The Things Our Fathers Saw—The Untold Stories of the World War II Generation From Hometown, USA-Volume I: Voices of the Pacific Theater

by Matthew Rozell

  ‘Five o'clock low,’ I cried out, and found him in my sight. I narrowed the circle of dots down to his wing tips, and began squeezing off bursts. He opened fire at the same time. The machine guns in his wings flared again and again as he closed in. His glowing tracer bullets flew lazily by, looking almost harmless. He kept coming until he was a few hundred yards away. The image of that black fighter, his winking guns and the slow motion tracers will stay with me forever.

  I slowly opened the ring to hold it around his wing tips, and continued firing. I was aware that I was spacing my bursts, letting up for a few seconds as he bore in. My bullets were striking his right engine, sending parts flying. Smoke began pouring from the engine, and the pilot broke off his attack. He banked down into the clouds, a long, black plume trailing behind. I have often wondered if he made it home safely, and where he is today. One of his engines was still operating, so he probably was able to return to his base.

  Late that day, as we were nearing home, I became aware that something was wrong. The captain and our flight engineer were talking about headwinds and the amount of fuel that remained in our wing tanks, as they so often did. But this time I could tell they were worried. Finally the flight engineer said, ‘It's going to be close.’

  Not long after, the captain came onto the intercom.

  ‘We've got a little problem up here,’ he said. ‘We've hit some headwinds, and might not be able to make it back. Y’all should get ready, in case we have to ditch or bail out.’

  By that time, we were well south of Saipan and forty five miles north of Guam. So not only the Japanese were running out of gas. I scrambled quickly back to the tail, where my life raft rested in its canvas pack within the seat frame. I snapped my chest parachute onto my harness. Listening from the tail, I could hear that the situation was worsening.

  I lifted out the life raft pack and attached it to the rings on the bottom of my parachute harness. A long strap hung from the raft inside the pack. I pulled the strap underneath my harness and snapped it onto my Mae West. It was an ingenious arrangement; once I shucked the chute harness in the water and yanked on the strap, the raft would be pulled free of the pack and automatically inflate.

  I folded my seat back and slid it up to give myself more room. The intercom clicked.

  ‘No time left’, the captain said. ‘Everybody out!’ A frightened voice broke in. It was the replacement radar officer. ‘I can't swim,’ he cried out. ‘I can't swim!’

  ‘You don't have to,’ I said. ‘Just remember your procedures. The life vest and raft should be enough’.

  The bailout bell began ringing. I unplugged my headset, unsnapped my throat microphone, and opened the escape window. The air whipped by in a fearsome roar. As I moved to dive out, I found I could not; I was caught by the life raft strap, which had become snagged in the folded seat. I felt a wave of panic, and began tugging desperately at the strap. It would not come loose. The bell kept ringing. I thought of cutting the strap with my knife, but told myself to calm down to work the strap free. I unfolded the seat, slid it back down, and released the strap. I pushed the seat up, and went out the window.

  Into the Ocean

  First there was a rush and roar of air, then I tumbled over and over. Suddenly the parachute opened above me with a ‘pop’ and I was jerked to a halt. I have no memory of pulling the ripcord handle, or where it went afterward. My helmet was gone. It was strangely quiet except for the hum of our disappearing bomber. The evening sky was still pink from the sunset as I floated down.

  I could see another chute against the black sea below, and called out to its owner. I undid my chest and leg straps and inflated my Mae West so that I could get out of the harness as quickly as possible after landing. I dangled there like a kid on a swing. As I watched, the horizon quickly closed in. For the first time, I realized that I would be alone in the ocean. I landed with a hard splash on my back and sank far deeper into the water than I ever imagined. It seemed a long time before I came up to the surface, even with an inflated vest. But I kept my mouth closed and held my breath until I surfaced. I threw off the parachute harness and pulled the life raft strap. The raft came out of its pack, and a gas cylinder opened it with a ‘whoosh.’ I drew the small raft to me and climbed in.

  The waves were rolling monsters, flecks of white spray whipping from their crests. I rode them up and down as if on a roller coaster. Even when I was carried high on a wave, I saw no other crew members. I spent the night trying to sleep, being tipped over by the big swells, climbing back into the raft, and drying off only to be tipped over again. I was glad I had not cut the strap, for it kept the raft from blowing away when I was spilled into the water. Each time I was dumped into the sea, I thought about the possibility of sharks being in the area and scrambled back into the raft as quickly as I could.

  A squall moved in. I collected rain in the rubber raft cover, washed the salt away as best I could, and drank all I could hold. I did not know how long it would be until help arrived.

  Just before dawn, I noticed a dark shape in the distance. For a time I thought it was Rota, a small, Japanese held island just north of Guam that had been bypassed [by our forces]. I did not want to be washed ashore, for B–29s that had to abort their missions dumped their bombs there before returning to Guam. The soldiers were not likely to be kind. I reversed the yellow side of the cover to the dark blue side and snuggled down even lower in the raft.

  After a time, I heard the muffled chugging of an engine. The dark shape was a merchant ship that was looking for us. A searchlight swept the ocean. ‘Ship ahoy,’ I called out, as they did in the movies. The beam came my way, and I waved my arms. It lighted on me. Soon the side of the ship loomed high above. A sailor came down a cargo net, grabbed my hand, and helped me out of the raft. I scrambled up the side, only to find my legs weak when I climbed over the railing and stood on the deck. Members of the ship's crew stood watching the strange scene. I was led below, given a hot shower, a shot of whiskey, an officer's underwear and bunk, and fell asleep.

  Our waist gunners were picked up before I was. One said later that someone told him that another member of the crew had been found, and that ‘he came up the side of the ship like a monkey.’

  ‘That must be our tail gunner,’ he said.

  Three other members of the crew were not as fortunate. Our navigator and the flight engineer failed to open their life rafts and had drowned. They were found floating in their life vests, unable to keep their heads out of the choppy waves all night. Our radioman was able to do that; he did not get his raft open, but he fought to keep his head up. His neck was scraped raw by his life vest, but he survived.

  I assumed that the replacement radar man who could not swim had leaped from the plane after I did. In the most bizarre aspect of the entire tragedy, I did not learn otherwise for many years. In actuality, he had gone down with the plane, refusing to jump despite the pleas of the waist gunners and our central fire control gunner. They considered throwing him out the rear door, but the central fire control gunner thought he could persuade him to jump by himself. He argued as long as he could, and then had to leap before it was too late. The radar man preferred to die in a crash rather than risk drowning in the sea.

  The Unwritten Rule

  They never talked about those awful moments, nor did I ever ask about them. Their need to deny or forget was complete, and I must have undergone the same subconscious process. It was only after I was reunited with one of the waist gunners, Jim Dudley, forty–five years after the war that I learned the true story.

  We could only speculate on what had happened to our navigator and flight engineer; possibly they had left their rafts behind. Possibly they had forgotten to attach the raft straps to their life vests, or had attached their straps over their chute harnesses instead of underneath them. Nor did we ever find out why we had not stopped at Iwo, Tinian or Saipan to refuel. There was an unspoken agreement that the enlisted men should not press the captain too much on the subject, so
we did not. We knew our place, and stuck to it.

  My impression was that the captain disliked the long fueling delays, and enjoyed the attention that early arrivals from a mission received. He may have been eager to get back to report that we had beaten off an enemy fighter at a time when few were left in the skies. Whatever the reason, three young men paid with their lives.

  Our encounter with the Irving was never reported; the damage inflicted on a Japanese fighter was incidental in light of what had happened to our bomber and the three men. I have since wondered if other B–29s that mysteriously disappeared off the coast of Japan without a trace during the war had fallen victim to surprise attacks such as ours.

  A few days later we gathered at a military cemetery outside of Agana. The burial ground was located on a hillside, overlooking the Pacific. The sun was shining, a light breeze was blowing, and clouds were piled high in the sky. It was a glorious summer day. Our lives were continuing on; three others had come to an end.

  An olive drab Army ambulance with a large red cross arrived, bearing the remains of our navigator and flight engineer in wooden coffins with rope handles. I wondered where the radar man’s body was. Thinking that he also had drowned, I assumed he was to be buried by members of his own crew at another time.

  We opened the rear doors of the ambulance and slid the flight engineer's coffin toward us. As we did, the box tilted, and blood trickled from a crack onto the ground. The officers bore our navigator to his open grave as we carried our flight engineer to his. The graves were located side by side, approximating the way the two men had sat across an aisle from each other for hundreds of hours in the air. After an Air Force chaplain performed the funeral service, our central fire control gunner stepped up to the graves and wailed a Hebrew funeral chant. It was one of the saddest refrains I had ever heard. None of us dared look at the others. Our crew was sent on a one week rest leave in Hawaii. Still stunned, we flew back in a comfortable Navy Douglas C-54 passenger plane. Seated close together on the long flight, we did not discuss what had happened. We dealt with our emotions by avoiding the incident altogether. Just as it was an unwritten rule not to question our captain, so it was that we did not revisit our experience. We were glad to be alive.[65]

  The Morality of War

  Over sixty Japanese cities had been incinerated by the B–29s. Howling firestorms devoured civilians and workers in sheets of flames, burning hundreds of thousands to death.

  When asked after the war about the morality of his orders to the crews of the B–29s, General LeMay responded, ‘We knew we were going to kill a lot of women and children when we burned [Tokyo]... Killing Japanese didn’t bother me much at the time. It was getting the war over with that bothered me.’

  ‘We had to kill in order to end the war,’ one pilot remembered. ‘We heard about the thousands of people we killed, the Japanese wives, the children, and the elderly. That was war. But I know every B–29 air crewman for the next two or three years would wake up at night and start shaking. Yes, [the raids] were successful, but horribly so.’ [66]

  Aftermath of March 9–10 1945 Tokyo raid. Ishikawa Kouyou.

  While the population reeled and staggered, the Japanese High Command showed no signs of giving up the fight.

  It would go on.

  chapter thirteen

  The Kamikazes

  ‘People of the Philippines, I have returned… Rally to me. Let the indomitable spirit of Bataan and Corregidor lead on! As the lines of battle roll forward to bring you within the zone of operations, rise and strike!’[67]

  On October 20th, 1944, after three years of Japanese conquest and occupation, General Douglas MacArthur dramatically strode forth through the surf to arrive in the Philippines from Australia. The campaign for the liberation of Manila and the rescue of the prisoners, many of whom had felt abandoned by his abrupt departure two and a half years earlier, began even before Peleliu Island was secured. On the first day, more men would land at Leyte than the numbers put ashore that previous June to invade ‘Fortress Europe’ at Normandy on D-Day.[68]

  Alvin Peachman was part of the naval force that put 200,000-plus American liberators ashore, and would also be a part of the Battle of Leyte Gulf, in which the Japanese Navy set into motion a complex ‘oceanic banzai charge’ to destroy the landing fleet and isolate the Americans now on land.[69]

  Alvin Peachman

  On the destroyer escort USS Witter, we made another trip to Saipan, and I got off there for a night. The captain was a good guy because I had a brother there in the Army crew, and I asked if I could visit the Army anti-aircraft crew where he was. He said ‘Yeah, take the night off,’ which I did. He was a good fellow. I went up there with the soldiers for a night with my brother.

  Then we left there and October 1944 we made a lot of fleet exercises, and we invaded Leyte in the Philippine Islands. We carried in a bunch of soldiers there and I witnessed the battle both on land and later on the sea, because the Japanese closed in on us. We picked up and escorted several ships filled with ammunition, and several with fuel oil. We were under great aerial attack coming in and out. We got through and brought them to the fleet and they unloaded them in great haste to get ready for the Japanese Navy.

  The Japanese Navy was converging from three different directions to take the gamble at destroying the invasion fleet.

  Crossing the ‘T’

  Admiral Oldendorf was there with the 7th Fleet and crossed the ‘T’ on them and sank the whole Japanese fleet. They had to come up for what was called the Surigao Strait, which was a strait between Samar and Leyte. Every ship coming in in that division, in that area, was sunk.

  ‘Crossing the T’ was the ideal in classical naval warfare. The battle line of the enemy’s ships steams ahead in single ‘vertical’ file just as its attackers cross the top of the line horizontally, the bar of the ‘ T’ allowing all of its broadside guns to be brought to bear while the enemy can only fire its forward facing guns.[70]

  That didn’t occur in other places. The Japanese Navy never attacked one spot. One of their fleets came through the center and Admiral Halsey had left that area, exposing our DEs [destroyer escorts] and light carriers which we provided in force for Leyte, and it almost upset the whole invasion! He had gone further north, hunting the Japanese carriers; the Japanese had provided the bait for him to do that very thing!

  The Japanese are not dumb people. Not only are they clever, but they are very brave and very fanatical. Every island we invaded had very few prisoners taken, they fought right to the last man. If they would have had our resources, it might have been a different story.

  We then left that area because we were needed elsewhere. Before the rest of the Philippines were invaded, we went back down to New Guinea and we got ourselves ready there.

  The greatest naval battle of the entire war had cost the Japanese nearly all of its Imperial Navy. However, at the conclusion of the three-day Battle of Leyte Gulf, a sinister new development began to harry the weary American crews. Out of the skies came suicide planes, armed with bombs, often closing on a target in pairs, intent on crashing into ships. The kamikazes, or ‘divine wind’, took their inspiration from the typhoons which had saved Japan from Mongol invasions centuries before.

  Back on land, 65,000 Japanese soldiers were killed at Leyte, with over 15,000 American casualties. The worst scenes of urban fighting in the Pacific took place for Manila, where in the month preceding Feb. 1945, over 100,000 Filipino civilians died at the hands of the Japanese. The battles in the Philippines lasted until June 30th, 1945. By this time, Alvin and the crew of the Witter were conducting tactical exercises and escort duties in the run-up to the massive Okinawa campaign, which would prove to be the last great amphibious operation of World War II.

  Ulithi

  Then we set sail for Ulithi. Ulithi Atoll was known as ‘Shangri-La’ to us, because it’s a deep water lagoon in the Carolines [where sailors could rest, swim, and get beer]. The Caroline Islands covers an area about as
large as the United States, but if you put all of the land area together, you’d get about the size of Rhode Island, very small atolls but in a very large area.

  In Ulithi we had an anchorage; it looked like a large ring. We had a net to cross where we’d go in, and we had our fleet in there [it could hold up to 700 ships] for this invasion of Okinawa. And I knew what was taking place right along, because I was on the radio.

  The ships that were coming in there were unloading to the other ships right from the water. They couldn’t even put it on land. There was just very little land for a staging area, you know? And one night, two suicide planes came in unannounced. I don’t know if the Japanese fixed them in some nearby island, because we neutralized them all. They hit this one carrier, while they were watching movies. The other airplane came down and he saw an island lit up right beside us, he thought it was a super dreadnought. He smashed into the island, and that was the end of him [chuckles].

  Setting Sail for Okinawa

  We then set sail for Okinawa in March of ’45, which was over about 2,000 miles, patrolled by Japs. See, things happen quickly; we had the Japanese on the run, we were hitting them hard. The Philippines were still going on when we hit Okinawa-there were troops in Luzon, still in battle. As I remember it must have taken five or six days. We had such a force; I thought we’d go right to Japan! It was 60 miles long, protected with submarines and DEs like ours, for Japanese U-boats.