Piercing the Fog - Air Force Historical Studies Office

piercing the Fog
Maj. Gen. Kenneth B. Wolfe Brig. Gen. Curtis E. LeMay
been nil except for the limited work done by XX Bomber Command flying from
China. Radar maps were not ready, either, so early radar bombing had to depend
on educated guesses by the bombardiers as much as on anything else. The XXI
Bomber Command stood ready to bomb Japan, but Hansel1 lacked much of the
target data and weather information to do a credible job.”
Not until November 1, 1944, did Hansel1 have a photoreconnaissance
version of the B-29 (called the F-13) to survey Japan. On that day, the first
plane of that type in the Pacific arrived from the United States, and the crew
made an immediate run over Japan. Luckily, the weather was clear. The men
took some 7,000 pictures of the Tokyo and Nagoya areas. There followed in the
next few days 16 more photography runs, some of which found virtually
complete cloud cover, obscuring the land below. Cloud cover was to become an
increasingly greater problem for the B-29s, forcing commanders into decisions
made from a narrowing list of options. Although Japanese air defenses made a
concerted effort to attack the reconnaissance aircraft, either their fighter
controllers and pilots could not gauge correctly the F-13’s speed and altitude,
or their fighters could not reach the high-flying airplane. By November 24, the
date of the XXI’s first mission to bomb Japan, enough information existed to
plot the main targets. The first target for Hansell’s bombers was the Musashino
plant of the Nakajima Aircraft Company, located near Tokyo. Based on studies
of maker’s plates from crashed Japanese aircraft, air intelligence specialists
believed that the plant produced an estimated 30-40 percent of all Japanese
aircraft engines. Besides its being a major weapons production facility, the
Americans believed that if they struck a plant close to Tokyo, the will of the
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