He had all but given up hope when at noon he saw another figure on a raft that was made from two hatch covers in the shape of a wedge. Brodsky called out to him. Would it be okay if he joined him? “Sure,” came the reply, “come on over.” It was Glenn Oliver, and the men made a pact: they wouldn’t kill each other, and they wouldn’t eat each other. They tried tying their three hatch covers together to form a triangle, but the lines kept coming undone.
The wind picked up at night, and in the darkness Oliver made out four waterlogged life rafts about six feet in length. They were tied bow to stern with a thick two-inch hauser. Oliver climbed onto one, while Brodsky grabbed another. They stretched out for the first time in thirty-six hours, but the rafts were half-submerged. They tried stacking them, but it took all of their energy to sandwich just two together. They completed the task in the morning, lashing the four rafts with manila rope. They were tired, parched, and hungry, but afloat.
Around noon Brodsky saw a body in a life jacket 150 yards away. Perhaps there was a canteen on it. He took off his underpants, gave them to Oliver to wave as a flag so he wouldn’t lose sight of him over the swells, and swam. Just before he reached it, the corpse slipped out of the life jacket. There was no canteen. Brodsky used the life jacket as a pillow. He and Oliver looked for other corpses that day. They didn’t say what they were thinking, but they knew they’d resort to cannibalism if they found another body. They’d had no food and hardly any water for three days. When it rained, they held up Brodsky’s shirt and wrung it out to drink the water from it. When they finally came across a dead minnow on their raft, they split it, sucking on each piece “for about an hour.”
On the morning of October 28 Oliver saw six columns of smoke. A convoy was zigzagging in the distance. Brodsky waved his long-sleeve white shirt back and forth. An enemy destroyer, with the insignia E-146 on its bow, pulled out of formation and came within twenty yards of the men. Brodsky swam for the ship. The Japanese tossed him a tie-line, but he couldn’t make it up the Jacob’s ladder without help. He scraped himself badly on the barnacles that clung to the hull. Oliver dog-paddled to a life ring but was also too weak to climb the ladder. He fell back into the water but was thrown some rope by the Japanese and then hoisted on deck. It was 1:07 P.M., he saw on the wristwatch of a Japanese seaman.
The two POWs were nearly naked, badly sunburned, and dehydrated. Brodsky weighed a mere 89 pounds and was covered with open sores. He was urinating pus. The Japanese gave them fundoshi to wear. Brodsky had to beg for water. Finally he found some steaming hot broth on deck and drank it. Later they were handed a small portion of lugao. The temperature plunged at night, and Brodsky shook so severely that his teeth chattered. The petty officer issued them blue serge uniforms. The wool chafed at Brodsky’s skin. He couldn’t get comfortable, but he slept as best as he could on the steel deck by the bridge.
Around 0700 the next day the destroyer pulled into Takao, where the security detail of the Arisan Maru had also arrived. Brodsky and Oliver were escorted to a large building, where they were interrogated by the Kempeitai. The men were blindfolded, and their hands were tied behind their backs. They were taunted with the threat of execution. The Japanese stroked their bare necks with sword blades and bolted their rifles as if forming a firing squad. The Kempeitai were furious at Brodsky and slapped him every time he denied being a submariner. Once their blindfolds were removed, Brodsky and Oliver encountered another survivor of the Arisan Maru in the room. It was Warrant Officer Martin Binder of the USS Pigeon, the submarine rescue ship that had been based in Cavite.
Binder had survived by clinging to a raft with ten other men. After a day at sea, half of them had found bits of flotsam that they decided to pin their lives on. After three days only Binder and one other Arisan Maru survivor remained. But drinking sea water drove the man out of his mind. He tore off his life jacket and in spite of Binder’s entreaties said “he was going to swim for it.” Binder was left by himself to bat away sharks with his water-filled canteen. Eventually he was picked up by a Japanese transport and taken to Takao for interrogation.
Brodsky, Oliver, and Binder were loaded onto a truck and imprisoned in a bamboo cell for the night. In the morning they met a fourth survivor of the Arisan Maru, Private Charles W. Hughes of the Coast Artillery Corps. They were transferred to a freighter in the harbor, where Brodsky recognized several POWs from O’Donnell and Palawan, but they were forbidden to speak to one another. They were confined on deck for nearly a week before the ship set sail for Japan. This time the POWs were locked in the aft hold. They’d never make it out alive if they were targeted by the Americans. The vessel departed on November 8, but returned to Formosa a mere twenty-four hours later; the waters were too dangerous. The sickest men were evacuated to a hospital at the Shirakawa POW Camp, where Hughes died. Brodsky, Oliver, and Binder were transferred with 400 POWs to Toroku in central Formosa. When American planes began bombing the area in December 1944, the prisoners were moved yet again by ship. Brodsky ended up in Taihoku, a coal mining camp in the mountains of northern Formosa, populated mostly by British POWs from Singapore. Binder had the good fortune to be consigned to a camp where the Japanese commandant refused to let POWs work because “he believed it too dangerous.” Glenn Oliver was transported to Moji and then Ōsaka, where he was imprisoned in a camp well known to John Bookman: Wakayama.
Brodsky, Oliver, and Binder found it inconceivable—as did Calvin Graef—that there had been any other survivors of the Arisan Maru. Indeed, of the 1,800 POWs who boarded the Arisan Maru on October 11, 1944, only eight survived: Robert Overbeck, Avery Wilber, Anton Cichy, Calvin Graef, Donald Meyer, Philip Brodsky, Glenn Oliver, and Martin Binder. George Ferguson was but one of 1,792 POWs lost at sea. One Japanese soldier and four civilians died. It was a tragedy whose proportions surpassed those of the Titanic and Lusitania, marking the greatest loss of American lives in a single maritime disaster.
Lucy Ferguson wouldn’t learn of George’s fate for months. When Fred, John, and Murray heard a rumor about him in Kōbe, they simply refused to believe it.
The greatest naval engagement of World War II, the Battle for Leyte Gulf, ended triumphantly for the United States. In spite of Halsey’s reckless pursuit of Ozawa’s ships, Admiral Toyoda’s ruse failed, leaving the Seventh and Third Fleets exposed. With less than half the airplanes he needed in the face of overwhelming Allied power, Vice Admiral Ōnishi Takijirō, commander of the Japanese First Air Fleet, resorted to a devious and desperate tactic: arming the single-engine Zero fighter with a 557-pound bomb and targeting enemy carriers. “Human bombs,” Commander Tamai Asaichi described them to Lieutenant Seki Yukio, who led the first surprise attack with his five Sacred Eagles. Formed into Special Attack Forces, they were known as tokktai. Navy recruits were called shinp, or “God’s wind,” a name that harks back to the typhoons that miraculously prevented Mongol ships from landing in Japan in 1274 and 1281. Outside Japan they were known as kamikaze.
The kamikaze had little strategic impact on the Battle for Leyte Gulf but enormous symbolic signifiance. As Lieutenant Seki wrote in a farewell letter to his family before crashing into Rear Admiral Clifton Sprague’s carrier St. Lo on October 25, 1944, “Nothing can be a greater honor” than to sacrifice oneself “for the sake of Japan.”
But victory eluded the Japanese at Leyte; their losses—four carriers, three battleships, ten cruisers, and eleven destroyers—effectively crippled their fleet. On October 26, 1944, less than a week after the American landings, The New York Times crowed: “U.S. DEFEATS JAPANESE NAVY; ALL FOE’S SHIPS IN ONE FLEET HIT; MANY SUNK; BATTLE CONTINUES.”
That same month marked the peak of Japanese merchant ship losses and proved the most deadly for American POWs being transported from Manila to Japan. In the seven weeks from the sinking of the Rakuyō Maru on September 6 to the sinking of the Arisan Maru on October 24, 1944, a total of 10,716 Allied POWs died at the hands of U.S. submariners.
By late December the island of Leyte h
ad fallen. Luzon would be next. Dr. Ōhashi himself was convinced Japan would lose the war. He admitted as much to Hinomoto Teruko, the seventeen-year-old daughter of one of his wife’s friends, as they walked one day from her house in Toyonaka, a suburb of Osaka, to the train station.
The Americans had routed the Japanese at sea and slashed the last supply line between the Philippines and East Asia. Now they would target the Japanese Home Islands—from the air.
22
Fire from the Sky
THEY WERE YOUNG, handsome, fearless, and a little foolish, from the mountains and the plains, small towns and big cities. An eleven-man crew might originate from eleven different states. They were teenagers, many of them, in their twenties if they were officers, eager for experience, out to test their mettle. Some were in college, like Ed Keyser and nineteen-year-old Ed Levin. Some were teaching college, like John Ciardi. Others were in girl trouble and had barely made it through high school. They became pilots and bombardiers, navigators and flight engineers, radio operators and central fire control gunners, blister and tail-gunners for a brand-new bird, the B-29: the Superfortress. They were the boys of the 73rd Bomb Wing, the initial bomb wing of the XXI Bomber Command. “Kids,” their thirty-eight-year-old commander, Brigadier General Emmett “Rosie” O’Donnell called them. Based in Saipan, their mission was first to destroy Japan’s principal engine manufacturers, its aircraft component and assembly plants, and then to incapacitate Japan’s port areas. In short, their goal was to burn to the ground Japan’s six most important cities: Tōkyō, Yokohama, Kawasaki, Nagoya, Osaka—and Kōbe.
They had heard the stories of the Bataan Death March. They had watched Darryl F. Zanuck’s The Purple Heart on Saipan and recoiled in horror when the Japanese scooped out the eyeballs of Jimmy Doolittle’s intrepid airmen. They’d had relatives who had fought in the Pacific, brothers who’d been captured in the Philippines. And they would never forget Pearl Harbor.
“I hated the Japanese,” said Sergeant Jules Stillman, the dapper right blister gunner for the Beau Bomber II, who in civilian life decorated candy store windows in New York City for a living. “They showed us a picture of a Japanese officer, sword in hand, beheading a B-29 pilot shot down over Japan. This was a Japanese propaganda photo. So I vowed that if I was ever captured, I’d kill as many Japanese officers as I could, and then shoot myself. I didn’t think too much about what we were doing. You just did your job.”
Private 1st Class John Davidson, Jr., affixed personalized notes to the 2,000-pound bombs he loaded into B-29s on Saipan. “Here’s to you, Tōjō,” he wrote, “payback time.” And indeed it was payback time for the Japanese, who on December 7, 1941, had dared to tell the “Goddam Americans” in leaflets that had fluttered to the ground over Oahu to “all go to hell.” Now the most technologically sophisticated country on earth would spare neither military installations nor residential neighborhoods in the most sustained bombing of a single nation in the world’s history, even if the bombing of civilians constituted war crimes under the Geneva Convention.
In February 1944, after the conquest of the Gilbert and Marshall Islands, U.S. forces launched Operation Forager to capture the Marianas—Saipan, Tinian, and Guam. Twelve hundred miles from Japan, Saipan was a vital operational center for the Japanese. A few miles to the south, Tinian held a 9,000-strong garrison under the command of Admiral Kakuta Kakuji. Guam, the southernmost island, 150 miles away, had been the headquarters of Admiral Ozawa’s Striking Force.
The Marianas were of strategic importance to the U.S. Army Air Forces (USAAF) because they could put the Superforts within striking distance of Japan’s Home Islands. On June 15, 1944, just as the invasion of Saipan was being launched, B-29s from the XX Bomber Command’s air base in Chengtu, China, struck the Imperial Iron and Steel Works at Yawata in Kysh. But Kyshwas the maximum range for the planes executing Project Matterhorn, the campaign to attack Japan from the Asian mainland. Those raids continued through early 1945, and their targets included Manchukuo, Korea, China, Formosa, and Southeast Asia, but they had limited effect. Henceforth the Marianas would form a base of operations for the long-range bombing of Japan, with airfields for B-29s, P-51 fighter escorts, and headquarters of the XXI Bomber Command on Guam.
The assault on Saipan was one of the bloodiest campaigns in the Pacific. In mid-June 1944 Saipan’s 32,000-strong garrison under Vice Admiral Nagumo Chichi, commander of the Japanese carrier force that attacked Pearl Harbor, faced an invasion force of 127,571 American troops, two-thirds of whom were marines. In the first forty-eight hours U.S. Marines suffered 4,000 casualties at the hands of Lieutenant General Saitō Yoshitsugu’s 31st Army. What was supposed to be a three-day campaign turned into an agonizing three-week battle.
“Come out and surrender!” one American is alleged to have demanded of a Japanese soldier in a cave.
“Come and get me, you souvenir-hunting sonovabitch!” came the reply in flawless English.
On June 24 Imperial General Headquarters determined that Saipan was a lost cause. Better that its defenders should choose gyokusai than surrender, and they did. On July 6 Nagumo and Saitō committed suicide after Saitō ordered the largest banzai charge of the war. Every man was sworn to “take seven lives to repay our country.” Forced to retreat to the northern end of the island, hundreds of Japanese civilians, including pregnant women and young children, leaped to their deaths from Marpi Point, some of them clinging to the necks of Japanese soldiers as they plunged into the sea. The Americans called it Suicide Cliff. When the smoke had cleared, 31,000 Japanese soldiers and 22,000 civilians were dead. The Americans suffered 3,426 losses. “It was obvious that Japan had no hope at all of regaining supremacy on the sea or in the air,” wrote a Japanese trainee pilot. Navy Seabees (Construction Battalion) celebrated the U.S. victory by displaying the heads of dead Japanese impaled on spikes.
In August 1944, the 73rd Bomb Wing commenced operations on Saipan and was assigned to the Twentieth Air Force. The aviation engineers were already working day and night to build an 8,500-foot runway from coral clawed out of Saipan’s mountains. Four airfields were supposed to be ready by the time General Haywood S. “Possum” Hansell of the XXI Bomber Command arrived on October 12. They weren’t. But by November the 73rd Bomb Wing was there in full force. With twenty planes per squadron, three squadrons per bomb group, and four groups per wing—497th, 498th, 499th, and 500th—it comprised, including ground echelons, some 12,000 men.
On November 24 the first B-29s rolled down Isley Field on their way to Target 357: Tōkyō. More than 100 Superforts, led by Dauntless Dotty with Brigadier General Emmett O’Donnell in the pilot’s seat, flew over the ocean at around 1,500 feet. They raised their altitude as they approached the IP (Initial Point) 100 miles or so from the mainland, passed snow-draped Mt. Fuji, and from 27,000 to 33,000 feet bombed the Musashino engine plant of the Nakajima Company in northwest Tōkyō, ten miles from the Imperial Palace. The Japanese responded by launching retaliation raids against Saipan’s “new management,” as the Americans facetiously referred to themselves, from Iwo Jima 725 miles away.
Three days later “Piss-Call Charlie came over at midnight,” Sergeant John Ciardi wrote in his Saipan diary. “Four Betty’s sneaked in under the radar net by riding in on the wave tops” and targeted the 499th dispersal area as B-29s were being readied for another raid. Ciardi, a gunner, had the bunk right next to Tech Sergeant Ed Levin.
Eight to ten Zero fighters strafed the air base in the face of ferocius antiaircraft fire. Then one plane peeled away, fingering the Americans’ quonset hut with eerie red tracers and opening up with a .20-caliber machine gun. Bullets flew within inches of Ciardi’s head.
“Words can’t describe the feeling when a tracer comes after you,” said Levin, “a flash of light as if it’s aimed just at you. That was more terrifying than being wounded.”
There were no foxholes near the air base on Saipan because you were scratching coral just a few inches beneath the topsoil. Sandbag she
lters sat aboveground like bees’ nests that had fallen off trees. A slight man, Levin wrestled with the six-foot-tall Ciardi to get under, of all things, a canvas cot. On another occasion airmen dove for cover at the sound of what they thought was an air raid alarm over the public address system. It turned out to be the opening glissando of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. They laughed about it afterward, but the fear was real: three B-29s had gone up in flames, and a total of twenty had been knocked out of commission.
“They shot hell out of our ships,” wrote 2nd Lieutenant Robert E. Copeland, who was eager for action. Four Japanese planes paid the price. He went down to the 883rd area where one of the Zekes was blown into pieces no larger than its propeller. He came upon the remains of the first dead man he’d ever a seen, he noted in his diary—a pilot, like himself.
A few nights later Japanese fighter-bombers returned, killing some men while maiming others as they tried to extinguish fires or move Superforts that were perched like sitting ducks on their hardstands.
The capture of Iwo Jima on February 19, 1945, was a huge relief. It meant there were fighter escorts on some B-29 missions as well as a place to land 627 miles north of Saipan in case of an emergency. Radio transmitters could now guide bombers along the “Hirohito Highway” to Tōkyō and back. Not a bad thing, either, to have air-sea rescue support from lifeguard submarines and surface vessels at preestablished coordinates along the 1,400-mile route from the Marianas to Honshin case you had to ditch. The submarines were protected by “SuperDumbos,” armed B-29s that were equipped with life rafts, survival gear, and droppable radio buoys.
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