Last to Die
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Morison, Samuel Elliot. The Rising Sun in the Pacific, 1931 to April 1942. Volume Three in the series History of United States Naval Operations in World War II. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2010.
Nanney, James S. Army Air Forces Medical Services in World War II. Air Force History and Museums Program, Albert F. Simpson Historical Research Center, Maxwell AFB, AL, 1998.
Newton, Wesley P., and Calvin F. Senning, et al. USAF Credits for the Destruction of Enemy Aircraft, World War II (USAF Historical Study No. 85). Albert F. Simpson Historical Research Center, Maxwell AFB, AL, 1978.
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Peattie, Mark R. Sunburst: The Rise of Japanese Naval Air Power, 1909–1941. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2002.
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——— and Martin Caidin and Fred Saito. Samurai! The Unforgettable Saga of Japan’s Greatest Fighter Pilot. New York: Nelson/Doubleday, 1978.
Sakaida, Henry. Winged Samurai: Saburo Sakai and the Zero Fighter Pilots. Mesa, AZ: Champlin Fighter Museum Press, 1985.
———. Imperial Japanese Navy Aces 1937–45. Botley, Oxford: Osprey Publishing Ltd., 1998.
Smith, Jim, and Malcolm McConnell. The Last Mission: The Secret History of World War II’s Final Battle. New York: Broadway Books, 2002.
Steere, Edward. The Graves Registration Service in World War II. No. 21 in the series Quartermaster Corps Historical Studies. Historical Section, Office of the Quartermaster General, Washington, DC, 1951.
———, and Thayer M. Boardman. Final Disposition of World War II Dead, 1945–1951. No. 4 in Series II of Quartermaster Corps Historical Studies. Historical Section, Office of the Quartermaster General, Washington, DC, 1957.
Sturzebecker, Russell L. The Roarin’ 20’s: A History of the 312th Bombardment Group. Kennet Square, PA: KNA Press, 1976.
Tagaya, Osamu. Imperial Japanese Naval Aviator, 1937–1945. Botley, Oxford: Osprey Publishing Ltd. 2003.
Troiad: Yearbook of the 1943 Senior Class, Pottstown High School. Pottstown, PA: The Feroe Press, 1943.
U.S. Army Center of Military History. Reports of General MacArthur: The Campaigns of General MacArthur in the Pacific, Volume I. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1966.
Watson, Mark Skinner. Chief of Staff: Prewar Plans and Preparations, in the series United States Army in World War II: The War Department. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1950.
Weintraub, Stanley. The Last Great Victory: The End of World War II, July/August 1945. New York: Truman Talley Books, 1995.
Werneth, Ron. Beyond Pearl Harbor: The Untold Stories of Japan’s Naval Airmen. Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing Ltd., 2008.
Werrell, Kenneth. Blankets of Fire: U.S. Bombers over Japan During World War II. Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 1978.
Wolk, Herman S. Cataclysm: General Hap Arnold and the Defeat of Japan. Denton, TX: University of North Texas Press, 2010.
Yoshimura, Akira. Zero Fighter. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996.
Zaloga, Steven. Defense of Japan 1945. Botley, Oxford: Osprey Publishing Ltd., 2010.
Newspaper Articles
Argus Leader (Sioux Falls, SD), “Japs Attack U.S. Planes Over Tokyo.” August 18, 1945.
Charlotte Observer (Charlotte, NC), “Charlotte Pilot Attacked While Flying Over Tokyo.” August 19, 1945.
Daily News (Los Angeles, CA), “New Jap Attack, American Flyer Killed Over Tokyo.” August 18, 1945.
Fresno Bee (Fresno, CA), “Zeros Attack B32s Over Tokyo, Killing Yank, Wounding Two.” August 18, 1945.
Navy News (Guam, Mariana Islands), “Flyer Killed As Nips Jump Photo Plane.” August 20, 1945.
New York Times (New York, NY), “U.S. Airman Killed By Foe Over Tokyo; Big B-32 Crippled.” August 19, 1945.
———, “Saburo Sakai is Dead at 84; War Pilot Embraced Foes.” October 8, 2000.
Pottstown Mercury (Pottstown, PA), “Sgt. Marchione Killed by Japs After Surrender.” August 30, 1945.
———, “Air Medal Posthumously Awarded to Pottstown’s Last Casualty of War.” April 26, 1945.
———, “Full Military Rites Accorded Soldier Killed After V-J Day.” March 22, 1945.
Star-Telegram (Houston, TX), “Jap Planes Attack B-32s on Photo Trip.” August 17, 1945.
———, “Japs Again Attack B-32s; Texans Bag 2.” August 18, 1945.
Transcript-Telegram (Holyoke, MA), “Japs Hit U.S Planes, Kill 1 Yank.” August 18, 1945.
———, “Holyoker Injured in Last Plane Hit Over Tokyo.” August 19, 1945.
———, “Sergt [sic] Lacharite Wounded Four Days after Japs Fell.” August 19, 1945.
———, “Wounded Long After V-J Day.” August 30, 1945.
———, “Airman Hit Four Days After V-J Is Expected Home Soon.” September 15, 1945.
Monographs
Huber, Thomas M. “Japan’s Battle of Okinawa, April–June 1945.” Leavenworth Papers No. 18, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, KS, 1990.
MacEachin, Douglas J. “The Final Months of War With Japan: Signals Intelligence, U.S. Invasion Planning, and the A-Bomb Decision.” Center for the Study of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, Washington, DC, 1998.
Military History Section, “Homeland Defense Naval Operations, Part III, Dec 41–Aug 45,” No. 124 in the series “Japanese Monographs.” HQs., U.S. Army Forces Far East, 1949.
———, “Homeland Air Defense Operations Record,” No. 147 in the series “Japanese Monographs.” HQs., U.S. Army Forces Far East, 1948.
———, “Air Defense of the Homeland,” No. 23 in the series “Japanese Monographs.” HQs., U.S. Army Forces Far East, 1956.
Rodman, Captain Matthew K. “A War of Their Own: Bombers over the Southwest Pacific.” Air University Press, Maxwell AFB, AL, 2005.
Magazine/Journal Articles
Hasegawa, Yoshiaki. “The Last Air Superiority Group Has Yet to Surrender.” Maru Extra, Volume 79, October 1981.
Hata, Dr. Ikuhiko. “The Combat of August 15: The Last of the Japanese Air Force” (Hachi Gatsu Ju Go Nichi No Ku Nippon Kugun No Saigo). Bungei Shunju, Tokyo, 1978: 250–255.
Komachi, Sadamu. “Becoming an Unusual Flying Ace After August 15.” Maru Extra, Volume 62, December 1978.
Sakaida, Henry. “Honor or Dishonor?” Banzai: The Newsletter for the Collector of Japanese Militaria, February 1991: 43.
“Surrender on the Air.” Military Review, Vol. 26, No. 2, May 1946.
Whittaker, Wayne. “Here’s the B-32, Our Newest Super Bomber.” Popular Mechanics, September 1945: 12–15.
Y’Blood, William T. “The Second String.” Journal of the American Aviation Historical Society, Summer 1968: 80–92.
———. “Unwanted and Unloved: The Consolidated B-32.” Air Power History, Fall 1995: 59–71.
“The Outlaw War.” Newsweek, Aug. 27, 1945.
NOTES
Chapter 1: Son and Gunner
1. Details of Marchione family history are drawn primarily from interviews conducted with Theresa Marchione Sell in 1997 and 2013, and with her sister Geraldine Marchione Young in 2013. Hereafter cited as Marchione Sisters Interview. Other details as noted.
2. At that time high school in most parts of Pennsylvania was three, rather than four, years: tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grades. Ninth grade was considered part of junior high.
3. Flexible Gunnery Training in the AAF, pp. 11–13. Hereafter cited as Flexible Gunnery Training.
4. A demand-flow mas
k, as its name implies, provides oxygen when the wearer inhales. This type of mask was superior to the continuous-flow masks—those that continuously “pushed” oxygen to the wearer—that had been standard in the Army Air Forces until early 1944.
5. As a young soldier, the author learned all too well that when attempting to field strip a “Ma Deuce” it is imperative to ensure that the weapon’s bolt is all the way forward before removing the backplate. If the bolt is to the rear, the machine gun’s driving spring rod can shoot out the back of the gun like a harpoon, an event that is certain to lessen a soldier’s popularity with his comrades—if it doesn’t impale the soldier himself.
6. Flexible Gunnery Training, p. 44.
7. Letter from Tony Marchione to his parents, April 5, 1945.
8. Tony’s class was the second to the last B-24 CCT class to graduate from Davis-Monthan; in January 1945 the 223rd shifted its focus to the training of B-29 Superfortress crews.
9. Letter of April 5.
10. “Just for You,” written March 27, 1945.
11. Details of this and Tony Marchione’s other 20th CMS combat missions provided by Chuck Varney, webmaster of the 20th CMS memorial page.
12. The modern names for the cities are, respectively, Shantou (in Guangdong Province) and Xiamen (in Fujian Province).
13. Letter from Tony Marchione to “Don,” written July 29, 1945.
14. Final Mission Report, Mission 190-Z-1, 9 July 1945.
15. Letter of July 29.
16. Letter from Tony Marchione to “Dick,” written August 15, 1945.
17. Ibid. In this sense “PFC” doesn’t stand for the Army rank of private first class, it stands for “proud f***king civilian.”
Chapter 2: The Second-String Super Bomber
1. Counted from the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, rather than from the United States’ official declaration of war against Japan the following day.
2. Flying Buccaneers: The Illustrated Story of Kenney’s Fifth Air Force, p. 9. Hereafter cited as Flying Buccaneers.
3. Fifth Bomber Command had originally been activated in the Philippines in late 1941, saw brief service in Java before its fall to the Japanese, and was essentially reconstituted by Kenney in Australia, at which time the “Fifth” was changed to the Roman numeral “V.”
4. MacArthur’s Airman, p. 175. Formed on New Caledonia in December 1942, Thirteenth Air Force had moved on to the Solomons. Seventh Air Force had originated in 1940 as the Army Air Corps’ Hawaiian Air Force, and was redesignated in February 1942.
5. World War II: The War Against Japan, pp. 506–507. This is Chapter 23 in the volume American Military History.
6. The historian was Dr. James Lea Cate of the University of Chicago, and he expressed the opinion in The Pacific—Matterhorn to Nagasaki (June 1944 to August 1945), p. 12. Hereafter cited as Matterhorn to Nagasaki.
7. General Kenney Reports: A Personal History of the Pacific War, pp. 529–530. Hereafter cited as General Kenney Reports.
8. Ibid., p. 531. This exchange is also dealt with in MacArthur’s Airman, pp. 221–222.
9. General Kenney Reports, p. 532.
10. Ibid.
11. The Army Air Corps was redesignated the Army Air Forces in June 1941.
12. Details on the development and testing of the B-32 are drawn largely from the chapter “The VLR Project” in The Pacific: Matterhorn to Nagasaki; pp. 208–211 of The Army Air Forces in World War II, Vol. V, Men and Planes; and A History of Air Proving Ground Command Testing of the B-32, September 1944 to October 1945.
13. The “X” designates an experimental or developmental design.
14. Production B-32s were powered by four 2,200-horsepower Wright R-3350–23A Cyclones, a development of the earlier 3350-5, and retained the reversible-pitch propellers on the two inboard engines.
15. The company’s San Diego plant produced only the three prototype XB-32s and one combat-equipped example; all the remaining B-32s and TB-32s that were actually completed were built in Fort Worth.
16. The aircraft’s name was officially changed back to Terminator late in the war, but the change was widely ignored and the B-32 has gone down in history as the Dominator. That name that will be used throughout this volume.
17. Author interview with Frank R. Cook. Hereafter cited as Cook Interview.
18. The parachute-retarded fragmentation bomb, or parafrag, allowed attack aircraft to drop accurately at extremely low altitudes and relatively high speeds, thus minimizing the aviators’ exposure to both the bomb’s blast and to enemy ground fire.
19. Also referred to as “demolition bombs,” these non–armor piercing weapons were normally fuzed for immediate, rather than delayed, detonation, and were intended for use against large concrete-reinforced structures such as factories, warehouses, barracks, bridges, and so on.
20. Details on this first combat strike are derived from Narrative Mission Report, Mission 149-A-11, 29 May 1945.
21. Cited in The Roarin’ 20’s: A History of the 312th Bombardment Group, U.S. Army Air Force, p. 208. Hereafter cited as Roarin’ 20’s.
22. Author interview with Ferdinand L. Svore. Hereafter cited as Svore Interview.
23. Author interview with Rudolph Pugliese. Hereafter cited as Pugliese Interview.
24. The island should not be confused with Luzon’s Bataan Peninsula, west of Manila, the site of the infamous 1942 death march in which Japanese troops brutalized and murdered American and Filipino prisoners of war.
25. Narrative Mission Report, Mission 163-A-6, 12 June 1945.
26. Now Taiwan.
27. Koshun is now known as Hengchun, and it is still the site of Taiwan’s southernmost airport.
28. Gremlins are mythological sprites rumored to cause mechanical problems aboard aircraft.
29. Narrative Mission Report, Mission 164-A-13, 13 June 1945.
30. Taito was the Japanese name for the town; after World War II it reverted to its Chinese name, T’aitung.
31. “Ack-ack” was the usual term for AA fire in the Pacific Theater; “flak”—a contraction of the German Flugzeugabwehrkanone, or aircraft defense cannon—was used in the European Theater. Narrative Mission Report, Mission 166-A-6, 15 June 1945.
32. Narrative Mission Report, Mission 167-A-7, 16 June 1945.
33. Today’s Leizhou Peninsula in Guandong Province; Haikou on Hainan; and, of course, Vietnam.
34. The Beinan River is known in modern Taiwan as the Peinan Hsi; Kiirun is present day Keelung, and Shoka is now Changhua.
35. Hobo Queen II could only carry nine bombs because she was still fitted with the auxiliary bomb-bay fuel tank she’d needed for the previous night’s long-range shipping-interdiction mission, from which she returned just two hours before the seventh mission’s scheduled takeoff time. Why 528 carried only nine bombs rather than the twelve carried by The Lady is Fresh is unclear.
36. Narrative Mission Report, Mission 170-A-3, 19 June 1945.
37. Today the bustling commercial port of Su-ao.
38. Modern Taimali.
39. Narrative Mission Report, Mission 171-A-3, 20 June 1945.
40. Modern Pingtung.
41. The word salvo has two meanings in terms of World War II aerial bombardment. In the first sense it simply means releasing all bombs with minimum intervals between them, essentially “dumping” them. In such a case the bombs are armed and will explode as intended. The other meaning, relating to hung-up bombs that fail to drop when the bombardier presses the release switch, means that the shackle to which the bomb is attached in the bomb bay is itself jettisoned. In such a case the safety wire is not yanked free as in a normal drop, meaning that the bomb never arms and does not explode on impact. In the B-32 both the bombardier and the pilot could salvo the bombs.
42. Narrative Mission Report, Mission 173-A-3, 22 June 1945.
43. The Canton River is today known as the Pearl River, and Canton itself is now Guangzhou.
44. Now Sanzao Dao in Guangdong Pr
ovince.
45. Narrative Mission Report, Mission 175-A-6, 23/24 June 1945. Additional details from Svore Interview, op. cit.
46. Now Yilan City.
47. Narrative Mission Report, Mission 176-A-1, 25 June 1945.
48. The representative from the Office of the Assistant Chief of Air Staff for Operations, Commitments and Requirements (OC&R).
49. This brief summary of the three reports and their conclusions is based on, respectively: Cook’s Combat Test of the B-32 Airplane, July 17, 1945; McElroy’s Report on Special Project 98269S, July 2, 1945; and Britt’s Report to USAAF Proving Ground Command on the Combat Test of the B-32 Airplane, August 2, 1945.
50. Modern Kaohsiung City.
51. Narrative Unit History, 386th Bombardment Squadron, July–August 1945.
52. Two kamikaze units, the 951st Air Group and the Nansei Shoto Air Group, are known to have been on Okinawa at the time of the U.S. invasion. Although it is unclear if either actually used Yontan before its destruction by retreating Japanese forces, advancing U.S. forces discovered five Yokosuka MXY7 “Ohka” rocket-propelled suicide planes when they overran the field on the first day of the invasion.
53. The main Japanese forces defending Okinawa may have abandoned Yontan without a fight, but on the night of May 24 commandos of the IJA’s Giretsu Kuteitai airborne special operations unit attacked the airfield, killing two soldiers and destroying nine aircraft before themselves being killed.
54. Issued jointly by the United States, the United Kingdom, and Nationalist China on July 26, 1945, the declaration called for the unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces. Continued resistance would result in the “prompt and utter destruction” of those forces.
55. Narrative Mission Report, Mission 225-A-6, 15 August 1945.
56. Narrative Mission Report, Mission 226-A-6, 15 August 1945.
57. Narrative Mission Report, Mission 227-A-6, 16 August 1945.
Chapter 3: Crisis in Tokyo
1. In keeping with Japanese tradition, Hirohito is today commonly referred to in Japan by his posthumous name, Emperor Showa.
2. The phrase regarding the unconditional surrender of Japan’s armed forces was a modification of the language used in the 1943 Cairo Declaration, in which the United States, Great Britain, and China had called for Japan’s unconditional surrender. The alteration was made, at least in part, to persuade Japan’s senior civilian leaders (and quite possibly the emperor himself) that the nation’s traditional institutions, including the monarchy, would remain intact.