Last Mission The Secret History of World War Ii's Final Battle

Chapter One The Superforts 1630 Hours, 5 August 1945 The long rows of four-engined bombers sat on the asphalt taxi ramps to the two parallel runways at Northwest Field, Guam, shimmering in the tropic afternoon. They were B-29Bs of the 315th Bomb Wing (Very Heavy), U.S. Strategic Air Forces XXI Bomber Command. This base in the Marianas was 1,500 miles south of the "Empire," the name American airmen had given the Japanese Home Islands. Today, loaded with nine tons of 500-pound bombs and almost 6,500 gallons of aviation gasoline, the Superforts were pushing their 140,000-pound maximum takeoff weight. But that was an increasingly normal risk their crews faced at this stage in the air campaign against Japan. Halfway down the line of Superforts, waiting for the order to start engines, The Boomerang sat on its hardstand, the sun glare flooding the multipane Plexiglas greenhouse cockpit. A jeep approached, and a full colonel from headquarters climbed a ladder to the nosewheel hatch. He would be "observing" tonight's mission, aircraft commander First Lieutenant Carl Schahrer announced to his crew over the intercom. This intrusion could be either an unnecessary occasion for a staff officer to rack up some combat hours or the legitimate desire for an experienced leader to watch one of the Wing's smoothly functioning crews in action. In any event, he didn't feel he had to explain himself. The Colonel sat on the deck beside Schahrer's central control console but did not offer to shake hands with anyone, making it clear that he wasn't interested in friendly relations with the plane's crew of junior officers and NCOs. Tonight's target was the sprawling Ube Coal Liquefaction Company synthetic oil facility near the extreme southwest tip of Honshu. Round-trip mission time had been briefed for just over fifteen hours, thirty minutes. As always, the Superforts carried a marginal fuel reserve, so that they could accommodate a maximum bomb load for the distance flown and predicted winds aloft. This reserve was certainly not the comfortable safety margin peacetime aviators would have expected or indeed demanded on such a long over-water flight. This was not peacetime, however. It was the fourth year of relentless war that had begun for America with the Imperial Japanese Navy's bombing of Pearl Harbor. During the forty-four months since Pearl Harbor, sixteen million Americans had put on uniforms and scores of millions more had gone to work in war industries. The three-year campaign against Nazi Germany and its Italian Fascist ally, which had cost America more than 200,000 killed or missing, had finally ended with victory in May 1945. In the Pacific, the Japanese had been invincible for the first six months of the war, defeating weaker American, British, and Dutch forces in the Philippines, Malaya, Burma, and the Netherlands East Indies--and capturing hundreds of thousands of Allied prisoners as well as seizing a trove of natural resources that Japan desperately needed to maintain its huge fleet and support its armies, which had been engaged in Manchuria and China for years. The American counteroffensive in the Pacific had gathered momentum slowly because President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had agreed on a "Germany first" strategy in which the major Allied effort would be focused on the European Theater of Operations (ETO) until Hitler was defeated; only then would the Allies' full might shift to Japan. The protracted and bloody island-hopping campaign resulting from this policy that began at Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands in 1942 had involved savage sea and naval-air battles, costly amphibious assaults, and bypassing strong Japanese garrisons on beleaguered fortresses such as Rabaul and Truk. American strategy had been to drive a line of air bases north from the Solomons across the vast blue void of the Pacific, soSmith, Jim is the author of 'Last Mission The Secret History of World War Ii's Final Battle' with ISBN 9780767907798 and ISBN 0767907795.