Dorr - Mission to Tokyo : the American airmen who took the war to the heart of Japan

The American Airmen Who Took
the War to the Heart of Japan

Robert F. Dorr

BOEING B-29 SUPERFORTRESS

Mission to Tokyo March 9, 1945, 10:00 a.m.4:45 p.m.

M AJOR SAM P. BAKSHAS woke up that morning with the secrets in his head.

Bakshas was one of the men flying B-29 Superfortress bombers from three Pacific islandsGuam, Saipan, and Tinian. A writer dubbed these men the thousand kids. There were actually several thousand, and they were giving heart and soul to bombing the Japanese home islandswhat they called the Empirewith no success. They were dropping bombs from high altitude and not hitting much. The precision daylight bombing that worked so well in Europe was not working here, not at all. The air campaign against Japan was failing.

Bakshas believed the situation could be turned around.

Bakshas was thirty-four. He was older and bigger than the Superfortress crewmembers around him. He was six foot one and almost two hundred pounds. He was from Fergus County, smack in the center of Montana, had courted his wife Aldora with the gift of an airplane ride, and was piloting biplanes with the National Guard in the previous decade. Today, Bakshas commanded the 93rd Bombardment Squadron, a component of the 19th Bombardment Group.

Hed been sleeping on a cot with an air mattress inside a partitioned Quonset hut. Awake now, on the day the secrets were unraveling around him as he prepared to bomb Japan that night, Bakshas needed to take care of a routine chore.

I need a haircut, he said to a fellow officer.

He was on the island of Guam (code name: Stevedore), the American territory that had recently been wrested back from its Japanese occupiers. Guam was farther south than Saipan and Tinian, and was the only island among the three considered to be fully tropical, with palm trees, high mountains and great jungles full of towering mahogany trees.

The temperature was in the eighties with a constant parade of showers carried through by high Pacific trade winds. Naval officer Lt. James N. Sussex, a medical officer on the seaplane tender USS Bering Strait (AVP 34) who was destined to be very busy today, wrote home about Guam after its liberation from the Japanese. It rains nearly every day and the mud is thick, Sussex said in a letter composed on a military typewriter called an MC-88 that wrote only in capital letters. The Guam natives, called Chamorros, are glad to see the Americans. They were treated to various forms of torture when their Japanese occupiers were here. If a Chamorro picked up an American propaganda bulletin dropped from a plane he would be beheaded in front of his family. Others lost arms and legs. Yet they are a friendly people, made gracious by the warmth and the sun.

In Guams affable climate, many B-29 crewmembers had taken scissors to their long khaki trousers to create frayed and sloppy-looking shorts. Not Bakshas. Sammy Bakshasalways Sammy, never Samdid not understand sloppy. Bakshas was wearing long khakis and low quarters as he stepped through a series of tents until he found the right one.

Bakshas would be one tall guy among many in the plane hed fly today. The B-29 was named Tall in the Saddle because no one in its regular crew was less than six feet in height. Bakshas was not a regular crewmember but would command Tall in the Saddle today, relegating airplane commander Capt. Gordon L. Muster to copilot duty. Bakshas had come a long way as a first-generation American, the son of Lithuanian immigrants who toiled the land in Montana.

As a squadron commander, Bakshas knew things other crewmembers didnt know, said a 19th group veteran. By the time we got up that morning, a lot of us knew we would be going to Tokyo that evening, but we didnt yet know the two key secretsthat wed be attacking at low altitude and that wed be told to leave our guns behind. Sammy knew we were going to introduce a new kind of warfare on this date. The rest of us found out from gossip and babble before our afternoon briefing and evening takeoff. If Sammy was going to help introduce a new way of flying B-29 missions, I guess he wanted to look right.

There was a wonderful urgency and an exhilarating secrecy about the B-29 outfits in the Marianas, wrote St. Clair McKelway in a perspective. Even after others began learning the two key secretslow level, no gunsBakshas kept them locked up, much like his buttoned-up expression, as the morning unfolded.

Bakshas found the tent marked Blinns Clip Joint, raised a flap, and stepped inside. Private First Class Earl P. Blinn was cutting hair. Bakshas sat next to another airman on an empty bomb crate, pulled out a letter from homeprobably from his wife of eight years, Aldora, who lived in Ridgefield, Montana, with their four-year-old son, Jeromeand started reading.

Blinn finished with a customer and said, Next. Others, deferring to Bakshass rank, beckoned him to take the barbers chaira rebuilt ammunition box. Bakshas waved them off. He got his haircut, but only after the men whod been waiting ahead of him. It was 10:30 a.m. Chamorro Standard Time, March 9, 1945.

Also on Guam was a young 1st Lt. Robert Bud McDonald, from Michigan, a lookalike for Hollywood personality Bert Parks. McDonald would soon go into battle as an airplane commander, responsible for a bomber crew at the ripe age of twenty-three, but today he wasnt scheduled to fly. McDonald would later say that he was a witness to history.

It was the morning of the great firebomb mission to Tokyo. They would launch in early evening and arrive over the Japanese capital in tomorrows early hours. It was the mission for which XXI Bomber Command boss Maj. Gen. Curtis E. LeMay changed tactics in hope of changing the war against Japan. It was the mission on which many B-29 Superfortress crewmembers were certain LeMay was going to get them killed.

Mature leaders like Sammy Bakshas would take the B-29 crewmembers into battle. But while Bakshas was getting his hair cut, some of the thousand kids on Guam, Saipan, and Tinian were writing what they feared were their last letters home. Among them were Staff Sgt. Carl Barthold, a radio operator on Saipan, and Staff Sgt. LeRoy Trip Triplett, a radar operator on Tinian.

Paul Didier, the right blister gunner on Carl Bartholds bomber crew, was certain that none of them would return from the Tokyo mission because of the shift to low altitude. Barthold observed Didier engaged in frenetic activity in their Quonset on the island of Saipan (code name: Tattersalls) just after they awakened in mid-morning.

As for Saipan itself, it was an attractive island, naval officer Sussex wrote. It is not very tropical. It has a few palms but mostly the usual type of temperate plants. Doves are common and other birds are just beginning to come back after the scare they had last summer. This was a reference to the furious battle for the island, now finished. The hills are rolling, some fairly high, with deep, fairly steep, shaded valleys. The most striking topographical features of Saipan are twothe bluff at the north end, over which the Jap remnants jumped last summer, and the lovely jewel of Magicienne Bay on the east side of the island. The bay is too shallow for an anchorage and Im almost glad. Its loveliness is too rare to spoil with a fleet.

There was loveliness around Bartholds Quonset that morning, but no one was savoring the view. The men in the hut were the enlisted men who would fly a plane called