B-29s over Tokyo

On 24 November 1944 American four-engined Boeing B-29 Superfortress bombers appeared over Tokyo. It was the first raid on the Japanese capital since the Doolittle Raid of April 1942 and the first attack on the Japanese home islands by bombers operating from the Marianas. The target was the Nakajima company’s aero-engine works at Musashino on the western outskirts of the city. The operation was codenamed San Antonio I. Its result was modest, but that day saw the start of an air campaign that within nine months reduced most of Japan’s great cities to ruins.

It is sometimes said that the first B-29 to attack Tokyo flew from a base on Tinian. That needs correcting. All the bombers that flew over Tokyo on 24 November took off from Isley Field on Saipan, home of the 73rd Bombardment Wing – at the time the only unit of XXI Bomber Command in the Marianas. The airfields on Tinian, part of the B-29 bases in the Marianas, received their first bombers only at the end of 1944 and were used for operations from the beginning of 1945. The date of 24 November, on the other hand, is correct.

The road to Tokyo

The B-29, the most expensive and most advanced bomber of the war, had been intended from the outset for the war against Japan. The first attempt to use it, Operation Matterhorn, was a disappointment, however. The bombers of XX Bomber Command, operating from India and from forward airfields near Chengdu in China, carried out the first raids on Japan in the summer of 1944, but from China they could reach only Kyushu, and every litre of fuel had to be flown in over the Himalayas. Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka were beyond their range.

The solution proved to be the Marianas. After the capture of Saipan in the summer of 1944 the Americans began building airfields there for B-29s, some 2,400 kilometres from Tokyo and supplied directly by sea. The bombers came under the Twentieth Air Force, directed personally from Washington by the head of the Army Air Forces, General Henry H. Arnold. Command of XXI Bomber Command in the Marianas was taken over in August 1944 by Brigadier General Haywood S. Hansell, one of the architects of the American doctrine of precision daylight bombing from high altitude. The 73rd Bombardment Wing was commanded by Brigadier General Emmett “Rosie” O’Donnell, a veteran of the fighting in the Philippines in 1941.

The first B-29 landed on Saipan on 12 October 1944, and others arrived over the following weeks. The crews had had only brief training in Kansas and little experience of long-distance formation flying, so Hansell first carried out a series of practice missions against nearer targets – Truk atoll in the Carolines and the island of Iwo Jima. On 1 November an F-13 reconnaissance aircraft, the photographic version of the B-29, flew over Tokyo. It was the first American aircraft over the capital since April 1942. Its photographs and further reconnaissance flights made it possible to identify targets: engine and airframe factories in the Tokyo and Nagoya areas.

Hansell chose the Nakajima works at Musashino as the first target. A large proportion of the engines for Japanese military aircraft were made there – about a third, according to American estimates. According to Hansell’s doctrine, destroying such a “bottleneck” would paralyse the enemy’s entire air force. The plan called for a daylight attack from about 9,000 metres, beyond the reach of most Japanese anti-aircraft artillery.

The preparations did not go smoothly. Originally the raid was to coincide with a carrier strike on the Tokyo area, but the fleet was engaged in the fighting for the Philippines after the landing on Leyte, and its participation was cancelled. According to American studies, the operation was planned for 17 November but was postponed for a week because of bad weather over Saipan and along the route. O’Donnell and some staff officers, fearing heavy losses in a daylight attack without fighter cover, proposed night raids instead. Hansell rejected the proposals and stuck to the plan for a daylight attack. He could not fly over Japan himself – he was forbidden to take part in combat missions, probably because of his knowledge of top-secret military matters.

The raid of 24 November

On the morning of 24 November 1944, 111 bombers (110 in some tallies) took off from Isley Field. In the lead was the B-29 Dauntless Dotty, with O’Donnell on board as mission commander. The aircraft was flown by Major Robert K. Morgan, formerly captain of the famous B-17 Memphis Belle in Europe, and the lead bombardier was his old comrade from that crew, Vincent Evans. The flight to Japan took several hours, and the whole mission – there and back – about 14 hours. On the way out 17 bombers turned back with mechanical failures, mainly of the unreliable Wright R-3350 engines, and six more were unable to drop their bombs for technical reasons.

Over Japan the Americans encountered a phenomenon the planners had not foreseen. At around 9,000 metres the jet stream was blowing from the west – a wind reaching, according to the airmen’s accounts, 200 kilometres an hour and more. Bombers approaching the target with the wind behind them had a ground speed of the order of 700 kilometres an hour. At such a speed the bombsights could not keep up, and the bombardiers had only a moment to identify the target. On top of that, cloud lay over Musashino and obscured the works.

According to most studies, only 24 bombers attacked the primary target (some tallies give a slightly higher figure). The other 64 dropped their bombs on secondary targets: the port area and the industrial and residential districts of Tokyo, largely through cloud, using radar. Bombing secondary targets over a densely built-up city meant in practice that bombs also fell on homes.

Defences and losses

According to American figures, the capital’s air defences put up about 125 army and navy fighters. At the altitude at which the B-29s were flying, however, the Japanese aircraft lost manoeuvrability, and the fast bombers with the wind behind them were hard to catch. One B-29 was destroyed by ramming: a damaged Nakajima Ki-44 fighter struck its tailplane, and the aircraft plunged into the sea off the Japanese coast. A second bomber, which ran out of fuel on the way back, ditched at sea. According to American tallies one airman was killed, four were wounded and eleven, including the whole crew of the rammed bomber, were listed as missing and dead; a dozen or so aircraft returned damaged by fighters or anti-aircraft fire.

The ramming heralded a new tactic. Faced with the B-29’s technical superiority, the command of the capital’s air defences began in the autumn of 1944 to form special fighter units whose pilots were to collide deliberately with the bombers, hoping to bail out by parachute. In the months that followed such attacks were repeated, though they never seriously threatened the American campaign.

Modest results

The effect of the raid was slight. According to the post-war findings of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS), 48 bombs fell on the Musashino works. They destroyed or damaged about 1 per cent of the buildings and 2.4 per cent of the machinery. Fifty-seven workers at the plant were killed and 75 injured. The casualties in the districts of Tokyo hit by bombs dropped on secondary targets are not precisely known. The works carried on, and the Americans had to return to Musashino many more times.

Even so, the raid mattered beyond the damage it did. The appearance of American bombers over the capital, in broad daylight and in large numbers, undermined Japanese confidence in assurances that the home islands were inviolable – especially after the earlier loss of Saipan, which in July 1944 had brought about the fall of Hideki Tōjō’s government. Japanese propaganda presented the raid as repulsed and greatly exaggerated the number of bombers shot down. For the American public, told of the “first big raid on Tokyo”, the event was above all symbolic.

Hansell and LeMay

Subsequent raids confirmed that 24 November had been no exception. On 27 November the B-29s flew to Musashino again, but because of cloud they bombed mainly secondary targets. On the night of 29/30 November 29 bombers carried out the first experimental incendiary raid on Tokyo’s industrial districts. From 27 November the Japanese responded with attacks on the airfields on Saipan; by January 1945 they had destroyed eleven B-29s there and damaged several dozen. In November the Japanese army also began releasing bomb-carrying balloons over the Pacific, intended to reach North America on the jet stream – to little effect.

In December and early January 1945 Hansell attacked aircraft works in Tokyo and Nagoya. The jet stream, cloud, engine failures and the crews’ inexperience meant that the results remained meagre, while losses – according to American figures, an average of more than 4 per cent of the aircraft dispatched on each mission – were growing. Arnold, who had to answer for the enormous cost of the B-29 programme, was losing patience. In the Twentieth Air Force staff the prevailing view was now that incendiary raids on Japanese cities, built largely of wood, would be more effective than precision attacks on factories. Hansell opposed this for both military and moral reasons.

On 6 January 1945 Hansell learned that he was being relieved. His successor was General Curtis LeMay, until then commander of the B-29s in India and China. After a few weeks of trials LeMay abandoned high-altitude daylight bombing. On the night of 9/10 March 1945 more than 300 bombers, flying low and stripped of most of their defensive armament, dropped incendiaries on Tokyo. The firestorm destroyed some 40 square kilometres of the city; estimates of the dead range from about 80,000 to more than 100,000. It was the most destructive single air raid in history and the worst moment of the bombing of Tokyo.

Place in the war

The raid of 24 November 1944 was a military failure, but it opened the strategic air campaign against Japan. It was followed by months of ever more powerful attacks: in the spring of 1945 the Americans took Iwo Jima, partly so that damaged B-29s would have somewhere to land on the way back, and bases on Tinian and Guam joined Saipan. Incendiary raids destroyed the greater part of Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe and Yokohama as well as dozens of smaller cities; B-29s also mined Japanese ports and straits from the air. The number of civilian victims of the bombing of Japan is disputed – estimates range from about 250,000 to more than half a million dead, including the victims of the atomic bombs.

The dispute between Hansell and LeMay – between precision attacks on industry and the destruction of whole cities – became one of the central themes in the history of air warfare. To the end of his life Hansell maintained that precision bombing would also have brought about Japan’s defeat. The campaign begun on 24 November 1944 ended in August 1945, when B-29s from Tinian dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Together with the naval blockade and the USSR’s entry into the war, this sealed Japan’s surrender.