The pathetic fact was that while the massive B-29 legion was arriving on Guam and Saipan and Tinian, the U.S. had almost no information on where these planes should drop their bombs. There was almost no target information. “We really didn’t know anything about Japan,” LeMay observed, “because the Japanese had kept the place pretty well closed before the war. We didn’t have any secret agents creeping around in Japan sending us information.”
For the United States, World War II began with an appalling intelligence failure at Pearl Harbor, and the intelligence problems continued almost to the end. Altogether, the information on Japan was extremely poor in spite of the fact that the U.S. broke the Japanese code early on and listened to their messages throughout the war. The U.S. Army Air Forces only had a vague idea of where some factories were located. “They had an ‘intelligence’ division in the State Department before the war,” LeMay would bitingly recall, “but members of the division didn’t do anything but balance teacups.”
Hap Arnold corroborated the dire situation with a vivid recollection: “When we were talking in the Joint and Combined Chiefs of Staff meetings about possible landings on the island of Hokkaido, in Japan, the only information I could get from the G-2 [intelligence] section of the Army and the ONI [Office of Naval Intelligence] Section of the Navy, was a book dated 1858!”
On the day the plane flew over Japan, more brand new B-29s had arrived on the runway of Saipan having completed their trip from Kansas. But one of these bombers, the Tokyo Rose, was different from all the rest. It was modified as a photo-reconnaissance airplane. Captain Ralph Steakley and his specially trained crew had just made the long, grueling flight across the Pacific. Without wanting to waste a moment, Steakley immediately reported to General Hansell and told him he was ready to take a crack at Japan to see if he could get any pictures with his new equipment. Hansell suggested that he get squared away and give his crew a rest after the long flight. No, Steakley replied, they were good to go. “Okay,” Hansell reluctantly told him, “go ahead.”
Hansell was a thoughtful and kind officer, who was always thinking of his men. But had Steakley followed his advice that day, the U.S. would have lost a golden opportunity. It turned out that Steakley’s flight on the same day he arrived from Kansas fell on the one and only crystal clear day for the next two years. The Tokyo Rose captured detailed pictures of almost every urban area, dock, factory, and transportation hub in Japan, and spent thirty-five minutes over Tokyo itself. The plane flew so high that the anti-aircraft fire was harmless. Steakley and his exhausted crew returned to Tinian fifteen hours later. But they came back with thousands of priceless photographs that would be used in every mission to follow. The B-29s finally had their targets. “There wasn’t really another chance like that for the rest of the war. Those photographs were a godsend,” LeMay would remember.
Kozak, Warren (2011-10-17). LeMay: The Life and Wars of General Curtis LeMay (pp. 194-196). Regnery Publishing. Kindle Edition.
