Flyboys

by James Bradley

  Americans had grown accustomed to suicidal banzai charges on the part of the Japanese military, but what they witnessed on the northern part of the island shocked even battle-hardened Marines. The civilians on Saipan had been told the Marines were kichiku who would torture, rape, and kill them in monstrous ways (flattening their bodies under the tracks of tanks, for example). The alternative to ignominious death was glorious gyokusai. At Marpi Point, a beautiful cliff jutting out into the Pacific with a two-hundred-foot drop to jagged coral and surf below, Japanese civilians jumped into the sea rather than surrender. Marines watched dumbfounded as mothers tossed babies off the cliff and then jumped to their own deaths.

  Some civilians had surrendered, so the Marines brought in loudspeaker equipment and had the Japanese prisoners broadcast appeals to those on the cliff: “Surrender! Don’t jump. We were given food, water and safety. You won’t be harmed. Surrender!”

  Still they jumped.

  Weeks later, reporter Robert Sherrod described what his Time editors termed “the gruesome deeds, incomprehensible to the occidental mind, which followed the U.S. victory.” The article, which became one of the most read of the war, was entitled “The Nature of the Enemy.” “During mopping-up operations a detachment of Marines on amphibious tractors saw seven Japanese offshore on a coral reef and drove out to get them. As the amphtracks approached, six of the Japs knelt down on the reef. Then the seventh, apparently an officer, drew a sword and began methodically to hack at the necks of his men. Four heads had rolled into the sea before the Marines closed in. Then the officer, sword in had, charged the amphtracks. He and the remaining two Japs were mowed down.”

  Suicidal behavior by the Japanese military was by now an old story. But it was the tales of civilian deaths that galvanized American readers. Sherrod recalled encountering a Marine near Marpi Point who had an incredible story to tell:

  “You wouldn’t believe it unless you saw it,” he said. “Yesterday and the day before there were hundreds of Jap civilians—men, women, and children—up here on this cliff. In the most routine way they would jump off the cliff, or climb down and wade into the sea. I saw a father throw his three children off, and then jump down himself. Those coral pockets down there under the cliff are full of Jap suicides.

  He paused and pointed. “Look,” he said, “there’s one getting ready to drown himself now.” Down below, a young Japanese, no more than 15, paced back and forth across the rocks. He swung his arms, as if getting ready to dive; then he sat down at the edge and let the water play over his feet. Finally he eased himself slowly into the water.

  “There he goes,” the Marine shouted.

  A strong wave had washed up to the shore, and the boy floated out with it. At first, he lay on the water, face down, without moving. Then, apparently, a last, desperate instinct to live gripped him and he flailed his arms, thrashing the foam. It was too late. Just as suddenly, it was all over: the air-filled seat of his knee-length black trousers bobbed on the water for ten minutes. Then he disappeared.

  Sherrod walked to the edge of the cliff and saw seven bodies bobbing in the surf. “This is nothing,” the Marine said. “Half a mile down, on the west side, you can see hundreds of them.” Later Sherrod checked with the officer of a minesweeper who reported, “Down there, the sea is so congested with floating bodies we can’t avoid running them down.” He described men, women, and children—entire families who had jumped into the crashing surf. Fathers had slit their children’s throats and tossed their bodies over the cliff. Three women had meticulously brushed their hair and adjusted their clothes before they jumped. One family had bathed, donned fresh clothes, and then held grenades to their stomachs to blow their insides out. One woman had drowned herself as she was giving birth; the fetus stuck halfway out of her lifeless, floating corpse. One Japanese family—father, mother, and three children—walked to the edge of the cliff and hesitated. Sherrod observed a Japanese sniper who “drilled the man from behind, dropping him into the sea. The second bullet hit the woman. The sniper would have shot the children, but a Japanese woman ran across and carried them out of range.” And the Japanese gunman had been more than willing to die under the rules he was playing by. “The sniper walked defiantly out of his cave, and crumpled under a hundred Marine bullets.”

  “What did all this self-destruction mean?” Sherrod asked. His speculative answer must have sent shivers down the spines of all Americans with boys in the Pacific war: “Saipan is the first invaded Jap territory populated with more than a handful of civilians. Do the suicides of Saipan mean that the whole Japanese race will choose death before surrender?”

  The fall of Saipan was not just another island defeat in the continuing series of Japanese defeats. The Japanese people had been told that Saipan was in the “inner ring” of Japan’s defenses, an “invincible” outpost that assured the safety of the Land of the Rising Sun. Now this shield for Japan had been conquered in just three weeks. American B-29s would soon be in easy striking distance of the Japanese mainland. Tojo’s government fell on the news.

  On July 18, Imperial General Headquarters issued an “acknowledgment” that Japanese forces on Saipan had made a “last attack” on July 7, and added that some troops had fought on until as late as July 16 before they finally “attained heroic death.” A second paragraph described the fate of the civilians: “It appears that the remaining civilian Japanese on Saipan island always cooperated with the military, and those who were able to fight participated bravely in combat and shared the fate of officers and soldiers.”

  The next day, newspaper headlines told the tale:

  ALL MEMBERS OF OUR FORCES ON SAIPAN MEET HEROIC DEATH

  REMAINING JAPANESE CIVILIANS APPEAR TO SHARE FATE

  Similar stories of desperate German, English, Soviet, or American civilian women leaping off cliffs with babes in arms would have given pause to citizens of those countries. Hitler was a target of an assassination attempt by his inner circle for much less. But incredibly, the Spirit boys translated and proudly reprinted Sherrod’s Time article, changing its title to the more glorious “Prefer Death to Surrender.” The Asahi Shimbun newspaper ran a large block-character headline proclaiming:

  THE HEROIC LAST MOMENTS OF OUR FELLOW COUNTRYMEN ON SAIPAN

  SUBLIMELY WOMEN TOO COMMIT SUICIDE ON ROCKS IN FRONT OF THE GREAT SUN FLAG

  PATRIOTIC ESSENCE ASTOUNDS THE WORLD

  Sherrod’s article followed, and the accompanying commentary read, “It has been reported that noncombatants, women, and children have chosen death rather than to be captured alive and shamed by the devil-like American forces. The world has been astounded by the strength of the fighting spirit and patriotism of the entire people of Japan.” The next day, August 20, the Mainichi Shimbun proclaimed that Japanese women

  CHANGED INTO THEIR BEST APPAREL, PRAYED TO THE IMPERIAL PALACE, SUBLIMELY COMMIT SUICIDE IN FRONT OF THE AMERICAN DEVILS

  SACRIFICE THEMSELVES FOR THE NATIONAL EXIGENCY TOGETHER WITH THE BRAVE MEN

  The Japanese “translation” of Sherrod’s article omitted references to Japanese soldiers “drilling” civilians and any mention of the fact that many civilians on Saipan had surrendered.

  Not all Japanese believed the propaganda of the Spirit Warriors. Kiyoshi Kiyosawa, a foreign policy expert and critic of the war, noted in his secret diary that the civilian deaths at Marpi Point represented “feudalism—the influence of ancient warriors—in the time of the airplane, a great admiration for hara-kiri!” Yet neither Kiyosawa nor any other leading figures publicly criticized the government. If they had done so, torture and death would have been their fate.

  For the Americans, Marpi Point meant there was no difference between a Japanese civilian and a Japanese military combatant. Both were prepared to continue to the end. And it was clear that even though Japan was beaten—Midway had demolished most of Japan’s sea and airpower two years before—it was necessary to bring the fight to the Japanese people in their own homes. At a meeting on Jul
y 14, General Marshall explained, “As a result of recent operations in the Pacific it was now clear to the United States Chiefs of Staff that, in order to finish the war with the Japanese quickly, it will be necessary to invade the industrial heart of Japan.”

  Their war was lost after the fall of Saipan, and if Japan’s leaders had heeded the writing on the wall, the majority of its eventual war dead would have been saved. Instead, the Spirit Warriors had set their country up for disaster. Now Americans would tread on their soil, the U.S. Navy would choke their nation with a blockade, and B-29s would burn their cities down. Almost all the half million Japanese civilian casualties of the war and perhaps over half of the more than two million military deaths occurred in the last year of the war. Hirohito and his advisers knew that Hitler’s Germany was in its final death throes and that America would soon swing more resources from Europe to the Pacific. But confronted with the certain knowledge that the “American devils” were closing in on Japan, the Boy Soldier still dreamed of Grandpa’s glory. On June 17, he admonished Vice Chief of Staff Admiral Shimada, “Rise to the challenge; make a tremendous effort; achieve a splendid victory like at the time of the Japan Sea Naval battle [in the Russo-Japanese War].”

  The sole power to stop the war was now in Japan’s hands. America had to fight as long as its enemy did. Indeed, U.S. troops in the Pacific theater adopted the adage “Golden Gate in ’48,” expecting the war to continue another horrible four years. How to defeat an enemy that could not, would not admit defeat?

  Marine captain Justice Chambers witnessed the suicides at Marpi Point. He suggested a solution: “To win the war and get it over with, just kill off many of the other side, make it terrible, and the war will stop.”

  And that is how America beat Japan. The war eventually did stop. But first it got terrible.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  To the Pacific

  Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

  — Winston Churchill, August 20, 1940, referring to airmen fighting the Battle of Britain

  AMERICAN troops did not invade Europe in vast numbers until D-Day at Normandy on June 6, 1944, two and a half years after Pearl Harbor. American Marines did not step on Japanese home soil until three years after Pearl Harbor, on February 19, 1945—D-Day at Iwo Jima. But just months after Pearl Harbor, the Doolittle Raid shocked Japan, and on August 17, 1942, Flyboy Paul Tibbets, who would later drop the atom bomb on Hiroshima, had led a squadron of exactly one dozen bombers from their base in southern England across the English Channel to bomb a railroad switching yard in Rouen, France. Jimmy Doolittle and Paul Tibbets had initiated the type of war America would fight from 1942 into the next century. For two years, the United States and England sent their Flyboys to bomb and burn out Hitler’s ability to wage war. Only after the Flyboys had gained almost complete control of the Third Dimension were American ground troops inserted into the conflict on the European mainland. And for those two years, Adolf Hitler, a man enamored with two-dimensional WWI ideas, had found his vast army useless against U.S. and U.K. forces that refused to engage him in the main ring. Instead, like a swarm of bees disrupting a picnic the führer had to deal with pesky Flyboys who chipped away at his ability to wage war.

  In the Pacific, FDR employed Billy Mitchell’s ideas to devastating effect. Because of superior intelligence and by seizing airfields, the U.S. sank massive Japanese ships—battleships, carriers, transports packed with troops, and supply ships stuffed with rice. Flyboys at the battles of the Coral Sea, Midway, and Guadalcanal had stymied Japan’s advance, seized the strategic offensive for the United States, and placed Japan on the defensive. Gaining control of the Third Dimension, U.S. carrier planes continually tore at Japan’s protective shroud.

  Hundreds of thousands of Japanese ground troops were now stranded on remote Pacific islands. With no control of the air, Japan was unable to supply these troops or evacuate them. Many starved, others lived on boiled grass and leaves, and some ate one another to survive.

  There grew a special hatred for Flyboys in the hearts of these Japanese ground troops. Their rifles might be clean and loaded, their boots and buttons shiny, but they could only shake their fists in anger at the Americans who bombed and strafed them from the air.

  “We’ll get them! They’ll pay for this!” former Japanese soldier Harumichi Nogi remembered thinking. Nogi had been trapped on an island in the Philippines. “Every day those [American planes] would come and run wild, doing what they wanted. All our plans had been destroyed. We could offer no resistance. We were enraged and frustrated. When you lose your own fighting capability and can only suffer under their attacks, you become vengeful yourself.”

  And when Nogi finally came face-to-face with a trio of captured American pilots, he knew what to do.

  “They were very pale,” Nogi remembered of the three Flyboys before him in 1944. “You have been sentenced to death,” Nogi told them. The Flyboys epitomized America’s rational and technological approach to war and highlighted the futility of Spirit War. “Their presence,” Nogi said, “was undeniable evidence that Japanese forces were collapsing.

  “The only choice for Japan,” Nogi thought at the time, was “total annihilation or victory. If we go on losing like this, we’ll never return home alive. Will I be questioned on my responsibility? Not likely. We’ll all be dead. If we win, there’s nothing to worry about because it was ordered from above.

  “Holding my sword, I made them kneel down,” Nogi remembered.

  One, two, then three Flyboys’ heads rolled onto the blood-slicked grass.

  Japanese hatred of the Flyboys intensified as the American military juggernaut drew closer to the empire. With the fall of Saipan, the next step for the American military boot was Iwo Jima, next to No Mans Land. These islands were Japanese home soil—part of the sacred realm. In 1944, Japan evacuated about seven thousand civilians from No Mans Land to Japan as crack Japanese troops from China took up positions on Iwo Jima and Chichi Jima. The emperor himself chose General Tadamichi Kuribiyashi, a member of a distinguished samurai family that had served the royal house for generations, to command Iwo Jima and protect its vital airfields.

  Chichi Jima’s value was as a communications relay station for messages to and from Tokyo’s Pacific theater. The U.S. Navy wanted to disable the radio stations atop Mounts Yoake and Asahi before the planned invasion of Peleliu. Those stations had been intercepting U.S. military radio transmissions and warning Tokyo and Japanese-held Pacific islands of American plans. Chichi Jima was seen as so crucial that as Yoshi Urazaki of the Tokyo Air Defense remembered, “Japanese anti-aircraft gunners were transferred from the Akasaka Palace of Emperor Hirohito” to defend the radio stations. The hilly island was just five miles by three, about double the size of New York’s Central Park. Those hills held concealed defensive cannon and antiaircraft guns shielded by thick concrete. It was the job of these expert antiaircraft gunners to shoot down any Flyboy who invaded Chichi Jima’s airspace.

  General Yoshio Tachibana, a grizzled veteran of the vicious fighting in China, was chosen to command the defense of Chichi Jima. Tachibana was a big brutal army man who beat his troops into submission by day and drank himself into a stupor at night. He relished the scorched-earth policies he had witnessed in China; he was one who loved to “Kill All, Loot All, Burn All.” To him, the Chinese and Americans were both kichiku, and if he got his hands on any Flyboys, he would treat them as he had his prisoners in China.

  Floyd Hall had enlisted in the regular navy and after boot camp had found himself aboard ship as a mess cook. But Floyd was ambitious. “Somewhere along the line,” fellow pilot Bill Hazlehurst remembered, “Floyd got it into his head that he wanted to be a navy pilot. He studied, took a test, and was accepted into the program. Floyd was above and beyond; he was smart. He wasn’t a typical grunt; he had aspirations to be something better. I know he felt he achieved a great deal by being accepted as an aviator. He was proud.”

&
nbsp; Floyd made the usual Flyboy training pit stops—Corpus Christi, Texas; Fort Lauderdale, Florida; Pensacola, Florida; Glenview, Illinois; and San Diego, California, among them. In the spring of 1944, Floyd was practicing bombing runs with gunner Glenn Frazier and radioman Marve Mershon. Their squadron was stationed in Astoria, Oregon. Astoria was not chosen for its good weather. One pilot remembered, “During the time we were there the coast was almost always blanketed by a shroud of wet, gray, low-hanging clouds. Typically we would immediately become enveloped in the thick, wet gloom. It wasn’t long before we became very good instrument flyers.”

  Floyd was flying a TBM Avenger, a “torpedo plane.” But he would launch no torpedoes in later combat out in the Pacific. With the decimation of Japanese shipping, planes originally designed to go in low and launch torpedoes were now being used mostly as glide-bombers.

  The Avengers, 40 feet long and 54 feet wide, were big and heavy (the heaviest plane flown from an aircraft carrier), which meant they were stable in the air—more stable than Dick Woellhof’s Helldiver, for example. They had a range of over 1,000 miles and could climb to 30,000 feet if need be. They were relatively comfortable too. “The TBM had a spacious cockpit,” Jesse Naul recalled. “We had armrests; you could sit comfortably for hours strapped in.” Noise was a problem, and the Flyboys dealt with it by wearing foam ear cups under their helmets.

  Glide-bombers would fly in formations of four planes known as “divisions”; groups of two planes were called “sections.” When it was time to engage the enemy or commence a bombing run, formations could and often would break into smaller units, but usually Flyboys continued to work as teams even when separated. This was in stark contrast to the Japanese pilots, who split apart from one another in battle without any attempt at coordination or team strategy. The results for the Japanese, not surprisingly, were poor and only got worse as the war went on.