Last to Die

by Stephen Harding

  By February 1944 Japan’s worsening strategic situation, coupled with the increasing attrition visited on the navy by Allied forces, led to the Yoko Ku’s being partially relieved of its training and development duties so that half its fighter pilots could put their considerable skills to combat use. At that point the organization consisted of 108 aircraft—48 Zeke carrier fighters, 48 Kawanishi N1K1-J Shiden (“George”) interceptors, and 12 Irving night fighters. About half that total complement was kept at Oppama to assist in the navy’s planned air defense of the Kanto Plain, while the other half was dispatched to aid in the Japanese defense of the Marianas. Over the following months the deployed Yoko Ku aviators did what they could to help stop the American advance, attacking enemy vessels and providing air-defense cover for Japanese forces on Iwo Jima. Though the unit racked up an impressive fifty-two kills, the ferocity of the American air assault had by July resulted in the deaths of more than twenty of the Yoko Ku’s top pilots and the loss of nearly two-thirds of its deployed aircraft. By the fall of 1944 the surviving unit members were sent back to Oppama, where the air group—now relieved of its training duties—was dedicated full time to the defense of the southern and eastern approaches to the Kanto Plain.

  The Yoko Ku’s ability to contribute meaningfully to that vital mission was greatly enhanced by the fact that, despite the battering it had taken over Iwo Jima, it still counted on its roster some of Japan’s most experienced and capable naval aviators. Among them was the unit’s leader, Lieutenant Commander Masanobu Ibusuki, a veteran of the attack on Pearl Harbor (flying from the carrier Akagi) who was renowned throughout the navy for having helped shoot down the first American warplane lost in aerial combat in World War II, a Boeing B-17C attempting to land at Honolulu’s Hickam Field after a ferry flight from California.19 Though Ibusuki never downed the five enemy aircraft traditionally required to reach “ace” status, several of his pilots had attained that honorific many times over.

  Among the more colorful of Yoko Ku’s aces was thirty-two-year-old Lieutenant (Junior Grade) Matsuo Hagiri, widely known throughout the navy as “Mustachio Hagiri” because of the luxuriant, and rare, handlebar that graced his upper lip. A veteran of combat above China and the Solomon Islands, Hagiri had been assigned to Ibusuki’s organization in September 1943 after being severely wounded in a dogfight over Papua New Guinea. After recovering he’d become an advanced flight instructor at Oppama, passing on the skills that had allowed him to down at least thirteen enemy aircraft.

  Joining Hagiri in the original instructor role was another wounded ace, twenty-five-year-old Warrant Officer Sadamu Komachi, who’d come to the Yoko Ku in the summer of 1944 with eighteen victories as well as burn scars inflicted by U.S. Navy F6F Hellcat pilot Ensign Wendell Twelves of VF-15 over Orote airfield on Guam. Komachi stood out among his fellow pilots, both because of his stature—at just over six feet tall he was literally able to look down on most of his colleagues—and because he was widely considered to be an excellent combat pilot. But the young warrant officer also had a reputation as a daredevil and hellion who was willing to bend rules and cut corners if doing so would help him further improve his already impressive technical skills or, presumably, further increase his score.

  Although he shared Komachi’s rank and at twenty-four was close in age, Warrant Officer Ryoji Ohara was by all accounts an altogether different type of fighter pilot. Methodical, patient, and a technician in the best sense of the term, Ohara had first seen combat over New Guinea in 1942 and since that time had downed some sixteen enemy aircraft and earned the nickname “The Killer of Rabaul.” His presence at Oppama was a huge boon for the Yoko Ku because of his obvious skill in the cockpit and, apparently, because his calm and rational temperament had a moderating effect on his close friend Komachi.

  Though each of these pilots and several others in the Yoko Ku helped burnish the unit’s reputation as the “group of aces,” it was the near-legendary exploits of one man—Lieutenant (junior grade) Saburo Sakai—that largely provided the foundation for that sobriquet. Twenty-nine years old in August 1945, the diminutive Sakai had entered the navy in 1933 as an enlisted man, initially serving on surface warships before taking the examination for pilot training. Though it took him three tries to pass the test, he excelled during flight school, showing a natural aptitude for the tactics and techniques of fighter combat. He first put his skills to the test in the late 1930s during the Second Sino-Japanese War, and by December 1941 was already an ace. Sakai participated in the Japanese assault on Clark Field in the Philippines,20 and went on to see combat and earn promotion to officer status flying the A6M Zeke over the Netherlands East Indies and the Central Pacific. He initially joined the Yoko Ku in June 1944 and was among those pilots sent to Iwo Jima, and returned to Oppama with the survivors of that deployment. By that time Sakai had downed at least fifty enemy aircraft, but he was initially relegated to flight-instructor status owing to the many injuries he’d sustained thus far in the war—most notably damage to his eyes resulting from a 1942 encounter with the rear gunner of a U.S. Navy SBD Dauntless dive bomber. Nonetheless, he remained one of Yoko Ku’s most formidable pilots.21

  Though Oppama had been heavily battered by enemy aircraft—the airfield was officially referred to by the Allies as Target 90-7-298 and had been attacked repeatedly beginning in the fall of 194422—the mere presence of men like Sakai, Hagiri, Komachi, and the rest ensured that the Yoko Ku remained a serious threat. Ordered to largely avoid combat in order to conserve fuel and ammunition for the Ketsu-Go operation, the unit’s pilots—like those in other air-defense organizations throughout southern Japan—had been forced to listen in silence to increasingly shrill civilian complaints about the apparent ability of Allied aircraft to transgress the nation’s airspace seemingly at will. Though most of Yoko Ku’s aviators were apparently not of the diehard, Bushido-driven stripe, their frustration levels were high. They were among the finest fighter pilots in the Japanese military, and yet they were being told not do what they did best. It therefore undoubtedly came as a huge relief to the aviators when, within hours of the noon broadcast of Hirohito’s rescript, Yoko Ku commander Ibusuki announced that despite the ceasefire and until a formal surrender had been signed he would do nothing to prevent his men from undertaking “defensive actions” over their own base.23

  It was just the sort of decree Ibusuki’s men had been waiting for, and when combined with the Bushido-enhanced fervor among the 302nd Air Group pilots at Atsugi it would contribute directly to the chaos that would soon engulf Tony Marchione and the men of the 386th Bomb Squadron.

  PRESIDENT HARRY S. TRUMAN’S order to cease offensive action against Japanese forces—relayed to operational units worldwide late on August 14, Washington time—was followed within hours by a second presidential message announcing the appointment of General Douglas MacArthur to the post of Supreme Commander Allied Powers, a designation that would, in essence, make him the de facto ruler of Japan once the occupation began. Before MacArthur could assume that historically unprecedented role, of course, he had to ensure that the Japanese would actually stop fighting, lay down their arms, and prepare for a formal surrender. To do that, he would have to communicate directly with Tokyo.

  MacArthur first attempted that contact using the War Department communications facility in Manila. When there was no response, he tried a different tack, directing the Army Airways Communications System’s Manila office to send the initial message over the frequencies used for uncoded weather information. The station, call sign WXXU, sent message Z-500 in Morse code at 9:30 A.M. Manila time, addressing it to “The Japanese Emperor, the Japanese Imperial Government, [and] The Japanese Imperial General Headquarters.” After informing the recipients of his appointment, MacArthur said he was “empowered to arrange directly with the Japanese authorities for the cessation of hostilities at the earliest practicable date.” The remainder of the message directed the Japanese to designate a single radio station in Tokyo that would handle all f
urther communications—which would be undertaken only in English—and then, perhaps as a not-too-subtle way of informing Hirohito and his advisers of just who was now in charge, MacArthur closed with a command: “Upon receipt of this message acknowledge.”24

  That acknowledgment had not even been received when, less than thirty minutes after dispatching the first message, the communications clerks at WXXU were directed to send out another:

  Pursuant to the acceptance of the terms of the surrender of the Allied Powers by the Emperor of Japan, the Japanese Imperial Government and the Japanese Imperial Headquarters, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers [sic] hereby directs the immediate cessation of hostilities by the Japanese forces. The Supreme Commander for the Allied Forces is to be notified at once of the effective date and hour of such cessation of hostilities, whereupon the Allied forces will be directed to cease hostilities.25

  The message went on to direct, among other things, that the Japanese send “a competent representative” and his accompanying delegation of senior military and political advisers by air to the American field on Ie Shima, an island off Okinawa, for onward transport to Manila to discuss the details of Japan’s formal surrender and its subsequent occupation by Allied forces.

  Though overshadowed somewhat by the other elements of the message, the phrase “whereupon the Allied forces will be directed to cease hostilities” was later to have far more importance than MacArthur and his staff may have intended, for it implied to its recipients in Tokyo that the Allies could, and presumably would, continue their air and sea attacks on the Home Islands until all Japanese forces had formally surrendered. Given that millions of army troops remained under arms in Japan proper and throughout Southeast Asia and China—and that Japanese units were still engaging advancing Soviet formations in Manchuria—senior leaders in Tokyo could understandably have believed that the Allies might at any moment resume their aerial assault despite the de facto ceasefire.

  No doubt partly out of a desire to avoid any further atomic bombings, the Japanese government, still led by Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki, was quick to respond to MacArthur’s initial contact. Tokyo’s reply to the 9:30 A.M. message, received by WXXU in Manila barely two hours after its dispatch, provided the requested radio station information and marked the first direct contact between the Allies and Japan. What that first response from Tokyo did not do, however, was furnish the timetable MacArthur had demanded for the cessation of hostilities by all Japanese forces. We know that senior army and navy leaders were burning up their remaining communications links trying to notify far-flung commands of the surrender decision and secure their acknowledgment that they would cease all offensive action, but it wasn’t until the evening of Thursday, August 16, that Tokyo was able to give an increasingly impatient MacArthur the information he wanted. In a message received in Manila just after 8 P.M., the Japanese stated that just hours earlier Emperor Hirohito had issued an imperial order to all armed forces units, no matter their location, to “cease hostilities immediately.” In an oblique reference to the difficulties of both reaching remote units and overcoming some field commanders’ resistance to the idea of surrender, the message stated that it would take from forty-eight hours (in Japan proper) to as much as twelve days elsewhere for the emperor’s order to “produce full effect.”26

  It may have surprised MacArthur and some of his headquarters staffers to learn that not all elements of the Japanese armed forces were observing the ceasefire that had supposedly gone into effect the day before, but it wasn’t news to certain American aviators. Earlier that Thursday, even as their newly appointed supreme commander was waiting to hear from Tokyo, several Okinawa-based airmen—including B-32 crewmen from the 386th Bomb Squadron—had personally learned that some enemy military units apparently hadn’t yet decided to call it quits.

  DESPITE ITS SUSPENSION OF offensive action against Japanese forces, the August 15 ceasefire order was not intended to halt all Allied air activity over the Home Islands. Indeed, three important requirements—to ascertain whether the enemy was actually beginning to abide by the terms of the ceasefire, to identify airfields and ports that could accommodate incoming occupation units, and the particularly urgent need to locate camps holding Allied prisoners so that food and medical supplies could be airdropped to them—guaranteed that Navy carrier-based and Army Air Forces land-based photographic reconnaissance aircraft would overfly Japan with increasing frequency. The latter service’s machines were dedicated photo-recon variants of the twin-engine P-38 Lightning fighter (known as the F-5) and the B-24 heavy bomber (F-7), though the importance of the missions and the vast distances involved virtually guaranteed that the 386th Bomb Squadron’s long-legged Dominators would be called on to assist in the reconnaissance effort.

  That call came even before The Lady is Fresh and Hobo Queen II returned from their canceled night mission on August 15. A warning order from Far East Air Forces headquarters directed that two B-32s be dispatched on a recon mission as soon as possible on August 16, with the specific requirement to photograph the Japanese naval air stations at Katori and Konoike, both northeast of Tokyo, the former in Chiba Prefecture and the latter in Ibaraki.27 Both fields were known to host kamikaze units, and it was imperative for Allied intelligence to know whether the remaining aircraft based at each installation still constituted a threat.

  Though the B-32 had an internal fixture for a vertically mounted aerial camera in its central cabin, just aft of the ball turret, it was not a dedicated photo-reconnaissance platform and the 312th Bomb Group had no aerial photographers assigned to it. This issue had been dealt with just after the unit arrived on Okinawa, however, when the Yontan-based 20th Reconnaissance Squadron had been tapped to provide qualified personnel as needed. Whenever the B-32s undertook any mission that might broadly be categorized as “reconnaissance”—including the flights already conducted over the East China Sea and the Korea Strait—the Dominator’s normal complement was augmented by an officer and one or two enlisted men from the 20th Recon. The officer would use the aircraft’s bombsight to spot the area or object to be photographed, then trip the camera’s shutter remotely. The enlisted aerial photographer and, if present, his assistant (who was also a qualified aerial gunner) rode in the central fuselage to be close to the camera in order to change its film magazine or troubleshoot any technical problems.

  The general outline of the B-32s’ first sojourn to the Home Islands was developed by staffers at V Bomber Command headquarters, also on Okinawa. When the plan was delivered to 312th Bomb Group intelligence officer Captain William P. Barnes and his deputy, First Lieutenant Rudolph Pugliese, just after midnight on August 15–16 they noted that despite the announced ceasefire the planned route would allow the two Dominators to avoid most known Japanese air defenses during the 2,050-mile round-trip flight.28 After takeoff from Yontan the B-32s would head northeast for just under 1,000 miles, skirting the east coast of Chiba Prefecture to a point just off Cape Inubo. They would then turn almost directly west, complete their photo runs over the target, and reverse course to head back out to sea. Once clear of the Japanese coast the Dominators would turn southwest and start the long haul back to Okinawa. Though there were known early-warning radar sites at Shirahama on the southern tip of the Chiba Peninsula and at Choshi and Hiraiso, on the coast just east of the target airfields, Barnes and Pugliese were reasonably sure they could be avoided or “spoofed,” if necessary, by the radar countermeasures sets and “rope” carried aboard the B-32s.

  The son of Italian immigrant parents Emelia and Raffaelle (Ralph) Marchione, Anthony James Marchione was born in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, on August 12, 1925. Tony, as he was always known to family and friends, grew up dreaming of a career as a musician until war drew him far from home. (Courtesy Theresa Marchione Sell and Geraldine Marchione Young)

  In this informal family portrait taken while Tony was home on leave after basic training, the young airman-to-be stands between his parents. The older of his two sisters,
Theresa, is next to her mother while younger sister Geraldine kneels in the foreground. Both girls thought the world of their easygoing and supportive brother. (Courtesy Theresa Marchione Sell and Geraldine Marchione Young)

  Always fascinated by airplanes and the technical aspects of aviation—and knowing that he was certain to get drafted—on November 20, 1943, Tony joined the U.S. Army Air Forces. He is seen here in an official portrait taken soon after he completed flexible gunnery training at Tyndall Army Airfield, Florida, proudly wearing the wings of a qualified aerial gunner. (Courtesy Theresa Marchione Sell and Geraldine Marchione Young)

  In November 1944 Tony Marchione (kneeling, second from right) joined a B-24/F-7 crew led by First Lieutenant Robert W. Essig (standing, at left). The crew also included Rudolph Nudo and Frank Pallone (kneeling, second and third from left, respectively). The crew was initially bound for Italy but was diverted to Oklahoma for photo-reconnaissance training. (Viracola Collection)

  Upon arrival at Will Rogers Army Airfield, Bob Essig’s crew transitioned into the F-7B, likely the very aircraft shown here. The photo-reconnaissance version of the B-24 retained its full defensive armament but carried no bombs, its primary “weapons” being aerial cameras. Tony Marchione and his crewmates spent nearly three months at Will Rogers, and their “final exam” was a complex photo-mapping mission that took them from Oklahoma to Colorado and back. (USAF via Theresa Marchione Sell and Geraldine Marchione Young)

  Tony scans the surrounding sky from the waist-gun position of an F-7B during a training flight from Clark Field soon after he and the other members of Bob Essig’s crew joined the 20th Combat Mapping Squadron in the Philippines in May 1945. (Frank Pallone Sr./Viracola Collection)