Flyboys

by James Bradley

  After a day’s work, the social scene in wartime California offered handsome pilots like Warren Earl some pretty choices. “The bachelors were having a ball,” Archie remembered. “We were their knights who were going to protect them. It was common to go into a bar and have everything paid for.” Warren Earl and his buddies would go to Hollywood on liberty. These dashing Marine officers with their gold aviator’s wings pinned on their smart uniforms attracted the attention of the local blondes and brunettes. “It was pretty easy pickings,” Flyboy John McManus remembered years later. “Bill Lynch was the smartest about it. Bill would never go to the bars—he’d go to the church socials. He met more beautiful girls there than we did.”

  Warren Earl spent a few weekends with some lovelies at Big Bear Lake, California. When I interviewed Wesley Todd, he well remembered the lakeside-cabin scene. “Gals from Hollywood would come up and meet us there,” he said. “They’d take off from their jobs; it was a big group-type of thing.”

  I told Todd, “Warren Earl had a girlfriend up there.” To which he laughingly replied, “Yeah, everybody did.”

  One day, back at Mojave, Warren Earl was feeling his oats and decided to imitate a hotdogging trick he had seen one of the veterans pull. A plane should be well off the tarmac before a pilot retracts its wheels. But Warren Earl had seen a vet demonstrate his confidence by retracting the wheels in conjunction with his plane’s initial lift. He decided to give it a try.

  “It’s a stupid thing to do,” Archie Clapp explained to me. “You can’t beat the odds in that maneuver. There’s something called ‘ground effect.’ There’s greater lift closer to the ground than there is a few feet up. So you might have enough ground speed to lift off a bit, but there are too many variables, like wind currents and air pressure, that could cause you to drop down again.”

  So why would Warren Earl attempt a dangerous maneuver that didn’t make sense? “A fighter pilot has to be a little crazy anyway,” Archie answered. “So he thinks it’s cool.”

  “Warren Earl tried it,” John McManus remembered, “and his prop chewed into the ground.”

  Warren Earl’s service record described the aftermath of the bent propeller and resulting fire from which he fled for his life: “Received first and second degree burns on hand and neck and flesh burns to face as the result of an aviation accident while on authorized flight.” The hotdogging Cherokee Texan spent three days in sick bay licking his wounds. “He was dark anyway,” Wesley Todd recalled. “But now his face was even darker, more Indian looking.”

  John McManus chuckled as he remembered. “In his Texas drawl,” he said, “Warren Earl told his commander, ‘I couldn’t hep it.’”

  Most navy carrier planes were bombers and carried pilot plus crew. This called for a slightly more conservative approach to their job. “Usually the fighter pilots are the most aggressive,” Flyboy Al Lindstrom told me. “Bombers are a little less reckless; they have crew in the back.” There were two types of bombers, a dive-bombing plane that carried pilot and one crew and a torpedo-bombing plane that carried pilot and two crew.

  “Dive-bombers carry a bomb,” Lindstrom explained. “At twelve thousand to fourteen thousand feet, you dive and drop your bomb on a target. You’re going sixty degrees down and you release the bomb at three thousand feet and pull out. You might dive lower. The lower you dive, the more accurate you are.

  “Once you commit to your dive,” he continued, “the antiaircraft gunners know exactly where you’ll be. Once you start down, there is a straight line between you and the target. You end up in a cone of their antiaircraft fire.”

  Torpedo bombers were designed to fly low over the ocean and launch torpedoes against enemy ships. But by 1944, Japanese shipping had been decimated, so the torpedo planes were now used as glide-bombers.

  Dick Woellhof had become a gunner in an SB2C dive-bomber. The SB2C—better known as the Helldiver—had two cockpits for a pilot and a gunner. The Helldiver’s wingspan was almost fifty feet, but the wings could be folded when the plane was in transit aboard ship. The pilot had two wing-mounted cannon and Gunner Dick had two .30-caliber machine guns to guard the plane from attacks. Unlike some other planes, the dive-bombers required the gunner to pull his Plexiglas canopy back to shoot his gun. Only his goggles and leather helmet protected him from the enemy’s exploding shells. But Dick depended on his luck and his belief that “the other guy will get it, not me.”

  The Pacific war was a battle for the Third Dimension, as Billy Mitchell had predicted. Japan had spent vast sums supporting millions of first-dimension troops in China and building the world’s greatest second-dimension battleships, but FDR’s bet on the Third Dimension paid off. The Japanese established impregnable fortresses on islands like Rabaul and Truk that they thought would secure the South Pacific. But America leap-frogged its way to victory. With their aircraft carriers, the navy projected airpower to soften up islands for the Marines to capture. These islands would then serve as airfields for Flyboys to attack the next islands on the way to Tokyo. Indeed, the first titanic land battle between Japan and the U.S. at Guadalcanal was fought over who would control the strategic airfield there. The Battle of the Coral Sea and the brutal fighting in Papua, New Guinea, were over who would control the airfield at Port Moresby, which held the key to control of Australia. From Bougainville to Okinawa, the value of the islands wrested from Japanese control was in their use as airfields to launch Flyboys. Marines would capture the Mariana Islands to serve as bases for U.S. Army Air Corps B-29 bombers to hit Japan. And Marines would die on Iwo Jima to clear the skies for the Marianas-based Flyboys.

  Thanks to the Flyboys, during the six-month-long battle over Guadalcanal that began in August of 1942, the Japanese lost 892 planes and 1,882 pilots. Airpower was crucial to the ground war too. While writing this book, I received an e-mail from a Pacific vet who wrote, “The Marines were abandoned by the Navy on Guadalcanal, with no supplies. They fought on for months. How did they win? The answer is they were supplied by air.” It was true. Only airplanes could supply the beleaguered Marines on Guadalcanal, as the Japanese controlled the seas. No less a navy man than Admiral William “Bull” Halsey declared, “Without the aid of SCAT [the South Pacific Combat Air Transport Command, a sky-based supply squad created by a group of former airline pilots who served in the Marine Corps reserve] some of our most important victories would not have been possible.” The Marines dubbed SCAT “the Flying Boxcars.” Food, medical supplies, and ammunition were all flown in, and the wounded were flown out. At a time when LaGuardia and Chicago airports serviced just over 100 flights a day, SCAT was running 72. “In one six-month period alone, SCAT moved 43,626,495 pounds of cargo plus 235,596 passengers carried in 34,834 trips.” In one typical instance, pilot Skip Kimball “alighted from his plane in the midst of artillery shelling. From a slit trench off the runway, he and his crew witnessed hand-to-hand fighting at the end of the strip. When the Marines ‘had the situation well in hand’ Kimball loaded his casualties aboard and took off.”

  A few decades earlier, it would have been impossible to create a supply network like the one the Americans established in the Pacific, where ports and even cities were few. The Flyboys had come along and changed the rules. But the Japanese still drew upon the old playbook. Where they saw islands as fortresses defended by a vast saltwater moat, the Americans saw them as springboards. The span of ocean that in the past had slowed troop movement and supplies was irrelevant to anyone who took to the skies. The imperial command saw the Pacific as a dispersed constellation of strongholds. But the Americans were connecting the dots, and as they did, an already gruesome war took an even bloodier turn.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Yellow Devils, White Devils

  We hold his examples of atrocity screaming to the heavens while we cover up our own and condone them as just retribution for his acts. We claim to be fighting for civilization, but the more I see of this war in the Pacific the less right I think we have to claim to be civilized.
In fact, I am not sure that our record in this respect stands so very much higher than the Japanese.

  — Charles Lindbergh, The Wartime Journals of Charles H. Lindbergh

  AMERICA did not learn the fates of the executed Doolittle Raiders until April of 1943, one year after the raid. FDR was “profoundly shocked” and issued a State Department warning threatening “officers of the Japanese Government” with punishment for “uncivilized and inhuman acts” and “acts of criminal barbarity” that were “in violation of the rules of warfare accepted and practiced by civilized nations.”

  On April 21, 1943, Roosevelt announced in a radio broadcast, “It is with a feeling of the deepest horror, which I know will be shared by all civilized peoples, that I have to announce the barbarous execution by the Japanese Government of some of the members of this country’s armed forces who fell into Japanese hands as an incident of warfare.”

  Two days later, a New York Times headline reinforced the inhuman quality of the Japanese action:

  Japan’s Barbarous Act Has No Parallel in War: Tokyo Stands Alone As a Cruel Captor in Defiance of Geneva Convention

  Rage swept the country. FDR predicted that Japan’s “barbarous” actions “will make the American people more determined than ever to blot out the shameless militarism of Japan.” General Hap Arnold sent a message to all his Flyboys saying that “inhuman warlords” had gone beyond “human decency” and that they must be “utterly destroyed.” Secretary of State Cordell Hull declared that there would be no negotiation with a country that executed prisoners of war. America would now settle for nothing less than “unconditional surrender” from Japan.

  The New York Times contacted Chase Nielson’s mother, who said, “I wonder if, and hope and pray, that it is propaganda. I don’t see how anyone who professes to be of the human race can be so cruel and inhuman.” Mrs. John Meder of Lakewood, Ohio, mother of another Raider, commented, “The Japanese just can’t be so heartless and inhuman as all that. They just couldn’t resort to such vile and insane acts with our boys.”

  But to the mothers of the children and hospital patients killed in Japan, it was the American Flyboys who were inhuman and heartless.

  Killing does not come naturally or easily to humans. Except for the small percentage of psychopaths in a population, most people find it nearly impossible to kill a fellow human being. A process of dehumanization must take place to get large numbers of soldiers to kill other people.

  The physical dissimilarities between Americans and Japanese were obvious. And culturally, it was as if the two nations were from different planets. The United States was a new country, an ever-changing dynamo filling out the immense North American landmass like a boy growing into a new suit. Japan was a small ancient land settled in its ways, with a god-king and a semifeudal social structure.

  Some of the differences were more trivial. For example, the two countries didn’t even agree what year it was. Americans thought Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941. But the Japanese dated the attack as Showa 16. “Showa” referred to Emperor Hirohito, and Pearl Harbor occurred in the sixteenth year of his reign. (Even today the front pages of Japan’s daily newspapers express the date in terms of the current emperor’s reign.) Likewise, the two countries couldn’t agree on how to write someone’s name. John Smith in the U.S. was “Smith John” in Japan.

  There were other distinctions. In greeting, an American made eye contact and shook hands; a Japanese averted his gaze and bowed. An American sat on a chair to eat with metal tableware; a Japanese sat on the floor and used wooden chopsticks. In the U.S., soup was the first course; in Japan it was the last. Pasta in the West had a sauce poured over it; in Japan the pasta was dipped into a sauce.

  The list was almost endless. An American counted on her fingers by displaying a closed fist and then raising each finger as she counted, “One, two, three.” A Japanese would hold up her hand with extended fingers and bring them closed to her palm as she counted “One, two, three.” An American washed in the bathtub. But the Japanese considered it disgusting to sit in water in which one’s body dirt was floating. A Japanese scrubbed down outside the tub and entered it only when she was clean. When an American read a book, she started from the “front” of the book, read left to right horizontally across each page, and turned the pages from right to left. In Japan, the reader started at the “back” of the book, read vertically down each page from top to bottom, going from right to left, and turned the pages from left to right. And on and on.

  In the 1930s and 1940s, there were almost no gaizin in Japan. And outside of a few pockets in California, there were few Japanese on the U.S. mainland. So each side knew only caricatures of the other, not the real thing. Americans were devils with green blood and tails. Japanese wore thick glasses and had buckteeth. By the time they laid eyes on each other, they had been culturally programmed to view each other as repulsive.

  Ernie Pyle was by far the most widely read World War II journalist. His column appeared in seven hundred newspapers every week around the world. Pyle spent most of his war career in Europe but transferred to the Pacific theater in 1944. He introduced the Japanese enemy to his millions of readers this way: “In Europe we felt that our enemies, horrible and deadly as they were, were still people. But out here I soon gathered that the Japanese were looked upon as something subhuman and repulsive, the way some people feel about cockroaches or mice.” When he saw Japanese prisoners for the first time, he told his readers, “They were wrestling and laughing and talking just like normal human beings. And yet they gave me the creeps, and I wanted a mental bath after looking at them.”

  Ashihei Hino was Japan’s Ernie Pyle. He called Americans “people whose arrogant nation once tried to unlawfully treat our motherland with contempt.” He described American POWs on Bataan this way: “I feel like I am watching filthy water running from the sewage of a nation which derives from impure origins and has lost its pride of race. Japanese soldiers look particularly beautiful, and I feel exceedingly proud of being Japanese.”

  To the Japanese people, who prided themselves on being genetically “pure,” uncontaminated by immigration, Americans were mongrelized devils. Posters in classrooms exhorted students to “kill the American animal.” A popular Japanese magazine spoke of “the breath and body odor of the beast . . . the American enemy, driven by its ambition to conquer the world.” This “savage . . . barbaric tribe of Americans are devils in human skin” with as much worth “as a foreign ear of corn.”

  “We had no knowledge of how America was founded. What races made up America. Nothing,” said Terumichi Kiyama, who later became a Shinto priest. “We just had the expression ‘Kichiku Bei-Ei’—American-English Devils. We saw them as lower animals. These terms were widespread in Japan.”

  “When you encounter the enemy after landing, think of yourself as an avenger come at last face to face with your father’s murderer,” wrote Colonel Masanobu Tsuji, who masterminded Japanese planning for the invasion of Malaya. “Here is the man whose death will lighten your heart of its burden of brooding anger. If you fail to destroy him utterly you can never rest in peace.”

  “The people were easily flattered by a sense of superiority,” remembered Masoa Kumai, seventeen years old in 1941.

  War leaders always incite their people before they begin a war. Hitler used the propaganda of racial superiority to incite the German people. In Japan the people were incited by the claim that the oracle of the Founder of the Empire had pronounced Japan to be a divine land—the crown of the world—with an unbroken line of emperors. Because of its superiority, the Japanese race could participate in these imperial achievements. Both the German and Japanese people were flattered by this sense of superiority, and it made them lose their sense of justice. It caused them to feel that invasion of other countries and annihilation of other races was justified.

  Like Commodore Perry, who knew little about the Japanese except that they were uncivilized Others, most Americans who had never seen a Japanese
knew exactly what to think of them. “The most popular float in a day-long victory parade in New York in mid-1942 was titled ‘Tokyo: We Are Coming,’ and depicted bombs falling on a frantic pack of yellow rats.” When an innocent kid asked an older Marine in the 1943 Hollywood film Guadalcanal Diary how he felt about killing Japanese people, the Marine responded, “They ain’t people.” Propaganda reinforced this sensibility. As a veteran of the Pacific fighting wrote, “The Japanese made a perfect enemy. They had so many characteristics that an American Marine could hate. Physically, they were small, a strange color, and, by some standards, unattractive. . . . Marines did not consider that they were killing men. They were wiping out dirty animals.” Author Studs Terkel remembered the Japanese portrayed as “subhuman, different and slanty-eyed.” Their cultural homogeneity was exploited to make them nameless and the same, like a hill of ants. Terkel remembered that in cartoons, “the Germans were ridiculed, Hitler especially, and Mussolini with his jutting jaw, but in the Japanese case it was tribal, it was collective . . . you know: the grin, the slanty eyes, the glasses, the Jap, or the Nip.” A Marine Corps film shot on Tarawa depicted Japanese defenders as “living, snarling rats.” The Japanese were routinely presented in print, speech, and cartoons as animals, and popular songs like “We’re Gonna Have to Slap the Dirty Little Jap” also encouraged a less-than-human view of the Japanese.

  Japanese were considered such despicable Others that most Americans applauded when Franklin Roosevelt ordered American citizens of Japanese ancestry interned in 1942. The general in charge of internment was asked in a congressional hearing to justify the action. The nation understood his reasoning when he answered that Americans of Italian and German ancestry could be trusted, but “a Jap is a Jap—it makes no difference whether he is an American citizen or not.” A year later, congressmen asked him why law-abiding Japanese Americans could not now be released. The general answered, “A Jap’s a Jap . . . we will be worried about [them] until they are wiped off the face of the map.”