The bomber crews were briefed using maps and photographs from the late 1920s and early 1930s. The United States Army Air Forces had almost no current imagery of Japan's industrial heartland in June 1944, so the men of the 58th Bombardment Wing studied decade-old street grids before climbing into the largest combat aircraft of the Second World War and flying 1,600 miles from Chengdu, China, to drop bombs on the Imperial Iron and Steel Works at Yawata in northern Kyushu. It was the first strategic bombing raid on the Japanese home islands, the opening salvo of a campaign that would culminate fourteen months later with atomic fire. By any tactical measure, the raid was a failure. By every other measure, it changed the war.
The logistics behind the Yawata raid bordered on absurd. Under Operation Matterhorn, B-29 Superfortresses were based in Bengal, India, with forward airfields near Chengdu in inland China. But the Chengdu bases had no fuel pipeline -- every gallon had to be flown in. The B-29s themselves served as their own tankers, and the math was punishing: twelve round-trip sorties between India and China were required to stockpile enough fuel and supplies for a single bomber to make the round trip to Japan and back. When General Henry H. Arnold, running the Twentieth Air Force from the Pentagon in an unprecedented personal command, ordered the raid for June 15, the stockpiles were not ready. The originally scheduled date of June 23 was pushed forward to support the invasion of Saipan. Fuel was scraped together by grounding fighter units in China. Ground crews worked around the clock reconditioning B-29s plagued by unreliable Wright R-3350 engines. Eighty-three Superfortresses eventually reached Chengdu, each carrying two tons of 500-pound bombs.
The raiders began departing at 4:16 p.m. local time on June 15, led by Brigadier General LaVerne Saunders. One aircraft crashed on takeoff; four more turned back with mechanical problems. Seventy aircraft flew northeast to Okino Island, then turned for the run-in to Yawata. They arrived after midnight to find the city blacked out and obscured by smoke. Only fifteen crews could aim visually; the other thirty-two bombed by radar. In total, 107 tons of bombs fell across northern Kyushu. Three days later, a reconnaissance aircraft photographed the results. A single bomb had struck within the Imperial Iron and Steel Works compound, hitting a powerhouse 3,700 feet from the nearest coke oven. The facility that produced 24 percent of Japan's rolled steel was essentially untouched. The 4th Air Regiment's Ki-45 Toryu fighters shot down one B-29 over Yawata. Another was strafed and destroyed after landing at a Chinese airfield. Two more crashed on the return flight, killing their crews and a Newsweek correspondent. In all, seven B-29s were lost and fifty-seven airmen killed.
The raid's tactical failure yielded strategic intelligence that proved far more valuable than a damaged steelworks. Electronic sensors aboard the B-29s revealed that Japanese radar was rudimentary -- unable even to determine the bombers' altitude. Anti-aircraft fire was heavy but wildly inaccurate. The searchlight network around Yawata failed to illuminate the attackers effectively. The 19th Air Brigade, responsible for defending northern Kyushu, initially claimed eight B-29s destroyed; the actual number was two. Japan's own after-action assessment was bleak: too few airbases, too few night-capable fighters, and the Toryu interceptor was slower than the bombers it was supposed to catch. Six days after the raid, the USAAF dispatched a single photo-reconnaissance B-29 to overfly much of Japan and Korea virtually unchallenged, vastly expanding American intelligence holdings. The door had been tested, found weak, and would not close again.
The Yawata raid was the second of many. XX Bomber Command conducted 49 raids from China and India between June 1944 and March 1945, nine of them targeting the Japanese home islands. None achieved decisive results, and Operation Matterhorn was ultimately judged a failure. The breakthrough came when XXI Bomber Command began operating from the Mariana Islands in October 1944, cutting the flight distance and eliminating the logistical nightmare of the China bases. For the people of Yawata, the delay was only temporary. On August 8, 1945 -- two days after the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima -- 221 B-29s returned to the city escorted by P-47N Thunderbolt fighters. This time they carried incendiary bombs. The resulting firestorm destroyed 21 percent of Yawata's urban area. Japanese government ministers, responding to the original June 1944 raid and the concurrent American landing on Saipan, had already urged families in the four major cities to evacuate their children to rural areas. For many civilians, Yawata's first ineffective raid was the moment they understood the war was coming home.
Yawata (33.88N, 130.88E) is now part of Kitakyushu City in northern Kyushu, Japan. The Imperial Iron and Steel Works site (now Nippon Steel) remains a major industrial facility along the coast. Kitakyushu Airport (RJFR) is located on an artificial island in the Suo-nada Sea to the northeast. Fukuoka Airport (RJFF) lies approximately 60 km to the southwest. The industrial waterfront is visible from altitude. The B-29s approached from the southwest after staging from Chengdu, China, approximately 1,600 miles away.