The Heroism of Logistics, April 1945
Eighty years ago, in April 1945, a detachment of one officer and seven enlisted men from the 757th Chemical Depot Company were finally given the forward assignment they wanted. Their orders sent them from their Company’s base at Hickam Field in Hawaii to the Mariana Islands to assist in the firebombing attacks then being conducted against Japanese cities. Although personnel of the 757th had experience and expertise with both toxic chemical bombs and the most sophisticated of America’s incendiary bombs, this mission was planned to help fill a critical shortage of standard incendiary bombs with the quick delivery of low-tech barrel bombs.
A few weeks earlier, on the night of March 9-10, 279 B-29s of the XXI (Twenty-First) Bomber Command had carried out Operation Meetinghouse, destroying much of eastern Tokyo. The raid is generally considered the most destructive and deadly single air raid of the entire war, exceeding even the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the immediate damage and deaths it caused. The firebombing of large Japanese cities continued for 10 more days, pausing only when the XXI Bomber Command exhausted its supply of incendiary bombs. Debate continues today about the morality of these raids, which primarily targeted broad areas that contained many small factories and the homes of many defense workers. Still, there is little question that this wide-scale incendiary bombing was far more effective than the previous strategy of precision bombing directed against specific military targets. In addition to their direct impact on Japan’s military production, the long series of firebombings also had a significant effect on the will of Japanese leaders and the public to continue the war.
The Tokyo raid on the night of March 9th and the subsequent raid on Nagoya two days later used only two types of bombs: M47 100-pound napalm bombs and clusters that contained 6-pound M69 bombs. The 7000 M47 bombs were dropped by the lead B-29s, primarily to mark the target area for the later bombers. The strategy behind the attack relied almost exclusively on 675,000 small M69 bombs to start a conflagration. Each M69 bomb was designed to penetrate the roof of a building before it ejected flaming napalm upwards and outwards. As intended, the large number of individual fires merged and overwhelmed local fire-fighting capabilities. Post-mission photographs estimated that the first raid had destroyed almost 16 square miles of Tokyo, and the second had destroyed over 2 square miles in Nagoya.
The following three raids in the series targeted Osaka and Kobe, then returned for a second strike at Nagoya. In these three raids, the XXI Bomber Command was already running short of its preferred M69 clusters and relied primarily on clusters of 4-pound M50 bombs. The M50 bombs employed a very different technology, in which a thermate explosive ignited and scattered a magnesium alloy that served as both the bomb’s casing and its incendiary material. Almost 1.9 million M50 bombs combined with the remaining 280,000 M69 bombs to destroy an additional 14 square miles in the three cities.
The B-29s were kept busy during late March and early April, dropping high-explosive bombs in support of the battle for Okinawa. However, Curtis LeMay, Commander of the XXI, was anxious to return to the firebombing attacks that he believed could force Japan to surrender without the need for another D-Day-style land invasion. For that, he needed incendiary bombs, which were not then available in the Marianas.
The April mission of the detachment from the 757th Chemical Depot Company was part of a vigorous effort to replenish the available supply of incendiary bombs as quickly as possible. Clusters of M69 and M50 had to be transported by ship, but the soldiers of the 757th Chemical Depot Company had helped perfect a method for delivering the powder that thickens gasoline to form napalm, wooden fines, and detonators by air. The soldiers of the 757th at Hickam Field loaded enough material to convert 10,000 barrels of already available gasoline into barrel bombs.
It is not clear if any of those barrel bombs fell on Japan itself, but some were likely used to supplement the attacks on closer targets. Incendiary raids against the Japanese home islands resumed on April 13, relying on 570,000 M69 bombs and 25,000 M47 bombs that had newly arrived by ship in the Marianas. The three incendiary raids in April destroyed an additional 20 square miles in Tokyo and Kawasaki. Five more incendiary raids followed in May, using over 2.1 million M50 bombs and over 1.5 million M69 bombs to destroy an estimated 32 square miles in Tokyo, Nagoya and Yokohama.
Logistics plays a crucial role in war, and units like the 757th Chemical Depot Company deserve greater recognition for their vital contributions. Only eight of their members achieved the status of being stationed briefly in the Mariana Islands, but all the soldiers who served with the 757th should be remembered as heroes. As early as December 7, 1941, some members of the unit that would soon become the 757th joined in firing at the attacking Japanese and were credited with shooting down one Japanese plane. One member of the Company, Pvt. John Lawrence Harrison, Jr., paid a heavy price on that day when he was struck in the head and severely injured by a Japanese machine gun bullet. In the days that followed, soldiers from the 757th helped prepare to defend Hawaii’s beaches and mountains from what many expected to be waves of Japanese infantry, troops that might well have landed behind clouds of poison gas.
Later, while chemists at Harvard University were still working to develop napalm, the soldiers of the 757th manufactured 700 100-pound incendiary bombs by filling M47 casings intended to hold mustard agent with a mixture of gasoline and chunks of rubber. Later still, in September 1943, soldiers of the 747th conducted live demonstrations of current incendiary bomb technology for a large group of officers. Adm. Chester Nimitz (Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet), Gen. Robert Richardson (Commanding General of the Army Air Forces in the Pacific), Gen. Willis Hale (Commander of the Seventh Air Force), and Gen. Robert Douglass (Commander of the Seventh Fighter Command) were among those who learned about the specific capabilities of M47, M50, M69 and other incendiary bombs from the 757th. For the 757th Chemical Depot Company, the responsibilities of running a chemical supply depot in Hawaii involved much more than the standard functions of receiving, storing, and shipping toxic and incendiary munitions.
The month-long deployment of eight soldiers from the 757th in April 1945 to work with barrel bombs in the Marianas brought those individuals a degree of satisfaction and bragging rights at having been close to the action. Still, the most significant contribution of the 757th to victory in the Pacific Theater was in ensuring that M47, M50, and M69 bombs were available when and where needed and in training others—from privates to Admirals and Generals—on how to work with those bombs.
The conventional history of World War Two has sometimes been filtered, for example, by a President who wanted to present the atomic bombs whose use he authorized as the primary reason for Japan’s surrender. For a more objective view, I recommend reading some of the primary source material written by people who were there. The original Organizational History Reports from the 757th and other Chemical Depot Companies were kept secret in Air Force archives until 2009, but they are now available at www.toxinsandfire.com.