The Day We Lost the H-Bomb Read online

  The airplane was just another tool for ground warfare, and it had no mission or role beyond what the Army assigned it.

  To airmen, however, the airplane wasn’t just a glorified school bus or food truck, it was a machine that could change the face of warfare. But they knew airpower could never reach its full potential under Army generals. They wanted their own service, with their own money, their own rules, and airmen in charge. To make a legitimate claim for independence, they had to prove that they were indeed different and offered a valuable skill that the Army and Navy lacked. That skill, most agreed, was long-range strategic bombing.

  Strategic bombing can be a bit hard to distinguish from tactical bombing, because the two often overlap. But in general it means dropping bombs on key bits of enemy infrastructure — oil refineries, engine plants, important bridges — that aren’t directly involved in a current battle but greatly affect the enemy’s ability to fight. In 1921, an Italian general named Giulio Douhet first defined strategic bombing in his book The Command of the Air. Douhet’s idea gained popularity between World War I and World War II but faced some resistance. For Douhet, strategic bombing meant that an entire country was fair game; planes could target hospitals and food depots as legitimately as airstrips and factories. There were few safe havens, no noncombatants. Bombing city centers could crush the will of the civilian population, argued Douhet, forcing enemy leaders to surrender quickly and leading to less bloodshed in the end. American airmen, wary of civilian casualties, advocated bombing specific targets to disable the enemy’s economy. Even so, critics called such tactics uncivilized, immoral, and un-American. Outside airpower circles, the idea fizzled.

  Then came World War II, and the Army Air Forces saw their chance. They argued for the opportunity to bomb German train yards and oil refineries, and they got it. And it was true that the airplanes offered something that Navy ships and Army tanks couldn’t: only airborne bombers could fly deep into Germany, destroy German factories, and break the German war machine. That is, if the bombers could actually get to Germany and manage to hit anything.

  In the early days of World War II, an assignment to a bomber crew was nearly a death sentence. The lumbering B-17 Stratofortresses flew in large, rigid formations, easy targets for enemy fighters and flak. Bombers flying from England to Germany sometimes had fighter escorts, but the fighters had such a short range that they usually turned back at the border of Germany, leaving the bombers to face the most risky portion of the journey alone. Bomber groups sometimes lost half — or more — of their planes on raids over Germany. In one infamous circumstance, the 100th Bomber Group lost seven planes over Bremen on October 8, 1943. Two days later, it lost twelve of its remaining thirteen planes over Munster. Bomber crews were more likely than foot soldiers to be killed, wounded, or captured. Twice as many air officers died in combat as those on the ground, despite their smaller numbers. An airman in a World War II bomber had a shorter life expectancy than an infantryman in the trenches of World War I.

  After reading accounts of air battles, such statistics seem less surprising. On August 17, 1943, German fighters attacked a division of American B-17 bombers over Belgium. An observer in one of the rear planes later described the battle:

  A stricken B-17 fell gradually out of formation to the right, then moments later disintegrated in one giant explosion. As the fighters kept pressing their attacks, one plane after another felt their fury.

  Engine parts, wing tips, even tail assemblies were blasted free. Rearward planes had to fly through showers of exit doors, emergency hatches, sheets of metal, partially opened parachutes, and other debris, in addition to human bodies, some German, some American, some dead, some still alive and writhing. As more German fighters arrived and the battle intensified, there were so many disintegrating airplanes that “sixty ’chutes in the air at one time was hardly worth a second look.” A man crawled out of the copilot’s window of a Fortress engulfed in flames. He was the only person to emerge. Standing precariously on the wing, he reached back inside for his parachute — he could hardly have gotten through the window with his chute on — used one hand to get into the harness while he clung to the plane with the other, then dove off the wing for an apparently safe descent, only to be hit by the plane’s onrushing horizontal stabilizer. His chute did not open.

  The passage comes from Iron Eagle, Thomas Coffey’s biography of Curtis LeMay. LeMay, head of the 4th Bombardment Wing in England at the time, flew in the lead bomber. Until his superiors forbade it, LeMay often accompanied his men on bombing missions, a habit that inspired deep trust and loyalty among his flyers. LeMay also inspired fear, or at least trepidation. Stocky, square-jawed, and perpetually chewing a cigar, he was a tough guy who looked the part. He scowled often and spoke little. Decades after the war, LeMay’s gruff demeanor and blunt, often tactless public statements would make him the object of widespread derision and caricature. But here, in World War II, he was in his element. He got things done.

  LeMay hated the thought of being unprepared, of losing men and bombers because of poor training or sloppy mistakes. When he arrived in England, he was alarmed by the rabble the Army gave him — rookie airmen who could barely fly a plane or bomb a target. These kids would die unless he whipped them into shape. And whip them he did. His men called him “Iron Ass” for his relentless training regimen — exhausted pilots would return from a bombing run ready for bed, only to be ordered back in the plane to practice bad weather takeoffs. Bombardiers had to memorize stacks of photographs in preparation for future missions. LeMay worked as hard as his troops, becoming a brilliant strategist. During his time in Europe, he devised new flying formations and bombing techniques that saved bombers and helped pick off German factories. On August 17, 1943, the day of the mission described in the passage above, the surviving B-17s flew to Regensburg and dropped 303 tons of bombs on a Messerschmitt aircraft plant, one of the most accurate strategic bombing runs of the war.

  By the time LeMay arrived in Guam, the AAF bombing campaign against Japan seemed a pretty dismal failure. The Navy, not the AAF, deserved the credit for gains in the Pacific, having crushed the Japanese fleet, mined the Japanese harbors, and captured valuable islands. The Navy brass, riding high, were even eyeing the powerful new B-29 bombers, plotting to steal them from the Army and incorporate them into the Navy. If LeMay didn’t get some results soon, Washington might scrap the strategic bombing campaign altogether. Failure in Japan would seriously jeopardize the case for an independent Air Force.

  Luckily, LeMay had a new weapon at his disposal, one that would alter the fate of strategic bombing in Japan: napalm, a jellied gasoline that stuck to almost anything and burned slow and steady. In a city like Tokyo, where about 98 percent of the buildings were made of wood, incendiary bombs promised massive destruction. When his 325 planes left Guam, Saipan, and Tinian on March 9, most carried six to eight tons of napalm “bomblets,” designed to scatter when dropped and ignite buildings at a number of points.

  LeMay put a trusted brigadier general named Thomas Power in charge of the raid. Power was to lead the planes to Tokyo, drop his bombs, and then circle at 10,000 feet to observe the rest of the operation. At around 2:30 a.m., Power, circling Tokyo, sent his first message to LeMay: “Bombing the primary target visually. Large fires observed, flak moderate. Fighter opposition nil.” Soon, messages arrived from other bombers reporting “conflagration.” The raid devastated Tokyo. The flaming napalm stuck to the flimsy wooden houses, starting small fires that quickly spread into giant firestorms. The flames burned so brightly that the bomber pilots could read their watch dials by the glow. The blaze burned nearly seventeen square miles of the city to cinders, destroying 18 percent of its industry. Somewhere between 80,000 and 100,000 people died, burned to death when their hair, clothes, and houses caught fire or suffocated when the firestorm sucked away oxygen. The smell of burning flesh hung in the air for days.

  The carnage sparked little sympathy in America. “When you kill 100,000
people, civilians, you cross some sort of moral divide,” said the historian Edward Drea. “Yet at the time, it was generally accepted that this was fair treatment, that the Japanese deserved this, that they had brought this on themselves.” If LeMay had any moral qualms about the slaughter, he never acknowledged them. For him, it was an obvious trade: Japanese lives for American. “No matter how you slice it, you’re going to kill an awful lot of civilians. Thousands and thousands. But if you don’t destroy the Japanese industry, we’re going to have to invade Japan,” he wrote in his autobiography, Mission with LeMay.

  “We’re at war with Japan. We were attacked by Japan. Do you want to kill Japanese, or would you rather have Americans killed?”

  When the B-29s returned from Tokyo on the morning of March 10, LeMay ordered them to get back into the air that evening and bomb Nagoya, Japan’s second largest city. But after a look at the exhausted crews, he postponed the Nagoya raid for twenty-four hours. Over ten days, LeMay’s B29s firebombed aircraft plants in Nagoya, steel mills in Osaka, and the port of Kobe, destroying thirty-three square miles of those cities. He bombed Japan until he ran out of bombs and started again when the Navy brought him more. Throughout April, May, and June 1945, LeMay’s bombers pounded the cities of Japan. By summer, LeMay announced that strategic bombing could probably force Japan’s surrender by October.

  The end came even sooner. On August 7, 1945, U.S. forces dropped an atomic bomb named “Little Boy” on the city of Hiroshima. Nine days later, they dropped a second, “Fat Man,” on Nagasaki.

  That evening, Japan surrendered. The war was over.

  The Japanese surrender confirmed one of LeMay’s long-standing beliefs: the value of massive, overwhelming force. In his eyes, the widespread bombing had shortened the war and saved lives. “I think it’s more immoral to use less force than necessary than it is to use more,” he wrote. “If you use less force, you kill off more of humanity in the long run, because you are merely protracting the struggle.” It was far more humane, he argued, to cut off a dog’s tail with one quick flick of the knife than to saw it off one inch at a time.

  On September 2, LeMay attended the Japanese surrender ceremonies on board the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. As he stood on the ship’s crowded deck, thinking of the Americans who had died and “where I’d gone wrong in losing as many as we did,” a roar filled the air. Four hundred sixty-two B29s flew overhead in a massive, deafening salute. To LeMay, the atomic bombs had been impressive but anticlimactic. In his opinion, those B-29s had won the war.

  In the months after VJ Day, LeMay and his fellow air generals toured the United States, drumming up support for an independent Air Force. Despite his initial ambivalence, LeMay soon realized that the atomic bomb was a major boon for his cause. In LeMay’s biggest raid over Japan, hundreds of planes had dropped thousands of bombs, adding up to the power of about 3,000 tons of T.N.T. A single atomic bomb, dropped onto Hiroshima by a single plane, exploded with five times that power — the equivalent of 15,000 tons of T.N.T. One bomb could now destroy a city. Whoever controlled this new weapon owned the future of war.

  The Army Air Forces had a head start. The early atomic bombs were far too big and heavy (the bomb dropped on Nagasaki weighed 10,000 pounds) to be launched by a soldier, tank, or battleship.

  Only a few, specially modified B-29s could actually drop one of these behemoths on a target. Some airpower advocates gleefully claimed that the atomic bomb had made the Army and Navy obsolete.

  The famed pilot Jimmy Doolittle said that the Navy’s only purpose now was ferrying supplies, the Army’s only job to occupy a country after bombers had crushed it into submission. LeMay wasn’t quite so harsh but argued that this new atomic age required a strong, vigilant Air Force to protect America. “Being peace-loving and weak didn’t stop us from getting into a fight,” he told the Wings Club in October 1945. “Maybe being strong and ready will do it.” Congress, the president, and even the Army agreed that World War II and the atomic bomb had enhanced the status of airpower. With the Army’s blessing, the AAF broke free. In September 1947, the U.S. Air Force became an independent service.

  The Air Force started life with three distinct commands. The Tactical Air Command (TAC) handled fighter planes and tactical support, the Air Defense Command (ADC) defended America against air attack, and the Strategic Air Command (SAC) took care of the bombers and atomic weapons. Most of the new Air Force generals believed that strategic bombing had won them independence, and they saw SAC as the key to the Air Force’s future. In the postwar scramble for planes, bases, and personnel, SAC grabbed the lion’s share.

  Not that there was much to grab. After the war ended, President Harry Truman rapidly demobilized the military, reducing defense spending from 40 percent of the gross national product in 1944 to a mere 4 percent by 1948. He slashed Air Force personnel from a high of 2.4 million to only 300,000 by May 1947. He sent soldiers home to their regular jobs and ordered planes and jeeps sold for scrap. Records were dumped into boxes and thrown away. “We just walked away and left everything,” said Leon Johnson, a bomber pilot who became an influential Air Force general. “We started from nothing, from nothing, to rebuild the Air Force.” For several years after the war, SAC floundered under limited budgets and weak leadership. But by 1948, there was a sense of urgency; the uneasy postwar alliance between the Soviet Union and the United States was rapidly crumbling. The two countries had never shared an easy friendship, even while allies in World War II, but now the relationship was worsening by the day. The Communists were gobbling up territory in Eastern Europe, and their hunger for more seemed insatiable. Then, in 1948, the tension reached a new height, focused on the German city of Berlin.

  After World War II, Germany had been divided into four sectors, under American, French, British, and Soviet control. Deep within the Soviet sector, the city of Berlin was subdivided into four sectors.

  The Soviets had long bristled at this arrangement, and in June 1948 they ramped up their efforts to assert themselves in the city by blocking all road, rail, and barge traffic to the western sectors of Berlin, leaving the Berliners marooned without adequate food or fuel. The United States responded with a massive airlift, hauling tons of milk, flour, medicine, and coal into the starving city. But Western leaders feared that the Berlin blockade was merely a prelude, that the USSR would soon try to push beyond Berlin and deep into Western Europe. If the Soviets made a move, Washington might need the bumbling Strategic Air Command to intervene. On October 19, 1948, SAC got a new commander: Curtis LeMay.

  LeMay, who had been running the Berlin airlift, started his new job by visiting SAC headquarters at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington, D.C. The situation shocked him. “Not one crew — not one crew — in the entire command could do a professional job,” he said. “Not one of the outfits was up to strength — neither in airplanes nor in people nor anything else.” LeMay grew annoyed when people at SAC told him that “everything was rosy.” He knew that pilots had been running practice bombing raids and asked about their accuracy. The commanders bragged that bombardiers were hitting targets “right on the button.”

  They produced the bombing scores, and they were so good I didn’t believe them…. I found out that SAC wasn’t bombing from combat altitudes, but from 12,000 to 15,000 feet…. It was completely unrealistic. It was perfectly apparent to me that while we didn’t have much capability, everyone thought we were doing fine.

  LeMay saw history repeating itself. SAC was just like the ragtag bomber groups he had initially commanded in Europe. But this time, America faced an even bigger threat: the Soviet Union would undoubtedly have its own atomic bomb soon. LeMay felt a tremendous sense of urgency. “We had to be ready to go to war not next week, not tomorrow, but this afternoon, today,” he said. “We had to operate every day as if we were at war.”

  With Air Force leadership backing him, LeMay sprang into action. Seven days after taking command, LeMay put Tommy Power, his old friend from the Pacific, into the dep
uty commander slot. Power was not well liked (even LeMay said he was a “mean sonofabitch”), but he got things done. LeMay replaced virtually all SAC’s commanders and headquarters staff with his pals from the Pacific bombing campaign. Their first mission was to prepare at least one group for atomic combat.

  They started with the 509th Bomber Group at Walker Air Force Base in Roswell, New Mexico. The Army had created the 509th for the sole purpose of dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Now it was the only group even close to atomic readiness. LeMay’s staff stocked their warehouses with supplies and made sure that the planes had parts, guns, and gas. They weeded through personnel, replacing dead wood with crack crews.

  LeMay worked nearly every day, from eight in the morning until well into the evening, and his housecleaning touched every corner of SAC. “My goal,” he said later, “was to build a force that was so professional, so strong, so powerful, that we would not have to fight. In other words, we had to build this deterrent force. And it had to be good.” He argued to Air Force leaders that SAC must be their top priority in funding, research, planes, and personnel. Aided by his reputation and zeal and the growing Soviet threat, LeMay convinced them to give him carte blanche. He created a recruitment and screening system that filled SAC’s ranks with bomber crews handpicked for their self-discipline and maturity. He arranged for new housing to be built so the airmen would have decent places to live. He made his leaders write detailed manuals for every job and train the airmen relentlessly. SAC developed elaborate war strategies, which it planned to change every six months.

  It built a million-dollar telephone and teletype system to link all SAC bases with the new headquarters at Offutt Field in Omaha, Nebraska. In six months, LeMay had turned SAC around and landed on the cover of Newsweek. Underneath his scowling portrait ran the headline “Air General LeMay: A Tough Guy Does It Again.” Inside the magazine, a glowing article called LeMay a genius and described how he had turned SAC from a “creampuff outfit” into an atomic force with real teeth. “When LeMay first came in, we were nothing but a bunch of nits and gnats,” one young officer told Newsweek. “Today, we’re a going concern.” LeMay had done more than shape SAC up; he had created a religion. The gospel he preached was a simple parable: the schoolyard bully and the gentle giant. The Soviets were the schoolyard bullies, aiming to seize Europe, crush America, and spread communism throughout the world. SAC was the gentle giant, the muscle-bound kid who stuck up for the skinny geeks and pimply weaklings, the kid who didn’t want to hurt anyone but could knock you out with one punch if he had to. The Strategic Air Command, and no one else, stood as America’s shield and protector.