Beyond Valor

by Jon Erwin

  Lincoln’s second inaugural address on March 4, 1865, was itself an intense prayer for peace: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds . . . and cherish a just and a lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

  Lincoln accomplished his sacred mission, but he died on the eve of peace between the armies of the North and South.

  The Fourth Prayer

  In 1918, President Woodrow Wilson faced a critical moment in World War I, an industrial-scale slaughter that had been grinding on for four years and caused over forty million casualties. Russia had abandoned the Allied cause, enabling Germany to launch a spring offensive on the western front, and German troops were breaking through Allied lines and flooding into Western Europe, threatening, it seemed, the fall of Paris.

  Wilson, who practiced a lifelong study of religion and consulted the Bible every night before bed, proclaimed May 30, 1918, as a national day of prayer and fasting, and exhorted all Americans “of all faiths and creeds to assemble on that day in their several places of worship and there, as well as in their homes, to pray Almighty God that He may forgive our sins and shortcomings as a people and purify our hearts to see and love the truth.”

  Wilson declared that prayers should be given “beseeching Him that He will give victory to our armies9 as they fight for freedom, wisdom to those who take counsel on our behalf in these days of dark struggle and perplexity, and steadfastness to our people to make sacrifice to the utmost in support of what is just and true, bringing us at last the peace in which men’s hearts can be at rest because it is founded upon mercy, justice and good will.”

  Exactly one day later, a miracle occurred.

  On June 1, US Marines launched their first major operation of the war: the Battle of Belleau Wood, near the Marne River in France. It was a twenty-six-day battle that climaxed in a stunning victory that blocked and stopped the Germans on the road to Paris, saved the French capital, and set the stage for the Allied victory a few months later.

  Once again, a president’s battle prayer was answered with a history-shaping miracle.

  The Fifth Prayer

  As American troops prepared for one of the greatest turning points in twentieth-century history, the D-day landings on June 6, 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt united the nation in an epic, fervent prayer that he broadcast to the nation. “Almighty God,” Roosevelt intoned, “our sons, pride of our Nation,10 this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity. Lead them straight and true. Give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith.” He added, “Some shall never return. Embrace these, Father, and receive them, Thy heroic servants, into Thy kingdom.”

  FDR mentioned God in each of his inaugural addresses, asking for divine guidance through difficult times. Like Lincoln, FDR died on the eve of peace.

  When World War II ended, President Harry S. Truman declared a day of prayer on August 16, 1945, stating that global victory “has come with the help of God,11 Who was with us in the early days of adversity and disaster, and Who has now brought us to this glorious day of triumph. Let us give thanks to Him, and remember that we have now dedicated ourselves to follow in His ways to a lasting and just peace and to a better world.” In 1952, Truman made the National Day of Prayer an annual event. “In times of national crisis12 when we are striving to strengthen the foundations of peace,” he explained, “we stand in special need of Divine support.”

  Truman relied on a single personal prayer all through his adult life: “Oh! Almighty and Everlasting God,13 Creator of Heaven, Earth and the Universe: Help me to be, to think, to act what is right, because it is right; make me truthful, honest and honorable in all things; make me intellectually honest for the sake of right and honor and without thought of reward to me. Give me the ability to be charitable, forgiving and patient with my fellowmen—help me to understand their motives and their shortcomings—even as Thou understandest mine!”

  “I am the most intensely religious man I know,”14 said D-day commander Dwight Eisenhower, explaining that “nobody goes through six years of war without faith.” Eisenhower became the first and only president to write and read his own prayer at his inaugural ceremony in 1953, and weeks later, he became the first president to be baptized while in office.

  The Sixth Prayer

  In January 1961, President John F. Kennedy, a Catholic, a man of quiet faith and a regular churchgoer who rarely missed church on Sunday or a holy day of obligation, ended his inaugural address with these words: “Let us go forth to lead the land we love,15 asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth, God’s work must truly be our own.”

  The following year Kennedy asked for God’s help16 during one of the most dangerous crises the world had ever faced: the thirteen-day Cuban Missile Crisis.

  Twenty-four hours after the crisis began on October 17, 1962, an apocalyptic showdown loomed with the Soviet Union that threatened to kill tens of millions of people worldwide in a nuclear war. Only a handful of people beyond Kennedy knew of the impending showdown.

  At that moment, President Kennedy decided to slip away to pray at St. Matthew’s Cathedral, a few blocks from the White House. It happened to be the same day as the National Day of Prayer he had proclaimed six days earlier.

  Kennedy knew an old tradition among his tribe of Boston Irish Catholics, that those who visit a church for the first time are entitled to three wishes. Kennedy had been to this church many times before, but on the way to the cathedral, aide Dave Powers joked softly to his boss, “Don’t forget the three wishes.” Kennedy replied with deadly seriousness, “I only have one wish today.” It was, Powers recalled, a prayer that a nuclear war might be averted, with God’s help. In fact, according to Powers, every night before going to bed during his time in the White House, JFK got on his knees to pray.

  Having made his prayer in the cathedral, and informed by the possibility of divine intervention through his lifetime of personal prayer, John F. Kennedy navigated the world to a peaceful resolution of the missile crisis, a miracle that saved the lives of at least one hundred million civilians around the world.

  A decade later, in the darkest days of the Watergate scandal that torpedoed his presidency, Richard M. Nixon,17 raised as a Quaker, got on his knees to pray with Henry Kissinger, a Jew, inside the White House.

  The day he pardoned former president Nixon, Gerald R. Ford18 walked to church to pray. “I felt very strongly I was about to make a monumental decision, and I wanted the feeling that I had prayed and hoped for the best,” Ford remembered. Ford prayed again during the Mayaguez rescue operation in Cambodia in the spring of 1975, and he prayed before a summit with the Soviets at Helsinki the same year.

  During the 1978 Camp David negotiations, when Egyptian president Anwar Sadat angrily threatened to leave the talks, President Jimmy Carter,19 a devout Baptist and a Sunday school teacher, fell to his knees and said “a long, silent prayer” that he could rescue the Middle East peace process. He then rushed to Sadat’s cabin and convinced him to stay and reach a peace agreement with Israel.

  The Seventh Prayer

  Ronald Reagan earnestly believed he was on a mission from God to prevent a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. And in what could be considered a completely unexpected miracle, he did exactly that.

  Reagan, a man of quiet personal faith who kept a prayer card in his Oval Office desk and was the son of a devout Christian mother, confessed to a friend in 1971 that he feared “for the first time ever, everything is in place for the battle of Armageddon and the second coming of Christ.” He added, “It can’t be long now. Ezekiel says that fire and brimstone will be rained upon the enemies of God’s people. That must mean that they’ll be destroyed by nuclear weapons.”

  Five years later, when he first ran for pres
ident in 1976, Reagan20 yearned for divine guidance to discover his ultimate mission. “I have to realize that whatever I do has meaning21 only if I ask that it serves His purpose,” he said. “I believe that in my present undertaking, whatever the outcome, it will be His doing. I will pray for understanding of what it is He would have me do.”

  When he accepted the Republican nomination in 1980, Reagan ended his speech with a dramatic moment of hesitation and a call for God’s help. “I have thought of something that is not part of my speech.22 And I’m worried over whether I should do it.” He asked, “Can we begin our crusade, joined together, in a moment of silent prayer?” After his public prayer, he concluded with a phrase that has since become commonplace in political oratory: “God bless America.”

  Early in his presidency, in a letter to a friend, Reagan wrote: “My daily prayer is that God will help me23 to use this position so as to serve Him.”

  On March 30, 1981, just two months and ten days into Reagan’s first term, a gunman fired a bullet into his chest that landed a quarter of an inch from his heart. The razor-close brush with death deepened Reagan’s faith and clarified what the final great mission of his life would be. He recalled, “Having come so close to death24 made me feel I should do whatever I could in the years God had given me to reduce the threat of nuclear war; perhaps there was a reason I had been spared.” Reagan told one of his Secret Service agents, “God wanted that assassination attempt to happen.25 He gave me a wake-up call. Everything I do from now on, I owe to God.”

  Throughout his life, Reagan believed there was a divine plan that God had for every human being. And late in his life, when he saw his own death narrowly averted, he finally grasped what it was: to move the world away from Armageddon and toward a more peaceful future.

  The final great Oval Office prayer began in 1985, when Reagan sent a warm letter to new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, a message in which he practically pleaded for warmer relations and an end to the arms race. And in a head-spinning series of events over the next three years, Reagan and Gorbachev largely achieved those goals. Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, was himself baptized as a child into the Russian Orthodox Church, and later revealed he was a lifelong believing Christian.

  In the American Revolution, the writing of the Constitution, the Civil War and Emancipation, victory in World War I, the D-day landings, and the peaceful resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Cold War, a series of miracles shaped American history. Our greatness as a nation was achieved with divine help, one could truly believe, and through the power of prayer, invoked by leaders who held in their hands the power to save lives, just as Red Erwin did.

  AUTHOR NOTE

  RED ERWIN’S MEMORIES AND QUOTES IN THIS book are primarily from his oral histories, correspondence, and press interviews, and from Erwin family correspondence, scrapbooks, and interviews with and written accounts by Erwin family members, particularly Hank Erwin Jr. Unless otherwise indicated, quotations by others in this book are from author interviews.

  Some accounts of Red Erwin’s Medal of Honor action incorrectly assert it took place during a Japanese aerial attack over the Japanese mainland, when in fact it occurred in the area over Aogashima, a small volcanic island 220 miles south of Tokyo in the Philippine Sea and administered by the Tokyo Metropolis prefecture of Japan, which has a current population of less than two hundred Japanese citizens.

  In an article titled “Medal of Honor Recipient: Henry ‘Red’ Erwin” by Robert F. Dorr, in the WWII Quarterly dated November 20, 2018, and posted online at https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/daily/wwii/medal-of-honor-recipient-henry-red-erwin/, Dorr describes the moments before the phosphorus bomb exploded:

  A yellow, twin-engined Japanese fighter known as a Nick was descending off to their right. Meatball red circles were painted on its wings, and muzzle flashes appeared at its nose.

  “I got ’em,” said top turret gunner Sergeant Howard Stubstad. “There’s also four Zekes circling off to the left.”

  “We’re at the assembly point—” Erwin stammered.

  “Four of them!” a voice garbled out the others. “Four Zekes closing on our left!”

  Dorr quoted an unnamed crew member as recalling the “Japanese fighters were like yellowjackets swarming out of a disturbed nest.” He sourced his article to “quotes from Henry E. ‘Red’ Erwin Sr., gathered in interviews conducted by the author over several decades, beginning in 1961.” No other accounts sourced to Red Erwin or anybody else mention such an aerial attack. Dorr died in 2016.

  Similarly, some accounts of the emergency landing of the City of Los Angeles at Iwo Jima have it occurring during a Japanese aerial attack on the island. In accounts years later, Red said he was told after the fact that Iwo Jima was under attack as the City of Los Angeles made the emergency landing, including an air battle where sixteen Mitsubishi G4M “Betty” bombers were shot down by P-51s over or near Iwo Jima. However, the authors of this book have not found any documentation that either the Medal of Honor action or the emergency landing at Iwo Jima occurred under direct enemy fire.

  In 2018 and 2019, gunner Herb Schnipper, the last surviving member of the City of Los Angeles crew, had no memory of any attack that day at either location and doubted such attacks happened. On April 12, 1945, there were Japanese stragglers remaining in the hills and caves on Iwo Jima, and it is possible they were active with small arms or mortar fire, but if they were, or if enemy air attacks occurred around Iwo Jima that day, they did not appear to have interfered with Red’s evacuation and treatment at Iwo Jima.

  Multiple accounts from Red and other crew members in the months and years after the Medal of Honor action have William Loesch and/or Herb Schnipper administering a shot of plasma and/or a shot of morphine to Red inside the aircraft, minutes after his injury. In 2019, Schnipper had no memory of administering any shots and said he wouldn’t have known how to do it, although he said he and Loesch ministered to Red as best they could. Other accounts, including Red’s, have Red instructing crewmen on how to administer morphine to him. Schnipper was stationed in the rear of the plane and had to crawl through a long tunnel to get to the front, so Loesch may have already given a shot or shots before Schnipper got there. There are also disagreements in various accounts about whether Eugene Strouse or Roy Stables was sitting in the copilot’s seat at the time of the incident and about who forced the window open so Red could flip the bomb out. It was probably a group effort. The narrative in this book is our best effort to navigate the available evidence on these and other points.

  The exact percentage of Red Erwin’s body that sustained severe burns is not known, but following medical guidelines for such estimates, it was 20 percent at a very bare minimum, and probably significantly more. The burned areas comprised the entire right hand and arm and parts of the left hand and arm, right ear, eyelids, lips, nose, scalp, and parts of the face and neck.

  Additionally, according to Hank Jr., “Dad’s torso was pretty torn up. Not merely the burns but the use of his stomach area to supply flesh for building his arm back. At one time I understand his damaged arm was sewn to his side for up to a year to grow tissue and skin. He never went around with his shirt off. He was too sensitive about the sight. He never griped about it, but he never showed us the scars.” Hank Jr. estimates that some 50 percent of Red’s body was burned in total.

  Information on the history of burn care and white phosphorus injuries was obtained through interviews with David Barillo, former chief of the US Army’s Burn Flight Team; James H. Holmes IV, professor of surgery and director of the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center Burn Center of the Wake Forest University School of Medicine; Randy D. Kearns, assistant professor of healthcare management at the University of New Orleans; Alan Dimick, founder and former director of the burn unit at the University of Alabama at Birmingham; and Uri Aviv, Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery Department, Chaim Sheba Medical Center, Ramat Gan, Israel.

  NOTES

  Chapter 2: To
End This Business of War

  1“We could hardly believe our eyes”: Ernest Pickett and K. P. Burke, Proof Through the Night: A B-29 Pilot Captive in Japan (Salem, OR: Opal Creek Press, 2004), 19.

  2“Every day from morning to night, B-29s”: Quoted in Warren Kozak, LeMay: The Life and Wars of General Curtis LeMay (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2011), 194.

  3“I was scared! It was known that the B-29 was a huge plane”: Barrett Tillman, Whirlwind: The Air War Against Japan, 1942–1945 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010), 51.

  4“so chaotic that it was obvious upon my arrival”: R. Ray Ortensie, “Flashback: The ‘Battle of Kansas’ and the Birth of the Superfortress,” Elgin Air Force News, August 14, 2018, https://www.eglin.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/1602130/flashback-battle-of-kansas-and-the-birth-of-the-superfortress/.

  5“Although it replaced the B-17”: Robert O. Bigelow, “The Beginning of the End: The First Firebombing of Tokyo, 9–10 March 1945,” Virginia Aeronautical Historical Society, Virginia Eagles Newsletter, July 2007.

  6“The B-29 was the best airplane made at the time”: Ed Shahinian, interview, December 5, 2003, Library of Congress, American Folklife Center, Veterans History Project, https://memory.loc.gov/diglib/vhp/story/loc.natlib.afc2001001.11156/transcript?ID=sr0001. Note: On B-29 crews, technically, the pilot was called the air commander and the copilot was called the pilot. In this book, we use the more familiar designations of pilot and copilot. According to John Correll, “A Brave Man at the Right Time,” Air Force Magazine, August 2007: “The B-29 standard crew had 11 members. Of these, five crewmen—four gunners and a radar observer—were in the back, aft of the bomb bays. The other six were in the forward section of the Superfort. The pilot, copilot, and bombardier (who also served as nose gunner) were up front on the flight deck. The flight engineer’s position was just back of the copilot, beside the nose wheel door.”