base Myer–Henderson Hall, in northern Virginia, just across the Potomac River from Washington, DC—a grand Victorian on a street of grand Victorians where many of the country’s top military brass live. After dinner, General Goldfein invited a group of his friends and colleagues—other senior Air Force officials—to join us. We sat in the general’s backyard, five of us in total. They were almost all former military pilots. Many of their fathers had been military pilots. They were the modern-day equivalents of the people you are going to read about in this book. As the evening wore on, I began to notice something.
Air House is just down the road from Reagan National Airport. And every ten minutes or so, a plane would take off over our heads. Nothing fancy: standard commercial passenger planes, flying to Chicago or Tampa or Charlotte. And every time one of those planes flew overhead, the general and his comrades would all glance upward, just to take a look. They couldn’t help themselves. Obsessives. My kind of people.
i I could go on. If, for example, you haven’t read Roberta Wohlstetter’s Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, then you’re missing a real treat.
ii Airpower has been something I’ve explored in a number of episodes of my podcast, Revisionist History, including “Saigon 1965,” “The Prime Minister and the Prof,” and the eponymous series starting with “The Bomber Mafia” in season 5.
Introduction
“This isn’t working.
You’re out.”
1.
There was a time when the world’s largest airport sat in the middle of the western Pacific, around 1,500 miles from the coast of Japan, on one of a cluster of small tropical islands known as the Marianas. Guam. Saipan. Tinian. The Marianas are the southern end of a largely submerged mountain range—the tips of volcanoes poking up through the deep ocean waters. For most of their history, the Marianas were too small to be of much interest or use to anyone in the wider world. Until the age of airpower, when all of a sudden they took on enormous importance.
The Marianas were in Japanese hands for most of the Second World War. But after a brutal campaign, they fell to the US military in the summer of 1944. Saipan was first, in July. Then Tinian and Guam, in August. When the Marines landed, the Seabees—the Navy’s construction battalion—landed with them and set to work.
In just three months, an entire air base—Isely Field—was fully operational on Saipan. Then, on the island of Tinian, the largest airport in the world, North Field—8,500-foot runways, four of them. And following that, on Guam, what is now Andersen Air Force Base, the US Air Force’s gateway to the Far East. Then came the planes.
Ronald Reagan narrated war films at the time, and one of those was devoted to the earliest missions of the B-29, known as the Superfortress. Reagan described the plane as one of the wonders of the world, a massive airship:
With 2,200 horsepower in each of four engines. With a fuel capacity equal to that of a railroad tank car. A tail that climbed two stories into the air. A body longer than a Corvette. Designed to carry more destruction and carry it higher, faster, farther than any bomber ever built before. And to complete this mission, that’s exactly what she was going to have to do.
The B-29 could fly faster and higher than any other bomber in the world and, more crucially, farther than any other bomber. And that extended range—combined with the capture of the Marianas—meant that for the first time since the war in the Pacific began, US Army Air Forces were within striking distance of Japan. A special unit was created to handle the fleet of bombers now parked in the Marianas: the Twenty-First Bomber Command, under the leadership of a brilliant young general named Haywood Hansell.
Throughout the fall and winter of 1944, Hansell launched attack after attack. Hundreds of B-29s skimmed over the Pacific waters, dropped their payloads on Japan, then turned back for the Marianas. As Hansell’s airmen prepared to launch themselves at Tokyo, reporters and camera crews flew in from the mainland, recording the excitement for the folks back home.
Ronald Reagan again:
B-29s on Saipan were like artillery pointed at the heart of Japan…The Japs might just as well have tried to stop Niagara Falls. The Twenty-First Bomber Command was ready to hit its first target.
But then, on January 6, 1945, Hansell’s commanding officer, General Lauris Norstad, arrived in the Marianas. Things were still pretty primitive on Guam: headquarters were just a bunch of metal Quonset huts on a bluff overlooking the ocean. Both men would have been exhausted, not just from the privations of the moment but also from the weight of their responsibilities.