The Air Force realized quickly that the justification for having the 6,000 dead Marines and sailors taking Iwo and about 25,000 wounded on Iwo was predicated on how many B-29 crews they saved and the value of Iwo as an airfield to support their fighter escorts.
To aid the single-engine fights get to and from Japan, a mother ship B-29 was detailed to do their navigating for them. On one of those flights, my uncle got his only confirmed kill, a Tojo that flew into his guns.
Since the Japanese started husbanding their aircraft for kamikazes for our invasion, the Air Force directed the fighters to get down on the deck after the B-29s turned for home and strafe any target of opportunity. I have some color video of some of my uncle's strafing runs and he established a record by setting three Japanese aircraft on fire in a single run.
There was a downside to strafing down low: it's a liquid-cooled engine and if any of the thousands of rounds fired at you hit some part of that vulnerable cooling system, you were going to stay in Japan or land in the water, neither of these were welcome options.
He told me that as soon as they were clear of land, they would take turns flying underneath each other to check on that small flap at the rear of the radiator scoop: it's automatic - and if it begins to open, you have about 60 seconds to leave the plane before the engine seizes and falls uncontrollably into the ocean. He remembered friends bailing out, climbing into their liferafts, waving at them and never being seen by anyone again.
WWII reminiscence really not apropos to the article: my godfather was commanding the USS William D. Porter (DD-579) when it was sunk by a shot-down kamikaze that exploded under its keel in WWII. All the crew got off safely. The ship had a rather colorful past (worth reading about) including accidentally firing a torpedo at a battleship President Roosevelt was aboard. I read that when the Porter entered ports, other naval ships would run up flags signaling, “Don’t shoot, we’re all Republicans here.”
I salute men of that generation. Hope we don’t end up going through something like that again.
I completely get the Iwo Jima angle. The bloodletting was staggering. It averaged something like eight or nine men an hour for thirty days. I can understand the effort to make that mean something.
Though to be fair, if I were asked to strafe like that, I would rather do it in a Jug.
But I’ll bet they loved their Mustangs.
Great anecdotes, thanks for sharing.