The Last Fighter Pilot

by Don Brown

  Not only did the Seabees offload supplies reaching the beachhead, but, armed with Browning Automatic Rifles and .30-caliber machine guns, they provided beach security teams that engaged the Japanese with active fire. Of the 790 Seabees who hit the beaches with the Marines on D-Day in Iwo Jima, forty were killed in action, 156 were wounded, two were declared missing and never found, and forty-eight were evacuated for sickness. The 133rd NCBs suffered 370 casualties, more than forty percent of the 790 men who landed, which totaled the highest percentage of casualties as part of a single battle in Seabee history.

  Despite all that, the 133rd NCBs were the only unit in the first wave that did not receive the Presidential Unit Citation. But thanks to the NCBs’ bravery in storming the beaches on February 19, 1945, military transport planes soon began flying into and out of South Field, resupplying the Marines on the ground and evacuating wounded Marines back to hospitals in the Marianas. With South Field operational, the Seabees began work on the 5,225-foot airstrip which had been constructed by the Japanese at Central Field, and which would eventually house the Twenty-First.

  Meanwhile, as the Seabees labored, the American pilots on Iwo Jima had another mission to complete as they worked to clear any impediments to attacks on the Japanese homeland. The Marines and Navy needed their help securing another crucial target: Chichi Jima, an island one hundred fifty miles to the north.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Chichi Jima Problem: The Last Impediment for the Fighters

  Chichi Jima, also a part of the Bonin Islands, had grown into a full-fledged military obstacle for U.S. forces operating in the Pacific theater. The Japanese placed a high value on Chichi Jima, viewing it as a major stronghold and part of the final defense to the homeland. According to historian Chester Hearn in Sorties into Hell: The Hidden War on Chichi Jima, “To bolster morale, Emperor Hirohito sent his own palace guard of antiaircraft gunners to the island, because, in the opinion of his advisors, they were the best antiaircraft units in the empire.” In addition, the Japanese were constantly enlarging and rebuilding their military airstrip on the island, which, if completed, could pose a significant problem to the American conquest of Iwo Jima. Each time the Americans launched an airstrike on Chichi Jima—mainly by U.S. Navy warplanes off aircraft carriers operating in the area—the Japanese started rebuilding the airstrip. Thus, the airstrip had to be attacked constantly to try to keep Japanese military aircraft at bay. The island also housed a major Japanese radio facility which boosted the Imperial Navy’s communication with its ships and bases deep in the Pacific and intercepted messages from the American fleet. All this posed a serious threat to the U.S. Navy and the American long-range bombers, which had already started attacking Japan without much-needed fighter escort.

  Conquering Chichi Jima, however, was a taller order than even securing Iwo Jima. The latter, with the exception of the 560-foot-high Mount Suribachi, was primarily flat, which helped from a topographical standpoint. By contrast, the high, mountainous geography of Chichi Jima, crawling with at least twenty-five thousand Japanese troops, presented more of a challenge. American intelligence also assumed that most of the Japanese 109th Infantry Division was still stationed there (though that assumption turned out to be wrong). At one point, the U.S. Navy had devised a plan to capture the island, but when reality set in—that the steep topography and heavy gun bombardments on Chichi Jima would exact too heavy a price—the Navy opted for an alternate strategy that would involve multiple air strikes from carrier-based aircraft. In fact, U.S. Navy aviators had been targeting Chichi Jima long before Army fighter pilots even arrived on Iwo Jima. But while the Navy had succeeded in destroying the Japanese fighter planes on Chichi Jima, the island’s radio stations continued to broadcast to Japanese forces in the Pacific.

  The consequences, meanwhile, of getting shot down flying over or around Chichi Jima were enough to make even the bravest man’s skin crawl. More than one of Jerry’s brothers in arms had discovered this the hard way. On one Navy mission, the pilots and crew of four dive bombers, known as Avengers, had been ordered to attack a radio tower transmitter on the top of Mount Yoake on Chichi Jima. The Avenger was the Navy’s largest carrier-based attack bomber; each plane carried four five-hundred-pound bombs. One by one, just after sunrise, each plane had launched off the deck of the San Jacinto into the rising sun. Down below, the rolling Pacific reflected a mix of the sun’s rays and the light blue morning sky as the four-plane formation reached the shoreline of Chichi Jima. Based on the spectacular colors alone, one could almost forget the ferocity of war lurked so near.

  The squadron commander, Navy Lieutenant Don Melvin, peeled off first and put his Avenger into a dive, zeroing in on the transmission station. But the American planes had been spotted by the Japanese, whose antiaircraft battalion responded. As tracers flew up from the ground, exploding all around him, Melvin kept his plane in attack mode, and, with bullets whizzing by his cockpit, released the plane’s bombs toward the target before pulling out of the dive. Moments later, the other pilots in the squadron saw multiple explosions and an eruption of fire coming from the buildings surrounding the tower. From the air, it appeared that the first bombing run had caused damage, but the tower remained standing.

  The next Avenger in the attack line, piloted by a young naval officer from Connecticut named George Herbert Walker Bush, followed into the flight leader’s original path. With the map of the target strapped to his knee, he steered the plane into a steep, thirty-five-degree dive headed straight towards the tower.

  Suddenly, a powerful burst of antiaircraft fire rocked the plane. Bush responded, executing an evasive maneuver by rolling the dive-bomber over and aiming the nose at the targeted tower. Now the plane was flying at the tower from an inverted position. Rapid pressure changes from the sudden loss of altitude caused intense pain in the pilot’s eardrums, prompting him to shout at the top of his lungs to try and relieve the sharp, knifing sensation jabbing the inside of his ears. Somehow, he managed to right the plane. Checking his altimeter, the pilot bore down on his target. A surreal adrenaline saturated his body, and he opened the bomb bay doors and toggled the bomb-release switch.

  Just as he released two five-hundred-pound bombs, another powerful antiaircraft burst exploded off his wing. Black splotches of antiaircraft gunfire appeared around the cockpit, which filled with smoke as more fire flamed across the crease of the wing and edged towards the fuel tanks. Despite his plane being hit, Bush stayed with the dive, determined to carry out his mission. He honed in on the target, dropped two more five-hundred-pound bombs, pulled up, pulled away, and banked the crippled plane off to the east towards the Pacific. Once over water, Bush leveled the aircraft at a few hundred feet above the surface. But he couldn’t keep the plane in the air much longer. He ordered his crew members to bail out, then banked right to try and take the streaming flames off the door near his gunnery officer’s station.

  The aircraft lost altitude, morphing into an out-of-control metal fireball. Bush had no choice but to jump. He tried bailing out, but a wind gust slammed him head-first into the plane’s tail section, nearly knocking him unconscious. Somehow, his parachute deployed, and in a moment of eerie silence, he hung in the wind—the island behind him, the ocean below. The water grew closer and closer, and a moment later, he splashed down into the Pacific, alive but bleeding from his head.

  His crew members were not so fortunate. One’s parachute did not deploy, and the hard fall into the water killed him on impact. The second never escaped from the fuselage of the falling plane and died as the Avenger plunged into the Pacific and sunk below the surface.

  Bush, though still alive, faced a less than optimistic predicament himself. Battling strong currents as his blood gushed into the sea, he became a floating target for both Japanese naval boats and vicious sharks in the water. Yet he managed to deploy his life raft and pulled himself up into it even as Japanese boats sped toward him.

  A sound from above brought a twist of fate. It came from U
.S. Navy planes, which suddenly buzzed the skies overhead. Soon machine-gun fire cracked the air, with bullets furiously slashing and spraying the water all around Bush as the planes poured .50-caliber rounds at the attacking Japanese boats, driving them back from the pilot. Bush was eventually rescued after three hours at sea, disoriented, weeping, vomiting, and still bleeding from the head. Of the nine squadron members shot down that morning, Bush was the only one fortunate enough to escape capture at Chichi Jima. Every other American airman except one was executed by the Japanese. Some were even cannibalized; Japanese military officials ordered their doctors to cut out the livers of some of the pilots’ bodies, and the United States later discovered senior Japanese army officers hosted a Sake party for their Navy counterparts where the livers of American POWs were served as an appetizer. The Japanese Navy officers reciprocated by hosting a party where they butchered and served their own American POWs. These atrocities, uncovered in late 1945, became known as the “Chichi Jima Incident.”1

  Though this extent of Japanese barbarism against American POWs had yet to be fully exposed as Jerry and his peers prepared to write their own stories above Chichi Jima, rumors flew among American pilots that a shoot-down over any Japanese enclave—especially Chichi Jima—would lead to Japanese cannibalism. Stories circled that the Japanese amputated a leg from still-living American pilots and ate the limb piecemeal before amputating the other leg and eating it too. Unfortunately, the rumors were true.

  But they also gave the U.S. pilots extra motivation. Attacking Chichi Jima was an absolute necessity on a tactical level, but, in addition, it offered the American pilots a chance at revenge for what the Japanese had done to their peers.

  And the payback from the Seventh Fighter Wing would start on the morning of March 11, 1945.

  CHAPTER 7

  Hitting Chichi Jima

  March 11, 1945

  With the Marines continuing to gain the upper hand against the isolated but still dangerous Japanese forces on Iwo Jima, Jerry and the other squadron pilots of the Seventy-Eighth emerged from their foxholes on the morning of March 11 to receive orders that had come down from Colonel Jim Beckwith, commanding officer of the Fifteenth Fighter Group. Their group was told they’d continue pressing aerial attacks against the Japanese on Iwo Jima. Seventeen Mustangs from the Forty-Seventh Fighter Squadron, meanwhile, would be assigned the first strike against Chichi Jima. Colonel Beckwith, as group commander, and Brigadier General Moore, as commander over the entire Seventh Wing, would accompany the men of the Forty-Seventh on the attack.

  At nine a.m., the pilots of the Forty-Seventh began to lift off one by one from Iwo Jima. Flying a holding pattern until all seventeen planes were in the sky, the “Dogpounders,” the nickname they had adopted, organized into the “four finger” formations for the 150-mile flight north. Moore, flying under the code name “Chieftan One,” stayed outside the formation as the seventeenth pilot.

  Seventy-five miles out, they passed a U.S. Navy PBY Catalina, known as a “seaplane,” capable of landing in the sea and often used in search-and-rescue operations. The Catalina patrolled the ocean, tasked with picking up any Mustang pilot who might have to bail out of his aircraft either on the approach to Chichi Jima or the return flight. As an additional precaution, the Navy had positioned at least one destroyer off the island for potential rescue operations.

  The pilots were now sixty miles out. As the minutes passed, tension rose inside the cockpit of each P-51. It was one thing to provide close-air support for the Marines against Japanese ground troops on Iwo Jima. On Chichi Jima, however, the Japanese boasted dangerous antiaircraft defenses— ones that had already brought torture and death to many American pilots.

  Soon, twenty-five-year-old Captain Ray L. Obenshain Jr., flying as Blue Flight leader, looked off to the right of his cockpit and saw the mountainous contour of Chichi Jima rising from the sea. Obenshain radioed his sighting to the sixteen other planes.

  The pilots exchanged thumbs up. As Moore broke off into a holding pattern about one mile southwest of the Americans’ principal target, Colonel Beckwith, flying lead in Red Flight, led the rest of the group in a low pass across the water, just southeast of the airfield. This position would allow the Mustangs to commence their aerial assault from the direction of the rising sun, giving them a blinding advantage against the Japanese antiaircraft gunners that would soon be firing into the skies.

  Turning his plane back to the northwest, Beckwith pushed down on his throttle and nosed the Mustang down.

  The airfield was a single-strip, dirt-surfaced runway sitting at the top of a hill and had already been bombed frequently by high-flying Americans B-24s out of Guam. In fact, the pattern had been the same for many months: the Americans would bomb the airfield, then the Japanese would repair it.

  On this mission—just as Beckwith’s intelligence briefings had reported—the Japanese had again graded the runway. Four Japanese warplanes sat there, with three of the four appearing operational. Those planes would need to be taken out before they could get airborne and cause trouble. Leading his Red Flight down to four thousand feet, Beckwith released two five-hundred-pound bombs on the airstrip, then pulled out and headed offshore into a holding pattern as antiaircraft fire and black smoke began to rise from the island.

  Moore, flying an observation pattern a mile out, watched as Beckwith’s men, following in tight formation, pressed their attack on the airfield with surgical precision, flying through Japanese flack to drop seven more bombs and strafe the aircraft at the end of the runway.

  As the Red, Blue, and Green Flights rained hell on the airfield, the Yellow Flight turned its fury to the harbor. With Captain John Piper leading, the four Mustangs soared over Shiomi Point, taking aim at sixteen smaller seagoing vessels moored in the harbor. The Yellow Flight unleashed a salvo of bombs, some finding their targets. The group pulled up, circled again, and took aim at the seaplane base, which had been added by the Imperial Japanese Navy at the start of the war for reconnaissance missions against the U.S. Navy. In fact, the seaplane base had been just as much of a pain to the American fleet and American aircraft as the ground-based airstrip had been. Now, the Mustangs’ .50-caliber bullets sent water spraying into the sky and disabled several of the Japanese seaplanes from taking off.

  Satisfied with the damage inflicted, Beckwith set a course for a brief, thirty-one-minute flight to the nearby island of Haha Jima, also known to be a Japanese stronghold. There was no point in not blasting the Japanese some more on the way back to Iwo Jima, he’d decided. The Mustangs had already dropped their bombs, so this time, they stayed with .50-caliber bullets, unleashing several hundred rounds on Haha Jima before finally turning back to Iwo Jima.

  Overall, Beckwith and Moore were pleased that the air assault considered a prelude to attacking Japan had gone off without a single scratch to any American plane. Everybody knew, however, that luck would eventually turn. In war, bloodshed was unavoidable, even for the victors. But for now, they appreciated a victory gained without the loss of American pilots’ lives.

  Over the next few days in March, the three squadrons of the Fifteenth Fighter Group on Iwo Jima established a rotation. One hit Chichi Jima while the second provided close-air support for the Marines. The third spent a maintenance day on the ground, preparing to fly in the rotation the next day. The exception was Beckwith, who, like the Green Mountain Boys of his Vermont heritage, could not resist a golden chance to take the fight to the enemy. Beckwith personally flew combat missions to Chichi Jima for three consecutive days.

  On that third day—March 13, 1945—Jerry’s turn to attack Chichi Jima arrived. So far, his tour in the Pacific had been productive—so much so that, since arriving on Iwo Jima, he’d already been promoted to captain. He and his squadron mates had been anxious to give Chichi Jima a taste of what the “Bushmasters” (the nickname for the Seventy-Eighth) could deliver; in addition, the chance to go into battle with his mentor, Jim Tapp, who would later go down in history as one
of the Air Force’s greatest aces, sent an extra thrill coursing through Jerry’s veins.

  The Seventy-Eighth’s mission this time followed the pattern their predecessors had established. Jerry and his squadron mates piloted their crafts in formation to Chichi Jima, and, once there, Jerry slid his Mustang down to four thousand feet, dropped two five-hundred-pound bombs, pulled out, re-positioned, and pummeled the seaplane base. It was yet another “maintenance strike” against Chichi Jima, all part of a constant effort to keep the enemy at bay. Altogether, the Mustangs would fly almost 140 missions against the Japanese strongholds on Chichi Jima and Haha Jima, striking daily to make way for the American fleet to operate without detection and increase protection for American B-29s on the eighteen-hundred-mile round-trip bombing runs from the Mariana Islands to Japan.

  But the Japanese were far from finished.

  CHAPTER 8

  In the Mind of the Enemy

  March 24, 1945

  During the American Civil War, soldiers of the Confederate Army would employ a tactic in battle that sent shivers up the spines of young Union troops the first time they encountered it.

  Charging across the field in a massive human wave, brandishing bayonets that flashed in the bright sun, the gray-clad, wild-eyed rebels, while firing rifles, unleashed in unison a blood-curdling scream. The scream became known as the “rebel yell” and ignited terror in anyone facing the onslaught. According to the great Civil War historian Shelby Foote, one Union soldier said, “[I]f you claim you heard it and weren’t scared, that means you never heard it.”