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Flyboys:
A True Story of Courage by James Bradley Rating: ••• (Recommended) |
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Disturbing Some readers
will pick up James Bradley’s new book of World War II on the Pacific Island
of Chichi Jima, Flyboys,
and expect a story similar to the one he told in Flags of
Our Fathers, his story of Meet the
expectations of your family and home community by making effort upon effort,
always mindful of the honor of your name. If alive, do not suffer the
disgrace of becoming a prisoner; in death, do not leave behind a name soiled
by misdeeds. — “Imperial
Japanese Army Field Service Code” In
the European war, On
that Friday morning, the largest and most powerful naval attack force ever
assembled, with more than twelve hundred planes, launched the first carrier
raid on It was
a dangerous mission. Three days earlier, the air group commander on the USS Randolph
had assembled all his Flyboys and announced, “Fellows, we’re on our way
to That wintery day’s weather was murky, cloudy, windy, rough,
cold, and wet. Flyboys like Bill Hazlehurst and Floyd Hall now appreciated
all the damp flying they had done in The
strike force lifted off early, plane after plane aloft with clockwork
precision. Gunner Robert Akerblom did not fly that
day, but he listened for news of his buddies’ progress. “Our ship piped a
Japanese radio station through the loudspeakers,” Robert said. “Our first
wave was supposed to hit The
Flyboys came in low, within antiaircraft range, and they took a heating.
“Charlie Crommelin had over two hundred holes in
his plane when he returned,” remembered fighter pilot Alfred Bolduc. “He had
fifty-four holes in one gas tank.” With
so many planes over The
Japanese were surprised and unprepared. As a result, the carrier planes wreaked
havoc on factories, shipyards, supply depots, and railroad yards. But
bombing the Japanese mainland still brought a special terror. “We were
scared,” said Hazlehurst. “It was disconcerting bombing Charlie
Brown was caught when his two-seater SB2C Helldiver was shot down near “Americans
would be hitting just as hard if the situation was reversed,” Charlie said
with a chuckle years later. “Emotions run high in the immediate area; people
get upset when they’re bombed.” Eventually,
the party made its way to a railroad station. His captors took Charlie
outside and made him kneel in the dirt and lean forward. “I had seen the
photo of the Australian pilot about to be beheaded,” Charlie said. “Someone
shoved me so my head was parallel with the ground. Then I heard sharp orders.
I thought I was about to have my head cut off.” But Charlie Brown would live to see
another day. Because the weather worsened around On a cold Sunday morning, February 18,
five Flyboys awoke ready to tackle their first combat missions. This was the
day they had prepared for. In the month they had been at sea, they had had
plenty of time to think about what that first taste of combat would be like.
Now they were about to learn. On the USS Randolph, pilot Floyd
Hall would wing into action with his gunner, Glenn Frazier, and his radioman.
Marve Mershon. On the
nearby USS Bennington, radioman Jimmy Dye and gunner Grady York
readied for their flight. Jimmy, Glenn, Marve, and
Grady were all just nineteen years old. Floyd must have been one of the “old
men” to them, because he was already twenty-four. The boys were briefed on the day’s
target, the airfields and radio stations on Chichi Jima.
“Chichi Jima was a mean place,” said pilot
Phil Perabo. “They had very good gunners there.
When you hit Chichi, you were hitting a valley between two mountains.” Fellow pilots Leland Holdren and Fred Rohlfing would
fly into battle with Floyd that day. “Floyd, Fred, and I were a division of
three,” Leland told me decades later. “This strike on Chichi was our first
time in battle. We were greenhorns. You can imagine our anxiety.” The winter sun did not rise until 7:12 A.M. on the morning of February 18,
1945. The USS Randolph began launching her planes at 10:54 A.M. The plane carrying Floyd,
Glenn, and Marve was in the last group and launched
after noon. They flew off into rainy, overcast skies. Over on the USS Bennington, Jimmy
Dye and Grady York were in their ready room being briefed on the same target.
They would fly that day with pilot Bob King. “Our mission that day,” remembered Ralph Sengewalt, “was to bomb
Chichi Jima’s small airstrip. They said we’d have
limited opposition.” February
18 in the Pacific was February 17 back home, and it marked two years to the
day since Jimmy had enlisted. “We hadn’t been in cold climates until then,”
Vince Carnazza remembered. “I had a black
navy-issue sweater and Jimmy asked if he could borrow it. I gave it to him
and said, ‘If I don’t get that sweater back, it’s your ass.’” As
they were headed out the door, Jimmy did something that Ralph Sengewalt will never forget. “Jimmy stopped at the door,”
Ralph told me, “turned around,
and with a smile, tossed his wallet to someone who was remaining behind. As
he did it he called out, ‘Just in case I don’t come back,
see to it that my mom and dad get this.’” Kidding
was one thing, but Flyboys almost never spoke so directly about death. “When
Jimmy said that,” Ralph recalled, “I had a strange feeling then and there. We
never talked about not coming back.” The
assault two days earlier on “When
Grady and I shook hands on the flight deck,” Ken recalled, “he said. ‘I’m
really scared.’ Grady always smiled when he talked. But at that moment he
wasn’t smiling. Just then I felt Grady had a premonition. Even at that young
age. I could feel it.” Jimmy
had tossed his wallet, but he did keep something for good luck that day. His
girlfriend, Gloria Nields, later told me: “In the
last letter I got from Jimmy he wrote, ‘I am flying off now with your white
scarf on. With
that, the three American boys took off in their Avenger, pilot King. radioman Jimmy, and gunner Grady. Two of the three had signaled
that this flight held special danger for them. King, also on his first combat
flight, had not expressed any qualms. Only one of them would return. The briefers had been wrong. The antiaircraft opposition was
fierce that day. “The
antiaircraft fire was very heavy and very accurate,” said gunner William
Hale. “There was black smoke everywhere, and we were getting bounced around
with the concussion of the shells. I was facing aft with a pair of machine
guns in my hands, looking for something to shoot at and wishing we could get
the hell out of there.” “It was overcast
over the island,” remembered pilot Dan Samuel-son. “There was a hole in the
clouds. A lot of the planes were going through that hole, and the Japanese
gunners just plugged that hole with antiaircraft fire.” One after
another, the carrier pilots made their glide-bombing runs over Chichi Jima. Pilots Leland Hoidren,
Fred Rohifing, and Floyd Hall — the “division of three” — circled above, waiting their turn. “The most
dangerous time is when you’re just hanging out, going slow,” said Robert Akerbiom. “Once you’re in the dive, you feel the speed
and it relieves the tension.” “We had to keep
circling until the others made their dives,” Leland Hoidren
said. “As you circle, you fly away from the optimum point from which to make
your dive. If you dive relatively straight down over the target, you go in
fast. But we were circling wide, and when it came time to make our dives, we
dove in a less severe angle and didn’t generate as much speed as the guys
before us.” Leland began his
dive into the flak with Fred Rohlfing and Floyd
following behind. “When the antiaircraft fire comes up,” said fighter pilot
Alfred Bolduc, “you see little red dots. When they get closer, they’re about
the size of a baseball bat diameter. They’re coming at you by the hundreds.” Two of those
hundreds of red dots found their mark: Both Fred’s and Floyd’s planes were
hit. Rohifing’s Avenger burst into flame and he,
radioman Carrol Hall, and gunner Joe Notary never
made it out. Floyd’s plane
did not catch fire, but it was fatally damaged and it was all he could do to
make a safe water landing. Leland had flown off at the completion of his run,
and since Floyd’s was the last plane, no one saw him or his crew land in the
water. Letters from the navy to the parents of the three downed boys would
later say that the probabilitY of their having
survived the landing “was extremely low.” But Floyd, Marve, and Glenn made it out of the plane safely and inflated
their Mae Wests. They were wet, cold, and scared,
but they were alive. They had landed between Chichi Jima
and Ani Jima, a small uninhabited
spit of land hardly big enough to have its own name. For some reason, Glenn
split off from the other two and made his way to Ani
Jima, while Floyd and Marve
swam to Chichi Jima. Floyd and Marve were now in the same general area that George Bush
had found himself in six months earlier, though George had landed a bit
farther out. Soldiers standing on the same cliffs where Nobuaki Iwatake had observed George’s rescue now saw Floyd and Marve in the water. Fisherman Maikawa
Fukuichiro and Warrant Officer Saburo
Soya were told to bring the Americans in. They paddled out about a hundred
yards and found Floyd and Marve in the frigid
water, ~almost half paralyzed and.. . on the point of sinking,” as Fukuichiro later recalled. “Their lips were blue and they
looked cold.” On the beach,
the boys were allowed to warm themselves by a fire. Floyd was dressed in his
one-piece flight suit and Marve was down to his
white woolen long johns. Warrant Officer Soya told Fukuichiro
to phone the headquarters of the 308th Battalion. The officer on the other
end of the line ordered the flyers brought to the 308th, which would get
credit for their capture. At the 308th
Battalion headquarters, the soldiers searched the prisoners and relieved
Floyd of his pistol and Marve of his survival
knife. These trophies were dispatched to Major Matoba. But soon
everyone on the island had to take cover once again. More waves of Flyboys
were approaching. Floyd and Marve were bundled into
an air-raid shelter. Major Matoba retreated to his cave. As the falling bombs
exploded in the sunshine outside, Matoba examined
Floyd’s pistol and Marve’s knife. In the blackness,
the major ran his hands over the Flyboys’ possessions as he drank and
thought. The swarms of
carrier planes kept the island hopping that day. “The February
eighteenth raids were the fiercest air raids we experienced,” said
antiaircraft gunner Usaki. “During the day about a
thousand planes raided the island. As antiaircraft personnel, we were almost
always at our battle stations and at night we also had to go to battle
stations. We were very tired and every chance we got we slept in the quarters
but stayed on the alert.” The gunners were
tired but dedicated. “We often had to eat our meals at our positions,” said
Lieutenant Jitsuro Suyeyoshi.
To the Flyboys, it seemed the emperor’s gunners didn’t pause for a bite.
“There was so much flak, you could walk on it,” said Robert Akerbiom. Ralph Sengewait
added, “It looked like every tree on the island was firing at us.” And still the Flyboys came. Pilot Jesse
Naul was flying behind Bob Cosbie’s
plane, which in turn was to the right of Bob King’s Avenger, with Jimmy Dye
and Grady York aboard. Jesse later told me what happened: We came in at about nine thousand feet
and we were getting ready to go into our dive. I was behind Cosbie’s plane. Suddenly, antiaircraft fire shot Cosbie’s right wing off. His plane went into a clockwise
spin, spinning clockwise down toward the right, where his wing had been. Cosbie’s plane flipped upside down and went
sideways. It slammed into King’s plane. Cosbie’s
left wing hit King’s plane between the turret and the vertical stabilizer. At
the same time, Cosbie’s propeller hit King’s left
wing and chewed off four feet of it. King’s plane then went into a spin.
King thought they would crash, so he told his crew to bail out. Jimmy and
Grady bailed out. My crew yelled, “We see two chutes.” King had his seat belt off, fixing to
bail out, and to his surprise, he got the plane straight. He “caught it,”
meaning he caught the spin and righted the plane. He kept flying. As Grady and Jimmy bailed out, Cosbie’s Avenger went into a fatal spin. Cosbie, gunner Lou Gerig, and
radioman Gil Reynolds never made it out. Jesse Naul
speculated on what their last minutes might have been like: Cosbie went into his spin at nine to ten
thousand. His plane just spun and spun. Let’s say they were all alive when
the plane went into that spin. Even though they were healthy American males,
the centrifugal force would have pinned them to the wails and they wouldn’t
have been able to get out. If they were conscious, they knew what
was happening and were fighting to get out. They’d be trying to unhook their
seat belts and pop the doors off, but they wouldn’t have been able to get out
of their seats. When a loaded seventeen-thousand-pound
plane is spinning, it creates a lot of force. It’s like a saucer at an
amusement park that is spinning and pinning you back. It’s the same thing.
The force of the spin would force them to remain in the position they were in
when they started going down. Finally, they smacked into the water and that
was it. Jimmy
and Grady floated down in the midst of exploding shells. ~Their chutes were
surrounded by antiaircraft bursts,” recalled Joe Bonn. “1 dismissed them as
shot up, dead.” But amazingly, the two crewmen landed safely just off shore. “We
flew down to drop them a life raft,” Ralph Sengewalt
said, “but we didn’t drop it because we could see Jimmy and Grady in
knee-deep water, walking
toward the shore. We thought they’d be prisoners and they’d be safe — at least that was our hope.” Now
there were four Flyboys in Japanese hands on Chichi Jima
—
Floyd Hall, Marve Mershon. Jimmy Dye, and Grady York. Glenn Frazier was huddled in the
bushes across the channel on uninhabited Ani Jima. Floyd and Marve were held at the 308th Battalion headquarters for
the rest of the day and overnight. Jimmy and Grady were captured by the 275th
Battalion and taken to General Tachibana’s headquarters. Captain Kimitomi Nishiyotsutsuji
remembered that General Tachiharm encouraged
anyone who wanted to beat the two bound nineteenyear-olds
to do so. The general further warned that anyone who protected the boys by
putting them in an air-raid shelter, or was lenient with them in any way, would
face his wrath. The next day,
Monday, February 19, Jimmy and Grady were taken to Major Yoshitaka Hone’s headquarters. Major Hone could speak some English
and he intet-rogated them. Glenn remained hidden in
the bushes on Ani Jima.
At night he must have shivered in the winter cold. He had a canteen full of
water, no food, and only a little hope. Early in the
morning of the nineteenth, Floyd and Marve were
taken from the 308th Battalion to General Tachibana’s headquarters, with a
Stop to visit Lieutenant Jitsuro Suyeyoshi’s regiment. Suyeyoshi
and the 308th both had a claim on the prisoners and they would later discuss
who got to kill which one. Floyd
and Marve were tied up outside a guardhouse for
three and One half hours, from 6:30 A.M. to 10:00 A.M. There, anyone who
Wanted to absorb some Yamato damashii kicked
and slapped the two defenseless boys. Lieutenant Suyeyoshi
admired the way the two Flyboys stoically endured their punishment. He
ordered his men to assemble in front of the prisoners. “I offered them a
drink of whiskey from my hip flask and a cigarette” Suyeyoshi
said, “and then I turned around to the enlisted men in the crowd and told
them, ‘These two flyers were working for their country and they are brave
men, and I expect all of you to take an example from them.’” But respect did not mean mercy.
American bombs had killed some of Suyeyoshi’s men
the day before and he wanted revenge. Later that afternoon, Suyeyoshi spoke to Matoba about
the casualties and the major promised retribution. “Lieutenant Suyeyoshi wanted a flyer to execute in order to show his
men that they were personally responsible for shooting down a plane or a
flyer, and to give them more fighting spirit and to build morale,” Matoba said. Floyd and Marve
were loaded back into a truck and taken to Tachibana’s headquarters so the
general could get a few licks in. But before he had a chance, an air-raid
siren sounded and Tachibana turned to scurry to his protective cave. One
soldier moved toward Floyd and Marve to untie them
and bring them into a shelter. General Tachibana noticed and barked. “Why are
you fooling around there? We do not care if they die or not.” Later that day. Floyd and Marve were moved to Major Hone’s
headquarters for interrogation~ where they joined Jimmy and Grady. Floyd and Marve
had flown off the USS Randolph, Jimmy and Grady belonged to the USS Bradley
noted at the end of the book that proceeds from the sale of Flyboys
have been used for scholarships for American high school and college students
to study in Steve
Hopkins, April 23, 2004 |
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ã 2004 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the May 2004
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Flyboys.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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