A lone Superfortress crosses Tokyo at 32,000 feet, and Japan's fighters cannot reach it
Early on November 1, 1944, Captain Ralph D. Steakley's F-13 Superfortress lifted off from Saipan at 5:55 am and set course for Tokyo, the first Allied aircraft over the region since the Doolittle Raid in April 1942. The skies were free of cloud, and from 32,000 feet the crew passed repeatedly over the aircraft and engine plants west of the city before photographing a similar complex near Nagoya. Japanese fighters and anti-aircraft batteries could not reach it. After 14 hours in the air, the F-13 landed back on Saipan with 7,000 photographs.
The sortie gave the Twentieth Air Force its first usable look at Japan's industrial core from the new Mariana bases, replacing a China-based effort that never had the range. Those photographs became working intelligence for XXI Bomber Command as it planned the bombing of the home islands.
QWhat did the crew name the first Superfortress to fly over Tokyo in two and a half years?
By the day after the flight, the crew had named the aircraft "Tokyo Rose," after the propaganda broadcaster. It was a wry choice for a plane that Japan's own air defenses had failed to touch. Steakley received the Distinguished Flying Cross for the mission, and the other members of the crew were decorated later. The film itself moved more slowly than the honors. It took weeks to process all of the photographs and months to analyze them fully, so the pictures that planners studied through the winter were still being worked over long after the crew had been recognized for taking them.
QWhy was the Superfortress barely crawling over Tokyo?
Steakley was surprised to meet strong winds over Japan, and he reported that his ground speed over Tokyo was sometimes only about 70 miles per hour. The cause was the jet stream, which the Army Air Forces did not know about at the time. The American crew had run straight into it at altitude without a name for what they were fighting. The discovery mattered well beyond this one flight: the jet stream over the region greatly complicated XXI Bomber Command's later air raids. A bomber that moved at roughly the speed of a car on a country road over its target was a very different problem from the one planners had drawn on paper.
QHow lucky was the weather on November 1?
Very. November 1 proved to be the only day of the entire air campaign against Japan on which conditions over the home islands were completely clear of cloud. The 3rd PRS's later missions were not so fortunate, and several were frustrated by bad weather. Reconnaissance also carried real risk: one F-13 was lost during a mission to Nagoya on November 21. The squadron had nine aircraft on Saipan by the end of the month. The 7,000 photographs from Steakley's flight were taken on a day that never came again, which helps explain why Hansell valued them so highly.
