09 June 2010
Serenade to the Big Bird
(Isley Field, Saipan, filled with Super Forts. Late 1945. Army Air Corps picture)
Bill McCullough is a Great American. So is his cousin Hal, a survivor of Crew 17. I will tell you more about his crew tomorrow, but the stories of how they bombed Japan and survived their thirty-mission compact with fire and death can’t be left to float out there as if Americans suddenly appeared in the skies above Tokyo in 1945, deus ex machina.
The presence of the XXI Air Force on Saipan was the product of some very deliberate decisionmaking in Washington and elsewhere, and included blackboards with flow-charts that included circles that contained the words:
“Insert engineering miracle here.”
Bill was on the island to maintain the sophisticated automated gun system that protected the Super Forts from the Japanese guns on the dwindling number of fighters that fiercely attempted to defend Tokyo and the industrial cities of the Kanto Plain.
Hal looked into the whirring circuits of the Norden bombsight at the Perspex prow of the Big Bird.
(Bombardier station in he B-29 Nose. Norden Bombsight a right center. USAF Photo)
My pal the Admiral was a junior officer on the Pacific Fleet staff at the time. He told me the other day that memories of the Big Bird “touched a soft spot in my heart. I LOVED the B-29s. They flew from Saipan, but also from Tinian and Guam. "Old Iron Pants," also known as General Cursis LeMay, attended our daily PACFLT Staff meeting, and we provided him with target intelligence.”
I listened with wonder, thinking of Old Iron Pants striding into the headquarters at Makalapa, cigar clenched in his teeth, implementing the strategy by sheer force of will.
The American air campaign against the Japanese Home Islands began less than five months after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. The Doolittle Raid, a flight of B-25 Mitchell bombers launched from the aircraft carrier Hornet, announced the intention of the Americans to hold the Japanese homeland at risk.
(B-25 Mitchell Bomber departs USS Hornet, 1942. USN Photo)
It was a one-way mission of sixteen B-25s, each with a five-man crew, to hit Tokyo and Nagoya. Damage to the intended military targets was modest, and none of the planes reached the Chinese airfields where they were intended to recover.
It was a stunt, albeit a dramatic one, and not subject to duplication.
The parallel issues in the Pacific bombing campaign were range and payload. The two requirements mandated an entirely new aircraft, and the B-29 bomber was to be the war-winning weapon. There were two key elements to implement the strategy. The first was to develop the airplane, and the second was to secure bases from which it would operate.
The home front war about fielding the heavy long-range bomber was as urgent as anything happening forward to secure the bases. Old Iron Pants was part of the Bomber Mafia whose holy grail was high-altitude precision delivery of ordnance. That all changed into low-level mass incendiary attacks, but the aircraft and the islands had to be delivered before anyone could find out that wholesale destruction, rather than retail, was the answer.
I took my son’s to the boneyard air base at Davis-Montham Air Froce base one time to look at what was left of the 5,000 F-4 Phantoms the McDonnell-Douglas had contributed to the defense of the Western World. I had a brief professional association with the airframe, about the same length of time that Bill McCullough had, and like him, I was a ground-pounder, not combat crew.
I tried to explain to the boys that the airplanes lined up before them were not the weapons-system that involved humans and training and spare parts and maintenance people and pilots and pylons and rockets.
Seen as what they were, the silent airframes would appear as a blur across time and space.
So I guess we are stuck with talking about Saipan and the development of the B-29 tomorrow. Both are cool stories.
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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