Beyond Valor

by Jon Erwin

  But something went terribly wrong. Instead of falling out of the plane, the phosphorus bomb backfired and ricocheted up the chute, possibly after slamming into a stuck valve.

  “It may have had a defective firing pin, or the wind velocity may have been so high it blew it back into the plane,” Red said. “I sensed it too. I had a premonition. I knew that sucker was coming back. I thought, Oh, this sucker is going to come back in here, and that’s when I tried to put my foot over the tube. I knew it was coming back, and I tried to put my foot on it and kick it out, but it shot back into the plane and exploded at my feet. All at once it exploded. It took my hair off my head. It took my right ear off. It blinded me. Phosphorus was all over me and burning.”

  The phosphorus bomb struck the right side of Red’s face and blanketed his upper body with a sticky coating of white phosphorus burning at over 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit. According to the notes compiled by journalist Robert St. John during interviews in 1946 with Red, “The inside of the B-29 was lit up as though by glaring arc lights.”

  In an instant, much of Red’s right ear and nose were seared away. His face, hair, and arms were on fire and his eyes were blinded. The bomb canister flipped around on the floor, churning out billows of fire and thick, noxious white and yellow smoke that quickly filled the aircraft’s forward compartment.

  Suddenly Captain Simeral could not see the instrument panel in front of him. The plane began a steep, out-of-control dive toward the ocean at a sixty-degree angle.

  Through a tidal wave of pain, Red’s mind focused on two imminent, split-second catastrophes. The plane was on a path to slam into the Pacific, break apart, and sink, but before that could happen, the detonating phosphorus canister would easily burn through the plane’s metal deck and tumble into the bomb bay and ignite the bombload, setting off a spectacular series of explosions that could even detonate the assembling bomber formation. Either way, everyone on the City of Los Angeles was doomed.

  Red, now blind and on fire, fell to his knees and swept his arms around the deck frantically, trying to feel his way to the bomb. Ten seconds elapsed. There was, theoretically, one way out of this predicament, but it would require superhuman strength and miraculous courage.

  Red had been a Christian for as long as he could remember, and he had led prayer services as a Methodist youth group leader. He could feel death approaching both him and his brother airmen with the speed of a bullet, and his body was registering the mind-boggling pain of being incinerated by white phosphorus.

  What he did next came naturally to him.

  He prayed.

  Lord, I need Your help now!

  Red remembered the cardinal rules that had been hammered over and over into him in flight training: expect the unexpected and don’t panic.

  “If you panic, you’ll make the wrong move,” Red recalled. “If you panic, you cannot think of what to do. You cannot find it. Don’t get emotional. Keep your presence of mind, figure out what’s going on, and work the problem through. If you don’t panic, there’s always a way out. That way you always have an escape possibility.”

  He said, “I didn’t panic. I asked the good Lord to help me. And I’ve thought about this a million times over the years. I didn’t pray God have mercy on my soul as if death was inevitable. I prayed for God’s help.” He asked for God’s help to conquer death in that moment and show him a way through the crisis.

  Red’s prayer wasn’t just an invocation for God to help him figure out what to do next; it was a reaction to the nearly infinite severity of the pain his body was registering as it was being consumed by fire. This was an entirely new universe of pain, the likes of which Red never dreamed possible. He recalled what went through his mind as he registered the impact of second- and third-degree burns all over his body.

  “I was in a sense praying to die. I was in such desperate pain that death would actually have been a blessing.”

  As soon as he uttered his prayer, Red felt the presence and the guidance of God. According to Red, in that moment, the Supreme Being became the central player in the drama.

  Instantly, Red recalled, three things happened simultaneously. First, he felt no pain. It was canceled out, perhaps by adrenaline and divine intercession.

  Second, his mind locked onto the one microscopic chance he had to save everyone’s life—to somehow get the bomb to the nearest window that could be opened, which was thirty feet forward in the pilot’s compartment, and get it out of the plane.

  He explained, “I knew that somehow I had to hit that window. Hit that window!”

  Third, and this is where his story becomes truly cosmic, he sensed the presence of angels or some other unearthly presence very near him, and they were giving him a loud-and-clear message: Go! Go! Go! You can make it!

  With those words in his mind, he recalled, “I was blinded but managed to grope around until I found the grenade. It took me ten seconds to find that sucker with my feet and hands, but I could tell the plane was going down.”

  Red found the fireball, scooped it up with his bare hands, cradled it against his right side like a football, and somehow struggled to his feet. His torso and the internal organs around his chest were partially shielded by the Mae West flotation vest he always wore on missions because he couldn’t swim, but he was sustaining severe third-degree burns1 to his head, face, neck, hands, forearms, and legs.

  A first-degree burn resembles a sunburn and usually heals on its own within a few days. A second-degree burn triggers blistering, but the skin heals, and skin grafts are needed only for very deep burns. But third-degree burns, the kind Red was suffering, penetrate all five layers of skin, unleashing prolonged, agonizing pain. And if the victim lives through the injury and survives the high risk of infection, skin grafting is always required. Such burns are among the hardest injuries to survive and treat successfully, because they unleash toxins that attack so many different body systems, including the heart, blood, kidneys, pancreas, and hormonal and immune systems. “There’s no other injury that has such a devastating effect2 on the body—no disease process, no cancer, nothing,” noted Canadian burn specialist Walter Peters.

  Through the thick smoke, Red’s stunned crewmates beheld an apparition from Dante’s Inferno—a blind man, enveloped in flames, crawling and stumbling through the aircraft toward the cockpit. As Red passed by with much of his body on fire, his crewmates heard the unfailingly polite southerner say, “Excuse me.”

  Red’s thirty-foot path to the cockpit was blocked by the gun turret, various stacked supplies, and the locked-down navigator’s table. There was no way around it.

  Still clutching the flaming phosphorus bomb against his right side, Red forced his burning right hand to fumble beneath the table, unlatch the hinge, and flip it up. The raging phosphorus actually melted layers of his skin so that it was fused into the table, but Red managed to pull off what was left of his hand and continue toward the cockpit.

  “Those thirty feet felt like an eternity,” he remembered. “I was crawling by instinct.”

  Red stumbled toward the pilot and copilot, who were frantically trying to stabilize the smoke-choked aircraft as it plummeted to 700 feet, then 600 feet, then 500 feet.

  As a boy growing up during the Great Depression, Red Erwin had seen his family experience several close calls with hardship, tough times, and even a few brushes with financial disaster, as so many families did. When this happened, his mother conducted a kind of prayer chant that she repeated over and over: The Lord will help us. He will get us through . . . The Lord will help us. He will get us through . . .”

  If there was ever a moment that Red needed the Lord’s help, it was now. And the voice—either of God or of angels—was by his side, encouraging him, Go! Go! Go! You can do it!

  Red called out, “Open the window, sir! Open the window!” He crawled into the cockpit.

  Captain Simeral screamed, “Get it out the window!”

  “Pardon me, sir,” Red said to Colonel Strouse as he maneuv
ered around him. “Is the window open, sir?”

  Someone pushed the window open. Red leaned over and forced his burning body toward it. The rushing air started to suck the smoke out of the cockpit.

  Red manhandled the bomb, still showering fire and smoke in all directions, through the open window, and flipped it into the open air. He collapsed on the copilot’s throttle stick, and then onto the floor.

  As the smoke was sucked out of the plane, Captain Simeral could again see his instrument panel. The altitude gauge plummeted from 380 to 350 to 320 feet as he and the copilot frantically tried to regain control of the aircraft. Finally, at 300 feet above the desolate ocean surface, at the last moment, they were able to stabilize the aircraft, level off, pull up, and gain altitude.

  The crew turned a fire extinguisher on the prostrate, burning body of Red Erwin. But Red’s skin was still sizzling and smoldering. The fiendish chemistry of a phosphorus burn on human skin is such that it can smolder for weeks, as long as it has contact with oxygen. He completed the 30-foot journey in 12 seconds, and he had been on fire for about 22 seconds total. But his skin continued to burn and smolder for months.

  Navigator Pershing Youngkin described what happened next. “I saw Red lying on the flight deck, and I just don’t know how to describe it. It was horrible. He was in tremendous pain. [Bombardier] Bill Loesch tried to inject some plasma and had a hard time. He couldn’t find a vein. Then [gunner] Herb Schnipper came up to help and they were able to find a vein and gave him a shot of plasma. I heard later a medic said that if they hadn’t given him that shot of plasma he would have died of shock. It kept him alive. They also gave him morphine.”

  Red recalled the desperate scene: “I was laying on the deck, and I was in sheer agony. Bill Loesch and Herb Schnipper got the first aid kit down, and I told Herb to give me a syrette of morphine. But they wanted to keep giving me morphine, and as the plane’s first aid man, I knew that was dangerous. I was mortally afraid they were going to give me too much morphine.” He told his crewmates, “You’re going to kill me if you give me more morphine. Don’t give me too much of that stuff, you’ll kill me!”

  Red remained conscious, so he was feeling the severe pain of his wounds again, but he was able to supervise his treatment. If he had passed out, he probably would have died. Nevertheless, he said, “I was in such pain and agony that I was actually wishing to die. I was so badly burned it would have been a blessing if I had been unconscious.”

  Despite the pain, Red managed to whisper to his crewmates, “Don’t worry about me. Go on with the mission.” He was coughing, crying, and spraying blood as his crewmates gently cradled him on the deck of the aircraft. According to Schnipper, “He was praying to God and to his mother.”

  The crew of the City of Los Angeles faced a dilemma.

  They were carrying a mortally wounded man with severe burn wounds, and he was in excruciating pain, dying before their eyes. They had to get him to a hospital. But they had standing orders to never, under any circumstances, deviate from their mission as long as the plane was airworthy. As always, by this point in the flight, they were totally committed to the mission. They had to get to the target and drop their bombload, no matter what, before they turned back. This edict by their commander, General LeMay, was unalterable.

  But there was a senior officer aboard the City of Los Angeles that day: Lt. Col. Eugene Strouse. He was their squadron commander, and he was only one level below LeMay. If anyone had the authority to override LeMay’s directive, it was Strouse. He saw the hideously burned form of Red Erwin and decided to divert the aircraft to the nearest US medical facility, which was on the recently captured island of Iwo Jima. He knew this decision could result in a court-martial, but he knew what he had to do.

  “My God, abort this mission!” Strouse yelled. “Turn this plane around! Abort the mission. Emergency run to Iwo. Let’s get him to Iwo quick!”

  The crew jettisoned the bombload, radioed the following B-29s of their decision, pulled the craft up to a fast-cruising altitude of 26,000 feet, swung around to a southbound flight plan, and began a desperate dash to Iwo Jima, which was 600 air miles and three hours away. The strike force proceeded to the target and completed the mission, inflicting significant damage on the enemy chemical factory.

  Through a coincidence of timing and geography, Iwo Jima offered a slender but potentially miraculous possibility of saving Red’s life. The clock was quickly ticking down toward death for him through blood loss and shock, and the hospital at Guam was at least a six-hour flight away. Although the facilities on Iwo Jima were smaller, they were just three hours away by air. It had been open for only a few weeks.

  The epic, incredibly bloody Battle of Iwo Jima had officially ended on March 26, 1945, five weeks after US Marines landed on the volcanic island to vanquish the twenty-one thousand entrenched Japanese defenders and less than three weeks before Red Erwin’s injury. The Americans sustained 26,040 casualties in taking the island, including 6,821 killed. The hope was that Iwo Jima’s three airfields (one of them unfinished at the time of the American invasion) could be used to attack the Japanese mainland, some 750 miles away. In the meantime, navy construction battalions quickly built bases and a rudimentary military hospital on the island and adapted the airfields to serve as emergency landing strips for B-29s in distress. That achievement eventually spelled salvation for many airmen, and it now offered Red Erwin a chance at survival.

  As the crew of the City of Los Angeles made their desperate dash to Iwo Jima, they had no way of knowing this act would spark a race against time that would involve a series of medical miracles, the Pentagon, and the president of the United States.

  Chapter Five

  RACE AGAINST TIME

  AS THE CITY OF LOS ANGELES HURTLED SOUTH over the ocean, Red Erwin barely clung to life. The moment he was wounded, a countdown clock started ticking down to his death. He could die within minutes or hours, but it was a clock that could only be slowed or stopped through a series of miracles, big and small.

  A white phosphorus burn over a large area of the body has two devastating effects: an immediate thermal injury and a lingering, embedded chemical burn that can continue for weeks. Burns from white phosphorus are intensely painful, as painful as hydrofluoric acid and more painful than caustic soda and sulfuric acid.

  Sudden death can occur soon after burns to 10 to 15 percent of the total body surface area, and Red had sustained burns well over 20 percent of his body. Without immediate medical treatment, he could die from a wide spectrum of crises that threatened to overwhelm his body, including kidney failure, shock caused by fluid loss, and infection.

  As soon as Red’s body processed the effect of the wounds, he experienced severe, instantaneous physiological changes, including effects on his heart, lungs, liver, and nervous system. As surgeon Larry Jones of Ohio State University and his colleagues explained in a 2015 research paper, “When skin, an organ about as thick as a sheet of paper toweling,1 is severely damaged, nearly every system in the body reacts. The metabolic system goes haywire and accelerates; the immune system changes, and the cardiovascular system falters. A first-degree burn has slight impact, but a second-degree burn destroys all of the epidermis (the top layer of skin) and part of the dermis (the underlying layer), and a third-degree burn consumes both. Serious burns cause a catastrophic loss of fluid through the burned area by evaporation and through leakage from damaged capillaries.”

  The amount of calcium in Red’s blood plasma plunged in reaction to the white phosphorus his body was absorbing. This threatened to kill him in as little as sixty minutes, either by shutting down his nervous system or by flooding his body with phosphate, which pushes down calcium levels in the bloodstream. This creates the risk of kidney failure or cardiac arrest. White phosphorus particles spontaneously oxidize and ignite when in contact with oxygen in the atmosphere, forming phosphorus pentoxide, a strong dehydrating agent, which can push fluid levels even further down to dangerous lows.

&
nbsp; Red was sustaining tissue damage from the corrosive effects of the phosphorus, and if his body fat absorbed too much of it, hepatic necrosis or renal damage would occur. As minutes and hours ticked by, his risk of fatal immune deficiency spiked, as the availability of his helper-T defensive white blood cells decreased in reaction to the injury.

  As long as he was medically untreated, Red’s risk of death from multiple organ failure due to infection increased. He had lost the protective barrier of his skin, which keeps blood and fluids in the body and keeps bacteria and viruses out. An invasive infection could easily occur. Roughly 90 percent of burn victims who succumb to the injury are killed by infection. Red needed antibiotics, both locally on the skin and system-wide to his body, but there were none in the B-29 and no one qualified to administer them; and there were very few types of antibiotics available at the time to begin with.

  Examining details and photos of Red Erwin’s wounds in 2019, leading Israeli reconstructive plastic surgeon and burn specialist Uri Aviv explained, “White phosphorus absorbed through a burn can produce serious electrolyte disturbances, including hyperphosphatemia and hypocalcemia with calcium-phosphate shifts, as soon as one hour after the burn is sustained. This change is responsible for cardiac arrhythmias (heart rate and rhythm abnormalities) post-burn, including prolonged QT intervals, ST-T wave changes, and progressive bradycardia, all of which can lead to cardiac arrest and immediate death. The absorption of a large amount of phosphorus can cause also liver and kidney failure. Furthermore, a relatively small surface area of 10 to 15 percent TBSA [total body surface area] can evoke a sudden and often unexpected death.”

  According to David Barillo, who served as chief of the US Army’s Burn Flight Team from 2005 to 2009 and who reviewed Red’s case in 2019, “Once you hit a 20 percent body surface area burn, basically everything in the body does not work correctly. Your heart goes into overdrive, your heart rate goes up from 60 to 80 to about 120 beats per minute, and your blood pressure drops to compensate. Pretty much every organ system is screwed up. Your endocrine system gets very strange, hormones are secreted, cortisol is secreted, your immune system kicks into overdrive. All of that continues until you close the burn. Getting the burn closed fast is really, really important. The reason for the high fatality risk is that your body can’t withstand that kind of stress.”