Countdown to Victory: March 1945

In our last blog we saw the Allies successfully crossing the Rhine into western Germany in March 1945 and it was clear that Hitler’s Third Reich would soon be defeated. In the Pacific, on the other hand, the war was far from over. Here is a key event in that long struggle.

The Battlefield

In 1942 the Japanese had captured most of the chains of islands that run north-to-south along the Pacific rim, from the Ryukyus and Taiwan all the way down to Guadalcanal in the Solomons, almost to Australia, an enormous maritime empire stretching more than 3,000 miles.

Their control also stretched far eastward into the Pacific, to the Marianas, the Gilberts and the Marshall Islands, which are more than 3,000 miles from mainland Asia. Last but not least they had also captured much of the mainland, from Mongolia to Singapore, and were at the gates of India in Burma.

The extent of this empire meant that Japan was beyond the range of strategic bombing. (The 1942 Doolittle raid, flying light bombers off an aircraft carrier, was heroic but impractical.) Whereas the Allies were able to drop thousands of tons of bombs on Germany day and night, destroying much of its industrial base and infrastructure, the Japanese home islands were beyond reach and undamaged.

For three long and agonizing years, 1942, 1943, and 1944, the United States had fought back, beachhead by beachhead, island by island, until, at long last in March of 1945, they had reached the Marianas, an island chain only 1,500 miles from Tokyo.

The Weapons

The principal bombers the Allies flew in Europe, the B17 Flying Fortresses, B24 Liberators, Halifaxes and Lancasters, had enough range to reach German targets from England, but could not cover the enormous distances the Pacific theater required.

The Boeing B29 Super Fortress first flew in 1942 and had a range of 1500 miles, which meant it could reach southern Japan from Nationalist China and all of Japan including Tokyo from the Mariana Islands. The B29 was by far the largest and most advanced piston-engined aircraft of the war and, like any new aircraft, suffered from teething problems, particularly with its engines, but was judged ready for operational service in 1944.

Its massive 54-liter R3350 air-cooled radial engines had two rows of 9 cylinders, and the upper cylinders of the back row didn’t get enough airflow and were prone to overheating. It was not unusual for a B29 to return from a flight to Japan with three or four cylinders burnt out and needing replacement.

Matterhorn

In 1944 the US Air Force attempted to bomb Japan from Chenstu and other bases in Nationalist China. Everything—bombs, fuel, equipment, spare parts, personnel and all their needs—had to be flown into China from India, over the Himalayas, the route known as ‘the Hump,’ which proved to be absurdly expensive. It took 5 gallons of aviation fuel, for example, to put 1 gallon of fuel into a B29 for a combat mission. The route itself was extremely arduous, requiring many of the transport aircraft to fly close to their operational ceilings, with little navigational guidance and often in severe weather.

The USAAF XX Bomber Command carried out 29 combat missions from China, known as Operation Matterhorn, between June 1944 and January 1945. Nine missions were against Japan; the rest were scattered from Manchuria to Singapore. The results did not justify the cost.

The operation was abandoned as soon as bases were ready in the newly captured Marianas. Even if the operation had been successful, it would not have lasted long, because Japanese forces in Manchuria would almost certainly have attacked and taken Chenstu, which had limited defenses.

As sometimes happens in war, just when the Hump had lost its value as the supply route for bombing Japan, a man arrived to turn the route from a hit-and-miss high-risk endeavor into a smoothly running, reliable and relatively safe operation. General Bill Tunner arrived in August 1944 and, by the end of the year, had halved aircraft loss ratios and doubled cargo delivery. His experience was not wasted, however; four years later he managed the brilliantly successful Berlin Airlift operation.

Meetinghouse

In popular culture, the firebombing of Dresden is often cited as a slaughter which qualified as a war crime; the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the most devastating blows which redefined the nature of war; and the London Blitz as a shocking campaign against almost entirely civilian targets.

In fact, as the following table shows, these operations, while devastating, were not the most destructive in terms of human life lost and damage done. That distinction goes to Operation Meetinghouse, conducted in March 1945 by B29s flying from airbases in the newly liberated Mariana Islands.

Meetinghouse represented a complete change in USAAF strategy in the Pacific. It was preceded by a test run against Kobe on February 4^th to prove the changes.

• Instead of mainland China, Meetinghouse was flown from the Marianas.
• Instead of dropping primarily high explosive munitions, the Air Force switched to incendiaries, a plan it had tested against mock Japanese buildings at the Dugway Proving Grounds the previous year.
• Instead of bombing from high altitudes in daylight, as the B29 was designed to do, Meetinghouse was flown at night at two- to three-thousand feet.

On the night of March 9^th/10^th (just after the capture of the bridge at Remagen we discussed in our last blog) 279 B29s dropped 1,700 tons of incendiaries, primarily M29 6-lb napalm bomblets nicknamed ‘Tokyo calling cards,’ which emitted flames up to 100-feet long upon impact. The target was the Nihonbashi district of Tokyo, a densely populated blue-collar area near the docks with many small industrial workshops and businesses. Most of the buildings were of traditional Japanese wood and paper construction.

The bombs ignited a firestorm. Propelled by winds blowing at fifteen- to twenty- mph, the flames consumed 16 square miles. Approximately 100,000 people were burned to death, and another one million people were injured.  Approximately 250,000 buildings were destroyed and more than a million people rendered homeless.

The Emperor Hirohito toured the devastated areas on March 18^th in his armor-plated black-and-crimson 1935 Mercedes 770 Pullman limousine. It was the first time he had seen war damage and some historians date his search for an end to the war to this experience.

In my new book, Triumph and Tragedy, which will be available on Amazon on May 8^th, my protagonist Eleanor sees a B29 for the first time.