The Bomber Mafia, page 10
The operation wasn’t as good as we would have liked was, to say the least, an understatement. The first raid damaged a mere 1 percent of the Nakajima plant. Hansell tried again three days later. None of the bombs actually hit the plant. On December 27, he sent back seventy-two B-29s. They missed the plant but wound up setting fire to a hospital. In the end, Hansell went after that factory five times and barely touched it.
Part of the difficulty was the same problem the Bomber Mafia had had over Europe: clouds. The bombardiers looked for the target through their Nordens and couldn’t find it. But there was another problem with the weather, a problem much worse and much bigger than anyone at the time could understand.
One of Haywood Hansell’s B-29 pilots, Lieutenant Ed Hiatt, was later interviewed for a documentary by the BBC. He described one mission:
After flying six hours, we climbed up to bombing altitude…We climbed up to thirty-seven thousand feet, and just as we broke out of the storm, there’s Mount Fuji, sitting right in front of us. And it’s a gorgeous sight, it really is.
Hiatt’s bombardier, a man named Glenn, started to make his calculations on their Norden bombsight, focusing on the Nakajima factory. But the telescope on the bombsight wouldn’t line up with the approaching target. Hiatt continued:
He turned around, and he said, “I can’t get this damn telescope on the target”…And so we called the radar operator to check our ground speed and…he came back and he says we’ve got a 125-knot tailwind. He said we’re going about 480 miles an hour. It’s impossible—it can’t be. There’s no winds like that.
There’s no winds like that. No Army Air Forces pilots had ever experienced what was happening to the B-29 bombers over Japan. They never expected winds like that.
“We’re going 480 miles an hour when we should be going 340 miles an hour…I said, ‘Well, Glenn, drop the damn bombs.’ He dropped the bombs, and we were already twelve miles past the target because of that wind,” Hiatt said.
They were bewildered. And back at base, they couldn’t explain it to their superiors.
When they debriefed us, they gave us the third degree. They wouldn’t believe us. “There’s no such thing as a 140-mile-an-hour wind up there over Japan,” they said. “No, there is no such thing. There can’t be a wind like that. You’re lying. You didn’t make it over the target; you’re just making this up.” And…we had our operations officer as a passenger with us, and he vouched for it. He said, “There was a wind that high.”
The Twenty-First Bomber Command had a team of meteorologists attached to it. They’d been trained at the University of Chicago. Meteorologists were crucial to the success of bombing campaigns, particularly in the days before sophisticated radar. You had to know whether there were clouds over your target. Or whether there was a typhoon poised to swallow up your command.
But the tools available to meteorologists of that era were crude. I know this is a digression, but the easiest thing to forget about the Second World War is that it took place in another technological era. It’s half twentieth century and half nineteenth century. The chief tool meteorologists had at that time were balloons, weather balloons that would float up into the atmosphere carrying little instrument kits that could record the wind, the temperature, and the humidity and transmit that information back to earth by radio.iv
John M. Lewis, a researcher at the National Severe Storms Laboratory, part of the Desert Research Institute, in Nevada, knew a number of the meteorologists who worked with the Army Air Forces during the war. I asked him if the weather balloons were connected back to earth with a rope. His reply: “Oh, no. They’re released. They’ll eventually, as the pressure gets lower as the balloon goes higher in the atmosphere—they expand, expand, expand. Kaboom! They explode, and they fall to the ground with the instrument attached. And at that time, they had a message on all the instrument packages: ‘Could you please return this to the University of Chicago? Here’s the address.’”
In the Pacific theater of war, that obviously wasn’t going to happen.
So there they are, the meteorologists, in the middle of the Pacific, with one of the most important jobs in the whole outfit—figuring out when to send the bombers—and they’re baffled. What’s going on with these super-fast winds the pilots are reporting high over Japan?
I asked Lewis if they had any reason to suspect that the winds around Mount Fuji would be so incredibly high. His reply: “They did not reach their conclusions until the pilots came back.”
After each bombing mission over Japan in 1944, the crews returned to the base and told the same story. As Ed Hiatt later recalled,
To tell you how powerful these winds were: a reconnaissance plane went up one time to take some pictures after a mission to see how effective they’d been, and the navigator called the pilot and told him they were going three miles an hour backwards. That was something you couldn’t afford to do because if you went from east to west, you were gonna be a sitting duck for Japanese fighters or their flak.
The pilots had encountered what would come to be known as the jet stream, a river of fast-flowing air that circles the globe in the upper atmosphere, starting at around twenty thousand feet. A Japanese scientist named Wasaburo Ooishi had actually discovered the jet stream in the 1920s in a series of groundbreaking experiments. But Ooishi happened to be devoted to the artificially constructed language called Esperanto, which was briefly in vogue in that era, and he only published his findings in Esperanto, which meant of course that almost no one read them. And since almost no one had ever flown at the altitudes the B-29 was flying at, there were no firsthand reports of the jet stream winds, either. It was a mystery.v
As John Lewis explained it to me, “This fast stream of air, very narrow, moves from north to south in both hemispheres. Basically, it is dividing the very cold air of the polar regions from the more warm midlatitude and equatorial air.”
When I asked him how wide the jet stream is, he replied, “I would say typically two hundred kilometers across, something on that order, certainly not a thousand kilometers, rarely five hundred kilometers, sometimes a hundred kilometers.”
It was such a new discovery that nobody realized it circled the entire planet. Lewis explained, “That was not discovered until the early 1950s, when we started to make upper-air observations routinely over the United States [and] some of the countries in Europe.”
The jet stream circles the whole earth, a narrow band of incredibly fast wind. It retreats to the poles in the summer and moves toward the equator during the winter months.
And in the winter of 1944 and early spring of 1945, this narrow, hurricane-force band of air was directly over Japan. That made it impossible for Hansell’s pilots to do any of the precision bombing they had planned to do. If they flew across it, the plane would get blown sideways. If they flew into it, they’d be fighting to stay aloft and would be easy targets for the Japanese. And if they flew with it, they’d be racing too fast to take proper aim.
The dream hatched back at Maxwell Field in the 1930s and brought to life by the genius of Carl Norden had run up against an unstoppable force in the skies over Japan.
This is not the same kind of obstacle as the Bomber Mafia faced over Schweinfurt and Regensburg. There, Hansell could justify to himself that the problem was solvable, that the first raid was a learning experience, that the raids could get better and more accurate. Every revolutionary understands that the path to radical transformation is never smooth. Software programmers have a beta version, and then a 1.0 and then a 2.0, because they realize that they can never get it right the first time.
But in the case of the jet stream over Japan, there was no 2.0 version, no revision that Hansell could use to bolster his faith. High-altitude precision bombing in the midst of a jet stream is impossible.
The dreams of revolutionaries go awry when they are forced to confront an unanticipated obstacle—not a rational obstacle such as inexperience or haste or miscalculation, but something immovable. And in that moment of vulnerability and frustration, with his dream in pieces all around him, Haywood Hansell, like Jesus in the wilderness, was presented with a temptation. As it says in the Bible:
And Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness for forty days, being tempted by the devil.
And what did the devil do? He led Jesus to the top of a high mountain—in legend, the peak on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho—and offered him power over everything he could see.
And the devil took him up and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time, and said to him, “To you I will give all this authority and their glory, for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.”
You can have everything. Victory over your enemies. Dominion over all you can see from twenty thousand feet. All you have to do is walk away from your faith.
Footnotes
i While the exact death toll remains unknown, it’s estimated that more than fourteen thousand Americans were killed, wounded, or listed as missing in action by the end of the Marianas campaign. Nearly all the Japanese forces stationed on the islands, around thirty thousand men, were wiped out. Today, 5,204 names are inscribed on a memorial on the island of Saipan, overlooking Tanapag Harbor.
ii One problem with the earliest versions of the Superfortress was that the engines easily overheated. If you were a B-29 pilot in those days, your biggest worry was the enemy shooting at you. Your second-biggest worry was that your engines would catch fire.
iii Needless to say, when LeMay arrived, he remained impervious to these less-than-ideal conditions. In fact, he described the dismal features of the island to his wife with almost comical optimism: “The beach here isn’t too bad. Not much coral and what there is [is] mostly rotten, so you don’t get cut up on it. There are quite a few sea slugs around, but they don’t bother you. This just blew off on the floor, so you will see some of the same red dirt that we had in Hawaii.”
iv Weather balloons are still used by meteorologists today. Twice a day, hydrogen- or helium-filled balloons are released simultaneously from around nine hundred locations worldwide. An instrument attached to the balloon, called a radiosonde, measures atmospheric pressure, temperature, and humidity and transmits the information back to tracking equipment on the ground.
v A few others encountered the jet stream after Ooishi. In the 1930s, a Swedish meteorologist named Carl-Gustaf Rossby identified and characterized both the jet stream and the type of atmospheric waves that would later be named Rossby waves. In 1935, the American pilot Wiley Post became the first to experience the jet stream directly. Post was famous for his daring flight experiments and discovered the strong winds of the jet stream during one of his high-altitude transcontinental flight attempts. The term jet stream wasn’t coined until a German meteorologist described the strong winds as strahlströmung, which translates literally to “jet stream.”
Chapter Seven
“If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.”
1.
Haywood Hansell’s temptation requires a detour, just for this chapter, away from airplanes and bombing runs and high winds over Japan to a meeting. A secret meeting, early in the war, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The president of MIT was there, along with, among others, a Nobel Prize winner, the president of the Standard Oil Development Company, and two professors—Louis Fieser of Harvard and Hoyt Hottel from MIT, a giant in his field who would later become the group’s chairman and spiritual leader.
The meeting was held at the behest of what would become the National Defense Research Committee. The NDRC was the government group charged with developing new weapons for the American military. Its most famous effort was, of course, the Manhattan Project, the multibillion-dollar operation out of Los Alamos to develop the atomic bomb. But the scale of the war effort was such that the NDRC had many other projects under way as well. It had Americans, off in corners, working on schemes shrouded in darkness. Missions launched that no one heard about. Ideas being pursued in one place that contradicted ideas being pursued in another place. During the war years, to use the cliché, the right hand of the United States government did not always know what the left hand was doing. And one of those shadowy left-handed projects was Hoyt Hottel’s subcommittee.
Unlike the geniuses down at Los Alamos, the men weren’t physicists. Their job was not to find better ways to blow things up. They were chemists. Specialists in the particular consequences of combining oxygen, fuel, and heat. Their job was to find better ways to burn things down.
As Hoyt Hottel recalled after the war, “Come ’39, a lot of people thought that a war was something we’d be in sooner or later, and our state of preparedness was poor…We needed to know more about incendiary bombs.”
Hottel’s group of chemists and industry officials and Nobelists began to meet whenever they could. They planned; they tinkered; they schemed. And on May 28, 1941, at a session in Chicago, they had their first real breakthrough. Hottel told his committee about a strange incident that had just happened at a DuPont chemical plant in Delaware. A group there had been working with something called divinylacetylene. It’s a hydrocarbon—an oil by-product—and if you mix it with a pigment, the paint will dry into a tough, thick adhesive film. But the film kept bursting into flames, which was a problem for a paint company such as DuPont. For the fire obsessives on the NDRC chemistry committee, however, that was fascinating.
Around the table, one man raised his hand. I’ll look into that. It was the Harvard chemistry professor, Louis Fieser.
Fieser was born in Ohio in 1899. He majored in chemistry at Williams College, got his PhD from Harvard, and earned postdoc fellowships at Oxford and Frankfurt. Before the war, he was the first to synthesize vitamin K. His research assistant was his wife, the equally brilliant Mary Fieser. Women didn’t get hired as chemistry professors in those days, but together, the couple wrote one of the definitive chemistry textbooks of the twentieth century. Louis was largely bald and a little heavyset. He sported a mustache and was always with a cigarette.
Louis Fieser was also a man of imagination and whimsy. His scientific memoir, published in 1964, begins with his wartime work, but then quickly turns to detailed descriptions of things such as a pocket firebomb that he called, in an inspired bit of brand awareness, the Harvard Candle. There is a chapter about attaching incendiary devices to bats. There is an extended riff on how to ignite a thousand-gallon oil slick. Detailed plans for a squirrel-proof bird feeder. And, the coup de grâce, a chapter about one of his many cats, a Siamese called Syn Kai Pooh.
In the Science History Institute archives, there’s an extended interview with a colleague of Fieser’s named William von Eggers Doering, who taught chemistry for years at Yale and Harvard. The interview goes on for hours—and it’s weirdly riveting. It gives you a glimpse into a world of scientists who had license to be just a little mad. This is how Doering remembers working in Fieser’s laboratory at the very beginning of the war:
God, what was the compound we were after? Oh, yes, trinitrobenzyl nitrate [laughter]…Listen to this: you put it—do you remember those heavy Carius tubes? They were for some sort of an analysis where you digested something with nitric acid at high temperature. So these were eighth-inch-thick tubes, about an inch in diameter and a couple of feet long. So you put in about twenty or thirty grams of TNT, you poured [in] a little excess of bromine, no solvent. You sealed the damn tube, put it in a bomb—an iron bomb—you know, with a wire wrapped around it to raise the temperature [laughter]…So that in effect, if you put the heating tube in that little space, then if it blew up, the glass would hit this little part of the wall [laughter] on the left and the other on the right. Well, of course, half the tubes blew up! [laughter]
Understand that Doering was one of the great chemists of his generation. He published his first scientific paper in 1939 and his last in 2008—eight decades of work. In every picture I’ve seen of him, he’s wearing a polka-dot bow tie. But in this interview, he’s like a thirteen-year-old kid with a chemistry set:
The laboratory would be filthy with bromine, and you wondered when the TNT was going to detonate! [laughter]…Oh, God, it was marvelous times! The Germans have a word to describe certain persons as tierisch ernst, which means having an animal-like seriousness about them. I must say there was very little of that [laughter] in those days! [laughter]
When Louis Fieser came down to the lab, smoking his ever-present cigarette, the grad students would play pranks on him.
Louis would come in to talk to his people and would invariably throw his cigarettes, still burning, into the sink. And so the game was to try to guess when he was coming down and then pour ether in [laughter] the sink in the hope that it would catch fire. [laughter]
In the hope that it would catch fire!
Fire was not just of intellectual interest to the people in Fieser’s basement lab. It was also an obsession, a fixation. So when Hoyt Hottel told the subcommittee that something in one of DuPont’s paint mixes would spontaneously burst into flames, who instantly raised his hand? Fieser, of course. I’ll look into that. And to help him with his investigation, Fieser immediately turned to another member of his basement coterie. In his memoirs, he writes, “I volunteered chiefly because I had available in my peacetime research group a man ideally qualified to experiment with and evaluate a hazardous chemical. Dr. E. B. Hershberg.”
I spoke to E. B. Hershberg’s son Robert Hershberg and asked him how his father first connected with Fieser. Robert replied: “First, he’s from the Boston area, [and] I think the very quick and short answer was there were limited places for employment for Jews, and Fieser couldn’t care less about religion. So that’s the lab he wound up in.”
