The Last Fighter Pilot Read online

  How many daggers could a single heart take?

  CHAPTER 18

  Heartbreak over Tokyo

  July 8, 1945

  The institution of war knows no patience, nor compassion. As before, Jerry had little time to mourn the loss of a close friend. The war went on, refusing to pause for grief. At best, its incessant demands might offer a tonic for dealing with it.

  By July 8, the young pilot was in the air again. The Fifteenth Fighter Group was flying that day with the Twenty-First on a mission over Tokyo. At first, Jerry hadn’t known many of the pilots from that unit; they’d tended to congregate at Airfield No. 2 and keep to themselves. But after the Banzai attack, that began to change; some of the Fifteenth’s more experienced airmen—including a few of the Seventy-Eighth’s better pilots—had been transferred to the Twenty-First to fill the places of those injured or killed. One of those transferred was Captain Al Sherren.

  Still, something didn’t seem right about Al being anywhere but the Seventy-Eighth. Al was one of Jerry’s best friends in the Army; they’d met in Phoenix in 1942, when they were both new aviation cadets at Luke Field. They went through flight school together and afterwards had been part of the same training class in Haliewa, Oahu, reporting fresh out of flight school in October of 1943. Along with Bob Roseberry and Bob Ruby—who, like Al, were from Iowa—the quartet formed a special bond as the first cadets of the Seventy-Eighth to arrive at Haliewa. Upon reporting, they were told they would receive at least fifty hours of training before being shipped out to a combat zone.

  Their first lessons were in the old P-40 (the P-51 had yet to be developed). Jerry had been assigned to the wing of Captain Vic Mollan in Jim Tapp’s flight, and, while American forces were challenging the Japanese in the Makin Islands, Jerry and the Iowa boys practiced, practiced, and practiced some more, flying simulated combat drills in the air, mimicking strafing targets on the ground, dive-bombing targets in the sea, and mastering the art of dog-fighting.

  Together, the quartet lived through the first loss of a comrade before ever entering a war zone: that of their first squadron commander, Major Bill Southerland, in a mid-air collision.

  The following April, Lieutenant Ed Green, a young pilot from Massachusetts who had become good friends with Jerry, lost control of his new P-47 Thunderbolt during a training exercise. Green had played first base on the squadron’s softball team and was in many respects a leader among his peers. But the new P-47 he flew was much faster than the P-40 and thus more prone to go into a flat spin. The last words anyone ever heard Ed say came over his radio as he flew over the Pacific off the cost of Hawaii: “Mayday! Mayday! I’m in a flat spin! I can’t get out.” They never found Ed’s body, nor even an oil slick from the plane.

  Unfortunately, Ed wasn’t the only pilot to die during training exercises off Hawaii. There was Lieutenant Howard Edmonson, the pilot who earlier had collided with Southerland, and Lieutenant Bob Ferris, who died one month before Christmas Day, 1944, when the P-51 he was piloting in a demonstration flight literally disintegrated before Jerry’s eyes over Bellows Field in Hawaii, the result of high-speed maneuvering gone awry. Like Green, Ferris’ body was never found. Fellow pilot John Lindner was killed two months later in a maneuver similar to the one Ferris had tried to execute. Lindner started a steep dive over Bellows Field, then tried to pull up too quickly. The harsh G-forces against the aircraft tore the wings off the fuselage. Within seconds, John was dead. This was on January 13, 1945, just a few days before the Seventy-Eighth shipped out on the Sitkoh Bay.

  The reality of death had cemented Jerry and the Iowa boys together, even before they’d dodged a bullet from the enemy. They shipped out together on USS Sitkoh Bay in January of 1945 to Guam, and then to Iwo Jima, where they fought the Japanese together.

  At five-foot-six-inches tall, with brown hair and blue eyes, Al wasn’t a physically imposing officer. One of the first things he and Jerry bonded over was their love of cigarettes. During the war, cigarettes became a popular pastime with many of the pilots. Al was a Lucky Strikes guy; Jerry preferred Chesterfields. Their differing taste generated plenty of friendly banter, especially when one ran out of cigarettes and the other remained stocked. Sometimes, when Al had used up the last of his “Luckies” and Jerry tossed him a pack of Chesterfields as a temporary holdover, Al lit one and smoked it while feigning disgust. Other times, he laughed, pulled out a single Chesterfield from the pack, studied it as if contemplating whether to light it or not, then threw it on the ground and stomped on it, his aficionado tastes too sublime to stoop to a “Chester” even at the moment. Al was a funny guy, a “life-of-the-party” type, and often clowned around. Sometimes, he’d switch his cap around backwards and mimic a German submarine officer. The guys always got a kick out of that routine. But he could also be persuasive. Eventually, he even convinced Jerry to “move up” to the Luckies.

  Al, along with Jerry, was part of today’s strike force over Tokyo. None of the missions flown from Iwo Jima to Japan that July were escort missions, which meant the P-51s would not be rendezvousing with B-29s. Rather, the Mustangs would be flying on their own, designated to attack targets of opportunity. The Mustangs’ focus this time was the Hyakurigahara and Tokorozawa Airfields in the Tokyo area. Hyakurigahara was one of the major garrison headquarters of Japan’s 721st Naval Air Group, which had been organized to launch kamikaze attacks against the U.S. Navy and other American targets. Tokorozawa, meanwhile, was the site of Japan’s first military airfield and its air service academy. It was considered a strategic fighter base during the war. Both of these airbases needed to be taken out, or at least damaged, to negate their operational effectiveness. The Mustangs planned to hit them on repeated strafing and bombing attacks, render them non-operational, and return to base.

  Except for some squalls the P-51s had to maneuver around about 350 miles out of Iwo Jima, the first leg of the 1,645-mile round-trip flight went smoothly. On the initial pass over the Hyakurigahara Airfield, the Forty-Seventh Fighter Squadron flew high cover for the pilots of the Seventy-Eighth. From eleven thousand feet, Jerry started a steep dive toward the target, attacking from east to west. In their pre-flight briefing, the pilots had seen two antiaircraft guns positioned on the airfield that they marked for attack. But on their first pass, the guns were not spotted. Perhaps the Japanese had moved them out of view to prevent their becoming targets.

  However, a number of dummy aircraft and biplanes that were being used as decoys were spotted along the side and edges of the field as Jerry began his first strafing run, firing all along the runway and into side buildings. Other pilots of the Seventy-Eighth followed suit, shooting at the airfield with devastating fury. Because of the steep angle of attack, however, not all the pilots fired on this initial pass. The squadron pulled up, regrouped, and prepared to attack again.

  On the second run, when the pilots had a better chance to eyeball the target area, they spotted a number of Japanese warplanes on the ground under camouflaged netting and parked inside of three-sided concrete revetments. Several other planes were hidden northwest of the airfield, also well-camouflaged under trees and farm buildings. Intense antiaircraft fire started rising up from buildings to the northwest of the airfield. Japanese antiaircraft fire at point-blank range was often more lethal than the Japanese fighter planes in mid-air, and the enemy had placed such firepower all around the area where they’d hidden their aircraft.

  Flying into the teeth of the enemy’s fire, Jerry lowered the fighter into an attack run and opened repeatedly on the targets. As the Seventy-Eighth continued its work, one of the buildings alongside the airfield burst in flames. The Japanese were firing from a number of concrete buildings surrounding the airfield and also from a ridge south of the building area, but the Seventy-Eighth’s return fire proved effective. Two Japanese planes on the south side of the field ignited.

  With the Forty-Seventh still flying cover overhead, the Seventy-Eighth cleared out to make way for an attack pass by the Forty-Fif
th Fighter Squadron, Al Sherren’s new group. Jerry was among those that pulled up and circled around as the Forty-Fifth started their run.

  What came next would haunt him for the rest of his life.

  A voice came over the squadron’s emergency radio frequency: “Mayday! Mayday! I’m hit and I can’t see!”

  It was Al Sherren. Those were the last words he uttered.

  Later, the Waterloo Courier—Al’s hometown paper—quoted details from the Army’s press release describing the young pilot’s cause of death: “Sherren was injured by enemy gunfire during a strafing run and, after radioing his flight commander that he had sustained head injury and could not see, headed for base and was believed to have crashed in the Pacific Ocean.”

  Jerry’s flight back to Iwo Jima that Sunday afternoon was the hardest he’d made to date. And he landed to more bad news: his tent-mate, Bob Carr, had been shot down somewhere over Tokyo. No one had heard any distress calls from Carr, but his plane had disappeared.

  Jerry taxied the Dorrie R II to a stop, powered down and got out. Personal grief struck him like no time prior in this monstrous war. Since June, death had come in quick waves—Danny Mathis, Dick Schroeppel, now Sherren and Carr. No mission the young pilot had ever flown would be as hard as the task now awaiting him: to pack the clothes of Al Sherren and Bob Carr, put them in footlockers, and ship them home to their families.

  CHAPTER 19

  The Blazing Winds of August

  Tinian Island—The Marianas

  At 2:45 a.m. on August 6, 1945, a solitary B-29 bomber lifted off the end of the North Field runway on Tinian Island.

  The aircraft nosed upward under a moonless night, angling toward the Milky Way. The galaxy painted a great sparkling display across the black heavens, while a dome of stars stretched from horizon to horizon, down to the dark waters of the ocean. The twelve men aboard the aircraft watched the breathtaking display in stunned silence.

  The plane climbed just over five thousand feet above the water, a relatively low altitude for a B-29. Up near the cockpit, Captain Theodore “Dutch” Van Kirk, the twenty-four-year-old navigator of the bomber that less than twenty-four hours ago had been named the Enola Gay, plotted his course and relayed coordinates to the plane’s pilot, thirty-year-old Colonel Paul Tibbets. In accordance with Operation Order 35, which had been issued by the 509th Composite Group and signed by Major James I. Hopkins Jr., only the day before, the Enola Gay would first fly north towards the airspace over Iwo Jima, then rendezvous with two other bombers in the air. The trio of planes would next ascend to thirty-one thousand feet over Iwo Jima to take themselves out of range of enemy fighters and antiaircraft fire, after which they would re-calibrate their course for their ultimate destination: Japan. Their mission that night had been personally ordered by their commander in chief, Harry S. Truman, who’d succeeded Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the U.S. presidency. And the arguments that had been made the month prior by Leo Szilard and other physicists on the Manhattan Project had failed: the atomic bomb was going to be unleashed on the enemy.

  Except for the sonorous roar of the bomber’s four engines, the first three hours of the flight were marked by silence, as the crew contemplated its mission. They reached Iwo Jima just as the sun began to rise, with the distinctive “pork chop” outline in the water coming into the view below them.

  Above Iwo Jima, two other B-29s were circling as they awaited the Enola Gay. One B-29 named The Great Artiste, under the command of Major Charles W. Sweeny, would serve as an observation aircraft for the mission. It carried, in addition to its crew, three civilian members of Project Alberta, part of the top-secret Manhattan Project. On board were special instruments for blast measurement to collect data and relay information about the weapon that would be dropped from the bomb bay of the Enola Gay. As for Sweeny himself, if he survived this mission, he had another within the next few days just like it, in the lead plane called the Bockscar over the city of Nagasaki.

  The third B-29 to join the group bore a codename of Victor 91 and was later renamed Necessary Evil. Commanded by twenty-six-year-old Captain George W. Marquardt, Necessary Evil was tasked with the job of photographing the events of the mission. The images Marquardt captured that day would later ensure his place in the annals of history.

  Once over Iwo Jima, the planes, as planned, climbed to thirty-one thousand feet, maneuvered into a three-plane battle formation, and set their course for Japan. Weather patterns appeared clear for the final leg of the flight.

  Now it was just a matter of time.

  Three hours later, the planes crossed into Japanese airspace. With the sun shining off their gray-silver wings, they would have been visible from the ground some five miles below. Yet they had arrived over Japanese airspace seemingly unnoticed. The Japanese, for their part, did not seem worried about a very small number of random bombers flying so far overhead. Their cities had been blasted by mighty waves of three hundred and four hundred bombers coming at once, with another hundred P-51s flying alongside. Besides, those attacks had come from much lower altitudes. What damage could a measly trio of planes, flying so high without any fighter coverage, possibly cause? The Americans had already learned that bombs dropped from five miles in the sky were not reliable and oftentimes did not damage their target from that high up. If these planes came down low enough to drop bombs, and without fighter cover, the Japanese air force would shoot them down.

  As the Enola Gay flew over the Japanese island of Shikoku toward Hiroshima, the plane’s bombardier, Major Tom Ferebee, moved into the nose section of the plane, where the large, glass bubble afforded him a panoramic view of the Japanese coastline. A moment later, he called out:

  “I got it!”

  He turned to the plane’s navigator for a second opinion.

  Van Kirk moved up into the nose section of the Enola Gay and confirmed that Ferebee had spotted the target area: the Aioi Bridge, designated as ground zero.

  As the Enola Gay approached Hiroshima at thirty-one thousand feet, Tibbets, speaking through a microphone to the rest of his crew, initialed a countdown of T-minus three minutes.

  Ferebee had crawled back into the bomb bay of the Enola Gay, his heart pounding as Tibbets counted down. With the bomber’s four powerful engines humming in a monotone roar, they crossed over the borders of Hiroshima and closed in on the Aioi Bridge.

  The nine-thousand-pound weapon the crew was about to drop had never been used in war before. The men knew little about what it would do, or even if it would detonate. They did know, however, that one like it had been tested in the American desert in New Mexico. The blast from that test, they were told, was a thousand times brighter than the sun itself and created powerful winds that could be felt miles away. The test had produced a mushroom cloud that climbed forty thousand feet into the sky, almost ten thousand feet above the Enola Gay’s current position. The shockwave from that bomb had also been felt ten miles from the explosion. People up to sixty miles away at Alamogordo Army Air Field had been able to see the light from the explosion.

  It all meant not a single man aboard the Enola Gay knew whether they would survive if the bomb they dropped actually detonated. Would a great fireball rise up and engulf the aircraft?

  Would winds and turbulence from the blast send the bomber spinning out of control? Every man aboard had volunteered for the mission, however, and each was prepared to give his life to help force an end to this war.

  Meanwhile, from the cockpit, Tibbets continued counting down:

  “Eight.”

  “Seven.”

  “Six.”

  “Five.”

  “Four.”

  “Three.”

  “Two.”

  “One.”

  “Zero.”

  It was 8:15:17 a.m.

  Ferebee pushed a lever in the bomb bay and made sure an automatic system he’d activated seconds earlier had functioned. He watched as the single, nine-thousand-pound bomb, nicknamed “Little Boy,” turned nose-down an
d dropped through the sky toward its target, Aioi Bridge, which Ferebee had originally selected back in the States from aerial photographs.

  As the bomb fell, the nose of the Enola Gay lurched upward and Tibbets put the plane into a quick 160-degree turn, a desperate maneuver to get the aircraft as far away as possible from the impending blast. Tibbets had practiced this maneuver on multiple occasions; now, he needed to execute it to perfection.

  As he turned the aircraft and went full throttle, the crew awaited the explosion. Some thought the bomb might have been a dud. Van Kirk later reported, “Everyone was counting, ‘One thousand one, one thousand two…’”

  The bomb fell for a total of forty-three seconds.

  Then, suddenly, a great, blinding light filled the Enola Gay’s cabin. Van Kirk later described it as a “photographer’s bulb going off.” Tibbets reported it “lit up the sky” and seemed to have “a bluish hue.” Seconds later, a great shock wave struck the Enola Gay. The plane jumped and made a frightening noise like the sound of sheet metal snapping.

  The men held their breath. For a moment, it seemed the bomber would disintegrate in the sky. A second wave hit the plane a moment later. But it held together.

  Crew members looked out at where the city of Hiroshima had been. The area was covered with smoke, dust, and dirt, and looked like a pot of black, boiling tar as fires raged on its edge. Tibbets turned and flew in an arc from the northeast to the southeast of the disintegrating city. The mushroom cloud climbed into the sky, its stem full of tumbling debris, and rising far above the Enola Gay’s current altitude of twenty-six thousand feet. The men were relieved that the bomber had not been damaged.

  It was time to get out of Japan.

  Moments later, the Enola Gay was back over the Pacific, headed south toward Tinian.

  CHAPTER 20