Word: flak
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With cold courage LeMay held the course seven minutes, although planes around him were going down and his own plane was hit by flak. Upon landing he posted a new order, ruthless but necessary: no more evasive action over the targets. ("Having paid the price of admission to get over the target, we've got to get the benefits.") His men saw the casualty list go up, tagged the skipper "Old Ironpants." But LeMay got bombing results. He led many a flight himself, including the famed raid on the Messerschmitt plant at Regensburg in August...
...almost unbelievable. There is little antiaircraft fire in the target area and if any enemy night fighters are in the air, none has made aggressive sweeps toward our aircraft. In the time we have been near the target we have seen only a few phosphorus shells from land-based flak batteries and a few tracers from small warships in the harbor but none came close. . . . They could not save this northern Honshu shipping center [Aomorí] even though they knew 24 hours in advance [see above] that we were going to burn it to the ground...
...Flak was spotty. Fighter opposition-on some raids at least-was weak. But weather was playing the enemy's game. On one raid the cloud cover was so thick that B-29 men could hardly see beyond their wingtips as they nervously watched ice thickening on the leading edges. Soupy fog kept navigators and bombardiers on instruments. After one raid more than 70 Superforts had to make emergency landings on Iwo.*But the planes drilled through, and reported the clouds over one city glowing "like a hot plate" from the flames below...
Enemy opposition to the Superfort attacks, while still stout, has begun to show signs of weakening. Flak remains heavy, but not uniformly so; fighter opposition on most recent assaults has been light. But in the drive to knock out Japan's industry, the B-29s will now face a new enemy: weather. Between June and September, eastern Japan's rainiest season, the air will be warm, moist and thick with clouds. Inevitably, more bombing will have to be done by instruments and will be correspondingly less accurate, but there will be no lightening of the bomb loads...
...gasoline jelly on the Marunouchi ("inside the castle walls") district. Said returning pilots: "Their searchlights picked us up at the coast, guided us in and took us right out to sea again . . . the toughest mission of my career. . . . Lots of Japanese came up at us right through their own flak. They were shooting down their fighters with their own flak...