MISSION THREE
Our third Mission. Briefing is at 10AM. A typical hot and humid morning. The crew, eleven of us, and twelve other crews, amble in. As always, we chat and gradually assemble. We sit on folding chairs in an open sided theater. Waiting for the play to begin. An exciting one. Gustav Holtz’s Planets would be a suitable background score. We grab coffee and donuts, grumble about the humidity, yawn, wait. Light hearted banter, until the Squadron Leader, the Chief navigator, and the Meteorologist are ready to perform. They describe the targets, predict the weather between here and Japan for the next several hours, tell us how high they think the clouds will be over our targets; provide the longitude and latitude of the rescue planes hovering at four locations in the event we must come down in the ocean. Usually a pitch for a laugh. Today it goes if we are forced to ditch in the Japanese harbor, wait in the raft for a sub to come and tow us out. Followed by a punch line: “Today’s menu on the sub is roast duck.”
“Synchronize your watches gentlemen.” “Hack watches.” Hack because the countdown to the coordinated moment begins “ten, nine, eight”, etc. and ends in “one, hack”. All of us depress our watch stems. It is a ceremony, the Chief Navigator, a cheerleader, momentarily leading the entire squadron in a team effort.
Later I’ll also synchronize another time piece, my master watch, a Hamilton (Yes, American brands follow us into combat). My Hamilton is a sturdy pocket watch. It is suspended by springs to cushion it from shocks on a platform attached to the side of a heavy aluminum case with a window at its top. Perfect time is needed for celestial navigation. However, something elegant, high tech, has entered my bag of tricks. Star gazing is suddenly an anachronism; the master watches unnecessary encumbrances. Long Range Aerial Navigation (LORAN) has arrived. It was placed in all the B29s just after our first mission. With it I can locate us with five mile accuracy. Pairs of master and slave stations thousands of miles apart have been installed around the globe. They broadcast intersecting parabolas. I find our location by twiddling dials and reading where two signals intersect. I no longer need to rely on radio navigation, dead reckoning or, if the moon and stars are visible, lines of position shot with a sextant. I hadn't trusted it at first, but once I got the hang of it, it was great. LORAN launched my enduring love of “toys”. It was a welcome addition to a 19 year old responsible for moving ten other men and himself thousands of miles over the barren ocean in a very expensive contraption. I had taken a long journey from high school graduation. For the time being I’m a significant citizen. But wait. The war hasn’t ended.
We collect our maps, including a silk one lovely enough to be a wall hanging. It is in a clear plastic case with a snap down closure. Silk is suitable for a watery environment. I carry my 45 loaded with seven very signal cartridges in the clip; one real bullet at the bottom. I have an idea that if the signals don’t work the bullet will. On me. I am a romantic.
We are free to rest until departure time later in the day. It is a 2,800 mile round trip, 1,400 up and back. A tiny incident returning from the bombing run was hugely responsible for positioning me in life.
July is the middle of the Japanese typhoon season. Clouds and low visibility over the target are almost certain. In dry seasons we would assemble above Iwo Jima, half way to Japan to fly and bomb in formation from high altitude. Tonight we travel individually in the dark of the night. Each plane must find its own way. No lead navigator. At the outset we’ll fly high to maximize fuel efficiency. When close to the target we’ll descend to 8,000 feet to drop our bombs.
We take off about six PM while it is still daylight at one minute intervals, barreling down the Northwest Field runway. The runway dips slightly midway along its one mile path; ends abruptly at a cliff. We roar to its end, dropping momentarily toward the ocean. Then we are airborne and begin to climb. Occasionally a plane fails to recover from this mild drop. Wet crew. Perhaps dead crew.
Our B29 is fully loaded, 20,000 pounds of incendiary devices in its bomb bays. We carry almost precisely the amount of fuel to get us to the target and back with a half hour of flying time to spare. This has been carefully worked out to optimize our range. Any additional, or less fuel, seven-pound-per-gallon gasoline, will reduce the total distance we can fly.
We reach cruising altitude, 25,000 feet. The pilot settles the plane into the course I set for him. In an hour or so we will eat our prepared dinners. Not high cuisine, a bit smelly, but warm. We work and eat in comfort with a cabin pressure of 10,000 feet no matter what our altitude. It will take seven hours to reach the target.
Night descends. The pilots are no longer busy. The plane is on automatic pilot. Beside my desk is a three knobbed console. I use it to modify the plane’s heading and altitude if a course correction is needed. Easy street for the pilots. They nap. Not me. I’m nervous. 1,500 miles overwater. I’d hate to make a mistake. Orlando Raimundo, the engineer, is the only person in direct view. He is a few feet forward and diagonally to my right across the cabin. He faces a floor-to-ceiling array of instruments. He too stays awake. The radio man, Harry Sutcliffe, sits directly across the compartment from my desk. I can’t see him though. A massive container, a giant half egg, hangs from the ceiling. A few feet below it, a smaller half sphere juts from the floor. Except for small patches of mid-waist dungarees, they obscure our views of each other. These obstructions are ammunition containers for the guns above and below them on the outside. They give off an enormous racket when the guns are fired.
This almost straight north leg is uneventful. The plane drones on. Other than mechanical failure the greatest danger in the dark sky is collision with another bomber. Although we must maintain radio silence our lights are on to avoid such accidents. The gunners are lookouts. Periodically a side gunner, Arvil Foley on the left and Frank Szamocki, right, sitting in their Lucite protuberances, announce through the intercom “clear on the left”. And the other echoes “clear on the right”. From time to time I sit myself beneath a clear plastic hemisphere at the forward part of the fore-to-aft tunnel, my legs dangling over the door leading to the bomb bay. I practice shooting the polar star with my sextant. This signpost, almost directly north, is a navigator’s blessing on a south-north nighttime run. I use the readings and the compass to calculate our position as we go. Just want to assure myself the Loran is functioning properly.
As we approach our destination we begin to descend. My burden is diminished. We have flown that 1,500 miles and I have passed my test once again.
Next, the bombing run. We will be shooting fish in a barrel. The Japanese no longer have serious defenses. No one on our aircraft dwells on the inhabitants below.
We fly low over the objective, at about 8,000 feet. We are ensconced in the most technologically sophisticated airplane then available. But we cannot see in the dark. So, we will employ primitive radar methodology to drop our incendiary load. A caller in our line dance, the radar man, seated in a dark compartment behind the bomb bays transmits by intercom his blip-upon-blip view of the aiming point to the bombardier in the nose. The bombardier massages, hand-calibrates, his elegant Norden bombsite from these voice commands. In daylight raids he would use its sophisticated aiming technology to hone in on a visible target. But now he himself is tool. The radar man’s robot. The pilot has opened the bomb bays. He transfers the automatic pilot control to the bombsite. It is steering the plane. Ultimately, picking up the bombardier’s cadent instructions, it whirs to an end point; trips the load. The bombs, nestled until now in bomb bays beyond the wall behind me, drop away. The Bombardier’s famous pronouncement: “Bombs away”. We can start for home.
A few weeks after my last mission which, though I don't know it then, will be in a few weeks, the American public saw on movie screens the stupendous mushroom cloud rising from the exploded atom bomb. That horrific view was very similar in looks, though not devastation, from what we encounter this, and each time we approach a target at night. Preceding planes have set a huge bonfire fueled by the city below. A mass of billowing smoke surges to our height just ahead. “Bombs away” is more than announcement. It demands the pilot to resume control at once. He must wheel instantly away from the inferno. The plane trembles in turbulence as we turn and set course for home.
From our point of view the flight had been uneventful. But now a problem arises. The forward bomb bay doors will not close. Protruding down, useless fins, they are a serious threat. Their drag can deplete our gasoline supply long before we reach our base.
It is the assignment of the bombardier and the navigator to hand-crank the doors closed. Ed Wojtowicz and I have been trained to handle this emergency. But hardly how we might feel while doing so. He and I clip on plump cylindrical parachutes. We will undertake this journey burdened with them jutting from our chests. We enter opposite sides of the bomb bay through a door immediately beneath the fore to aft tunnel. It is dark so the water below is not visible. Only an abyss. We stand on 12 inch wide catwalks, sliding one foot then the other until we reach the rear of the bay. We reach and slowly operate the cranks. The doors close slowly. Ed and I slide our way back, a slow motion two step dance ending in relief.
Others that night have had darker problems. Ed Sawyers craft exploded for no known reason. All lost. Others lose engines and must head for Iwo Jima to land, our fate on another mission.
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