For many Flyboys, it was a technician’s job—taking off, navigating, dropping ordnance as planned, landing back on the carrier. Like clockwork, they breezed through their routine, knowing that a friendly poker game was waiting for them back in the ready room. Even though they didn’t talk about it, as the list of buddies who didn’t come back lengthened, they had to wonder and worry about their own chances. John Leboeuf told me, “We tried to be strong and not show anything except complete bravery in front of our fellow airmen.” But there was plenty of cruel truth in a ditty that made it around the carrier ready rooms out in the Pacific:
He loved his plane
And he loved to fly.
He never thought
He was going to die.
Now don’t feel bad
And don’t feel blue.
Who knows tomorrow
It may be you.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
No Mans Land
This is my duty and I have got to do it.
—George Bush
AMERICAN Flyboys recovered from the war’s early setbacks and eventually knocked Japan out of the sky. In 1941, the Mitsubishi Zero was a terror, but soon Japanese pilots were the ones trembling when a Flyboy zoomed into view. American airmen had learned from their mistakes and trained themselves to peak performance. And their machines had improved along with them. Now Hellcats, P-38 Lightnings, and Corsairs had Japanese airpower reeling. By 1944, the emperor’s air forces were in tatters. Too many Japanese planes had become just another notch in a Flyboy’s belt.
As American airpower gained control of the Third Dimension in the Pacific, the battlefield was transformed. Now a prediction by Billy Mitchell was becoming self-evident: He who controlled the air controlled the outcome of the war.
Admiral Chester Nimitz’s strategy had called for making a beeline for Japan, as directly as possible. The Mariana Trench snakes its way from Guam, Tinian, and Saipan north to Tokyo Bay. The islands along this trench—the highest peaks of this submerged mountain range—would be the American military’s road to Tokyo.
And as that road neared Japan, both sides knew that hostilities in No Mans Land would be different. Unlike Guadalcanal or Tarawa or Saipan, the islands of No Mans Land were Japanese native soil, part of the undefiled realm. No barbarian had ever set his victorious foot on Japan’s sacred soil. An American invasion here would constitute the invasion of Japan. The fighting would be ferocious.
But before American rifles and Japanese swords would cross in conflict there, the Flyboys brought the war to No Mans Land.
A Japanese soldier’s life on Iwo Jima and in No Mans Land in 1944 and early 1945 was tedious, dull, depressing, and dangerous. On Iwo Jima, Japanese boys dug caves and tunnels into the stinking sulfurous rock. Sweat poured off their bodies as they worked far below the surface in stifling hot, clammy caverns. Carrier planes and B-24s from Saipan would suddenly appear to make their lives even more miserable. There was no spring water on barren, sulfurous-smelling Iwo Jima, and their commander set the example for his 22,000 troops by using only one cup of water a day to bathe himself and brush his teeth.
In comparison, Chichi Jima had plenty of water and was tropical-paradise lush. But the 25,000 troops there had denuded the hills long ago by cutting down trees to build shelters and foraging for anything edible.
Besides being a communications hub, Chichi Jima was the staging area for supplies intended for Iwo Jima. Freighters and transport ships would sail the six hundred miles from Japan to Chichi Jima, where they would unload in the fine natural harbor. Then the supplies were transferred to smaller boats, which ferried them the final one hundred fifty miles to Iwo Jima. Iwo had no harbor, and the small boats would have to ride the waves onto the black sand shore or wait offshore while boats from Iwo would come out to unload at sea.
As time wore on, however, American planes and submarines made the transport of supplies from Japan to Chichi Jima and onward to Iwo Jima impossible. Only the occasional Japanese submarine could get through, and they couldn’t carry much cargo.
Soon a dark, forlorn feeling of abandonment overtook the soldiers in No Mans Land. Even though the issen gorin knew their mission was to die for the emperor, they were human beings. It was natural for them to hope that they might survive the war and feel the embrace of their mothers, girlfriends, and wives again. But these boys could see the gaizin planes swarming overhead, the dwindling number of Japanese ships making it through. They understood that their Spirit Warrior masters back in Tokyo had sentenced them to gyokusai deaths. They knew the caves they were digging would be their tombs.
In America on July 4, 1944, Dick Woellhof’s mother, Laura, was celebrating the nation’s 169th birthday. She was taking charge of the Independence Day picnic at her sister Ruah’s farm in Idana, Kansas.
The farm kitchen was crowded with family members working, talking, and laughing. “Laura was the oldest in the family,” Ruah Sterrett told me, “so she would cook and tell everyone what to do to get things ready.”
The potatoes that needed peeling were grown on the farm, as were the beans that had to be trimmed. The chicken frying in oil came from the farm also. “I laid their heads on a block,” Ruah said, “and would cut them off with a hatchet. You had to be brave in those days. I don’t think I could do that today.”
For drinks, lemons had to be squeezed and precious rationed sugar was added to make lemonade. “We didn’t serve beer at our house,” Ruah remembered. “We got along fine without it.”
The scent of fried chicken must have reminded Laura of her son. Dick had come back to Clay Center on leave a few times over the past two years. In one of his first letters home to his mother (“Dear Sweetheart”), he asked her to “quit talking about fried chicken in those letters as I haven’t had a real good meal for three weeks and it makes me hungry. We have plenty of beans. The way we can tell it is Saturday up here is every Saturday morning we have beans as our main dish.” So when he was home, Laura had fried him all the chicken he wanted and gone easy on the beans.
Dick craved another simple pleasure. “When I come home,” he wrote, “I’m going to lay down on a soft bed and sleep as long as I can. A person doesn’t get any too much rest sleeping in a hammock and a lot of the boys have some sore spots from falling out of the hammocks. It is about a four foot drop and the floor is plenty hard.”
This July Fourth must have held special meaning for Laura. She was a single mother with both her sons off fighting for their country. She could brag about Dick in the Pacific and her older boy, Lawrence, who was a GI in Africa. Laura worried about her sons, but she hoped for the best and kept herself occupied. She still worked six days a week in her beauty salon, which had supported the family since the death of her husband. And a big family gathering like this one certainly kept her distracted. Laura had to corral someone to turn the crank on the wooden freezer to convert the sweet cream and sugar into homemade ice cream. The ice had been purchased from a neighbor who had cut it from the river in the winter and stored it packed in straw in a nearby cave. Turning the crank was hard work on a hot July day, too arduous for the kids, so Laura had to assign an available adult to do the work.
During the afternoon, the relatives visited around the backyard picnic table and on the shady porch. When the sun went down, out came the fireworks. First, sparklers for the little kids and firecrackers for the teenagers. Then the climax of any American family’s Independence Day—the big rockets that only the uncles could handle.
“Everybody loved those fireworks,” Aunt Ruah said. “They’d burst and go into a million pieces.”
That same day, Dick was aboard the USS Yorktown, which had sailed north from Eniwetok on June 30, 1944. On July 3, a fighter sweep had been launched against Iwo Jima, but Japanese planes rose to intercept them. In the resulting melee, twelve Japanese planes were downed, as was pilot Arthur Ward, who “failed to return,” as the ship’s action report put it.
Operations began bright and early the next day,
July 4. There were scattered showers as the USS Yorktown, just sixty-six miles from Chichi Jima, readied for launch by turning into the wind. Dick’s Helldiver, piloted by Owen Hintz, with Dick behind him in the gunner’s seat, took off in the predawn darkness at 5:00 A.M. On the way to the strike, Dick saw the sunrise at 5:54 A.M.
Dick and his strike force circled Chichi Jima’s harbor at 11,000 feet, searching for ships and docks to bomb. At 6:40 A.M., they began their dives. The plan was to dart down from 11,000 feet, release the bombs at 2,000 feet, and pull out at 1,000 feet—a classic dive-bombing operation. Unfortunately, this plan was also perfect for the island’s defenders. The harbor was a “punch bowl” surrounded by rugged hills with only a small opening in the west for escape. It was a uniquely dangerous place to dive. The antiaircraft fire came not only from below but also from all sides as the planes dove below the level of the hilltops. As the planes pulled out and escaped to the west, Japanese fire would actually come down at them from caves above.
One by one, the bombers dove and the Japanese gunners reaped their bloody harvest. Warren Wright’s plane was hit and burst into flame. Witnesses saw a parachute blossom forth—it was Warren or his gunner, Fred Pryor; no one knew for sure. The jumper landed in the harbor and sank beneath the water. Just then, another plane was a burning mass. Like that, pilot Jack Drysdale and gunner Bruce Dalton were gone.
Then it was Dick’s turn.
As Laura Woellhof gazed into the Kansas night sky, her face illuminated by the red, white, and blue explosions, she had no idea that on that same Fourth of July her son was observing fireworks from the opposite angle. The colored missiles he saw were tracers fired at him from the antiaircraft guns below. One of those shells found its mark and tore into Dick’s plane. His pilot, Owen Hintz, was killed instantly.
Then the plane burst into a million pieces.
Now Dick found himself falling free of the destroyed Helldiver and he yanked his chute open. The shell that ripped into Dick’s dive-bomber had cut into his right leg. Bleeding, in great pain, Dick floated down into No Mans Land.
He landed in the harbor with no chance of escape. As he swam ashore, three soldiers pointed their bayonets. It was a hopeless mismatch, but this former letterman for the Clay Center Tigers drew his survival knife and lunged. A bayonet thrust into Dick’s shoulder ended the face-off as the Japanese bagged their first Flyboy of the day.
Dick’s flying career was over. Exactly two years earlier—to the day—his mother’s signature on his enlistment papers had made that July Fourth “the happiest day” of his life.
As Dick was hustled off, additional waves of planes suddenly appeared. Pilot Bill Connell from Seattle had enlisted because he thought flying would be “neat.” Now he was at the controls of a two-seated dive-bomber with gunner Ben Wolf in the back. Bill and Ben had lifted off from the USS Hornet in the dark and now, just after 7:00 A.M., they were over Chichi Jima’s harbor. “We could see two freighters entering the harbor,” Bill recalled. “Those were our targets.”
Just as he began his dive, a shell exploded near his plane and Bill was knocked out cold. “When I came to,” he said, “I tried to regain control of the plane. I pulled the stick, but there was no response. The tail was gone and the right wing was missing. I was falling down through the air like a leaf. Going flip, flop, just swaying back and forth like a falling leaf.”
Bill jettisoned his bombs and yelled, “Get out! Get out!” to Ben Wolf in the backseat. Bill could not turn to see if his gunner was alive or dead or if he was even still in the plane. To this day, Bill has no idea what happened to Ben.
“I waited a few minutes to give him a chance to get out,” Bill recalled. “And then I undid my straps and jumped.”
As Bill floated down from eight thousand feet, the gunners below took potshots at him. “I saw the tracers coming at me,” he said, “and I had a brief thought: ‘Gee, today is the Fourth of July.’”
Bill landed in the harbor, stripped off his parachute harness, and inflated his Mae West. One of the ships he had been attempting to destroy sailed by him. “They aimed their machine guns at me,” he recalled, “but they didn’t shoot.”
Bill remained floating in the harbor for about forty-five minutes. No one wanted to come out and get him until they were satisfied the bombing runs were finished. Finally, a small vessel with ten crewmen fished Bill out.
“They dragged me aboard,” he said, “and started screaming and yelling and hitting me about my head. The Japanese don’t use their fists; they were striking me with their open hands on the side of my head.”
Then they threw Bill down on the deck and started kicking him. Their slaps and kicks were only meant to terrorize him; they could have broken bones if they wanted to. “I was scared to death,” Bill said. “I thought I was going to die.”
After ten minutes of this treatment, the crew took a one-inch-thick rope and bound Bill from his knees to his shoulders “like a mummy,” he said. “Then they threw this mummy onto the bow of the ship and sailed toward shore.”
On shore, Bill was blindfolded and his hands were handcuffed behind his back. Just then an air-raid siren wailed as another strike force appeared overhead. Bill was tossed into the sidecar of a motorcycle and rushed into an air-raid shelter.
After the raid, Bill was driven about half a mile and lashed to a tree in a manner guaranteed to cause excruciating pain. “They blindfolded me,” he said, “and tied my hands to a tree behind my back. Then they kicked my legs out from under me so my legs were stretched out in front and my butt was a few inches off the ground. The pain was terrific, I was crying, tears were coming down. It felt like my shoulders were being ripped off. I tried to dig my heels in the ground to inch my way back up the tree, but I couldn’t. The guards were laughing, knowing I would fail. The pain was unbearable.”
After six hours, Bill had no feeling in the upper half of his body. Another wave of air strikes hit the island, with bombs landing near Bill, now left alone by the guards.
“A big chunk of dirt landed in my lap,” he said. “I didn’t know what had happened; I had a wild thought that my legs were gone. I was able to peek out from under the blindfold and see that I still had legs!”
Bill was lucky that he wasn’t pulverized. Planes from the USS Yorktown alone dropped over 110 tons of bombs on Chichi Jima that day.
After almost twelve hours, the guards finally cut Bill down. “When they untied my hands,” Bill recalled, “I couldn’t see between my fingers because they were swollen together. My hands looked like two big balls on the end of my arms. They were blue, and I wondered if I’d ever be able to use them again. I couldn’t raise my arms for two days.”
Bill spent the night lashed to a second tree, with his hands tied behind him more loosely, and this time he could sit down. While he was bound there, a Japanese civilian walked up to him and put a rifle right between his eyes.
“He made it clear,” Bill recalled, “that an American bomb had killed his son and he was going to kill me. I thought, ‘This is it,’ but the guards shooed him away.”
Finally, Bill was moved to army headquarters, where he would spend the next six days. He was tied to a tree outside the headquarters building and taken inside every day to be interrogated. “They questioned me as if I had the knowledge of an admiral,” Bill said, “asking me, ‘How many planes does this carrier have?’ and, ‘What is the mission of this other carrier?’” When Bill gave an answer the interrogator didn’t like, the guards boxed the side of his head so hard that he and the chair he was bound to would topple over onto the floor. “They weren’t trying to kill me,” Bill said, “but it sure was uncomfortable.”
Bill was fed a rice ball once a day and could have all the water or tea he wanted. When tied to the tree, he was always blindfolded. “I was very frightened,” he admitted. “I was sure I was going to be executed. I thought of my folks, my sister, my aunts and uncles, my grandparents. But my life was out of my control and I was living day to day, just
hoping for the best.
“One day I heard voices,” Bill told me, “and I angled my head so I could peek under the blindfold. I saw an American enlisted man in blue dungarees, blindfolded and handcuffed, being led across the courtyard to a building. He was limping.”
It was Dick Woellhof.
Bill and Dick shared a similar existence during those harrowing days, but there was a big difference between the two in the minds of their Japanese captors. Bill was an officer and Dick was an enlisted man. “Being enlisted people, we were told we’d be shot right away because we didn’t know enough,” said gunner William Hale, recalling an intelligence briefing he received aboard his carrier. “The Japanese judged us according to their enlisted men.”
Bill Connell spent seven days tied to the tree outside headquarters. Then he was bundled aboard an old seaplane and flown to Iwo Jima. He sat on the tarmac under the shade of the aircraft for five hours. Then he was tied again, blindfolded, and placed in the backseat of a two-engined bomber. Bill was headed for further questioning at the Ofuna POW camp, just outside of Tokyo.
On the flight to Japan, Bill peeked out from under his blindfold. “I saw I was sitting next to a canvas bag,” he told me. “The bag was full of baseball bats! There was a leather baseball glove looped over one of the bats. Here we were fighting a war and they’re flying baseball equipment back and forth.”
After the war, Bill submitted an affidavit to the relevant war crimes trial about his treatment on Chichi Jima. In one of the letters from the American prosecutor, Bill learned that he had earned a unique distinction. “They said I was the last American off the island alive.”
Iwo Jima’s defenders knew they would die there, but at least they had the small comfort that they admired the man leading them to their deaths. General Tadamichi Kuribayashi was a sixth-generation samurai whose family had long served the emperor. Kuribayashi knew this would be his final battle. He wrote his wife, “Do not expect my return.” To his son, he wrote, “Your father’s life is like a candle in the wind.”
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