“No, I didn’t.”
“Go ahead. Ask James what he said.”
“James, what did you say?”
“That plane that was just shot down by a Corsair was a Tony, not a Zero.”
Bruce rewound the tape and played it again. He couldn’t see the distinction. “What kind of a plane was a Tony?”
“The Tony was a Japanese fighter that was smaller and faster than a Zero.”
“Why was it called a ‘Tony’?” asked Andrea.
“The fighters were named after boys, and the bombers were named after girls.”
Bruce had heard this from James before: the boy-girl distinction in Japanese aircraft. He had even researched it and found that it was true. But he didn’t remember the Tony. Somehow, that seemed important.
Back to his research. He discovered that the Tony was a knockoff of a German ME-109. The small fighter planes were disassembled and smuggled to Japan by submarine. When Bruce went to the war diary of VC-81, he found that the squadron had destroyed one Tony in the air. The pilot who spotted the aircraft and brought it down was James M. Huston Jr.
Soon after the Primetime broadcast, Bruce walked into the house one night and overheard Andrea talking on the phone. “Bruce will be so excited to talk to you.”
Bruce gave her the fish eye. He was tired and didn’t want to listen to another crackpot. She turned to him and said, “Bob Greenwalt is on the line—he knew James Huston.”
“I know who Bob Greenwalt is. He came aboard Natoma Bay with Jim Huston and Warren Hooper on October eighth, 1944.”
It was an accident that Greenwalt saw the program. His son, who lived in Houston, was watching the Primetime show and recognized the name Natoma Bay. He called his father, who lived in Albuquerque—an earlier time zone—and got him to tune in.
Bruce grabbed the phone, and he and Greenwalt spoke like old war buddies. Bruce already knew a lot about Bob Greenwalt, but Bob added a few extra details. He had flown that last mission on March 3, 1945. He was, in fact, James Huston’s wingman. They were close friends. He had packed Huston’s effects when Huston was killed—including the model Corsair that Anne had sent James.
From January until August 1944, Greenwalt and Huston served in VF-301, an elite squadron called “Devil’s Disciples.” Their job was to test-fly the modified Corsair for carrier use. In April 1944, the Corsair was qualified for use on Gamber Bay, an escort carrier that was later sunk. The Corsair turned out to be a valuable weapon. The Japanese called the aircraft “Whistling Death” because of the sound it made in a dive. But Corsairs always had problems when it came to the tricky business of landing on an aircraft carrier. The engine was too big, and the high cockpit didn’t leave enough visibility for the pilot to control the plane. He couldn’t see the deck. It landed rough and tended to blow out tires. It also tended to pull to the left on takeoff because of the high engine torque. The way James had put it when describing the Corsair was that “it wanted to turn to the left.”
The test pilots worked on it, and the engineers kept making adjustments to the ailerons; they positioned the pilot higher in the cockpit, allowing for a better line of sight. They replaced the inflatable rear tire with a solid rubber tire and eventually had an aircraft that became a standard for U.S. Naval carrier duty.
“Jim was a great pilot,” said Greenwalt. “And a great friend.”
There were a lot of coincidences—things that could have changed James Huston’s fate. Another pilot was supposed to go to Natoma Bay but got transferred, so Huston took his place. He was supposed to rotate out of combat by March 3, 1945, but volunteered for that last mission over Chichi-Jima, where he was killed—on March 3.
So many “if’s” in war.
A telephone call was insufficient, and Bruce and Bob Greenwalt agreed to meet at the next Natoma Bay reunion.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
THE ABC PRIMETIME program lifted the shadow that had hung over Bruce Leininger. The 2004 Natoma Bay Association reunion in San Antonio, Texas, would be his coming-out party. No one would again question why he was so hot to attend the reunions of the “Naty Maru” or why he was taking such a lopsided and emotional interest in one little ship. The story of his son, James, and the boy’s nightmares was out in the open. Bruce was now the designated zealot for the Natoma Bay Association.
And so he was determined to make this gathering memorable. Not only for his own sake, but because of the inexorable grind of time—the members were dying off or growing frail or, as happens late in life, losing much of their attachment to worldly matters. Bruce wanted to contribute something to the group before it was too late.
At ten a.m. on the inevitable September 11—later than he had allowed in the attack plan—he loaded the old Volvo with Andrea and James and made the six-hour drive to San Antonio. His mother-in-law, Bobbi, joined them there. He wanted a crowd. He had lobbied all the veterans on the list of active members to attend. And James had spent more time on the phone with “Annie,” convincing his “sister” to make the trip from California.
Bruce had spent months making twenty-one individual blue loose-leaf binders devoted to each of the Natoma Bay dead—complete with biography, war records, and pictures. Andrea spent weeks making a home video that was both specific (pictures of each lost sailor) and general (pictures of the ship in action). It was a haunting nine-minute ode to the ship and the dead.
And Bruce found a fresh peg for the reunion—something to make it stand out, make it an event! At the time, there was only one memorial for Natoma Bay. It was on the Yorktown in Charleston, South Carolina. And three of the men from Natoma Bay who were killed in the war were missing—not listed on the plaque: Billie Peeler, Lloyd Holton, and Ruben Goranson.
Well, that made me a little crazy. So I got in touch with John DeWitt, the ship historian, and a bunch of us decided to start a small capital fund and have a new monument made. We decided that it should be dedicated at the reunion—we’d bring it to the Nimitz Museum in Fredericksburg, Texas, which was only an hour and a half northwest of San Antonio. It would be a perfect time and a perfect place.
The veterans and the surviving family members were drawn by the memorial service and the plaque—especially the three families whose loved ones were left off the original plaque. And there was the extra incentive of seeing James. For many of them, the ABC Primetime report that their comrade, James Huston Jr., had returned from his last mission in the form of a child from Louisiana was just too provocative to ignore.
And James himself, with all his innocent maturity, had the run of the place.
After the Leiningers checked into the Woodfield Suites, which were equipped with a kitchenette and a small living room, Andrea and James went shopping for some snacks. Since the hotel served only breakfast, Andrea wanted to have something on hand for James. They bought milk, juice, mini boxes of cereal, oranges and grapes, and some cookies and microwave popcorn. Once the groceries were put away and Andrea had unpacked, they went down to the ready room, where James was an eye-catching presence.
Meanwhile, Bruce was busy setting up his displays in the ready room. He had the records and pictures and PowerPoint displays for USS Natoma Bay (CVE-62), commissioned in October 1943 and sold for scrap in May 1959—to the Japanese.
John DeWitt had also arrived early. He and his wife, Dolores, had brought their own collection of photographs, along with models of Natoma Bay and World War II aircraft.
On that first morning, as they were walking out of the ready room, Andrea and James were stopped by a handsome man in a polo shirt. They had never seen him before.
The man looked down at James and asked in a hearty, robust voice, “Do you know who I am?”
James looked him in the eye, thought for a second, and replied, “You’re Bob Greenwalt.”
The man looked shocked. He laughed a little nervously and said, “That’s right.”
Andrea asked, “You’re really Bob Greenwalt?”
And he said yes.
&nbs
p; Later, in their room, Bruce asked his son, “How did you know that?”
“I recognized his voice,” he told his father.
Even Greenwalt, who calls himself a “rational skeptic,” was impressed.
The whispers about James went through the reunion crowd like a wind:
“Did you see the program? It was on Primetime.”
“He looks just like Jimmy!”
“Such a nice kid.”
“I don’t know what to think!”
The Leiningers were caught up in the significance of the moment. For the first time, Andrea was meeting the family members she had spent more than a year trying to locate, in the flesh. There was an immediate sympathy between them. In trying to ease her own son’s pain, she had reopened old wounds. But Andrea also understood that it would soon be over; the confrontation would put a lot of painful questions to rest.
Meanwhile, for Andrea, there was the business of motherhood. James had taken three days off from school, and she had collected from his teachers the subjects that he was supposed to cover. She began working with him in the car, then moved to the hotel coffee table in the room. The issue of homework settled forever any question of homeschooling—Andrea was not up to it, nor was James.
A reunion was always a thrill for Bruce. The veterans invariably greeted each other at the reunion sign-ins with the exaggerated gusto of men who had just returned from combat and were thrilled to find themselves still alive.
There were the usual dinners and speeches and the customary business of calling the roll, paying the dues, reading the minutes—and looking around to see who had gotten older, who had lost a mate, and who was missing. They took care of all the conventional things to which such meetings must attend. On days with a light schedule, the veterans sailed on the little canals in San Antonio, visited the local museums, and just sat around trading lore and lies.
The veteran stories were handed down like oral history. Victor Claude Evans, a solid, bald man with a bawdy sense of humor, was a 20-millimeter gunner on Natoma Bay. He is famous for the story of his attack on his own fleet off the Phillipines. The attackers came in low and were pressed home by the Japanese pilots. Evans was so intent on firing at the attacking planes that he shot the tails off the American planes parked on deck. He also superficially damaged a nearby U.S. battleship, USS West Virginia, which sent an urgent cease-fire orders: “We surrender!” He ignored the orders and shot down the Japanese plane, along with two or three parked American TBMs, and he had raked the deck of an American warship.
Evans stayed on in the Navy for thirty years and became an officer, rising to the rank of lieutenant commander. He was a master diver and would eventually teach the special-effects team, along with Robert DeNiro, how to dive in the movie Men of Honor.
On the second day, Bruce went over to the video rental store to get a tutorial on how to operate the audiovisual equipment that he would use to show the PowerPoint presentation and video at the banquet. Meanwhile, James changed into his flight suit and came down to the ready room. James and Andrea encounted an older-looking gentleman with a jovial smile; he was Jack Larsen, and Andrea screamed with excitement when they were introduced. James shook his hand and smiled.
That there was actually a Jack Larsen and that they were all here meeting face-to-face was an astonishing thing in itself. The reality was enough. And all the veterans and their families began to trickle into the ready room, where James stood sentinel in his flight suit. He quietly studied all the faces and listened to the tidbits of conversation and was attentive to little habits and mannerisms—he was looking for his friends.
No one thought it odd that a six-year-old child was in the thick of it, eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner with the old veterans, listening to their stories with the polite rapt attention of someone not a peer but not quite a child.
He was inseparable from men who had been his wingmen in war. He sat with them when they had breakfast, followed them around like a puppy. One morning, when he was taking a break with his mother at the pool, he looked troubled. She asked what was wrong.
He shook his head; he had a few things on his mind, he said—nothing that he wanted to talk about at the moment. Andrea pressed a little, and he confided, “I’m sad that everyone is so old.”
Well, of course. He remembered them all as hot young pilots! Andrea realized that James was caught in a slipstream of memory.
Of course, the thing that made this reunion so extraordinary was the presence of Annie Barron. When she and James met, would it be an encounter between an old lady and a young boy, or would it be that other reunion, the meeting of lost siblings across more than half a century?
The Leiningers were nervous. Andrea was hoping that she could orchestrate the meeting, mentally prepare the ground. But they bumped into each other, as if fate had something else in mind.
Andrea and James were heading down to the lobby, on their way to the pool, when Andrea spotted Annie and her daughter, Leslie, heading for the reception desk. She panicked. This was not the ideal moment. Annie had just come all the way from California and would surely be exhausted. So Andrea took James back to the room. After about twenty minutes, Bruce came back, and they decided to go to the pool together. As they headed toward the elevator, they found themselves walking straight into the path of Annie and Leslie.
There was no getting around it. Introductions were made, hugs were exchanged, and James became uncharacteristically quiet. He watched Annie intently, studying her, weighing… something. It was as if he was trying to find the face of his twenty-four-year-old sister in the eighty-six-year-old woman.
“I found him shy,” Annie would recall. “Children of that age are shy. I would catch him looking at me, as if he was studying me.”
They spoke very little, as if they each were afraid of shattering something fragile. Still, there was something powerful and detectably understanding between them.
Andrea and Bruce asked Annie and Leslie to join them for dinner that evening. It would be a more auspicious moment, Andrea thought. They planned to meet at the San Antonio Riverwalk. That night, all of them, along with Bobbi, went to a casual Mexican restaurant. The lively atmosphere settled everyone’s nerves, and Annie and James seemed to bond. They settled into a kind of watchful but fond relationship, something that defied an explanation.
The featured event of the reunion was the memorial service and the dedication at the Nimitz Museum in Fredericksburg of the new plaque. This was the event that Bruce had been planning for months—his own combined operation, his own version of D-day. He drove ahead to Fredericksburg in his Volvo. He wanted time to set things up.
He laid out the chairs, placing a flag and a program on each one. But just as he got everything set up, the main group of veterans and their families pulled in.
This was not in the plan. Bruce had wanted some time alone to gather his thoughts—he would have to speak—but it was too late. The guests had arrived. The memorial service was conducted; a bell tolled for each man lost, and a family member placed a small flag in a stand that Bruce had built. Speeches were delivered, prayers offered, silence observed, taps played, and the bronze plaque was unveiled. It was quietly impressive. It was his moment.
But the reunion really belonged to James. After the service, the group toured the museum. There were a lot of displays spread over the grounds. There was even a five-inch cannon. James wanted to climb on it.
“Natoma Bay had one of these,” he said of the gun.
Stanley Paled and Frank Woolard, who had served aboard Natoma Bay, were right beside James when he said it. They could not believe what they had just heard.
“Where was it located?” asked Stanley.
“On the fantail,” James replied, and the two veterans just stared at him—that was exactly where the five-inch gun was located.
Lloyd McKann and his wife, Alta, were walking past the gun, a little ahead of the rest of the crowd, when he heard it, too.
James and his mother
were about forty feet behind us—a ways behind—and we passed the five-inch gun. Natoma Bay had one just like it on the fantail. I whispered that to my wife. And then we heard James say, “Oh, they had a gun like that on Natoma Bay.”
You know, when I said that to Alta, he was out of earshot. He couldn’t have heard me. I’m positive of that.
The next night, there was a banquet, and the veterans were noisy with a kind of relief. They had met James. They had met James Huston’s sister, Annie. They had watched the video, read the binders, seen the complete picture of “Naty Maru’s” war service, documented and illustrated by Bruce Leininger.
There were among them the believers, the skeptics, and those who accepted that something inexplicable had sailed in the wake of Natoma Bay.
It had been exhausting—the years of slavish devotion to records and documents and tracking down veterans. But in the end, Bruce and Andrea had accomplished something almost miraculous. They had solved the riddle of their child’s nightmares. But it was bigger than that. In the course of doing it, they had resolved the mysteries for a lot of families and veterans of a small escort carrier, one of many that had served nobly in the war in the Pacific.
Coming home from the reunion in the old Volvo, Bruce and Andrea were exhausted but happy. A great weight had been lifted. They also realized something profound. These men would never again be together like this—the casualties of time were even more inexorable than the victims of war. The Leiningers had gotten to see all these people, had gotten a chance to say good-bye.
And in the backseat, James slept peacefully.
EPILOGUE
IN THE SUMMER of 2006, James was like most other eight-year-old boys. He was nuts about Star Wars movies, Spiderman, Batman, and the usual violent video games that ate up his mother’s fingernails. He still played with airplanes, but his life was crowded with the customary small-town activities: ballgames, birthday parties, cookouts, and sleepovers. He seemed more or less like any other sweet kid of those tender, dreamy years—except that every so often he had a nightmare. Not those big, kicking screamers, but a softer, sobbing reminder that there was still something lingering within him.
Soul Survivor: The Reincarnation of a World War II Fighter Pilot Page 22
