Last to Die

by Stephen Harding

  Swimming and quiet rest were apparently not the only way Tony and his fellow patients were allowed to pass the time, for they were able to attend a USO show featuring “The Ol’ Professor of Swing,” band leader Kay Kyser. It was obviously a performance that thrilled the young would-be swing trumpeter:

  [He] put on a great show the other night, wow! … He didn’t have his band with him, due to his radio show in the States—think he said Phil Harris or Phil Baker is taking his place during his [USO] tour. He got up a GI band and they were really solid! He did bring 4 of the most beautiful girls along—they had everything, wow! You know Kay is about the best showman of all the big band leaders—he doesn’t need a band because he’s the whole show.

  Then, good son that he was, Tony asked his friend to keep the news of the illness to himself:

  Oh, listen, don’t mention to anyone that I’m in the hospital, because if you do it’s very possible [the news will] get around to my folks and you know how mothers are. They worry over nothing, and especially my mother. Okay? I’ll let them know as soon as I get out.15

  In the letter Tony also wrote something that his friend might well have misunderstood, saying that he wished “to hell” that he could get out of the hospital so he could “put in some combat time.” This wasn’t false bravado, it was simple pragmatism. Just days after Germany’s unconditional surrender in early May 1945 the U.S. War Department implemented a point system to govern the return to the United States and demobilization of Army personnel in Europe. “Rotation points,” as they were informally called, were awarded for time in service, years deployed overseas, awards received, total flight hours and combat flight hours, among other things. Those men with at least eighty-five points were the first to be sent home for demobilization, and most U.S. military personnel in the Pacific Theater assumed (rightly, as it turned out), that the same system would be instituted following Japan’s surrender. Tony’s desire for more combat time was therefore likely no more than a wish to earn as many points as possible as quickly as possible in order to speed his return to Pottstown once the fighting ended.

  It was a desire that was soon to have tragic consequences.

  THOUGH TONY’S STAY IN the Clark Field base hospital was originally supposed to last thirty days, he was released four days early—on August 9—so he could join his crewmates for the move to Okinawa. The 20th Recon Squadron’s headquarters staff and several F-7s had departed for Yontan on August 3, with the remainder of the squadron scheduled to leave Clark Field on August 11. The afternoon before that, however, the base radio station received word of Japan’s conditional acceptance of the terms of the Potsdam Declaration. The word spread quickly, and even though it wasn’t actual surrender, everyone at Clark—and throughout the Pacific Theater, for that matter—saw the news as a great reason to celebrate. As Tony wrote to another hometown friend:

  We didn’t believe it at first, but when [celebratory] flares and ack-ack started to fill the skies and searchlights circled the skies we knew this was it. The GIs went wild. Wow! What a celebration we had. The officers had a barrel of whisky. Can you imagine, feller, a barrel (55 gallons). So the squadron had one big time. We all had to turn our [pistols] in first, tho’. Ya know when the men get tight anything can happen. I didn’t drink much because I didn’t want to get sick again.16

  Not overindulging in the whisky was probably a very smart move on Tony’s part, for he and the remaining 20th Recon Squadron aircrews and key staff personnel took off from Clark Field on the morning of the eleventh bound for Yontan. For those still suffering from the previous day’s merrymaking, the 900-mile flight to Okinawa would certainly have been an unpleasant and painfully long journey.

  Though the men of the 20th got right to work once they landed at Yontan, Bob Essig gave Tony permission to take a few hours off on the afternoon of August 12 to observe a milestone—his twentieth birthday. His pals Nudo and Pallone had managed to preserve a bit of the whisky that had flowed on August 10, and the three young Italian-Americans apparently passed a few enjoyable hours whooping it up in the tent they shared just off the Yontan flight line.

  From that same tent on August 15 Tony wrote to a friend about his impressions of Okinawa, calling it “beautiful” and “the closest country I’ve seen here in the Pacific that reminds me of the U.S.” He also provided a glimpse of how austere life was on the as-yet uncompleted Yontan base:

  First few days we were here we ate nothing but Spam, bully beef & dehydrated foods & it was miserable. Today we had fresh pork and potatoes. Boy, that really was a treat after those darn rations… . Since our showers aren’t completed as yet we have to walk nearly a mile to a creek to bathe—down a mountainside too. Also do our own laundry till the squadron laundry is operating.

  The big news in that August 15 letter, of course, was that the “happy day has arrived.” Tony wrote that Japan’s unconditional acceptance that very day of the Allied surrender terms and the ceasefire that had gone into effect throughout the Pacific Theater were wonderful, but added that he didn’t think his chances of getting back to the States “are very good for a while yet. Think we’ll have to stay over & do some peace time mapping—much to my dislike, darn it!”

  Tony was also aware that the end of hostilities would have other professional consequences: “Don’t think I’ll make that rocker [a fourth stripe indicating promotion to staff sergeant] now that the war is over. My guess is that ratings will be frozen, but I don’t give a darn. All I want is to be a PFC & I don’t mean in the Army.”17 It was almost certainly Tony’s heartfelt desire to be a civilian sooner rather than later that led him to make what would ultimately turn out to be the worst decision of his young life.

  Following its arrival on Okinawa the 20th Recon Squadron was tapped to provide personnel for any B-32 mission that had a reconnaissance aspect. Men from Tony’s squadron were aboard the Dominators that conducted the shipping sweeps over the East China Sea and the Korea Strait on August 13–14, and on The Lady is Fresh and Hobo Queen II, when they were recalled late on the fifteenth. Though the 20th continued to be responsible for providing the necessary personnel for any B-32 reconnaissance flights conducted after the ceasefire announcement, the squadron commander decided to allow men to volunteer to assist the photographers assigned to the mission. Because any flight over Japan would be counted as a combat mission until the actual signing of the surrender document, those who volunteered to take part in the B-32 flights would accrue additional rotation points while not actually running the risk of getting shot at. Moreover, volunteers would have the opportunity to see Japan from the air well before their comrades would step ashore for occupation duty.

  As a qualified aerial photographer assistant, Tony Marchione could legitimately boost his rotation points by taking part in a B-32 mission. It must have seemed like an ideal way to increase his chances of a quick return to the United States: he would get combat points for riding along on what promised to be a long but delightfully boring flight. But Tony wasn’t a fool; he waited until the August 16 mission over Tokyo went off without any enemy interference before adding his name to the roster of 20th Recon Squadron men offering to take part in a Dominator mission.

  On the morning of August 17, well before the four B-32s ran into the hornet’s nest over Tokyo, Tony wrote a cheerful, almost whimsical letter to his sister Gerry. Datelined “Somewhere on the Ryukyu Islands,” the missive bore no indication that he had any reason to regret his decision. Indeed, after mentioning that censorship of mail would soon be lifted he added that “in the next few days we’ll be able to write whatever we please—won’t that be great?”

  It would be the last letter Tony Marchione ever wrote.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE SECOND-STRING SUPER BOMBER

  BY THE TIME TONY MARCHIONE sat down at a makeshift desk in his tent at Yontan on August 17 to write to his youngest sister, America’s participation in the Allied war in the Pacific had lasted three years, eight months, and ten days.1

 
; That war had initially not gone well for the United States and its allies, of course. The devastating Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and other installations on the Hawaiian island of Oahu on December 7, 1941, had been followed by what at the time seemed to be an unending string of defeats throughout Southeast Asia and the western Pacific—the Philippines, French Indochina, British Malaya, and the Netherlands East Indies had all fallen to Japan’s seemingly invincible air, sea, and land forces. Even when the tide began to turn in the Allies’ favor following the June 1942 Battle of Midway, the road to Tokyo promised to be long, difficult, and bloody.

  One of the greatest challenges the Allies faced in the war against Japan was the sheer expanse of what military planners now refer to as the “overall battlespace.” For World War II’s Pacific Theater was truly vast: it spanned multiple time zones and the International Date Line, encompassed some three million square miles of the planet’s surface, and even in 1941 was home to more than half of the world’s population.

  These geographic realities ensured that the Pacific war would of necessity be a maritime struggle; however, since the early 1930s American war planners had clearly understood that military airpower would also play a major role in any conflict with Japan. Unfortunately, at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack the vast majority of U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Army aircraft in the Pacific were obsolescent or simply outclassed by the Japanese types they were up against, and American pilots had to make do with what they had until newer and more capable machines became available.

  Among the organizations most affected by the initial shortage of suitable aircraft was Major General George C. Kenney’s Australia-based U.S. Fifth Air Force. The gruff and plain-spoken Army aviator had arrived in the Land Down Under in July 1942 to take command of the Southwest Pacific Area’s Allied Air Forces, an organization that the fifty-two-year-old Kenney quickly determined was “the goddamndest mess you ever saw.”2 With the support of General Douglas MacArthur—who had been given command of the Southwest Pacific Area (SWPA) after his arrival in Australia from the besieged Philippines in March 1942—Kenney had reorganized Allied Air Forces into Fifth Air Force. To further enhance the new organization’s operational capabilities, Kenney subdivided it into V Bomber Command and V Fighter Command, with both units receiving procurement, supply, and repair support from Fifth Air Service Command.3

  Simply activating these organizations did not make them immediately capable of effectively carrying the war to the enemy, however. In the early days of operations from Australia and, later, from New Guinea, Fifth Air Force and its subordinate units faced significant challenges. Kenney initially had to make do with a motley collection of tired and well-worn aircraft—among them early model B-17 Flying Fortress heavy bombers; A-20 Havoc, B-25 Mitchell, and B-26 Marauder medium bombers; P-39 Aircobra and P-40 Warhawk fighters; and a grab bag of transport types. Indeed, the operational and environmental challenges Fifth Air Force faced in its earliest days initially made its designation as the Allies’ main offensive air arm in SWPA more an aspiration than a reality.

  As the war in the Pacific progressed, however, Kenney and the “Flying Buccaneers” of Fifth Air Force received newer and more capable aircraft, replacing their original B-17 bombers with longer-ranged B-24s, and fielding P-38 Lightning and P-47 Thunderbolt fighters in lieu of the increasingly outmoded P-39s and P-40s. All of these aircraft types were put to good use supporting the Allied advance northward from Australia, in New Guinea in 1943 and 1944 and the Philippines in 1944 and 1945.

  In June 1945—a month after the liberation of the Philippines—Kenney was named commander of Far East Air Forces (FEAF); as such, he not only retained control of Fifth Air Force (now commanded by his former deputy, Major General Ennis C. Whitehead), he gained both the U.S. Thirteenth Air Force and the formerly Hawaii-based Seventh Air Force.4 Operating from Luzon, Fifth Air Force ranged widely along the coasts of French Indochina, mainland China and over Formosa, as well as undertaking long-distance anti-shipping missions throughout the South China Sea. But Kenney had even bigger things in mind for the entire Far East Air Forces.

  The primary goals of the United States’ “island-hopping” strategy in the Pacific included securing forward bases from which armadas of new Boeing B-29 Superfortress very heavy bombers could intensify the direct bombardment of the Japanese Home Islands, an assault that began in mid-June 1944 when, from austere bases in China, B-29s of the Twentieth Air Force launched the first U.S. air attack on Japan since the April 1942 Doolittle raid.5

  While serving as a staff officer at the then–Army Air Corps Materiel Division at Wright Field, Ohio, from 1939 to 1942, George Kenney had been part of the team that developed and refined the design and performance requirements for the Very Long Range bomber program. Boeing’s B-29 was one of the aircraft produced as a result of that program, and its very long range, heavy bomb load, and sophisticated self-defense systems made it immensely attractive to every U.S. Army Air Forces combat commander in the Pacific and Far East. As one historian later expressed it, Kenney “seems to have entertained some belief that [because of his time at the Materiel Division] he enjoyed a personal priority in plans for [the B-29’s] use.”6 Whether he held that opinion or not, Kenney, like Douglas MacArthur, firmly believed that the B-29 was ideally suited for operations in the Southwest Pacific, and he continuously and aggressively lobbied for the big bombers to be assigned to him.

  Unfortunately, Army Air Forces chief General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold believed that the B-29s would be most effective if they flew from the Mariana Islands rather than the Philippines, and when the logistical difficulties of supporting Superfortress operations from bases in China became overwhelming, Arnold ordered the big bombers moved to fields on the newly captured islands of Saipan, Guam, and Tinian. Kenney, never one to give up a fight easily, continued his adamant lobbying for the B-29s far beyond the point of prudence, in the process angering Arnold so much that he seriously considered relieving the FEAF commander and replacing him with someone less troublesome.

  In early March 1945, with the battle for the Philippines essentially over, Kenney decided to travel to Washington. His mission was twofold: first, he wanted to smooth relations with Arnold, who was still recovering from a heart attack he’d suffered several weeks earlier. Second, Kenney wanted to personally examine a bomber that he’d heard might be a decent standin for the B-29s he so coveted, but was apparently never going to get. The possible replacement aircraft—the machine with which Kenney hoped to make a significant contribution to the aerial bombardment of Japan so long foreseen in American war planning for the Pacific—was the B-32 Dominator, and Kenney’s introduction to it would ultimately have tragic consequences for Tony Marchione.

  WHEN GEORGE KENNEY ARRIVED in Washington, D.C., on March 14, 1945, he was a worried man. Before leaving the Philippines he had heard from a trusted aide newly returned from the States that Army Air Forces headquarters was buzzing with rumors regarding Hap Arnold’s imminent relief of Kenney because of the latter’s constant—and far too vocal—campaigning to receive B-29s. Understandably concerned that he might be removed from his command before the war in the Pacific was won, Kenney was determined to see Arnold at the earliest opportunity.

  An immediate audience with the Army Air Forces chief wasn’t forthcoming, however, because Arnold was still recuperating in Florida. Kenney instead made the rounds at the Pentagon, participating on MacArthur’s behalf in several high-level meetings pertaining to Operation Downfall, the planned Allied two-phase invasion of the Japanese Home Islands. Kenney also checked in with Lieutenant General Barney M. Giles, chief of the Air Staff and the Army Air Forces’ deputy commander. The two men had known each other for years, and Giles was characteristically blunt: Kenney wasn’t going to get B-29s, ever, and for the good of his career he needed to drop his continuing effort to obtain the Superfortress for FEAF. Finally convinced of the futility of his campaign for B-29s, Kenney—like any good staff officer confronted with a superi
or’s negative response—trotted out his fallback plan. As Kenney later recalled: “I asked about the B-32, a Consolidated Aircraft bomber that had been built as an ace in the hole in case the B-29 had not turned out successfully. Giles said they were building about 200 of the B-32s but the assignment would be up to Hap Arnold.”7

  Anxious both to save his job and to gain priority access to the B-32, Kenney quickly made an appointment to meet with Arnold in Florida. Though the senior officer was leery of a face-to-face encounter with a subordinate who could be extremely irritating even when halfway around the world, Arnold consented to the meeting, which occurred in Miami on March 17. Kenney was apparently on his best behavior, and after the two men had “buried the hatchet” and sat down to lunch, the Far East Air Forces commander carefully brought up the second reason for his trip south from Washington:

  I told [Arnold] how things were going in the Pacific and broached the subject of assigning me enough B-32s to equip one of my heavy groups. If he would give me the plane I would give it a real test so that he could make a decision whether to go on with production or abandon it. He finally promised to send them out to me, beginning in June, when about 20 would have been delivered from the factory.8

  Undoubtedly relieved that he wouldn’t have to listen to any more of Kenney’s pleas for B-29s and apparently feeling expansive, Arnold picked up the telephone and ordered that two B-32s be flown to Bolling Field outside Washington. He directed Kenney to go back north and look the aircraft over. If after inspecting the B-32s he still wanted the type for the Southwest Pacific, Arnold said, he would provide enough for two bombardment groups—some ninety aircraft under then-current tables of organization.9

  Kenney was back in Washington by March 20, and that afternoon he walked out onto the Bolling Field flight line to examine the aircraft he hoped would change both the composition of his command and the nature of the air war it was conducting against Japan. One of the B-32s had been flown up from Florida’s Eglin Field, and the other had come in from Wright Field in Ohio. Although the squat, single-tailed B-32 was perhaps not as elegant as the Superfortress for which Kenney had long carried a torch, he liked what he saw. And his initially positive reaction was reinforced when he took one of the Dominator’s controls during a forty-minute flight over the snow-covered Maryland and Virginia countryside. Impressed by the bomber’s flight characteristics and its potential ability to carry ten tons of bombs from Clark Field on Luzon to southern Japan, Kenney was a confirmed fan of the B-32 by the time the aircraft thumped back down onto Bolling’s runway. He immediately called Giles at the Pentagon and told him that Far East Air Forces would take Arnold up on his offer to send Dominators to the Southwest Pacific.10