The Last Fighter Pilot

by Don Brown

  In fact, by 1937, given Japan’s massive power in Manchuria and her growing threat to the rest of China, the Chinese communists and nationalists were forced to suspend their infighting and focus on fighting Japan. That year, the United States also began supplying some military assistance to China against the Japanese. In August, the country dispatched retired U.S. Army Air Corps General Claire Lee Chennault to China to advise Chaing Kai-Shek on organizing an air force resistance against the Japanese and to serve as an aviation trainer to the Chinese Air Force.

  Japan, thus challenged, struck back with impunity. Her victories on the ground included the great city of Shanghai—the cultural mecca of China—and offered a glimpse of the brutal massacres for which the Japanese would become infamous. The Chinese lost over two hundred thousand men in that battle alone—half of the total number of souls lost by the United States during its four-year involvement in World War II. Between November of 1937 and January of 1938, the Japanese killed half a million Chinese. Overall, the Japanese ground war against China proved one of the most devastating slaughters of human life in history. In fact, from the Nanking Massacre in 1937 through the end of World War II, the Japanese would kill more than twenty million Chinese. Most of these casualties were inflicted on civilians. The Nanking Massacre itself became a massively publicized genocide which turned the United States and the West against Japan and led to the Allies giving aid to China during the first few years of the war. Following President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s declaration that the defense of China was vital to the defense of the United States, American “Lend-Lease” money began flowing to the country. The American president hoped to at least help feed starving Chinese soldiers in their less-than-effective operations against the more powerful and disciplined Japanese.

  In addition, to establish at least a token military presence in the region, the United States recognized the “China-India-Burma” Theater of Operations, often referred to as the “CBI Theater.” Under the command of Army General “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, theater headquarters were established in Burma in early 1942, not long after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Most American and British firepower, however, remained concentrated in Europe, focusing on first defeating the Germans. That task was primarily assigned to the U.S. Army and British ground forces, while the U.S. Navy, U.S. Marines, and Royal Navy took on the brunt of the war in the Pacific. The Allied strategy involved having these forces attack from the east to keep Japan at bay in China and Southeast Asia. When Germany was on the ropes, the bulk of the U.S. Army could join the other branches in the Pacific for the impending invasion of Japan itself.

  One of the notable Allied forces fighting in the region was the Chinese Expeditionary Force. Facing an increasingly unstable military situation, however, and with no substantial airfields in the CBI theatre, air support missions for this group had to be launched from the eastern Himalayas. These flights were necessary because the Japanese had shut down the Burma Road, which ran from Rangoon, Burma, along the Andaman Sea, into China, thereby cutting off the supply line for Chinese and Allied forces on the ground. Thus, air support became the only means of reinforcing those soldiers fighting the Japanese in China.

  Most of the flights originated from bases in Assam, a state in Northeast India, to Kunming, a tropical city in Southwest China. Both the airbases in Assam and the City of Kunming were well west of the Japanese advance. It was a treacherous flight path that forced pilots to navigate the eastern end of the mammoth Himalayas, an area the pilots christened “the Hump.” Because of the great height and size of the Himalayas, the erratic and violent wind shifts often caused the pilots to lose control of their aircraft, as the blinding weather conditions slammed them into the mountains’ sides. Winds of two hundred miles per hour whipped out of nowhere. On occasion, the aircrafts’ wings would ice over and the planes would drop like rocks, sending their crews to violent deaths below. A lack of reliable navigational charts and radio navigation aids made the pilots’ situation even more precarious. In fact, from the Allies’ first flight over the Hump in April of 1942 until the re-opening of the Burma Road, they lost six hundred aircraft and over sixteen hundred men along the route. Most of the dead were American.

  This was the setup that greeted LeMay as he arrived in the Pacific theater in August of 1944. Japan controlled most of the populated area of China along her Pacific Coast. She was also far and away the dominant military power in Asia—between 1894 and 1931, the small island nation had fought wars against the two largest nations in the world (China and Russia) and beaten them both. In fact, in terms of impressive military victories since 1894, she had surpassed that of her better-known Axis partner Nazi Germany, which had suffered a humiliating defeat to the Allies in 1918. Excepting one debacle against the Russians in 1939 known as the battle of Khalkhin Gol, Japan had suffered no such defeats. She seemed unstoppable.

  But she was also more brutal, ideological, less prone to any cooperation with the international community, and far more determined to fight to the last man than even the Germans LeMay had left behind. Both the Nazis and Japanese had committed inexcusable atrocities against humanity, but there had been one place where the Japanese sank even lower than their German counterparts, at least from a war-crimes standpoint. That was POW treatment. In contrast to the Japanese, the Nazis rendered relatively humane treatment to prisoners of war from France, Britain, and the United States. In these three instances, the Germans tended to follow the Geneva Convention protocol and even spared Jewish POWs wearing American, French, or British uniforms, although they employed unrestrained barbarism with Soviet POWs, killing some 3.3 million. But while the Nazis chose to exercise some caution with certain POWS, the Japanese barbarism towards POWs showed no restraint, regardless of the prisoners’ nationality. Among the well-noted atrocities committed by Japanese forces against American and other captured Allied POWs were the notorious Bataan Death March in the Philippines in 1942; the torturing of American B-29 crews shot down over China; the Banka Island Massacre of 1942, in which the Japanese gunned down twenty-two Australian army nurses who were wearing Red Cross armbands, along with sixty Australian and British soldiers and crew members from two sunken ships; the Sandakan Death Marches—three forced marches on the Island of Borneo, resulting in the deaths of 2,345 mostly British and Australian soldiers; and the beheading and cannibalism of American pilots shot down over the Pacific. (Among American forces, word had gotten out of the extent of the brutal Japanese treatment of prisoners of war for at least a year before the battle for Iwo Jima had even commenced.)

  Such incidents were a reflection of the brutality Japan inflicted across the region. The Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) lost four million of its citizens at the hands of Imperial Japan by the end of World War II. French Indochina, which included the modern countries of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, lost 1.5 million. The Philippines lost another million. By the time America ended the war with the deployment of the second atomic bomb, Japan had killed over twenty-six million people. In fact, when considering the widespread swath of pillage, murder, mayhem and torture all over eastern Asia, the Pacific and even the Indian Ocean regions, along with Japan’s record of unbridled military victories in the twentieth century, a strong argument existed that Japan, and not Germany, was the most formidable, ruthless and dangerous nation in the world at the start of World War II. Such was the nature of the enemy LeMay now faced.

  LeMay realized that, for the Allies to eventually strike Japan itself, the current flight route over the Himalayas was insufficient. Effective bombing raids against Japan would require a base of operations both closer to that country and easier to supply. Already devastated by the military licking Japan delivered, China had no internal airbases from which to launch strikes against the island nation. So LeMay searched for alternates. Such bases, at least for launching long-range bomber strikes, would become available in mid-1944 as U.S. forces captured the Marianas; once they secured Iwo Jima, they would finally have a spot that would allow their b
ombers to be protected by shorter-range fighter pilots. And so, on February 19, 1945, following three days of naval bombardment, the first of seventy thousand Marines had waded onto the island to face eighteen thousand Japanese soldiers dug into deep bunkers, craters, tunnels, and volcanic rock under orders to fight to the death. Once the Marines secured all of Iwo Jima, Jerry and his fellow fighter pilots could take off, join the bomber fleets already airborne from the Marianas, and attack targets over Japan itself.

  CHAPTER 5

  Hell Rains from the Skies

  Iwo Jima

  March 8, 1945

  At 5:52 a.m., after twelve hours of darkness, the first ray of sunlight appeared above Jerry’s foxhole. He had survived his first night on Iwo Jima. Dawn meant opportunity: to transform from hunted to hunter.

  Against this sunny backdrop, Jerry and his fellow pilots were summoned and given their objective for the day. The Marines needed the pilots to fly close-air support on the island, which meant looping back over Iwo Jima after takeoff and flying down to dangerously low altitudes—ten to fifteen feet off the ground—while blasting Japanese ground troops with the six .50-caliber machine guns mounted in the wings of each plane. The Marines had already begun to map the entry points to many of the tunnels used by the Japanese to travel around the island and ambush Americans; the P-51s’ fire from the sky would help root the enemy out.

  The man in charge of the day’s airstrike was Brigadier General Ernest M. “Mickey” Moore, who, like Curtis LeMay, had become a star in the U.S. Army Air Force. At thirty-seven, Moore was one of its youngest generals. With black, bushy eyebrows, a pearly white smile, and an Italian-looking pug nose, he bore a striking resemblance to the famous American actor, Humphrey Bogart. Even when Bogart—who had served in the Navy in World War I—suspended much of his movie-making to travel with the USO in 1943 and 1944 to war-torn sections of Africa and Italy, the comparisons with the young aviation officer persisted. While Bogart had been making movies, however, Moore was already living an adventurous life from which movies would later be made. In September of 1941, he won the Distinguished Flying Cross for leading a daring, long-range flight of nine B-17s from Pearl Harbor through Midway Atoll, Wake Island, Port Moresby, New Guinea, and Darwin, Australia, and then to Manila. With Moore in the cockpit, the Army Air Corps pushed the envelope with its planes, and especially its bombers, testing the efficacy of long-range bombing missions by flying over twelve thousand miles round trip. In fact, Moore’s testing of B-17s over great distances in September of 1941 served as a building block for both the long-range bombing missions that LeMay and his fellow pilots would fly over Germany in 1943 and also the long-range bombing that would later be launched against Japan from the Mariana Islands.

  Here in Iwo Jima, Moore had been given charge of Seventh Fighter Command, known as the “Sunsetters,” which included Jerry and the rest of the Seventy-Eighth. The command was broken up into four different “fighter groups” of P-51s, with each group containing three fighter squadrons. At full deployment, each squadron was assigned thirty-seven planes, which meant the total number of P-51s on Iwo Jima reached approximately 444 planes at full strength. The groups, however, had staggered their arrival; the third group, known as the 506th, did not arrive on the island until April of 1945; the fourth group, called the 414th, would arrive in July of 1945. That meant, for now, Moore had only two fighter groups under his command: the Fifteenth—to which the Seventy-Eighth Fighter Squadron belonged—and the Twenty-First Fighter Group. Moore himself had flown the first fighter plane to land on Iwo Jima just fifteen days after the Marines stormed its beaches. But despite his status as a brilliant tactical aviator, the general lacked some of the superior fighter pilot skills shown by men like Jerry and had “pancaked” his plane upon landing at the base of Mount Suribachi (a “pancake landing” was an aviation term for when a plane made an emergency landing from a low altitude without first deploying the landing gear; the plane landed on its underside, or belly, which scraped against the surface of the earth, often running the risk of the plane flipping, disintegrating, or catching on fire).

  This morning, Moore sent the Forty-Fifth Fighter Squadron into the air first, commanded by Major Gilmer L. “Buck” Snipes of Anderson, South Carolina. After takeoff, the Forty-Fifth flew over the ocean, then turned and started pouring a wall of .50-caliber lead into Japanese-held positions on the island. The angry fury from the powerful machine guns gave the Marines fighting on the ground an early-morning shot of adrenaline against the enemy.

  Then came the Seventy-Eighth’s turn.

  For Jerry, just getting back into the bubble cockpit of the Dorrie R brought an electric, energetic feeling that washed away last night’s nightmare. He listened to the seventeen-hundred-horsepower Rolls-Royce engine ignite and purr as he swung the plane around on the field and gave the “thumbs up” for takeoff. He pushed down on the Mustang’s throttle and pulled back on the stick. The warbird rolled forward, picked up speed, and then lost contact with the soil of Iwo Jima. Under Jerry’s skilled hands, she climbed into the sky and crossed out over the ocean.

  Exhilaration overcame the young pilot. Here in the air—like all fighter pilots—he felt free. He swung out over the Pacific, then put the plane in a bank, turning in a large loop to head back to the island. As he closed back in on Iwo Jima, he felt a rush of adrenaline—he was about to engage in combat for the first time.

  In the pilots’ pre-flight briefing, they’d been told the Marines had fired yellow smoke grenades on target areas. Jerry and his companions’ job was to find the smoke bombs and blast the living hell out of wherever the Japanese were hiding—and hopefully avoid getting shot down in the process.

  Jerry brought the Mustang down low, almost as if he wanted to caress the top of the waves. He could see the whitecaps breaking as they rolled onto the beach below him. The plane roared back over the island. The first cloud of yellow smoke rose in a plume on the other side of the enemy lines.

  He drew a bead on the source of the smoke, pushed the stick down and, flying right at the base of the smoke plume, let the .50-calibers rip off six flying streams of bullets directly at the target. The bullets tore up the ground in front of the plane, obliterating everything in their path. He had not seen any Japanese; they were likely hiding in the cave just below the surface. But nothing on the surface anywhere close to those bullets could have survived.

  When he finally landed that day, back at Iwo Jima, it hit him: all the training he had done in the air, all the practice crisscrossing maneuvers and simulated dogfights, all the painful loss of his friends who had died alongside him, had brought him to this moment. Jerry Yellin had officially entered the war. There was no turning back. From now on, he had only two options: survival or death.

  Over the next few days that followed, the pilots of the Fifteenth Fighter Group continued to pound ground targets all over Iwo Jima. Jerry himself flew mission after mission, strafing Japanese positions with machine-gun fire and hitting the Japanese with fifty-pound bombs.

  Before, the Marines’ only air support had been from U.S. Navy planes flying off escort carriers. These planes had dropped napalm—a propellant used in warfare, designed to burn people and things—from altitudes no lower than fifteen hundred feet. The Navy had been unable to maintain this air support, however, because of kamikaze attacks being flown into American ships by Japanese pilots. In addition, shifting wind conditions meant the napalm dropped from Navy planes at higher altitudes often proved unreliable in reaching its intended target. Acid spray from a stray U.S. Navy napalm would sometimes burn through a Marine’s clothing and flesh, leaving the victim screaming and twisting in pain. But with the arrival of the Fifteenth Fighter Group, the P-51s now gave the Marines a more effective brand of close-air support. Because the attacks could be launched from a lower altitude, accidental friendly fire from American aircraft would be drastically reduced.

  There was, however, a major problem. The Mustangs had ultimately come to launch long-range m
issions against Japan, not provide close-air support for the Marines. To that end, they’d been equipped with .50-caliber bullets instead of napalm, which rendered them far less effective in this instance. The Japanese had dug themselves so deep into holes and craters on the island that the best way to root them out was with smoke and fire. So the Fifteenth Fighter Group, working with Marine and Army explosive ordinance personnel, began building their own napalm bombs to use against the Japanese.

  The results were devastatingly effective. Soon, the P-51s were raining napalm all over the island, turning large parts of it into a flaming inferno in the midst of the ocean. By the close of March 15, the Mustangs had flown their last close-air support on Iwo Jima. The remaining Japanese had retreated so deep underground that the Marines would have to go in and flush them out.

  With their role on Iwo Jima winding down, Jerry and his fellow pilots felt anxious to commence the real reason they’d been brought to Iwo Jima: long-range flights to Japan. They were still waiting, however, for the rest of the Seventh Fighter Command to arrive. The Twenty-First would come soon; the 506th was farther behind.

  One of the main holdups in their arrival was expanding a second airfield and completing a third on the island from which the Twenty-First and 506th could operate. The Japanese had originally begun work on the third airfield but never completed it, in part because of the repeated attacks from the U.S. military. The job of finishing the third airfield now fell to the Army engineers and U.S. Navy Seabees—in particular, the 133rd Navy Construction Battalion or “133 NCB.” Despite the fact that they were trained as engineers, the Seabees of the 133rd were attached to the Fourth Marines and, along with them and the Fifth Marine Amphibious Corps, had been part of the first wave of troops to land on Iwo Jima’s beaches. Before they ever distinguished themselves as engineers on Iwo Jima, they distinguished themselves in combat.