There's some important background that's necessary in order to appreciate what really happened that night in early March of 1945, during World War II.

I arrived in January, as the first replacement crew, where the morale was terrible. This was the 497th Bomb Group, 73rd Wing, stationed on Saipan. This Group, along with all the rest of the 20th Air Force, was taking a terrible beating,and there appeared to be no end in sight.

Headquarters tried everything and nothing worked. We kept losing airplanes and crews no matter what was tried. I remember one mission -- we took off and joined others who were circling above and when all were in formation we headed North toward Japan. As we neared the coastline, we started to climb to about 20,000 feet fully loaded with bombs and fuel, straining the engines......still flying in formation. We bucked 200 mph winds and tried to hit a target way down below obscured by clouds
. . . we failed miserably.

Furthermore, engines failed and if you weren't hit by flak over the target you ran out of fuel on the way back and had to ditch in that endless ocean. We tried flying individually and assembling about 100 miles off the coast - then climbing up - which made more sense, but still the casualties mounted.

It wasn't working! Twenty-five missions constituted a tour, a number few thought possible. Subsequently, a tour was upped to 35 missions.

I guess it was March 8th when we were ordered to attend the briefing for our next mission and there were a lot of unhappy campers when they announced that we were to hit Tokyo - at night - individually and at an altitude of between 6,000 and 9,000 feet! We all thought they had gone mad. They were hitting us with flak at 20,000 feet. At 6,000 feet we were dead ducks!

But, as ordered, off we went in the late afternoon to what many believed was going to be a disaster. There was a lot of letter writing to loved ones back home. . . and I suppose, a lot of praying too, before take-off.

It was eerie on the way up because we knew that out there in the dark were hundreds of other B29s all racing along without any lights. We flew like that for about 7 hours. Suddenly, way off at about 2 o'clock, I saw a glow on the horizon, like the sun rising or maybe the moon. I'd seen that sight many times, so it was no big deal. However,our flight plan called for a turn to a more North-Easterly direction and now the "glow"started moving Westerly, until it was off our left wing tip. By now we realized this was no rising Sun or Moon!

We turned due West and by now the whole sky was a vast reddish glow with many search lights roving wildly - - here and there catching a 29 lighting up the silver plane and breaking our hearts. Soon, we were at the coast line and now the whole city of Tokyo was below us stretching from wing tip to wing tip, ablaze in one enormous fire with yet more fountains of flame pouring down from the B29s. The black smoke billowed up thousands of feet in the air causing powerful thermal currents that buffered our plane severely, bringing with it the horrible smell of burning flesh! We dropped our load of incendiaries . . .and as quickly as possible got out of there.

I cannot, of course, speak for the rest of our crew but there was a feeling in our ship that we had just been through an inferno and had come out alive, for which we were all grateful.

The success of that mission was such that we were soon fire bombing city after city to the point that we ran out of targets to bomb!

There are those who claim that the Atomic Bomb brought about the end of the war in the Pacific.

Personally,I think it was a combination of a number of factors. Okinawa was slowly being taken by our forces and that city was on their door-step. They were losing Iwo Jima, which put our P51s in range of their major cities. And our B29, had devastated almost every city of any size, along with hundreds of thousands of their civilian population. The Atomic Bomb was the "clincher".

The largest contributing factor in ending World War II was the unrelenting pounding by our B29s. The cost in human life was horrible and that's why March 9,1945 was a night like no other!!

- Robert Ramer