By the end, Hansell was increasingly alone. Historian Tami Biddle put it like this:
I think when a commander goes into a command with an idea of what’s going to work, first of all, they believe it. They have to believe it because you couldn’t send so many men into combat if you just didn’t believe in what you were doing.
You send men into combat with an idea, and you’re anchored to that idea about what you’ve got to do to make it work and to justify those lives and to justify that blood and treasure…
I think commanders when they’re in the field, doing something that’s so intense as what Hansell was trying to do between basically October and December of 1944—he is fixated. I think he’s got one thing on his brain, and he’s just determined that he’s going to make it work.
At one point, in late December, the second in command of the entire Army Air Forces, Lauris Norstad, gave Hansell a direct order: launch a napalm attack on the Japanese city of Nagoya as soon as possible. It was, in Norstad’s words, “an urgent requirement for planning purposes.” Hansell did a trial run and burned down a paltry three acres of the city. Then he grimaced, shrugged, delayed, promising to do something bigger at some point, maybe, when his other work was finished.
He wouldn’t give in to temptation.
And because he wouldn’t, Norstad flew in from Washington. You can imagine the moment. The visiting dignitary from home. An honor guard at the airfield. Whiskey, cigars, and gossip in Hansell’s Quonset hut. Then Norstad turned to Hansell, completely out of the blue, and said: You’re out. Curtis LeMay’s taking over.
“I thought the earth had fallen in—I was completely crushed.” That’s how Hansell later described his feelings in that moment. Hansell was given ten days to finish up. He walked around in a daze.i
On his last night in Guam, Hansell got drunk and sang for his men: “Old pilots never die, never die, they just fly-y-y away-y-y-y.”
Curtis LeMay arrived for the changeover, flying himself to the island in a B-29. The two men posed for a picture together. LeMay said, “Where do you want me to stand?” The camera clicked.
After that, Hansell went home to run a training school in Arizona. His war was over.
“I got to read a number of interviews with the man,” the historian Stephen McFarland told me. “I got to read a few of his letters, and he was truly a thoughtful, caring individual. And he was a true believer, but he was not the kind of man who was willing to kill hundreds of thousands of people. He just didn’t have it. Didn’t have it in his soul.”
Footnotes
i Hansell’s final mission takes place on January 19. It’s a tremendous success. Sixty-two B-29s take out the Kawasaki factory. As historian William Ralph notes: “Every important building in the entire complex was hit. Production fell by 90 percent. Not a single B-29 was lost. Hansell flew back to the United States the next day.” The irony is unbearable.
Chapter Eight
“It’s all ashes. All that and that and that.”
1.
Military historian Conrad Crane is an expert on Major General Curtis LeMay. I asked him about LeMay’s mind-set when he became head of the Twenty-First Bomber Command after taking over from Haywood Hansell in January of 1945.
As Crane put it, “When he takes over the Twenty-First Bomber Command, when he first arrives in the Marianas, he does not have his eventual strategy worked out. His mind is still open.” If Hansell was inflexible, a man of principle, LeMay was the opposite.
First things first. LeMay was not happy with the military’s infrastructure on the Marianas. It was all built by the Navy’s construction battalion, the Seabees. LeMay had lost none of his disdain for the Navy, the military branch he believed cheated in the bombing exercise years before.
As Crane related,
He looks around and sees the primitive nature of the facilities and said, “This won’t do”…He gets invited to have a dinner with Admiral Nimitz, who also is headquartered in the Marianas, and he goes over to Nimitz’s place and he’s in this ornate…almost a palace, and he gets fed [a] very formal Navy-style dinner with the tablecloths and being served and everything. So he invites Admiral Nimitz to visit him for dinner in the next couple of days, and Admiral Nimitz shows up for his dinner, and they’re sitting in a Quonset hut on a couple of crates, eating C rations, and at the end of the meal, Nimitz looks at LeMay and says, “I get your point.” And then he started sending more construction materials to LeMay to help finish up the rest of the facilities.