24 June 2010
Low Level
(314th Squadron (VH) against Mt. Fuji, 1945. USAAF picture)
Bill McCullough remembers when Curtis Lemay’s order to transition to low-level tactics against Japan, changing from high-altitude daylight missions to mass low-level night-time attacks against industrial and population centers on the Home Islands.
The crews and support personnel welcomed the change. The struggle to get the heavily-laden Super Forts to altitude forced them to carry extra fuel tanks in the bomb bays, like the one cousin Hal inadvertently had to salvo, and turned out to be already on fire.
It would have killed them in a brilliant fire-ball, or at least forced them to bail out over the city you have just put to the torch, which is not a place you want to be.
Funny about changes in tactics. General Dave Petraeus has been forced into a lower level mission himself. With the dismissal of General McCrystal, the President needed someone who is intimately familiar with Afghanistan and its leaders, problems and assorted issues.
The War hangs in the balance, and if this is a step down for Dave, it is a move to safety for the Administration. They do not understand the military any more than the Clintons did, and it is better to ride a pony you know than one you do not. That is particularly important if the path is narrow, the slopes steep, and the journey long.
That is what life in the Pacific was like in the 20th Air Force, 73rd Bomb Wing, 498th Bomb Group, 873rd Bomb Squadron (Very heavy) on Saipan, Fall 1944 through the late summer of 1945.
In the course of listening to Bill talk about life on Isley Field in his year overseas, I ran across a photo album put together by a fellow Air Force kid who Bill might have known. He was a combat crewman, from what I can discern from the pictures, and you might be interested in seeing what they saw in those days.
Here is the link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/msh-images/sets/72157623757839248/ <http://www.flickr.com/photos/msh-images/sets/72157623757839248/>
It includes all the stuff you might expect and some you might not. The Second Marine Division cemetery is one that is incredibly poignant. Bill said on Sundays the Jarheads, one of whom had a cousin in his unit, would come down to trade their warm beer for the cold ones that belonged to the better equipped Air Force.
There are some things that have not changed down through the years.
Bill remembers one Marine who tried to trade his Bronze Star for a case of beer, which tells you something about the relative price of heroism.
The combat crews were entitled to little 2-ounce bottles of whiskey on return from a mission. Some of them took the thing with apparent equanimity. Others were shaking with what they had experienced. Bill and his buddies always made sure his cousin Hal got back to his quarters safely.
Bill’s tales of enlisted life on the base still resonate as well. The baseball, the KP anf guard duty, the horror of losing aircraft on take-off, or through crashes at the field on return from combat damage or pilot error.
The biggest raid in the seven month campaign came on 24 May, when 520 B-29s bombed the urban-industrial area south of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo.
(Tokyo, August 1945. USAAF picture)
The US Strategic Bombing Survey later estimated that a single strike, conducted by nearly 300 bombers March, killed nearly 88,000 people, and left a million homeless. Others have put the tolls much higher. Mark Selden wrote in his book “Japan Focus”:
“The figure of roughly 100,000 deaths, provided by Japanese and American authorities, both of whom may have had reasons of their own for minimizing the death toll, seems to me arguably low in light of population density, wind conditions, and survivors' accounts.... With an average of 103,000 inhabitants per square mile and peak levels as high as 135,000 per square mile, the highest density of any industrial city in the world, and with firefighting measures ludicrously inadequate to the task, 15.8 square miles (41 km2) of Tokyo were destroyed on a night when fierce winds whipped the flames and walls of fire blocked tens of thousands fleeing for their lives. An estimated 1.5 million people lived in the burned out areas.”
The campaign was enormously successful, and yet curiously only seemed to strengthen the resolve of the military junta to resist.
Later that summer, in July and August, a baseball series featuring the top players in uniform from the Big Leagues were played on Saipan, Tinian and Guam, with one series being played on newly-fallen Iwo Jima.
Iwo had been taken at a cost of 6,821 American lives, including Philadelphia Athletics’ catcher Harry O’Neill and minor league players Jack Lummus, Bob Holmes, Jack Nealy and Frank Ciaffone.
During the pro baseball tour of the summer of ‘45, 27 games were played before an estimated 180,000 soldiers, sailors and marines. Not all spectators were Allied troops. One of the players remembered that “Japanese soldiers would watch the games from the jungle in the background and go back and hide when the game was over.”
Iwo was needed as a divert field for the next years of the war. No one knew what was coming. A reserve field was necessary to support the invasion that was sure to come.
In August 1945, Seabees cut a baseball field in the side of a hill, built stands and named it Higashi Field. On August 29, Tex Hughson then hurled the 73rd Bombers to a 3-2 win against the 313th Flyers in the opening game. The following day, the 58th Wingmen of Bill McCullough’s Isley Field beat the 313th Flyers of Guam, 5-4.
Enos Slaughter’s seventh-inning home run was the winning margin in a game that featured seventeen put outs by the two centerfielders. Swede Jensen fanned 11 of the Flyers while Joe Marty hauled in seven for the Wingmen.
Why would the pros play so hard in these games that meant nothing?
Stan Rojek, Brooklyn Dodgers shortstop played with the 73rd Bombers of Tinian. He said later that “There was no loafing or protecting yourself. Not before those crowds. Some of us got razzed, too, but it was all very friendly.”
(Yankee Joe Gordon signs a ball for fans)
Enos Slaughter was fired up enough in one game that he took out Stan on a high slide. Joe Gordon, the Yankee’s second baseman in real life told him to lighten up. Slaughter did not know how to play any other way.
Neither did anyone else.
August was the month that it finished, but that will have to wait until tomorrow.
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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