Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945 (The Pacific War Trilogy Book 3)

by Ian W. Toll

At Konoike Airfield, northeast of Tokyo, a dozen Mitsubishi G4M bombers were lined up wingtip to wingtip on the flight line. Konoike was an “Oka” (manned suicide missile) training center, and the bombers were the mother planes that carried and dropped the little rocket-propelled suicide craft. The G4Ms were fully fueled up, as they had been scheduled to fly a training exercise that morning. A squadron of Corsairs flew a low strafing run over the field and riddled the parked planes with .50-caliber incendiary fire. All twelve of the Mitsubishis were destroyed on the ground.

At 11:00 a.m., Spruance pulled the plug. He told Mitscher to recover all planes and retire to support the landings on Iwo Jima. By 4:00 that afternoon, the task force was speeding away to the south.

The carrier bombers had taken the Tachikawa plant off line and demolished about 60 percent of the structures at the Nakajima airframe plant in Ota. Task Force 58 had lost sixty carrier planes in combat and twenty-eight in operations, but the carriers and screening ships were unscratched. The strikes were held up by naval aviators as Exhibit A in their ongoing meta-argument with the USAAF. The navy had argued that dive bombing and low-altitude strafing and rocket attacks could hit targets on the ground more reliably than the high-altitude precision bombing practiced by the Superfortresses. The results at the Tachikawa and Nakajima plants appeared to justify their claims. Mitscher probably had that interservice debate in mind when he called the two-day attack “the greatest air victory of the war for carrier aviation.”27 Task Force 58 (and 38) would return again and again to hit Tokyo and other points in Japan with increasing frequency and ferocity, literally until the last day of the war.

THE BOMBARDMENT FORCE, which had arrived off Iwo Jima the same day the carrier planes hit Tokyo, buried the island under an avalanche of high-explosive shells. Wrapped in a shroud of smoke and flame, nothing of Iwo Jima could be seen from the fleet, except (sporadically) the peak of Mt. Suribachi.

A formation of B-24s soared overhead, and diagonal glints of steel fell away from their open bomb bays. A series of explosions walked across the heart of the island, and spikes of orange and yellow flame shot above the boiling smoke and dust.29 War correspondent Bob Sherrod, who had witnessed the landings on Tarawa, Kwajalein, and Saipan, called it “more terrifying than any other similar spectacle I had ever seen.”

The troopships of Task Force 53, embarking the 4th and 5th Marine Divisions, arrived after midnight on D-Day. Minesweepers had cleared the lanes to the beaches, and the frogmen of the underwater demolition teams (UDT) mapped the sea bottom and demolished all obstacles placed there to deter landing craft.

The invasion force carried 111,000 troops, including 75,000 troops in the landing force (nearly all of whom were marines) and another 36,000 in the army garrison force. The transports and landing ships carried 98,000 tons of supplies.

As awesome as the naval bombardment seemed, it fell far short of what the marines had wanted. While planning Operation DETACHMENT, Major General Harry Schmidt had requested a minimum of ten consecutive days’ bombardment before landing.

The command lineup was largely unchanged from that of prior operations in the Gilberts, the Marshalls, and the Marianas. Spruance remained the big boss afloat, in charge of the entire Fifth Fleet, with Mitscher as commander of Task Force 58. Admiral Turner commanded the Amphibious Expeditionary Force, as he had done since the Tarawa operation sixteen months earlier; and in that role he gave orders to the marine ground commanders, as he had done before. Smith commanded the expeditionary troops, comprising the 3rd, 4th, and 5th Marine Divisions and an army garrison force that would land after the island was secured. But Smith would not command the Fifth Amphibious Corps (VAC) directly, as he had done in prior operations; that job would fall to General Schmidt.

The sixty-two-year-old Smith was facing mandatory retirement from frontline service, and Iwo Jima would be his last battle. As the only senior marine with a track record of working effectively with the irascible Kelly Turner, his job was to remain aboard the admiral’s command ship Eldorado, representing the views and safeguarding the interests of the Marine Corps, while Schmidt went ashore and oversaw the battle on the ground.

The 4th and 5th Marine Divisions would land on the island’s southeast beaches. The 4th Division would drive directly inland to take control of the larger of the two airfields, Motoyama No. 1, and then turn north to take Airfield No. 2. The 5th Division would push across the relatively narrow and flat neck of the island, and then turn south to isolate and seize Mt. Suribachi. Once the volcano was in U.S. hands, the 5th Division would advance north up the west coast and form a continuous line across the island with the 4th Division. The 3rd Marine Division would be held aboard the transports offshore as a floating reserve, but Schmidt and Smith expected that it would probably be summoned ashore on the third or fourth day of the battle, to be inserted into the middle of the line.

No one expected a walkover. The Americans were braced for a bloodbath on Iwo Jima. In a press conference a week before D-Day, Admiral Turner had told the correspondents: “Iwo Jima is as well defended as any other fixed position in the world today.”34 Another officer judged that storming Gibraltar would be easier. General Smith expected his assault forces to suffer a minimum of 15,000 casualties.

At 8:40 a.m., at the sound of a horn, the coxswains opened their throttles and started their long run into the beach. The boats bucked and reared through the swells, so that from the point of view of those watching from the rails of the transports, they seemed to disappear entirely into the sea before rising to become visible again. It was a rough ride. Men struggled against seasickness, their tailbones bumping uncomfortably on the wooden benches, their dungarees soaked and their eyes stinging from the cold salt spray. Passing the cannonading warships, they felt the blast concussions radiating from the big naval guns.

Two files of F4U Corsairs flew low over the beach, strafing the pillboxes just inland of the terraces. These were Marine Fighter Squadrons 124 and 213, flying from the carrier Essex—the first Marine Corps aircraft that most of the infantrymen had ever seen.

Until the capture of Iwo Jima, Japanese fighters based on that island flew regular low-altitude bombing and strafing raids against the Marianas airfields. The most spectacular of these had occurred on November 27, when fifteen Zero fighters flew south from Iwo Jima at wavetop altitude, ducking under Saipan’s radar screens, and appeared without warning over Isley Field. Achieving complete surprise, the Zeros strafed B-29s parked on the hardstands, destroying three and damaging eight more.

New fighter patrols were scheduled, and B-24 raids cratered the airfields on Iwo Jima. Searchlights and a Microwave Early Warning (MEW) radar system were installed at the north end of Saipan, and destroyers were positioned north of the island to act as radar pickets. These measures helped, but the threat was not entirely eliminated until February 1945, when the marines stormed Iwo Jima.

Bomber Command launched ten raids against the Japanese homeland. The missions targeted aircraft factories and urban installations in Tokyo, Yokohama, Hamamatsu, Numazu, and Nagoya. Some were more successful than others. Bombs dropped from 30,000 feet often missed the aircraft plants they targeted and fell into nearby residential districts.

Meanwhile, the Americans attacked the psychological foundations of the Japanese war effort by dropping leaflets over Nagoya, asking, “What shall we offer you next, after the earthquake?”2

In the 1930s, the U.S. Army Air Corps had poured funding into technologies for high-altitude precision bombardment—most notably, the vaunted Norden bombsight, which proponents advertised as a potential war-winner. The Superfortress had been conceived as a weapon that could fly 30,000 feet over enemy territory and drop bombs “into a pickle barrel.”

true believers in the USAAF had kept the faith with their precision-bombing orthodoxy, and B-17 Flying Fortresses had achieved a certain degree of success in bombing ...

The B-29 missions followed a predictable pattern—the bombers repeatedly arrived in daylight over the same regions (Tokyo and Nagoya), at the same altitude (30,000 feet). In time, the Japanese army and navy fighter commands recognized these patterns and made tactical adjustments to counter the raids. As soon as their coastal radars detected an inbound strike, the fighters scrambled to altitude. Often the Japanese were able to put more than two hundred fighters into the air to meet an incoming formation of fifty to seventy-five unescorted B-29s. Air defense of the Kanto region was concentrated at Atsugi Air Base, near Yokosuka.

The elite 343rd Kokutai, based at Matsuyama Air Base on Shikoku, was recruited and organized by the famous Japanese naval pilot Minoru Genda, who had developed the tactical plans for the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Until Iwo Jima fell into American hands, there was no safe runway within 1,400 miles of Japanese shores.

On nearly every mission, B-29s were seen to crash at sea, or their crews radioed to report that they were attempting a controlled water landing. But recovering the castaway crews was a low-percentage proposition. Searching for little yellow rubber rafts in those blue immensities was like trying to find a needle in a haystack, especially when the weather was less than perfectly clear. The navy floatplanes employed for air-sea rescue operations lacked the range or endurance to search thoroughly in waters so far from base.

In January 1945, an average of four to five B-29s failed to return safely from each bombing mission over Japan, for an average loss rate of 5.7 percent. The

The USAAF had tentatively fixed a tour of duty at thirty-five combat missions. The airmen could do the math. With per-mission losses topping 5 percent, they could expect to survive, on average, fewer than twenty missions.

If their loss rate did not improve, all of the B-29 pilots and aircrews could expect to keep flying missions until they died.

Morale deteriorated. The B-29 crews were conscious of having fallen short of the high expectations set for them. Bombing accuracy had been consistently disappointing, due in part to abominable winter weather over Japan. Their losses had been heavy, and they seemed to be getting worse.

After more than ten missions aimed at Japanese aircraft manufacturing targets, only the Mitsubishi plants in Nagoya had been seriously disrupted, and that was owed partly to the December earthquake. Nakajima, Tachikawa, and Kawasaki production centers had been attacked without evident success. A Nakajima engine plant in Musashino, Tokyo had been visited five times by Hansell’s B-29s, but remained largely intact.

Some argued for a more radical shift in tactics, employing full-scale firebombing raids on Japanese cities—that is, to burn them down, more or less indiscriminately.

Major General Curtis LeMay had previously served under Hansell in Europe, but he had since been promoted and was now senior to Hansell. Arnold decided to put LeMay directly in charge of the 21st Bomber Command; Hansell, in turn, would act as LeMay’s vice commander.

JAPANESE CIVILIANS REGARDED the B-29s with curiosity, fascination, and even admiration. Whenever the tiny silver crosses appeared overhead, they crowded out into the streets, craning their necks and pointing to the sky. “We went through those early bombings in a spirit of excitement and suspense,” wrote a Tokyo journalist. “There was even a spirit of adventure, a sense of exultation in sharing the dangers of war even though bound to civilian existence.”10 Police and civil defense authorities shouted at the spectators, but many were too excited to retreat into their underground shelters.

The air raids presented a dilemma for the regime’s propaganda authorities. Witnessed by millions, they could not be censored out of existence. News coverage veered between competing impulses—to belittle the raids as feeble and ineffective, or to whip up popular anger.

On January 27, 1945, seventy-two B-29s were diverted from their primary targets by cloudy weather. They dropped their payloads on the heart of downtown Tokyo, and bombs fell among Saturday shoppers in the tony Ginza district, killing several hundred. For urbanites who witnessed such scenes of devastation, the regime’s appeals to “fighting spirit” inspired bitter sarcasm. In his diary, Kiyoshi Kiyosawa commented that “the Japanese spirit encourages the idea that when one sees B-29s, they can be dealt with [by] bamboo spears or judo.”

After the war, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS) conducted extensive interviews with a cross-section of Japanese at every level of society. The results led the USSBS analysts to conclude that aerial bombing was the “most important single factor” in undercutting the morale of the Japanese people. More than any other development—including military reverses overseas and the reduction in food rations at home—the appearance of enemy planes in Japanese skies prompted ordinary citizens to doubt their chances of victory, and to desire an early termination of the war.

Moreover, the Japanese were more inclined to blame the air raids on their own leaders than on the enemy. “Now was the time when Japan’s history of geographical isolation, abetted by centuries of cultural isolation, became a liability,” wrote the USSBS authors.

The director of Ueno Park Zoo ordered that lions, tigers, and other large predators be euthanized, lest an air raid destroy their enclosures and set them loose in the streets of Tokyo.

In other words, the Japanese aviators were to survive to fight another day, even at the cost of allowing uncontested raids on their airfields: “Anti-fighter plane combat for the purpose of air defense of strategic points will not be carried out, in principle, with combat strength, except when the situation is particularly favorable or when it is urgently needed.”

The deadly missiles punched through the Franklin’s flight deck and plunged into the heart of the ship. The results were calamitous. The fires and explosions aboard the “Big Ben” were worse than those suffered by any aircraft carrier that survived the Pacific War. Hundreds were killed instantly, probably before they were even aware that the ship had been hit. The attack was so sudden that Captain Leslie Gehres, on the bridge, never caught a glimpse of the plane or the bombs it had dropped.

“Big Ben” regained power and was able to make 20 knots under her own steam. Spruance sent her back to Ulithi, and then to Pearl Harbor. From there, she made a 12,000-mile voyage to New York, also under her own steam. At every port on her voyage, witnesses gaped. The Franklin was a pitiable wreck, blackened and gutted. Deformed lumps of charred steel on her flight deck were the only remaining traces of her aircraft. (The fires had burned so hot that the wreckage had fused onto the ship, and could not be jettisoned.) The Franklin’s casualty list included 807 killed and more than 487 wounded, amounting to nearly half her complement. As Chester Nimitz later concluded, “No other ship in World War II, and possibly in history, suffered such extensive injuries and yet remained afloat.”14

There would be no rest for Task Force 58. The carrier air groups were needed to support Operation ICEBERG, the invasion of Okinawa, to commence on April 1.15

AS A RULE, EACH SUCCESSIVE AMPHIBIOUS OPERATION in the Pacific was larger than the last. Okinawa was the last amphibious operation of the war; accordingly, it dwarfed all previous landings. The ground force included 183,000 combat troops drawn from the army and marines, with an additional 120,000 service troops and engineers. The transport and logistical fleet consisted of more than 1,200 ships. That figure did not include the roughly two hundred warships of Task Force 58 and the British Pacific Fleet, which would furnish air protection. Okinawa was 6,100 miles from San Francisco, 850 miles from Iwo Jima, 920 miles from Manila, 1,400 miles from Guam, almost 1,400 miles from Ulithi—but only 330 miles from the Japanese home islands.

Looking down through broken cloud cover, a crewman on a Yorktown TBM Avenger saw “a dainty island with crumpled hills, thickly wooded, sloping down to a neat crazy quilt of tan and green farmland.”16 The island’s economy was chiefly limited to fishing and agriculture; the important crops were sugarcane, rice, sweet potatoes, beets, barley, and cabbages. Cane fields, terraces, and sunken rice paddies took up almost all of the island’s central plains, and a fair portion of the hills.

West-facing slopes were dotted with stone burial tombs, in the shapes of lyres or keyholes; many had evidently been incorporated into Japanese defensive fortifications.

Okinawa was about 60 miles long, varying in width from about 15 miles to 3 miles, and took in about 480 square miles of territory.

About 80 percent of the prewar population had lived in the southern third of the island, which included...

Task Force 58 planes attacked the island’s major airfields, at Yontan, Kadena, Machinato, and Naha. All of t...

There were few Japanese planes to be seen, except wreckage. Naha had been devastated by a Third Fleet carrier raid in October 1944, and it...

The island’s only paved road was a two-lane highway connecting Naha and Shuri.

The U.S. carrier airmen took thousands of photographs. Okinawa was a populous island, they knew, with a 1940 population of 800,000—but now, as they looked down, they saw few people at all. Nimitz’s intelligence analysts had estimated Japanese troop strength on the island at 65,000. The actual number was closer to 100,000—but from the air it was difficult to pinpoint the locations of blockhouses and gun emplacements.