The Last Fighter Pilot Read online

  As their bombing on Tokyo concluded, the B-29s and their P-51 escorts began turning south for the flight back to Iwo Jima. Halfway between Tokyo and Mount Fuji, a call came in over the radio from one of the B-29s.

  “Bushmaster Leader! We got an inbound bogey approaching from 12 o’clock high! Repeat, inbound bogey at 12 o’clock high!”

  The phrase “12 o’clock high” was used among American military aviation personnel to describe the location of attacking enemy aircraft based on the imagery of a clock face. The bomber was considered the center; the term “high” meant above the bomber, while “level” meant at the same altitude and “low” meant the enemy was below the bomber. Enemy fighter pilots preferred this “12 o’clock high” location, because the target aircraft had difficulty spotting the attacking fighter, which was in the bomber’s “blind spot.” For the aggressor, this proved the best position from which to get a shot at the bomber’s wings and engines.

  Vande Hey looked up through the top of the Mustang’s glass cockpit into the blue skies above. Sure enough, the twin-engine Japanese Ki-45 “Dragon Slayer” was about to take a shot at the B-29.

  Vande Hey pulled back on the stick of his plane, Jeanne VII, and put it in a climb, bringing the Dragon Slayer into his gun sights. He fired a quick burst from his .50-caliber, striking the aircraft and sending it into an evasive maneuver. Not a shoot-down, but good enough for the time being. The threat, at least, had been removed.

  A minute later, he spotted a twin-engine Japanese Ki-46 “Dinah” moving in. It made a diving turn to the right, again, targeting the American bombers.

  Vande Hey set an immediate intercept course, closed on the enemy, and opened fire. This time, his bullets sprayed into the engine and right wing of the enemy aircraft. Debris flew off the plane, and the Dinah burst into flames. Vande Hey quickly broke off to avoid a mid-air collision with the crippled fighter. Jerry, soaring several hundred feet above with the Yellow Flight, saw the Dinah fall to the earth. The shoot-down of the Dinah marked Vande Hey’s third confirmed kill of the war.

  The pilot rejoined his squadron, which pushed on toward Iwo Jima. Remarkably, the American P-51 pilots’ casualties for their first mission over Japan had been low. One pilot did not return: the P-51 flown by Lieutenant Robert Anderson from the 531st Squadron was spotted by his fellow pilots burning and on a crash pattern over Tokyo. Anderson never bailed out and lost his life that day. A second P-51, flown by Captain Frank Ayers of the Forty-Seventh Squadron pilot, ran out of fuel on the flight back to Iwo Jima. Captain Ayers was more fortunate than Anderson—he bailed out near the U.S. Navy destroyer on watch in waters just north of Iwo Jima and was picked up by a U.S. Navy search-and-rescue team. Meanwhile, Jerry and the rest of the Seventy-Eighth landed back at Iwo Jima without losing a single plane from their squadron.

  Later that evening, after hitting the hot tubs and grabbing a hot meal, Jerry and his squadron mates attended the post-mission intelligence de-briefing in the squadron Quonset hut. There, they learned that only three B-29s—out of the hundred that had flown the mission—had been lost. By contrast, at least twenty-one Japanese fighter aircraft had been shot out of the skies over the Japanese mainland, and the B-29s had unloaded tons of deadly and destructive fire on Japanese ground targets.

  All in all, the first joint long-range mission against the Japanese homeland had been a smashing success, with the American pilots inflicting far more damage on the enemy than they had suffered. Eventually, the air raid of April 7 would be remembered as the greatest accomplishment in the history of the Seventh Fighter Command. Just as their fellow patriots had done at Normandy, these pilots had taken the fight directly to the shores of the enemy under heavy fire. Many of the men also enjoyed a bit of personal satisfaction that the raid had come on April 7, subtle vengeance for what the Japanese had inflicted on December 7, 1941, at Pearl Harbor.

  But the stubborn Japanese were far from finished. Brainwashed into a kamikaze mentality and prepared to commit suicide for their emperor, they refused to surrender, and remained capable of dealing a deadly blow to the Americans.

  This would be a long air-war of attrition, the American intelligence officers told their pilots that night, followed by a dreaded invasion of the Japanese homeland itself. For Jerry and the men of the Seventy-Eighth, the real war was just beginning. Mortal danger, as always, loomed over the horizon.

  CHAPTER 14

  The Second Empire Mission and the Death of a President

  April 12, 1945

  Along with the destruction of key Japanese targets, the April 7 mission had accomplished another tactical purpose: it proved that the long, round-trip mission could be made and effective. The rest of April and May brought more fighter-accompanied bombing runs against Japan, shaking the island to its core and laying the groundwork for a U.S. invasion. Every day, it seemed, Jerry piloted the Dorrie R through the Pacific skies, alternating between attacks on Chichi Jima and Japan.

  Meanwhile, news arrived from the States and from Europe, reminding the men living inside this temporary hell how much the world was changing on distant shores. Perhaps the largest collective shock came just five days after their first great mission. On April 12, 1945, a radio announcement from CBS interrupted regular programming of “The American Frontier with the Western Family and Daniel Boone”:

  We interrupt this program to bring you a special news bulletin from CBS World News. A press association has just announced that President Roosevelt is dead. The President died of a cerebral hemorrhage. All we know so far is that the President died in Warm Springs, in Georgia.

  The message spread like wildfire across the globe. On Iwo Jima, the Americans were stunned. A profound mourning followed. FDR had been a highly controversial president, but to many of these pilots—who had known no other presidents and knew little of politics except their country had been attacked—Roosevelt had, in a way, been a comforting father-figure. He was also their commander-in-chief.

  Increasing their anguish that day on the island were several losses within their own ranks. April 12 marked the Seventh Fighter Group’s second long-range mission to Japan. With windy conditions at takeoff, this second mission did not begin as smoothly as the first nor progress nearly as well. Several pilots, including Second Lieutenant Maurice F. Gourley of the Forty-Seventh Fighter Squadron and First Lieutenant Gordon A. Christoe of Jerry’s Seventy-Eighth, were shot down and killed over Tokyo. First Lieutenant Fred White, flying as Tapp’s wingman, was another casualty. Tapp had been leading his flight group off the far right of the B-29 fleet over Tokyo when he looked down and spotted a Japanese “Tony” moving into firing position. Tapp accelerated downward and got the Tony into his gun sights. White, as Tapp’s loyal wingman, executed a crisp maneuver to follow his boss down toward the target. Tapp wasted no time opening fire on the enemy fighter, and the Tony fell from the sky. Unfortunately, however, White’s shadow maneuver behind Tapp was a bit too close—spent cartridges from Tapp’s wing-mounted .50-caliber machine gun got sucked into White’s engine, creating an instant mechanical problem.

  Tapp recognized the problem immediately and knew he had to get his wingman away from Japan. Bailing over the ocean was much preferable to doing so over Tokyo and becoming a POW.

  With White still on his wing, Tapp swung his Mustang around in a wide circle and set his back out towards the Pacific. Within minutes, the two aircraft had cleared the Japanese shoreline. White’s Mustang may not make it far, but there were also designated rescue points in the ocean, with a U.S. Navy warship and two American submarines pre-positioned for rescue purposes.

  White’s plane began to leak coolant as it struggled against headwinds. From the glass canopy of his P-51, Tapp saw more and more fluid spraying from White’s engine, creating a long line in the sky behind the plane. Tapp recognized the plane would never make it back to Iwo Jima. Both pilots, however, knew the drill for engine failure over water. Unlike larger aircraft such as long-range bombers or cargo planes, where ditching t
he plane into the sea might be viable, fighter planes would not float for any length of time, and the P-51, with its air-scoop under its fuselage, would sink faster than most fighters. In fact, according to the P-51’s operations manual, the plane might, in a lucky scenario, stay on the surface for one and a half to two seconds before sinking. In this instance, a P-51 pilot’s best option was to bail. Inside the cockpit of the dying Mustang, White recognized the move as his only chance for survival.

  Tapp vectored a course over the position of one of the rescue submarines and signaled for White to bail out. Hopefully the American submarine, still submerged somewhere under the Philippine Sea, would surface and pick him up.

  The leader and his wingman exchanged thumbs up. White pulled the emergency release handle, located on the right forward side of the cockpit, all the way back to release the canopy.

  Tapp watched as the glass bubble covering the cockpit flew off White’s plane. A moment later, White climbed out of the plane and jumped.

  He was free-falling in the sky, thousands of feet above the water.

  Tapp kept his eyes on his friend, waiting for his parachute to open. He waited. And waited.

  White kept falling, dropping like a rock. He plunged toward the ocean.

  Come on. Open up, baby! Open!

  But his parachute never deployed. When White smashed into the water, he died almost instantaneously on contact. His body would never be recovered.

  Jerry took White’s death hard.

  They were a tight-knit bunch, the men of the Seventy-Eighth—a group who helped one another and watched one another’s backs. Just as Tapp had helped mentor Jerry, so, too, had Jerry helped guide some of the younger pilots, including White. Back in Hawaii, he’d trained White in combat flight procedures as a wingman for D-Flight, another moniker for the fourth group of planes in the sixteen-plane formation. The training involved many hours practicing in the air, with their planes flying side-by-side over Hawaii and the Pacific. During the flights, Jerry taught him to hug the element leader’s wing, and White rehearsed intricate crisscrossing maneuvers designed for the wingman to evade enemy fire. Thus, in many respects, it had been Jerry who trained White for combat.

  Through all of this, they had become like family, just like the rest of the Seventy-Eighth. They lived together, fought together, trained together. When one of them died, a part of all of them died. And when White plummeted into the Pacific, a part of Jerry went down with him.

  But there had been three pilots total from the squadron lost that day, and each one stung their remaining comrades, reminding the survivors of their own mortality. Freedom exacted a heavy price: the loss of friends, physical discomfort, emotional anguish—even the time to properly grieve. A war zone did not allow for much mourning. For the men on Iwo Jima, the fight would march on, and so would they, determined to finish what they had started.

  For Major James M. Vande Hey, the mission would mark his last as commander of the Seventy-Eighth Figher Squadron, as orders to a new duty station were imminent for him.

  CHAPTER 15

  Baseball, Softball, and the Southern Boy from Clemson

  May 29, 1945

  For Jerry, reaching out to mentor younger pilots seemed a natural thing. He felt a duty to pass on the knowledge he’d acquired and a passion for equipping these younger pilots with the aerial combat skills necessary to survive the war. Jerry had seen far too much tragedy already. If he could teach them an extra trick or two, it might be the difference between life and death.

  But perhaps he also wanted to make sure that none of the newer pilots felt ostracized in the way he had in his hometown on the memorable morning way back in 1936. Already, he’d started mentoring fellow Seventy-Eighth squadron pilot Phil Schlamberg, in part because of their common Jewish heritage, but also because Phil seemed like a loner. Both traits made Jerry feel protective of Phil. But Jerry also bonded with others, like First Lieutenant Danny Mathis Jr. Danny had attended secondary school in Augusta, Georgia, before enrolling at Clemson University in South Carolina in 1940. A skinny, brown-headed kid with a sharp chin, he’d graduated in 1944—shortly before D-Day—with a degree in agriculture. Like so many of the young pilots in the Seventy-Eighth, because Danny showed promise as an aviator, the Army (in which he’d enrolled) accelerated him through flight school.

  When Danny first showed up as a rookie pilot with the Seventy-Eighth in Hawaii, one of the first things Jerry noticed about him—aside from his thick, Southern drawl—was that Danny played a mean game of baseball, or, in this case, softball. Jerry had been an accomplished second baseman in school, and the soft-talking Mathis was a lightning-quick shortstop who also swung a good bat. They proved a devastating infield combination for the Seventy-Eighth Fighter Squadron softball team in Hawaii. But they also became good friends. Danny often flew as Jerry’s wingman, and on May 29, as the Seventy-Eighth prepared for a bombing attack against Yokohama—the great Japanese port city on Tokyo Bay—he was slated to do so again.

  As the home of the Imperial Japanese Naval Academy and headquarters for the Imperial Japanese fleet, Yokohama was of high strategic importance to Japan. The Yokosuka Naval Arsenal, one of the major naval shipyards, was also located nearby, just south of the port city. With a fleet of over four hundred B-29 bombers, the American command intended to blister the Japanese industry at Yokohama and set the city ablaze. The bombers would be accompanied by men in the Fifteenth and Twenty-First Fighter Groups, including Jerry and Danny.

  That morning of May 29, the Empire of Japan already found itself in a precarious spot. Twenty-one days had passed since its Axis ally, Nazi Germany, had fallen to the Allies. With Germany finished, America would now pull forces from Europe and pour its full fury on Japan. Previously, the Japanese had felt the mettle of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps, and on this very day, Marines were plowing across the island of Okinawa, soon to capture Shuri Castle.

  Meanwhile, back in April, the American air forces on Iwo Jima had inflicted significant damage on another key military target: Atsugi Naval Airfield, located on the east coast of Japan and twenty-five miles southwest of Tokyo. Three years before Pearl Harbor, the Japanese Navy had began construction of a large air base that would house the Japanese 302 Naval Aviation Corps, which became one of Japan’s most formidable and destructive fighter squadrons during World War II. Atsugi-based aircraft shot down more than three hundred American bombers during the fire bombings of 1945. The Americans’ April mission against Atsugi—its third great Empire Mission—had dealt the Japanese another blow: their strike destroyed twenty-three enemy planes in the air, another fourteen on the ground, and damaged fifty more.

  Today, unbeknownst to the Japanese, the U.S. Army Air Force was about to pay them another visit.

  At 6:30 a.m., the Dorrie R nosed off Airfield No. 1 for what felt like its thousandth mission to Jerry, who’d now been on Iwo Jima for two-and-a-half months. He wondered, often, if this war would ever end. He checked out the side of his cockpit and saw that he’d been joined in the air by Mathis. They exchanged the traditional thumbs up and set their course to join the rest of the planes for the approximately seven-hundred-mile trek.

  Midway through the flight to Japan, the squadrons ran into bad weather. When flying head-on towards a storm front, a pilot had three options: try flying around it, over it, or under it. All, of course, carried risk. The system might be too big to fly around, and a P-51, especially on a long-range mission where fuel would be stretched even in a straight shot, could run out of gas prematurely. Flying over the cell, however, wasn’t optimal, because the top of the system might be above the effective ceiling of the aircraft. Depending on how low the cloud cover came to the sea, going below the storm posed its own problems: a pilot ran the risk of down-drafts and strong winds if he tried that route. But there was also a saying in aviation for such situations: “When you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t, pick a damn.”

  In this case, the group decided to attempt flying under the weat
her front.

  Following the lead of their B-29 navigation plane, Jerry, Danny, and the other squadron members pushed down on their yokes, executing a dive designed to bring them just two thousand feet above the water. Though the route was bumpy, they cleared the bottom of the cloud cover with enough open air space to continue on to Japan.

  Some three and a half hours after departing Iwo Jima, the Mustangs arrived off the Japanese coast, ahead of the B-29s flying in from the Marianas and designated to provide the firepower on the mission. Waiting for the bombers to arrive, the Mustangs fell into a holding pattern off the Japanese shoreline. A nervous anticipation soon blanketed the fighter groups. Everybody was worried about fuel. Jerry checked his gauge. Hopefully, the bombers would show soon. Nobody wanted to ditch a Mustang into the ocean, and, after what happened with White’s parachute, nobody wanted to bail out of one either.

  A moment later, a gorgeous sight broke into the skies from the south: the lead elements of the B-29s emerged from the cloud cover. The P-51s soon took their positions, and, together, the planes set a course due east that would take them over Mount Fuji towards Yokohama.

  Within minutes, Japanese interceptors could be seen, coming out to challenge them. Reaching their target, the B-29s began to drop their payload as the Mustangs started engaging the Japanese fighters over the city and Tokyo Bay. Smoke and fire rose as the P-51s made waste of their Japanese opposition. In early combat operations, the Japanese “Zero” had established a legendary reputation as a dogfighter, with initial kill ratios of twelve to one. But by mid-1942, a combination of new tactics and the introduction of better equipment enabled the Allied pilots to engage the Zero on more equal terms. In fact, the P-51 was a superior craft. But an aerial dogfight also required piloting and marksmanship skills, factors that came into play as much as the quality of the aircraft. Not a single member of the Seventy-Eighth would take the sight of a Zero lightly.