Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (52 page)

The biggest problem the Boeing engineers and subcontractors faced was with the Wright R-3350 engines themselves. All the early ones were inadequate and unreliable. The contrast with the Merlin in the Mustang and the Pratt and Whitney in the Hellcat is intriguing. In those cases, a superb replacement engine solved the problem of powering a potentially wonderful aircraft. In this case, the B-29, a bold and terrific tool of war, had to overcome not only technical challenges such as cabin pressurization but the fact that it was underpowered and underperforming. The Wright engine cowling for the B-29 was wrong, the flaps were wrong, and the engines would overheat and catch fire. The second prototype had a fire during testing and crashed into a nearby meat factory, with mass casualties, including all the crew. The greater the pressure to get the plane perfected, the more numerous and serious the setbacks. Engineers at the giant Wichita plant, ordered to get four entire groups upgraded and completed, ironically referred to their work as the “Battle of Kansas.” They were not wrong. There was serious discussion of canceling the program before Hap Arnold—as we have seen, desperate about the inadequacies of Allied strategic bombing in Europe and grasping for any straw—ordered work to go on. December 1943 and January 1944 really were the hinge period for Allied strategic bombing.

Work did go on, and the planes came through, due to hundreds of minor adjustments by the Boeing engineers. The pilots, often desperately scared, described the first twenty seconds of flight after takeoff as being “an urgent struggle for airspeed” as the crews willed their massive craft to gain altitude.
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Sometimes their prayers were not answered; several of them crashed as they left Saipan because an engine failed just
as the heavily laden plane made its urgent efforts to gain altitude. In fact, it was not until after 1945 that a much better Pratt and Whitney engine solved this problem. Even the famous
Enola Gay,
lumbering off Tinian with its critical atomic bomb for Hiroshima in the hold on August 5, 1945, came dangerously close to failing at the end of the vast runway before wobbling slowly into the night.

When it had gained its desired height, however, the B-29 was normally untouchable and virtually indestructible. What could get at it? Its problems were its own hypertechnological demands, and many more of this aircraft were lost to operational causes (engine failure, air pressure loss) than were shot down by the enemy. Yet once three or four air groups of Superfortresses were safely launched, inaccessible to enemy fighters, the punishment of Japan commenced.

The biggest question Air Force planners had was where to site the giant aircraft. Roosevelt’s original instruction was to fly the planes out of bases in southern China, themselves supplied by larger bases in India. That general idea simply wouldn’t work in the case of the energy-consuming B-29s, which would have to fly from Seattle to Hawaii to Australia to Assam, over the hump to a base in Chengdu Province, and then on to bomb Japan. But then someone would also have to bring to Chengdu the bombs and fuel and machine gun shells, as well as the construction battalions, the cement, the Quonset huts, the wiring. It would be like reinforcing the Allies’ Italian campaign by flying planes from Florida to Bahia to Freetown to Capetown to Zanzibar to Aden to Cairo to Calabria. There had to be a shorter way.

Yet in June 1944 American planners felt they had to try the China option. Although production problems halved the number of B-29 groups that could be based out of India, the scheme went ahead. On June 5, 1944, ninety-eight B-29s flew from India to attack Japanese railroad repair shops in Bangkok; it must have been an extraordinary surprise to local Thais and the Japanese garrison alike. And on June 15, 1944, forty-seven Superfortresses, which had indeed flown across the eastern Himalayas and refueled in Chengdu, bombed the Imperial Iron and Steel Works at Yawata—the first attack on the Japanese homeland since the Doolittle raid more than two years earlier.

But June 1944 was also when the marines, army, and Seabees took the Marianas, thus diminishing the point of keeping up the hugely expensive,
logistically tortuous campaign of bombing Japan from southern China. These B-29 attacks upon Japan out of Chengdu Province did not cease immediately; they could continue to hit the foe’s homeland for another half year before the Mariana bases were ready, and in doing so provided important operational experiences.

So they continued to attack, though only with about two raids each month, from July until December 1944. On November 21, for example, 61 B-29s took off from Chengdu to bomb Japanese targets; but three days later 111 B-29s attacked Tokyo from the more convenient Mariana bases. The last B-29 bombing assault upon Japan from China took place on January 6, 1945, after which the squadrons were relocated to the Pacific.
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The crews had had one of the toughest aerial assignments of the war, and their very presence drove Imperial General Headquarters to order its troops farther and farther into central China, thereby pulling them away from the altogether more strategically significant American drive through the Pacific. The original American intention to station bombers in these distant places was to render support to Chiang Kai-Shek’s shaky regime and to find a smart way of eliminating Japan’s industrial base and cities. But perhaps the greatest benefit from Operation Matterhorn was to further increase the Japanese army’s “continentalist” tendency, leaving it, by 1944–45, with well over a million troops in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The later story of the B-29 attacks upon Japan takes us out of our time frame, though even a brief synopsis of the bombing campaign from the Marianas and onward would confirm its main point. The first mission from the islands against Tokyo, on November 24, 1944, took place while Americans back home were celebrating Thanksgiving. The Japanese authorities, by contrast, were giving out instructions about conserving food and water, and forming neighborhood air raid watches. From the turn of the year onward, the aerial attacks intensified. After a while, the B-29s’ ferocious field commander, Lieutenant General Curtis LeMay, decided that their high-level bombing was inflicting insufficient pain and that it was probably unnecessary to fly at such altitudes because Japanese antiaircraft defenses were much weaker than those he had experienced in Europe. Without consulting Washington, he had the aircraft stripped of much of their heavyweight armament and of their remote-controlled sighting equipment to make more capacity for
fuel and a newer type of bomb—a jelly-like incendiary deliberately designed to burn Japan’s vulnerable wooden cities.

On March 9–10, 1945, some 333 bombers set out from the Marianas, flew over the fighting on Iwo Jima, and proceeded to devastate Tokyo in the greatest firestorm of the entire war. During the next days Nagoya, Osaka, and Kobe suffered the same fate. LeMay was certainly tearing apart Japanese industry and much else besides; in these few weeks, Toland calculates, “forty-five square miles of crucial industrial areas had been incinerated.” Two million buildings were razed to the ground overall, and thirteen million Japanese civilians lost their homes. Strategic bombing worked.
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The great moral problem, as with the Allied bombing of German cities at the same time, was that this destruction of enemy war industries was also taking the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians, chiefly women, children, and older people. By this stage of the conflict, though, not many among the victors were raising St. Augustine’s questions about proportionality in war. To a large degree, the A-bomb devastations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were epitaphs to the earlier, larger airborne devastations of Berlin, Dresden, and Tokyo.

The story of the Seabees is about a man who created a team, which in turn created a gigantic organization that brought American military-industrial power—in the form of cement, tarmac, steel girders, electrical wire, rubber, glass, bulldozers, and lighting equipment—across the 7,000 miles of the Pacific Ocean to the outlying territories of Japan. It is a tale that is equivalent to that of Hobart and his Funnies, and that of Harker and Freeman in rescuing the P-51 Mustang from death; it ranks with Barnes Wallis and his creation of the Wellington, the “Dambuster” skipping bombs, the Tallboy and Blockbuster bombs. Ben Moreell was one of those neglected middlemen who made Allied grand strategy
work
.

Moreell was a civil engineer turned naval officer who became the only noncombat serviceman in the United States Navy to achieve a full admiral’s rank.
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After majoring in engineering at Washington University, he immediately joined the navy during the First World War and
showed his extraordinary talents for construction and development of military bases, catching the attention of the young FDR, then assistant secretary of the navy. In the early 1930s Moreell was sent to study at the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées in Paris, the premier place in Europe for military bridge and road construction. In December 1937 Roosevelt appointed him to be chief of the Bureau of Yards and Docks, and also the chief civil engineer of the navy, a brilliant double appointment. One of the first things Moreell did was to urge and organize the construction of two giant dry docks at Pearl Harbor. The American battleships and other craft that were damaged on that fateful morning of December 7, 1941, were thus able to be partially repaired at the home base; they did not need to be towed, powerless, to San Diego. Ships badly damaged in the Solomons, Gilberts, and Marianas could also limp into Pearl Harbor. This was a man who was thinking ahead.

But if Moreell planned protective or defensive construction, he also thought of what would be needed to carry the fight back to the enemy. In late December 1941, he recommended to Roosevelt the establishment of naval construction battalions that would be recruited from the building trades, and whose officers could exercise authority over all lower-ranked officers and men assigned to these units. The idea of putting Civilian Engineer Corps officers over regular navy and marine units caused an immense fuss in Washington in early 1942, but Moreell got his way. Thus were the Construction Battalions (CBs)—the Seabees—born on March 5, 1942. Moreell already had their motto ready: “Construimus, Batuimus” (“We Build, We Fight”)—for he had conveniently got a ruling that these were
fighting
men and therefore, if they fell into enemy hands, could not be executed as armed civilian guerrillas.

Getting skilled construction workers into the Seabees in early 1942, when every service was screaming for personnel, was a major stroke. According to the U.S. Naval Historical Center’s account, “the first recruits were men who had helped to build the Boulder Dam, the national highways, and New York’s skyscrapers; who had worked in the mines and quarries and dug the subway tunnels; who had worked in shipyards and built docks and wharfs and even ocean liners and aircraft carriers.… They knew more than 60 skilled trades.” Their average age was thirty-seven, though some of them sneaked in even though they
were over sixty.
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Later in the war Moreell was not allowed to skim off America’s skilled workforce to the same degree, but by that stage he and his team had created an impressively sophisticated system of training centers and advanced base depots through which all new recruits passed before being sent off to the front lines.

By the time peace arrived, 325,000 men had enlisted in the Seabees, and in total they had constructed more than $10 billion worth of infrastructure, from Trinidad to Londonderry, from Halifax to Anzio.
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They created and manned the steel pontoons that allowed the Allied armies and their supplies to come onshore in Sicily, Salerno, and southern France. Ten thousand Seabees of Naval Construction Regiment 25 came ashore on the Normandy beaches, along with their U.S. Army Engineering equivalents, to demolish Rommel’s steel and concrete obstacles—German engineers had built the fabled Atlantic Wall, and American engineers took it down. Seabees manned many of the landing craft for the first waves of troops and tanks, then towed in and anchored thousands of pontoons. At Milford Haven, they assembled the extraordinary Mulberry harbors that were to shelter the Allied beachheads. Their biggest logistical challenge in the European war was to rebuild the ports of Cherbourg and Le Havre, which had been thoroughly devastated by German demolition teams—yet the first American cargoes were being landed in Cherbourg only eleven days after the capture of that city. Building the pontoons to cross the Rhine was relatively easy for them. While all this was going on, Moreell was brought in to negotiate a settlement to the national strike of oil refinery workers in 1943; a year later he was asked to be the administrator to the bituminous coal industry after it came under federal control. His organizational capacities were immense.

The greatest achievements of the Seabees were in the Asia-Pacific theaters, where 80 percent of the entire Naval Construction Force was located. The raw statistics are staggering: in the Pacific alone, these artificers of victory built 111 major airstrips and 441 piers, tanks for the
storage of 100 million gallons of gasoline, housing for 1.5 million men, and hospitals for 70,000 patients. The war stories are even more eye-opening. The first battalion ever sent to the Southwest Pacific—to the disease-ridden island of Bora Bora—had just enough time to erect the fuel tanks that were to be used by U.S. ships and aircraft during the Battle of the Coral Sea. Seabees went ashore with the marines at Guadalcanal and spent day and night repairing the bomb craters of Henderson Field as well as bulldozing Japanese emplacements. They hopped all the way with MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific Command from Papua New Guinea and the Solomons, via New Britain, the Admiralty Islands, Hollandia, the Celebes, and then the central Philippines.

When MacArthur at last fulfilled his promise “I shall return” and marched ashore through the shallow waters for photographic effect in October 1944, he gripped the news editors’ attention. But that photo op was possible only because the Seabees had skillfully operated the pontoon barges and causeway units that brought the army—and the photographers—ashore in the first place. Very soon, 37,000 men of the Naval Construction Force were spread across the Philippines, building the main fleet bases, submarine bases, airfields, repair facilities, roads, housing, and hospitals for the gigantic military force that would then leap northward to Japan itself.
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