LeMay starts by trying out his own version of his predecessor’s strategy. He decides to take out the Nakajima aircraft plant in Tokyo. He needs to satisfy himself that Hansell’s failure wasn’t just Hansell.
LeMay sends his first mission against Nakajima in January, then one in February, and another in early March. Hundreds of B-29s, making the long trek to Japan. And in the end, the plant is still standing.
He has run up against the same obstacle as Hansell did. How can I force a Japanese surrender from the air if I can’t hit anything? As Crane explains, “There’s nothing else he can tweak. He says, ‘Okay, I’ve got to try something different.’”
He starts with the wind. The jet stream is an unstoppable force. It can’t be wished away, and LeMay realizes it’s making everything else impossible. Precision-bombing doctrine starts with the requirement that the bomber come in high, well above the range of enemy fire and antiaircraft guns. LeMay throws that doctrine out the window. He decides the B-29s will have to come in under the jet stream.
Then there are the clouds. The Norden bombsight only works if the bombardier can see the target. But Japan can be almost as cloudy as England. In February of 1945, the staff meteorologists on Guam tell LeMay that he can expect no more than seven days in March when there would be skies clear enough for visual bombing. He could expect six days in April and May and four in June. How do you mount a sustained attack on Japan if you can only bomb six or seven days a month?
There’s a strange stream-of-consciousness section in LeMay’s autobiography where he writes:
How many times have we just died on the vine, right here on these islands? We assembled the airplanes, assembled the bombs, the gasoline, the supplies, the people. We got the crew set—everything ready, to go out and run the mission. Then what would we do? Sit on our butts and wait for the weather…So what am I trying to do now? Trying to get us to be independent of weather. And when we’ll get ready, we’ll go.
So what does “trying to get us to be independent of weather” mean? It means not only is he going to come in under the jet stream, he’s also going to come in under the clouds. He’s going to have the pilots come in between five thousand and nine thousand feet, lower than anyone has ever dreamed of taking a B-29 on a bombing run.
Crane explains, “Once he realizes he’s going to have to go to lower altitude, then that leads to a whole set of other conclusions.”
The next logical step: precision bombing was supposed to be daylight bombing. You needed to see the target before you could line up the bombsight. But if LeMay’s bombers come in low during the day, they will be sitting ducks for the Japanese air defense, so he decides: We have to come under cover of night.
Jet stream plus heavy cloud cover means low. Low means night. And the decision to switch to night raids means you can’t do precision bombing anymore—no more fiddling with the Norden, no more tight-formation flying in order to coordinate bomb strikes, no more agonizing over exactly where the target is.
And what weapon will he use for these attacks? Napalm. Napalm will work perfectly.
LeMay’s anger over Schweinfurt and his frustration over the impossible conditions in India have come to a head. And so he says, there in his Quonset hut in Guam, I’m going to do it my way now. He writes out a plan for his first big attack, and instead of naming the exact target—as the Bomber Mafia would always insist on doing—he just writes: “Tokyo.” Then, when he sends his plan to Washington for the approval of his boss, General Hap Arnold, he makes sure it arrives on a day when Arnold isn’t in his office, “so he can get that initial raid off before Arnold really has a chance to look at it very much,” Crane says. “Because he realizes he’s taken a risk. B-29s are very valuable…You’re talking about going in at night, low altitude. He leaves most of the ammunition and gunners behind.”
The only thing LeMay lets his pilots have to defend themselves is a tail gunner. All other guns are removed. He wants to cut all excess weight so he can carry as much napalm as possible.
The airmen who flew that mission never forgot when they were first given those instructions. The B-29 airman David Braden described the briefing:
And there was just a gasp in the audience, ’cause you never thought about doing anything except high-altitude flying.
And you went out, and the bottom of your aircraft had been painted black. So you knew that this was going to be a different thing…Most of the guys thought it was a suicide mission. Some of them went in and wrote goodbye letters to their families, you know, because of the low-altitude [flight profile].