Beyond Valor

by Jon Erwin

  Roosevelt lingered for some two hours but died at 3:35 p.m. He had been the president for more than twelve years, and he led the nation through the Depression and to the edge of victory in the Second World War. Now he was dead. Mercer and the portrait artist quietly departed Warm Springs.

  On Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, at 5:00 p.m., Vice President Harry S. Truman was about to enjoy a glass of bourbon in the office of Speaker of the House Samuel T. Rayburn when he was told to call the White House. This was unusual because, so far, Truman had spent his eighty-two days as vice president almost completely ignored by Roosevelt. In cabinet meetings and in two short one-on-one meetings with Roosevelt, Truman could see how sick the president was and how skeletal he appeared.

  Truman was told to get to the White House “as fast as you can.” He turned to Rayburn and exclaimed, with a premonition of what was about to happen, “Jesus Christ and General Jackson!”2 Truman raced across the capital city by car and arrived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue at 5:25 p.m.

  “Harry, the president is dead,”3 said Eleanor Roosevelt. Technically, Truman had been president for about two hours, since Roosevelt’s heart stopped beating, but he didn’t know it until now.

  Hours later, Truman recalled, “I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets4 had fallen on me.”

  Truman had admired FDR as the titanic figure he was, but he saw his flaws too, and he was bitter about Roosevelt inexplicably shutting him out of Oval Office affairs at a time when FDR must have known how sick he was. “I was handicapped by lack of knowledge5 of both foreign and domestic affairs—due principally to Mr. Roosevelt’s inability to pass on responsibility. He was always careful to see that no credit went to anyone else for accomplishment.” Truman later privately asserted6 that FDR’s cabinet was a “mudhole,” and the people he inherited from FDR were “crackpots and the lunatic fringe,” including one longtime Roosevelt crony, Henry Morgenthau Jr., the secretary of the treasury, who Truman thought was a “blockhead” and a “nut.”

  As Red Erwin battled for life in a hospital bed on Iwo Jima, his new commander in chief took up his post at the top of the Allied war effort in the Oval Office, the cockpit of what would soon become the world’s first nuclear superpower.

  Despite their age difference—Erwin was twenty-four years old and Truman was sixty-one—they had many things in common. They were both modest, humble, reliable men from the heartland of small-town America. They were both dirt farmers who had known struggle and hardship. They both lacked a college education but knew the value of hard work. Both were God-fearing men who studied the Bible and loved reading history and current events. They were both men of integrity who were madly in love with their wives. And they had both experienced the horrors of combat.

  Truman and Erwin had something else in common: they generated great affection from the people who knew them, the product of their warm, modest, reliable, and humble personalities. In Truman’s case, the effect was remarkable in light of his exalted position and how it continued even when he was president and had the pressures of the world on his shoulders.

  Longtime White House clerk William Hopkins explained, “Truman probably had the human touch7 to the greatest extent of any president I’ve worked for.”

  Presidential assistant David Stowe recalled, “Each and every one of us8 had a close personal relationship with him. In my case, I felt he was like a second father to me; he was kind, he was decisive, he never bawled anybody out in public; if he had anything to say to them, he always said it in private. A guy like that you just have to love.”

  When Secretary of State Dean Acheson had to leave the country when his wife was gravely ill, Truman called the hospital each day to check on her status and then relayed the news to Acheson by transoceanic telephone. Acheson confessed, “Well, this is the kind of person that one can adore.”9

  The love for Truman went deep, even to the lowliest White House employees. A White House messenger explained: “The first thing you find out is that he calls you by name.10 You don’t feel like some kind of a servant, but like a real human being. One day he was walking along with General George Marshall, and I tried to slip by quickly, but he stopped and introduced me to General Marshall in a way that seemed like I was somebody who was real important.”

  A White House usher agreed, saying, “When a butler or doorman or usher would enter the room,11 the Trumans would introduce him to whoever happened to be sitting in the room, even if it were a king or a prime minister.”

  Truman assistant Ken Hechler explained, “He always made everybody feel they were a part of a great team.12 This extended not only to the staff members but also to the cooks and ushers and carpenters and electricians, all of whom just revered Truman because he knew about them as individuals and knew about their families.”

  On his first full day as president,13 April 13, Truman entered the Oval Office at 9:00 a.m., sat in FDR’s chair, squirmed, rolled it back and forth, leaned back, let out a sigh, pulled up to the desk, and plunged into his work. Adm. William D. Leahy, the military chief of staff, brought in a pile of urgent papers and thought the pile looked taller than Truman in the chair. Another aide looked in and saw Truman swiveling in the chair, peering anxiously through his thick spectacles. “I’m not big enough,” he muttered. “I’m not big enough for this job.”14

  Truman had no grand vision, no master plan, only an in-box that was soon overflowing with the colossal challenges of finishing the war, postwar economic conversion, demobilization of hundreds of thousands of American troops, and the emergency needs of entire nations of refugees wandering across the ruins of Europe. Above all, he grappled with the inevitable clash between the two ideological empires of democracy and communism. Ahead lay Hiroshima, the Marshall Plan, the Cold War, the nuclear age, and Korea.

  The man at the desk wore a double-breasted suit adorned with a World War I discharge button. He was a compact five-eight and 175 pounds, with warm hazel eyes and thick glasses that the chief White House usher said “magnified his eyes enormously,15 giving him a peering, owlish gaze.” At sixty-one, he was the flesh-and-blood incarnation of the disappointments and promise of middle America in the early twentieth century. He had grown up in small-town Missouri at the convergence of the West, the South, and the Midwest. He had swept floors and bussed tables at the malt shop on the town square. He had wooed and won the hand of a local girl from a well-to-do family. And he spent ten years plowing fields as a dirt farmer before going to war at the age of thirty-two.

  In 1918, as a captain of an artillery battery charging into the slaughterhouse of the Meuse-Argonne forest, a single battle that killed twenty-six thousand American troops, Truman quickly discovered two talents that later defined his style as president: a skill for fast, instinctive decision-making and the ability to inspire fierce loyalty among his men.

  Nearly eighty years after the battle, Truman’s chief mechanic, McKinley Wooden, reflected on his boss: “He was the best in the world.16 For the simple reason that he was a gentleman from the word go. If you soldiered, he got along with you. If you didn’t, he gave you some trouble.”

  Earlier that summer, in fact, Truman’s men had panicked, broken, and run under a nighttime barrage, and Truman chased, screamed, and swore at them until they stood their ground.

  “In combat, he was pretty cool,” the 103-year-old Wooden recalled in 1996. “He gave you credit, and he backed you up all the way.”

  Truman said that combat had taught him a crucial lesson: “There are a great many different factors17 that go into the making of a command decision, but in the end there has to be just one decision—or there is no command.”

  In his first few days in office, as Red Erwin hovered between life and death in the Pacific, Truman delivered a radio address to the country’s armed forces: “As a veteran of the First World War,18 I have seen death on the battlefield,” he said. “When I fought in France with the Thirty-fifth Division, I saw good officers and men fall and be replaced. . . . I kno
w the strain, the mud, the misery, the utter weariness of the soldier in the field. And I know too his courage, his stamina, his faith in his comrades, his country and himself.”

  Truman’s postwar career was a mixture of failure and comebacks: near bankruptcy from the collapse of his haberdashery business, election as a county commissioner, defeat for reelection, two years in a career wilderness as a membership salesman for the Kansas City Automobile Association, seven years as presiding judge of Jackson County, and ten years as a New Deal US senator, when he gained national attention for investigating defense industry waste and fraud.

  “His personal and professional experience,19 like that of many men, had been an ambiguous blend of success and failure,” observed Alonzo Hamby. “The security and confidence he had achieved were fragile.”

  “I get up at five-thirty every morning,”20 Truman told reporter John Hersey. “Most people don’t know when the best part of the day is: it’s the early morning.”

  Many mornings he would charge through the streets and parks of Washington on a vigorous power walk for a mile or two at the military regulation pace of 120 steps per minute, swinging a rubber-tipped walking cane and accompanied by ten Secret Service agents, some wielding machine guns.

  “I’ve been taking these walks for thirty years now. I got in the habit of getting up and moving around smart in the early mornings on the farm, and then when I got into politics, I couldn’t stop,” he explained as Hersey trotted alongside. “A man in my position has a public duty to keep himself in good condition. You can’t be mentally fit unless you’re physically fit. A walk like this keeps your circulation up to where you can think clearly. That old pump has to keep squirting the juice into your brain, you know.”

  After his morning walk,21 Truman worked out in the small gym and then ate a light breakfast with a shot of bourbon. He fit into suits he wore fifteen years earlier. As early as 7:00 a.m., he would enter the Oval Office, park his briefcase on the walnut desk, and dump out the papers he had worked on the night before.

  Truman’s Oval Office executive style was relentlessly decisive. He tackled most every decision quickly and clearly, and he worked through his in-box at machine-gun speed. In his memoirs, he wrote, “I discovered that being a president is like riding a tiger.22 A man has to keep on riding or be swallowed. The fantastically crowded nine months of 1945 taught me that a president either is constantly on top of events or, if he hesitates, events will soon be on top of him. I never felt that I could let up for a single moment.”

  “You could go into his office with a question23 and come out with a decision more swiftly than any man I have ever known,” Averell Harriman observed.

  In sharp contrast to the roundabout decision-making style of patrician FDR, “Truman was a dirt farmer,”24 said assistant Kenneth Hechler. “He plowed a straight furrow when it came to issuing directions and making decisions.”

  Truman aide David Bell recalled, “We hadn’t expected very much,25 but as time went on, we realized, here was a guy with a backbone of iron! Here was a guy came from the middle of the United States and was not well educated, who was thoroughly up on the world, and was doing his damnedest.”

  On one of his first days as president, Harry S. Truman approved the recommendation for Red Erwin’s Medal of Honor. Truman had epic decisions ahead of him, on monumental issues affecting America and the world, but Red’s medal was one of the easiest decisions he ever had to make.

  Truman was to personally present Medals of Honor to many American servicemen during his seven years in office, often in Rose Garden ceremonies, and his awe and respect for their deeds of courage was so great that he often told the recipients, “I’d rather wear that medal than be president26 of the United States.”

  Red Erwin had no way of knowing this, but Truman would also soon be responsible for showing Red what he would do with the rest of his life, what his destiny would be, and what he was put on earth for.

  Word quickly arrived from the Pentagon that Red’s Medal of Honor was signed off on by the president. In the meantime, General LeMay’s staff had canvassed the Pacific, trying to find a Medal of Honor to present to Red before he died. None were available except for one in a display case in the office of Maj. Gen. Robert C. Richardson, commander of the US Army, Pacific (Hawaiian Department), at Hickam Field in Hawaii, nearly four thousand miles away.

  LeMay dispatched a B-29 to Hawaii with orders for the crew to get their hands on the medal. When they arrived at Hickam, the glass case was locked and the general and the key were nowhere to be found. So they smashed open the case, seized the medal, and bolted back to Guam.

  Red lingered at the Iwo Jima field hospital for three days while doctors frantically labored to stabilize his grave condition. Sections of his scorched skin were removed, multiple units of plasma were administered, and he was wrapped from head to toe in sterile gauze. He resembled an Egyptian mummy.

  The job of informing Red’s family of his injuries fell to a Roman Catholic chaplain on Iwo Jima, Capt. George Lehman. On April 16, just after Red was evacuated to the larger hospital at Guam, Lehman wrote to Betty: “It is my duty to inform you that your husband, Henry E. Erwin, was admitted into our hospital for the treatment of third degree burns of his head, face, neck, hands, forearms, and legs.” After some reassuring words on Red’s progress, he added, “He was a remarkable patient. In spite of his intense discomfort, he was unusually considerate, concerned less about himself, really, than about you. His first request when I came to his side was that I write you.”

  On April 19, at a brief bedside ceremony in Fleet Hospital 103 on Guam, with the officers and crew of the City of Los Angeles looking on, General LeMay and Maj. Gen. Willis H. Hale, the commanding general, Army Air Forces, Pacific Ocean Areas, and deputy commander of the Twentieth Air Force, presented the Medal of Honor to Sgt. Henry E. Erwin.

  General LeMay told Red, “Your effort to save the lives of your fellow airmen is the most extraordinary kind of heroism I know.”

  When they told Red he was going to receive a Medal of Honor, he was too wracked with pain to care. “I was not in any condition to appreciate anything,” he said later.

  Red was the only Superfortress crewman to receive the Medal of Honor for service aboard a B-29. One of LeMay’s pilots, however, Michael J. Novosel, would be awarded the medal twenty-four years later for his actions as a helicopter pilot in Vietnam at the age of forty-seven.

  General Hale gently laid the medal on the bedsheet covering Red, who was swathed in gauze, his body almost completely hidden except for a small area of his face. Hale said, “Today is the first time I have ever had the honor of presenting the Congressional Medal of Honor. I’ve never known of one being more deserved. It is an example of sheer guts and will power in overcoming physical agony. I think the event as expressed in the citation is outstanding in military history.”

  Two photographs were taken of the bedside ceremony, and in them, the expressions on the faces of Red’s crewmates are funereal, reflecting sadness at his wounds and sadness at their impending farewell. LeMay does not appear in the photos, perhaps not wanting to intrude on the solemnity and fragility of the moment.

  The Medal of Honor was presented to Henry E. Erwin on April 19, 1945, at his Guam hospital bedside. (US Air Force)

  Usually, it takes months or even years for a Medal of Honor recommendation to be approved and the medal awarded. In the case of Red Erwin, it took seven hours and thirty minutes for approval by the Department of Defense and just six days for the medal to be presented to him. It happened so quickly that the official general order wouldn’t be published for seven weeks:

  MEDAL OF HONOR

  STAFF SERGEANT HENRY EUGENE ERWIN (Air Mission)

  Rank and organization: Staff Sergeant, US Army Air Corps, 52d

  Bombardment Squadron, 29th Bombardment Group, 20th Air Force

  Place and date: Koriyama, Japan, 12 April 1945

  Entered service at: Bessemer, Ala.

  G.O
. No.: 44, 6 June 1945

  Citation: He was the radio operator of a B-29 airplane leading a group formation to attack Koriyama, Japan. He was charged with the additional duty of dropping phosphorus smoke bombs to aid in assembling the group when the launching point was reached. Upon entering the assembly area, aircraft fire and enemy fighter opposition was encountered. Among the phosphoresce bombs launched by S/Sgt. Erwin, 1 proved faulty, exploding in the launching chute, and shot back into the interior of the aircraft, striking him in the face. The burning phosphorus obliterated his nose and completely blinded him. Smoke filled the plane, obscuring the vision of the pilot. S/Sgt. Erwin realized that the aircraft and crew would be lost if the burning bomb remained in the plane. Without regard for his own safety, he picked it up and feeling his way, instinctively, crawled around the gun turret and headed for the copilot’s window. He found the navigator’s table obstructing his passage. Grasping the burning bomb between his forearm and body, he unleashed the spring lock and raised the table. Struggling through the narrow passage he stumbled forward into the smoke-filled pilot’s compartment. Groping with his burning hands, he located the window and threw the bomb out. Completely aflame, he fell back upon the floor. The smoke cleared, the pilot, at 300 feet, pulled the plane out of its dive. S/Sgt. Erwin’s gallantry and heroism above and beyond the call of duty saved the lives of his comrades.

  In the days and weeks following Red’s Medal of Honor action, army officials rushed to offer praise to him and his family. And slowly, incredibly, and despite constant, indescribable pain, Red Erwin began to recover from his wounds.