After the emperor surrendered, General Tachibana had ordered the Flyboys’ bodies uncovered, cremated, and their ashes thrown into the sea. Soldiers opened the graves and poured oil on the bodies to burn them. Marine lieutenant Robert Frazer later testified that American investigators found very little. In one grave they discovered a mechanical pencil with the words “Glenn J. Frazier” on it, a piece of rope, and three bones. In a nearby grave they found a jumble of burned bones. At Omura Cemetery the U.S. team found a box of ashes and a few charred bones. These combined remains were assumed to be those of Glenn Frazier, Marve Mershon, and Floyd Hall, who had flown together.
In Jimmy Dye’s grave near the Mount Yoake radio station, the investigators found a few bones and “considerable amounts” of brown hair.
In the area where Dick Woellhof and the B-24 pilot were killed, one grave yielded a single vertebra. Pieces of rope and segments of wooden stakes were found in the other. In 1946, each of the families was told that “remains” of their boys had been reinterred at the American cemetery on Iwo Jima. Pilot Floyd Hall, radioman Marve Mershon, and gunner Glenn Frazier flew together, crashed together, and were buried together. The families were told that “individual identification [was] impossible.”
In 1947, the U.S. government removed the remains of all Americans from Iwo Jima. Floyd, Marve, and Glenn were formally buried in the Santa Fe National Cemetery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on Friday, July 2, 1948. The headstone of their common grave reads:
Floyd Ewing Hall
Ensign
Glenn Frazier Jr
AOM2C
Marve William Mershon
ACM3C
US Naval Reserve
February 19 1946
The most popular tourist attraction in Hawaii is not the USS Arizona memorial or a volcano, but “Punchbowl” cemetery. Its official name is the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific. One glance at the graceful sloping crater in which the cemetery lies and one understands its nickname.
More than thirty-five thousand veterans of America’s wars are buried there. The centerpiece of the beautiful cemetery is a striking “Court of Honor” dominated by a thirty-foot statue of Columbia, in whose name American pioneers first moved west. (Columbia was featured in the opening montage of the TV program Hawaii Five-0.)
The families of Dick Woellhof and Warren Earl Vaughn were told that when the graves of their boys were opened on Iwo Jima, there were no “remains” to be found. The Punchbowl’s “Courts of the Missing”—ten granite monuments on either side of the ascending stairway leading up to Columbia—honor the vanished. An inscription reads:
In These Gardens Are Recorded
The Names of Americans
Who Gave Their Lives
In the Service of Their Country
And Whose Earthly Resting Place
Is Known Only to God
Among the 28,788 names chiseled into the Courts of the Missing are these two:
Vaughn Warren Earl
Second Lieutenant USMC Texas
Woellhof Lloyd R
AVN Radioman 2C USNR Kansas
Jimmy Dye always wanted to stand out from the crowd, so perhaps it is fitting that he is the only Chichi Jima Flyboy with a grave all his own. Jimmy’s “remains” are buried at Punchbowl cemetery, his tombstone at “Plot N 1291,” flush with the grass, reading:
James Wesley Dye Jr.
New Jersey
ARM3 US Navy
World War II
Nov 27 1925 Feb 25 1945
Two of the Flyboys are also memorialized elsewhere. Dick Woellhof’s name is chiseled on a stone at Greenwood Cemetery in his hometown of Clay Center, Kansas. And today when students enter the lobby of Smith-Cotton High School in Sedalia, Missouri, they see a photo collage of the sixty students from that little school who died in World War II. One of the photos is of handsome Floyd Hall, the Flyboy who liked blondes and knew he would never come back.
Two Flyboys have no memorial. No one knows the identity of the B-24 airman killed with Dick Woellhof. And when Grady York’s grave was opened on Iwo Jima there was nothing there. In an oversight, Grady’s name never made it to the Courts of the Missing. The religious skillyboo boy who hoped someone would “Pray for me” has nowhere for anyone to pray for him.
For one year after the initial MIA telegrams the postman brought reminders of the Flyboys back home but no new information. Letters from Flyboy buddies, chaplains, and commanding officers recounted fond memories of brave boys but offered no real hope to anxious families. The mothers’ hearts must have beat faster whenever official letters arrived from the navy, but the envelopes only contained routine paperwork. Each mother had to sign for a box containing the possessions her boy had left behind in his ship’s locker before his last flight. Marve Mershon’s earthly possessions were listed as “bible, log book, key ring, penknife, address book, bedroom slippers, sheath knife, gym pants, billfold containing ID, photos and $55.28.” When Dick Woellhof’s belongings arrived, his mother didn’t open them right away. “I want to do that when I’m alone,” Laura Woellhof told her sister.
Then, in February of 1946—one year after the boys’ deaths—the families received telegrams and letters that repeated Major Horie’s big lie. Evi’s telegram told her that Warren Earl had been:
KILLED ON 15 MARCH 1945 IN AN AERIAL BOMBARDMENT AT OMURA CHICHI JIMA. HE IS CARRIED ON THE RECORDS OF THE MARINE CORPS AS KILLED IN ACTION. NO INFORMATION AVAILABLE REGARDING DISPOSITION OF HIS REMAINS. PLEASE ACCEPT MY HEARTFELT SYMPATHY.
Some accepted this news, others were in denial. Warren Earl’s high school buddy Harold Waters visited Evi soon after she learned of her only child’s death. “She had his room exactly like he left it,” Waters told me. “She didn’t touch a thing. Evi wasn’t accepting his death. She said she knew he was going to come back.”
Floyd Hall’s memorial service was at the Broadway Presbyterian Church in Sedalia, Missouri. “We had Floyd’s photo on the altar with a few flowers,” his sister, Margie, told me. “It was hard to just look at a picture.” Dick Woellhof’s aunt Ruah Sterrett said, “We had a memorial service for Dick at the church. It was hard with no body.”
“In June of 1946, we read an article in Life magazine about Chichi Jima and the torture and things done there,” Jimmy’s brother Ronnie Dye told me. The Life article mentioned that General Tachibana and Major Matoba were accused of executing “American fliers shot down in the Bonins and, even more revolting, of practicing cannibalism on them.” There was “evidence of American fliers being clubbed, bayoneted and beheaded, of their bodies being mutilated, of their livers being served in sukiyaki, and strips of their flesh used to flavor soup.”
“My mom read that Life article and got hysterical,” Ronnie Dye said. “She cried for years and years. It was never out of her mind. My mother never recovered. She was in a doctor’s care for the rest of her life.” Because the articles offered no American names and only sketchy rumored details, relatives were left in an anguished limbo. Mr. Dye wrote the navy requesting they stop sending letters to the house because “my wife suffers a nervous condition.” Subsequently, Jimmy’s navy record states that letters should be “addressed to the local Veterans Assistance Office which will in turn contact Mr. Dye personally so that the mother of James will not have to suffer the pains she has already suffered in connection with her son’s death.”
Finally, one and a half years after their deaths, their families recieved letters in the fall of 1946 with the navy’s final censored version of the boys’ demises. The letters recounted the boys’ shoot-downs and gave bare details, like Jimmy Dye was “sent on to Yoake wireless station for the purpose of helping decode messages,” Dick Woellhof “remained about a month” on Chichi Jima, and Marve Mershon was “cremated and buried in Omura Cemetery; 20 Jan 46, remains exhumed and delivered to Iwo where reburied 14 Nov 46.” No mention was made of beheading or the desecration of their corpses.
Many years later, I obtained the Chichi Jima Flyb
oys’ military service records. These records are still withheld today from the families. I obtained them through sources I choose not to reveal. Their service records show clearly that the navy knew who was bayoneted, beheaded, and/or cannibalized. But these details were never passed on, despite desperate pleas from mothers wishing to know what happened to their babies.
Some families imploded, the grief too overwhelming to address. “Floyd’s memory was about silence,” his brother James later told me. “There was no counseling then, and we all dealt with it internally, by ourselves. In 1955, my parents went to see his grave. They didn’t say much about it.”
Other families exploded. Marve’s death blew the Mershon family apart. With no body, little information, and no counseling, there was no outlet for their grief. Already hard drinkers, Marve’s parents—Hoyt Sr. and Clarinda—and his brother, Hoyt Jr., upped their intake to drown their sorrow. Hoyt Jr. suffered a special survivor’s guilt. He was the one who had talked Marve into enlisting. And after a few drinks one night, Clarinda compounded her son’s suffering when she told Hoyt Jr., “I wish it had been you that died.”
Clarinda and Hoyt Sr. abandoned their city life and moved to Cathedral Canyon, California, where they lived in a garage on the edge of the desert. They cooked on a hot coil, slept on army cots, and poured alcohol over their grief. A relative told me, “Clarinda would wander in the desert for weeks at a time and no one knew where she was.”
Like many fathers, Hoyt Sr. (“a big jolly man”) kept his grief inside, unexpressed. He died in 1951, at the age of fifty-nine, of a heart attack. Clarinda passed away in 1955, also at the age of fifty-nine. On her death certificate, the “Reason for death” is listed as “Cirrhosis of liver.” On the line that requests “How long condition?” there is one word: “Years.”
Hoyt Mershon Jr. never shook his guilt over persuading Marve to enlist in the navy. He died in 1958 at the age of thirty-eight. His death certificate says he had “Cirrhosis of the liver for three years plus” and “chronic alcoholism for ten years plus.”
Hoyt Jr. had buried his mom and dad in the Santa Fe National Cemetery near Marve. Expressing his guilt to the end, Hoyt Jr. had himself buried apart from the rest of the family, in Inglewood Memorial Park in Inglewood, California.
Many years later, I spoke with Hoyt Jr.’s three daughters, Susan, Linda, and Carol. They are now in their fifties and though they were vaguely aware of their father’s feelings regarding his brother’s fate, they knew nothing about how Marve perished. They always thought he had “died when his plane crashed.”
After I told Susan Mershon that Hoyt Jr. knew that his brother had not died in a crash and that Marve had made it onto Chichi Jima alive, she was quiet for a while. Then Susan said, “So that’s why when I was a little girl my father was always alone in that room at night. He would sit there in the dark just smoking, drinking, and crying.”
Unlike some other families, who were silent about their loss, the Yorks often discussed Grady. “My mom would cry and talk about what a good boy he was,” Grady’s sister Pearl Diffenderfer told me. “I remember her saying many times that he was so different. He was a good Christian boy. He didn’t go out drinking; he believed in God and doing something for his country.”
Grady’s mother devoted a small shrine to her lost son. As Pearl later told me, “Mother kept Grady’s things in a cedar chest. She placed the chest in the foyer close to her bedroom. She had a scarf over it and put Bibles on top. She would get on her knees and go through his things silently. Reading the letters and looking at the pictures. I must have seen her kneeling there a hundred times or more.”
And Laura Woellhof kept Dick’s memory alive. “Till her dying day, she had his navy picture displayed,” Ruah Sterrett told me. “It was on a table in the living room, a big picture of Dick in his navy uniform.”
Warren Earl’s mother, Evi, struggled for the rest of her life. In a letter to one of Warren Earl’s Flyboy buddies, she wrote, “I will never get over losing my son.” She tried to console herself with religious thoughts: “I will live a clean Christian life, and when my work in this wicked world is finished, I know I will meet my darling son, for I have the assurance that he was a Christian. He has gone to his permanent home, and I must try to think, it will just be a short separation, and then I will see him again.”
But, as her nephew Ralph Sides told me, “After Warren Earl was killed, Evi wasn’t right anymore.” Ethelyn Goodner said, “Her personality changed. She was very sad and had nothing to say. She took shock treatments for a while.” Billye Winder remembered, “Through the years Evi attempted suicide. Her second husband divorced her.” Ralph Sides said, “She had a few nervous breakdowns. She married her third husband on a whim. She didn’t even know the fellow. It only lasted a month.”
Evi spent most of her life in nursing homes, dying in one at the age of eighty-seven in 1991. Columbus Lewellen was one of her pallbearers. He often visited her in her last years. “She never gave me any details about her son being killed,” Columbus told me. “But she said she didn’t care if she lived or died after he didn’t come back. Evi had a fine mind the day she died. But she was a brokenhearted woman.”
There were broken Japanese hearts also. Haro Iketani’s young daughter was strafed and killed by an American Flyboy as she ran across a field. “My daughter died after living only sixteen years,” Iketani said. “A miserable ending. I loathe and hate that enemy from the bottom of my heart. I want to trace the single shot back to the pilot who shot my daughter and I want to shoot the person who killed my daughter.”
Kazuyo Funato was a little girl when her family ran from the napalm flames in Tokyo on March 10. In the melee, she and her father were separated from her mother, who was carrying her baby boy on her back. In the morning, Kazuyo and her father returned to the family home, now reduced to a pile of ash. They waited for her mother to return. After a while, they realized she was already there; they just hadn’t recognized her. The mother was sitting on the ground covered by an army blanket. Her clothes were charcoal, her hair burned.
Kazuyo asked about her baby brother. “What’s happened to Teruko-chan?”
Kazuyo’s mother was silent. Kazuyo looked closely at her mother when she didn’t answer. “I could see she had been holding Teruko-chan on her back,” Kazuyo said. “Where Teruko-chan’s legs had touched her body there were horrible burns. Her elbows, where she was probably holding him to keep him from falling off, were burned so that you could see the raw flesh. She could barely walk.”
Kazuyo’s mother lost two of her children—Teruko-chan and Hiroko-chan—in the Tokyo fire raid. Flames burned Teruko-chan off her back.
“I used to take her to pray at their graves,” Kazuyo said. “She’d pour water on them and say, ‘Hiroko-chan, you must have been hot. Teruko-chan, you must have been hot.’”
Nations tend to see the other side’s war atrocities as systemic and indicative of their culture and their own atrocities as justified or the acts of stressed combatants. In my travels, I sense a smoldering resentment toward WWII Japanese behavior among some Americans. Ironically, these feelings are strongest among the younger American generation that did not fight in WWII. In my experience, the Pacific vets on both sides have made their peace. And in terms of judgments, I will leave it to those who were there. As Ray Gallagher, who flew on both atomic missions against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, argues, “When you’re not at war you’re a good second guesser. You had to live those years and walk that mile.”
If anyone has a right to hate, it is Glen Berry. Berry was on the Bataan Death March (“heads chopped off, bodies all over the road”), endured two Hell Ships (“one hundred thirty degrees down in the hold, guys went crazy”), and had medical experiments performed on him at Fukuoka prison camp (“I don’t remember anything for a three-month period”). He told me, “It’s a matter of indoctrination. Their soldiers were taught that their emperor was a descendent of the sun goddess. They were taught not to have regard for hu
man life, not even their own lives.
“I have forgiven the Japanese. I have Japanese friends. I make it clear that I have respect for the Japanese now because they have changed their attitude. I believe any culture can be indoctrinated into any attitude that the leaders want to teach them.”
Masayo Enomoto, who as a young soldier helped bring terror to China, agrees. Now the Chinese welcome him to their country because he tells the truth about Japan’s past. As I sat in his suburban living room sipping tea, Enomoto-san told me:
It was the emperor system that allowed such atrocities to take place. People thought that they could do anything for the sake of the emperor. The soldiers were prepared to die for the emperor. And they thought they could do anything in China. The militarism and imperialism was because of the emperor system. Others helped, but in the end it’s the emperor who is responsible. I do have grudges against the emperor.
I want to make known what we did in China. We have to eradicate militaristic thinking from this earth.
Flyboy Oscar Long almost died in Ofuna prison camp. When he returned and his sister saw his emaciated body, she cried and had a deep contempt for all Japanese. But Oscar explained to her: “The Japanese were doing what they were commanded to do. It was no different from me doing what I was commanded to do. I killed people with the bombs I dropped. It was my job to do it, and it was their job to do what they did.”
Singaporean Elizabeth Choy was a victim of brutal Japanese torture. After the war, she argued that her torturers should not be executed: “It’s the war that is so wicked. If it hadn’t been war, if they were in their own homes, they would be just like you and me. They have got their families, they have got their father, they have got their mother and they have got their wives and they’ve got their children, and they’ve got their jobs, so they are ordinary people. Because of the war they are forced to be so cruel and brutal. So I say I forgive them.”
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