On this day in 1944, on the night of June 15 into the 16th, the skies over Japan filled with the roar of a weapon the world had never seen before, and Japan was bombed for the first time since the famous Doolittle Raid more than two years earlier.
The aircraft was the Boeing B-29 Superfortress, and it was a genuine leap in technology. It could fly higher, farther, and carry more than any bomber that had come before, with a pressurized cabin and remote-controlled gun turrets that felt like something from the future. The problem was reach. Japan was vast distances from any Allied airfield. So the Americans devised an extraordinary and difficult scheme called Operation Matterhorn, basing B-29s in China and flying their fuel and bombs in over the Himalayas, the treacherous route pilots called "the Hump."
On this night, dozens of B-29s lifted off from bases around Chengdu in China and set course for the Imperial Iron and Steel Works at Yawata on the Japanese island of Kyushu, one of the beating hearts of Japan's war industry. The raid itself did little real damage. Bombing at night from extreme range, with crews still learning the temperamental new aircraft, scattered the bombs and accomplished little physically.
But the meaning of it was enormous. For two years, since Jimmy Doolittle's daring carrier raid in April 1942, the Japanese home islands had been untouched by American bombs. Japanese leaders had assured their people that the homeland was safe, beyond the enemy's grasp. Now, on this night, the drone of American engines over Yawata proved that promise was a lie. The home islands could be reached. And once Saipan and the Marianas were secured in the following months, the B-29s would no longer need the desperate route over the Hump. They would come from the Pacific, in their hundreds, and the cities of Japan would burn.
This single, militarily modest raid on this night was the opening note of the air campaign that would define the last year of the war.