THE PLANE AND THE MEN

January and February 1942

Where to Land?

At a January 28 meeting with the president and other service chiefs, General Arnold reported that a plan to bomb Japan was being studied, but not that it involved army bombers launched from navy carriers. Navy Captain Wu Duncan dispatched submarine Thresher to gather weather data in the waters off Japan. In February he also scrambled to scrape together from the meager surviving vessels of the wounded Pacific Fleet enough surface ships to compose two task groups to escort and transport the Army Air Forces bombers within range.

Washington approached both Nationalist China and the Soviet Union about landing aircraft on their territories. Although Vladivostok in Russian Siberia lay closer to the targets than any bases in unoccupied China, Premier Joseph Stalin soon ruled out that destination. Hard-pressed to hold back German invaders, he didn't want to risk Japanese enmity by aiding America in the Pacific war, nor did he want even allied foreigners closely observing conditions in the USSR.

So Marshall and Arnold asked Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek to allow American raiders to land in eastern China. The bombers would home in on a radio signal at Chuchow (Quzhou) in Chekiang (Zhejiang) Province, on the seacoast 200 miles south of Shanghai. After landing at fields there and refueling, they would continue on another 800 miles to Chungking (Chongqing), Szechwan (Sichuan) Province, the wartime capital deep in China's heartland, where the sixteen Mitchells would remain to augment allied air power in the China-Burma-India Theater.

Chekiang Province lay between Japanese-occupied Shanghai and Canton. Its interior was under tenuous Nationalist control. A puppet Chinese regime subservient to Japan ruled parts of its western neighbor, Kiangsi (Jiangxi) Province. Generalissimo Chiang feared that approving landing rights would bring Japanese reprisals, but, advised by former US Army officer Claire Chennault, then serving as a Chinese Air Force general leading the American Volunteer Group "Flying Tiger" fighter pilots, grudgingly gave permission.