When B-29 Destroyed 14 Japanese Fighters — Two Had Already Rammed It

November 24th, 1944, 10:40 in the morning over the Kanto plane. Corporal Yoshio Mita of the 47th Senti had been climbing for 38 minutes and he was running out of sky. His aircraft was a Nakajima Key 44. The Japanese army called it Shoki demon queller. It was a good machine, fast in a dive, heavy in the nose, built to kill bombers. In China, it had been enough.

Over Burma, it had been enough. Above him, the bombers were not even bothering to evade. They were flying in a loose line at something above 31,000 ft in a cold so absolute that the vapor trails behind them hung in the air like scars. There were more than 80 of them. They were silver.

 They were not painted, not camouflaged, not hidden. They did not need to be. Mita pulled the nose up again. The shoki shuddered. At this height, the air was too thin for the engine to breathe properly. The supercharger was already at its limit, and the controls had gone soft and vague in his hands, like flying through water. He was 2,000 ft below them.

 He had been 2,000 ft below them for 4 minutes. Every gun on his aircraft was useless at that range. Every fighter in the Japanese Empire was at that moment useless at that range. And that is the question this story is about. Not how the Americans built the most expensive aircraft of the Second World War. Not how it burned the cities of Japan.

 But this, what do you do when the enemy is directly above you in daylight, unhurried, and you physically cannot reach him? To understand what Japanese pilots were looking at in the winter of 1944, you have to understand what they had already survived. For three years, the home islands had been almost untouched. There had been the dittle raid in April of 1942.

16 B-25 bombers flown off a carrier deck over Tokyo for a few minutes gone. It had killed around 50 people. Strategically, it was a pin prick. Psychologically, it had been a warning, and the Japanese high command had understood it as one. But nothing came after it. Month after month, nothing. Japanese air defense doctrine had been built on that silence.

 The home islands were ringed by ocean. Any American bomber would have to come a very long way and arrive alone and arrive low and arrive tired. The army’s fighter regiments were positioned to meet exactly that aircraft. They had in fact already met the new one. On the 15th of June 1944, 68 B-29s had lifted off from muddy air strips outside Chungdu in western China and bombed the Imperial iron and steel works at Yawata on the island of Kyushu.

It was the first raid on the Japanese home islands since dittle. It achieved almost nothing. 47 aircraft reached the general area. One bomb landed within the plant boundary. One, the Japanese noticed something else, though. The bombers had come from more than 1,500 m away. They had come at high altitude, and nothing the army sent up had been able to touch them in a serious way.

 The pilots gave the aircraft a name. They called it Banan, Mr. B. It was not affectionate, and it was not mockery. It was something closer to the flat, tired respect a man gives to weather. Because here is what the Japanese Army Air Force was actually working with in 1944. The Key 44 Shoki could reach a service ceiling around 36,000 ft on paper, but paper is not combat.

 Loaded with ammunition. With a pilot in a bulky flight suit and an oxygen mask that leaked, climbing from a standing start, it took roughly 40 minutes to get anywhere near 30,000 ft. 40 minutes. By then, the bombers had crossed the coast, released, and turned for home. The Kawasaki K45 Touyu, a twin engine heavy fighter, could carry a heavier gun, including an upward-firing cannon designed to be flown underneath a bomber and fired into its belly.

 But it was slow, and above 28,000 ft, it simply ran out of performance. The Navy’s Mitsubishi J2M Raiden, the Thunderbolt, had been designed specifically as a bomber interceptor with a fast climb and heavy cannon. It was on paper the right answer, but the engine was troublesome. Production was slow and by the time it existed in useful numbers, the war had moved on without it, and there was a problem none of the specification sheets mentioned.

 At 30,000 ft in an unheated cockpit in a Japanese fighter without cabin pressurization, the temperature outside was around -40°. Gun oil thickened, cannon breaches froze, gun sights fogged over from the pilot’s own breath. Men lost feeling in their hands before they ever reached firing position, and Japanese oxygen equipment was not as good as the American equivalent.

 Pilots reported gray vision, poor judgment, and a crawling exhaustion that arrived long before the enemy did. And the guns on the ground were no better. The standard Japanese anti-aircraft weapon in 1944 was the type 8875 mm gun, a design that dated back to 1928. Its shells could theoretically reach around 23,000 ft theoretically.

 In practice, by the time a shell from a Type 88 arrived anywhere near 30,000 ft, it was slowing, tumbling, and its fuse timing was guesswork. Japan did have a heavier weapon. The type 3 120 mm gun could genuinely reach a B29 at altitude. It was an excellent gun. There were around 200 of them in the entire empire.

200 guns to defend an archipelago of 70 million people from an enemy who could come from any direction at any hour at a height where nothing else could touch him. So when Corporal Mita hung 2,000 ft below that formation on the 24th of November, he was not there because he had been outflown.

 He was there because the Empire of Japan had spent a decade building fighters for a war that was being fought at 15,000 ft. and the Americans had arrived at 31,000. Everything above that line belonged to somebody else. So what precisely was flying over Yoshio’s head? It is worth being exact about this because the B-29 Superfortress is one of the most misunderstood machines of the entire war.

 It is remembered for what it dropped. It should be remembered for what it was. The B-29 was the most expensive weapons program the United States undertook in the Second World War. It cost around $3 billion. The Manhattan project, the entire atomic bomb effort, the reactors, the enrichment plants, Los Alamos, the physicists, the test at Trinity cost around 2 billion.

 The United States spent more money building the airplane than it spent building the bomb. And the reason it cost that much is that Boeing was not building a better bomber. Boeing was building an aircraft that required four separate technologies that had never been made to work together before. The first was pressurization.

 The B17 Flying Fortress, the aircraft the B-29 replaced, was not pressurized. Its crews flew at 25,000 ft in electrically heated suits that failed constantly, breathing bottled oxygen in temperatures that caused frostbite through gloves. Men came home from missions with fingers that had to be amputated.

 The B-29 was pressurized. The forward crew compartment and the aft compartment were sealed, warmed, and held at a pressure roughly equivalent to 8,000 ft, while the aircraft flew at 31,000. The two compartments were joined by a padded tunnel running over the top of the bomb bays, long enough that crews used to crawl through it to trade places.

 The tail gunner sat in his own separate pressurized cell, but you cannot pressurize a bomb bay. So the aircraft was designed so that the bomb bays sat outside the pressurized sections entirely. And when the doors opened at altitude, the crew felt nothing. The second technology was the guns. Every heavy bomber of that era had gunners sitting inside turrets, freezing, handc cranking their weapons. The B29 did not.

It carried a General Electric central fire control system. The gunners sat in warm, pressurized sighting blisters and aimed through optical sights. The turrets themselves were remote, mounted in the skin of the aircraft, empty of men, driven by electric motors. Between the gunner’s sight and the guns sat a set of analog computers.

 They corrected automatically for the aircraft’s own speed, for the range to the target, for gravity drop, for the parallax between where the gunner was sitting and where the guns actually were, and one gunner could hand control of his turret to another. If the man in the top blister was busy, the man in the side blister could take his turret and fire it.

 In 1944, a bomber that aimed its own guns with a computer was not an improvement on the B17. It was a different century. The third thing was the airframe itself. A wingspan of 141 ft 3 in a maximum takeoff weight approaching 135,000 lb. A wing so efficient, so narrow, and so highly loaded that it gave the aircraft a top speed around 357 mph, faster than some fighters of 1941, and a service ceiling just under 32,000 ft.

 And the fourth thing very nearly destroyed the entire program. The engines, four right 3350 duplex cyclones, 18 cylinders in two rows, twin turbo superchargers, around 2,200 horsepower each. On paper, magnificent. In practice, the right R3350 was one of the most dangerous engines ever fitted to an American aircraft. The rear bank of cylinders sat in the shadow of the front bank and did not receive enough cooling air. They ran hot.

Exhaust valves overheated and failed. And when a cylinder let go, it could throw oil onto a hot exhaust. And the crank case of that engine was made partly of magnesium. Magnesium burns at around 3,000° F. It burns underwater. It cannot be put out with a standard extinguisher. And a magnesium engine fire in a B-29 could burn through the main wing spar in less than 90 seconds.

90 seconds. That was the number crews carried in their heads. On the 18th of February 1943, the second XB29 prototype took off from Boeing Field in Seattle. In command was Edmund Allen. Eddie Allen, the most respected test pilot in the United States. A man Boeing considered irreplaceable. An engine caught fire.

Allen turned back for the field. The fire spread into the wing. The aircraft came down short into the fry meat packing plant on the edge of the city. Allan died. His 10 crewmen died. Around 20 people on the ground died. A firefighter died. The B29 had killed 32 people and it had not yet flown a single combat mission, and it very nearly did not fly one at all.

 By the beginning of 1944, the aircraft was in production. and it was in production before it was finished. Boeing, Bell, and Martin were building airframes on factory floors while engineers were still rewriting the design behind them. Aircraft came off the assembly line already obsolete, already needing hundreds of modifications, already wrong.

 General Henry Arnold, commanding the United States Army Air Forces, had promised that B-29s would be in combat by spring. In February of 1944, he went to look at them, and what he found in Kansas were rows of brand new bombers that could not legally be flown to war. What followed is remembered as the Battle of Kansas.

Thousands of workers and mechanics were sent to the modification centers at Selena, at Pratt, at Great Bend, at Walker. They worked outdoors. It was February in Kansas. Temperatures dropped well below freezing. There were not enough hangers and men lay on their backs on frozen concrete with bare hands inside engine necessels because you cannot fit a wrench into a B-29’s engine bay wearing gloves.

 They worked in shifts around the clock for roughly 5 weeks. At the end of it, the first B-29s flew out toward India. And they got there because a few thousand civilians froze in an open field in the American Midwest to fix an aircraft that the United States Army had already told the world was ready.

 That is what was above Corporal Mita. Not a bomber, a gamble, $3 billion of one that had already burned its own creator to death and was still climbing. The Marianas changed the war. Saipan, Tinian, and Guam fell to American forces in the summer of 1944. From those islands, Tokyo was around 1,500 m away. A hard flight, but a flight a B-29 could make with a bomb load from a paved runway with a supply line that came by ship instead of over the Himalayas.

 Command of the bombing effort went to Brigadier General Haywood Hansel. Hansel was one of the intellectual architects of American air doctrine and he believed in it completely. Precision, daylight, high altitude. You do not burn the enemy’s cities. You find the factory that builds his engines and you destroy that factory and the war machine stops.

 On the 24th of November 1944, he launched Operation San Antonio 1. 111 B-29s took off from Saipan. Their target was the Musashino plant of the Nakajima Aircraft Company on the outskirts of Tokyo, the factory that built engines for the fighters of the Imperial Japanese Army. It was the first raid on Tokyo from the Maranas.

 It was the aircraft doing exactly what it had been built to do from exactly the altitude it had been designed for. 24 of them bombed the primary target. Out of 111, the rest bombed elsewhere or turned back or could not find the ground at all. The damage to the Nakajima plant was slight. Production barely dipped.

 And the reason was something no one in the United States had planned for because before that year almost no one on Earth knew it existed. The jetream over Japan in winter at around 30,000 ft there is a river of air moving from west to east at speeds that can exceed 200 mph. AB29 bombing downwind found itself crossing the target at a ground speed of over 450 mph.

Far too fast for the bomb site to solve. AB29 bombing upwind was almost standing still. A stationary target hanging over an anti-aircraft battery. Bombing across it meant a crosswind so violent that bombs drifted for miles. The most accurate bomb site in the world in the most advanced aircraft in the world at the altitude it had been designed for and the bombs went into rice fields.

Here is the strange truth of that November morning. The Japanese could not reach the bombers and the bombers could not hit the factory. Two air forces 31,000 ft apart, both failing. But only one of them was failing over its own cities. And this is where the Japanese response begins to change shape. If you cannot bring the enemy down with guns, you bring him down with the airframe.

The practice had a name, Tayatari, body crashing, ramming. Elite units were formed for it. In the 244th centuri defending Tokyo, a specialist flight was raised for exactly this purpose. Aircraft were stripped, armor plate removed, guns removed, ammunition removed, radios removed, anything to shave weight and buy another thousand ft of climb.

 A fighter with no guns cannot shoot a bomber down. It was not meant to. And on the 24th of November 1944 over the Kanto plane, Corporal Yoshio Mita of the 47th Senti pushed his shi up into that formation and flew it into a B-29. Both aircraft fell. It was the first B-29 lost to a ramming attack. It would not be the last.

 Understand what that decision means. Coldly. A trained pilot, an aircraft, and a life traded for one bomber out of 111 from a country that could not replace the pilot and could not replace the aircraft against a country that was building more than one B29 every day. It was not a tactic. It was arithmetic that had already lost.

 In January of 1945, Hansel was relieved. The man who replaced him at the head of 21st Bomber Command was Major General Curtis Lame. Lame had flown bombers over Germany. He was 38 years old and he had a reputation for looking at a problem without any interest whatsoever in how it was supposed to be solved.

 And Lame looked at the B29, the pressurized cabin, the computer aimed guns, the 31,000 ft ceiling, the $3 billion. and he took almost all of it away. He ordered the aircraft to fly at night. He ordered them to come in low, 5,000 ft, 7,000, 9,000. He ordered the guns and most of the ammunition stripped out to save weight so that each aircraft could carry more bombs.

 And he ordered them to stop carrying high explosive. Instead, they would carry M69 incendiaries, small canisters of thickened gasoline, dropped in clusters, scattering across a wide area and burning at temperatures no domestic fire brigade on Earth could contain. Japanese cities in 1945 were built largely of wood and paper. Lame knew this. Everyone knew this.

 Now, consider what that order sounded like to the men who had to carry it out. You have spent a year learning to survive in a pressurized bomber at 31,000 ft where flack is inaccurate and fighters are gasping. You are now being told to fly the same aircraft into the most heavily defended city in Asia at night at 5,000 ft alone without a formation to protect you and with your guns taken out.

 The crews did the arithmetic in the briefing rooms and came to the obvious conclusion. They believed they were being sent to die. Some of them said so out loud. Lame did not argue with them. He simply told them that the low altitude would confuse the anti-aircraft guns, which were calibrated for high targets, that Japanese night fighters were few, and that lower altitude meant less strain on the engines, the R3350 engines that had been killing B-29 crews without any help from the Japanese at all. He was right about all three

things. He also knew that if he was wrong, he would lose most of his command in a single night, and he sent them anyway. On the night of the 9th of March, 1945, 334 B-29s lifted off from the Maranas. Around 279 of them found Tokyo. They dropped roughly 1,665 tons of incendiaries. The fires met. When separate fires join, they draw in air from around them and the inrushing wind feeds them and the whole thing becomes a single self- sustaining system that generates its own weather.

 Around 16 square miles of Tokyo burned. The canals boiled. People who ran into the rivers to escape the heat died in the water. Somewhere in the region of 100,000 people were killed in a single night. It remains the deadliest air raid in human history. Deadlier in that one night than either atomic bomb. 14 B29s did not come home.

 And now look at what happened to Japanese air defense. Every fighter, every tactic, every stripped down rammer, every frozen cannon, every pilot who had spent 40 minutes clawing his way toward 30,000 ft. All of it had been built for one problem. a bomber in daylight very high. The bomber came at night at 5,000 ft with no guns and no formation and there was almost nothing waiting for it.

 Japan had no meaningful night fighter force. Its radar guided interception was primitive. Its high alitude interceptors were at 5,000 ft simply ordinary fighters in the dark hunting an aircraft they could not see and could not find. The Empire had spent two years learning to fight the B-29 that had been designed. It never got the chance to fight the one that actually came.

 There is one more thing, and it is the part almost nobody tells. Ewima was taken at appalling cost in February and March of 1945. Historians argue about the strategy of that battle to this day, but the practical reason for it was very simple. Ewima sat almost exactly halfway between the Maranas and Tokyo and it had airfields.

 On the 4th of March 1945, while the island was still being fought over, while Marines were still dying on it, while the runway was still under Japanese fire, a B-29 named Dynamite came in from a raid on Tokyo with a fuel system failure and nowhere to go but the sea. Her pilot, Lieutenant Raymond Malow, called Ewoima and asked to land.

He was told the field was not secure. He landed anyway. Marines came out of their holes to watch it come in. This enormous silver machine far too big for the strip, settling onto an island that was still a battlefield. Dynamite rolled out, took on fuel, turned around, and flew home. Every man aboard lived.

 By the end of the war, the figure most often cited is that more than 2,200 B-29s made emergency landings on Ewima. Roughly 24,000 American airmen came down on that island who would otherwise have gone into the Pacific. The Marines who took Ewaima never got to see what it was for. The men who flew off it did.

 3,970 B-29s were built. Two of them dropped atomic weapons. Inola Gay over Hiroshima on the 6th of August, Boxcar over Nagasaki on the 9th. And those two names swallowed the other 3,968 whole. Inola Gay sits today at the Udvar Hazy Center outside Washington. Boxgar sits in Dayton, Ohio. Both are behind ropes.

 Both are silent, but two B29s still fly. One is called Fifi. The other is called Dock. Pulled out of a bombing range in the Mojave Desert where it had been used as a target for decades and rebuilt by volunteers in Witchah in the same city where it was born. When Doc runs up those four right cyclones on a summer morning, the sound carries for miles.

 Men in their 90s still come out to stand at the fence and listen to it. And somewhere in Japan, there is a memorial that carries the name of Corporal Yoshio Mita, 21 years old, of the 47th Senti, who on a clear November morning climbed as high as his aircraft could possibly go, found that it was not high enough, and decided that this would not be the end of the matter.

 He was wrong, but he was not a coward. They flew. They fell.