The Last Fighter Pilot

by Don Brown

  November 1944

  In any hellhole, the question eventually becomes, “why?”

  Why were American troops fighting in places and under conditions that could pass for the hottest, dirtiest, deadliest, and most deplorable on the planet?

  Why Iwo Jima? Why had Jerry and his fellow pilots flown their P-51s over the waters of the western Pacific and, risking life and limb, executed a pinpoint landing on a small island in a ferocious war zone?

  The answer: the United States needed a mid-ocean landing strip for its fighter pilots, and Iwo Jima just happened to be at the right place. Capture it, and the airstrips already built by the Japanese become available to the American P-51s that needed to protect B-29 bombers trying to strike the Japanese homeland.

  Before the Marines even started their offense against Iwo Jima, however, they’d had to capture the Mariana Islands, which lay in the Pacific to the southeast of Japan and southwest of Hawaii. Named for the Spanish Queen of Austria, Mariana, who lived in the seventeenth century, the islands remained under Spanish jurisdiction until the Spanish-American war, when Spain ceded control of Guam, the largest of the Mariana Islands, to the United States in 1898. Of the sixteen islands making up the Mariana chain, only four were populated: Guam—the best-known island of the Mariana chain—Saipan, Tinian, and Rota, all of which had been captured by the Japanese soon after Pearl Harbor.

  Upon taking back the Marianas, the United States had used the island to stage aviation assets for future use against Japan. In January of 1945, some two months before they would first land on Iwo Jima, Jerry and his squadron mates from the Seventy-Eighth boarded the USS Sitkoh Bay, a small “jeep” carrier launched less than a year earlier and named for a tiny, idyllic bay in Southeastern Alaska. It was lightly armed and largely defenseless against enemy submarines. The men were jammed on board the ship with their planes, which were greased down to protect their wings, cowlings and fuselages from the corrosive effects of the salty sea. Only after the pilots boarded did they learn their destination was Guam.

  The Sitkoh Bay had cut a two-week westerly course of four thousand miles across the Pacific, alone and unprotected except for the thirty-seven light antiaircraft guns positioned around her deck. Had a Japanese sub spotted the ship, she surely would have gone down, and—like the crew of the USS Indianapolis, which was torpedoed several months later—left her passengers to drown or be mauled by sharks.

  But on this trip, the Sitkoh Bay got lucky. No Japanese submarine spotted her. And for the men of the Seventy-Eighth, the cross-ocean voyage would prove their last taste of anything with a semblance of luxury. The commanding officer of the Sitkoh Bay and his crew took it upon themselves to treat the Army aviators like deserving kings. This included steak dinners, linen sheets, nightly movies, and volleyball courts on the flight elevator.

  Once they arrived in the tropical climate of Guam, the luxury—if one could call it that—ended. Under sweltering sunshine, the P-51s were unloaded, cleaned up, washed down, and matched with their pilots. Located on the earth’s thirteenth parallel, with year-round temperatures in the eighties, the island’s warm breezes and tropical beauty painted an eerie, surrealistic contrast to the bloody war zone around it. This brief respite on Guam was the pilots’ last rest before facing the scourge of war and inhaling the stench of death. Within a few days, Jerry and his comrades flew their Mustangs 120 miles north to Saipan, where they waited for the Marines to seize control of Iwo Jima. From there, the P-51s could begin assaulting Japan itself.

  Saipan, which the Japanese considered a last geographic line of defense to the homeland, had fallen to Marines on July 9, 1944, just one month after Normandy. Her sister island, Tinian, fell three weeks later, on August 1, 1944. These tropical islands—Guam, Saipan, and Tinian—would become crucial as staging bases in the final air wars against Japan. In fact, the atomic bomb that drove the final nail in Japan’s coffin would be flown from Tinian.

  To prepare for the eventual invasion of the Japanese homeland, the Allies’ battle plan resembled that used for the invasion of Europe. The first step would involve a massive, strategic bombing campaign of Japan over a number of months to soften the enemy’s resolve before the first stage of a ground invasion around November 1, 1945. The pre-invasion air war would involve bomber strikes on the Japanese homeland from the Mariana Islands, with fighter cover launched from Iwo Jima. B-29s could strike from fourteen hundred miles away, but fighter planes—notably the P-51s needed to protect those bombers—did not have long-distance striking ranges. Consequently, America needed a base for her fighter planes closer to Japan.

  That’s where Iwo Jima came into play. It was 759 miles south of Tokyo, about half the distance between the Japanese capital and the American bomber bases in the Marianas, making it the perfect location for a fighter base. The fighter planes’ smaller fuel tanks could make the fourteen-hundred-mile round-trip flight, unlike the twenty-eight-hundred-mile round-trip flight from the Marianas. From Iwo Jima, the P-51s could launch and accompany the bombers flying from Saipan, Guam, and Tinian to Japan. Thus, controlling Iwo Jima became key to the U.S. war effort in the Pacific.

  Controlling Iwo Jima became key to the U.S. war effort in the Pacific.

  The man who’d been chosen to lead this air war against Japan was General Curtis LeMay, a native of Columbus, Ohio, who’d eventually serve as the vice-presidential running mate for Governor George Wallace on the American Independent Party ticket in the 1968 presidential election. LeMay had begun his career with the U.S. Army Air Corps (renamed the U.S. Army Air Forces in 1941) and made history as the general who directed U.S. air operations during the Berlin Airlift. A brilliant pilot and military aviation tactician, he’d reached full-bird colonel when he took command of a new B-24 bomber unit in England during World War II. Without adequate fighter escorts in 1943, LeMay’s bombers sustained heavy losses on dangerous and daring missions flown deep over Germany as they attempted to take the war to the Nazis more than a year before the Normandy invasion.

  What LeMay learned during those missions to Germany proved prescient for his later command in the Pacific. A saying in American football applied to the punting team warns, “Don’t out-kick your coverage.” It’s so worded because, if the punter kicks the ball too far downfield ahead of the punt coverage team, the other team can catch the ball and start to make a maneuver before the punt coverage unit gets downfield to make a tackle. That football saying also applied to the early doctrine of aerial warfare during World War II. The bomber was the football, and the fighter planes were the punt coverage unit. If a bomber flew out over enemy territory ahead of its fighter coverage, bad things could happen. Thus, fighter aircrafts like the well-known British Spitfire and the incomparable American P-51 Mustang were designed to protect larger bombers on their missions deep over hostile territory.

  But when selecting bombing targets tucked snugly away in Germany, a new reality emerged. Though the bombers—such as the B-17, the B-24, and later the B-29—were bigger and slower than their fighter escorts, they also had one major advantage: their fuel tanks were much larger, meaning the bombers could penetrate deeper than their fighter escorts into enemy territory to deliver their payload (provided they could make the trip without being shot up—or shot down). Thus, the real danger to the bombers came when the fighters had to turn back on long-range bombing runs because of smaller fuel supplies. Though most bombers were armed with .50-caliber machine guns, because of the plane’s larger size and diminished maneuverability, a bomber’s capacity to defend itself was compromised without fighter escorts. This dynamic left the bomber pilots with a choice: use the superior fuel tanks to their advantage and penetrate deeper into enemy territory without fighter protection, or take the safe path and turn back when their fighters did.

  Early in the air war against Germany, American bombers from the Eighth Air Force often out-flew their fighter coverage, increasing their vulnerability against enemy aircraft and antiaircraft fire. Doing so required great skill a
nd bravery. And the American bomber pilot who most distinguished himself for flying into harm’s way with no fighter protection was Curtis LeMay.

  His signature mission came in August of 1943. Ten months before the grand invasion of France, the Allies commenced a strategic carpet-bombing campaign of Germany as a prelude for the ground invasion. The air campaign was designed to soften enemy resistance on the ground, thus giving Allied forces a slightly safer chance to march towards Berlin. However, at the time, the United States had no fighter aircraft capable of accompanying the bombers on these long-range missions. Therefore, bomber pilots knew from the beginning they would be out-flying their fighter coverage and thereby exposing themselves to German fighter attacks.

  On August 17, in broad daylight, LeMay flew deep into Germany without fighter coverage in what became known as the Schweinfurt-Regensburg mission. The targets were military aircraft factories and ball-bearing factories (ball bearings were used in military ground vehicles, such as tanks, and other machines). A total of 376 B-17 bombers were scheduled to fly without fighter escort. To compensate for lack of U.S. fighter coverage, LeMay devised a plan to split the bombers into two separate groups, thus dividing (and thereby weakening) the enemy’s own fighter coverage. LeMay would command the Fourth Bombardment Wing on the most dangerous leg of the mission—a strike against Regensburg, where the Americans would target factories that produced German Messerschmitt fighter aircraft. The other U.S. air commander, Colonel Bob Williams, would lead the First Bombardment Wing on a mission over Schweinfurt to attack ball-bearing plants crucial to the German war effort. Though both were high-risk endeavors, the Messerschmitt factories would be more fiercely defended, thus making them more dangerous targets.

  The mission proved highly successful, despite its cost. The Eighth Air Force lost sixty B-17 bombers, shot down by German antiaircraft fire and fighter fire. Another ninety-five bombers were heavily damaged. The Germans lost only twenty-seven fighter aircraft—less than half the number of bombers lost by the Eighth Air Force—but the mission rendered a short-term blow to the German war effort by delaying production of fighter aircraft for weeks and creating brief shortages of ball bearings needed to operate Nazi war machines.

  The mission ultimately became the model for the planned long-range bombing of Japan, but LeMay learned from its mistakes, too. In attacking Japan, he would demand fighter support, and a mid-ocean base from which those fighters could be launched. That was Iwo Jima.

  CHAPTER 4

  Assessing the Threat

  1944

  LeMay arrived in the Pacific region the summer before the United States had secured a foothold on Iwo Jima. In August of 1944, two months after the great Allied invasion at Normandy, the American high command had transferred him to the China-India theater to assume control of the Twentieth Bomber Command in China. China was a more desirable location for U.S. forces than the Mariana Islands, since it was much closer to Japan. But it quickly became apparent that setting up strategic bomber bases in eastern China to attack Japan posed logistical issues that rendered the entire setup impractical.

  Part of that had to do with the vicious beating the Japanese had inflicted on the Chinese in the decade prior to LeMay’s arrival in the region. While Americans marked the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor as the moment in which the United States essentially entered the war, the first taste of Japanese aggression in World War II for the Chinese occurred ten years earlier when Japan invaded Manchuria on September 18, 1931. Sometimes referred to as “Northeast China,” Manchuria occupied the far northeastern section of China and was separated from Japan by the Sea of Japan. When the Japanese invaded Manchuria in 1931 and the Chinese did not oppose the invasion, Japan declared Manchuria to be an independent state. The independence was in name only, of course, for the area remained under Japanese control and later became a convenient staging base for Japanese incursion into China.

  Manchuria occupied the far northeastern section of China and was separated from Japan by the Sea of Japan.

  The Japanese, however, wanted Manchuria for reasons other than its military positioning. Japan was a volcanic archipelago, consisting of over sixty-eight hundred islands. Most of these islands were tiny and uninhabitable, with four of them—Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu, and Shikoku—making up over ninety-seven percent of the Japanese landmass. As an island nation, Japan needed more space and natural resources, and Manchuria offered rich ones, including minerals, forest, and land for agricultural purposes. The Japanese homeland was also becoming crowded, and owning Manchuria would give the exploding population somewhere to expand.

  Manchuria itself had been the subject of competing claims from several nations over the years. Though culturally Chinese, large portions of the area had been controlled by Russia prior to the Russo-Japanese War, fought between February of 1904 and September of 1905. The conflict pitted the ambitions of Russia against Japan for control of both Manchuria and Korea. For the Japanese, both countries provided natural geographic buffers separating them from imperialist Russia, which Japan accused of having expansionist territorial ambitions. They may very well have been correct. The Russians had already expanded their massive Eurasian holdings to warmer waters in the Pacific and constructed two valuable railways in the region, the Chinese Eastern and the Manchurian Railway, revealing their intent to assert a powerful influence in East Asia.

  But soon after the establishment of the Manchurian Railway—paid for by the Russians—the Boxer Rebellion arose, pitting the uprising of Chinese nationalists against “foreign influence” and Christian missionaries. The “Boxers,” a group of Chinese peasants who attacked and killed Christian missionaries and Chinese Christians across China during 1899 and 1900, were supported in the massacre by the Qing government and the Chinese Imperial Army. In response to the Boxers, an ironic alliance of eight “allied” nations (known as the “Eight Nation Alliance”) joined together in China to suppress the rebellion. The alliance members were Japan, Russia, Britain, France, the United States, Germany, Italy, and Austria-Hungary—many of which, in just a few short years, would be pitted against one another in two of history’s bloodiest wars. Yet, for a brief, one-year period, they came together in what proved a short-lived alliance. The first post-alliance rupture occurred between Japan and Russia, triggered in large part by Russian troop buildups in Manchuria.

  Already, by the time of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, Russia had sent one hundred seventy-seven thousand troops to the region to protect its railways under construction. This massive troop movement, even during the period of the “Ironic Alliance,” strengthened Japan’s worst fears. War erupted between the two empires on February 8, 1904. Though not known about by most Americans, the Russo-Japanese War would prove to be among the bloodiest in history. The battle of Mukden involved six hundred thousand combatants and was the largest battle fought by an army organized along modern lines in Asia until World War II. Despite the tragic casualties incurred, Japan managed to trounce the Czar’s eastern army and navy and do so quickly, thereby upending a long-held international notion that Asians were an inferior race incapable of competing with Caucasian nations.

  After the Japanese soundly beat the Russians, U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt stepped in to personally mediate the end of the conflict. The war ended on September 5, 1905, with the signing of the “Treaty of Portsmouth,” named for the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in New Hampshire where Roosevelt helped broker and negotiate the treaty that officially suspended the war. Following its defeat, Russia transferred control of the Liaodong Peninsula—which included part of Manchuria—to Japan. Russia had just officially lost its warm water port and had also became the first European power in modern history to lose a war to an Asian power. One of the great spoils grabbed in the victory by the Japanese was the Russian-built South Manchuria Railway Company, which Japan soon made its chief instrument for the economic exploitation of Manchuria. Ultimately, however, the shocking victory marked Imperial Japan’s arrival on the stage of world powers.
And she wanted more.

  And so, in 1931—ten years before Pearl Harbor—Japan launched a full-scale invasion of Manchuria (since victory against the Russians had only ceded them military control of the part of the region known as the Liaodong Peninsula). It could be argued that date—September 18, 1931—marked the real start of World War II, as it saw the massive mobilization of the ferocious Japanese war machine. The 1929 worldwide depression had hit Japan hard: within the country, there was a perceived need for the additional natural resources they believed could be found in Manchuria. China, meanwhile, would not trouble their ambitions, for that country was four years into civil war. In fact, when Japan first invaded Manchuria, Chiang Kai-Shek, China’s nationalist leader, adopted an appeasement strategy in order to focus on defeating the communist uprising.

  By 1933, the Imperial Japanese Army, marching under the guise of the Manchukuo Army, launched an invasion of northern China and moved into China’s northern Jehol province, which adjoined the Manchurian border. The Japanese troops only stopped their march short of the former Chinese capital Peking when a last-minute truce was arranged. The truce, of course, favored the Japanese in a big way. Under its terms, Chinese troops were barred from all areas in China now occupied by the Japanese Army.

  Then, in the spring of 1936, the Japanese transferred the First Division of the Kwantung Army to Manchuria, the largest infantry division in the army. Extremist officers in the army also revolted against the Japanese emperor’s chief advisers, intent on removing obstructionists who opposed military expansionism. The first coup attempt occurred in Tokyo on February 26, 1936.

  Now referred to as the “February 26 Incident,” these conspirators assassinated two of Emperor Hirohito’s key advisers. Other rogue army members surrounded the Japanese Foreign Office and held much of Tokyo hostage for three days. The insurgents captured the minister of war, the governor-general of Korea, and the commander of the Kwantung Army, which was the largest and most prestigious command in the Japanese army. The coup attempt failed only when the Army High Command refused to support the mutineers. The leaders of the mutiny were persuaded to commit suicide to avoid a trial that would have embarrassed the Army. However, in a greater sense, the coup attempt succeeded, as the Army would end up asserting even more control within the civilian government for the remainder of the war.