In the large green tent that the enlisted men shared, they arranged their cots against the walls, hung their belongings from the poles that supported the pyramidal top, and traded wisecracks in the darkness.
Only one member of the crew had not trained with them in Tonopah. His name was Ted Goulding, and he was a quiet kid from Yonkers, New York, with padded cheeks and sad eyes and the faint beginnings of a mustache. He’d been through Tonopah at about the same time, but would now transfer into their crew as radio operator. Ted had a soft, clear voice and a studious air that belied a limited education. He’d dropped out of school in his midteens and run away from home to escape the domineering presence of a hard-drinking father. By the time he was sixteen, he’d settled into a job at a dog kennel in Westbury, Long Island, where he tended and groomed show dogs for a woman he addressed only as Mrs. Tucker.
Long Island in those days, and especially Westbury, was home to some of the most famous airfields in the country, known collectively as “the Cradle of Aviation.” Just two miles from Mrs. Tucker’s kennel sat the nation’s busiest airport, Roosevelt Field, where Charles Lindbergh departed in 1927 on the first solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic. Next door to Roosevelt was Mitchel Field, another legendary airstrip, where a young Jimmy Doolittle had completed the first “blind” flight in 1929—lifting off, navigating, and landing with only instruments to guide him.
Living among the airfields of Westbury offered Ted a kind of daily proof that even the loftiest dreams may rise. He was infatuated with aircraft, and studied the various models of the era with an intensity he’d never found at school—memorizing their dimensions and mechanical features in the way other boys knew baseball or movie stars. Inside his tiny bedroom at Mrs. Tucker’s, he collected flight magazines and sent away for model kits, which he built up carefully and brought into her backyard to fly. He had been mesmerized when Jimmy Doolittle led the first American raid over Tokyo in April 1942, and whenever he was outside with his models, he would keep one eye on the horizon for airplanes landing in the fields nearby. Who knew, one day it could be General Doolittle himself.
One afternoon while Ted was in the yard, he struck up a conversation with two young boys kicking about the neighbor’s property. George and Phil Graziosi were two of the youngest in a family of twelve kids, and soon they were bumbling through the small gate to help Ted in the kennel in exchange for a few pennies and a turn at his model planes. Then Ted was passing through the gate to join the Graziosis for dinner—hoisting little George and Phil into the air and posing for photos with one boy on each shoulder and a billiard pipe clamped in his teeth.
It wasn’t long before Ted noticed the Graziosis’ daughter, Diane, and then his dreams weren’t just about airplanes anymore. In the summer of 1942, he spent his savings to buy a sporty green 1936 Oldsmobile coupe from Mrs. Tucker’s boyfriend, a proud figure named Grayson Neff who always wore a three-piece suit. Neff had mounted two small bronze statues of Airedale terriers on the front fender and Ted adored them, but he folded away the backseats to give the interior a sportier feel. Then he ushered Diane into the passenger seat and whooshed her off to the movies. Afterward, he would drop her back at home, park the car, and climb up to the second-floor balcony by her bedroom for a kiss good night. In his own room at Mrs. Tucker’s, he would stare at the ceiling for hours, buoyed by the memory of Diane and flipping absently through airplane magazines, dreaming of life in the sky. Within a year, Ted and Diane were married: Ted moved into the Graziosi house, Diane got pregnant, and Ted got drafted.
As Ted wound his way through training in Miami Beach and Chicago, Diane’s family moved to a small farm in the gentle folds of Marlboro, New York. They rested Ted’s car on blocks in a barn, and in the evenings, little George and Phil would traipse down to see it, standing in the shafts of light and wondering when Ted would come home. In July 1943, while he was still in training, Diane gave birth to a son. She named him Ted Junior. Another three months passed before the youngest of the Graziosi boys, Paul, was playing outside and spotted Ted at the foot of the driveway, walking toward the house with a duffel bag over his shoulder. Paul Graziosi stared, frozen, then raced inside to tell.
They got seven days together, taking picnics by the river and staying up late to walk the moon across the stars. Ted checked on the Oldsmobile and played with the Graziosi boys, but mostly he stayed near his son, cradling the boy to sleep and posing for a photo in his bomber jacket, with his goggles on his forehead, and Ted Junior nestled into a mountain of white swaddles in his arms. Then Ted Senior was back in training, and then he was off to war.
As he settled into the green Big Stoop tent and got to know the rest of the crew, he could only wonder when they would see combat. Each morning, the veteran fliers of the unit would hurry to the airfield, climbing aboard their Liberators and speeding down the runway, while the new arrivals shuffled into a thatched building for advanced training. Jammed in their seats, they listened to a droning spiel about island topography, enemy tactics, target identification, and sea survival, and when the classes ended at lunch, the afternoon yawned before them. They would wander off to play cards, or amble down the beach, throwing shells back into the water and swimming along the coral coast. In the evening, they watched as the Liberators returned, clattering onto the airfield with wings holed by Japanese artillery, medics racing the injured men to the island hospital, while the rest of the fliers tossed back a glass of juice, grabbed a cookie, and stumbled back to their tents to descend into a haze of beer. At dinner, they would leave empty seats for the men who hadn’t made it back, turning their cups and plates upside down. Then they would walk through the darkness to a huge white sheet stretched between palms, where the unit broadcast nightly movies sent by the War Department. The films were often several years old, but familiarity was its own reward.
On the last night of May, at a screening of the 1938 film Alexander’s Ragtime Band, Jimmie Doyle found himself drifting back to the day that he and Myrle first saw the movie at the squat brick Palace Theater on First Street in Lamesa, Texas. When the reel fluttered out and the screen went dark, Jimmie shuffled up the coral road. He lit a candle inside the tent, stooping over a small lined notepad to write a letter home. “Do you remember when you and I saw it,” he began, “back in those golden days when there wasn’t a war? Sweetheart, I sure wish you could be with me, to help me gather coconuts. There are a thousand new things to see, and you should see some of the blossoms that grow here. There is one red one that grows at the top of a tree, and it is the prettiest flower you ever saw.”
As the days of training dragged by, the boys grew restless. They began to grouse in letters home about the tedium of training, and the long, aimless days. Some began to call the island Camp De Luxe. Lying on his bunk the night of June 15, Jimmie wrote to Myrle, “I go to the show about three times a week, and drink my two bottles of beer. . . . The rest of my time is spent dreaming about coming home.” Across the tent, Johnny was finishing a letter to Katherine when a loud thump broke the silence and a coconut rolled through the door to Jimmie’s bunk.
Jimmie looked up. He grinned. “Now that,” he said, “is real service.”
But the slow pace of life on Los Negros was about to end. What Jimmie and Johnny couldn’t know as they finished their letters that night, was that two dramatic changes were already unfolding that would alter history and their lives. A thousand miles north, in the Mariana Islands, American forces were landing on the island of Saipan, sending shock waves through the Japanese military that would eventually shatter the imperial command. And closer to home, that same day, the Long Rangers had a new commander of their own: after eighteen months in the northern column led by Nimitz, they had been transferred into MacArthur’s line—putting the Army’s Thirteenth Air Force under the Army’s command for the first time. In the days to come, the Big Stoop boys would not just fly their first mission. They would enter the war at a pivotal moment, with Japanese forces
reeling on Saipan and the Thirteenth Air Force coming into its own.
—
THE AMERICAN LANDING on Saipan was more than just a beachhead. Though the Mariana Islands were barely a speck on the regional maps issued to Long Ranger navigators, their importance went far beyond size. Like Palau, the Marianas lay near the center of the new Japanese perimeter, and a victory there would be the first breach of Japan’s inner line. It would also provide the Air Force with a base just 1,500 miles from Japan, putting the US heavy bombers within reach of Tokyo. In time, the Marianas would launch the Enola Gay toward Hiroshima.
For the Japanese, the Saipan landing was also a political disaster. All year, Prime Minister Hideki Tojo had been girding for an assault on Palau, and he had personally dispatched Sadae Inoue to defend the islands with twenty-five thousand men. Now that US troops were swarming across a different archipelago, Tojo’s judgment and his position were cast in doubt. As the military historian Mark Peattie wrote in Nan’yo, “The attack on the Palaus [three months earlier] had convinced Imperial General Headquarters that the next American amphibious blow would fall on those islands, a conviction in which both Tokyo and the Thirty-First Army [in the Marianas] persisted up to the very last days before the American invasion of Saipan.”
If the balance of power in the Central Pacific was shifting, so was the power of the Long Rangers. Unit commanders had never been happy about their position in the northern line. It wasn’t just that they answered to the Navy there; the bigger problem was that under Nimitz they had to give up operational control of their fleet. With the transfer to MacArthur, they would not only come under Army command, but would gain control of their planes, equipment, and staff for the first time. As the historian of the Thirteenth Air Force, Benjamin E. Lippincott, wrote in the 1948 book From Fiji through the Philippines with the Thirteenth Air Force, “With operational control, it may be said that the Thirteenth came into its own. There was a distinct improvement in morale at headquarters; men could now see and feel that the Air Force was performing the function for which it had been designed.” A keepsake volume assembled by the Long Rangers in 1945 described the transfer like this: “This move seemed to symbolize in our minds the opening of a new era. Like a boxer who has been seasoned by a number of successful preliminary bouts, the Allied forces were now ready to step into the big ring, confident of the devastating punch they could deliver.”
In a fitting gesture, the first mission the Long Rangers would fly under MacArthur was to support Nimitz on the northern line. As the Central Pacific ground forces pushed onto Saipan, the Japanese Navy responded with a massive assault on American support ships offshore. By June 19, the fight for the Marianas was raging on land and water, when a US reconnaissance plane spotted a bevy of Japanese reinforcement ships heading to join the fight. Nimitz dispatched a special task force to cut them off at Yap, but if the task force failed, the whole campaign could tip.
With so much on the line in the Central Pacific, MacArthur sent the Long Rangers to cover their former commander. Their instructions were to find the Japanese ships, sink them, and destroy the imperial infrastructure on Yap while they were there.
Just getting from Los Negros to Yap was a navigational feat. The flight crossed more than one thousand miles of uninterrupted water, with no major landmarks or points on the horizon to help chart the way. In a rare feature on the Long Rangers, the New York Times declared Yap “the most important single target in the Southwest Pacific area,” and praised the unit for having already completed three hundred successful combat missions in less than two years.
While the Long Rangers prepared for the mission, another plane was lifting off in California on a very different journey. It was a medical airlift heading to rescue the wounded on Saipan, and a small troupe of entertainers had hitched a ride on board. The leader of the group was Bob Hope, who was still in his early forties but already a legendary figure around the world. Hope had spent the previous year touring military bases in England, Sicily, North Africa, and throughout the United States, but he was heading to the Pacific for the first time.
To join him, Hope brought some of his favorite performers, including the singer Frances Langford, the comedian Jerry Colonna, the musician Tony Romano, the dancer Patty Thomas, and a joke writer named Barney Dean, who had been working with Hope since his early days in 1920s Chicago vaudeville. When the airlift touched down to refuel in Hawaii, the entertainers transferred to one of Douglas MacArthur’s personal planes, the Seventh Heaven, to complete their journey south. Over the next two and a half months, they would travel thirty thousand miles across the South Pacific, performing 150 shows that would change Hope forever. According to biographer William Robert Faith, the comic remarked at the end of the trip, “Everyone claims I’m a little more serious than I was. . . . Those men, those soldiers, they’re not just a bunch of crap-shooting, wolfing guys we like to joke about. These men are men, with the deepest emotions and the keenest feelings that men can have about everything life holds dear.”
While Hope circulated through the islands, the Long Rangers were gearing up for Yap. In their first strike, they took the Japanese garrison by surprise, plastering the harbor and airfield with enough bombs to destroy nineteen planes and damage fifteen more, all without losing a man. But they hadn’t found the Japanese ships, and were surprised to discover how extensive the fortifications were on Yap. They were planning a series of follow-up missions, but they knew the surprise was lost.
The return to Yap would also mark the first combat mission for a member of the Big Stoop. As part of each crew’s preparation, the pilot and co-pilot were required to fly one mission as observers with another crew. On the morning of June 23, under a blanket of cumulus clouds, the pilot of the Big Stoop crew—Norman Coorssen—climbed aboard a silver B-24J to see his first day of battle. The plane was so new that it had only completed eight missions, and it had no name or artwork painted on its nose; it was known only by the last three digits of its serial number, 453.
But that was a number Coorssen would never forget.
—
COORSSEN WAS A STRAPPING KID with blond hair and blue eyes and the faintest hint of a sarcastic smile. He came from the town of Amesbury, Massachusetts, just above the harbor of Newburyport, where shipwrights had built the Antelope in the nineteenth century for its journey past Palau. In the years since, Newburyport had diminished as a shipping center—its waterfront yards giving way to railroad tracks, then parking lots, while its remaining docks echoed not with maritime traffic, but with the vestigial ruckus of longshoremen carousing.
The town of Amesbury, meanwhile, was nestled up the Merrimack River and its tributary, the Powwow, far enough from downtown Newburyport to sustain its own social strata. Tucked below the New Hampshire border, it was about as far north as one could go in Massachusetts, and the Coorssen family was as far north as one could go in Amesbury. They owned the last big nautical company in town, the Henschel Corporation, which made telegraphs and consoles for ships in a massive brick warehouse that employed 10 percent of the town.
For the Coorssens, the Great Depression had been something in the newspaper. Norman and his older brother, George, enjoyed the sort of crisp New England privilege that seems rinsed in sepia even to those who were there. “It was almost a caste system,” George’s wife, Helen Coorssen, said. “It’s embarrassing to say it now, but the Irish were still not accepted. There was a large French population, who were the workers. Then there were the Protestants, who lived at a higher level. And then there were five or six families like the Coorssens—for them, it was a wonderful place to live. They had no competition. They all sort of played bridge and golf, and liked their drinking. The whistle blew at noon, and everybody went home for lunch.”
Like the other leading families in Amesbury, the Coorssens kept a summer cottage at nearby Plaice Cove, where Norman and George spent teenage afternoons swimming and sailing and chasing all the right kinds of
girls. For high school, they attended Phillips Exeter Academy. For college Norman chose Williams, and George, MIT.
But while George adapted well to collegiate life, Norman had trouble. “Norman liked to play a lot,” Helen said. “He was handsome, blond, crispy-creme, and all that—just loved the parties.” After the Pearl Harbor attack, George volunteered for officer training in the Navy. Norman continued to enjoy himself at Williams, until the draft notice came.
For the first time in his life, Norman Coorssen was on the wrong side of fortune. “It was like a rug pulled out,” his nephew, Gary Coorssen, said. Under the draft, Norman would not only enter the service as a lowly private, but he was slated to serve in one of the most dangerous jobs of the war, as an infantryman in a reconnaissance battalion. “That’s when he started to think, ‘Gee, that’s the front line—maybe I should become a pilot!’” Gary said.
“He must have been a wretched private,” Helen added. “He used every wile he had to get out of it.”
Somehow, by the spring of 1943, Norman had managed a leap that few men could make, from the enlisted ranks to the officers’ club, from grunt to pilot. How he did so, even his family wasn’t sure. But he arrived in Tonopah at the head of a crew filled with men who weren’t so lucky: Jimmie and Johnny and Ted and Earl and Leland—the Big Stoop crew. Now, as Norman climbed aboard the 453 bomber for his observation flight to Yap, even those men were gone. He was heading into enemy territory with a crew he didn’t know.
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