World Battlefronts: The Dirty Tricksters

From the Kurils to Java the Japanese were scanning the skies and the seas for the foe who had promised them that: 1) thousands of bombers would come to devastate their cities as Germany’s had been devastated; 2) early in 1945 there would be twice as many fast carriers in the U.S. Pacific Fleet as there were last May.

In their homeland watchful Japs were rewarded last week by the sight of B-29 Superfortresses, bucking winds of hurricane force to bomb the airplane factory center of Omura, on Kyushu Island. The Japs had no way of knowing that these China— based planes had been ordered by radio to swing over to secondary targets when the weather turned bad, but had failed to receive the message. Squadrons which received the signal bombed Nanking and Shanghai instead.

Information, Please? Fearful that other B-29s by now were based in the southern Marianas, the Japs reported Superfortresses reconnoitering the Tokyo region and bombing the northern Marianas. If they were fishing for information, they got none.

Fearful that the U.S. Navy, now undisputed ruler of the western Pacific, would take advantage of the Imperial Navy’s eclipse, the Japs reported American surface ships shelling the Volcano Islands, only 750 miles south of Tokyo.

Storm in the Night. The Third Fleet’s carriers were giving close support to the Army on Leyte, blasting the 1944 schedule of the familiar Tokyo Express (see below). Before this, they had struck two terrific blows against the Japs’ land-based air power on Luzon.

The first day, U.S. Hellcats, Avengers and Helldivers had arrived after dawn, and many of the Japs’ planes were aloft. Result: 88 enemy planes shot out of the skies, 100 destroyed on the ground.

That night, Admiral “Bull” Halsey’s staff, the self-styled “Dirty Tricks Department,” decided that it would be in their tradition to hit the Japs before the next dawn. Result: only 22 Jap planes had to be shot down; 227 which had been pinned down by night intruders were smashed on the ground in a few hours. Habit-bound themselves, the Japs had failed to allow for the change of pace. “I knew they were stupid,” said Trickster Halsey, “. . . but not that stupid.”

Pace that Kills. The grand total for two days: 440 planes, laboriously siphoned out of Manchuria and other northern bases for the last-ditch stand in the Philippines. No air force could stand this rate of attrition. The Japs knew it. But all they could do about it was to speed measures for evacuating eleven of their largest cities and improvising air raid shelters—to be planned within a week and finished within five days thereafter.