Researching this book was often a disorienting experience. Early on, I thought I knew where justice lay. But as I listened to stories in Japan and America, I wasn’t so sure.
I know former Flyboys who napalmed a horrible war to an end. And in Tokyo I spent a day with eighty-one-year-old Yoshiko Hashimoto, who jumped into the icy river to save her baby. Throughout the interview we passed a box of Kleenex back and forth. When she finished her story, I asked her how she felt about Americans.
Hashimoto-san said, “A chaplain told me that if you kill one person it’s murder, but if you kill many you’re a hero. Those people who killed many in Tokyo are heroes in the U.S., I guess. But our Japanese soldiers were killing in China. At that time Japan praised that killing as a great achievement. We all do the same bad things. War is like that.”
On a trip to Japan in the summer of 2001, I spent a day in Yokohama with seventy-six-year-old Fumio Tamamura, the San Francisco nisei who as Petty Officer Tamamura had walked Jimmy Dye to his death. A Rotary International pin sparkled from his suit lapel. “Japan is the number two Rotarian country, you know,” Tamamura-san proudly noted.
We spoke all morning and into the afternoon. Only at three P.M. did we part. I was jet-lagged and tired. At four P.M. I drew my hotel room drapes to block the sunshine. I lay down for a nap.
A ringing awakened me. The clock said I had slept just forty minutes. It was Tamamura on the phone. He asked if I would like to speak with a former Japanese Imperial Navy lieutenant. Minoru Hayashi had spent seven years in Sugamo prison for following Captain Yoshii’s orders to kill Jimmy Dye.
“I phoned Hayashi just now, after I got home,” Tamamura-san said. “I told him to speak with you. He was hesitant. Hayashi said, ‘No, I don’t speak to anyone about that time. Not even my children know.’”
Tamamura continued, “But I told him to speak with you anyway.”
From my darkened hotel room, I asked Tamamura-san, “Hayashi must be near eighty, so his kids are in their forties or fifties right? Why do you think he will speak to me when he hasn’t even told them?”
Tamamura-san responded, “I told him your father had served on Iwo Jima and that you are fair. I told him just now, ‘Bradley will write the story with or without you. Hayashi, this is the time for you to talk.’”
So the next morning I boarded a train. As I gazed at the countryside speeding by, I wondered what it would be like to meet the man who fifty-six years earlier had sliced Jimmy Dye’s neck.
Hayashi-san was mild-mannered and conservatively dressed in a blue suit, white shirt, and red tie. He reminded me of my father, in the sense that there is something torn in those who have killed unwillingly. I asked him repeatedly, “You had to obey Yoshii’s order . . . don’t you think seven years in prison was too much?” No, he answered. He thought his sentence was fair. Japan lost the war. He had expected to die. “America treated me well,” he assured me.
At the end of our time together I said, “Hayashi-san, of course you realize I am going to write facts about you that your children still don’t know.”
“My plan is to tell them before I die,” Hayashi-san said, his eyes moist. “Or maybe they will find out from you. Please write a good book.”
When I returned home from Japan, I phoned Jimmy’s Flyboy buddies to tell them more of his fate. One day I was speaking with Joe Bonn, who saw Jimmy parachute off Chichi Jima. Bonn is a straight-ahead, no-nonsense sort of guy. He had told me of the mutual hate in the Pacific and how he had strafed helpless Japanese soldiers and civilians. “That’s the way it was,” he had explained. I wondered how he would react to the news that I had met with a Japanese who had swung a sword at his friend.
I explained how Hayashi-san had unwillingly followed an order under the duress of strict command. Lieutenant Hayashi, the meek radar technician, had had no animosity in his heart when a drunken Spirit Warrior forced him to wield his untested sword. Hayashi had been just one of Japan’s many good children scarred by the Spirit Warriors’ non-Bushido mania. Drunken cannibal officers abusing their troops are not part of the samurai tradition.
After I told Bonn about Jimmy’s last moments, there was a silence on the telephone line.
“That’s a hell of a thing,” he finally said.
After a few seconds I asked, “What’s a hell of thing?”
“Well, I don’t think it was right to cut Jimmy’s head off,” he answered.
Now it was my turn to be still. I could agree with Bonn, but just days before I had had tears in my eyes as I listened to Hayashi-san. I took a chance and said, “Yes, but maybe the civilians you strafed thought that was a hell of a thing.”
Now there was an even longer silence.
I wasn’t sure if I had gone too far.
Finally the former Flyboy sighed. “Yeah, I guess it just matters what side you’re on.”
George Bush made his peace with his former enemy. He had many friendly dealings with Japanese in his long career as a businessman, U.N. ambassador, and America’s envoy to China. In 1989, President Bush endured political heat for attending the funeral of Emperor Hirohito. And at a Pearl Harbor remembrance ceremony in Hawaii on December 7, 1991, he stood before American and Japanese veterans and declared, “I hold no rancor in my heart for my former enemy.”
By 2002, the former Flyboy was seventy-eight years old. He had been mostly silent about the flames, the explosion, the blood, the ghosts. But in his dreams, did he see a small island where, young and hopeless, he feared he would die? And what about his two lost Flyboy buddies? I had heard him say, “I think about those guys all the time.” And I learned just how much when he phoned me one day and asked me to take him back—back in time to when he was just George, a twenty-year-old Flyboy in big trouble.
So on Tuesday, June 17, 2002, I stood on Iwo Jima’s tarmac watching President Bush’s jet arrive. I greeted him, “Welcome to Iwo Jima, Mr. President.”
We walked the black sands and then ascended Mount Suribachi. “Here’s where the boys raised that flag,” I said. Dwight Eisenhower is the only other American president to have walked that sacred ground.
On June 18, 2002, we awakened to an Iwo Jima sunrise. It is at Iwo Jima that the goddess Amaterasu’s rays first shine upon Japan. Her sunlight initially warms Iwo, then travels up the No Mans Land archipelago to mainland Japan. Only then does the Land of the Rising Sun pass light on to the rest of the world.
Later that morning, Japanese Flyboys whisked us by helicopter to Chichi Jima. When we touched down, my eyes searched the happy crowd for a friend from my previous visits. When I noticed him—handsome, suntanned, and fit—I motioned him forward to the edge of the landing pad.
He was Abel Savory. Nathaniel Savory, a founder of Chichi Jima, had greeted Commodore Perry in 1853. Now, 149 years later, Nathaniel’s great-great-great-grandson would do the honors. Abel Savory beamed, “Welcome to Chichi Jima, Mr. President.”
The whole island—all two thousand people—turned out to welcome President Bush. Four-foot-tall Japanese women squealed and hugged his legs as smiling men shook his hands.
Two veterans with their own Chichi Jima wartime memories accompanied us. They were former United States Navy lieutenant Bill Connell and former Imperial Japanese Army private Nobuaki Iwatake.
Bill Connell, the “last American off Chichi Jima alive,” vanquished old ghosts at the tree to which he had been tied for seven days. Warren Earl Vaughn’s old buddy Iwatake-san and I took President Bush to the cliff from where, on September 2, 1944, Private Iwatake had seen Flyboy Bush crash into the Pacific. As former Japanese devil Iwatake and former American devil Bush squinted out to sea, Iwatake-san told the president, “Do you know what the Japanese soldier next to me said when we saw the submarine that rescued you? He said, ‘Americans sure take good care of their pilots!’ Sending a sub for one pilot was something Japan would never have done.”
Out in the Pacific, off the coasts of Chichi Jima and Ani Jima, I snapped a photograph of George Bush placing tw
o wreaths on the water in memory of Gunner Ted White and radioman John Delaney. The whirr of my camera was the loudest noise.
Atop the two peaks Commodore Perry had written of, the president discovered that Flyboys had caused little actual damage to the Japanese radio stations. Their three-foot-thick concrete-and-steel-reinforced walls still stand. The ceilings are damaged only because Colonel Rixey’s Marines dynamited them after the war.
Iwatake-san led President Bush to the outside wall of the Mount Yoake radio station, where he had bid farewell to Warren Earl Vaughn. As Iwatake told the story, tears ran down our cheeks. Then it was on to the sunlit shore where the handsome twenty-four-year-old Texan had rolled down his collar. The two former foes, Bush and Iwatake, placed one flower each to mark Warren Earl’s death spot. They lingered to speak privately. I knew President Bush held Iwatake-san in special esteem.
Earlier I had told the president how Iwatake-san’s life story seemed to sum up all the twists, turns, and contradictions of Japanese-American relations in the twentieth century. He was born Nobuaki Iwatake, the American son of Japanese immigrants. He recited the Pledge of Allegiance in Hawaiian grade school. Later, the Japanese army drafted him from a Tokyo college and slapped Yamato damashii into him. Then American submarines torpedoed him and Flyboys flung bombs at his head. Awaiting slaughter by the expected soon-to-invade American devils, he assisted Japanese intelligence while seated at a radio console trading jokes with a Cherokee Marine. Having formed a close bond with this kichiku, he came to loathe Captain Yoshii for ordering Warren Earl’s death. Months later, on August 6, 1945, Iwatake-san was still atop Mount Yoake with his headsets. He was startled to hear about an explosive device called the atomic bomb. His extended family lived in Hiroshima. He later learned that his younger brother had been vaporized near the detonation point. Bearing no grudges, he promoted friendship between America and Japan as a longtime employee in the press section of the United States embassy in Japan. Iwatake-san is retired now and lives in a comfortable section of Tokyo. He holds Japanese and American citizenship.
Standing where Warren Earl had died, I was moved by the sight of the old Flyboy and the old issen gorin together—once boys whose divine mission had been to kill each other, now wiser men lost in the quiet murmurs of mutual understanding.
The Flyboy who got away became president of the United States. What might have been for Warren Earl, Dick, Marve, Glenn, Floyd, Jimmy, the unidentified airman, and all the Others who had lost their lives? A Nobel prize, a wife’s love, a daughter’s soft memory? And what might have been for those millions of doomed Japanese boys, abused and abandoned by their leaders? War is the tragedy of what might have been.
On Chichi Jima in March of 1945, twenty-two-year-old Private Iwatake had promised himself he would honor the memory of his friend Warren Earl Vaughn. After he returned to Japan, he followed through, taking a name that reminds him daily of what might have been.
In 2001, Iwatake-san was the first person I phoned in my search for the Chichi Jima Flyboys. Fifty-six years had passed since that final handshake, and I was curious about Iwatake’s dreams. I touched his Tokyo number on my telephone keypad.
From across the Pacific—as if borne by god winds—I heard his aged voice.
“Hello,” he said, “this is Warren.”
Acknowledgments
War has always interested me; not war in the sense of maneuvers devised by great generals . . . but the reality of war, the actual killing. I was more interested to know in what way and under the influence of what feelings one soldier kills another than to know how the armies were arranged at Austerlitz and Borodino.
— Leo Tolstoy, quoted in On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society
IRIS Chang and Bill Doran inspired me to search for the memories of the Chichi Jima Flyboys. I thank them and all those interviewed for the book. I also appreciate the kind help offered by Mark Bradley, Chris Cannon, Isabel DeSouza, Hill Goodspeed, Mako Hanyu, John McGuire, Liz Nagle, Mickey Russel, Barbara Russo, Abel Savory, Rocky Savory, Yoshikuni Taki, Betsy Uhrig, Richard Wheeler, and Yuko Yoshioka.
I owe special thanks to Audrey Manring, who single-handedly organized thousands of pages of trial documents from the National Archives.
I am fortunate to be represented by the world’s finest literary agent, Owen Laster. And I sleep well knowing I have professionals like Max Eisikovic and Robert Rapoport advising me.
Great editors don’t get enough credit. Geoff Shandler acquired this book in the idea stage and never flagged in his enthusiasm. Geoff’s emotional commitment to the Flyboys was evident from the beginning. His laserlike focus on excellence helped immeasurably in creating a worthy testament. The reader cannot identify Geoff’s many important contributions, but I can and I will always remember.
I have lived and worked in Japan and have warm friendships with a number of Japanese. Nothing I have written detracts from the deep respect I have for Japan and its people.
My admiration for the Flyboys is boundless. As Rowdy Dow told me, “If we had given in to our fears, we wouldn’t have won that war. There were no replacements out there. Our country was depending on us and we were all ready to die for our country. There was a job to do. We did it.”
Philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote, “With men the normal state of nature is not peace but war.” This state of nature can change. To that end, proceeds from this book will fund scholarships for American students to attend high school and university in Japan. If you are interested in contributing to this cause, or if you know a worthy student, please visit my Web site at: http:// www.JamesBradley.com/ scholarships.cfm.
James Bradley
June 24, 2003
Rye, New York
Notes
Chapter 2: Civilize-ation
p. 9 “. . . with plants and animals to which they were accustomed.” Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire Building (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980), xiii.
p. 10 “. . . made them all in the same mould, has imposed on them the duty to help one another.” Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 2, ed. J. P. Mayer and Max Lerner, trans. George Lawrence (London: Collins/ Fontana Library, 1968), 971.
p. 10 “. . . where the barbarian peoples of the world hold sway.” Drinnon, Facing West, 232.
p. 11 “. . . as righteous and beneficial a deed as ever took place on the frontier.” Thomas G. Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), 79.
p. 11 “. . . I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.” Ibid., 86.
p. 11 “half-savage, half-civilized race.” Sam W. Haynes, James K. Polk and the Expansionist Impulse (New York: Longman, 1997), 169.
p. 11 “they want nothing but tails to be more brutes than the Apes.” Ibid., 101.
p. 11 “melt away as the Indians before the white man.” Ibid., 169.
p. 11 “we were sent to provoke a fight.” Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant (New York: Dover Publications, 1995), 16.
p. 11 “. . . a stronger nation against a weaker nation.” Ibid., 21.
p. 12 “. . . most cordially and intensely ashamed of it.” Center for Research on North America (CISAN), National Autonomous University of Mexico, Voices of Mexico, #41.
p. 12 “. . . a vast field of warm-blooded oil deposits known as sperm whales.” Nathaniel Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex (New York: Viking, 2000), xi.
p. 12 Herman Melville estimated the American whaling industry employed 18,000 men aboard 700 ships, reaping a harvest of $7 million annually. Peter Booth Wiley, Yankees in the Land of the Gods: Commodore Perry and the Opening of Japan (New York: Viking, 1990), 30.
p. 12 . . . scarcely charted wilderness larger than all the earth’s landmasses combined. Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea, xi.
p. 13 Chichi Jima: The island had many names over the yea
rs given to it by English, American, and Portuguese explorers. I use its eventual Japanese name, which translates as “Father Island.”
p. 14 “. . . by establishing the quickest lines . . . turn [these channels] through the U.S.” Wiley, Yankees in the Land of the Gods, 92.
p. 14 It was clear to the congressmen that Maury was suggesting no less a prize than commercial domination of the Pacific. Ibid., 92.
p. 16 “One and all rushed out to see him, crowding all the roads.” George Elison, Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA: Council of East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1988), 321.
p. 16 “. . . They are truly the delight of my heart.” Matthew C. Perry, comp. Francis L. Hawks, Narrative of the Expedition of an American Squadron to the China Seas and Japan Performed in the Years 1852, 1853, and 1854, Under the Command of Commodore M. C. Perry, United States Navy, by Order of the Government of the United States (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1857), 30.
p. 16 “Once the people’s allegiance has been shifted, they can be manipulated and nothing can be done to stop it.” Wiley, Yankees in the Land of the Gods, 266.
p. 17 “. . . ‘Common people who behave unbecomingly to members of the military class . . . may be cut down on the spot.’” Ibid., 252.
p. 18 “. . . laws imposed from on high governed the tiniest details of life in Japan.” Ibid.
p. 18 Japan was the most urbanized country in the world, with almost 7 percent of the population living in cities, compared with 2 percent in Europe. James L. McClain, Japan: A Modern History (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2002), 54.
p. 18 “majestic citadels . . . loomed over the countryside as awesome symbols of their prodigious strength.” Ibid., 5.
Flyboys Page 40