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But LeMay's great asset was his ability to make men work hard—even in the wretched (by Air Forces standards) living conditions in the Marianas. When he was hard-pressed he borrowed Seabees to help load bombs, and they liked it. Somehow the grim General made hard work attractive. Mechanics learned to make certain small parts whose lack had grounded planes. The General never said much—for him, a nine-word sentence is a monologue —but his men gladly toiled around the clock. The availability record of B-29s (i.e., the daily number ready to fly) rose almost to 70%, double what it had been.
Iwo & Fire Bombs. This made for safer as well as for more powerful operation. The morale of the air crews rose. Then the Marines (after 22,500 casualties) captured Iwo Jima, halfway between Saipan and Tokyo. Iwo had been intended primarily as a base for P-51 fighters which would accompany the B-29s over Japan. But Iwo turned out to be even more valuable as a rescue station where crippled or gas-shy B-29s could settle down on the way back from Japan.
By last week B-29s to the number of 2,000 had pulled up at Iwo. Some of them could have made it back to Saipan, but their pilots took no chances. Many more would have been lost on the way home. B-29 crews blessed the Marines, named some of their planes for Marine divisions.
From Iwo, too, air-sea rescue planes could go to the shores of Japan to pick up downed airmen, and that was good for LeMay's V.L.R.-men to know. Finally, B-29s used Iwo as a gasoline filling station on the way to Japan, thus increasing their bombloads. Among B-29 men time is divided "before Iwo'' and "after Iwo."
Another event in March involved one of the great military decisions of the war.
It was LeMay who made it and he did it without batting an eye. He called in the brigadier generals commanding his three wings—Thomas Power of the 314th, Emmett("Rosie") O'Donnell of the veteran 73rd and John Davies of the 313th. LeMay had a plan: to throw the whole force at Tokyo at night from 5,000 and 6,000 feet, using the new M69 incendiary bombs. The plan might be a spectacular success or it might be an earth-shaking failure—some officers speculated that three-quarters of the planes might be shot down.
By his decision to get down out of the upper levels and bomb from a mile high, LeMay took the lives of over 3,000 airmen in his hands, not to mention his own career. Not the least courageous phase of his decision was the implied admission that high-level bombing with the missiles then being used was still not so good as low-altitude work. The B-29 had been painstakingly built to work above 25,000 feet.
But LeMay believed that the Japs would be susceptible to surprise, and he calculated shrewdly. Jap antiaircraft could shoot down an occasional plane at 30,000 feet, but their flak was weak and ineffective at one-fifth the height. Besides, they were no longer putting many fighters in the air—a vital factor in his later calculations.