It was a grueling hell…The mountains were a veritable smorgasbord of meteorological treachery—violent downdrafts, high winds and sudden snowstorms—all served up in temperatures 20 degrees below zero. As if they needed any reminding, the crews could frequently glimpse the 29,028-foot peak of Mount Everest thrusting up through the clouds just 150 miles from their flight path.
Over the course of the war, how many American planes do you think crashed while trying to navigate over the Hump? Seven hundred. The flying route was called “the aluminum trail” because of all the debris scattered over the mountains.
It gets worse. The air base in Chengdu didn’t have any aviation fuel. It was in the middle of nowhere—just a landing strip. Much later, one of LeMay’s airmen, David Braden, recorded an interview with a former brigadier general in the Air Force, Alfred Hurley. Every pilot who flew the Hump complained about it:
Braden: That was a crazy thing. The only way they could get gasoline to Chengdu was by flying the Hump. Sometimes, if they had a headwind, it took twelve gallons of a B-29’s gasoline to bring one gallon over the Hump.
Hurley: It was extraordinary.
Braden: It was insane.
Then, even from Chengdu, most of Japan’s territory was still beyond the B-29’s range. The planes couldn’t get as far as Tokyo and make it back. So the best they could do was nibble at the closest corner of Japan’s southwestern tip, where there was only one factory worth the Allies’ attention.
Braden recalled, “When they started flying out of Chengdu, they could reach Kyushu [Japan], but there was really only one target on Kyushu, and that was an iron-and steelworks…They flew a mission there, and everybody was just exhausted.”
To give you an example of what LeMay faced, here’s a typical mission, launched out of Kolkata, on June 13, 1944. Ninety-two B-29s took off from India. Twelve turned back before crossing the Hump. One crashed. So that’s seventy-nine that made it to China. They refueled, took off again. One crashed immediately after takeoff. Four more turned back because of mechanical problems. Six had to jettison their bombs. One got shot down on the way to Japan. Then the weather was terrible over Kyushu, so only forty-seven actually made it to the steelworks, and of those only fifteen could actually see the target. By the time the mission was complete, they’d lost seven planes and fifty-five men. And a total of one bomb actually hit the target. One.
You send ninety-two B-29s halfway around the world, and all you get is one bomb on the target.
The Japanese had a field day with the Twentieth Bomber Command. As their most famous propagandist, Tokyo Rose, broadcast to Allied airmen: “Listen to me, boys: fly back over the Hump to India. I hate to think of all of you getting killed. We have too many fighter planes and too many antiaircraft for you to get through. It would be suicide, boys, suicide.”
That was how the air war in the Pacific was going in the fall of 1944. Whose position was more absurd: Curtis LeMay’s or Haywood Hansell’s? That’s easy. Guam to Japan was hard. But India to Japan was insane.
The better question, though, is what effect each man’s absurd predicament has on his way of thinking. Let’s start with LeMay, someone whose entire identity is about problem solving. It’s how he made sense of the world. He’s not a man of great personal charm and charisma. He’s not some towering intellectual. He’s a doer. As he put it much later: “I’d rather have somebody who is real stupid but did something—even if it’s wrong he did something—than have somebody who’d vacillate and do nothing.”
That’s what LeMay values. So imagine that he is stationed in India, thousands of miles from the action, and he’s being asked to solve a problem that cannot be solved. You cannot wage an air war with any effectiveness when you spend twelve gallons of aviation fuel getting over the Himalayas in order to deliver one gallon to the other side.
No amount of human ingenuity or single-mindedness could overcome the obstacle of the Himalayas.
In the many considerations and reconsiderations of LeMay’s legacy, there have been all manner of theories about his motivation for what he would do the following spring, when he took control of the air war in the Pacific. I wonder if the first and simplest explanation isn’t just this: when a problem solver is finally free to act, he will let nothing stand in his way.
Then there’s Haywood Hansell. His predicament was different; he was the true believer.
3.
Haywood Hansell’s first act when he arrived in the Marianas was to ask, as any upstanding member of the Bomber Mafia would, What is the critical vulnerability of the Japanese war economy? What should my new B-29s attack? The answer to him was obvious: the Japanese aircraft manufacturing plants. But where are the Japanese manufacturing plants?