Beyond Valor

by Jon Erwin

  9“Well, this is the kind of person that one can adore”: McCullough, Truman, 755.

  10“The first thing you find out is that he calls you by name”: Ken Hechler, Working with Truman: A Personal Memoir of the White House Years (New York: Putnam, 1982), 20.

  11“When a butler or doorman or usher would enter the room”: Robert J. Donovan, Conflict and Crisis: The Presidency of Harry S. Truman, 1945–1948 (New York: Norton, 1977), 148.

  12“He always made everybody feel they were a part of a great team”: Doyle, Inside the Oval Office, 58.

  13On his first full day as president: Doyle, Inside the Oval Office, 46–61.

  14“I’m not big enough for this job”: Donovan, Conflict and Crisis, 15.

  15“magnified his eyes enormously”: R. Gordon Hoxie, Command Decision and the Presidency: A Study in National Security Policy and Organization (New York: Reader’s Digest Press, 1977), 79.

  16“He was the best in the world”: Doyle, Inside the Oval Office, 47.

  17“There are a great many different factors”: Hoxie, Command Decision and the Presidency, 79.

  18“As a veteran of the First World War”: Richard F. Haynes, The Awesome Power: Harry S. Truman as Commander in Chief (Baton Rouge, LA: LSU Press, 1999), 15.

  19“His personal and professional experience”: Hamby, Man of the People, 484.

  20“I get up at five-thirty every morning”: John Hersey, “Mr. President, Quite a Head of Steam,” New Yorker, April 7, 1950.

  21After his morning walk: Doyle, Inside the Oval Office, 46–61.

  22“I discovered that being a president is like riding a tiger”: Harry S. Truman, Memoirs of Harry S. Truman: Years of Trial and Hope, 1946–1952 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956), 1.

  23“You could go into his office with a question”: Robert J. Donovan, Tumultuous Years: The Presidency of Harry S. Truman, 1949–1953 (New York: Norton, 1982), 24.

  24“Truman was a dirt farmer”: Doyle, Inside the Oval Office, 59.

  25“We hadn’t expected very much”: Doyle, Inside the Oval Office, 59.

  26“I’d rather wear that medal than be president”: James H. Willbanks, ed., America’s Heroes: Medal of Honor Recipients from the Civil War to Afghanistan (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2011), xv.

  Chapter 7: Homecoming

  1“I cannot endure the thought of letting my people suffer”: Takeshi Suzuki, The Rhetoric of Emperor Hirohito: Continuity and Rupture in Japan’s Dramas of Modernity (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017), 91.

  2“Fundamentally the thing that brought about the determination to make peace”: Robert M. Neer, Napalm: An American Biography (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013), 85.

  3“I, myself, on the basis of the B-29 raids”: E. Bartlett Kerr, Flames over Tokyo: The U.S. Army Air Forces’ Incendiary Campaign Against Japan, 1944–1945 (New York: D. I. Fine, 1991), 293.

  4“The war was lost when the Marianas were taken”: US Army Air Forces, Mission Accomplished: Interrogations of Japanese Industrial, Military and Civil Leaders of World War II (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1946).

  5“The firebombing probably led to an earlier end of the war”: Nicholas Kristof, “Tokyo Journal; Stoically, Japan Looks Back on the Flames of War,” New York Times, March 9, 1995, https://www.nytimes.com/1995/03/09/world/tokyo-journal-stoically-japan-looks-back-on-the-flames-of-war.html.

  6“Brother, I hope those are my discharge papers”: Donald L. Miller, D-Days in the Pacific (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 370.

  7“I watched Shigemitsu limp forward”: John Rich, “On the Deck of a Battleship, Men of Peace,” Christian Science Monitor, September 1, 1995, https://www.csmonitor.com/1995/0901/01091.html.

  8“that so lately belched forth their crashing battle”: Quoted in William Manchester, American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur, 1880–1964 (New York: Little, Brown, 1978), 527.

  9“a solemn agreement whereby peace may be restored”: Congressional Record 91, part 7 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1945), 8915.

  10Toshikazu Kase memories of surrender ceremony: Eclipse of the Rising Sun (London: Jonathan Cape, 1951), 7–13.

  11“Was the day beclouded by mists or trailing clouds?”: Donald Wallace White, The American Century: The Rise and Decline of the United States as a World Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 39.

  12Cushing General Hospital details: Nicholas Paganella, “Remembering Cushing Hospital, 70 Years Later,” Metro West Daily News (Framingham, MA), January 25, 2014, https://www.metrowestdailynews.com/article/20140125/OPINION/140127304.

  13“The effort to save it involved one particularly excruciating operation”: Sidney Shalett, “What Happens to a War Hero,” Saturday Evening Post, September 4, 1948.

  14“The disorder is widespread among aging veterans of World War II”: Associated Press, “Fifty Years Later, War Stress Ambushes WWII Vets,” Daily Courier (Yavapai County, AZ), August 1, 1995, https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=894&dat=19950801&id=kCYOAAAAIBAJ&sjid=lX0DAAAAIBAJ&pg=6953,97195&hl=en.

  15“In many studies PTG and PTSD are found to stem from similar traumatic events”: S. Moran, J. Schmidt, and E. Burker, “Posttraumatic Growth and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Veterans,” Journal of Rehabilitation 79, no. 2 (April 2013): 34–43.

  16Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun first described the concept of PTG: Richard G. Tedeschi and Lawrence G. Calhoun, “The Posttraumatic Growth Inventory: Measuring the Positive Legacy of Trauma,” Journal of Traumatic Stress 9, no. 3 (July 1996): 455–71.

  17“People develop new understandings of themselves”: Quoted in Lorna Collier, “Growth After Trauma: Why Are Some People More Resilient Than Others—and Can It Be Taught?” Monitor on Psychology, November 2016, https://www.apa.org/monitor/2016/11/growth-trauma.

  1850 percent of all contemporary veterans: J. Tsai, N. Mota, S. Southwick, and R. Pietrzak, “What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger: A National Study of U.S. Military Veterans,” Journal of Affective Disorders 189 (2014): 269–71, http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.stthomas.edu/10.1016/j.jad.2015.08.076.

  19“He was bedridden, but our reunion was a wonderful occasion”: William H. Stewart, “Time Heals Everything—Almost,” Saipan Tribune, July 26, 2005, https://www.saipantribune.com/index.php/a41e8eba-1dfb-11e4-aedf-250bc8c9958e/.

  Chapter 8: Guardian Angel

  1Crewmembers after the war: Ruth Orkin, “We Are the Living: Twelve Men in a Superfort,” Coronet, August 1948, and notes and letters from crewmen in Erwin family collection.

  2Fate of Eugene Strouse: Gregory Liefer, Broken Wings: Aviation Disasters in Alaska (Anchorage, AK: Publication Consultants, 2014), 134–38.

  3Soviet tactical nuclear weapons in Cuba: Robert McNamara on ABC’s Nightline, October 24, 1996. According to former CIA analyst Dino Brugioni, the SS-4 missiles in Cuba, which had the range to hit Washington, had warheads at their launch sites and could have been fired within a few hours of an order from Moscow. Newsweek, October 26, 1992, 39.

  4JFK thought the chances of nuclear war were “fifty/fifty”: Theodore Sorensen, interview by Carol Fleisher, Secret White House Tapes, A&E, 1997.

  5“the government had disregarded the feelings of the people”: “Honor to LeMay by Japan Stirs Parliament Debate,” New York Times, December 8, 1964, https://www.nytimes.com/1964/12/08/archives/honor-to-lemay-by-japan-stirs-parliament-debate.html.

  6“Bygones are bygones”: “Honor to LeMay by Japan Stirs Parliament Debate.”

  7“as far as the Defense Agency knows”: “Honor to LeMay by Japan Stirs Parliament Debate.”

  8“My solution to the problem would be to tell them”: Thomas Coffey, Iron Eagle: The Turbulent Life of General Curtis LeMay (New York: Crown, 1986), 356, 357.

  9“I used to worry about the fact that he had control”: Scott D. Sagan, The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 150, citing Air Force Oral History w
ith Wade.

  10“Restraint? Why are you so concerned with saving their lives?”: Gerard DeGroot, The Bomb: A Life (New York: Random House, 2011), 208.

  11Power and LeMay rushing bomb into service: Sagan, The Limits of Safety, 72, 73.

  12Eisenhower nuclear contingency plan: Bruce G. Blair, The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1993), 48, 49.

  13“certifiably off the deep end”: Bruce Blair, interview by Carol Fleisher.

  14October 23, 1962, events: “Foreign Relations: The Backdown,” Time, November 2, 1962, 27, 29.

  15“Can we, maybe before we invade, evacuate these cities?”: Evan Thomas, Robert Kennedy: His Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 223.

  16The air force dispersed hundreds of B-47 Sratojet bombers: Raymond Garthoff, Reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2011), 61.

  17U-2 straying into Soviet airspace: Sagan, The Limits of Safety, 136, 137; Dean Rusk, As I Saw It, ed. Daniel S. Papp (New York: Norton, 1990), 242.

  18October 27, incident at New Jersey radar post: Sagan, The Limits of Safety, 6.

  19Power and DEFCON alert: Blair, The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War, 24; Garthoff, Reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis, 37; Sagan, The Limits of Safety, 62, 63, 65, 72, 73; “The U.S. Air Force Response to the Cuban Crisis” (undated Air Force document, presumably soon after crisis), National Security Archive, 1998, 18, 19; Bruce Blair and Raymond Garthoff, interviews by Carol Fleisher.

  20Sullenberger inspired by Erwin: Chesley B. Sullenberger III, Sully: My Search for What Really Matters (New York: HarperCollins, 2016), 146.

  21“For some reason the story of the Tokyo air raid was not talked about”: Richard Lloyd Parry, “Tokyo Chooses to Forget the Night 100,000 Perished,” Times, March 11, 2005, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/tokyo-chooses-to-forget-the-night-100000-perished-m2hjmfwqh0t.

  22“I think Japanese just wanted to forget”: Ben Hills, “Tokyo’s Hell on Earth: The Night a City Died,” Sydney Morning Herald, March 4, 1995.

  23“I wonder if they had thought of the people on the ground”: Mari Yamaguchi, “US Veterans Who Firebombed Japan in WWII Meet Survivor,” Associated Press, December 9, 2005, https://apnews.com/42af0571c88e4f1c85c78d619801b70e/us-veterans-who-firebombed-japan-meet-survivor.

  24“For years after the war, Van Bush would wake up screaming”: Hills, “Tokyo’s Hell on Earth.”

  Chapter 9: Legacy in the Clouds

  1Gary Littrell’s comments are reconstructed by Jon Erwin from memory and from Littrell’s interview with the Library of Congress Veterans History Project, https://memory.loc.gov/diglib/vhp-stories/loc.natlib.afc2001001.89725/transcript?ID=mv0001.

  Appendix: Seven Prayers

  1“pardon all our manifold sins”: National Archives, “General Orders, 15 May 1776,” https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-04-02-0243.

  2“Gentlemen, I suggest that we have a word of prayer”: Gregory Corte, “How Presidents Pray,” USA Today, February 4, 2016, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/theoval/2016/02/04/how-presidents-pray-prayer-breakfast-eisenhower-obama/79786384/.

  3“In the beginning of the Contest with Great Britain”: 155 Cong. Rec. (2009), part 9, 11843, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CRECB-2009-pt9/html/CRECB-2009-pt9-Pg11843.htm.

  4“Strangely enough, after a bit of prayer”: U.S. President, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1953), 9.

  5At the moment Washington was inaugurated: “Washington’s Inaugural Address of 1789: A Transcription,” National Archives and Records Administration, https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/american_originals/inaugtxt.html.

  6“I now leave, not knowing when”: Abraham Lincoln, “Farewell Address,” from Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 9 vols., ed. Roy P. Basler (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953–55), https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/farewell.htm.

  7“God had decided this question in favor of the slaves”: Allen C. Guelzo, “Emancipation and the Quest for Freedom,” National Park Service, n.d., https://www.nps.gov/articles/emancipation-and-the-quest-for-freedom.htm.

  8“I’ve been driven many times to my knees”: Gregory Corte, “How Presidents Pray.”

  9“beseeching Him that He will give victory to our armies”: Congressional Record 75, part 13 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1932).

  10“our sons, pride of our Nation”: Congressional Record 154, part 8 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2008), 11503.

  11“has come with the help of God”: “Victory, Day of Prayer,” Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum, https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/proclamations/2660/victory-day-prayer.

  12“In times of national crisis”: “National Day of Prayer, 1952,” Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum, https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/proclamations/2978/national-day-prayer-1952.

  13“Oh! Almighty and Everlasting God”: Harry S. Truman, “A Prayer Said Over and Over All My Life from Eighteen Years Old and Younger,” Notes of August 15, 1950, Harry S. Truman Library and Museum, https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/node/404492.

  14“I am the most intensely religious man I know”: Joseph Hartropp, “God and the Presidency: The Faith of Dwight D. Eisenhower,” Christianity Today, October 27, 2016, https://www.christiantoday.com/article/god.the.presidency.the.faith.of.dwight.d.eisenhower/99103.htm.

  15“Let us go forth to lead the land we love”: “Inaugural Address: Transcript,” John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/historic-speeches/inaugural-address.

  16The following year Kennedy asked for God’s help: “War and Peace in the Nuclear Age; Europe Goes Nuclear; Interview with David Powers, 1986,” February 28, 1986, WGBH Media Library and Archives, http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/V_8946E771A345459DA076BD20131B96CB.

  17Prayers by Nixon: William Safire, “Nixon on His Knees,” New York Times, March 29, 1976, https://www.nytimes.com/1976/03/29/archives/nixon-on-his-knees.html.

  18Prayers by Ford: David M. Shribman, “Prayer and the Presidency,” Buffalo News, January 21, 1995, https://buffalonews.com/1995/01/21/prayer-and-the-presidency/.

  19Prayers by Carter: Shribman, “Prayer and the Presidency.”

  20Prayers by Reagan: Daniel Schorr, “Reagan Recants: His Path from Armageddon to Détente,” Los Angeles Times, January 3, 1998, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-01-03-op-32475-story.html.

  21“I have to realize that whatever I do has meaning”: Richard Land, The Divided States of America: What Liberals and Conservatives Get Wrong About Faith and Politics (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2011), 99.

  22“I have thought of something that is not part of my speech”: “Republican National Convention Acceptance Speech, July 17, 1980,” Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum, https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/7-17-80.

  23“My daily prayer is that God will help me”: Kiron K. Skinner, Annelise Anderson, and Martin Anderson, Reagan: A Life in Letters (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 654.

  24“Having come so close to death”: Paul Vorbeck Lettow, Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (New York: Random House, 2006), 50.

  25“God wanted that assassination attempt to happen”: John R. Barletta and Rochelle Schweizer, Riding with Reagan: From the White House to the Ranch (New York: Citadel Press, 2006), 56.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Author Interviews

  Interviews conducted from 2004 to 2019 by Jon Erwin, Andrew Erwin, and William Doyle, with family members Henry E. Erwin Jr., Betty Erwin, Ray Erwin, Karen Erwin Brown, Nancy Erwin Herndon, Bette Erwin Cobb, and Mark Ray; Red Erwin’s crewmates on the City of Los Angeles, Pershing Youngkin and Herb Schnipper; B-29 veterans Hap Halloran, Orville Blackburn, Ray Clanton, and Carl Barthold; survivor of the March 9–10, 1945, Tokyo air raid Shizuyo Takeuchi; and Jeffrey Hester and Geneva Robinson of the Veterans Administration H
ospital of Birmingham.

  Archives and Private Collections

  Author inspections of World War II–era B-29s FiFi (Fort Worth, Texas) and Sentimental Journey (Pima Air and Space Museum, Tucson, Arizona). B-29 technical manuals and research files, Pima Air and Space Museum, Tucson, Arizona.

  Henry E. Erwin correspondence, historical clippings, files and scrapbooks, autobiographical notes, Erwin Family Collection.

  Henry E. Erwin Oral History interview with Maj. Judd Katz, March 5, 1986; Henry E. Erwin Oral History interview, 1974; Erwin exhibits and historical file, Enlisted Heritage Hall, Air Force Historical Research Agency, Maxwell Air Force Base, Montgomery, Alabama.

  Museum exhibits and historical files, Center of the Tokyo Raids and War Damage, Tokyo, Japan.

  “Prepared to Die: Henry ‘Red’ Erwin and the Low-Level Bombing of Japan,” Oral History Interview with Henry E. Erwin, Tony Simeral, and Harry Mitchell by George Hicks, director of Airmen’s Memorial Museum, Suitland, Maryland, October 6, 1989, Air Force Historical Research Agency, Maxwell Air Force Base, Montgomery, Alabama.

  Robert St. John, script for Facts and Faces broadcast on Henry E. Erwin, National Broadcasting Company, August 1, 1946, Erwin Family Collection.

  Transcript of Decoration Ceremony on Guam, Medal of Honor for S/Sgt Henry Erwin, April 19, 1945, for shortwave relay to Blue network, San Francisco, for “Fighting AAF” program, Erwin Family Collection.

  Twenty-Ninth Bomb Group historical files, B-29 Museum, Pratt, Kansas, including material from the National Archives.

  William Doyle interviews for Inside the Oval Office: The White House Tapes from FDR to Clinton (New York: Kodansha, 1999); Carol Fleisher interviews for companion A&E special.

  Books

  Ambrose, Stephen E. Americans at War. New York: Berkley, 1998.

  Arnold, Henry Harley “Hap.” Global Mission. New York: Harper, 1949.

  Baime, A. J. The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.

  Barletta, John R., and Rochelle Schweizer. Riding with Reagan: From the White House to the Ranch. New York: Citadel Press, 2006.