Eagles at War (30 page)

A crushing sense of guilt overwhelmed him, compounding his fatalistic certainty that he was living his last days. He had not been strong enough to prevent the war nor wise enough to win it.

Everything that he had predicted, from the early victories to the mounting defeats, was coming to pass. And he was responsible. After Midway, someone had asked him, "Who would apologize to the Emperor?" It was a rhetorical question; only he could apologize, and that was not enough, not for the Emperor, not for the nation.

Admiral Isoruku Yamamoto sat dressed in an olive-green fatigue uniform, a drab contrast to the customary formal whites he wore on Rabaul, saluting each arriving and departing flight of aircraft. It was a concession to his good friend Lieutenant General Imamura, who tried to get him to cancel the trip; he had himself been almost shot down on a similar flight. When Yamamoto had politely refused to delay the inspection Imamura had pleaded with him to tighten security and not to wear the familiar full-dress white uniform that was virtually his trademark. Reluctantly, Yamamoto had given in, not out of concern that some American spy would see him, but simply to appear to pay attention to his friend's concerns.

He had no concerns about himself. Death would be a sweet reprieve, far better than watching Japan slide endlessly toward its certain bloody destruction. The signs were already there; at the beginning of the war, at Pearl Harbor and after, one of his pilots had been worth five of the enemy. Now the enemy was equally skilled and enjoyed an endless supply of superior aircraft.

A year ago today there had been the unthinkable raid on Tokyo, not much damage, but an affront. Since then the Japanese carrier fleet had been plucked from him at Midway, and he had suffered the humiliation of the battle in the Bismarck Sea. The truth was that he'd lost any meaningful offensive capacity.

Yamamoto shifted his samurai sword, clasping it tightly in the three fingers of his left hand and threading the blade underneath his right leg. Son of a samurai and a perfect product of the Japanese naval system, Yamamoto was quite small at five-foot three-inches, paunchy at 130 pounds. His was an unlikely physique, given his robust appetites for sweets, cigars, and geishas. Especially geishas. He had close familial relations with two and enjoyed the company of others. He was liked in return. In the Shimbashi geisha district, he even received a nickname from the manicurists. A full manicure, all ten fingers, cost one yen. Yamamoto had lost two fingers fighting the Russians in 1905. There were ten sen in a yen, so they affectionately called him "Eighty-sen."

He was told that his visit would be a "shot in the arm" for the morale of the troops on Bougainville; it was all he could do nowadays. There were no more Pearl Harbors to be planned, no more Midways to be fought—it was now hang on and wait.

Yamamoto's eyes wandered around the immaculate interior of the Mitsubishi G4M1 attack plane; it was factory-new, still shining inside and out, suffused with the harsh smell of oil, fuel, and raw metal. A piece of paper was handed to him from the pilot. It read "Ballale at 07:45." He folded it and placed it in his pocket; out of the cabin window he saw the escort fighters suddenly dive away.

*

Ballale/April 18, 1943

Bandfield enjoyed the building tension as the minutes ticked away on their water-hugging flight. One plane caught its propellers on a wave, disappearing momentarily in a white sheet of foam, before struggling out the other side. Mitchell had led them through three course corrections, and now they were heading directly for Bougainville, still on the deck. Suddenly, a low controlled voice broke radio silence.

"Bogies eleven o'clock . . . high."

He saw them at once, two bombers, escorted by two flights of three Zeros each. Mitchell's navigation had been magnificent. Bandfield scanned the sky anxiously—this couldn't be all!

"Skin 'em off!"

On command, the drop tanks fell away and they began a hard climb for altitude, everything full forward, the Lockheeds quivering as they hung on their propellers. The Japanese were surprised; they had been expecting any attack to come from above, not below.

Bandfield followed Mitchell and the other Lightnings on their preplanned climb to twenty thousand feet as the four hunters roared at the bombers. He scanned the empty bright blue sky, unbelieving—there simply had to be more Japanese aircraft in the air; they couldn't have left their top man exposed like this.

The diving Zeros had reached the hunter Lightnings just as they began their attack; Bandfield could see one of the Lockheeds turn into the enemy fighters, while the other P-38s hurled themselves at the two Bettys, themselves now diving away, one toward the green sanctuary of the ground, the other out to sea. His earphones filled with the excited chatter from the four hunters.

Without waiting for orders, Bandfield rolled the Lightning on its back and dove for the island below, where the fleeting shape of the Betty was discernible above the tree line. Two Lockheeds were hot after it, and two Zeros were converging on the Lightnings. A dozen lives hung on the razor sharp balance of timing; if the Zeros could fire first, the Americans would go down, or break off the attack, and the bomber would land safely; if the Lightnings fired first, the Betty was doomed.

Bandfield ripped straight down, forgetting all the warnings about compressibility as the controls grew stiff in his hands, ignoring the unwinding instruments, intent only on solving the elegant three-dimensional trigonometry, to place himself in a position to knock the Zeros off the P-38s' tail.

One Lightning had already fired and gone past the Betty, now smoking and edging lower to the forest canopy, all trees and vines to Bandfield now, no longer just a green mass against the sea. He was too low, too fast, and damn near too late; the Zeros were gaining on the second P-38 as it sat in perfect position, firing now at the fat fuselage of the Betty. Bandfield used his maneuvering flaps as he reefed back on the wheel, winching his fighter's nose around, shooting as he came, his bullets and shells passing between the other Lightning and the two Zeros. It was close enough; the Zeros broke off.

Yamamoto had watched the Zeros drop away, then saw the silver H-shape of a twin-engine American fighter roaring past. He looked back, almost casually; this was the day he would die, and he was well prepared.

He grasped the sword tightly, then turned again to see another American fighter close behind, to the left, a shark pursuing a fat tuna, its nose lit up with cannon and machinegun fire.

The Admiral of the Combined Fleet saw shells tear a piece of engine cowling off, felt the thud of bullets entering the fuselage, and died when a . 50-caliber slug entered the base of his skull, tore through the brain that had come so close to defeating the Americans, and exited through his cheekbone. Everyone else on board was killed when the aircraft ripped through the jungle canopy to explode and burn. Yamamoto's body was thrown clear. When they found little "Eighty-sen," he was strapped upright in his seat, his sword still clasped in the three fingers of his hand, face still recognizable, his eyes closed as if dreaming of his geishas.

*

Wichita, Kansas/May 10, 1943

Major Jim Lee strolled in from the rain, almost as wet as he'd been when the crew of a Catalina had pulled him from the water off Guadalcanal. He shivered involuntarily as he walked into the brilliantly lit fluorescent cavern that was the brand new Boeing Plant II, his injured arm beginning to ache from the bulging briefcase he carried. This was just the first increment of a planned 180 acres of covered floor space dedicated to building B-29s in Kansas.

Two years before this had been a wheat field with an apple orchard on one border. Now slim steel columns supported a web-bridge structure overhead, which carried all the utilities and the miles of light fixtures. The floor was a sea of aluminum, subcomponents shipped from Seattle and a thousand other places, marching along toward completion on jigs that looked like giant erector sets. There was tooling everywhere, everything from simple drill presses to gigantic
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monstrosities from the Cincinnati Milling and Machinery Company that swallowed aluminum ingots and spit out finished parts. At first glance the plant seemed to be completely automatic, free of all workers; as Lee walked through to his new office he saw that there were hundreds of people laboring like army ants under the canopy of aluminum.

The crash of the second XB-29 in February had stunned Boeing and thrown the entire program into disarray. Lee had come back from Guadalcanal in October, his arm almost healed, and was immediately sent back to the McNaughton plant. He'd donned his new oak leaves in January, happy to be test-flying the Merlin-powered Sidewinder and consulting on the new jet. Now Caldwell had temporarily assigned him to Wichita, where Boeing was in the middle of a production crisis. Lee had liked the way things were developing at McNaughton and protested the move, but, as usual, Caldwell had been firm.

As he worked with Caldwell to get Boeing back on track, for the first time Lee began genuinely to understand just how tremendous the XB-29 program was and how much it owed to Caldwell's vision.

Boeing had built more four-engine planes than any other manufacturer in the world and, in conforming to the basic specifications Caldwell had framed, had created an extraordinarily advanced aircraft that could fly higher, farther, and faster, with a bigger bomb load, than any bomber in the world. But, strained as the company was with B-17 production, the mass manufacture of the B-29 on a tight schedule was too much for them. Caldwell had charted the course out of building disaster with his personal system of orchestrated management. Just as he had Lee at Wichita, Roget at Dayton, and Bandfield in the field, Caldwell over the years had hand-picked dozens of other bright, independent managers, men who could grasp what he wanted and then make it happen.

The B-29 program was the epitome of the forced draft war effort, demanding an incredible variety of scarce talent in the work force, everything from spindle shapers to rivet buckers, from heat-treaters to crane operators. In a whirlwind ninety days, "Caldwell's orchestra" had created them out of bakers, housewives, schoolboys, by setting up schools to teach women from Kansas farms and men from Georgia cotton fields how to build airplanes. Many of the workers had never even seen a sheet of aluminum before, much less turned one into parts.

Caldwell's people sent recruiting teams into the field to hire engineers, machinists, and unskilled laborers; he forecast where shortages would occur—aluminum, machine tools, fasteners, instruments—and told his managers to forestall the shortages with imagination and money. Like Caldwell, the managers were supposed to use
any
technique to get what they wanted—cajoling, threatening, inducing, seducing, whatever it took. And when Lee looked out the window of his second-story office, there was the result: B-29s being completed, on their way to the Pacific and the skies over Japan.

At nine-thirty a weary General Caldwell strode into the room, followed by the usual entourage of Boeing and Army personnel. Shaking Jim's hand, he asked the others to leave. He gratefully accepted a cup of coffee as he lit up his tenth Camel of the morning.

"Sorry to be late. Give me a rundown on the engineering fixes."

Lee went through the agonizing list of tooling problems, engine fires, fouled-up electrical systems. Caldwell indicated approval or disapproval of proposed solutions with short nods of his head, then snapped more questions, going into details on Boeing's personnel problems, the work force, the local Army people. It was like feeding grain into a mill: Caldwell just kept accepting facts, grinding them up, spitting out ideas he didn't like. At three o'clock Jim was exhausted, but he said, "I've got some ideas for you on some other subjects, General. I wish you'd hear me out."

"Shoot, you've got five minutes."

"I think it's wrong to apply European methods to the Pacific theater. I've studied all the intelligence reports on the Japanese home defense, on their fighters and their radar. They are pitifully weak, and it doesn't make sense to send the B-29s in at high altitude, at the limit of their range, to try to hit the Japanese factories with precision bombing. It would be a lot more efficient to strip them of their armament, load them up with the max amount of bombs they can carry, and send them in low, at night. Drop mostly incendiaries, and just burn the cities out."

Caldwell, in a voice vaguely like Jimmy Durante's, said, "Everybody wants to get into the act." Then, "Is that your strategy for winning the war?"

"Yes, sir."

"Stick to ramrodding production problems. Hap Arnold has his reputation riding on the B-29 as a high-altitude precision bomber—do you think I'm going back to tell him it won't work?"

"If you don't he'll find out soon enough. This thing is close to my heart; I was in China, I studied the Tokyo raid. It's not like I'm some professor talking theory out of War College."

Caldwell thought it over. He'd made a career of getting the right advice from the field—and Lee was smart. "Okay, Major, you've got a point. You've done a good job here; maybe there's a way we can work together on this." He walked to the door and checked the hallway—there was no one in sight.

"Look, this is absolutely top secret; I could get my ass in a sling for even mentioning it. But there is a mission coming up in July that conforms to your theory—we're going to make a low-level B-24 strike from Benghazi at Ploesti, at the Rumanian oilfields. It's too long-range for conventional fighter escort, so everything will depend upon secrecy, and staying low beneath the German radar. I could get you on the mission, if you want."

"Sounds ideal—I've checked out in the B-24."

"Good. I'll send you to Killer Kane's outfit; they've got a lot of guys ready to rotate, and one of them would be glad to see you. You can make the flight as a copilot, and be back in the States by mid-August."

"What about this job?"

"You've just about finished what I needed you to do. We're going through a standby period, getting all the tooling standardized so that we're building the same thing in Wichita that we're building in Omaha and Atlanta. And this will give you a chance to see your theory in practice and give me a first-hand report."