As Hansell recalled, “We were on Saipan with about forty or fifty B-29s [and] a deadline of the thirtieth of October. We had a deadline for an operation against the Japanese aircraft industry…and we had no target folders; we didn’t know where the Japanese aircraft industry was.”
So a crew flew out from the United States in a B-29 that had been modified for aerial reconnaissance. They took hundreds of photos, which showed that the Japanese aircraft industry—in particular, the Nakajima Aircraft Company, known as Subaru today—was heavily concentrated in and around Tokyo. The Allies knew that Nakajima was responsible for a large share of all Japanese combat-aircraft engines. Hansell said, Let’s start by hitting that factory, and we’ll cripple the Japanese fighting force.
San Antonio One was that first crucial mission, the one that narrowly avoided being lost to a typhoon. After a week of waiting, Hansell’s planes finally took off.
The B-29s took off from the Marianas, skimming over the ocean at several thousand feet. As they approached Japan, they climbed high in the air, out of harm’s way. They turned at Mount Fuji, then came in from the west over Tokyo. Here, over aerial shots of the city, in the Army Air Forces’s war film, Ronald Reagan describes what happened:
Six hours later, through the clouds, they saw it—Fujiyama [Mount Fuji], ancient symbol of Japan. Here come some modern symbols. Phosphorus bombs and flak. And fighters…Within a radius of fifteen miles of the Imperial Palace live seven million Japanese, a people we used to think of as small, dainty, polite, concerning themselves only with floral arrangements and rock gardens and the cultivation of silkworms. But it isn’t silkworms and it isn’t Imperial Palaces these men are looking for. In the suburbs of Tokyo is the huge Nakajima aircraft plant. Well, Bud, what are you waiting for?
He lays it on a little thick.
San Antonio One was hugely symbolic. It demonstrated that Japan could finally be reached. But was it a success, as a military operation? After the war, speaking to cadets at the Air Force Academy, Hansell tried to put a good face on things. “The operation wasn’t as good as we would have liked, but as an initial effort, it did show it could be done. This was a very doubtful issue at the time.”
The operation wasn’t as good as we would have liked was, to say the least, an understatement. The first raid damaged a mere 1 percent of the Nakajima plant. Hansell tried again three days later. None of the bombs actually hit the plant. On December 27, he sent back seventy-two B-29s. They missed the plant but wound up setting fire to a hospital. In the end, Hansell went after that factory five times and barely touched it.
Part of the difficulty was the same problem the Bomber Mafia had had over Europe: clouds. The bombardiers looked for the target through their Nordens and couldn’t find it. But there was another problem with the weather, a problem much worse and much bigger than anyone at the time could understand.
One of Haywood Hansell’s B-29 pilots, Lieutenant Ed Hiatt, was later interviewed for a documentary by the BBC. He described one mission:
After flying six hours, we climbed up to bombing altitude…We climbed up to thirty-seven thousand feet, and just as we broke out of the storm, there’s Mount Fuji, sitting right in front of us. And it’s a gorgeous sight, it really is.
Hiatt’s bombardier, a man named Glenn, started to make his calculations on their Norden bombsight, focusing on the Nakajima factory. But the telescope on the bombsight wouldn’t line up with the approaching target. Hiatt continued:
He turned around, and he said, “I can’t get this damn telescope on the target”…And so we called the radar operator to check our ground speed and…he came back and he says we’ve got a 125-knot tailwind. He said we’re going about 480 miles an hour. It’s impossible—it can’t be. There’s no winds like that.
There’s no winds like that. No Army Air Forces pilots had ever experienced what was happening to the B-29 bombers over Japan. They never expected winds like that.
“We’re going 480 miles an hour when we should be going 340 miles an hour…I said, ‘Well, Glenn, drop the damn bombs.’ He dropped the bombs, and we were already twelve miles past the target because of that wind,” Hiatt said.
They were bewildered. And back at base, they couldn’t explain it to their superiors.
When they debriefed us, they gave us the third degree. They wouldn’t believe us. “There’s no such thing as a 140-mile-an-hour wind up there over Japan,” they said. “No, there is no such thing. There can’t be a wind like that. You’re lying. You didn’t make it over the target; you’re just making this up.” And…we had our operations officer as a passenger with us, and he vouched for it. He said, “There was a wind that high.”