Flyboys

by James Bradley

  But he did not despair, and in true samurai fashion his behavior enhanced the family name. The general shared his soldiers’ privations, labored as hard as he asked his men to, and devised a brilliant defensive strategy for the island.

  The soldiers on Chichi Jima were much less fortunate with the abusive General Yoshio Tachibana. “He was a hard drinker,” recalled Matsuo Kagiwada, who served under Tachibana for six months. “I often had to get sake for him. He always drank himself to sleep.” Tachibana was feared for his short temper and for personally beating soldiers when perturbed. He was a true product of the Spirit Warriors’ upside-down system of morality. In an army that valued animal-like responses, this bully had risen to the top. Kagiwada concluded that he “always thought of General Tachibana as one who came up from the gutter.”

  On August 5, 1944, Chichi Jima was hit with another fierce bombing raid during which a B-24 was downed. All aboard were killed in the fiery crash except for one army crewman who crawled out alive. The raid had caused other casualties: Members of General Tachibana’s 307th Battalion had been killed. With that, Tachibana had had enough. It was time for revenge.

  The general had Dick Woellhof and the unidentified B-24 crewman tied to trees in front of his headquarters.

  “These kichiku killed our fellow soldiers,” Tachibana shouted to his assembled men. “Hit them as a warning to others. Kick them hard and hate them.” Then the general smacked the two helpless boys, took a swig from a nearby sake bottle, and exclaimed, “I feel great. I am revenging the enemy!”

  Tachibana issued a daily order later that August 5 calling for the execution of the two prisoners the next day. That evening he stood and addressed his men in the headquarters mess hall: “Tomorrow, prisoners will be disposed of. All orderlies and clerks who are not required to perform other duties will attend.”

  “The general,” said Captain Seiji Higashigi, “mentioned that while he was a battalion commander in Manchuria, the execution of prisoners of war helped to build the fighting spirit of the troops.”

  On August 6, Dick and the B-24 crewman were loaded onto the rear of a truck and taken to the 307th Battalion’s rifle range. Captain Higashigi, a senior adjutant to Tachibana, had ordered Lieutenant Colonel Kikuji Ito to oversee the execution as follows: “It has been decided upon that the prisoners should be executed by bayoneting. Lieutenant Colonel Ito, you supervise the execution.”

  Later, Ito would speculate that General Tachibana had intentionally singled him out for this unpleasant task. “It is true that I had a quarrel with the general,” said Ito, “and it is a fact that the general hardly spoke to me.” But all officers’ orders were to be considered as commands from the emperor, and Colonel Ito thought only how to obey.

  At the rifle range, Dick and the crewman, their hands tied behind their backs, were made to walk up a small hill. It was around 8 A.M.; the sun was up, with the temperature beginning its predictable rise. The two boys were not told they were about to be executed, but they must have assumed so. They watched as stakes were pounded into the ground. Then they were lashed to the stakes and blindfolded.

  “After the prisoners were tied,” recalled Moriko Okamoto, “Colonel Ito gave the order to worship the emperor with a deep bow.”

  “I gave the following speech,” Colonel Ito later related. “‘Acting on orders, we are now going to execute these two prisoners.’ I then walked over to the prisoners and felt their chests and with my fountain pen, I put a circle over their hearts.” The instructions were the same as they had been in training: Executioners were not to pierce hearts or else the victims would die too soon. It was important that as many as possible got their chance to strengthen their Yamato damashii.

  Colonel Ito then gave the order to begin the bayoneting. “I will make a coward stab a prisoner,” he said, and selected Private Matsutano Kido. When Kido wasn’t enthusiastic enough, Colonel Ito shouted at him, “Why are you hesitating to stab?”

  There was no further hesitation. After the first round of stabbings by four privates, the lungs and stomachs of the two Flyboys were punctured, and aerated blood bubbled forth from their noses and mouths. Their heads sagged to their chests. More men came forward two by two to thrust their sharp blades into the Americans’ bodies.

  “The flyers were groaning,” recalled a soldier named Shimura. “They did not cry out or yell; they only groaned.”

  “After the prisoners were bayoneted,” said Okamoto, “Colonel Ito beheaded them. They were still alive when he did this.”

  Ito later claimed he beheaded Dick and the crewman out of respect. “In Japanese bushido,” Ito said, “when a man is executed, it is a sign of honoring him that he be beheaded. Although I was stepping beyond my actual orders, I honored the two prisoners by beheading them.” Ito was referring to kaishaku, the ritual beheading administered after someone commits seppuku, or hara-kiri. A samurai would disembowel himself over a matter of honor and an assistant would then behead the suffering man to end his agony. This beheading was prearranged and agreed to by all parties. But the American boys with blood running out of their mouths were accorded no honor that day. In contorting the true essence of bushido, Colonel Ito was typical of his fellow Spirit Warriors, who bastardized Japanese history as they led their nation to ruin.

  Dick’s and the B-24 crewman’s bodies and severed heads were placed in a previously dug hole. Dick had turned twenty years old eight days before.

  On August 16, Laura Woellhof received a telegram from the navy notifying her that Dick had been shot down on July 4. The navy wrote that Dick was “missing in action” and that Laura was to wait for further word before jumping to conclusions.

  It would be a year and a half before the navy would learn that Dick was dead. But Laura told her niece Laura Massaro that by then she already knew that her son’s spirit had left the earth.

  “Dick flew over the house,” his mother told Massaro. “It was like a dream, but not a dream. I was awake. I saw him. Dick waved the American flag and said, ‘Good-bye, Mom.’”

  General Tachibana’s temper grew hotter as the simmering summer of 1944 dragged on. Japanese military doctrine focused on taking the offensive, but on Chichi Jima there were no glorious battles to fight and no sex slaves to rape. As he awaited his own gyokusai death, all the general could do was order the digging of more caves.

  Nobuaki Iwatake, the Hawaiian Nisei dragooned into the Japanese army, was one of the soldiers ordered to dig in the hard rock day after day. Iwatake-san later told me of his labors:

  Usually the engineers would use dynamite to open a hole at the entrance. After that we used the crude hammer-and-chisel method to dig caves. It was difficult to dig those caves due to the rocky nature of the landscape. Because of the hard labor and scarce food rations, many of us got sick.

  Actually, there was a large stockpile of rice, dried vegetables, dried tofu, and canned goods on the island. But the Chichi commanders cut rations because they expected a long war and the island was completely isolated.

  While digging caves, our food ration consisted of a small portion of rice gruel. We all talked about the delicious food we used to eat before life on Chichi. I even dreamed about the good food I used to eat in Hawaii, especially the whole barbecued pig we’d eat at picnics.

  While we were digging caves, we were constantly under attack from carrier planes and B-24 Liberators from Saipan. Once while we were taking a rest outside our cave, we heard the sound of planes approaching the island. Everyone ran for cover into the cave. I was the last one to take cover, and just as I entered the cave, there was a terrific explosion. When we went out to see what happened, there was a large crater only twenty feet from where I was standing. A B-24 had dropped a five-hundred-pound bomb. The others said to me, “You were a lucky guy.”

  I noticed that during bombing and strafing attacks, the first ones to take cover were married men. I realized later that they had their wives and children waiting for them at home.

  Iwatake and his fellow
soldiers labored in the caves seven days a week. There were no weekend breaks. So on Saturday, September 2, 1944, as the dawn once again anointed No Mans Land the spot where Japan’s sun is first seen, Iwatake arose to another day of drudgery.

  That same dawn shone on the USS San Jacinto, an American aircraft carrier steaming only fifty miles west of Iwatake’s cave. Flyboy George Bush was just leaving the ready-room briefing on the day’s strike. His buddy Ted White saw him and asked, “What are you hitting today, George?”

  “The radio station on Chichi Jima,” Bush answered.

  George, who had celebrated his twentieth birthday just two months earlier, had bombed Chichi the day before, but the damage had been slight. His instructions this day had been brief: “The radio station is your primary target.”

  Ted and George had first met on board the San Jacinto, but they had a special connection through their fathers. Ted’s father had been a Yale classmate of George’s father, Prescott, and twenty-six-year-old Ted was himself a graduate of Yale, the university George planned to attend. Family ties sure to strengthen after they both returned home to civilian life bound their friendship.

  George had planned to fly that day with his regular crew, gunner Leo Nadeau and radioman John Delaney, but Ted asked if he could replace Leo. Ted was the ordnance officer for the squadron and he wanted to go on a strike as a turret gunner.

  “We’re moving out later today, and this may be the last time I can go with you,” Ted said. “How about it?”

  “It could be a rough trip,” George warned.

  By now, George knew all about rough trips. He had been flying in the Pacific for almost five months. He had flown into antiaircraft fire over Guam, Saipan, Wake Island, and Marcus Island. George had sunk ships and had a few close calls, including a harrowing sea ditching. Eventually, he would fly 58 strikes, make 126 carrier landings, and log 1,228 hours. At twenty years of age, George was the youngest pilot in the squadron. Like so many Flyboys, he was a kid doing a man’s job.

  And a dangerous job too. After George’s very first combat run, a strike over Wake Island on May 23, he had experienced the spooky, empty pang of loss unique to the Flyboys’ existence. George had flown off that day to bomb Wake while his roommate, pilot Jim Wykes, flew antisubmarine patrol. Jim and his crewmen, Bob Whalen and Chuck Haggard, never returned. There was no distress signal, no debris found in the water, just a heartsick void when, after waiting and hoping, the Flyboys aboard the San Jacinto realized their buddies were gone for good. Young George had displayed a stiff upper lip to his comrades, but when he returned to the room he and Jim had shared the night before, he boosted himself into his top bunk, curled up, and cried.

  George knew that Chichi Jima presented a dangerous challenge—he had seen the flak coming at him the day before—but Ted White persisted. George said it was OK with him if the flight leader approved, which he did. Ted would fly in the turret that day in place of Leo Nadeau.

  At 7:15 A.M., after a breakfast of powdered eggs, bacon, sausage, dehydrated fried potatoes, and toast, George lifted his torpedo plane off the carrier with Ted White and John Delaney in back. Each boy wore a Mae West over his flight suit. George’s plane carried four 500-pound bombs.

  As the Flyboys winged toward Chichi Jima, the enemy was monitoring their progress, Emperor Hirohito’s antiaircraft gunners scanning the telltale pips on their radar screens.

  At 8:15 A.M., George and his squadron initiated their glide-bombing run. Mount Yoake and Mount Asahi and their radio stations were easy targets to spot. The twin peaks rose abruptly from the Pacific to a height of about one thousand feet and were distinguished by their forests of antenna towers, which served as the Japanese military’s radio transmitters and receivers. Surrounding these radio towers were nests of antiaircraft guns and radar facilities, now homed in on George and his group.

  The lead plane went down through black clouds of antiaircraft fire, followed by the second. The two dropped eight bombs—two tons of explosives—on the radio complex. Now, however, the Japanese gunners had the Flyboys’ range in their sights. George was the next to dive. He could see that he had to fly into the middle of intense antiaircraft fire.

  Fifty-seven years later, I asked George Bush what it was like to dive straight toward antiaircraft gunners trying to blow him out of the sky.

  “You see the explosions all around you,” he said, “these dark, threatening puffs of black smoke. You’re tense in your body, but you can’t do anything about it. You cannot take evasive action, so you get used to it. You just think to yourself, ‘This is my duty and I have got to do it.’”

  Bush paused for a moment and then added, “And of course, you always thought someone else was going to get hit.”

  But on September 2, that “someone else” was George Bush. At release altitude, a Japanese shell tore into his plane.

  “There was a fierce jolt and it lifted the plane forward,” he recalled. “We were probably falling at a speed of a hundred and ninety miles per hour. Smoke was coming up from the engine; I couldn’t see the controls. I saw flames running along the wings to the fuel tanks. I thought, ‘This is really bad.’ But I was thinking of what I was supposed to do. And what I was supposed to do was drop those bombs and haul ass out of there.”

  The twenty-year-old, not yet old enough to vote or drink in a bar, was now at the controls of a burning, falling plane with two buddies in the back. A potential explosion loomed. Flight leader Don Melvin, hovering nearby in a torpedo plane, later said, “You could have seen that smoke for a hundred miles.”

  Amazingly, George stayed on course long enough to drop his bombs on target, as instructed. Later he would be awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his bravery. His flight leader wrote, “Bush continued his dive, releasing his bombs on the radio station to score damaging hits. He then turned sharply to the east to clear the island of Chichi Jima, smoke and flames enveloping his engine and spreading aft as he did so, and his plane losing altitude.”

  Once the bombs were away, it was time to escape. “Hit the silk! Hit the silk!” George shouted into the intercom, telling Ted White and John Delaney to bail out. “Then,” he told me, “I turned the plane starboard to take the slipstream pressure off the door near Delaney’s station.” Bush was riding a volatile fireball, but he still thought to maneuver the plane in such a way to give his crewmen a better chance of survival, though it would hinder his own ability to get out. By dipping the right wing slightly and turning the tail rudder to the left, George caused the plane to “skid” sideways through the air, thus relieving air pressure on the crew door and providing them a better opportunity to escape. It was a maneuver that used up precious time and delayed his own exit.

  Finally, it was time for George to save himself. “I unfastened my seat belt and dove out and down to avoid the tail,” he told me. “But I pulled the cord too quickly, and the tail came up and hit me in the head.”

  Now George had a big bleeding gash above one eye, and there was more. “Then the parachute hooked on the tail and tore a few panels out,” he said. “As a result, I was falling faster than normal.”

  “Bush’s plane was smoking like a two-alarm fire,” said radioman Richard Gorman, “then I saw a chute blossom out.” Gorman saw Bush “hit the drink” and at the same instant, he saw a “a huge ball of fire.” Bush’s bomber had exploded.

  George had the presence of mind to unsnap his parachute chest strap just as he slammed into the water. He put his hands up, and the parachute blew away from him toward Chichi Jima. He splashed down about four miles northeast of the island and swam to a collapsible yellow one-man life raft dropped from another plane. He inflated it and climbed in. He had no paddles, and the wind was blowing him toward Chichi Jima.

  “I could see the island,” Bush told me. “I started paddling with my hands, leaning over the front of the raft, paddling as hard as I could. A Portuguese man-of-war had stung my arm and it hurt. I had swallowed a few pints of water and I was vomiting. My head wa
s bleeding. I was wondering about my crewmen. I was crying. I was twenty years old and I was traumatized. I had just survived a burning plane crash. I was all alone and I was wondering if I’d make it.”

  George scanned the horizon looking for his crewmen. He saw nothing. Witnesses later said that only two chutes came out of the plane. One was George’s, but it was unclear who was in the other. Neither Ted White nor John Delaney survived.

  George was in even more trouble than he could imagine. Not only was the current pushing him toward Chichi Jima, but some small boats had been launched from the island to capture him.

  “I saw those small boats heading his way and thought, ‘Oh, he’s a goner,’” said gunner Charles Bynum. Two American planes dove and strafed the boats. Battle reports later noted that “San Jacinto ordnance records indicate 1,460 rounds of machine gun bullets were fired at the would-be Bush captors.”

  For the moment, the boats retreated, but Bush’s fellow pilots could only help for so long. They were running low on fuel and had to return to their carriers. The flight leader radioed George’s location to the rescue submarine USS Finback, which was standing by for just such an emergency.

  For what seemed like an eternity, George paddled and hoped and paddled some more. “I had seen the famous photo of the Australian pilot being beheaded,” Bush told me, “and I knew how Americans were treated at Bataan. Yes, I had a few things on my mind.”

  Nobuaki Iwatake had been digging in a nearby cave when the strike force appeared overhead. “Someone yelled, ‘Plane down!’” Iwatake-san recalled. Along with the others, he ran to follow the action. From the vantage point of a high cliff, the soldiers saw the submarine long before Bush did.