Beyond Valor

by Jon Erwin

  On April 20, the day after the bedside presentation, Gen. Thomas Power, commander of the 314th Bombardment Wing, sent a letter to Red’s mother: “It is with a deep sense of pride and gratification that I am writing to you of the unselfish and heroic deed performed by your son, Staff Sergeant Henry Eugene Erwin. The courage and bravery which your son displayed in removing a burning smoke-bomb from one of our planes undoubtedly saved the plane and the lives of his fellow crewmen. . . . [Red] is the type of man that makes me humbly proud to be his Commanding General.”

  He added, “A man of Sergeant Erwin’s character and personality is not the product of instinct or accident. His life reflects the training of the home that reared him and the happiness of the home which he himself is now building. All of you who love him, and who have made him what he is, played a vital part in this heroic act, and you too have a share in these tributes of praise.”

  On April 26, Gen. Lauris Norstad wrote to Red’s wife, Betty: “Outstanding amongst all of the heroic acts achieved by members of the Twentieth Air Force in over a year’s operation is the glorious self-sacrifice of your husband, Staff Sergeant Henry E. Erwin.” He continued, “His transcendent heroism moves me, as a professional soldier, to pay him tribute. His deed lifts him to a place with the bravest men in all history, and as we consider the courage he displayed we gain a new and humbling appreciation of the valor inherent in mankind.”

  At the hospital on Guam, doctors worked heroically to keep Red alive. His burns were so deep and severe that they feared a fatal infection would soon erupt. The doctors painstakingly scraped phosphorus out of his eyes and off the rest of his body, but it kept reigniting and tormenting the young airman. They performed improvised surgeries and gave him blood transfusions and antibiotics.

  Red remembered, “They kept me in all these bandages while I was soaked in a saline solution in a little tub, so what little flesh I had wouldn’t come off. I always felt like I’d wet the bed or something.”

  Gen. Henry H. “Hap” Arnold later wrote to Red, “I regard your act as one of the bravest in the records of the war.” On other occasions, Arnold wrote, “The country’s highest honor will still be inadequate recognition of the inspiring heroism of this man. . . . Few men, officers or enlisted, in any Army of any service look back upon an act of such stark courage as his.”

  Capt. Tony Simeral described Erwin’s action as “an ordeal with the fires of hell.”

  One of Red’s visitors on Guam on May 7 was General LeMay, who asked, “Is there anything I can do for you, sergeant?”

  “Yes, there is, sir,” whispered Red through his bandages. “My brother Howard is with the marines over on Saipan. I’d like to see him. Would you see if you can get my brother to come over?”

  Red hadn’t seen Howard in four years, and he yearned to make a family connection in the midst of his despair.

  LeMay replied, “He’ll be here tomorrow morning.” A special flight was arranged, and the pilot was 1st Lt. Tyrone Power, a swashbuckling Hollywood actor who was doing his wartime service as a marine transport pilot, supporting the just-concluded Battle of Iwo Jima and the upcoming Battle for Okinawa.

  The next morning, the two Erwin brothers had a reunion at Red’s hospital bedside. Still blind, Red couldn’t see Howard, and his burn wounds prevented them from embracing, but Red was thrilled to hear Howard’s voice. They exchanged hours of whispered small talk.

  “That was a very proud moment,” recalled Red. “It made tears come to my eyes because I was in such sad shape, to be very frank with you, but I just enjoyed being there with him. I couldn’t see him, but I knew he was there and that was a great comfort.”

  After checking with Red, Howard touched him on a rare unburned section of his torso, which thrilled Red. Here was the touch of someone he truly loved, a kid brother who he’d grown up with through countless backyard games and rough-and-tumbles on the grass.

  Red’s burn wounds were so severe that the slightest touch of a bed or a pillow would cause him to scream in searing pain, but Howard brought with him a precious therapeutic agent—hope. “He stayed with me for twenty-four hours,” remembered Red. “When he visited me, I knew I was going to live, despite the pain I was in.”

  The military doctors on Iwo Jima and Guam had saved Red’s life, at least for now, but they knew he would need years of intensive medical care, surgical reconstruction, and physical rehabilitation to regain any semblance of a normal life.

  On May 7, Red was put on a plane to the States for a series of hopscotch flights that would take him home to Alabama, to be with his family and the woman he loved.

  Chapter Seven

  HOMECOMING

  IN MAY 1945, THE MOMENT RED ERWIN FEARED more than anything else arrived.

  His wife, Betty, was coming to see him in the burn ward at Northington Hospital in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He had arrived there on May 7, after a series of special military flights from Guam, Hawaii, and Sacramento. At Northington, a series of excruciating, complex operations began, with surgeons beginning to scrape most of the unstable, constantly reigniting phosphorus from the area around his eyes. Already some sight had been restored to his right eye. Miraculously, the doctors, aided by Red’s prayers and his fierce will to live and come home to his family, were pulling him out of the jaws of death, despite the relatively primitive state of burn rehabilitation and reconstructive surgery. He was alive, but just barely.

  “I was in so much misery and pain I was praying to die,” he explained. “And then I got so near dying that I was praying to live.” He thought, Why did God save me?

  “I was in the hospital a long, long time,” Red remembered. “When you see a lot of boys around you in so much worse shape than I was—arms off, legs off, paralyzed so they can’t move at all—you can’t waste time feeling sorry for yourself. I’m lucky to be alive.”

  But for days Red witnessed a series of heartbreaking scenes among his fellow wounded patients. Wives and girlfriends would freeze in shock at the mangled remains of the men who once were their true loves before they went to war. Some of the patients lacked arms and legs. Some were blinded and burned even worse than Red.

  “While I was in the hospital, I saw many episodes of badly wounded soldiers being rejected by their wives,” Red recalled. “They would come to the hospital, see their wounded mate, then take off their wedding band, lay it on the bed, and walk out.”

  “I didn’t know what to expect,” he said of Betty’s coming. Would his wife, to whom he had been married only three months before he went overseas, do the same? The last time she saw him, he was a movie-star handsome soldier. And now? She had been told he had sustained third-degree burns over much of his body, but how would she react when she saw him in person? Red lay helpless and flat in the bed. His head was still bandaged and much of his body was immobilized. He was horribly scarred and disfigured but clinging to life. His weight had plummeted to 87 pounds, as his body could only take in liquids for nourishment.

  Red’s mother waited outside the hospital room. She had been told how badly burned he was, and she couldn’t yet bring herself to go inside.

  And then Betty walked into the ward.

  But instead of giving a look of shock or horror, she smiled—a serene, confident, loving smile. In fact, it seemed as if she hardly noticed Red’s injuries at all. She didn’t hesitate for a moment. She leaned down, found the one small, undamaged, unburned section of skin on his left cheek, and gently kissed it. In that moment, and for the rest of their lives together, her attitude toward his appearance was like a fairy tale. Where everyone else saw the terrible effects of severe burns, she saw only goodness and beauty. He was still the best-looking man she had ever laid eyes on.

  “Welcome home, Gene,” she said. “It’s good to have you home. I love you. I am here for you.”

  Red could do nothing but cry.

  Betty Erwin committed to stay at Red’s side for the rest of her life, just as she’d promised when she married him. Nothing would chan
ge that. Red had just celebrated his twenty-fourth birthday, and she was just turning nineteen.

  “The thought of leaving him never entered my mind,” she told me many years later.

  They would stay together, for love and honor, for the next fifty-seven years.

  Red Erwin recovering back in the United States, 1945. He would endure forty-one surgical procedures over the next two years. (Erwin Family Collection)

  One memorable day in June 1945, the well-known disability rights champion Helen Keller came to visit Red at Northington Hospital. Now sixty-four, the Alabama-born Keller, the victim of a childhood illness that rendered her blind, deaf, and speechless, had become a globe-trotting advocate for the rights and potential of handicapped people.

  When Keller met Red at his bedside and heard his story, she was moved to tears and gave Red a memory he cherished for the rest of his life. The next day she dictated a letter to him:

  Dear Sergeant Erwin,

  This is what I tried to say to you yesterday when I had the touching, unforgettable honor of visiting you. I love you because of what you did for the crew in the plane. That act, so simply wrought, is a life given—a gift which no words can compass. . . . As I stood in your modest, regal presence, I was conscious of something which transcends my own experience. The chronicle of the handicapped is a chapter in the world’s history, which I have been proud to interpret for others, but, ‘Red’ Erwin, you have reached heights of handicap higher than any I know, and I proudly bow before your indomitable spirit as I remember your saying you would do it over again. You have translated sheer deprivation into courage that will fortify an increasing number of soldiers of limitation far down the centuries.

  On August 6, 1945, the B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay detonated an atomic bomb over Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later, the B-29 Bockscar detonated another on Nagasaki.

  Five days later, Emperor Hirohito held a conference in the air raid shelter at the imperial palace. His cabinet was divided over whether to accept the unconditional surrender demanded by the Allies in the Potsdam Declaration.

  The emperor broke the deadlock and said, “I cannot endure the thought of letting my people suffer1 any longer. A continuation of the war would bring death to tens, perhaps even hundreds, of thousands of people. The whole nation would be reduced to ashes.” He concluded, “It is my desire that you, my Ministers of State, accede to my wishes and forthwith accept the Allied reply.” The next day, Hirohito publicly ordered the surrender.

  By then there were almost no undamaged strategic targets remaining in Japan, as most of the nation’s ability to wage war had been destroyed by demolition and incendiary bombs dropped by the B-29 force and the combined power of the Allies. The conventional and atomic attacks, combined with the USSR’s last-minute entry into the war on Japan on the side of the Allies, brought the war to an end.

  From March to August 1945, American firebombs had killed more than 300,000 civilians in 67 cities, injured 412,000 others, and left close to 10 million people homeless. Half of the capital city of Tokyo had been obliterated. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings killed at least 120,000 people, mostly civilians. During the war, 437 American B-29s were lost, many to malfunctions, and more than 3,000 officers and men were lost forever.

  After the war, various Japanese officials argued that conventional B-29 bombing would have ended the war soon enough, even though hard-core militarist factions had, until early August 1945, paralyzed the Japanese government into what seemed like an indefinite war mentality.

  “Fundamentally the thing that brought about the determination to make peace,”2 said former Japanese prime minister Fumimaro Konoye, “was the prolonged bombing by the B-29s.”

  Other Japanese officials agreed. “I, myself, on the basis of the B-29 raids,3 felt that the case was hopeless,” said Adm. Kantaro Suzuki, who was the prime minister from April 7 to August 17, 1945, and a key player in the final surrender negotiations.

  Naruhiko Higashikuni, commander in chief of Home Defense Headquarters, argued, “The war was lost when the Marianas were taken4 away from Japan, and when we heard the B-29s were coming out. We had nothing in Japan that we could use against such a weapon. From the point of view of the Home Defense Command, we felt that the war was lost, and we said so.”

  Katsumoto Saotome, a writer and antiwar campaigner and survivor of the March 9–10 Tokyo air raid, told a journalist, “The firebombing probably led to an earlier end of the war.5 But I think killing noncombatants was an unforgivable violation of human morality.” After a momentary pause, he added, “But in fact it was Japan that was the first to kill noncombatants, when it bombed cities like Chongqing in China.”

  On the morning of September 2, 1945, B-29s flew their last mission over Japan. It was unlike any mission they had flown before.

  It was the day Red Erwin and millions of other people around the world had prayed for: the official last day of World War II, a war that killed some seventy-five million people.

  Emperor Hirohito had broadcast a capitulation speech two weeks earlier, on August 14, but Gen. Douglas MacArthur, supreme commander of the Allied powers, gave the Japanese two weeks to get the word out to seven million far-flung Japanese troops to complete the surrender. MacArthur made a historic landing at Atsugi Airfield near Yokohama on August 30, with a corncob pipe in his mouth, and he was chauffeured by his Japanese hosts in a vintage Lincoln limousine to a steak dinner at the Yokohama Grand Hotel. American army and marine units soon charged ashore from landing craft at spots around Tokyo Bay and elsewhere along the Japanese coast, peacefully occupying strategic strongpoints around the vanquished nation.

  Now, on this morning in early September, hundreds of Allied aircraft thundered toward the scene to provide an awesome finale to a solemn surrender ceremony that unfolded aboard the battleship Missouri, flagship of Adm. William Halsey Jr.’s Third Fleet, anchored in Tokyo Bay, along with nearly 260 Allied warships. There were no aircraft carriers at the scene—they were on alert farther out, in case there might be a last-minute attack by disaffected Japanese military factions.

  The Missouri was flying the Stars and Stripes that had flown atop the US Capitol on December 7, 1941, and the warship was near the spot where Cmdre. Matthew C. Perry had arrived in 1853 with his “black ships” when he aimed his guns at Japan and opened the nation to the Western world.

  The battleship was packed to overflowing with Allied generals and admirals from the United States, the United Kingdom, China, the Soviet Union, Canada, France, Australia, New Zealand, and the Netherlands and with US Navy personnel and journalists from around the world.

  “Brother, I hope those are my discharge papers,”6 joked an American when he saw the surrender documents being assembled.

  Shortly before 9:00 a.m., eleven Japanese military and diplomatic representatives, some wearing formal top hats and striped pants, walked onto the deck of the Missouri. They represented the emperor and the military and foreign services. The weather was gray and overcast.

  Leading the delegation was Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu, recently a leader of the peace faction in the Japanese government, wearing a black top hat, white gloves, and morning coat and walking with great difficulty (his right leg had been destroyed in a 1932 assassination attempt by a Korean patriot). Shigemitsu had to be helped up the ladder. He smiled at a friendly face in the crowd, a Canadian doctor who had saved his life in the 1932 attack at Shanghai.

  Shigemitsu was followed by stone-faced Gen. Yoshijiro Umezu, the Japanese army chief of staff and soon-to-be-imprisoned war criminal, who snapped off a salute to the Americans as he boarded the ship in high leather boots.

  In a startling scene that anticipated a new foundation of the postwar world order, American and Japanese military officials exchanged salutes as the delegation boarded the ship.

  Gazing at the scene was Life magazine photographer Carl Mydans, who had been a prisoner of the Japanese at the brutal Santo Tomas Internment Camp in Manila. “I watched Shigemitsu limp
forward,”7 he recalled, “his wooden leg tapping out his progress in the silence. He was helped by two servicemen to a chair. He leaned on his cane, took off his top hat, and stripped off his gloves, and for an instant seemed confused. As I watched this man, at what for him must have been a terrible moment, I suddenly felt all my pent-up wartime anger drain away, and compassion filled my heart.”

  Once they stood on the veranda deck of the Missouri, beneath the colossal number-two gun turret, recalled Toshikazu Kase, one of two foreign service deputies in the delegation, “a million eyes seemed to beat on us with the million shafts of a rattling storm of arrows barbed with fire.” All was quiet except for whispers among the thousands of Allied observers and the cranking of newsreel cameras. “I felt their keenness sink into my body with a sharp physical pain. Never had I realized that the glance of staring eyes could hurt so much.” The Japanese delegation waited, he said, “like penitent schoolboys awaiting the dreaded schoolmaster.” He looked up and spotted a row of painted rising suns on a nearby wall, marking enemy kills by the crew of the Missouri. “As I tried to count these markings, tears rose in my throat and quickly gathered to the eyes, flooding them. I could hardly bear the sight now.”

  Katsuo Okazaki, the other civilian deputy, was a graduate of Amherst and Harvard Universities. He remembered the scene vividly, describing the warships “that so lately belched forth their crashing battle,8 now holding in their swift thunder and floating like calm sea birds on the subjugated water.”

  A squeaky phonograph played “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and a navy chaplain offered a short prayer.

  Shortly after 9:00 a.m., General MacArthur appeared before the microphones to take charge of the ceremony and announce “a solemn agreement whereby peace may be restored.”9 The issues of the war were settled in battle and not for debate, he declared, but they were not meeting “in a spirit of distrust, malice or hatred but rather, it is for us, both victors and vanquished, to rise to that higher dignity which alone befits the sacred purposes we are about to serve.” He spoke not of conquest but of freedom, tolerance, and justice.