Unbeknownst to them, Japan had passed the Enemy Airmen’s Act on August 13, 1942. This ex post facto law held that anyone who bombed or strafed nonmilitary targets would be sentenced to death. All eight Flyboys had received the death sentence, but the emperor in his “benevolence” had commuted the sentences of the other five to life imprisonment. Those spared were not to be treated as ordinary prisoners of war but as guilty of war crimes. “As war criminals,” an army message stated, “their treatment shall not be that accorded ordinary prisoners of war [and] even in the event of an exchange of war prisoners they may not be repatriated to the United States forces.” So now it was official Spirit Warrior policy that Flyboys be killed.
Japanese army jailers gave Dean, Bill, and Harold pens and paper to write their last letters home.
Dean, too weak to even stand, wrote to his mom in Dallas: “I hardly know what to say. They have just told me that I am liable to execution. I can hardly believe it. . . . I am a prisoner of war and I thought I would be taken care of until the end of the war. . . . I did everything that the Japanese have asked me to do and tried to cooperate with them because I knew that my part in the war was over.”
Bill wrote his widowed mother back in Darlington: “Don’t let this get you down. Just remember that God will make everything right, and that I will see you again in the hereafter.” In a separate letter to his fiancé, Farrow wrote, “You are, to me, the only girl that would have meant the completion of my life” and thanked her “for bringing to my life a deep, rich love for a fine girl.” He added, “Please write and comfort Mom, because she will need you—she loves you, and thinks you are a fine girl.”
Harold wrote his widowed father, “If I have inherited anything since I became of age, I will give it to you, and Dad, I want you to know that I love you and may God bless you. I want you to know that I died fighting for my country like a soldier.”
After the war these letters were found in Japanese military files. The prison officials never mailed them.
On the morning of October 15, 1942, the three condemned Flyboys were handcuffed and driven to Shanghai’s Public Cemetery Number One. Overnight, carpenters had constructed three wooden crosses, which were now embedded twenty feet apart from one another in the newly-mown grass.
Prison warden Tatsuta approached the three. “I told them that Christ was born and died on the cross and you on your part must die on the cross, but when you are executed—when you die on the cross you will be honored as gods, and I told them to pray and they made a sign which resembled the sign of the cross and they prayed. I told them, ‘You will soon be bound to the crosses and when this is done it is a fact that it is a form that man’s faith and cross shall be united. Therefore, have faith.’ Then they smiled and said they understood very well. Then I asked them if they had any more to say and they said they had nothing more to say. That was all that was said.”
Bill, Dean, and Harold were led to the crosses and made to kneel with their backs against the wood. Guards removed the handcuffs and tied the boys’ wrists to the crosspieces. Their faces were covered with white cloth. The guards marked black Xs on the cloths to designate the middle of their foreheads.
The firing squad stood twenty feet away, next to a Shinto altar where incense burned. “Attention!” the commander barked. “Face the target!”
Three shots rang out. Three Flyboys’ heads jerked backward. Blood spouted, soaking their white blindfolds red.
Four days later, Japan broadcast, in English, that “the cruel, inhuman and beastlike American pilots who . . . dropped incendiaries and bombs on non-military hospitals, schools and private houses and even dive-strafed playing schoolchildren, were captured and court-martialed and severely punished according to military law.” The reports noted the names of the three men but did not mention the form of their punishment.
Up to that point in the Pacific war, the Japanese had maintained much of their earlier advantage. At the end of 1941, the Japanese had captured Wake Island, the westernmost American base in the Pacific. An American counterattack in February 1942 in the Marshall and Gilbert Islands had dented Yamamoto’s forces. American Flyboys had fought fierce battles in an attempt to take Rabaul in New Guinea, which the Japanese were transforming into their largest air and naval base, but to little avail. And in the Battle of the Coral Sea in May 1942 (the first pure carrier-against-carrier battle), the Japanese had sustained heavy damage to two of their fleet carriers but had tactically advanced against the Allies.
Back home, more navy Flyboys trained for war in the vast Pacific. These airmen would go to war sitting down. As warriors they were prized not for their brawn but for their brains. Throngs of fighting men were trained not to develop calluses but to master syllabi. Navigation, dead reckoning, map reading, code recognition, and myriad mechanical challenges faced these Flyboys.
After Pearl Harbor the navy had quickly assembled a vast network of training fields and requisitioned university campuses. Training facilities had to be spread out across the country. Airfields themselves didn’t take up much room, and the Flyboys’ living quarters were the same size as those of first- and second-dimension warriors, but once airborne, Flyboys needed wide-open spaces to do their thing.
The dogfighting fighters needed miles of empty Texas sky; the dive-bombers roamed over rugged California mountains, searching empty valleys for practice targets painted on the ground, driving bombs toward bull’s-eyes; the torpedo bombers winged over the Gulf of Mexico’s blue green sheen to hit practice rafts or machine-gun target sleeves towed behind training planes. Inside all these aircraft, machine-gunners swiveled in turrets, knees to their chins, as radiomen below them tapped Mr. Morse’s code.
Their status was high, and the girls were attracted to them. But there was another side to the coin. It was apparent early on, when a friend would burn to death in a crash, his charred body a smoking heap in a potato field. It was obvious when buddies would lose sight of the horizon on a night flight and plow into the ocean. Even on the ground, chums lost arms, backing into invisible twirling propellers. They wouldn’t discuss it much, but they knew. The Flyboys understood that while they were lethal, their business was too.
On the frigid winter morning of November 21, 1942, eighteen-year-old aviation cadet George Bush lifted off a tarmac in Minnesota and flew a small trainer plane by himself for the first time. “It is hard for non-pilots to understand the joy of a first solo flight,” Bush later commented. “All of us who soloed thought we were ten feet tall.”
Bush was at the controls of a Stearman N2S, an open-cockpit biplane nicknamed “the Yellow Peril.” It was called that, Archie Clapp recalled, because “other people better look out—we new pilots were perilous. That’s why it was painted bright yellow.” Many a Stearman had gone down during training, and cadets sometimes called the plane “the Washing Machine” because so many trainees washed out after being unable to handle it. But the Stearman was sturdy and safe, and so it was the trainer of choice, even though the open cockpit and Minnesota winters didn’t go together well—except, perhaps for Bush. He loved the roar of cold air gusting through the plane’s struts, which reminded him of being back in Maine, on a boat, when he was a kid and war was something in the history books.
“Your first solo is like when your dad tells you you can have the family car for the first time,” Bill Connell from Seattle told me. Solos only came after weeks of training in the air and on the ground. Each step was a first. Jesse Naul was an instructor before he shipped out to the Pacific. “I put them in the plane and then would ‘feel them through,’” he said. “The trainer planes had duplicate controls for the student pilot and the teacher. The student would place his hand on the stick and his feet on the pedals. He could feel what I was doing as I took off and landed. When it was his turn, he would ‘follow through’ and copy my actions. Of course, my hands and feet stayed on the controls to make sure he was doing the right things.”
“I didn’t have the vaguest idea when I went in,
” George Bush later recalled about learning to fly. “But I wanted to be a pilot. I went to ground school, passed tests on navigation, learned how the engine works. Then you get in the plane and you are under the trainer’s leadership. He tells you what to do. Push the pedal this much, turn this way. You are following his instructions completely. Then it’s a seat-of-the-pants thing. You get a feel for altitude, what’s safe and what’s not. You go through the fundamental maneuvers—stalling, et cetera. I liked it. The feeling of flying is like nothing else in the world.”
“When your instructor was satisfied you were not going to kill yourself, he’d let you solo,” said Archie Clapp. “Then you alternate. Your instructor would show you something new. Then he’d be on the ground watching you do it. Slow rolls, loops, how to recover from a spin. You’d make the plane do everything it could do.”
“After the pilot has soloed, experience is the best teacher,” explained navy flying instructor Robert Banta. “Experience makes the pilot. The best pilots had the most experience. We’d give them plenty of time in the air.”
“It’s like driving a car,” Leland Holdren said. “But you are moving in three dimensions rather than two. With a car you can only go left or right. With a plane you can go up and down also.” For some, even that comparison only went so far. “I had never driven a car,” recalled John Leboeuf, who hailed from Michigan’s rural Upper Peninsula. “In fact, I logged over four hundred flying hours before I learned to drive a car.”
Air combat was still relatively new, much more of an art than a science, but the Flyboys were taught a series of offensive and defensive maneuvers. Some seemed relatively simple—like a loop over, or a barrel roll, which was an aerobatic corkscrew that could be used to shake a tailing enemy—and others were much more complicated. A chandelle was a climbing turn that resulted in a 180-degree change of direction and that also often resulted in deadly spins. An Immelmann combined a half loop and a half roll and allowed a pilot to both gain altitude over and turn toward an enemy, but if it was not executed perfectly, the plane would stall, leaving it powerless and in perfect position for enemy machine guns. Pilots were taught which moves were best against specific enemy fighters. The Japanese Mitsubishi Zero, for example, was phenomenally maneuverable and could, at the beginning of the war, at least, outclimb Allied planes. At speeds below 250 miles per hour, its ability to dart and turn and gyrate was incredible and intimidating. But American Flyboys gradually discovered that the Zero’s wing, which was light, with a shape that created high lift, hindered the Zero’s ability to dive. And at speeds above 300 miles per hour, Japanese pilots had trouble controlling their planes. As long as the Americans could keep the dogfight at higher altitudes (which presented increased dive-attack opportunities, as opposed to lower altitudes, which encouraged fast-climb strategies) and higher speeds, they had a distinct advantage. The Zero also had a design quirk that meant it rolled faster to the left than to the right. Flyboys learned attack maneuvers and formations that took advantage of weaknesses like these, and as the war progressed, they would eventually smash their less experienced and less well informed Japanese counterparts.
The navy Flyboys-in-training were constantly tested and evaluated through every step of the syllabus to make sure they had the “right stuff.” If they didn’t master a maneuver, they were promptly replaced. “A lot of people don’t have the natural coordination to be a pilot,” Tex Ellison, who instructed George Bush, told me. “We’d watch them and wash out those who shouldn’t be at the controls.”
These novice pilots had to understand mechanics and physics. “It’s all about the wings and the propeller,” Flyboy Charlie Brown explained to me. “The wing is flat on the bottom and the top is curved. The air has to fly over a greater surface on the top, which creates lift and keeps the plane in the air. The propeller is angled so it bites into the air and actually pulls the plane forward. So you have lift from the shape of the wings and motion from the turning of the propeller.” These were facts of life and death to the pilots: Without enough speed there would be insufficient lift, but too much speed at the wrong angle could be disastrous.
The toughest skill to master, Charlie Brown recalled, was landing. “When you come in, you reduce your power so you are not moving as fast through the air. The air is not giving you as much lift, so you gradually descend. Each plane has a stalling speed at which it drops. You want to be going just a little faster than stalling speed. But when you are just about on the runway, you pull back on the stick, which raises the nose of the airplane and causes it to stall and you’ve made a successful landing.”
All pilots make landings, but navy pilots had to make the most dangerous ones. To a pilot, an aircraft carrier is a tiny landing strip that is not only sailing away from him but might also be bobbing six to fifteen feet up and down as well as rolling side to side. And getting on deck was just part of it. Cables were strung across the carrier decks. The landing plane had to drop its tail hook and snag a cable to arrest its forward progress. As Charlie Brown described it, “You crash-land on the deck and hope you catch a wire.” Harold Wegener told me, “They’ve instrumented pilots nowadays and found their heart rate is faster landing on a carrier than when they are in combat.”
“How do you land on an aircraft carrier?” I asked George Bush. He answered with a knowing smile, “Very carefully . . .” The key was the pilot’s confidence in the landing signal officer, the LSO. The LSO was an experienced pilot who directed pilots coming in for a landing by signaling with his paddles. These signaling paddles were like cut-off tennis rackets with strips of colored fabric stretched across the face. (The strips allowed the LSO to wave the paddles about and not worry about catching the strong winds that blew across the deck of the aircraft carrier.) “You depend on the LSO totally,” George Bush said. “You’re too high, you’re too slow, he will signal. It is the landing signal officer who gives you the ‘cut signal’ to land. You place yourself totally in his hands.” Charlie Brown remarked, “The LSO gives you a cut sign or a wave off. The cut sign means you can land. The wave off means you give it full throttle and circle around to try again. Once he gives you the cut sign, you don’t touch the throttle again or you’ll get court-martialed.”
Fighter pilot Lowell Bernard told me about practicing night landings on a carrier. “Day landings are bad enough,” Lowell said. “But landing in the pitch-dark, with no lights whatsoever, was the most terrifying thing I ever did.” Harold Wegener remembered a particularly frightening night landing: “There were no stars, no horizon, no lights, and you couldn’t see the water. We were flying on instruments alone. Two planes went into the water. When I got out of my plane I was soaking wet. Pure terror and sweat.”
Pilots were the quarterbacks of this third-dimensional war, but there were others on the team. It took the skills of highly trained radiomen, radar operators, ground mechanics, machine-gunners, and bombardiers all working together to turn the airplane into a true fighting machine.
There were two main types of carrier pilots. “The big decision,” Archie Clapp told me, “was whether you were going to be a fighter pilot or a bomber pilot.” Fighter planes were sleek and fast; bombers were bigger and heavier, allowing them to carry larger payloads. But both types of carrier planes were smaller than their land-based cousins.
Fighter pilots like Warren Earl Vaughn flew fast single-seat airplanes, and their main job was to fight off opposing enemy fighters. In his final months before shipping out to the Pacific, he was trained by hot-dogging Marine veterans at Mojave Air Base in California.
Warren Earl flew the Vought F4U-1A—better known as the Corsair. Fast (speeds in excess of 400 miles per hour) and with excellent maneuverability, the Corsair was good-sized (more than 33 feet long, with a wingspan of 41 feet) and tough. It bristled with six .50-caliber machine guns and included several armored plates that added to the plane’s 14,000-pound weight but helped in a dogfight. (Just as the Spirit Warriors abandoned troops once in the field, they usually chos
e not to armor Japanese planes, leaving them lighter and more maneuverable at slow speeds but subject to immediate destruction if hit squarely.)
Once they learned how to conquer the Corsair’s dangerous spin characteristics, Flyboys came to love the plane. “Smoother than riding in a boat on the water,” was how Archie Clapp remembered it. “Like an automobile.” Unlike the bombers, this was not a plane for the small. “The Corsair,” Archie recalled, “was built for a six-foot-four-inch test pilot, so it was roomy. Small guys needed padding.” Pilots sat in a Plexiglas bubble with an armor plate behind them. There were three rearview mirrors, and pilots had to constantly check all of them, as well as the view out the cockpit. The Corsair had an extralong nose that made looking downward difficult, especially when approaching a carrier. “On a carrier landing,” Archie explained, “you couldn’t see anything except from the side, so you were flying in a constant turn to see the LSO.” But as scary as that was, it was even scarier to be a Japanese pilot when a group of Corsairs came screaming in. The Japanese would eventually nickname the Corsair “Whistling Death” for the sound it made when diving and for the damage it wreaked.
“We spent four months at Mojave,” recalled Wesley Todd, who flew with Warren Earl Vaughn. “We all figured we were overtrained and we should get overseas. We were eager and ready to go.”
“We practiced air tactics,” Archie Clapp remembered. “Bombing, rocket work, you’d just keep working at it. We were called ‘fighter pilots,’ but it would have been more accurate to call us ‘fighter-bomber pilots.’ We fired air-to-ground rockets off our wings and practiced glide-bombing.” Glide-bombing is exactly what the name sounds like—instead of diving down to a target, a plane glides over the target to release its ordnance.
“When you get into maneuvers,” Archie recalled, “we wore G-suits.” The Corsair pilots wore form-fitted pants that had air bladders in the pelvic area and all down the leg. The bladders, Clapp explained, would squeeze to “cut off blood below to keep the blood up in your upper body so you didn’t faint. It was spring-loaded and calibrated to respond to the G-forces. The more Gs, the more it would let the air in the bladders to squeeze more.”
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