For example, at the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the workhorse of the US Army Air Forces was the B-17 bomber, also known as the Flying Fortress. That’s what LeMay and Ira Eaker and Hansell were using in Europe. The Flying Fortress had a range of roughly two thousand miles—one thousand miles out and one thousand miles back. In January of 1944, you couldn’t find an air base controlled by the Allies within a thousand miles of Tokyo. Australia is more than four thousand miles from Japan. Hawaii is just as far. The Philippines made the most sense on paper, but the Philippines had been captured by the Japanese and weren’t fully recaptured until late in 1945. In any case, Manila was still 1,800 miles from Tokyo.
If you were the United States and you wanted to drop bombs on Japan, how would you do it? Solving that problem took the better part of the war. The first step was building the B-29 Superfortress, the greatest bomber ever built, with an effective range of more than three thousand miles.
The next step was capturing a string of three tiny islands in the middle of the western Pacific: Saipan, Tinian, and Guam. They were the Mariana Islands, controlled by the Japanese. The Marianas were 1,500 miles across the water from Tokyo—the closest possible spot where you could build a runway. If you could put a fleet of B-29s on the Marianas, you could bomb Japan. The Japanese knew that, too, which led to another absurd moment: some of the ugliest fighting in the entire war was over three tiny clumps of volcanic rock that no one outside the western Pacific—no one—had so much as heard of before the war started.
The Marines were called in. One veteran, Corporal Melvin Dalton, recalled the fight:
Our main job was to soften them up so the troops in the landing barges could get on the beach.
After two or three days of that…the next morning at the crack of dawn, the ocean was full of ships and barges headed for the beach, and there was gunfire you just can’t believe. [tears up] The dead bodies were everywhere, just floating. Nobody had time to pick them up. They were all picked up later. When those Marines hit those beachheads, it was terrible sometimes.
One by one, over the summer of 1944, the islands fell to the US Marines,i whereupon Haywood Hansell was dispatched from Washington to head up the newly formed Twenty-First Bomber Command. It was an elite force composed entirely of the newest and most lethal weapon in the Air Force’s lineup, the B-29 Superfortress. Its task was to cripple the Japanese war machine from the air, to pave the way for what the military leadership considered inevitable: a land invasion of Japan.
Leading the air attack on Japan was the most important job of Hansell’s career. At that point, it was probably the most important job in the entire Army Air Forces. But the air attack plan was—in every sense of the word—absurd. Deeply absurd. First, consider the B-29. In 1944, it was a brand-new airplane, rushed into service. It broke down. Engines caught fire. No one had been properly trained to fly it. It had all kinds of idiosyncrasies.ii
And this new weapon was to be launched from just about the least hospitable place imaginable for an air force base. The Marianas are hot and humid, blanketed with mosquitoes. They suffer torrential rains. There were no proper buildings, or hangars, or maintenance facilities, or roads, just Quonset huts and tents.iii Haywood Hansell—a decorated general, the man who wrote the air-war plan used against Hitler in Europe—was camping out like a Boy Scout.
Vivian Slawinski, a second lieutenant in the Army Nurse Corps, recalled what it was like on the island of Tinian in those early months after the United States took over. “It was a lot of rocks…And there were rats in the place. They were up in the rafters. That was one thing that I couldn’t stand. They’d come down and nibble at some people’s hair. And a couple times they came up close to my hands…We didn’t have a hospital. All we had were these Quonset huts.”
When her interviewer noted that those huts were metal and must have been hot, she replied, “Oh, honey, we were hot everywhere.”
The sole thing the Marianas had going for them was that they were within range of Japan. But even that was an exaggeration. The truth is that they were within range only under perfect conditions. To reach Japan, a B-29 first needed to be loaded up with twenty thousand pounds of extra fuel. And because that made the plane dangerously overweight, each B-29 also needed a ferocious tailwind to lift it off the runway. This was as crazy a situation as anyone faced throughout the whole war.
It gets worse. By late fall of 1944, Hansell was ready to launch his first major attack on Tokyo. He described it after the war to a class at the Air Force Academy, in Colorado Springs: “The first operation against Japan was called San Antonio One. It was coordinated with the Joint Chiefs of Staff strategy, which made the timing extremely important.”