10 June 2010
 
Meat Grinder and the Flames

 
("Tokyo burns under B-29 firebomb assault." May 26, 1945. Army Air Forces picture)
 
Bill McCullough wants to get out the story of his first cousin, Harold. It was first told a long time ago in an Air Corps in-house organ commemorating the day the first two crews of Brigadier General Emmet O’Donnell’s bomb wing hit thirty missions, and were granted a pass back to the world from the meatgrinder of the Pacific war.
 
Harold’s crew was the first to finish, a nose ahead of the other. There was nothing special about their name. They were called “Crew 17,” which is not nearly as colorful as the other lucky ones, the “Lucky Irish.” They were both fortunate groups of young men on so many levels.
 
Due to the scarcity of trained aircrew, the number of combat missions required to compete a tour and rotate home had risen from the 25 required in Europe to thirty for the crews flying out of the Marianas and Saipan. The number was increased again, to 35, dramatically increasing the chances of being killed.
 
Crew 17 only had to complete the original target of thirty missions, which above the flames of Japan was a matter of life and death.
 
The Air Corps was a meat grinder, and Curtis LeMay was one of the ones who turned the crank. Only the Submarine Force exceeded the Army Air Forces in percentage of combat crews killed in action. A startling 88,119 airmen died in service, 52,173 in battle with more than 3,603 missing in action and declared dead. The 35,946 non-battle deaths included 25,844 in aircraft accidents, more than half of which occurred within the Continental United States, mostly in the training command.
 
The scope of the enterprise is still amazing. The Army Air Force reached its peak size just as the fighting was ending on Saipan in 1944, over 2.4 million men and women operating nearly 80,000 aircraft from more than 1,600 airfields worldwide on Victory in Europe (VE) Day.
 
Alexander Bonner was Crew 17’s pilot in command. a first lieutenant for the combat tour. It is quite astonishing to consider the amount of life-and-death authority that was conferred on these young men. In addition to the sleek B-29 airframe, sole authority over the lives of ten other men at altitudes up to 40,000 feet above the surface of the earth we walk each day.
 

(Old Iron Pants. Picture USAF)
 
Of course, by the time Al was flying Crew 17 to Japan, the tactics had changed. Old Iron Pants LeMay had been a devotee of high-altitude precision bombing in Europe: the horrendous casualties suffered by the crews of the 8th Air Force and the nature of the Japanese targets made him adopt a strategy of low-level incendiary attacks to bring the Japanese to their knees.
 
Then a Major General, LeMay once said, "I'll tell you what war is about. You've got to kill people, and when you've killed enough, they stop fighting."
 
Low-altitude delivery improved bombs on target, and that also was down where the flak and remaining fighters of the Imperial Japanese Air Force and Navy lived.
 

(Saburo Sakai in the cockpit of his Mitsubishi A5M in China)
 
When I lived in Japan, our Squadron invited the legendary Japanese pilot Saburo Sakai to visit USS Midway, and get a VIP tour of the squadron and our F-4J aircraft. Sakai was the Imperial Navy's fourth-ranking ace and Japan's second leading fighter pilot to survive the war. He claimed 64 victories, and bagged the last American aircraft shot down in the war. There was plenty of danger over Japan, not the least of which were the harrowing thermal currents rising from the fire-storms of the cities that that tossed the aircraft like corks.
 
Iron Pants was getting his target support from my pal the Admiral at the Fleet Advanced Headquarters on Guam. Mac wrote me to say “His HQ was on Guam.  Navy intel support role for the bombers is a tale that's never been told.   LeMay got all his target assignments from the Joint Targets Group (JTG) in Washington.  The Fleet Intel Officer, CAPT Eddie Layton, observed that the JTG "didn't know the difference between a warehouse and a whorehouse." That's where the story begins, and it had interesting ends, according to Mac.
 
He would be about the last guy to be able to tell the stories.
 
Meanwhile, Crew 17 was on the first Superfort raid over Tokyo on November 24th, 1944. There followed a long line of what they later called “hair-raising, close-call stories.”
 
We will listen to some of them tomorrow. I listened in astonishment as Bill and Hal told them. They were the Greatest Generation, all right.
 
But sitting in on the video-teleconference with the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan yesterday, it seems that it is the times that produce great generations. We are in pretty good shape in that regard.
 
The stories from the mountains have yet to be told, but there is plenty of time for that. The voices from the Pacific War are falling silent. I am interested in listening while I can.
 

Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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