The Twenty-First Bomber Command had a team of meteorologists attached to it. They’d been trained at the University of Chicago. Meteorologists were crucial to the success of bombing campaigns, particularly in the days before sophisticated radar. You had to know whether there were clouds over your target. Or whether there was a typhoon poised to swallow up your command.
But the tools available to meteorologists of that era were crude. I know this is a digression, but the easiest thing to forget about the Second World War is that it took place in another technological era. It’s half twentieth century and half nineteenth century. The chief tool meteorologists had at that time were balloons, weather balloons that would float up into the atmosphere carrying little instrument kits that could record the wind, the temperature, and the humidity and transmit that information back to earth by radio.iv
John M. Lewis, a researcher at the National Severe Storms Laboratory, part of the Desert Research Institute, in Nevada, knew a number of the meteorologists who worked with the Army Air Forces during the war. I asked him if the weather balloons were connected back to earth with a rope. His reply: “Oh, no. They’re released. They’ll eventually, as the pressure gets lower as the balloon goes higher in the atmosphere—they expand, expand, expand. Kaboom! They explode, and they fall to the ground with the instrument attached. And at that time, they had a message on all the instrument packages: ‘Could you please return this to the University of Chicago? Here’s the address.’”
In the Pacific theater of war, that obviously wasn’t going to happen.
So there they are, the meteorologists, in the middle of the Pacific, with one of the most important jobs in the whole outfit—figuring out when to send the bombers—and they’re baffled. What’s going on with these super-fast winds the pilots are reporting high over Japan?
I asked Lewis if they had any reason to suspect that the winds around Mount Fuji would be so incredibly high. His reply: “They did not reach their conclusions until the pilots came back.”
After each bombing mission over Japan in 1944, the crews returned to the base and told the same story. As Ed Hiatt later recalled,
To tell you how powerful these winds were: a reconnaissance plane went up one time to take some pictures after a mission to see how effective they’d been, and the navigator called the pilot and told him they were going three miles an hour backwards. That was something you couldn’t afford to do because if you went from east to west, you were gonna be a sitting duck for Japanese fighters or their flak.
The pilots had encountered what would come to be known as the jet stream, a river of fast-flowing air that circles the globe in the upper atmosphere, starting at around twenty thousand feet. A Japanese scientist named Wasaburo Ooishi had actually discovered the jet stream in the 1920s in a series of groundbreaking experiments. But Ooishi happened to be devoted to the artificially constructed language called Esperanto, which was briefly in vogue in that era, and he only published his findings in Esperanto, which meant of course that almost no one read them. And since almost no one had ever flown at the altitudes the B-29 was flying at, there were no firsthand reports of the jet stream winds, either. It was a mystery.v
As John Lewis explained it to me, “This fast stream of air, very narrow, moves from north to south in both hemispheres. Basically, it is dividing the very cold air of the polar regions from the more warm midlatitude and equatorial air.”
When I asked him how wide the jet stream is, he replied, “I would say typically two hundred kilometers across, something on that order, certainly not a thousand kilometers, rarely five hundred kilometers, sometimes a hundred kilometers.”
It was such a new discovery that nobody realized it circled the entire planet. Lewis explained, “That was not discovered until the early 1950s, when we started to make upper-air observations routinely over the United States [and] some of the countries in Europe.”
The jet stream circles the whole earth, a narrow band of incredibly fast wind. It retreats to the poles in the summer and moves toward the equator during the winter months.
And in the winter of 1944 and early spring of 1945, this narrow, hurricane-force band of air was directly over Japan. That made it impossible for Hansell’s pilots to do any of the precision bombing they had planned to do. If they flew across it, the plane would get blown sideways. If they flew into it, they’d be fighting to stay aloft and would be easy targets for the Japanese. And if they flew with it, they’d be racing too fast to take proper aim.