19 June 2010
 
Offensive

(View of two 39th Bomb Group B-29s out of North Field-Anderson Air Force Base, Guam, on a mission to Hiratsuka, Japan, 16 July 1945. Army Air Force Picture)

There are a lot of people finding things offensive these days.
 
There is a fight brewing over conduct on the pool deck. Speedo-man noticed me collecting signatures in favor of a designated smoking area, and he became quite agitated. Little Sheeba called me said he was frothing at the mouth in the lobby about it.
 
I think the pro-designated area faction may have the high ground on this one. Speedo-man had a complaint lodged against him for indecent conduct in the outdoor shower. His Speedo doesn't completely cover the crack of his ass, and he likes to stretch his tiny suit way out to rinse the chlorine off and one of the ladies was offended enough to bring the public display of his inadequacy to the attention of management.
 
I don't really care and am going to quit smoking this summer anyway, but the high-handed and self-righteous board action is offensive, and I like grass roots democracy.
 
They have called a special meeting of The Board for Monday night, posted by stealth in the in the elevator, so there could be rioting. More on that as it happens. I will keep you posted on the offensive.
 
It is all thoroughly small potatoes, if you compare our little peeves with real things.
 
I was talking to the Admiral yesterday, on the topic of the great air and sea offensive against the Empire of the Sun. It came up because of my investigation into Bill McCullough’s experiences on Saipan during the Pacific War, and that of his cousin Hal, who was bombardier for Crew 17, one of the first two Super Fort crews to finish their combat tours against Japan’s cities.
 
The Admiral had a story to contribute as well, since he served in the Navy’s forward headquarters on Guam in 1944. He gave me some perspective on what Bill and Hal were supporting, and an aspect of the bombing campaign in the Pacific that the Air Force does not want to hear about even today.
 
It is specifically about the 313th Bomb Wing, and the possibly mutinous and certainly insubordinate conduct of then-Major General Curtis “Iron Pants” Lemay.
 
The Admiral has a fondness for the Super Forts unusual in a naval officer, and he explained why. Lemay was determined to bring down the Japanese with the most effective- and savage- bombing campaign of a savage and effective war.
 
In order to do so, he changed the way the Super Fort was employed. Intended to be a strategic precision bomber, dropping mass precision bomb loads from on high, far above the flak and fighters, Lemay brought his crews down to low-level and spread incendiary bombs across the tinder of Japan’s paper-and-timber buildings.
 
The Joint Target Board in Washington picked the aim-points, and they were wrong. The Staff of Admiral Chester Nimitz, forward deployed on Guam had a better idea, the one that the Japanese should have contemplated when they savaged Pearl Harbor. In the sneak attack, the targets had been the capital ships sleeping at their anchorages.


(Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. US Navy Picture)
Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, architect of the attack, had mused sadly that he was waking the giant. In fact, the ships that were churned out of American yards were the ones that carried the day, and even the ones that were sunk for the most part were repaired and present at the end.
 
If the Japanese had taken out the petroleum storage at Pearl it might have been a different story. The Americans knew something about vulnerability, and POL was number one in the minds of the Pacific fleet. With no indigenous sources of oil, the Japanese at the end were reduced to refining pine root oil to struggle on against the American onslaught.
 
Lemay knew the Navy was on to something, and against the orders of the War Department, turned over his 313th wing on Tinian to follow the target recommendations- and aerial mining missions- to planners of the Navy. The Air Force still resents it, and their historians have ignored the story that the Admiral could tell them about some heroic Air Force crews.
 
The whole thing is amazing. What I knew about the Army Air Forces was through the lens of Uncle Dick’s experience, circa 1944, in the campaign of the Mighty 8Th against the Germans and in occupied France.
 
I have long been fascinated with the history of the Manhattan project as well, the coming together of the delivery platform (The Super Fort) and the wonder weapon (The A-Bomb).
 
I got a bit of a sense for what it must have been like through the story of the operations on Tinian, where Col. Paul Tibbets special mission unit was staged for the one-two blow that finally ended the whole bloody nightmare.
 
It was the ponderous strategic advance to be able to deliver those knock-out blows that made the Pacific war so completely different than the one fought in Europe. To hit Japan across the thousands of miles of open ocean, the islands had to be taken or leap-frogged and cut off, one by one.
 
 

(The Marianas and the target of the B-29 Offensive)

The Mariana Islands were the destination that the Marines and the Army grunts had to wrest from the Japanese to provide a home for the new super weapon that would bring the Japanese- all the vets use the shorter more offensive version of the name- to their knees.
 
The islands that would provide the advance fields for the air assault had been claimed as Spanish possessions in the late 1600s. After losing Guam to the United States in the war of 1898, the beleaguered Spanish crown sold the rest of the Marianas to Germany in 1899. Japan was on the side of the victorious allies in the First World War, and was rewarded with the mandate to administer the entire island chain, less Guam.
 
In the 1930s, Japan began to build extensive military installations across all its Pacific holdings, and the one on the southern tip of Saipan was intended to be the largest and most significant in the island chain. The Aslito Airfield was built to be the largest and most important airfield in the Marianas, ultimately home to two Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service squadrons equipped with A6MT Zero-sen fighters.
 
Dozens of bunkers, storage facilities, and bomb-proof buildings were carefully constructed to support them, and well-built enough that they survive to this day. Aslito Airfield was intended to serve as a critical air supply center for the expansion of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.
 
By 1944, Japan was falling back. The two Zero squadrons were participants in the mid-June 1944 Battle of the Philippine Sea, also known as the “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot.” They were both nearly wiped out. Saipan became the last line of defense for the home Islands to prevent the creation of unsinkable bases for air attack against Tokyo.
 
On June 15, 1944, American forces invaded Saipan and began a bloody battle that would last several weeks. The Super Forts, design glitches and all, had been rolling off the assembly lines for months, and crews were trained and ready to go as soon as operational run-ways were available for them.
 
Bill McCullough had been to school to learn how to repair the automatic machine-gun systems. Hal McCullough was perfecting his mastery of the Norden Bomb Sight.
 
My pal the Admiral was packing his sea-bag to forward deploy to Guam.
 
When they all arrived in the Marianas islands, Japanese stragglers were still out there in the jungle, and leaflets like this were dumped all over to encourage them to come in from their tunnels and caves.


The final offensive was about to begin, with a surprise finale that very few people knew about.
 
As far as the common soldier, sailor and airmen knew, this fight to the finish was going to require the sacrifice of another hundred thousand kids, and just about everyone present, friend and foe, would be asked to pay in person.
 
More about that tomorrow.

Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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