Hansell’s fleet would launch on November 17, 1944. Everything was ready. The weather looked good. The Army set up the media—with flashbulbs, cameras, and microphones—along the runways at dawn. Hansell conducted the pre-mission briefing himself. “Stick together. Don’t let fighter attacks break up the formations. And put the bombs on the target.”
The planes lined up. They were weighed down with all that extra fuel for the return trip, about to take off with the help of the usual strong tailwind blowing down the runway.
Except, that morning, there was no tailwind.
As Hansell recalled, “The orders were out, the airplanes were warmed up, and they taxied out to the end of the one strip that we had, and at that time, the wind, which had been blowing constantly down the runway for the last six weeks, died down to nothing.”
So Hansell’s overloaded B-29s couldn’t take off. Then the wind started up again, only in the opposite direction. Could he turn his planes around—all 119 of them—and still make his window for the mission? He couldn’t. All he had was a single runway, only half paved. He had to scuttle the mission.
It got crazier. The weather changed a third time.
Hansell continued,
And three or four hours later, we were in the midst of an intense tropical storm, a hurricane, a typhoon. It lasted about six days, left the camp just a quagmire. And in the meantime, the B-29s were all loaded with bombs standing by, the orders were out. We were very seriously worried for fear that there’d be a security leak. It was pretty much too late to change. I kept thinking every day, maybe we’ll make it. We sent weather airplanes out through this hurricane to trace it up the coast; it went right on up our route to Japan.
As a result, it was…[a week] later, before we were able to get that mission off.
Hansell made these remarks to a room full of Air Force cadets in 1967. Most of his audience was headed to Vietnam—by the way, another war on the truly absurd end of the absurd continuum—so they were hanging on to Hansell’s every word. He’d fought in Asia, the part of the world where they were likely to be going next.
Then someone asked the old general: Suppose the wind hadn’t died down and then changed course? Suppose you had managed to launch all your B-29s that morning of November 17, 1944? As the cadet pointed out, “You would have lost your whole organization if you had gotten off in time.”
Hansell replied: “Certainly would.”
Hansell and the rest of the Army Air Forces had none of the sophisticated navigation electronics that exist today. His entire fleet would have been up in the sky. One hundred and nineteen B-29s, each with a crew of eleven. That’s 1,309 men circling around and around, looking helplessly for a speck of runway lights in the midst of a typhoon while the needles on their fuel gauges hovered over empty. And then, one by one, they would have been swallowed up by the ocean.
The storm lasted for six days. Hansell continued, “A couple of hours earlier, a couple of hours’ difference in this weather situation, would have lost the entire bomber command. Because there was no other place to go.”
Haywood Hansell’s faith in the doctrine of precision bombing had been tested once, in the disaster over Schweinfurt. And his faith had survived intact. On the Marianas, his conviction would be tested a second time, only this time by something that had never crossed the minds of the Bomber Mafia, back in the seminar rooms of Maxwell Field.
2.
At the same time in 1944 that Haywood Hansell was deployed to the Marianas, Curtis LeMay was also transferred from Europe to the Pacific theater, to head another newly formed elite bomber group of B-29s: the Twentieth Bomber Command, stationed in eastern India, near Kolkata （formerly Calcutta）。
Kolkata is—as the crow flies—the Indian city closest to Japan. It’s in the far northeastern corner of the country. And since British India was a safe haven, the idea was that the B-29s would take off from there, then fly to an airfield carved out of some pretty dodgy territory in China, near Chengdu. There, they would refuel, then fly on to Japan, drop bombs, come back to Chengdu, refuel, and fly home to Kolkata. Distance-wise, that’s like flying from Los Angeles to Newfoundland with a refueling stop in Chicago.
And then the crucial fact: Between Kolkata and Chengdu are the Himalayas, the tallest mountain range in the world. The pilots called the Himalayas “the Hump.” If you thought that an air war launched from the Marianas was absurd, well, this was much, much worse.
This is how LeMay described flying the Hump. And LeMay never complained about anything.