World War II: Operation Matterhorn

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When the United States entered World War II on December 8, 1941, it possessed no aircraft capable of reaching the Japanese mainland from land bases. The nearest friendly territory (discounting Siberia, from which the Soviet Union had banned any flights) lay 1,600 miles away in central China, well beyond the operating radius of existing Boeing B-17s and Consolidated B-24s.

On April 18, 1942, an audacious raid on Tokyo, Nagoya, Kobe and Yokohama was launched when Lt. Col. James H. Doolittle led a flight of 16 North American B-25s from the flight deck of the carrier Hornet. That sortie, a one-time effort that resulted in little damage to the widely dispersed targets, was intended primarily as a boost to sagging American morale and as an embarrassment to the Japanese general staff. Carrier-borne attacks against the Japanese Home Islands would not occur again for nearly three years.

Development of the B-29’s Mission

The original concept behind the Boeing B-29 was ‘hemispheric defense,’ that is, a very long-range bomber that could operate out of bases within U.S. territories. However, in 1940, amid fears that America would ultimately be drawn into the conflict then raging in Europe, the War Department drafted a contingency plan to use the proposed B-29 to bomb Germany from bases in either Britain or North Africa. Two events then intervened that irrevocably set the B-29 on a course for the Far East. First, after the dust from the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor settled, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Joint Chiefs of Staff decided that America’s primary war effort would be focused on defeating Germany first. In terms of land-based heavy bombardment, this meant that most of the current production four-engine bombers, B-17s and B-24s, would be earmarked for combat missions in the European Theater of Operations. Second, the president believed it was imperative to make a gesture to assure the Chinese leader, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, that the United States was prepared to stop the Japanese from taking over all of China.

The first B-29 prototype, meanwhile, flew on September 21, 1942, and the type was anticipated to be combat-ready by late 1943. The airplane itself was a technological triumph, able to cruise at speeds near 300 mph and capable of carrying 5,000 pounds of bombs in the rarefied air above 30,000 feet (or twice that weight at lower altitudes) while conveying its bombload to a target more than 1,600 miles away. But the B-29 was also the most complex machine the American aircraft industry had ever tried to produce, and the giant plane had big problems, the most persistent and dangerous of which involved engine fires linked to the cooling of the new Wright R-3350 engines.

The die was cast during the Casablanca conference in January 1943, when Roosevelt, in spite of serious reservations expressed by the Joint Chiefs, informed Chiang Kai-shek that he would send a large force of bombers to strike at Japan from China. Although the president did not specifically mention B-29s, it was certainly the only type of U.S. aircraft then capable of such a mission.

Laying Plans for Matterhorn

Three issues were central to planning bomber operations out of China: command and control of the B-29s once they were deployed overseas, resupply and maintenance support for a large bomber force, and construction of bases for combat operations. Command of the China-Burma-India (CBI) Theater was essentially divided three ways. British Lord Louis Mountbatten commanded the India-Burma area, while Lt. Gen. Joseph Stilwell was the U.S. theater commander in China, also serving as Chiang’s chief of staff — and then there was Chiang Kai-shek himself. Added to that was Maj. Gen. Claire Chennault, commander of the Fourteenth Air Force in China, who had his own ideas about the employment of the bomber force.

Logistics posed an enormous problem. The Japanese occupied Burma between China and India and controlled the entire Chinese coast, which precluded resupply by land or sea. Munitions, spares, fuel and everything else needed to support operations would have to be flown in from India over ‘the Hump,’ the Himalaya Mountains. And then there was the problem of airfields — the B-29s could not operate off hastily prepared airstrips covered with pierced-steel matting. The 120,000-pound bombers would need hard-surface runways more than a mile long.

Tags: 20th - 21st Century, Airborne Operations, Aviation History, Historical Conflicts, World War II

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