1st Lt. Gerald Auerbach’s job as the navigator was to get the plane to the target, but...
Gerald Auerbach was a young aviator who flew B-29 missions over Japan during World War II. He holds a picture of himself as a young man.SAN ANTONIO — The mission to Tokyo late in the war was like most any other. Flown at relatively low altitude, the B-29 Superfortress bombers in a long trail formation headed west to Japan after taking off from Saipan.
Now 98 on this Veterans Day, Auerbach is one of the few surviving Americans who fought in World War II. There were 16 million of them called into service after Dec. 7, 1941. While he was rated as a gunner, among other jobs, he never fired a shot in anger, and — despite the risks of flying combat over the heart of the Japanese empire — never much worried about being shot down.
But in 1945, Auerbach said he liked the general and the way he thought. He and other airmen felt that LeMay wanted to kill the enemy with the least amount of American losses. Then a major general, LeMay didn’t do away with the general-purpose bombs. He set fuses on some of them to detonate hours after impact, a tactic that would disrupt Japanese firefighters.
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