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Second Stage. Saipan was ready by Nov. 24, when 100 B-29s took off on the first 1,500-mile raid on Tokyo. (A coordinated carrier strike had been called off because of 1) the Second Battle of the Philippine Sea and 2) the alarm inspired by increasing Kamikaze attacks.) By January 1945, when Trouble-Shooter LeMay came out of China to take over the Marianas operations, three wings composed of about 300 B-29s were operating or being organized, and 14 missions had been flown. The China-based force was later transferred to the Marianas.
LeMay found more planes and plenty of gasoline on Guam, Saipan and Tinian. He also found plenty of trouble.
The biggest trouble was the weather over Japan. At 30,000 feet the wind often blew 200 miles an hour. This meant that the B-29s had to drop their bombs while traveling upwind at a ground speed of 50 or 100 m.p.h. (making fat targets for fighters and ack-ack) or downwind at 500 m.p.h. with doubtful accuracy or no accuracy at all. Japanese fighters apparently could go as high as the B-29s could—and their suicidal pilots did not hesitate to ram the big planes.
Morale began to drop in the B-29 outfits. January losses were nearly 6%. Compared with losses at the most grueling period of the European bombardment, this percentage was not high. But it did mean that a man could expect to average 17 missions before he was killed—and no quota of missions had been set.* Furthermore, pilots and their crews, bombing mostly through heavy clouds did not know whether they were hitting anything or not. "I believe it is worthwhile," said one pilot, "because I've got to believe it."
The Driver. For more than a month after LeMay's arrival in the Marianas, B-29 bombing was reduced to a trickle. The tough new general set his pipe or cigar in the corner of his mouth and quietly gave the orders: get to work on maintenance, give the crews more training.
He set up special schools for pilots, navigators, bombardiers. At a lead crew school, selected men were trained intensively to ride the lead planes, take them in to the targets, give the signal for all planes in the formation to drop their bombs. New crews and re-educated crews trained together in practice runs on LeMay's bombing range: the bypassed island of Rota, 60 miles north of Guam.
Maintenance was LeMay's fetish ("you can't drop bombs from a grounded plane"). When he noticed the ground force overworked in one group, while another group's men were comparatively idle, he pooled all the maintenance forces within each wing. A crack pilot with an exceptional feel for mechanic's work, he set up a system of specially skilled roving workers, for speedier, better repairs.
By setting up an assembly line, he cut engine-change time from three days to less than half a day. The mechanics soon knew that the Old Man knew as much about the work in the shops and hard-stands as he did about what to do in the pilot's seat of a B-29—or the navigators seat for that matter.