by Jon Erwin
These words of conciliation by the tall, imperious, sixty-five-year-old MacArthur hit Toshikazu Kase,10 facing him from a few feet away, with the force of a freight train. “For me, who expected the worst humiliation, this was a complete surprise,” he explained. “I was thrilled beyond words, spellbound, thunderstruck.”
General MacArthur gestured to Foreign Minister Shigemitsu to sign the instrument of surrender documents. MacArthur supervised the proceedings with the regal confidence of an emperor himself. It was the pinnacle of his life and career. Other Japanese representatives signed, then representatives of eight Allied powers. When MacArthur signed the document, as if on a perfectly timed cue, shafts of sunlight penetrated the heavy overcast and illuminated the scene.
Returning to the microphone, MacArthur grandly intoned, “Let us pray that peace be now restored to the world and that God will preserve it always. These proceedings are closed.”
A mechanical buzz that had been building in the distance became a thunderous roar, and more than four hundred B-29s from every squadron of the Twentieth Air Force flew over the Missouri, joined by fifteen hundred carrier planes, the biggest overflight thus far in history.
“Was the day beclouded by mists or trailing clouds?”11 MacArthur later wrote. “I cannot remember, but this I do—the all embracing pride I felt in my country’s monumental victory.”
At long last, the war was over.
A report of the proceedings by Shunichi Kase was rushed to an anxious Emperor Hirohito. He ended his report with the question of “whether it would have been possible for us, had we been victorious, to embrace the vanquished with a similar magnanimity.”
At this, according to an eyewitness, the emperor nodded and sighed.
Red’s eyes were periodically sewn shut for twelve months in order to save his sight. Doctors periodically opened them to scrape out any lingering smoldering phosphorus. His arm was sewn to his abdomen for several months in order to grow new flesh on his severely damaged right arm. His mouth was sewn shut to prepare him for skin grafts to replace his lips, which had been burned away. So he had to drink and eat through a straw. His skin from his abdomen was grafted to create a new ear to replace the one that had been burned off. He had to have numerous skin grafts to replace the burned right side of his face.
“The pain was so bad that I just wanted to die,” Red said. “Then when I came so close to really dying, I began to pray to live. I didn’t give up.” He surprised everyone, not only by surviving, but by recovering.
Red Erwin was in and out of hospitalizations for the next two and a half years at medical facilities in Alabama, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. Starting in August 1946, Red had an extended stay at Cushing General Hospital12 in Framingham, Massachusetts, a giant army hospital that specialized in neurosurgery and in pampering wounded personnel. Here, Red underwent a series of critical attempts at reconstructive surgery and rehabilitation of his wounds. Betty came to Framingham with him, and she worked at a ward in the hospital so she could be close to him.
When the special hospital train brought Red and Betty onto the tree-lined, 110-acre hospital grounds, they were astonished and grateful at their new home. It was a city within a city, with the most advanced medical equipment, labs, x-ray machines and operating rooms, swimming pool, post office, fire department, and an ornate interfaith chapel built in 1943 by Italian masons who were prisoners of war. A shuttle bus took ambulatory patients on outings to downtown Framingham to watch movies at the St. George Theater, quaff a beer at the Blue Moon Café, or enjoy a “turkey dinner with all the fixin’s” at the Wellworth restaurant for forty cents. The hospital’s corridors converged at a spot called Times Square, where an auditorium featured performances by celebrities such as Bing Crosby and Bob Hope, and where patients could relax in a comfortable lounge and have a smoke, a snack, or a card game.
Patients at Cushing, which was also called the City of Mercy, were given the red-carpet treatment. It was a huge hospital, with eighteen hundred beds, and had been specially designed by the War Department to welcome returning wounded personnel and make them feel at home. Patients came from battlefields across the world and had endured brain and spinal cord injuries, shattered limbs and eyes, and severe burns such as Red’s, but the atmosphere at the hospital was remarkably happy and peaceful.
One patient who had been wounded at Anzio, Corp. Stanley Smith, recuperated there for two years and said he “couldn’t recall anybody grumbling and moaning about the position they were in.”
The residents of Framingham showered the patients with love and attention. Members of the Garden Club placed fresh flowers in the mess hall, the Elks Lodge was converted into a mini-USO Club for the wounded troops, and Boy Scout leader Peter Mespelli taught his troop to cook Wednesday night spaghetti dinners that patients loved. At Christmastime, they sang carols to the wounded.
Red needed all the love and comfort he could get, as he was enduring what he described as the worst pain he had ever experienced, like “being skinned alive.” The procedure was recently dubbed “incredibly barbaric and heinous” by burn surgeon James Holmes of Wake Forest University.
Military burn specialist David Barillo explained recently that instead of surgically removing the burned area within two weeks as is now standard practice and results in much less pain and fast recovery, “In the 1940s we let the burn separate by itself, which could take months. For weeks on end, Erwin would have been placed in a man-sized tub called a Hubbard tank, the water would run like a whirlpool, and he’d just sit there for endless hours as doctors and nurses picked off pieces of the burn with scissors and tweezers, which was just incredibly painful and incredibly stressful. As much as you tried to treat them for pain, you can’t really control that kind of pain. That would go on for weeks and months, day after day. At some point all of the burn would be peeled off and you’d have a nice layer of skin-granulation tissue under it, and at that point you could start skin grafting.”
Eventually, flaps of skin were grafted from Red’s lower body and shoulder to create the semblance of a right ear. His right eyebrow was cut from a piece of his scalp. Miraculously, his eyesight returned over three years. Doctors wanted to amputate his right arm, but Red begged them not to. So for two years the doctors worked to create something out of nothing. It was never fully completed.
In 1948, journalist Sidney Shalett, who interviewed Red extensively, reported of his arm, “The effort to save it involved one particularly excruciating operation13 wherein the skin of his abdomen was slit and the arm attached to it. It stayed bound to his body for three months while the skin grew to his wrist. He has flesh on his wrist and forearm now, but it is swollen and unpretty. Then they discovered that his wrist was in a distorted, claw-like position, so they fractured the wrist and braced it with a bone taken from his hip region in another operation. The piece of bone from the hip was held in place with a Steinmann pin—a surgical steel spike driven into Red’s hand.”
Red spent the rest of his life not being able to move his right arm and with the immobile remains of three fingers on a right hand that resembled a small loaf of bread. Much of his left index finger was missing, but his legs and feet were good and his mind was sharp.
The phosphorus lodged in Red’s skin continued to smolder and reignite for months after his injury. He had no less than forty-one surgical procedures until he decided he’d had enough and was ready to reenter civilian life. Surgeons had reassembled Red’s face and body into an imperfect but, considering the circumstances, fairly good reflection of what he looked like before he was wounded, though the natural process of skin aging would gradually and increasingly accent the visibility of his wounds and surgeries. His red hair grew back.
Red’s right arm remained nearly useless, visibly scarred with major wounds that hadn’t healed well. It was locked into a right angle for the rest of his life. In 1945, doctors had managed to save the arm from amputation, but the skin was extremely rigid from scarring, and burn injury rehabilitat
ion practices were primitive. Red didn’t have the years of physical therapy that he should have had, so any remaining muscle function in the arm atrophied completely. His right hand, also useless, was also badly distorted from imperfect and unfinished reconstructions. Surgeons gave him a new right ear and rebuilt his nose and lips with skin grafts. The index finger on his left hand was partially amputated because of the burns. He was blind in his right eye, but he regained sight in his left eye. He had the full use of the left side of his body, and eventually much of the right side, other than the arm. Gradually, after spending months as a living skeleton, as his ability to take nourishment returned, his weight went from a low of 87 pounds back toward his normal 165. He regained the full ability to walk and talk.
On October 8, 1947, Red was discharged from the US Army Air Forces as a master sergeant. In addition to the Medal of Honor and two Air Medals received earlier in 1945, he was also awarded the Purple Heart, the World War II Victory Medal, the American Campaign Medal, three Good Conduct Medals, the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal with two bronze campaign stars (for participation in the Air Offensive Japan and Western Pacific campaigns), and the Distinguished Unit Citation Emblem.
Red’s challenge after finally being able to leave the hospital for short periods in late 1945 was to find a place to live and a professional mission that would enable him to provide for Betty and what he hoped would be a good-sized family.
In October 1945, the city of Bessemer, Alabama, staged a Hero’s Welcome Home Parade for the still-frail and recovering Red Erwin, complete with brass bands and marching military and Red Cross units, while flag-waving throngs lined the sidewalk. The parade was staged to raise funds to buy a house for the young couple. Three thousand people packed the city hall auditorium and a thousand more gathered outside to get a glimpse of the modest red-haired war hero. The fund drive collected $10,000 from the Kiwanis, Lions, and Rotary Clubs, the Junior Chamber of Commerce, and the American Legion. A group of children in the Fairfield Highlands community raised $54 by collecting dimes, nickels, and pennies. One boy took the money he earned by cutting grass and gave it to the fund.
The fund drive resulted in a white-framed house being given to Red and Betty. It consisted of two bedrooms and a bath, a neat kitchen, a refrigerator, an electric stove, and lots of cabinets, complete with a big fenced-in backyard with two swing sets for future children. Betty and Red loved the house.
Harry Truman then reentered Red Erwin’s story, opening a door that shaped the rest of Red’s life.
While he was still hospitalized, Red heard in September 1945 that President Truman had issued an executive order decreeing that Medal of Honor recipients were entitled to a job with the Veterans Administration as a contact representative, or benefits counselor, without having to comply with the requirements of civil service rules.
Soon after he was discharged in October 1947, Red applied for the job with the VA, which in classic bureaucratic fashion gave him a job, not as a contact representative at a salary of $3,400 per year, but as a file clerk in the medical department of the VA at the Jefferson County Courthouse in Birmingham at only $1,954 per year, taking care of five thousand case files on sick and wounded veterans. Red was glad to find work and did the file clerk job well, but he was determined to get what had been promised him. He pushed for the correct job until he finally received it on January 4, 1948.
For the next thirty-seven years, until he retired on April 3, 1985, Red Erwin worked as a contact representative and benefits counselor at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Birmingham, acting as a one-man champion and SWAT team to get sick and wounded veterans the help, treatment, benefits, and respect they deserved.
Red Erwin in action, fighting for his fellow wounded veterans, which he would do for thirty-seven years. (Erwin Family Collection)
Red’s new mission in life was to deliver comfort, compassion, and critical medical and financial aid to soldiers, sailors, marines, and air force veterans of the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and peacetime service. From all accounts, he executed his mission as heroically as he did his Medal of Honor action.
In the hours and months after his accident, as he endured the agony of his injuries, treatments, and surgeries, Red freely admitted he had moments of black despair, when he wished his life was over and prayed for death as a merciful delivery from his pain. Perhaps he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), an anxiety disorder that is triggered by a psychologically distressing, traumatic event and causes a cluster of symptoms in victims that can include intense terror, fear, helplessness, hypervigilance and hyperarousal, emotional numbing, intrusive nightmares, flashbacks, and hallucinations about the traumatic event.
Many members of the so-called Greatest Generation who emerged from the severe circumstances of both the Depression and World War II seemed both unequipped and highly reluctant to dwell on the severe stresses and anxieties they endured. In fact, the condition known as PTSD was little understood prior to the 1980s. Psychologists Elizabeth Clipp of the Veterans Administration and Glen Elder Jr. of the University of North Carolina reviewed the research on the subject and wrote a quarter-century ago of their findings: “The disorder is widespread among aging veterans of World War II,14 that symptoms may be quite serious in later life, and that a substantial number of its victims are currently undiagnosed because of an unwillingness to admit war-related problems or misdiagnosed as having anxiety, alcoholism, depression or chronic physical conditions.”
It would be perfectly understandable if Red suffered from some form of PTSD, especially early on. But each time he had feelings of ultimate despair, Red’s love for God and his love for Betty and his family pulled him through, and he emerged from his epic ordeals as a better, more fulfilled, and more thriving human being. It is pure conjecture, but Red may have experienced a fascinating, little-known condition that can coexist with PTSD but is instead associated with powerful positive effects—a condition called post-traumatic growth (PTG). According to researchers, “In many studies PTG and PTSD are found to stem from similar traumatic events15 and to be positively correlated.”
In the 1990s, psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun first described the concept of PTG16 as a positive psychological response to trauma that is marked by improvements in relationships, personality, self-efficacy, spiritual development, openness to new possibilities, feelings of personal strength, and a greater appreciation of life. PTG has been observed in survivors of war, severe medical events, terrorism, rape, accidents, and natural disasters. The theory suggests that people who struggle psychologically after adversity can often experience positive growth afterward. Professor Tedeschi explained, “People develop new understandings of themselves,17 the world they live in, how to relate to other people, the kind of future they might have and a better understanding of how to live life.”
The characteristics that researchers positively associate with PTG, in fact, read like a road map to the personality of the Red Erwin that my family and I knew and loved: humor, kindness, leadership, curiosity, honesty, bravery, judgment, forgiveness, modesty, fairness, gratitude, hope, extraversion, effort and perseverance, and strong religious beliefs. According to a recent analysis, 50 percent of all contemporary veterans18 and 72 percent of veterans with PTSD report at least moderate PTG in connection to their worst traumatic event.
Red may have naturally been highly resilient, but he also may have been a case history in the power of post-traumatic growth to enhance life after terrible adversity.
Red Erwin never had the occasion to visit Japan after the war, but several of his B-29 comrades did. One of them was Hap Halloran, the navigator of the Rover Boys Express who had been shot down over Japan on January 27, 1945, and put on display in a Tokyo zoo.
After the Japanese surrender on August 14, 1945, Hap and several hundred other prisoners lingered for a time at the Omori prisoner-of-war camp near Tokyo, waiting for repatriation and living on
rations air-dropped from B-29s.
“One day there were ships in Tokyo harbor,” he told me sixty years later. “They looked like Americans. You can just imagine what we felt. Then some B-29s came over. They were at low altitude and the bomb bay doors were open, and they gently made a dry run past and then came back and disgorged pallets with 55-gallon drums with all kinds of clothing and medication. Those were our guys! Those B-29s never looked better than when they were doing that for us. I understand we lost seven planes on all those relief missions. So here are those guys doing their best for us, and they lost their lives. After that, some US Marines came in on landing craft and picked us up. Can you imagine that? To see the American flag flying? It was August 29, 1945, and it was the happiest day of my life. We were taken aboard the hospital ship Benevolence. It was white and clean and perfect. And that was the first chance I had to wash. It took months because of all the sores, and my skin had changed color. You couldn’t rub very hard. But I was on the way home.”
Hap was lucky to be rescued. Scores of other B-29ers captured by the Japanese were beheaded, burned, starved, beaten, and tortured to death before the war ended.
On September 2, while Hap was still aboard the Benevolence in Tokyo Bay, he heard a tremendous commotion. So he dragged himself out of sick bay and made it outside to the rail. “There must have been a total of eight hundred planes coming over Tokyo Bay, and they were our planes! They were fighter planes and medium bombers and everything.”
It was the flyover of the USS Missouri that marked the final Japanese surrender. He heard a wave of thunder gathering beyond the horizon, growing louder and louder. He knew it could only be one thing. It was an armada of hundreds of B-29s that filled the sky and swooped at low altitude over the ceremony aboard the Missouri.