Freedom's Forge (50 page)

The assault on Saipan began on June 15. Even with the battle still raging on the beaches, Navy engineers and Construction Battalions were ferrying in to start laying out the island’s airfield. A month later the battle was still going on. Even though the Seabees were under constant enemy fire, work on the runway never stopped.

Saipan’s Isley Field would be the headquarters of the new B-29 force, the 21st Bomber Command. The first Superfortress,
Joltin’ Josie
, fresh from Wichita, arrived on October 12. Soon Saipan would be home to the eighty planes and 20,000 men of the 21st’s 73rd Wing, and Guam would be ready for the next wing in December. Tinian, they figured, would be set by February or March 1945.
⁶
It was time to carry the war to Japan.

Yet the initial results were disappointing. The officers of 21st Command tried the same old approach of hitting specific targets day and night. The results were dismal. The B-29s flew seven missions, dropping 1,550 tons of bombs. Not even 2 percent hit within a one-thousand-foot radius of the target. Of 350 sorties versus the aircraft engine factory at Musashino near Tokyo, only 34 hits were achieved on the plant itself.
⁷

And the mechanical problems just kept coming. Overheating and blown cylinders, defective valve push rods, busted valve springs, defective fuel pumps, and faulty fuel transfer systems—they kept more than half of the planes from hitting the primary targets, and caused three-quarters of the aborts.

The other big problem was the December weather, and the gales from the jet stream over Japan, sometimes up to 230 miles per hour. Planes downwind were passing over the target at 500 miles per hour. Bombardiers and radio operators barely had time to recognize the target on their newfangled radar scope with its black screen and flashing yellow lights (something else to adjust to), when it would be gone.

After the first wave of B-29 raids, the Japanese were able to breathe easier. Their empire in the Pacific was collapsing, island by island. The American armada in the Marianas had virtually finished the Japanese naval air arm, the proud corps of sailors and pilots who had bombed Pearl Harbor, as a fighting force. But the Japanese homeland remained safe. So many B-29 bombs fell into Tokyo Bay that people joked the
Americans were trying to starve Japan into submission by killing all the fish.
⁸

Then the jokes died.

On January 19, 1945, there arrived at Guam a soft-spoken, pipe-smoking, cigar-chomping major general named Curtis LeMay, an Ohio country boy with an engineering degree from Ohio State and a reputation as the mastermind of daylight bombing in Europe, to take charge. LeMay decided training on how to fly the B-29 in battlefield conditions had to be the top priority, over bombing of Japan.

The number of planes for each mission would be reduced, and time was spent honing skills in pattern bombing, navigation, gunnery, and cruise control to gain mastery of fuel economy. As the sleek silver planes swarmed and swooped over the blue water to attack their practice targets, LeMay held one conference after another with his commanders, chomping on a cigar or his corncob pipe.

Finally, at the start of February, LeMay judged his men and planes ready. He launched 21st Bomber Command in sixteen sorties against primary targets in Japan. Afterward reconnaissance planes flew high over the bombed areas, snapping pictures. The photos revealed that in fourteen of the sixteen raids, not one target had been destroyed, despite dropping five thousand tons of ordnance. Losses remained high. Twenty-nine B-29s had been lost to enemy fire—and twenty-one had crashed due to mechanical failure.

LeMay’s crews were sore, and more discouraged than ever. LeMay didn’t care. “I’m not here to make friends,” he liked to say, “but win a war.” But how to do that was still eluding him.

Then in March he had it.

It was a drizzly afternoon when LeMay’s adjutant Colonel Edward “Pinky” Smith wandered into the Tinian war room. At first Smith thought the place was empty, but then he realized LeMay was there, sitting in the darkness and gazing at the big map on the wall. He had been there a long time.

Sitting and thinking was something LeMay often did at his desk, which was almost always clear of papers. “The general does less work
than any man in the Army,” one of his aides said. But another added, “But he
thinks
more than any man I have ever known.” LeMay was averaging four hours of sleep a night, and when he wasn’t out on the landing strip or reading reports, his officers could find him at his desk, staring into space—or writing letters to the wives and children of his killed and lost crewmen.
⁹

In any case, the sight of a silent, meditative LeMay didn’t surprise Smith. He was turning to leave the general alone with his thoughts when LeMay suddenly spoke.

“No, Pinky, don’t go away. I want to talk to you. There’s something I’ve been thinking about—a new way of hitting them.” Smith sat down. For the next few minutes, LeMay laid out his plan, almost to the last detail, with occasional forays to point at the map.

As Smith listened to LeMay’s monologue, it seemed to him “almost unbelievable.” Later he admitted it made his flesh creep. But as he listened, his airman’s instinct told him LeMay’s plan might work, for all its terrible awesomeness. It also told him LeMay
knew
it would work.
¹⁰

In part because he had a silent partner in Henry Kaiser.

Even after building ships, aircraft carriers, airplanes, and steel, one industrial dream had eluded “the man from Frisco”: processing magnesium.

That seems a strange addition to Kaiser’s wish list. But magnesium had become the new miracle metal of the modern aircraft industry. Lighter than aluminum and far more plentiful, magnesium was harder and more capable of bearing precise tooling than steel. When the British learned in the summer of 1940 that the Germans were using the metal in massive quantities for Luftwaffe parts and airframes, they immediately contacted the United States for help.

That December it was Bill Knudsen who first learned about the vital importance of magnesium from Churchill himself. The British thought they might be able to produce 27,000 tons by 1942, if the Americans were willing to make up the difference.

“Your figures are wrong,” Knudsen had told the prime minister. “You will not produce more than half that amount because you haven’t
the facilities, and you will not have them”—certainly not in time. Given magnesium’s new importance (it didn’t even appear on the Army’s critical materials list in 1940), the United States was going to have to produce enough for both its own aircraft industry and that of its Lend-Lease ally, he decided—close to 12 million pounds of magnesium per year.
¹¹

That had triggered a crash program for magnesium production, in the shadow of the Blitz. The one American company capable of mass-producing magnesium in that tight time frame was Dow Chemical, the biggest chemical company in the country. Its founder, Herbert Dow, had been obsessed by the light white metal. Back during the First World War when the commodity’s price kept falling, Dow had been convinced magnesium would be the building material of the future. Even though there were no customers, Dow had kept his plant in Midland, Michigan, making it, even after he retired.
¹²

Now, anticipating the wartime need even before the federal government did, Dow had built a brand-new plant in Freeport, Texas, at its own expense, ready to extract millions of pounds of magnesium from seawater. But Dow’s method was its own, a virtual monopoly—a nasty word in New Deal Washington. So late in 1940, Henry Kaiser had waded into the competition, determined to find a method of extracting magnesium that would break Dow’s monopoly
and
give him a lucrative government contract.
¹³

He found what he was looking for in an odd little Austrian scientist named Dr. Fritz Hansgirg. Hansgirg’s method was more like the one the Germans were using, a carbothermic reduction process that turned brucite clay into magnesium oxide, heated it up with carbon to burn off the oxygen, then cooled it with natural gas. Harry Davis, Kaiser’s man at Kaiser Permanente Cement, checked out Hansgirg and declared the idea good, at least in theory. With the Davis report in hand and his lawyer Chad Calhoun pushing from behind, Kaiser managed to squeeze a $9.2 million loan from his arch-nemesis, Jesse Jones, in the spring of 1941, to build a plant next to his cement factory in Manteca, California, deep in the San Jose Valley. Kaiser was fully launched in the magnesium business, with Dr. Hansgirg as his technical advisor.
¹⁴

It was a disaster almost from the moment they broke ground on the
facility. Hansgirg proved to be a cantankerous, unreliable character contemptuous of American business methods and—even more alarming—with more-than-casual ties to the Nazi government.
^*
Nine days after Pearl Harbor, the FBI scooped him up as a security risk and threw him in jail. Kaiser was undeterred, and kept at the Hansgirg process even though it failed to produce much magnesium and was turning positively dangerous.

In August 1941 a fire in a retort furnace killed three Manteca workers; a few weeks later another accident killed two more. By March 1942 the head of the War Production Board’s Magnesium and Aluminum Division dubbed the entire experiment a failure, and lamented the amount of money lost thanks to Kaiser’s “too rapid push attitude without much thought or study.” He noted that the usually ebullient Kaiser looked down in the dumps, surveying the meager production numbers month after month.
Time
magazine had to pronounce the Manteca venture a “flop so far,” as Henry Luce wondered if this was one miracle even his hero couldn’t pull off.
¹⁵
Even Bill Knudsen, no fan of Kaiser, felt free to weigh in, pronouncing Kaiser’s magnesium venture a “lemon.”

But what Henry Kaiser lacked in patience, he made up for in persistence. Over the course of 1942, as Kaiser’s people hammered away at the problems with the Hansgirg method one by one, they also began building three other magnesium-producing facilities using other methods, including Dow’s seawater method. At the government’s request, that company had generously offered to donate its formula and technical specifications to a number of other companies, including Kaiser’s Permanente.
¹⁶

By early 1943,
Time
was able to report: “After many a delay, Henry J. Kaiser’s $6 million Permanente Magnesium plant is finally over the hump.” Finished ingots began to pour out of the four facilities and into factories and plants around the West Coast for making light airframes, bomb casings, and magnesium flare shells. Kaiser was still losing money. But later that year, Kaiser engineers, working with the Army’s Chemical Warfare Service, found another use for Kaiser magnesium that would alter the course of the war.

They called it “goop.” It was a mixture of powdered magnesium, a magnesium distillate, and asphalt. Permanente chemists began making it to sweep up all the finely powdered magnesium dust floating through the plant—a highly flammable not to mention explosive hazard. Then they wondered if it wouldn’t have a wartime application.
¹⁷
Both the Germans and British had developed incendiary bombs and used them with telling effect on both cities and industrial targets. The American Air Force was doing the same. But this “goop,” the Kaiser people pointed out, didn’t just burn like fire but stuck like glue. Once it started a fire, it would be nearly impossible to put it out.

The Chemical Warfare people discovered this when they tried the goop out in the middle of the Utah desert, at the Army’s Dugway Proving Ground. There they built a complete replica of a Japanese village—just the kind of place where parts of planes and tanks were being assembled in Japan’s highly dispersed war industries. New York architect Antonin Raymond, who had lived for years in Japan, designed at Dugway a five-block site complete with industrial and residential buildings. There were even soldiers playing Japanese air raid wardens and firemen, who tried to put out the fires that the dropped goop spread—all in vain.
¹⁸

The Army was very impressed. It immediately ordered Kaiser to halt magnesium ingot production. Now everything coming out of his Manteca plant would be in the form of goop—while DuPont and Standard Oil chemists worked out how to make it safe for manufacture. That suited Kaiser, since making goop took one-fourth the time, and at 18.3 cents per pound proved profitable enough to recoup his losses and repay his loans. Even better, “this is our real opportunity,” he crowed, “to be of service to the war effort”—and final victory over Japan.

In little more than a year, Kaiser Permanente had turned out 410,000 tons of goop—all of it to be stuffed into ten-pound cylinders together with proximity fuses and dubbed the M-74 incendiary bomb.
¹⁹
And by the end of 1944, almost all of
those
were headed in one direction: westward across the Pacific to the Marianas and the waiting arms of Curtis LeMay, who would use them to transform his B-29 strategy.

He first tried out the goop incendiaries on December 18, 1944, in a
raid on Japanese-occupied Hankow in China. The first trial run on Japan came on February 25. It proved a bust.
²⁰
Even though Japan’s densely packed wooden houses should have burned like tinder, the bombing results had been largely ineffectual. That was the problem LeMay had been hashing out in his mind, on that rainy afternoon in March. And it was there that he realized in a flash the problem wasn’t the plane, or the M-74 that was being dropped. It was the
height
at which they were being dropped. If you expected to create genuine mayhem, you had to get in closer.

Until now, no B-29 had ever attacked below 20,000 feet. LeMay decided every single one of his planes would attack at less than half that altitude, at between 5,000 and 8,000 feet.
²¹
It was a revolutionary concept—as was its combustible corollary. Instead of carrying a mixture of bombs and incendiaries, as the British did for their attacks on German cities, LeMay’s crews would carry nothing
but
incendiaries. A front line of pathfinders would drop several tons of bombs and flares from about 25,000 feet in order to mark targets and get things started. Then the real fireworks would come in at a fraction of that level, all at once and without warning.