Transcript of Long Road to Tokyo

The History Channel original podcast.

As in the struggle against Nazi Germany, American strategy in the war against Japan includes launching mass bombing attacks against factories, military installations, and cities. But the map of the Asian Pacific War covers enormous distances. A new, more powerful bomber is needed: the B-29 Superfortress. Securing air bases for these Superforts becomes a primary objective for President Roosevelt and American military leaders. This is World War II with Tom Hanks, Episode 14: Long Road to Tokyo. For over 2 years, the United States has been building the B-29 bomber, the Superfortress. When it's ready to roll off the assembly line, The B-29 will be one of the most potent weapons in the American arsenal.

The B-29 Superfortress is the most expensive program in World War II. $3 billion to go ahead and build an aircraft.

The B-29 is a stunning leap in aircraft technology. The B-29 will incorporate a pressurized cabin, airborne radar, It has 10 miles of wiring.

It had a remote-controlled turret. It had the most powerful engines in the history of the world. But the critical thing about the B-29 was range. It could carry bombs farther, higher, faster than anything else that had not just been built but ever imagined.

The complexity of its design, however, delays its manufacture.

It's been riddled with problems. It ends up behind schedule.

Bombing the Japanese home islands is a crucial part of the American strategy in the Asian Pacific War.

Allied air commanders want to launch the same kind of air offensive against Japan that they've been carrying out against Germany. They want to destroy factories, shipyards, infrastructure, bring the Japanese war economy to its knees.

In addition to strategic considerations, President Roosevelt understands that the American people expect retribution against the Japanese.

If you'd have done a public opinion survey of Americans, there was a palpable sense of wanting to get these people back for Pearl Harbor. By 1943, it's payback time.

And so the B-29 is going to become the first weapon system that can really attack the the Japanese homeland and military targets.

The problem is, where are your airfields going to be? They have to be within range of the Japanese home islands.

U.S. Marines have been fighting their way across the Pacific, but it will take months before they can secure an area suitable for launching B-29s.

The B-29, it's got a 1,600-mile combat range. So Roosevelt's looking at several options as to where to base these things.

They don't have an island close enough, but they do have an ally within range of the Japanese home islands. And that ally is Chiang Kai-shek and China.

Chiang Kai-shek emerged as the leader of the Chinese Nationalist Party in 1928. He's ruled China ever since.

He is the generalissimo of China. He's a general, but he's also a dictator. The problem he's got is since the early 1930s, there is rising communism under Mao Zedong. He's effectively got a civil war.

In addition to internal conflict, China faces an external threat. Japan invaded China in 1937 and seized Chiang's capital, Nanking, as well as all major Chinese coastal cities.

The Japanese control 95% of China's industry, 90% of China's railways. Half of China's population. They control a quarter to a third of China's landmass, and they closed off all the Chinese ports.

Severed from Chinese port cities, Chiang established a new capital, Chongqing, and constructed a route that connected China to the port of Rangoon in the British colony of Burma. Cut through more than 700 miles of mountainous jungle terrain, the Burma Road was China's main route for receiving supplies primarily from the United States, until Japan seized Burma too.

The final piece of this Japanese imperial puzzle was the conquest of Burma in 1942. The Japanese seize the Burma Road and make it impossible for the Allies to supply China's armies.

The Chinese have lost their umbilical. They've lost their artery, all their supplies flowing in.

Chiang Kai-shek has maybe 4 million men available for military service, but only a million rifles. So he's desperate for Western material to flesh out his army and pose some kind of serious obstacle to the Japanese.

In November of 1943, President Roosevelt confers with Chiang and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in Cairo. At the top of the agenda: how to keep the Chinese in the fight.

Franklin Roosevelt is worried that if China is without resources, Chiang Kai-shek could make a separate peace with Japan, which would be hugely problematic for the Americans.

China is where the vast majority of the Japanese army is currently being tied up. And let's not forget that Roosevelt has this big new weapon, the B-29s. He wants to base them in southern China. So keeping China in the war is absolutely essential to FDR.

Chiang goes to Cairo with a big shopping list. He needs aircraft, fuel, shells, guns. He'll take anything that the Allies will give him. He's, he's pretty desperate. Winston Churchill, this is all a bit alarming to him. He just doesn't trust Chiang Kai-shek in his bones.

Chiang Kai-shek has a reputation for being corrupt, not particularly reliable. There are valid concerns that instead of using the supplies that FDR is promising Chiang Kai-shek for the purposes of fighting Japan, he might instead hoard those supplies and then use them to fight the communists. FDR knew he wasn't running a Boy Scout troop, so he didn't examine too closely. The morals of those who shared his interests. That wasn't how you could fight a global war.

At Cairo, FDR and Chiang agree that the Chinese will build runways for the B-29s and that the U.S. will send even more supplies to China.

That requires mind-boggling scales of logistics. For a single bullet to get to a single Chinese rifle, it's got to come from a factory, let's say, in the Midwest, So you send it all the way across the Pacific. The British still hold India. So it would then get into Calcutta, then be put onto a train, then sent up to Northeast India, and then fly them over the Himalayas to the Nationalists in China.

Flying the India-China Ferry over the highest mountain range in the world is extremely hazardous. The men ordered to do it call it the hump.

Flying supplies into China is something that's never been attempted on this scale.

These were just transport aircraft, but the missions were as challenging as bomber raids over Germany.

These aircraft are taking off with incredibly high weights because we are trying to get as many supplies in as we can.

The route is only about 500 miles, but the difficulty is the altitude. These pilots are flying in unpressurized aircraft over peaks that are 16,000 feet high and then back down again to their Chinese bases.

You've got this hot, moist air bubbling out of the Indian Ocean, meeting with this Siberian air blowing down from Tibet. Causing some of the most difficult weather conditions on the planet. You get these incredible changes in air pressure, and pilots who flew the Hump say the plane would lurch like 100 feet in the air and then drop 200 feet and lurch back up 100 feet.

It's hard to imagine for the pilots who do it. The aircraft is proven, but not in these conditions. So every time they go up, they're learning. But there's a cost to learning this real time. 594 aircraft are lost and 1,500 aircrew.

The problem is you have to deliver 18 tons of fuel and other supplies to get 1 ton of stuff to the Chinese Army. It was a trickle of what was needed.

But China remains a priority for President Roosevelt.

There is another option. The Allies need to reopen the Burma Road.

By late 1943, China has been at war with Japan for 6 years, engaging the majority of the Japanese Army. President Roosevelt and his military leaders are determined to defend China, including using B-29s to strike the Japanese home islands. The US plans to build 4 air bases around Chengdu that will accommodate the B-29.

The B-29 Superfortress is a heavy bomber, and that means it needs a runway that's strong enough to land on. But the problem is there's no way to bring in a bulldozer or a truck or heavy equipment into China. They simply won't fit in the aircraft that are flying over the hump.

But the upside for running a bomber campaign out of China is that the Americans know that they will have access to all the Chinese labor they could ask for.

Hundreds of thousands of people grinding out a runway by hand.

No bulldozers or complicated machinery available, only manpower and hard work.

Just the sheer scale of human labor, it looks like ancient history. Men, women, children pulling the rollers, working side by side.

Their country in jeopardy, Chinese civilians defend against the Japanese any way they can: building roads, constructing airfields, loading supplies.

China is an agrarian economy in a time period where industrial warfare has taken over. So how did they produce all these weapons that you need? For example, how do you produce tanks? So part of the problem here for Chiang is that he needs Everything.

The only way to bring the tanks and the artillery that Chiang needs into China is to reopen the Burma Road.

The Allies have more than a quarter of a million troops based in eastern India, from Calcutta to Lido in Assam. They planned a two-pronged offensive. The British 14th Army will push into central Burma to expel the Japanese. An American-led force will cross into northern Burma and fight their way through to reestablish the Burma Road. General Joseph Stilwell commands the American forces. His personal and professional connection to China spans 3 decades.

Joseph Stilwell, well known as Vinegar Joe. He's cranky and acerbic and sarcastic.

But Stillwell speaks and reads Mandarin. He's a great lover of China, and he has nothing but good things to say about the Chinese.

A respected commander, Stillwell has trained thousands of soldiers in his long career.

Stillwell's task is to take a handful of Chinese divisions, 30,000 of Chiang Kai-shek's troops, and train them up to Western standards. He takes over an old British POW camp in India, and he's able to give them the training, the weaponry, so that they turn themselves into relatively solid units.

General William Slim, Uncle Bill to his troops, leads the British 14th Army, a multinational force comprised of units from Britain, India, and Africa. Many have been battling the Japanese since the invasion of Burma.

Slim says, "Look, we got beaten in Burma because we couldn't fight in the jungle like the Japanese can. They're not superhumans.

We just have to learn how to do it." The Japanese were considered to be these amazing jungle fighters. But we should remember, Japan's not a jungle country. They're not great jungle fighters 'cause they grew up in it. This is about training.

A complete rethink is needed. Slim starts training everybody, not just frontline infantrymen. Everyone needs to be able to handle themselves with their weapons. The bottle washers and the cooks and the truck drivers. And everyone needs to know that the Japanese are not these supermen. They're not bogeymen. Actually, they are completely defeatable.

So I think by this point the war's going very badly for Japan. You've had the Battle of Midway in 1942, which Japan lost. Now, as a result, Japanese shipping is struggling to get through. So you've got rationing tightening in Japan. And then back in Europe, you've had the German loss at Stalingrad. You've had the toppling of Mussolini. So I think at this point Japan doesn't expect it's going to get any help really from the Axis powers.

Hideki Tojo, who has been Prime Minister since 1941, is the dominant force in the Japanese government and military.

By early 1944, there's a feeling for Tojo and for others at the high command that something can be done elsewhere in the war to try and offer Japan a little bit of progress. And some kind of dramatic success for the Japanese might force the Americans to come to the negotiating table. One idea is to put some pressure on the Allies in Northeast India and on Chiang Kai-shek in China.

Prime Minister Tojo approves Operation Yugo, an invasion into India. His generals prepare to attack the British bases of the 14th Army. And to capture the American Hump airfields.

Tojo understands that at this point, these flights across the Hump are the last remaining connection point with the West that the Chinese National Government has. And if he can cut those air bases off, that will then be the straw that breaks the Nationalists' back. For the Allies, this is rife with political intrigue. Portents of disaster.

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March 1944. Operation U-Go begins. Japanese troops move across the Burmese jungle into India toward British bases and the American airfields. The Japanese commander is General Renya Mutaguchi.

Mutaguchi thinks he is a creature of destiny, and he's got a plan. He believes that right there on the very, very western frontier of the Japanese Empire, he could strike a blow that could save the war for Japan.

Mutaguchi hopes his invasion will inspire the Indians to overthrow the British and join Japan in the war.

The Japanese are banking on speed and surprise, that they're gonna move 3 divisions across these 8,000-foot-high mountains in the space of just a few days. As such, he cuts the rations for all of his attack soldiers. It's just 20 days worth of food.

The Japanese soldiers carry very small amount of food supply, like dried rice, and they do not carry many heavy weapons.

So the Japanese cannot get locked into an attritional battle because they're traveling light. They're gonna have to rely on capturing British supply dumps as they go along. It's a gamble.

To get to the air bases in India, Mutaguchi will need to cross the Imphal Plain, site of a large British forward base.

The Imphal Plain, it's kind of like a big river valley surrounded by mountainous jungly terrain. The Brits have used this like a breadbasket. They've got airfields there, they've got supply dumps, food, everything the Japanese need.

Based in Imphal are 3 British Indian divisions from General Slim's 14th Army. They're about to push into enemy territory when they receive reports that Mutaguchi's Japanese troops are moving towards them.

Bill Slim's new plan is to withdraw slightly, create a killing zone, let the Japanese attack through this difficult terrain, and pound them with artillery and aircraft.

He's going to relinquish ground, but all the time he's going to attrite, grind down the Japanese. This is a high-risk strategy, and you can only do that if you're extremely confident that your men are sufficiently trained.

But Mutaguchi's force arrives quickly and is far larger than Slim was expecting.

So when these Japanese divisions start sort of materializing out of the jungle, it's a real pucker moment for the British.

The Japanese encircle Imphal and cut off its supply roads.

There is this just brutal battle. The fighting is incredibly close quarter. And it is absolutely touch and go.

But Mutaguchi is mired in mental models that were applicable in 1942 and are no longer applicable in '44. Back then, if you hit an Indian division in the face with a frontal attack, a lot of the time it fell apart. But Slim's army is better trained, It is more resilient, and from a morale standpoint, they believe in themselves. They think that they can fight the Japanese toe-to-toe.

Fighting is relentless around Imphal, but General Slim has a plan to bring in reinforcements and supplies.

All this time, Imphal itself is completely cut off, and if you're going to make a stand, you're going to need supplies. What Slim recognizes with his American colleagues is that air power is key to the whole thing.

There's only one way to supply this Allied pocket, and that is by air.

The Americans have already got a very efficient, well-trained transport air force in the north of India, the Hump, and they turn that airlift 90 degrees aside and aim it towards towards Imphal than the British troops there.

When you're flying low and slow, you are one big fat target. These cargo planes have no defensive armament. They don't have any guns. And if you push the cargo out 4 seconds late, it's going to end up in the Japanese hands. But astonishingly, it Works.

These transports airdrop and land about 14 million pounds of food, ammunition, heavy equipment, and thousands of fresh troops. And that means that Slim can keep his forces fighting. Mutaguchi had hoped to take Imphal within days, right off the march. Instead, what he gets is a meat grinder.

For weeks, divisions of General Slim's 14th Army have been receiving supplies by air. They're the front line resisting Japan's invasion of India, but Mutaguchi's men are running out of time.

The Japanese have gone into the offensive without much equipment. They don't have an established supply line. So every day that they don't achieve success, it becomes more and more desperate.

Of course, the big problem they face is rations. These start to run out. Hunger starts to become a big issue. They're picking up snakes. They're trying to eat monkeys. They are literally starving.

General Tojo famously issued instructions for the soldiers in the battlefield that to be taken by enemy as a prisoner of war is unacceptable. Facing defeat, they should make a final suicidal charge and die or commit suicide.

The survivors are forced to retreat. Japanese soldiers are dropping dead along the route.

The retreat becomes hellish. The Japanese words were translated as "the road of bones." The survivors' accounts are of mass suicides all along the way. Their stories are of Japanese buddies getting together and hugging each other and then detonating a grenade between the two of them.

Up to this point in the war, this is the largest defeat the Japanese Army has ever suffered on the ground. Around 60,000 casualties.

Mutaguchi had a vision of this operation to destroy the Allied efforts in northeastern India and foment an insurrection. All of those dreams are shattered at the end of this.

In the spring of 1944, President Roosevelt is focused on Operation Overlord, the upcoming invasion of Normandy. But he's frustrated by the delays in East Asia and the fact that the B-29s are still not in action.

America is in Burma and in this theater to supply China with weapons. And to supply their B-29 bases in southern China. Roosevelt has been told time and again by his military men that they're devoting precious resources on an effort that looks increasingly futile. And yet Roosevelt simply doesn't see another horse to back. In May of 1944, there is no alternate place from which B-29 bombers can operate.

In northern Burma, General Vinegar Joe Stilwell is preparing troops to push to the Burma Road.

If the Americans can reopen that road, it's going to completely transform not only the ground campaign in China for Chiang, but also the aerial campaign for the American B-29s that are going to be based in China, because they will be able to drive over the heavy equipment that they can't fly across the hump. Like steam shovels and steam rollers. And so it transformed these bases into the sort of bases that Americans like to build—big, sprawling, and full of warehouses.

Stillwell's plan is to move across northern Burma, attack the Japanese military base at Myitkyina, then push forward to create a new route to the Burma Road. He sent 7,000 men, including Chinese troops and a veteran American deep penetration force nicknamed Merrill's Marauders, on a 3-week march through the jungle towards Myitkyina.

Certain fighting environments kill you all by themselves. You don't need bullets, you don't need shells. The jungle kills you. It destroys armies. Day by day.

The American and Chinese troops that are inserted there, they're just absolutely devastated by illness. They've all got amoebic dysentery, severe diarrhea. They've all got, you know, dengue and other tropical fevers. There was nowhere to rest, there was nowhere to recuperate, and nowhere to get the resources for war.

On May 17th, Stilwell's troops launched the attack on Myitkyina.

It's a really hard-fought battle. There's more Japanese there than they expected, and the Japanese fight doggedly for it.

The Americans call in air support from their bases in India and take Myitkyina Airfield. US gliders land, bringing reinforcements and General Stilwell.

fall of Michinam. That now enables the Americans to play their strong suit, which is construction.

Army engineers and local laborers start to build a new route from India to the Burma Road.

It's hundreds of miles long, scraped out of the jungle, and it's a major construction program. It's going to take months.

From the British and American standpoint, it's all looking good. It's gonna take a while to rebuild that road, but we can rebuild it now. And it seems that the tea leaves are now propitious for a B-29 offensive out of China. The problem is that the Allies don't know that the Japanese have an even bigger land operation up their sleeve.

General Stilwell's victory at Myitkyina will enable the Americans to reconnect to the Burma Road, but it's a slow and arduous process, and the road won't be operational for months. In June 1944, B-29s begin to arrive at the airfields in China.

The Army Air Forces have They've been waiting for the B-29 for years. Finally, here they are, ready to fly their first missions out of China. The idea is to put up a sustained bombing campaign over Japan. The key is being able to fly missions over and over and over again.

The problem is logistics. The B-29 is an enormous fuel hog. It runs on about 9,000 gallons of gasoline per sortie.

They also need a lot of bombs. And the only way you're going to get bombs and fuel to those airfields is they got to fly over the Hump until they open up a new Burma Road.

It takes 8 airlift missions flying over the Hump for every B-29 combat mission just to bring in the bombs and the fuel.

In mid-June, the first B-29 combat mission to Japan sets off from Chengdu. 68 Superfortresses attack the Imperial Iron and Steel Works at Yawata in southern Japan.

But because they don't have enough supplies coming into China, they're only flying a few missions at a time. It's just not going to add up to the sustained pounding campaign that Roosevelt wants.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Tojo has launched an offensive in China.

It's called Operation Ichigo, which means Operation Number One, and this is the largest operation that the Japanese undertake during the war The offensive has two goals: secure land access to Japan's occupied possessions in Southeast Asia and capture US air bases in China.

The Japanese attack with about half a million troops, several thousand artillery pieces, hundreds of tanks. A lot of aircraft as well.

But the big surprise of this campaign is how poor Chiang Kai-shek's forces are. At this point, some of them are starving. There've been lots of deserters from that army. And with that level of morale, some of these forces under Japanese pressure simply melt away.

The Japanese push south, overpowering Chinese forces. Millions of Chinese attempt to flee, caught between a foreign invader and their own corrupt leaders. The U.S. is forced to abandon bases and airfields.

It's a huge embarrassment for Chiang Kai-shek, particularly in the face of his allies. All this time he's been trying to talk up what he's capable of if only the Americans give him what he needs. And yet, in the face of Operation Ichi-Go, his forces just seem to crumble.

For the Americans looking at the wreckage of the aftermath of Ichi-Go, they recognized that the Chinese can't defend American bases no matter where they are. On top of that, the increasing logistical headaches of trying to get supplies over the hump means that they decide to just cut their losses, and they pack up those B-29s.

The Army Air Forces have put everything into making these Chinese bases work, but they're done with China.

And the Americans may now have a new option for basing B-29s, which is a better option.

Since 1943, American forces have been fighting their way across the Central Pacific. Now a combined Marine and Army force is on the verge of invading the Mariana Islands, Tinian, Guam, and Saipan, only 1,600 miles from Japan.

So if the Americans can capture the Marianas, the B-29 bomber will now be within range of almost all of Japan. The expectation for the Americans is that this should be a relatively easy operation. But the reality is going to be utterly different.

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Attack Saipan in the middle of the Pacific.

This is really an unprecedented display of American power projection, that the Americans are able to launch these two massive operations— Overlord first in Europe and then Saipan. They're separated by half a planet. They're thousands of miles apart.

The expectation The expectation is that this is gonna take 3 days for 2 Marine divisions and an Army division to be able to conquer Saipan.

But the Japanese had fortified it and built D-Day-style fortifications. Not only bunkers and pillboxes, but they had dummy bunkers and pillboxes so that they could waste some of the naval bombardment on fake targets.

In fact, there's actually 32,000 Japanese there. Saipan is the part of the Japanese defenses that they would consider to be the inner ring that must be defended, that they will sacrifice the most for, because if they lose Saipan, then Tokyo is in danger, and that's where the Emperor is. The resistance is ferocious.

The Americans successfully get a full division's worth of troops on there within the space of just a few hours.

In the initial assault, 8,000 Marines land. Over 2,000 of them become casualties. This is a bloodletting beyond what anybody had expected.

Anytime a Japanese formation attempts to put in a counterattack, they are immediately met with inordinate amounts of naval gunfire that just crushed The Japanese retreat into the hills in the interior, along with several thousand Japanese settlers living in Saipan.

And they forced the Marines and the Army troops to root them out of caves in these hills.

The battle for Saipan lasts almost a month. Thousands of civilians die, caught in the crossfire.

The final climax of this battle happens at a set of cliffs on the northern part of the island.

At Marpy Point, advancing U.S. troops trap civilians and Japanese soldiers between the front line and the sea.

The Japanese propaganda that's been fed to these people tells them that the Americans are going to surrender. We're going to kill all the men, rape all the women, and it's effective. They don't surrender.

And then as the Marines close in, some of them leap to their deaths, some of them clutching their children.

Marines and soldiers confront the inconceivable. For Japan, the loss of Saipan is a disaster.

They've now had the heart ripped out of their defensive line, and they know that the Americans now are going to have perfect operating conditions to launch this bomber offensive against Japan itself.

The casualties are high for both sides, but the terrible loss of life Finally gives the B-29s the air bases they need to bomb Japan. Instead of having hand-built runways in China that require airlift just to bring in the gas, now in the Marianas Islands you have huge runways built by the Seabees using brilliant white coral, as hard and durable as you can want.

On these three islands, Sai Pan, Tinian, and Guam. The Americans build 5 long runway complexes, each to be supported by a bomber group of 180 B-29s.

And suddenly, the Marianas are the world's biggest airbase.

FDR's objective, the B-29, finally gets its optimum opportunity to achieve the mission for which it was developed in the first place.

November 1944. B-29 Superfortresses take off for the first of many missions to bomb the home islands of Japan. With the capture of the Mariana Island chain, the United States is capable of regularly striking Japan. Just as it's been able to hit Germany for the past 2 years. As the tide turns for these Axis partners, each country tightens its grip on its people. World War II with Tom Hanks is produced by A&E Factual Studios, Newtopia Limited. Playtone Productions, and Backpocket Studios, in association with Motion Entertainment, for the History Channel. This episode was narrated by Tom Hanks and mixed by John Lloyd. Additional voicing provided by me, Jeremy Reagan. From the History Channel, our executive producers are Eli Lehrer and Liv Fidler. For Playtone, executive producers are Tom Hanks and Gary Getzman. For Backpocket Studios, our executive producers Executive producer is Ben Dickstein.