Flyboys

by James Bradley

  The terror of Iwo Jima was that one side was not fighting for victory. The Japanese knew in advance that they were going to lose. They were not even fighting for survival. General Kuribayashi composed orders he called “Sacred Battle Vows” and ordered them posted in every blockhouse, cavern, and cave. He didn’t write, “Kill ten Americans for victory,” or “Kill ten Americans and we have a chance.” He wrote, “Kill ten Americans before you die.”

  Fighting on Iwo Jima was like being confronted in your garage at night by an attacker who will not stop if you stab him, who will keep on coming if you shoot him, who will grab you by the throat with his left hand if you cut his right hand off, an attacker you can mangle but who will still crawl malevolently toward you with his last ounce of life. Kei Kanai, a POW captured unconscious on Iwo Jima, told me of the advice his schoolteacher had given him about going into battle: “My teacher told me that even if I had no arms or legs on my body and had only my mouth left, I was to spit at the enemy.”

  Knowing they would die, the Japanese went underground and became “cave kamikaze” to cause maximum casualties. They dug sixteen miles of tunnels on a five-mile-long island. These tunnels with their shellacked walls were large enough for troops to run through standing up and they boasted electric lights to illuminate the way. Japanese engineers had constructed a multilayered military city far below the island’s surface. General Kuribayashi’s command post was seventy-five feet under ground. The island’s hospital was forty-six feet under ground, its beds carved into the walls. The whole of Mount Suribachi had been hollowed out into a fantastical seven-story subterranean world, fortified with concrete revetments and finished off with plastered walls, a sewer system, and conduits for fresh air, electricity, water, and steam. Japanese soldiers armed with guns of every conceivable size and design filled the rooms and tunnels.

  Before the Marines ascended Mount Suribachi on February 23, navy and Marine carrier planes zoomed in to soften it up. “They dropped napalm for an hour and a half,” Marine Don Howell told me years later. “Suribachi was a wall of flame from top to bottom.”

  Napalm was invented by Harvard president James Conant, and scientists at MIT, DuPont, and Standard Oil. They found that mixing naphthenic and palmitic acids (hence na-palm) with gasoline produced a sticky Vaseline-like yellow paste that stuck to materials and burned slowly. It was a perfect incendiary. This jellied gasoline would stick to anything—roofs, walls, humans—and it could not be put out. Water only splattered it. If a glob landed on the back of your hand, it would burn until it consumed itself. If you patted the burning napalm in an attempt to extinguish it, the result would be scorched fingers and a burned hand.

  “The pilots were dropping napalm jelly around the side of the top cone of the mountain,” said Howell. “That napalm would run down the side of the mountain. The whole thing was aflame. The planes toasted Suribachi before we walked up. We wondered how anyone could live through that.”

  Don Howell, climbing just ahead of my dad, peered into some of the caves. He saw Japanese soldiers who were alive but hardly moving. “They sat there looking stunned, dazed, like they were all drunked up,” he said. “Their eyes were open, but they were lethargic, not even reaching for their rifles. They were dressed well in uniforms, but they were laid back, like they were in a stupor.”

  Contrary to later garbled press reports and John Wayne’s celluloid heroism in Sands of Iwo Jima, not one Japanese bullet was fired at the forty boys who first ascended Mount Suribachi. Not one Japanese leaped out with a sword to attack the Marines. No Japanese grenades were tossed.

  “We were tense,” said Robert Leader, “thinking the enemy would suddenly jump out, or one of us would step on a mine. But it was completely quiet. Not a shot was fired. It took us about forty minutes to get to the top.”

  No one knows exactly why the tenacious Suribachi defenders did not lash out one last time. None of the stunned Japanese soldiers in the caves lived to later tell their tale. (“You didn’t give them a chance,” Howell told me. “You just shot them or threw in a hand grenade.”) But the most probable reason is that the Flyboy rain of napalm fire had sucked the oxygen out of the mountain, suffocating the Japanese inside to death, or at least into the stuporous state Don Howell described.

  The photo of the flag raising on Iwo Jima would win a permanent place in the world’s heart and go on to become the single most reproduced image in the history of photography. But until now, almost no one knew that at about the same time Indian Ira Hayes was helping to raise that flag on Iwo Jima, another Indian Marine was in trouble 150 miles away.

  Earlier in the week, Marine Lieutenant Warren Earl Vaughn had been waiting on a destroyer as part of a replacement pool of pilots. When the USS Bennington—Jimmy Dye’s and Grady York’s carrier—asked for pilots to replace their losses, Warren Earl was sent over. He flew air patrols over the carriers on February 20, 21, and 22. The February 23 strike against Chichi Jima was his first combat flight.

  Archie Clapp flew behind Warren Earl that day. “It was a terrible target for us,” Archie told me. “Because of the intense antiaircraft fire, it was like coming down the rails at a carnival with you as the sitting duck. Vaughn’s plane got hit. His wing was clipped off. When I flew over the target, I could see him going down in a chute. When he hit the water, he swam toward shore.”

  Warren Earl’s actions after being hit were normal for a gaizin. He bailed out of his Corsair, opened his parachute, and then swam ashore to avoid dying quickly of hypothermia in the chilly North Pacific waters. But to his soon-to-be captors watching him swim into their grasp, Warren Earl had disgraced himself by saving his own life.

  And Warren Earl’s captors were not hypocrites. They didn’t think he should die only because he was an American. They weren’t the type to kill a POW and then beg for their own lives. Honorable warriors should never become prisoners, they believed.

  Back on Iwo Jima, friends of the men who captured Warren Earl were demonstrating this code of honor with their lives.

  After the first flag was raised on Iwo Jima, Don Howell, who would later be awarded a Navy Cross for heroism, went inside Mount Suribachi’s rim to check for Japanese caves:

  We were scouting quietly with our rifles ready. Suddenly, a Japanese emerged from a cave. He had a rifle in his hands, but it wasn’t pointed at us. He was just carrying it by his side with no intention of shooting us. He came out screaming like a wild man, squawking. He must have known we’d shoot if he screamed like that. If he had come out quietly without a weapon, with his hands up, we would have taken him prisoner. We dropped him.

  Others came out. They came out one at a time, disorganized. We did not encounter any organized resistance. They were like wild men running around with rifles or swords. They were announcing their presence. They knew it was the end, their suicide. They wanted to go to their happy hunting grounds by dying for their country.

  That’s the way they were. Nobody could understand them.

  Just as back on Chichi Jima, nobody could understand Warren Earl’s desire to live. A soldier’s duty was to die and never surrender. War, the Japanese knew, was about victory or death.

  It was a lesson the Cherokee in No Mans Land would soon be taught.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Kichiku

  It is better not to have persons on Chichi Jima, even if they do good, if they disobey orders. My policy is to execute all persons who do not obey orders.

  — Captain Shizuo Yoshii, Guam War Crimes Trial, 1946

  As Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal’s camera shutter immortalized six boys raising Old Glory on February 23, 1945, Warren Earl Vaughn parachuted into the water 150 miles north of Mount Suribachi. He landed near a cliff, where Private Yukutaro Ishiwata of the 307th Battalion tossed him a rope and pulled him out of the water. The soldiers gave him a cigarette and allowed him to warm up by their fire.

  Now there were two pilots—Warren Earl Vaughn and Floyd Hall—and three enlisted men—Jimmy Dye
, Marve Mershon, and Grady York—in custody on Chichi Jima. Glenn Frazier remained hidden on Ani Jima.

  The soldier who escorted Warren Earl to General Tachibana’s headquarters described his prisoner as “an officer, over six feet tall, very handsome, medium dark complexion with long brown hair.” Another soldier also described the prisoner: “His skin, as an American, was very dark, and he had a very furious look on his face. He was tall and his body was strongly built.”

  When Warren Earl arrived at Tachibana’s headquarters, the general had already decided some fates. Floyd Hall, Jimmy Dye, Marve Mershon, and Grady York had spent the last five days at Major Horie’s headquarters being interrogated. Now things were about to change.

  “General Tachibana said that all flyers would be executed as soon as Major Horie was through with them,” Major Matoba recalled. The enlisted men—Jimmy, Grady, and Marve—would go first.

  Jimmy and Grady were sent to Tachibana’s headquarters, where they would spend three days tied to trees with Warren Earl. Marve was dispatched to Major Matoba’s 308th Battalion headquarters. “The feeling of hatred was running very high in the 308th Battalion and at General Tachibana’s headquarters,” admitted Major Horie.

  After the fierce bombing raids of February 18, Major Matoba had promised Lieutenant Suyeyoshi that he could execute a prisoner. Now the major kept his word. Marve, clad only in his white long johns, was moved from Matoba’s headquarters to Lieutenant Suyeyoshi’s. There he awaited his fate tied to a tree.

  February 23 was the fifth day of the battle for Iwo Jima. The United States had no intention of invading Chichi Jima—taking out the radio station and interrupting the shipping lines was all the U.S. planned to do. But the Japanese didn’t know that. Given Chichi Jima’s location as the next island on the way to the mainland, it was natural to assume the Americans would arrive there any moment now. “We thought we were the next to die,” said Lieutenant Minoru Hayashi. Thus, the Japanese soldiers on Chichi were like prisoners in a holding cell, hearing friends being tortured in the next room, awaiting their own turn. A Lieutenant Wantanabe later recalled the mood of the men:

  The despair of the soldiers was very great. Most of the personnel thought that after the fall of Iwo Jima, the enemy would come to Chichi Jima.

  The air raids were very frequent and especially during February it was most fierce. During the day we were attacked by rockets and strafing, and they did a very thorough job. At night they dropped time bombs, and during the daytime as the planes came strafing, we could not be too careful. At night when an air raid sounded, we had to take shelter in the air raid shelter so we could only sleep about two hours.

  Concerning provisions, the supply route to Japan was cut. All the units were cut down on their rations and because of this they were using all sorts of edible grass, snails, et cetera, to supplement their diet.

  Because of these reasons the troops were suffering from something like a nervous breakdown.

  At one point, Lieutenant Suyeyoshi gathered his soldiers around the prisoner. He gave Marve a swig of whiskey and a cigarette. Then he turned to the assembled soldiers and said, “We are very tired from fighting air raids every day, building positions and working hard. The prisoner is also tired and war is hard on both sides. We have fought very courageously up to now on Chichi Jima. This prisoner has come through a sheet of bullets. Even as an enemy he is courageous. He has shed no tears.”

  Even though he had requested a prisoner to execute, for some reason Lieutenant Suyeyoshi did not take this opportunity to make Marve’s beheading a public spectacle. The lieutenant simply ordered Lieutenant Hironobu Morishita to “dispose” of the prisoner. Morishita decided that the island’s cemetery was the best place to do the deed and late in the afternoon he assembled a crew.

  “There was an order for a working party to fall out,” a soldier named Iwakawa later testified. “So I took a shovel and went to the cemetery. I was told to dig a hole.”

  There is no record of what Marve was told about his forthcoming fate, but he must have assumed he was about to die. He walked along the road with his hands tied, accompanied by a party of soldiers carrying shovels. A samurai sword dangled from Lieutenant Morishita’s side.

  As Marve was walking to the cemetery, his gunner, Glenn Frazier, arrived at Major Matoba’s 308th Battalion headquarters with a bag of biscuits.

  Earlier that day, Glenn had awoken on Ani Jima, his fifth morning on the tiny uninhabited island. He had his canteen with him and still had a little water left, but he had had no food since the February 18 breakfast aboard the USS Bennington. He decided he couldn’t go on.

  Glenn normally weighed 110 pounds, but by now the nineteen-year-old boy must have been well under 100 as a result of the lack of food and dehydration. He saw two fishermen, Maikawa Fukuichiro and Tsutomu Yamada, out in the strait between Chichi Jima and Ani Jima. Fukuichiro was one of the men who had pulled Glenn’s buddies Floyd Hall and Marve Mershon out of the water when Glenn swam the other way.

  When American planes had appeared overhead that morning, the two fishermen paddled to nearby Ani Jima, beached their craft, and hid behind some rocks. When the air raid was finished, they shoved off again. Then they heard someone calling from the beach.

  The two men turned and saw Glenn walk out from behind some bushes with his hands up. He pointed to his mouth in a gesture the fishermen understood meant he was hungry.

  “I yelled, ‘Come here,’” recalled Fukuichiro. “The flyer walked out on the pier. We thought that the flyer wouldn’t shoot us, so we paddled back and Yamada put the flyer in the canoe.” Fukuichiro was “amazed at how small he was. The flyer was a very small man, so that Yamada did not have much trouble with him.”

  Glenn was wearing a reddish-brown leather jacket with a fur collar, blue dungarees, brown boots, and a blue shirt. He wore a silver ring and had his survival knife on his belt and carried his canteen. Fukuichiro described Glenn as having “fiery red” hair.

  In the boat, Glenn, using hand signals, asked for food. The fishermen had none but offered him some raw squid, which Glenn refused. When they beached on Chichi, the fishermen took Glenn to their nearby fishing shack, where they gave him some biscuits and water. Glenn slipped off his ring and gave it to Fukuichiro-san in gratitude for the biscuits he was hungrily devouring. Fukuichiro remembered, “The flyer was crying, he was so thankful.

  “As soon as I gave the flyer biscuits,” Fukuichiro said, “he was eating them so fast that I could not find out anything. His mouth was full all the time.”

  Orders soon arrived to deliver Glenn to the 308th Battalion headquarters. A truck came to get him.

  At the 308th headquarters, Captain Yoshikaru Kanmuri took charge. Glenn was in such an obviously weakened state that his captors didn’t even bother to tie him up. Instead, they just left him on a mat in front of the guardhouse.

  Major Matoba was hosting a conference of his commanders in the headquarters building that day. The “conference” consisted of Spirit Warrior officers feasting and drinking themselves silly while the enlisted men hacked out caves on meager rations.

  Matoba and his fellow revelers had already been imbibing for three hours when, at 4 P.M., they were told that an American prisoner was outside. Prisoners were supposed to proceed to General Tachibana’s headquarters, but this would have interrupted the party, so Matoba ordered Glenn held until the next morning.

  One of the officers swigging sake with Major Matoba was Captain Noburu Nakajima, a notoriously violent drunk. Nakajima was well-known for always carrying a club to beat his soldiers. The weapon was about three feet long and one inch thick, made from the core of a tree, so it was dense and heavy, like a billy club. Many Japanese soldiers had felt its crunching impact.

  As the afternoon wore on and the sake flowed, Captain Nakajima became so obviously inebriated that even Major Matoba scolded him for overdrinking. Nakajima got up from his table in a huff, grabbed his club, and stormed out of the party around 6 P.M.

 
Captain Kesakichi Sato was interrogating Glenn in a nearby building. Captain Nakajima approached.

  “He was very drunk,” recalled Corpsman Kanemori, who was one of approximately ten soldiers on the scene. “When Nakajima gets drunk he is like a madman. It is impossible to stop him. Therefore, when he approached us, we drew back.”

  Captain Nakajima barked questions at Glenn. The boy not only didn’t understand a word of Japanese, he must have been terrified and probably confused. His withered body was just now digesting its first food in days and he had been knocked to the ground by Captain Sato’s blows several times.

  “I stuck out my arms,” Nakajima later testified, “and tried to ask how many big and small airplanes were around Iwo Jima, and how many planes crashed and were shot down.” The drunken captain, who wasn’t using an interpreter, said he expected Glenn to answer his questions “by signs.”

  When the disoriented nineteen-year-old Kansan wasn’t quick enough with answers for his growling, inebriated interrogator, Nakajima lashed out. “Captain Nakajima started to beat the prisoner with his club,” Kanemori remembered. Glenn was seated in a chair when Nakajima first struck him. The heavy blows drew blood. Glenn absorbed three whacks and then fell backward onto the floor. He groaned as the thick club cracked his skull. Ten blows left Glenn’s face and head a bloody pulp and Nakajima panting.

  Later, the captain informed Major Matoba that he had beaten the prisoner to death. “Major Matoba told me that by rights he should kill me for killing the flyer,” Nakajima said. But it wasn’t the loss of a life that concerned the major. “Major Matoba said he should kill me because I killed the flyer before they could extract any information from him, and not just because I killed the flyer.”