What the Japanese saw in China was not just opportunity. They saw a resource they could scarcely live without. Japan’s population had been growing since the turn of the century, until the home islands were filled with more than four hundred people per square mile. At the same time, the country’s military economy was faltering, and the American stock market collapse had eviscerated the demand for high-dollar exports like silk. The combination of a growing population and a sinking economy was devastating. With labor strikes mounting in Tokyo, and food and land in short supply, Japanese political leaders gazed achingly across the sea toward the lush, fertile, and largely open Chinese mainland. As Iris Chang explained in The Rape of Nanking, “China was twentieth-century Japan’s manifest destiny.”
But with the Japanese assault on China came a defensive mandate: the greatest threat to the imperial project was not Chinese resistance but the massive US naval fleet parked on the Pacific. To American leaders, the Japanese expansion represented both a military and an economic threat, and by the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the carnage may have been shocking, but the war itself was not. US commanders had been planning for it all year, flying spy missions over the Japanese islands, patrolling the region with submarines, and fortifying US bases in anticipation of trouble. All of which made the strike on Pearl Harbor seem sensible to Japan: if war with the United States was inevitable, then the best option was to strike first, strike hard, and keep striking, so the Americans stayed on their heels.
The Japanese advantage held into 1942, as imperial forces followed Pearl Harbor with a race across the Pacific: northeast to the Aleutian islands of Attu and Kiska near Alaska, southeast to Tarawa and the Solomon Islands, and southwest across a constellation of larger islands—Sumatra, Java, Borneo, Celebes, New Guinea, and the Philippines, which together comprised about twice as much land as Germany, France, and Italy combined. Some of those captured islands were rich with natural resources, while others, like the diminutive atolls of Truk, Yap, and Palau, served mainly as a strategic buffer. Within six months of Pearl Harbor, the Japanese controlled a radius of three thousand miles in some directions, across a string of disparate islands. Any effort to restrain the empire would require American forces to beat a path through those islands and the garrisons stationed on them.
Suddenly, the clunky, clumsy B-24 was essential. Whatever its flaws, the Liberator was the only heavy bomber capable of crossing the vast distances between many Japanese islands. As US forces prepared to push across the Pacific, production of the B-24 surged like never before. Soon there were assembly plants in San Diego, Dallas, Fort Worth, and Tulsa—but none would symbolize the rise of the Liberator like the facility near Detroit known as Willow Run.
Managed by the Ford Motor Company, Willow Run was in some respects a greater engineering feat than the planes it produced. It was the largest factory in the world, spread across 3.5 million square feet, with 28,855 windows and 152,000 fluorescent lights. The assembly line traveled so far that, when it reached the edge of the county, designers built a fifty-foot-diameter lazy Susan to rotate the line and avoid paying extra taxes. As American forces drove into the Pacific in 1943, the pace of production at Willow Run doubled, then doubled again. In January 1943, the plant produced 31 B-24s. In February, it was 75. In March, 104 and rising.
To keep the plant humming, Ford hired workers in unprecedented number. When there weren’t enough local men, they recruited throughout the region, and when the region came up short, they offered moving incentives to men as far away as California and the Deep South, building dormitories to house them and a shopping mall to serve them. When there still weren’t enough men, the plant began hiring women, and at the same wage. Soon, there were twelve thousand salaried women on the line, and the plant’s output continued surging: to 400 planes a month, then 500, then 650.
Pilots and crews would arrive at the factory, wait for a plane to come off the line, and then climb aboard and fly the eighteen-ton behemoth off to war. The most famous pilot in the world stopped by from time to time. Charles Lindbergh had, like Henry Ford, opposed American involvement in the European war, and he was regarded in many circles as a Nazi sympathizer. He had resigned his own rank in the Air Corps to protest US intervention, but in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, he had been calling for an assault on the “Asiatic intruder.”
Unmatched as a pilot, Lindbergh toured American airfields and manufacturing plants to offer advice on everything from airplane design to combat tactics. “The Willow Run factory is a stupendous thing,” he wrote in his journal after a visit to the plant. “It is a sort of Grand Canyon of a mechanized world.” As for the lumbering B-24, Lindbergh was less enamored. “I am not overly impressed with the qualities of this bomber,” he wrote. “When I flew it for a few minutes in the air, I found the controls to be the stiffest and heaviest I have ever handled. Also, I think the gun installations are inadequate and the armor plate poorly installed. I would certainly hate to be in a bomber of this type if a few pursuit planes caught up with it.”
Yet as the war with Japan raged on, production of the B-24 would outpace not only the B-17, but all other planes. No other multi-engine aircraft had ever been manufactured in such numbers, nor has any since. Though assembly of the Liberator ended with the war, in just five years of high-intensity production, more than 18,000 models were built. By comparison, fewer than 13,000 B-17s were manufactured, and fewer than 4,000 B-29s. In forty years of production, only about 1,500 Boeing 747s have been assembled.
A 1945 advertisement for Ford boasted of Willow Run: “Raw material went in one end, planes came out the other.” A newsreel crowed, “Relentless. Unceasing. On time. As methodical as a great river fed by its tributaries.”
By the dawn of 1944, it was a river rushing toward the Pacific, and tiny islands like Palau.
—
WITH SO MANY BOMBERS coming off the production line, the Army needed more men to fly them, and engineers in Nevada set about revamping a sleepy airfield in Tonopah into a massive B-24 training school. With $3 million in new runways, roads, barracks, and hangars, it would be the job of Tonopah to manufacture airmen as quickly as Willow Run produced planes.
They arrived in Tonopah from all across the country, having finished specialty programs like the navigation school at Selman Field, Louisiana, or the gunnery school in Laredo, Texas. But it was in Tonopah that a cluster of ten random men became a crew, bringing their skills together for the first time. Day after day, they roared across the Nevada desert in training. They learned to fly close, in a box formation called “javelin-down,” while spitting bullets from the guns in their nose, tail, waist, ball, and top turrets. After a day of flight, they would find their way back to base by triangulating from the nearby mountains, or by following a lone radio signal, or by charting the night stars.
For many of the men, those stars were the only familiar sight. Born in the 1920s, they had come of age in an endless depression, and many had never left home before or had any idea where they were going. Their uniforms would be their first suits; their barracks, their first homes with lights and plumbing.
At twenty-five, Jimmie Doyle was one of the oldest men in his crew. He came from the flatlands of West Texas, raised by a single dad who’d left his mom and four siblings in Arkansas years earlier, heading across the High Plains with only Jimmie at his side. Growing up in the heart of the Dust Bowl, Jimmie had gone to work with his father—helping to lay stone walls and build fences on the Llano Estacado caprock. They spent one summer pouring a road base for Route 180 between the towns of Lamesa and Snyder, staking the shoulder with wooden rails and pouring in stone and crushed lime, then hitching up horses to drag a chain across the top. At night, they bedded down with the animals, cooking over a campfire with the other men.
Jimmie’s hands were calloused and strong but he still had the lanky physique of a teen. His blond hair was perpetually tossed over a boyish face of freckles. O
ne day at gunnery school in Laredo, he was struggling with a heavy pack, the blisters bleeding on his feet, when his wiry frame gave out. He felt a surge under his arms as another private hoisted him up, carrying him down the field until his strength returned. After that, Jimmie and Johnny Moore were rarely apart. They bunked together, ate together, and stayed up late talking. Jimmie told Johnny about life on the plains, the shade of the elm trees he longed for, and the little boy, Tommy, he’d left behind with Myrle, the only woman he’d ever loved. Johnny told Jimmie about the sultry woods of Arkansas, a place that Jimmie no longer remembered, but where his mom and siblings still lived.
Johnny was five years younger than Jimmie, but he was a head taller and laced with muscle. His dark brown hair scooped into a swirl, and he beamed the easy sideways smile of a lifelong country boy. Growing up on the Des Arc Bayou, he was the youngest of nine kids and the second son, but he was named for his father. Most folks in Des Arc called him John Junior. His dad and sister called him Bud. In the service, he was Johnny.
Life in Des Arc hadn’t changed much in a century or two. Johnny’s dad woke early each morning for a bowl of corn mush and a mug of hot water, then headed out to fish the hidden corners of the White River, bagging catfish and buffalo fish as big as fifty pounds. In the evening, he dragged them home to put on ice and ship to Saint Louis. When Johnny was little, he stayed home with his mom, Addie, a husky, whistling figure who tended the chickens and milked the cow and raised fields of cotton and corn beside the jumble of beans and peas and potatoes in the household garden. The older kids sometimes helped Addie do laundry in the outdoor washtub, or hang the clothes to dry on a line between trees. When things got busy, Johnny hung by his sister Melba, who was six years older. “He was my pet,” Melba said. “He was my baby. He was my doll.”
In place of toys, Johnny had cousins and nephews to race and chase through woodland acres. Two of his sisters were so much older that one had a son, Doyle, who was just ten months younger than Johnny, and another had a boy named Charles born just two years after that—the year the White River climbed so high in Des Arc that it breached the pages of the New York Times. By the time the three boys were old enough to walk, they were running. They’d skinny-dip in the river behind the cemetery and climb up high in the persimmon trees to ride the branches to the ground. When school began, they made the two-mile walk along railroad tracks by the river, tossing rocks into the water to see who could make the biggest splash. The year Johnny turned thirteen, the river surged over the banks again, sweeping through the first floor of the house. Johnny was surging that year, too: In high school, he was six feet tall, with size 11½ shoes. His hands were strong enough to crack a walnut.
On weekends, Johnny and his dad would slip away together, crawling up the malarial gulches of the river to hook fish. Johnny would clean them with a cleaver he’d cut from a railroad plate. Back home, he rounded up his cousins and nephews to smack a baseball or hurl a football until they were all falling down. Then they’d clamber into someone’s kitchen to belt down beans and broth. Once a year, on the Fourth of July, the town filled with farmers, everyone converging to park their wagons by the river and bustle into Caskey’s Hardware, or chop a hunk of cheese from the block on the counter at Robinson’s Mercantile. At dusk, they drifted back to the waterfront, eating together at long picnic tables and sleeping below their wagons under lilting cricketsong.
When Johnny got a football scholarship to junior college, he trundled off to spend four days each week on campus. Then he’d hurry home for long weekends, demanding a pile of fresh biscuits from whichever sister he found first—Melba, Mary, Flossie, it didn’t matter; they all had Addie’s recipe.
One day at Melba’s, Johnny spotted a new girl across the road. She had downturned eyes and a broad, open face, and she’d just moved with her family from the little town of Hazen. Her dad had a job in the rice fields. Dirty work, but it paid. By summer, Johnny and Katherine Price were dating. By fall, they were hinting at marriage.
Whatever passion some men had for war, Johnny had none. The thought of combat was alien to him, and the thought of leaving Katherine worse. When the draft notice came, he handed it to his mother and she ran away. His dad’s face turned red and he swore he’d never vote for a Democrat again. Johnny’s sisters reassured him. “It’s only a while,” Melba said. “You’ll be back before you miss us.” But Melba knew it wasn’t true, and Johnny knew it, too. On the last day before he shipped out, he stood with Melba on the front porch. They looked across the road to Katherine’s house and the woods beyond.
“Melba,” Johnny said quietly in a voice she’d never forget, “I don’t think I’m ever going to see you again.”
“Oh,” she snapped, “don’t say that, Johnny.”
“Well, I just don’t think I will,” he said.
Johnny met Jimmie at gunnery school, and then they were off to Fresno. He married Katherine on a visit home, then he was in Tonopah.
Most of the men on Johnny’s crew were about his age, but they came from places he couldn’t imagine. Earl Yoh was a gunner from the snowy plains of northwest Ohio, one of thirteen kids crammed into a house with no electricity or plumbing. At night, Earl and his family would gather by the downstairs fireplace to play records on a windup Victrola, or else they’d tune in to the battery-powered radio for episodes of The Shadow. Then the kids would trudge upstairs to the cavernous second floor, with no insulation or dividing walls. The girls took one end of the room, the boys the other—except in the deepest part of winter, when they might burrow together under a mountain of blankets to stay warm.
Earl played baseball and basketball well enough to be named the “Best Boy Athlete” in his yearbook, but with soft brown hair and wide blue eyes, high cheekbones and a chiseled chin, he spent nearly as much time under the stage lights of the auditorium—starring in theater, the chorus, and the glee club, and singing his way into the hearts of local girls. In the annual “Will” section of the yearbook, his classmates wrote, “Earl Yoh leaves his way with women to Wayne Zielke”—a junior who, judging by photos, must have been grateful for the help.
Leland Price happened to grow up just a few miles from Earl on the banks of the Auglaize River, where his grandparents, aunts, and uncles shared a large house on a forty-acre farm, while Leland and his parents lived in a smaller home nearby. At five feet six and 130 pounds, he was small but not slight; his powerful shoulders and arms made him a natural fit for the cramped turrets of a B-24.
In Tonopah, they all bunked together, ate together, and raced together into the sky. Each time they lifted off, Johnny felt the pressure building in his nose, throbbing as they gained altitude until the blood came trickling down from an old football injury. He’d try to pin his nostrils shut, but never had much luck, laughing to the other boys that, damnit, he’d been hit. Then he’d belly up to the waist gun, raining hell on the desert floor.
“I’ve been on two gunnery missions this week and fired 500 rounds,” he wrote to his sister Mary in March. “I almost shot a hole in the tail of the plane. Scared the heck out of me!”
After dark, the boys would retreat to their barracks—enlisted guys playing cards and drinking beer together, while the officers disappeared into separate quarters. Only one of the officers routinely visited the enlisted men. He was the navigator, Frank Arhar, a massive kid from a coal-mining family near Johnstown, Pennsylvania, who loomed even over Johnny at six feet five, with a jutting jaw and short hair parted down the middle. At navigation school on Selman Field, he’d been issued a small booklet that he carried with him. It gave instructions to officers on how to relate to enlisted men. “If you do not have a sense of humor, cultivate one,” it said. “Lack of it is worse than a disease. A disease affects only the person who has it, whereas a lack of a sense of humor is a wet blanket over all with whom you come in contact. Do not be afraid to laugh with your men. It will only go to show that you are human, and will add a l
ittle cement to the bonds that hold them to you.”
More than any other officer the men had known, Frank Arhar lived those instructions. He would join them for a hand of cards and a drink and a laugh, and in time they gave him the nickname “Big Stoop,” after the good-natured giant in a popular 1940 serial film. When they reached the war zone and got their own plane, they said, they would name it Big Stoop, and they would be the Big Stoop crew.
That day was coming. Each morning it seemed another crew departed Tonopah, and soon it would be their turn. They would fly to Hamilton Field, California, pick up a gleaming silver B-24J, and head west, to war.
—
THE WAR WAS PICKING UP. As the Big Stoop boys finished their training in Tonopah, Mussolini was hiding in the strongholds of northern Italy, Allied raids were leveling German positions in Belgium and France, and final preparations were under way for the landing at Normandy. But if the war in Europe was reaching an apex, the Pacific was at a crossroads of its own.
Since the beginning of the drive in 1942, US forces in the Pacific had formed along two primary lines of attack. The northern line, led by Admiral Chester Nimitz of the Navy, was pushing through the Central Pacific toward Taiwan. The southern line, led by the Army’s General Douglas MacArthur, looped through Fiji and the Solomon Islands, and across New Guinea toward the Philippines.
If the two-column advance had some tactical benefits, they weren’t entirely deliberate. Mostly, the twin approach reflected two different strategies for the war. The northern column embodied the Navy’s conviction that the best way to reach Japan was in a relatively straight shot. But in the Army, MacArthur was just as adamant that only the southern track would work. Driving through the Philippines, he insisted, was a strategic and a moral necessity. Strategic because the islands offered a choke point to stop the flow of oil from Japanese refineries, including those of Balikpapan, Borneo, known as “the Ploesti of the East.” But the southern route was also a moral necessity, MacArthur believed, because two years earlier he’d been driven from the islands himself and promised, “I shall return.” Any strategy that failed to keep that promise was a betrayal of America’s good name—not to mention his own.
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