“One afternoon we were talking on the flight line,” Bill recalled. “‘Where you keeping yourself?’ we asked Floyd.
“He told us he was living with a girl,” Bill continued. “I remember him telling us about the groceries he was going to buy for her and how she’d cook for him. Floyd was a true hell-raiser, and it struck Joe and me as very weird. He was domesticated! He was a different person. This was a complete turnabout that we didn’t understand.”
“Hell, Floyd, why stick with one when you can have ten girls a week?” Joe asked.
“We kept kidding him about it, and he got exasperated,” Bill said. “Finally, Floyd turned to Joe and me and said, ‘I don’t think I’m going to come out of this alive and I want to enjoy some things and I’m going to do them now.’
“It never occurred to Joe and me that we weren’t coming back, so we scoffed at this. He said it with a smile, but he was very serious. ‘What are you saying?’ we asked him. He elaborated that he had this gal and he was going to enjoy the relationship because it was his last chance.”
Years later, I asked Hazlehurst if he had any idea what brought on Floyd’s sudden change of heart. “I have no idea,” he answered. “About that time Bill Colbert, a senior pilot, flew right into the Salton Sea on a night practice and was lost. But we lost pilots all the time, and I can’t say that was it. All I remember is Floyd repeating, ‘I’m going to take every opportunity to enjoy myself because I don’t think I’m coming back.’”
By the fall of 1944, George Bush was out in the Pacific flying Avengers off the USS San Jacinto, and Dick Woellhof was flying the gunner’s position in dive-bombers off the USS Yorktown. In September of 1944, Warren Earl Vaughn sailed on the USS Ticonderoga for further training flying Corsairs over Hawaii. Aboard the USS Bennington, Jimmy Dye and Grady York sailed from the East Coast through the Panama Canal to Pearl Harbor. Floyd Hall, Glenn Frazier, and Marve Mershon sailed out under San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge aboard the USS Randolph.
Now in control of the Third Dimension, the United States was able to sail these behemoths out to the Pacific killing fields with relative impunity. The Flyboys played poker, ate steaks, and watched movies on ships that symbolized America’s awesome power in the Pacific. With the Japanese fleet severely diminished and Japanese air strength shredded, sailors and Flyboys on American ships had little to be concerned about.
In contrast, without control of the air, the Spirit Warriors were not even safe in their home waters. With the fall of Saipan, there was no hope of regaining the offensive. By the summer of 1944, the Japanese high command had concluded that even if they could not win the war outright, they might force America to negotiate a peace. They reasoned that the American public would not tolerate a long war with growing casualties, so they ordered attrition warfare: fighting that would slow the Americans down and inflict maximum losses. This tactic would capitalize on two great strengths of the Japanese troops—their ability to dig in and their ability to endure the most god-awful shelling from the sea and bombing from the air.
Imperial General Headquarters issued orders calling for “endurance engagement” through the use of “fukkaku positions,” honeycombed subterranean defensive positions. No longer would Japanese soldiers mount banzai charges; now they were ordered to fight from heavily fortified underground tunnels and caves.
In July of 1944, the Japanese army dispatched a convoy of soldiers to No Mans Land. Nobuaki Iwatake was one of those soldiers, a reluctant combatant with an unusual background. Iwatake-san was born an American citizen in Maui, Hawaii, of Japanese immigrant parents. In 1940, his father died in a fishing accident and relatives in Hiroshima sent for him, promising him the education his mother could no longer afford. After graduating from high school in Maui in June of 1941, he sailed to Japan.
“The U.S. Customs officer in Hawaii said, ‘Don’t go to Japan, there’s going to be a war between us,’” Iwatake-san remembered. “I explained that I had to go because of the death of my father. He understood, but he had tears in his eyes.”
Iwatake-san was drafted by the army while studying at Meiji University. “Basic training was very harsh,” he recalled. “The older soldiers beat you any time they wanted. There was inspection every night. They’d spot a speck of dust on your shoes and you’d get beaten up. They’d whack you across the face so hard you’d fall over. Some would be bleeding through the nose. The officers would say, ‘We want to put Yamato damashii into you so you’ll be good soldiers.’”
Nobuaki Iwatake boarded the Nissho Maru for the trip to No Mans Land. The islands of No Mans Land were the equivalent of America’s Florida Keys, stepping-stones to the mainland. If Japan could not protect even these islands, it had no hope of projecting power out into the Pacific. Along the way, the convoy zigzagged to avoid submarines. One night, Iwatake-san heard explosions. American submarines roamed at will just off the coast of Japan, and the next morning he could see that the largest ship in the convoy was gone. The next night another was sunk. “Even as subs sunk our ships near the mainland,” Iwatake-san said, “the high command was lying to the people about great victories.”
Then it was Iwatake’s turn. “A torpedo hit our ship,” he remembered. “There was panic. I jumped and got away so I wouldn’t get sucked under. I saw the ship crack in two and pull many soldiers down with it.”
The survivors were picked up by a smaller freighter, which was now overloaded with troops. The salt-encrusted, shaken boys couldn’t find shade, and the summer sun beat down mercilessly. There was no water. “One guy drank his own urine,” Iwatake-san recalled. “Another said he drank seawater, which was much worse.”
The next day, someone screamed, “Torpedo!” The troops could see the white wake, but the captain swerved the ship and avoided the missile. “I’ll always remember the sound that rose up when we saw that torpedo,” Iwatake-san said. “It was a wailing sound of people facing certain death.”
A rainstorm brought some relief as the troops lay on the deck with their mouths open. Landing on Chichi Jima, Iwatake was assigned to a work party to dig tunnels and caves. The Americans would eventually come, he was told. Iwatake now had to help save Japan with a hammer and chisel.
As the great U.S. carriers sailed farther from home, the reality of coming battles weighed on the Flyboys’ minds. Previously hypothetical, imagined danger now became a real possibility. The Spirit Warriors might not be able to mount an offensive, but their determination to fight to the last man meant they were still a lethal enemy. And the Flyboys knew it. “We were told,” Bill Hazlehurst said, “that if we were captured by the Japanese, we could expect to be tortured to give them some intelligence.”
As Jimmy Dye sailed to his destiny aboard the USS Bennington, his ebullient optimism deserted him. Jimmy had come to the same conclusion as Floyd Hall: that he wasn’t coming back. As if to inoculate them from the coming pain, Jimmy wrote his “Dearest Folks” to assure them they had been wonderful parents:
You and Dad never held me back. You gave me everything I ever wanted. I can think of nothing that I ever wished for and didn’t get.
My home wasn’t just a home it was a place where I could come and bring my friends knowing it was clean and nice and that my friends would be welcomed and treated the way I wanted them to be. Yet at the same time it was a home were we could have fun and act up without feeling like you were in a china shop like some homes are. I guess I was lucky to have such a family and I really don’t know how I rated it.
Jimmy referred to Gloria Nields, who had held his head so tenderly on the couch, as “The Girl” and concluded that “Fate” would “keep us apart.” While he never came out and wrote explicitly, “I’m not coming back,” it’s hard to come to any other conclusion about his meaning. “I know that if you ever receive this it will be the toughest time of your lives,” he told his parents. They should know, he said, that it was his decision to enlist. “I went in doing what I wanted to do.
“I’m not afraid to go because
I know someday we’ll be together again,” Jimmy continued, telling his parents to be strong: “God be with you and protect you. Keep your chins up. Remember whenever things went wrong Mom and Dad you always said, ‘We’ll make it somehow’ and we always did, this isn’t much different.” In his final paragraph he wrote, “Goodbye for now. The Lord bless and keep you. We’ll be together again someday.”
It is very unusual for young men going into combat to think they will die. There’s a famous story of three Marines being briefed before battle. Their captain says, “Two out of every three of you will not make it.” Each of the three glances at the others and thinks, “Those poor sons-of-bitches.”
I have interviewed hundreds of Pacific veterans in the course of writing two books. I never heard a survivor say, “I thought I wouldn’t make it.” And I never heard a survivor say about another survivor, “He told me he wouldn’t make it.” In my research, I found only four who said they weren’t coming back. Iwo Jima flagraisers Mike Strank and Harlon Block, and Flyboys Floyd Hall and Jimmy Dye told those close to them, “This is it.” Four announced they would die. Four were correct.
Jimmy never told Gloria Nields of his belief, and she continued to pen regular letters to him and sleep with his photograph. It was a formal close-up of him in his navy uniform that highlighted Jimmy’s blue-eyed, all-American good looks. Gloria had the eight-by-ten photo framed. For Christmas she mailed Jimmy a white scarf. “It was pretty and I could afford it,” she said. “I thought of it as a personal gift; I liked the idea of him wearing my scarf around his neck.”
Grady York was on the same ship as Jimmy Dye and he also wrote letters home. Grady knew censors read his mail, so he couldn’t say much, but he wrote repeatedly of how much he missed home with heart-tugging lines like, “I don’t see how you could be any lonelier than I am.” In one letter, festooned with a realistic rendition of three airplanes, he asked his mother, “Do you think I’ll ever make a good artist? If I had some paints and brushes I would paint you a good picture.”
As the ship took him closer to combat, Grady spent his time quietly drawing pictures of fighters and bombers soaring gracefully through the sky. But his sketches belied the reality that these sleek machines were instruments of death and destruction, instruments of war that to the Japanese symbolized their growing impotence in the face of American airpower.
As Grady drew and thought of his mom, in Japan, newsreels described the islands of No Mans Land as “a suitable place to slaughter the American devils.” Another magazine declared that as more of the American devils “are sent to hell, the cleaner the world will be.”
Nineteen-year-old Flyboy Grady York never wrote about his fears of confronting an enemy that considered him an inhuman Other. But the last words of the last letter Grady ever wrote were these: “Pray for me.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Carrier War
Your brain tells you not to get into the airplane; you’ll die a nasty death. But our brain also told us that we had to do something for our country.
—Rowdy Dow
THE aircraft carriers taking the Flyboys to war were the equivalent of floating American towns. Boys on board could visit the doctor or climb into a barber’s chair. They could read the ship’s daily newspaper over their breakfast coffee, then check out a book at the library or shop at the general store. The sailors had regular work schedules, attended church services, ate hamburgers, played basketball, soaped up in hot showers, watched movies, slept in clean bunks, and wore regularly laundered uniforms.
For much of their time on the carriers, it didn’t seem as if they were in a war at all. The Pacific conflict was being waged over the largest battlefield in the history of warfare, and the sprawling carrier fleet was often spread out over such a wide expanse that some of the sister ships were beyond the horizon. Because of the distances involved, many days were spent just sailing. American combatants sailing from West Coast ports traveled the equivalent distance of New York to Los Angeles—and back—just to get to Pacific battlefields. Ernie Pyle was astonished to realize that fighters in the western Pacific islands were brought back to Pearl Harbor rest camps, “the equivalent of sending an Anzio beachhead fighter all the way back to Kansas City for his two weeks.”
The vast distances involved were just one of the factors that made the carrier war unusual. The European conflict had its aerial component, but it was a more traditional contest of mud, cold, and close combat. But WWII in the Pacific was a war in which pilots took their meals at linen-covered tables, then flew off to sudden, flaming deaths, a war in which airplanes brought misery to millions behind the lines but in which the airmen rarely saw their enemy.
The airmen were considered the most important passengers on the carriers. They provided the fleet with both its offensive thrust and its defensive protection. The massive battleships hurtling shells against one another as in past wars had been replaced by carriers waging a new kind of long-range warfare by flinging their airplanes out to engage in battle. And the carriers, which were vulnerable to attack from the air, depended upon their planes to protect the vital airspace above them.
“We didn’t have duties aboard the ship,” said radioman George Flashner. “We didn’t have anything to do other than fly. And we would fly only three to four hours any given day; and we didn’t fly every day. We didn’t really feel a part of the ship’s crew. We were attached to the ship rather than being part of crew.”
In recognition of their cutting-edge potency, the navy assigned the pilots the largest and most comfortable accommodations on its ships. “I preferred being on a carrier to being land based,” said pilot Walter Stonebraker. “Aboard an aircraft carrier you have beautiful air-conditioned quarters. The rooms were small, but they were neat and orderly. You had a desk. The food was excellent. Two-day laundry service. You could get a haircut. Friends of mine on islands lived in a tent, standing in lines in the mud to eat off tin plates. On the ships it was first-class living. Linen on the tables, nice tableware, like a five-star hotel. Another thing about carrier duty: Everything is immaculately clean. The airplanes were so clean; there was no opportunity for them to get dirty.”
The gunners and radiomen were enlisted men and slept in quarters separate from those of the pilots. “We called the officers’ quarters ‘God’s Country,’” remembered George Flashner. The navy enforced a strict wall of separation between the enlisted men and the officers. Fraternization was discouraged, and they led separate lives aboard ship. “Even when we went ashore,” Flashner recalled, “there were two gangplanks—one for the enlisted men and one for the officers. But there wasn’t any antagonism; that’s just the way it was.”
The one place on the carrier where the all the airmen—officers and enlisted—came together was the “ready room.” “The ready room was the flight crews’ home away from home. It served as office, classroom, movie theater, and living room. The walls were covered with bulletin boards, charts, maps, posters, and briefing guides.” The ready room was “control central,” where airmen gathered to receive assignments, get debriefed after a strike, and just hang out. “We read books, horsed around, played cards, dominoes, checkers, looked after our clothes, relaxed, and did anything we felt like,” said Vince Carnazza. “The ready room was open twenty-four hours a day,” Flashner added. “The officers sat in front; we sat in the back. We didn’t interface with them or even play cards with them.” Bill Hazlehurst explained, “Even though we shared the ready room with the enlisted men, there was a clear hierarchy. We were officers; we were pilots.”
“The ready room was very comfortable,” said Vince. “Each one of us had an easy chair, like the kind you get today only not as fluffy. Each chair had a little locker under the seat and there was a dressing room in back with lockers for our flight suits, parachute harness, pistol, and survival knife.” The Flyboys got to know their clubhouse well. “In the ready room,” Rowdy Dow remembered, “we would talk and talk and talk. We’d be there all day long talking. What did
we talk about so much? I wonder about that sometimes.”
“We also had a little kitchen off the ready room,” said radioman Ralph Sengewalt. “We could get food any time we wanted. The men who didn’t fly always had things ready for those coming off a flight. There were sandwiches, coffee, milk, juice.” “For our main snack,” said Vince, “we would take canned corn beef and mix it real well with pickles and make it into meat loaf, then put it on a plate. We had this with sandwiches or sea ration crackers.”
But that was just ready-room cuisine. The enlisted men took their three main meals in the mess hall. “We ate dehydrated eggs with tomato sauce,” Vince remembered. “Lots of Spam with shredded pineapple, tomato, and cabbage. We ate boiled beef, sliced beef, fresh or dehydrated mashed potatoes, canned vegetables, and a chili made from hamburger meat and ground-up bologna.”
“The thing that got me,” George Flashner recalled, “is that there was never any red jam, just marmalade. I always wondered if that marmalade manufacturer had paid someone off for that monopoly.”
“While we were under attack,” remembered Vince, “they would close the mess. ‘Secure the mess hall’ is how we said it. They would set up urns, blue enamel coffee pots, with two gallons of pea or vegetable soup. Those coffee pots were suspended on a cord, so when the ship swayed, the pots swayed with it.
“As soon as we were under attack, we’d rush up onto the flight deck,” Vince continued. “Five or ten times during each attack, we were told, ‘Clear the flight deck!’ So we would jump down into the cat works, then come back up again. So there would always be several hundred of us on the flight deck who weren’t supposed to be there. We couldn’t resist. We would be cheering gunners. When they hit an airplane, a huge cheer would go up from all of us. We were average American kids; we loved football, baseball—this was another big game.”
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