With Courage: The U.S. Army Air Forces in World War II

Yamoto

Yamamoto pores over maps during a Japanese fleet exercise in 1940.

At right, he appears in white uniform to offer a traditional wave of his cap to pilots departing Rabaul for counterair attacks on American airfields on Guadalcanal in Operation I, which he conceived. This is supposedly the last known photograph of the admiral. Japanese Combined Fleet, Yamamoto left Rabaul to inspect his air units striking American forces on Guadalcanal. American codebreakers plotted his itinerary and made possible an aerial interception on April 18,1943, by eighteen P-38s flying a 1,000-mile mission. Armed with precise information, the The map inset marks the route of the American interceptors, with the village of Aku marking the spot nearest the wreckage of Yamamoto's plane, rediscovered in 1972. Controversy continues over the destruction of the bomber and the death of its celebrated passenger”.

“[Yamamoto] was an eccentric genius who had made a name for himself by championing the use of oil in the Japanese fleet, espousing the introduction of aircraft carriers, and promoting the design of the A6M Zero tighter. Isoroku Yamamoto learned English in the course of an assignment to Harvard University and during a American pilots destroyed two G4M BETTY bombers over southern Bougainville, one of them Yamamoto's. Though the Allies had taken the risk of revealing that they were reading Japanese codes, the enemy never deduced this, and one of Japan's great wartime commanders was reported to a mourning public as killed in action. separate stint as naval attache in Washington in the 1920s. A world-class poker player and master strategist, Yamamoto directed the planning for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, though he quietly voiced misgivings at the ignorance of his political leaders on the dangers of a collision with the United States. “

Airwar in the Southwest Pacific

Aerial operations in the Southwest Pacific theater had a character markedly different from those in Europe. Strategic bombing came heavily into play only in the later stages of the war, when bases within reach of the enemy homeland were finally in Allied hands. Army air elements struck at isolated enemy garrisons, their seaborne tines of supply, and airfields that defended Japanese conquered areas. Above, artist Michael Hagel depicts a devastating assault by Fifth Air Force B-25s on the Japanese anchorage at Rabaul in his Simpson Harbor. In scenes showing the nature of air combat. A Japanese ground crew at a Philippine base (below) cheers a departing kamikaze pilot off on his one-way mission against U.S. Navy targets.

The forgotten theater: China-Burma-India

O n e of the first commitments of American fliers against the Axis in a foreign theater of war came as the result of an active recruitment program by the Chinese Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek among commissioned American Army and Navy pilots. Ninety fliers and 150 support personnel under retired Maj. Claire Lee Chennault took their P-40s to Burma in September 1941. Three weeks after the Pearl Harbor attack, this American Volunteer Group went into action against Japanese bombers, shooting down six of ten Mitsubishi Ki-21 SALLY bombers. The group was thereafter renowned as the "Flying Tigers.'' Its planes, sharktooth faces evident in one of the famous images of the war, stand under the eye of a Chinese guard after the Americans moved north in 1942. The AVG was among the tint to devise effective hit-and-run tactics against the Japanese A6M ZEKE fighter. On July 4, 1942, the group dissolved and holdovers became the nucleus of the AAF's 23d Pursuit Group, eventually absorbed into the Fourteenth Air Force under Chennault, now a major general.

American policy required a theater in being to tie down Japanese forces in the region, but gave ground and air forces there only a shoestring subsistence. Supply and spare parts had to come in by air over the Himalayan mountain range.

Marianas Operations

The Home Islands Besiged

Early in the last year of the war, American seaborne forces were closing in on the remnant Japanese empire while the bombing offensive grew in fury. Each of the later island conquests brought the air offensive closer to the enemy's homeland and war production base. The U.S. Marine V Amphibious Corps assaulted Iwo Jima in the Bonin Islands on February 19,1945, and in a bloody campaign against a fierce defense seized this volcanic outpost only seven hundred miles from Kyushu, the southernmost Japanese island. From here, fighter escorts could easily stage to protect raiding B-29s. Iwo's capture also eliminated a Japanese radar station that gave warning of incoming attacks, further blinding the enemy's faltering air defenses. By June, Okinawa, the main island in the Ryukyu chain, was secure enough to begin basing the heavies there. Above, a damaged B-29 takes refuge at Bolo Strip on Okinawa, limping south after a strike at Japan. Armorers on Ie Shima field reload a P47's guns. A P-51 revs up on pierced-steel-plank runway on Iwo Jima. One of the few Convair B-32 Dominators to see war service takes on gasoline at an Okinawan field.

Why Civilians were Bombed

This difference in attitude resulted at least in part from a desire to avenge Pearl Harbor and retaliate for Japanese wartime atrocities, among them the execution of airmen captured after the Doolittle raid of 1942 and the brutal treatment of American prisoners of war in the Philippines. The wanton murder of American and Filipino captives during the death march from the Bataan peninsula on Luzon to prison camps elsewhere on the island came to light after an Air Forces pilot, Capt. William E. Dyess, Jr., and a few fellow prisoners escaped and, with the aid of Filipino guerrillas, eventually returned to the United States. Other factors influencing the air war against Japan undoubtedly included the lack of widely shared ethnic, cultural, or religious ties with the populace. Perhaps the most powerful argument for unrestrained attack was the refusal of the Japanese to surrender, even when facing overwhelming odds and certain death-an attitude the Americans considered fanatical. In the Marianas, for instance, civilians, including women and children, had chosen suicide rather than internment, and enemy sailors and airmen had become kamikazes-willing to ram B-29s, dive aircraft into warships, or ride explosives-laden boats or manned torpedoes to certain death. By the spring of 1945, American planners looked forward with dread to an assault upon the home islands in which the entire populace would rise up and fight to the death. Estimates of Americans killed and wounded in this kind of fight to the death varied from 31,000 in the first 30 days of an invasion of Kyushu to as many as 268,000 in overrunning the entire island town by town.

Cities on Fire

T h e enemy's home islands now inside the range of American land-based air power, General Arnold began experiments in the United States in 1944 to determine the best means of attacking Japan's vulnerable cities. Attempts at high altitude precision bombing against industrial targets with the few B-29s on hand in the Mananas through mid-January 1945 had only started to produce results. Arnold sent hard-driving Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay to step up the pace. Between mid-March and the end of the war, LeMay, with his strength now increased to three B-29 wings, began incendiary attacks on the highly flammable structures of urban Japan.

Photos: A formation from the 500th Bomb Group showers firebombs on targets. In the opening stroke of this new campaign, 334 bombers hit Tokyo itself on March 9. Sixteen square miles of the city center (right) were leveled. In the most devastating air raid of the Pacific war to that time, 85,000 died and a million were homeless after a firestorm rivaling that in Dresden a month before. The Tokyo refinery shown next was hit later with high-explosive ordnance. The B-29s then struckin succession at Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe, and Nagoya again before the supply of firebombs was exhausted on March 17. In April, P-51 Mustangs settled on Iwo Jima, and the attack become irresistable. Japan was virtually defenseless by day and helpless in attack by night. After continuing raids with high explosive, the incendiary attacks resumed in May; by June the hearts of the half dozen largest cities in the home islands were cinders. Japanese survivors eke out shelter below ground or in small shacks in the center of blackened Yokohama in this scene after V-J Day. The docks at Kobe, Japan's sixth largest city, fall under the incendiaries on June 5 in the third attack on the city.

Closing the sea routes

In the closing months of the war, while strategic bombers struck Japanese cities and industries, mediums prowled the sea routes to help eliminate the remains of enemy seapower. Above, a B-25 of the Apache Group attacks a small Japanese frigate from abeam. Seventy of the ship's crew abandoned ship as the vessel heels over to starboard. Even more telling in closing off Japanese waterways were mining operations against Japanese harbors and shipping, begun quietly in October 1942. For over two years already, Army aircraft adding to the efforts of surface ships and Allied submarines sowed mines along the supply routes of enemy garrisons in New Guinea, the Solomons, the Malay peninsula and archipelago, and the Philippine Islands. B-24 Liberators from bases in India and Ceylon dropped these silent weapons into river estuaries, bays, and harbors on the coasts of Indochina and Malaya. From Kunming in China, B-29s covered northern Indochina and the China coast from Haiphong to Shanghai. Once situated in the Marianas, Twentieth Air Force B29s began the mining campaign to the Japanese home islands and the coasts of Korea with devastating effect. A B-29 of the 9th Bomb Group, 313th Bomb Wing, drops Navy Mark 25 mines in Japanese waters. The parachute detached itself from the ordnance once it entered the water. The hydrostatically armed mine then lay in the shallows to await the passage of a vessel. American mines left the quarter-mile-wide Strait of Shimonoseki separating the southernmost Japanese main island of Kyushu from its neighboring Honshu, completely impassable in the last months of the war. The waterway was one of four main arteries for maritime traffic between the Inland Sea west of Japan and the Pacific Ocean. These weapons sank an estimated 700,000 tons of Japanese naval and maritime shipping

The Japanese Air Arm

Japanese aircraft manufacturers of the late 1930s ere dismissed in the West as being unsophisticated and given to copying foreign designs. The Imperial Navy especially promoted the development of modern designs influenced by Japan's maritime character. By the late 1930s the Mitsubisbi concern had supplied an all-metal monoplane in the A5M4, code-named CLAUDE by US Navy intelligence, for the Japanese Navy. Comparable in size and performance to the American Boeing P-26, it was a transitional design and the forerunner to the same company's A6M Reisen. Coded as ZEKE, but forever known as the Zero, its successive variants dominated aerial combat in the Pacific until 1943. The Japanese also fielded a superior torpedo bomber in the Nakajima B5NJ, with the U.S. Navy code name KATE . The Mitsubishi G4M medium bomber, coded as BETTY , was the most widely used Japanese bombardment aircraft, though its unprotected fuel tanks were highly susceptible to battle damage and explosions. The Nakajima Ki- 43 Hayabusa, known as Oscar, was built in larger numbers than any other Japanese fighter and matched the Zero's superb performance against Allied aircraft in the first half of the war. Also there is the Kawanishi H8K (EMILY)the single best combat flying boat of the war; four of these machines carried out a mission against Hawaiian targets in March 1942, aborted only because weather obscured the objective. The Kawasaki Ki 61 Hien (TONY) was aerodynamically sound but suffered from the balkiness of its license-built Daimler Benz DB 601 engine, one of the few liquid-cooled motors in Japanese inventories. The original DB 601 powered the Lujfwafle's Bf 109.

The Dolittle Raid

For five months after the attack on Pead Harbor, the tide of war in the Pacific ran in favor of the Japanese. In early April 1942 the main body of American forces in the Philippines surrendered, leaving a doomed garrison on the island of Corregidor to fight on. About to be realized was a bold plan to strike Japan with Army bombers brought within range by a Navy aircraft carrier. On April 18, a task force including the newly commissioned USS Hornet (CV-8) entered Japanese waters, the carrier steaming with sixteen B2Ss lashed down on her deck. Eighty Army fliers under Lt. Cot. James H. Doolittle prepared for the difficult takeoff from the ship 400 miles from their targets. An encounter with a Japanese trawler forced the planes off 650 miles from shore instead. Stripped of most defensive armament and equipped with additional internal fuel tanks, the B-25s also lost their heavy bombsights, replaced by two simple metal strips set in the bombers' glazed noses and calibrated for attacks from 1,500 feet. With three 500-pound bombs and an incendiary, each bomber strained off Hornet's bow and headed for targets in one of five cities: Tokyo, Kobe, Yokohama, Yokosuka, and Nagoya. Unable to return to the carrier, the B-25s were then to head for landings at Chuchow, in China. Doolittle buzzed Tokyo three days after a local radio broadcast proclaiming that the capital would never be bombed. All sixteen planes were lost in the raid, one interned in the Soviet Union. Eight fliers fell into Japanese hands in China and three of these were executed by their captors; the Chinese who helped the American fliers suffered the more at the hands of their enemies. The Japanese obliterated Chuchow and murdered local Chitwe mercilessly.

The photos show Doolittle's plane is taking off; crews break out cases of .SO-caliber ammunition. Capt. Marc A. Mitscher, Hornet's skipper, confers with Doolittle just before the raid. Lashed down bombers frequently ran up their engines. At full throttle, a B-25 claws for altitude after the dangerously short roll down the deck. A glimpse of the Japanese Naval Station at Yokosuka flashes under the raiders' noses. Jimmy Doolittle, one of America's premier aviators, beams in the inset portrait. Anticipating the possibility of court-martial for losing his entire complement of bombers, he returned to the United States a hero. Though it had little military effect, his feat astounded the Japanese government, raised American morale immeasurably, and earned him the Congressional Medal of Honor and promotion to brigadier general.

Coral Sea and Midway Actions

Even as American fortunes in the Pacific war seemed at their lowest with the surrender of U.S. Army forces on Bataan in the Philippines, there came a dramatic reversal in the course of the conflict within the space of four weeks in the spring of 1942. In two climactic sea-air battles, the Japanese outward drive was halted. In early May the Japanese Combined Fleet made for Port Moresby on the south coast of New Guinea to consolidate a strong link in the defensive perimeter in the Pacific. Operating with carriers USS Lexington (CV-2) and USS Yorktown (CV-3, a patrolling American task force found the Japanese force of three flattops in the Coral Sea, due south of the Solomon Islands. In the world's first naval action in which the hostile surface units never sighted each other, aviation was the striking arm of both fleets. The Japanese abandoned forever their designs on Port Moresby and with them the possibility of threatening the north coast of Australia.

Turning to the mid-Pacific, the Japanese gathered a force of four aircraft carriers and a battleship element to seize Midway Island, 1,100 miles north of Hawaii, while a diversionary force moved against the Alaskan chain further north. An American naval task force with Enterprise and the patched-up Yorktown, fully apprised of the Japanese advanced by the so-called MAGIC intercepts of Japanese coded message traffic, sailed to give baffle. Aviators again tipped the balance. Early on June 4, Japanese planes had attacked the Midway defenses and were gassing up and rearming on the of their carriers for another strike when torpedo bombers from the American flattops bore in on them. Defending Zeros dove to destroy nearly every U.S. Navy torpedo plane, but it left their fleet undefended from above. At that exact moment, American dive bombers entered the by ; in the five minutes after 10:24 in the morning, they sank all three carriers in the main Japanese force. "be fourth went down next day in a stunning reversal for the Japanese cause; at one stroke, air power, with the advantage of superior intelligence, had placed the Japanese on the strategic defensive for the remainder of the war.

Photos: Two Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bombers are ready to jump the remains of the Japanese fleet in the last phases of the battle on June 6. Stricken Hityu, the last of the enemy carriers burns before being scuttled. An Army Air Forces B-17leaves a Midway airstrip to attack the Japanese. A B-26 Marauder crew counted over 500 holes in their ship after striking the enemy fleet. One B-26 attempted a torpedo run on enemy vessels, but dropped the missile from too high an altitude for any effect.

Tuskegee Airmen

Ok. I know that these gentlemen were not in the Pacific Theater, but I still think they are extremely important, valiant men. I find very little material about them in publications, and when I do I want to include it. So there.

“Racially segregated American society excluded African-Americans from commissioned rank in the U.S. Army except in token numbers. In 1941, the American military had just five black officers, three of them chaplains; the last two were father and son: Col. Bejamin 0. Davis and 1st Lt. Bejamin 0. Davis, Jr. Prospective demands for military manpower in an emergency caused the nation to open the ranks to black Americans as it had done hesitantly in all previous wars. The Army Expansion Act of April 1939 brought into existence the all black 99th Pursuit Squadron the following January, a unit trained at the traditionally Negro Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. The flying program at the institute was commanded by often unsympathetic white officers, with the exception of Maj. Noel Parrish, who built a reputation as a champion of his black fliers. The program began with 47 officers and 429 enlisted in the squadron under the command of Captain Davis, Jr. The Tuskegee program eventually contributed black combat aviators in a number of specialties: 673 single engine pilots, 253 twin engine (medium bomber) pilots, 58 field artillery liaison officers, and 132 navigators. The 99th Pursuit, renamed the 99th Fighter Squadron, led the way for other fighter squadrons, the 100th, the 301st and the 302nd, which, with the 99tb, made up the 332d Fighter Group serving under Twelfth Air Force in Italy after February 1944. The younger Davis, now a lieutentant colonel, led the group through a baptism of fire with its Pa0 aircraft in North Africa to the end of the war, which it finished flying from Italian airfields in Fifteenth Air Force P-51 Mustangs. Black airmen were credited with destroying 108.5 enemy aircraft in the air and another 150 on the ground. On escort missions, they never lost or abandoned a bomber. The unit won a Distinguished Unit Citation, its members a Silver Star Medal and 150 Distinguished Flying Crosses.

Photos: A Tuskegee formation includes an imposing Major Davis in the front rank and Maj. Noel Parrish, the second officer to Davis's left. A black trainee solves a piloting problem in a Lockheed navigation trainer based at Hondo Field in Texas. A ground crew services and refuels a P-40 Warhawk fighter at Selfridge Field in Michigan, where the 332d Group spent the summer and fall of 1943, before it deployed to North Africa. With his father seated next to him, Colonel Davis presides over a press conference for members of the Negro press in September 1943. American society and its air forces remained racially segregated just after the war, but the record of risk and sacrifice shared by black servicemen fueled the civil-rights movement that gathered force in the decades afterward. The younger Davis had a distinguished career in the independent Air Force, in which he earned the rank of lieutenant general.”

Just in case you didn't know, segregation was not just related to human beings. It was also practiced on blood; blood from whites and blood from blacks was kept separately. Also, from what I have read in various places, any invasion of Japan would have been an all-white one, although, as it was, most blacks were kept to jobs like mechanics and cooks.

Women Pilots

The contributions of female pilots to Anny Air Forces activities during the war resulted from the initiatives of two women with decidedly different backgrounds. With Germany's conquest of western Europe, Nancy Harkness Love promoted a plan to have accomplished women pilots serve the Air Form by ferrying aircraft around the country, releasing male pilots for combat assignments. A thousand flying hours logged and Co-ownership of a Boston flying business gave Love a circle of colleagues that let her offer the Ferrying Division of the AAF's Air Transport Command a cadre of experienced women pilots in September 1942. Her "originals began flying light aircraft and trainers from factory doors and repair facilities to Army airfields. They remained civilian pilots in a Women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron, or WAFS, under Ferrying Division at New Castle Army Airfield in Delaware. More skilled women were soon in C-47 transports and even the latest 6ghters. Jacqueline Cochran, a deprived orphan who never precisely knew her own birthdate, received a pilot's license in 1933. By 1938, she won the first of several Harmon Trophies and took the Bendu Trophy in a Seversky P35. As the WAFS flights began, Cochran returned from England where she had recruited American women for service in the British Air Transport Auxiliary. Her influence with Eleanor Roosevelt gave her an intro to General Arnold and facilitated the start of her own program, which trained novice women pilots for employment in the Ferrying Command. She inaugurated her Women's Flying Training Detachment with a class of twenty eight in November 1942 at a field in Houston, Texas. In April 1943, the school opened new facilities at Avenger Field, Sweetwater, Texas, thereafter the home of the program that produced eighteen classes before it ended on December 20,1944.

.


Main Index
Japan main page
Japanese-American Internment Camps index page
Japan and World War II index page