After paddling his raft and praying for three hours and thirteen minutes, George saw a black dot emerge from the water about a hundred yards away. “The dot grew larger,” he recalled. “First a periscope, then the conning tower, then the hull of a submarine emerged from the depths.” Bush had no idea that anyone had radioed his position. “At first I thought maybe I was delirious,” he said, “and when I concluded it was a submarine all right, I feared that it might be Japanese. It just seemed too lucky and too far-fetched that it would be an American submarine.”
Five submariners threw Bush a line, pulled him alongside the sub, and helped the soaking-wet and exhausted Flyboy aboard. George managed just four words to his saviors: “Happy to be aboard.”
George spent a month on the Finback, which gave him plenty of time to reflect on his brush with death. He would often stand the midnight-4 A.M. watch while the sub was surfaced. Later, he recalled those reflective moments:
I’ll never forget the beauty of the Pacific—the flying fish, the stark wonder of the sea, the waves breaking across the bow. It was absolutely dark in the middle of the Pacific; the nights were so clear and the stars so brilliant. It was wonderful and energizing, a time to talk to God.
I had time to reflect, to go deep inside myself and search for answers. People talk about a kind of foxhole Christianity, where you’re in trouble and think you’re going to die, and so you want to make everything right with God and everybody else right there in the last minute.
But this was just the opposite of that. I had already faced death, and God had spared me. I had this very deep and profound gratitude and a sense of wonder. Sometimes when there is a disaster, people will pray, “Why me?” In an opposite way I had the same question: why had I been spared, and what did God have in store for me?
One of the things I realized out there all alone was how much family meant to me. Having faced death and been given another chance to live, I could see just how important those values and principles were that my parents had instilled in me, and of course how much I loved Barbara, the girl I knew I would marry.
As you grow older and try to retrace the steps that made you the person that you are, the signposts to look for are those special times of insight. I remember my days and nights aboard the Finback as one of those times—maybe the most important of them all.
In my own view there’s got to be some kind of destiny and I was being spared for something on earth.
Many years after those Pacific nights, I interviewed former President Bush about the events of that tragic September day in 1944. When we finished, I was shutting my computer down and we were making idle conversation. Out of the blue, he asked me if I had any additional information about the fates of his crewmen, Ted White and John Delaney.
I was surprised by the question because I assumed it had been answered long before. If there was anything new to learn, surely the press would have dug it up during his four campaigns for vice president and president. But no one knew exactly what happened to Ted and John that day, only that they both died.
I told the president I had no additional information.
“It still plagues me if I gave those guys enough time to get out,” he said with a pained grimace.
At that moment, I was looking into the eyes of arguably the most accomplished and successful man alive. George Herbert Walker Bush had led a storied life as an athlete, war hero, businessman, congressman, ambassador to the United Nations, ambassador to China, head of the CIA, vice president, president, and father of the current president. He had been in love with one woman since he was seventeen and they were approaching sixty years of marriage.
But in George Bush’s eyes, I could see the same survivor’s guilt—however illogical and unfounded—I had observed in other war veterans. I thought of my father, how he never got over the torture death of his buddy Ralph on Iwo Jima.
“I and everyone else thinks you did all you could, Mr. President,” I said. “And I am sorry you had to be put into the position where you have these feelings still today.”
For a few heartbeats we were both still. Then, as if to break the emotion of the moment, he uncrossed his legs, stood, and pushed his chair against the wall as I went back to putting my computer away.
I glanced up when he didn’t walk back to his desk. He was standing at his large office window. His hands were in his pockets, causing his sport jacket to rumple a bit. The Texas sunlight illuminated President Bush’s face.
Staring at the sky, the former Flyboy said, “I think about those guys all the time.”
By February of 1945, the awesome might of the American military machine began the endgame of grinding Japan down to defeat. More than eight hundred American ships rendezvoused in Saipan to prepare for the invasion of Japan. Soon eighty thousand marines, my corpsman father, John Bradley, among them, would sail to invade Iwo Jima, the first Japanese soil upon which the barbarians’ boots would tread.
As the Americans moved into the North Pacific in force, soldiers on Chichi Jima found themselves scurrying into their caves day and night for protection from marauding American planes. Lieutenant Mitsuyoshi Sasaki, who was a surgeon based on Chichi, later recalled the extreme conditions on that isolated island in February of 1945:
There were four to five raids during the day and two to three at night. There was no end to the number of casualties resulting from these raids. During the day there may be twenty or thirty people killed by bombings and also many people may be trapped in caves. The amount of sleep the soldiers could get at night was negligible.
The amount of ammunition was for just one battle in repelling the invasion forces. The amount of provisions was for several months. The amount of medical supplies was almost nothing.
In the sick bay there were many cases in which maggots came out of the wounds. Surgery was done in caves where there was a lot of dust.
Our supply route was cut. We would have to wait several months for supplies. The [daily] food ration was fifteen hundred calories, and every laborer was forced to work on this.
Together this physical and spiritual fatigue caused our power to dissolve and the work did not go ahead. The ability to work was getting lower. Everybody did not volunteer for work and they showed tendencies to try to keep from doing anything. The number of people arriving at the hospital showed many signs of strain. I had four or five people actually go mad; because of these the psychological aspects of the men on Chichi Jima were not normal.
One of those “not normal” men serving on Chichi Jima was a Major Sueo Matoba, commander of the 308th Battalion. Hard-drinking Major Matoba had been stationed in Singapore when the Japanese army mounted thousands of heads on roadside poles as a reminder of the fate awaiting any resisters. “The rumor was that he played a part in the capture of Singapore,” said Captain Noboru Nakajima. “He often sang a song about the triumphal entry into Singapore. He spoke admiringly of the 3,000 Chinese heads put on display there.” Later, he had participated in the Rape of China, during which he raped and killed women and beheaded prisoners.
One of the mythic heroes for Japanese officers like Matoba was Colonel Masanobu Tsuji. Tsuji had planned the blindingly successful invasion of Malaya and quickly become known as the “God of Strategy.” It was Tsuji who had ordered the massacre of the Chinese in Singapore and that their heads be displayed on pikes. Tsuji was also known to boast that one of the secrets to his success was the “special medicine” he imbibed. This medicine was brewed from the livers of prisoners.
When I visited Chichi Jima years later, I sat crouched in Major Matoba’s cave. About twenty yards deep and six feet high, chiseled out of hard volcanic rock, it looks out onto a beautiful beach. The contrast is dramatic. It is dank and dark in the cave, but you gaze out upon a postcard-worthy scene of brilliant sunlight, white sand, and gorgeous blue ocean. How many times Major Matoba must have sat in that darkness with his sake bottle, angry that he was unable to step out on that beach because of bombs falling from the Flyboys’ pl
anes. How often in his drunken stupor he must have dreamed of venting his impotent rage.
As the American juggernaut approached in February of 1945, General Kuribayashi told his men on Iwo Jima to “pray for a heroic fight.”
But “praying” and “heroism” weren’t macho enough sentiments for hard-drinking Spirit Warrior Tachibana on Chichi Jima. That month, he called his commanders together to deliver his version of a motivating Yamato damashii speech in preparation for the mass gyokusai death he expected of them.
“General Tachibana said that supplies would diminish and ammunition would run short,” recalled Matoba, “and in the end men would have to fight even with rocks. He also said we would be forced even to eat our own comrades killed in combat, and the flesh of the enemy kichiku should be eaten.”
Lieutenant Jitsuro Suyeyoshi also heard General Tachibana’s speech and the specific reference as to how all captured Americans would be treated: “General Tachibana said that all POWs would be executed and their flesh would be eaten.”
Some of the assembled officers thought this was just the general employing motivational hyperbole. But Major Matoba had experience in such matters and took him literally. As Matoba later admitted, eating the flesh of prisoners “was a practice I had grown fond of in China.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
No Surrender
Meet the expectations of your family and home community by making effort upon effort, always mindful of the honor of your name. If alive, do not suffer the disgrace of becoming a prisoner; in death, do not leave behind a name soiled by misdeeds.
—“Imperial Japanese Army Field Service Code”
IN the European war, Germany did not surrender until Allied troops invaded its heart. But Japan would be defeated by Flyboys. The beginning of the end for Japan came on February 16, 1945.
On that Friday morning, the largest and most powerful naval attack force ever assembled, with more than twelve hundred planes, launched the first carrier raid on Tokyo since Jimmy Doolittle’s almost three years before.
It was a dangerous mission. Three days earlier, the air group commander on the USS Randolph had assembled all his Flyboys and announced, “Fellows, we’re on our way to Tokyo.” There was a moment of silence as the thought sunk in. Then the Flyboys broke out in loud cheers and applause. A moment later, a pilot turned to Bill Bruce and said, “My God, why am I clapping?”
That wintery day’s weather was murky, cloudy, windy, rough, cold, and wet. Flyboys like Bill Hazlehurst and Floyd Hall now appreciated all the damp flying they had done in Oregon.
The strike force lifted off early, plane after plane aloft with clockwork precision. Gunner Robert Akerblom did not fly that day, but he listened for news of his buddies’ progress. “Our ship piped a Japanese radio station through the loudspeakers,” Robert said. “Our first wave was supposed to hit Tokyo at six A.M. At exactly six A.M. they went off the air. We cheered.”
The Flyboys came in low, within antiaircraft range, and they took a beating. “Charlie Crommelin had over two hundred holes in his plane when he returned,” remembered fighter pilot Alfred Bolduc. “He had fifty-four holes in one gas tank.”
With so many planes over Tokyo that day, there were close calls. Fighter pilot M.W. Smith was strafing a train at an altitude of one hundred feet. “The fellow behind me shot his rocket right as I was going over that train,” Smith recalled. “He shot three holes as big as fists in both of my wings.”
The Japanese were surprised and unprepared. As a result, the carrier planes wreaked havoc on factories, shipyards, supply depots, and railroad yards. But bombing the Japanese mainland still brought a special terror. “We were scared,” said Hazlehurst. “It was disconcerting bombing Japan in part because there wasn’t open water to ditch in. You had to crash over land, and that meant you’d probably be captured.”
Charlie Brown was caught when his two-seater SB2C Helldiver was shot down near Tokyo. “We were bombing a factory,” he told me later. “We got hit; the engine was on fire. I saw a lake and made a water landing. As the plane was sinking, my crewman, J. D. Richards, was already in the life raft.” A farmer in a rowboat came out. Charlie and J. D. got into his boat. When they reached shore, another farmer swung a club at Charlie’s head. “If he had hit me,” Charlie said, “he would have killed me.” Some Japanese soldiers appeared with a thick rope. “Oh, my God!” thought J. D. “It’s a lynching!” But the soldiers merely tied their prisoners together and marched them along a road. The procession would stop from time to time to allow women to beat the flyers with their geta—wooden shoes.
“Americans would be hitting just as hard if the situation was reversed,” Charlie said with a chuckle years later. “Emotions run high in the immediate area; people get upset when they’re bombed.”
Eventually, the party made its way to a railroad station. His captors took Charlie outside and made him kneel in the dirt and lean forward. “I had seen the photo of the Australian pilot about to be beheaded,” Charlie said. “Someone shoved me so my head was parallel with the ground. Then I heard sharp orders. I thought I was about to have my head cut off.”
But Charlie Brown would live to see another day.
Because the weather worsened around Tokyo on February 17, the carrier force headed south to pound Iwo Jima. Then they sailed to bomb Chichi Jima the next day.
On a cold Sunday morning, February 18, five Flyboys awoke ready to tackle their first combat missions. This was the day they had prepared for. In the month they had been at sea, they had had plenty of time to think about what that first taste of combat would be like. Now they were about to learn.
On the USS Randolph, pilot Floyd Hall would wing into action with his gunner, Glenn Frazier, and his radioman, Marve Mershon. On the nearby USS Bennington, radioman Jimmy Dye and gunner Grady York readied for their flight. Jimmy, Glenn, Marve, and Grady were all just nineteen years old. Floyd must have been one of the “old men” to them, because he was already twenty-four.
The boys were briefed on the day’s target, the airfields and radio stations on Chichi Jima. “Chichi Jima was a mean place,” said pilot Phil Perabo. “They had very good gunners there. When you hit Chichi, you were hitting a valley between two mountains.”
Fellow pilots Leland Holdren and Fred Rohlfing would fly into battle with Floyd that day. “Floyd, Fred, and I were a division of three,” Leland told me decades later. “This strike on Chichi was our first time in battle. We were greenhorns. You can imagine our anxiety.”
The winter sun did not rise until 7:12 A.M. on the morning of February 18, 1945. The USS Randolph began launching her planes at 10:54 A.M. The plane carrying Floyd, Glenn, and Marve was in the last group and launched after noon. They flew off into rainy, overcast skies.
Over on the USS Bennington, Jimmy Dye and Grady York were in their ready room being briefed on the same target. They would fly that day with pilot Bob King. “Our mission that day,” remembered Ralph Sengewalt, “was to bomb Chichi Jima’s small airstrip. They said we’d have limited opposition.”
February 18 in the Pacific was February 17 back home, and it marked two years to the day since Jimmy had enlisted. “We hadn’t been in cold climates until then,” Vince Carnazza remembered. “I had a black navy-issue sweater and Jimmy asked if he could borrow it. I gave it to him and said, ‘If I don’t get that sweater back, it’s your ass.’”
As they were headed out the door, Jimmy did something that Ralph Sengewalt will never forget. “Jimmy stopped at the door,” Ralph told me, “turned around, and with a smile, tossed his wallet to someone who was remaining behind. As he did it he called out, ‘Just in case I don’t come back, see to it that my mom and dad get this.’”
Kidding was one thing, but Flyboys almost never spoke so directly about death.
“When Jimmy said that,” Ralph recalled, “I had a strange feeling then and there. We never talked about not coming back.”
The assault two days earlier on Tokyo had been considered dangerous, b
ut that day’s strike against Chichi Jima was anticipated to be relatively easy, a “milk run.” That’s why so many of the inexperienced airmen, like Bob King, Jimmy, and Grady, were heading out. But Jimmy must have had a sixth sense about the danger that awaited him. And radioman Ken Meredith learned that Grady had had his qualms too.
“When Grady and I shook hands on the flight deck,” Ken recalled, “he said, ‘I’m really scared.’ Grady always smiled when he talked. But at that moment he wasn’t smiling. Just then I felt Grady had a premonition. Even at that young age, I could feel it.”
Jimmy had tossed his wallet, but he did keep something for good luck that day. His girlfriend, Gloria Nields, later told me: “In the last letter I got from Jimmy he wrote, ‘I am flying off now with your white scarf on.’”
With that, the three American boys took off in their Avenger, pilot King, radioman Jimmy, and gunner Grady. Two of the three had signaled that this flight held special danger for them. King, also on his first combat flight, had not expressed any qualms. Only one of them would return.
The briefers had been wrong. The antiaircraft opposition was fierce that day.
“The antiaircraft fire was very heavy and very accurate,” said gunner William Hale. “There was black smoke everywhere, and we were getting bounced around with the concussion of the shells. I was facing aft with a pair of machine guns in my hands, looking for something to shoot at and wishing we could get the hell out of there.”
“It was overcast over the island,” remembered pilot Dan Samuelson. “There was a hole in the clouds. A lot of the planes were going through that hole, and the Japanese gunners just plugged that hole with antiaircraft fire.”
One after another, the carrier pilots made their glide-bombing runs over Chichi Jima. Pilots Leland Holdren, Fred Rohlfing, and Floyd Hall—the “division of three”—circled above, waiting their turn.
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