B-29 Low-Level Bombing

1st. Lt. Guice Johnson was the bombardier on the 12-man crew of the first B-29 to land on Tinian Island during the closing months of World War II.

In fact, when Capt. Walter Schroder put down the wheels, the Seabees were still working to build the runway.

Johnson was in the 484th Squadron, 505th Bomb Group, 313th Bomb Wing, 20th Air Force commanded by Gen. Curtis LeMay.

“We were supposed to land on Guam, but we refueled at Wake Island, and our commander decided to go on to Tinian. The captain heard a lot about that later on from the higher-ups,” Johnson said.

Before the war was over, Johnson flew 36 combat missions over Japan. Half of them were bombing raids on Tokyo.

“On our first mission, eight out of our 12 bombers were shot down,” the 84-year-old resident of the Royal Palm Retirement Center in Port Charlotte, Fla. said. “One time we had a three-aircraft formation. We were on the right wing, and both the lead aircraft and the left-wing aircraft got shot down.

“We got shot up a little bit and had to land at Iwo Jima on our way home and get an engine replaced,” Johnson said. “On takeoff somebody on the ground shot a hole through the propeller on our No. 2 engine. We shut it down and kept going.”

The problem was, in the beginning his squadron was flying high-altitude bombing runs. They were dropping their loads at 30,000 feet or more. Head winds at that altitude slowed them to a crawl and made the huge silver bombers sitting ducks for enemy ground fire and fighters.

“Several of us got together and decided we had a better way to bomb. We asked to speak to General LeMay. We went to see him at his headquarters on Guam,” Johnson recalls.

“LeMay was sitting there with a 2-inch piece of half-chewed cigar in his mouth. He had one foot in the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet and the other one up on his desk as he leaned back in his chair,” he said. “We told him we wanted to go in low and fast and escape the high-altitude flak problems and the head winds.

“LeMay looked at us and said, ‘If you … want to kill yourselves it’s OK with me.’ He gave us permission to do low-level bombing. Lo and behold, when it became a success, he invented it. It was LeMay’s idea.”

https://donmooreswartales.com/2012/12/10/guice-johnson/

Extracted September 27, 2020

Joseph Degenfelder