Following the night strike at Kawasaki, the 39th Bomb Group, along with other units of XXII Bomber Command, began the long series of attacks on the southernmost Japanese home island of Kyushu.

In order to carry on those neutralizing attacks, it was necessary, for the time, to abandon the strategic plan to knock out systematically the major industrial cities of Japan one by one. It was the urgency of the situation at Okinawa that dictated the new bombing policy of the Command.

Since the beginning of the American invasion of Okinawa, the United States Navy had been experiencing a great deal of trouble with damaging attacks by enemy planes and suicide aircraft based on Kyushu. The number of naval vessels thus hit was reaching such proportions that something had to be done about it. In this situation, the Navy called upon the XXII Bomber Command for help and got it.

The Superforts placed a series of more than a dozen airfields on Kyushu, stretching all the way from Oita, Usa and Saeki on the north around the eastern shore to Izumi under almost daily attack.

Beginning with a strike at Kanoya airfield on 17 April, the 39th Group continued these raids until 5 May and flew a total of eleven missions of this sort. During this period there was but one break in the schedule of Kyushu airfield bombings. This break came on 23-24 April when a GP strike was made on the Hitachi Aircraft Factory, seventeen miles west of Tokyo.

The long list of Kyushu missions was grueling for everybody concerned, but especially for the combat crews and the maintenance personnel. Sometimes the 39th would send out a maximum effort to target and on other occasions one or two squadrons would go. In the latter event, it was more than likely that before the first force had returned to base, the other planes were on the way to another target. On one occasion Intelligence was holding a debriefing on one end of the briefing room while the other end was being used to brief crews on the next strike.

Except for the orderliness of the proceedings, the whole affair might have been called a rat race.

In all, the Kyushu raids stacked up like this: Kanoya was hit three times, Kokobu twice, Kushu four times, Saeki once and Oita once.

Opposition varied a great deal. Sometimes the flak would actually be negligible and the fighters scarce and then at other times the enemy would put up a hot defense.

On the flight to Kokobu on 26 April, the only flak reported by crews of the 39th were two bursts near Kanoya on the way to the target and one burst just after bombs away. Seventeen enemy aircrafts were seen airborne, but not one attack was made on the bombers.

In connection with this strike, the crews like to tell a story. Kokobu was the training station for the Japanese suicide squadrons, the so-called "Kamikaze." According to the Nips' propaganda, these eager beavers wanted nothing better that to take to the air against the B-29s and, by their much heralded "body crashing" tactics, to ram the Super-fortresses and then join their honorable ancestors wherever they were. But this time the little dare-alls showed just exactly how eager they were. It so happened that Kokobu was socked in 10/10ths. There were seventeen enemy fighters in the air - presumably some of the Kamikaze. But because of the cloud coverage, their antics could not be seen from the ground and not a one tried the well-known suicide system on our force. Maybe these particular buck-toothed boys subscribed to the old system saying that sometimes life just ain't worth living, but even at that it's a hell of a sight better than dying.

No one will ever forget the exploit of Captain Gene Flewellen and crew 49 which grew out of this Kokobu strike on 26 April.

Weather was wretched at the assembly point just south of Kyushu that day and Flewellen's "City of Cleveland", Ohio had trouble with its radar set. When he failed to make assembly with the other planes of the 39th that day, he decided not to abandon the strike but to head for target and hope to join up, if not with the 39th then with the B-29s of another outfit. The only trouble with this reasoning was that, because his radar set was not working properly, he was not in the position he thought he was and headed off not for Kokobu, but on a due north course for Korea. After flying for some hours through overcast, he finally discovered that he had crossed Japan and was over the Korean Straits.

Refusing to turn to back for base before dropping his bombs on something, Flewellen looked at his map and saw the great Japanese industrial city of Nagasaki staring him in the face. This was long before the time of the Atomic Bomb, and Nagasaki was known to be one of the more heavily defended targets in Japan.

For a lone B-29 to go over and bomb the place was risky to say the least, but relying on a thin scattering of clouds below him to cut down on the enemy spotting power, Flewellen did just that. All alone and with not one other plane friendly or enemy in the sky he made three passes over Nagasaki, finally got on a bombing run and dropped his entire load of delayed action eggs right on the Nagasaki dock area. Then having been molested by no one, he returned to Guam and told his story.

Even after that day it was a standing joke in the 39th that Nagasaki was Flewellen's private bombing range and when the Atomic Bomb broke up his little playhouse, Gene felt robbed.

Nevertheless, the Kyushu missions were not always devoid of opposition. The 27 April attack on Kushira resulted in the loss to the 39th Bomb Group of its most famous B-29. The plane was named "General Andrews."

The most enemy opposition of the Kyushu campaign was met with on 29 April mission to Kyushu airfield. Thirty to forty aggressive attacks were make on the 39th Group's bombers by enemy fighters estimated to number around fifty-three. About fifteen white phosphorus bombs were dropped in air-to-air bombing attempts. The group's gunners claimed nine enemy aircraft destroyed, four probably destroyed and four damaged, with some returns not being tabulated from outlying precincts because the precincts were at Iwo, Saipan and Tinian. That day there was a hot fight with the Japanese.

For his outstanding work in connection with this mission to Kushira, Major Woody Styron of the 61st Squadron (P-22) was awarded the Silver Star for gallantry in action.

The Kyushu missions were varied in their execution and they produced varied results. Higher authority, realized the necessity of putting the Japanese out of a position where they could menace our Navy so threateningly at Okinawa, tried to fly strikes everyday. Sometimes weather was so bad that missions could not be flown at all, but just moderately bad weather would see big birds on the way to the Empire. Sometimes targets were not hit because of cloud coverage, but we went back another day when the bombardiers could draw a bead in clear daylight.

When the Kyushu series was over, the 39th Group along with other units of the XXI Bomber Command, had the great satisfaction of hearing Admiral Chester W. Nimitz himself say what a fine job the B-29s had done and thanked the Army Air Force for the vitally needed support the Navy had been given.