by Jon Erwin
“God, I just screamed,” Hap told me. “And if I was proud in Harrington, Kansas, the first time I saw a B-29, I think I was ten times prouder as they came over that day.”
Within a year, Hap came home and left the military. “I was not fit to serve,” he explained.
Today, we would probably diagnose it as severe post-traumatic stress disorder, but back then there was much less medical knowledge about such things. For nearly forty years, Hap was plagued by nightmares, about falling through space, about fire, and about being beaten. Sometimes he would break windows, run out into the street, or flee into closets to cower from the beatings. People in adjoining hotel rooms would call the management to report their next-door neighbor was being attacked. He covered it up by working hard in a business career and feeling satisfied when his efforts were rewarded, but the nightmares never ended.
Then Hap started thinking about going back to Japan. He wanted to reconnect with people like the good people he met there, people who stepped in to comfort him at crucial points during his six months in hell. “Like the lady who gave me seven beans from out in her garden,” he told me. “The lady who gave me a small piece of soap when that was a risk to her. The fellow who talked me out of a problem. The guard who kept smiling and saying ‘Ohio’ to me. I hated him and accused him of cruelty, because I thought he was taunting me about home. But then I found out that he was just saying the word for ‘good morning’ in Japanese. He was just trying to be a human being. I was so regretful about that. People like the administrator from our prison camp who tried to help us and gave us a Bible. I thought there must be a lot of people back there like that.”
Hap went back to Japan a total of nine times, beginning in 1984. He visited most of the major cities and toured the grounds of the emperor’s palace. On one of his visits, he befriended a man in Shizuoka who took him up two hundred stairs to the crest of a mountain. He carried two bouquets of flowers. On top of the mountain were two obelisks. One was to honor some two thousand civilians killed in a B-29 raid on the city on June 19–20, 1945, and the other was to honor the twenty-three deceased B-29 crewmen from the 314th Bomb Wing who crashed that day after a midair collision.
Hap learned that Fukumatsu Itoh, a brave Japanese farmer, town councilman, and devout Buddhist, had come across the bodies and wreckage of the B-29s the day after they crashed, and he insisted on giving the Americans a decent burial beside the graves of the Japanese victims. When the war was over, Itoh built the two monuments to the Japanese and American victims and placed them next to each other on the summit of Mount Shizuhata, not far from Mount Fuji.
Hap also learned that Itoh had found a fire-scarred, partly crushed US Army canteen in the wreckage of one of the bombers, bearing the handprint of what Itoh assumed was the canteen’s owner. Every year, on the anniversary of the air raid, Itoh visited the crash site, said a prayer, and poured bourbon whiskey from the canteen on the ground to honor the spirits of the fallen. The ritual of healing and forgiveness earned him scorn from some in his community, but he kept doing it.
After Itoh died, a younger helper named Hiroyo Sugano continued the tradition. In 1991, he began an annual tradition of bringing the so-called Blackened Canteen to the Arizona memorial at Pearl Harbor and pouring whiskey from the canteen into the water, along with flower petals. Over time, Japanese and American veterans, military officers, and citizens joined both annual ceremonies, and the tradition continues to this day.
Standing before the two obelisks, the Japanese man told Hap, “If you would put your flowers on the civilians, I’ll put mine on the B-29 men. We’d like to honor them.” Hap Halloran and his new friend placed their flowers on the monuments. They bowed their heads and said a prayer together.
This was only one of the many surprises Hap experienced in Japan. He learned that a B-29 crewman who perished in the March 9–10 air raid was found the next day in a wheat field near a small town east of Tokyo. The townspeople, Halloran learned, “brought him to the temple and he was treated with dignity and honor, and eventually cremated and put into a box with silk lining and placed in a place of prominence in that temple.” Working from information on the fallen airman’s dog tags, Halloran was able to bring the news back to the man’s family, who never knew what happened to him.
On another occasion, Hap tracked down and befriended Kaneyuki Kobayashi, one of his captors at the Omori camp, where he had spent seven months in captivity. Kobayashi was a guard who had befriended him and had shared a few bites of chocolate and words of encouragement with him.
Incredibly, with the help of Japanese researchers and historians, Hap Halloran managed to track down two former enemy pilots who played a huge role in his life’s journey: Isamu Kashiide, the ace who shot down the Rover Boys Express, and Hideichi Kaiho, the pilot who saluted and held his fire as Halloran descended by parachute to earth.
Hap spent two days with Kashiide, who had shot down the most B-29s during the war, a total of seven. His approach was to attack from the front and target the Plexiglas nose of the aircraft. The two veterans discussed golf, family, and other things that older men think of, and they drank a toast to peace and friendship.
In 2002 and 2003, Hap visited Kaiho, who explained that his squadron followed the traditional bushido code of warrior chivalry rather than the brutal interpretation of the code that pervaded the Japanese military. Hap recalled the scene: “He was bedridden, but our reunion was a wonderful occasion.19 I was scheduled for a third visit on June 24, 2004; however he died one day before. I was invited to his pre-funeral in Tokyo. His son opened the casket for my final viewing of this gentleman flyer—the one who saluted me when I was helpless in my chute fifty-nine years earlier. I prayed as I stood at his casket and recalled those long-ago days. I saluted him as I walked away from his casket.”
Once he began visiting Japan, Hap Halloran experienced something wonderful. His nightmares stopped. He was a free man again, at peace and happy to be alive with his family and new Japanese friends.
Chapter Eight
GUARDIAN ANGEL
ON JUNE 5, 1945, WHILE RED ERWIN WAS IN THE burn ward at Northington Hospital in Alabama, the City of Los Angeles was damaged by antiaircraft fire and enemy fighters during a bombing mission over Kobe, Japan, and was forced to make an emergency landing on Iwo Jima with the fuel gauges at near zero, one dead engine, and a damaged wing and flaps. The wreckage of another B-29 blocked the main airstrip, and the City of Los Angeles had to land on the shorter fighter runway. Pilot Maj. Tony Simeral was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross (the predecessor of the Air Force Cross), the highest award for valor next to the Medal of Honor.
All the crew of the City of Los Angeles survived the war.1 When the fighting ended, they went their separate ways and entered the anonymity of postwar life, along with millions of other returning veterans.
Some of the crew adjusted easily and achieved swift personal and career success, but others struggled to gain their footing in the vast demobilization. Red stayed in touch with most of them. Many of the crew got married and had children, meaning that the probable grand total of people whose lives Red saved—and made possible—could number in the hundreds.
Tony Simeral, the City of Los Angeles air commander, retired from the Air Force as a full colonel in 1968, became a stockbroker and real estate investor, and died in 2000. In 1989, he joined Red for an oral history interview with an air force historian, passages from which are quoted in this book.
Pilot LeRoy Stables earned graduate degrees in physics and engineering, had two children, and retired in Florida. After the war, he became one of Red’s closest friends, and the two stayed in touch for the rest of their lives. Over the years, the one thing Stables declined to talk about with Red and Red’s family was April 12, 1945, the day Red was injured. All he would say was, “It was the darkest day of my life.”
Navigator Pershing Youngkin became a petroleum engineer for Standard Oil of California, had five children and three grandchildren, and ret
ired in Texas. Bombardier William Loesch started a successful business in Houston and retired there, and then moved to Florida. He had two children and five grandchildren. Leo D. Connors, the radar observer, became a postman in Madison, Wisconsin, and died around 1954. Flight engineer Vern W. Schiller stayed in the aviation business for the rest of his life. He was an engineer for Eastern Airlines, Pan Am, and Boeing Aircraft. He retired in Seattle.
Gunner Kenneth E. Young moved back to Norwood, Ohio, after the war. Gunner Howard Stubstad moved back to his native St. Paul, Minnesota, and had three children and a bunch of grandchildren. He became a carpenter, managed a building materials store, and spent eight years as the mayor of Buffalo, Minnesota. His free time was spent between golf, hunting, and fishing. Gunner Vernon G. Widemeyer returned to North Dakota and got into the television and electronics business. He lived on a small farm where he enjoyed camping, fishing, and hunting.
By far the most tragic fate befell Lt. Col. Eugene Strouse,2 the squadron commander who had ridden along on the mission that saw Red earn the Medal of Honor. After Red saved the lives of Strouse and the crew, Strouse saved Red’s life by breaking protocol and ordering the plane to Iwo Jima so he could receive emergency medical treatment.
After the war, Strouse became the head pilot for Reeve Aleutian Airways, a civilian airline company based in Alaska. On September 24, 1959, while piloting a C-54 aircraft in good flying condition and in normal weather, Strouse flew the plane into the side of a mountain on Great Sitkin Island. The crash killed Strouse, five crew, and eleven passengers, consisting of two civilians and nine servicemen: seven from the air force and one each from the army and navy.
According to author Gregory Liefer, an investigation revealed that Strouse was overdue on a flight evaluation, a clear violation of regulations, and he had apparently falsified his flight record to show he had received the required semiannual medical exams, when he hadn’t had one for three and a half years. When the doctor who had last examined Strouse was interviewed, he reported that Strouse had been diagnosed not only with glaucoma but with cerebrovascular disease, which can impair judgment and cause memory loss. If the Federal Aviation Administration had known this, Strouse would have been grounded.
Gen. Curtis E. LeMay remembered Red Erwin fondly and appeared with him at a war bonds event in Alabama after the war. LeMay went on to run the Berlin Airlift in 1948 and became commander of the Cold War–era Strategic Air Command (SAC) that same year. During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, as Air Force chief of staff, LeMay made an astonishing outburst to President John F. Kennedy at a White House meeting. LeMay advocated an immediate bombing and invasion of Cuba to destroy the Soviet nuclear3 missile sites and was disgusted by what he saw as JFK’s weak plan of a naval quarantine, or blockade, of the island and negotiations for a solution.
As JFK’s secret tape recorder captured LeMay’s words, the general told Kennedy that his plan “is almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich.” Comparing JFK to British prime minister Neville Chamberlain was the most shocking insult a general could hurl at a postwar president. Luckily, Kennedy ignored LeMay’s demand for “direct military intervention, right now” and navigated the world to a peaceful solution of the crisis. If JFK had taken LeMay’s advice, there is a good chance that nuclear war would have erupted, as neither man knew that Soviet officers stationed in Cuba had been given the authority to launch short- and intermediate-range nuclear missiles at US targets in the event of an American first strike or invasion, which likely would have ignited wider barrages of nuclear weapons. Roughly one hundred million people worldwide would have died in such a conflagration. At the time, JFK thought the chances of nuclear war were “fifty/fifty.”4
Some Japanese were appalled in late 1964 when LeMay was awarded the First-Class Order of Merit of the Grand Cordon of the Rising Sun by the Japanese government, its highest decoration for a foreigner, for his work in establishing Japan’s postwar air self-defense force.
Announcement of the award triggered a vigorous debate in the Japanese Parliament, where socialist member Hiroichi Tsujihara charged that “the government had disregarded the feelings of the people”5 in decorating a general involved in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Curiously, the debate focused on the atomic bombings, in which LeMay’s role was only to give the go signal when the takeoff weather was clear, rather than on the increasingly forgotten firebombings of Tokyo and other Japanese cites, of which LeMay was the hands-on mastermind.
The award was defended in Parliament by Japanese prime minister Eisaku Sato and Jun’ya Koizumi, director general of Japan’s Defense Agency. “Bygones are bygones,”6 said Prime Minister Sato, who in 1974 received the Nobel Peace Prize for bringing Japan into the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Sato added, “It should be but natural that we reward the general with a decoration for his great contribution to our Air Self-Defense Units.” Koizumi declared that “as far as the Defense Agency knows,7 General LeMay was not responsible for the dropping of the atomic bombs.”
LeMay was presented the award by Japanese Air Self-Defense Force chief of staff Gen. Shigeru Ura at the Iruma Air Base. It was a striking illustration of the world-shaping military and economic embrace of the United States and Japan in the postwar age.
General Shigeru Ura, Japan’s Self-Defense Forces chief of staff, bestows the First Order of Merit of the Grand Cordon of the Rising Sun upon General Curtis E. LeMay, US Air Force chief of staff. (AP, https://outlet.historicimages.com/products/rsn05449)
In 1968, Curtis LeMay, now retired from the air force and a fierce Vietnam War hawk, ran as the vice presidential candidate on the third-party ticket of former Alabama governor and notorious segregationist George Wallace. By then, a quote from his 1965 book Mission with LeMay, about the Vietnam War, had gained wide attention and would largely define his image in popular culture as an unhinged warmonger: “My solution to the problem would be to tell them8 [the North Vietnamese] frankly that they’ve got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression, or we’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age.”
Gen. Thomas S. Power, Red’s wing commander in 1945 and LeMay’s deputy, was LeMay’s successor as head at SAC, and during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he took actions that some thought highly dangerous. One of Power’s subordinates, Gen. Horace M. Wade, said, “I used to worry about the fact that he had control9 over so many [nuclear] weapons and weapons systems and could, under certain conditions, launch the force.” During one discussion of nuclear risks with a government contractor, Power exploded at the idea of not attacking Soviet cities. He said, “Restraint? Why are you so concerned with saving their lives?10 The whole idea is to kill the bastards. At the end of the war if there are two Americans and one Russian left alive, we win!”
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, both of Red’s former bosses, Curtis LeMay and Thomas Power, took actions that could have been extremely dangerous and risked hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives. Both Power and LeMay reportedly tried to rush the thermonuclear 9-megaton B53 gravity bomb into service11 at the Bunker Hill Air Force Base in Indiana. A civilian Pentagon official ruled it unsafe and blocked the request.
At the time, as SAC commander, General Power had both the ability to launch airborne nuclear forces and, under contingency plans12 approved by President Dwight Eisenhower and still in effect under President Kennedy, the legal authority to order a nuclear launch if the president couldn’t be reached. Some three thousand nuclear warheads were under the command of Power, a man who was, in the eyes of some who knew him, “certifiably off the deep end”13 and “not the sort of person who could be counted on to follow strict orders of the political leadership during a nuclear crisis,” according to nuclear historian Bruce Blair.
On October 23, 1962,14 the day after President Kennedy announced the existence of Soviet offensive missiles in Cuba in a nationwide television address, the stock market plunged, and in Florida there was a run on rifles and shotguns in sporting-goods stores.
I
n Los Angeles, civil defense officials announced that stores would be closed for five days if a war occurred, sparking a stampede on supermarkets. In one store, hand-to-hand fighting erupted over the last can of pork and beans.
Kennedy asked a civil defense official, “Can we, maybe before we invade, evacuate these cities?”15
The air force dispersed hundreds of B-47 Sratojet bombers16 to scattered civilian airfields to escape the first Soviet missile detonations, and one thousand combat aircraft swarmed into Florida air bases to join more than a hundred thousand troops poised to invade Cuba.
The risks of human or mechanical errors introduced the horrific possibility of an accidental nuclear launch. On the night of October 26, an American U-2 reconnaissance aircraft strayed into Soviet airspace17 over the Chukchi Peninsula when its navigation system failed. The pilot radioed his base in a panic, “Hey, I think I’m lost. I may be over Siberia. For Christ’s sake, tell me how to get home!” MiG interceptors scrambled to chase and shoot down the plane. Responding to the U-2’s SOS, several American F-102A Delta Dagger interceptors, fully armed with Falcon air-to-air nuclear missiles, were launched from Galena Air Force Base in western Alaska. While still over Siberia, the U-2 exhausted its fuel, flamed out, and began to glide back toward Alaska, steadily losing altitude. Over the Bering Strait, one of the F-102As spotted the U-2 and escorted it to a landing site on the Alaska coast.
On October 27,18 technicians at a New Jersey radar post signaled the national command headquarters that a missile had been fired from Cuba and was about to land on Tampa, Florida. Other US commands were informed that a nuclear assault seemed to have begun. It was soon recognized as a false alarm, triggered by test software accidentally inserted into the radar screen.