The Last Fighter Pilot Read online

  The three o’clock hour came and went peacefully.

  The four o’clock hour arrived.

  Suddenly, a mortar explosion rocked the night air, sending sharp shrapnel flying. One piece tore through Harry Crim’s tent with such a powerful blast that it knocked him to the floor.

  Something had gone horribly wrong.

  It had to be the Japanese.

  But where the hell had they come from?

  Crim grabbed a .45-caliber pistol and rushed out into the darkness.

  Across the way, the command tent, which housed Powell and several other senior officers, had collapsed from mortar fire. The Japanese were crawling all over the camp, their menacing silhouettes visible in the fading moonlight. An hour and a half before sunrise, the Twenty-First was under a surprise Banzai attack from Japanese who were not even supposed to be on the island. The Americans’ crisis was compounded by the fact that most of the Marines had already pulled out. The few who remained and their replacements from the U.S. Army were clustered elsewhere on the island, currently unaware of the ambush.

  Crim realized he needed more than a pistol. He ran back into the tent, grabbed a carbine, popped a magazine in it, and snatched several other magazines full of bullets. Crouching low, he sprinted across the camp and took cover behind a berm.

  There. About 150 feet downrange. At least thirty armed Japanese soldiers had crawled into a large hole in the ground at the end of the camp.

  Crim worked the bolt on the carbine and took aim. He pulled the trigger, and his shot pierced the air. He pulled the trigger again and again, raining .30-caliber bullets down on the enemy. Some slumped over.

  Crim adjusted his aim and fired again. More Japanese fell. Others scrambled.

  But they were far from finished.

  At the tent occupied by Captain Jim Van Nada and six other officers of the Seventy-Second Fighter Squadron, a hand grenade exploding outside the flap entrance woke the pilots inside. Before they could get their bearings, the Japanese tossed a second grenade into the tent.

  “Hit the deck!” someone shouted.

  But the grenade landed under Van Nada’s cot before he could react. The subsequent explosion sent shrapnel penetrating his left leg and knee joint.

  Dazed, the pilots scrambled to find their .45-caliber pistols, determined to get outside. Three of the pilots, Lieutenants Canfield, Rogers, and Howard, rushed out of the tent. As Van Nada and his buddy, Lieutenant Bruner, started to step out, another grenade blast knocked them back inside. Van Nada fell backward, bleeding again.

  Canfield, Rogers, and Howard, meanwhile, had exposed themselves to Japanese rifle fire by leaving the tent. An enemy bullet struck Howard. Canfield and Rogers also took bullets and stumbled back into the tent. Both writhed in agony for much of the night. Rogers died before it ended; Canfield passed away that morning. Of the three pilots who left the tent, only one, Howard, survived.

  In fact, the scene outside the tent was a nightmare. With most of the Marines gone, the American pilots suddenly found themselves facing off against Japanese infantry in a mortal struggle of hand-to-hand combat. Bullets ripped through tents, tearing the canvas and whizzing by pilots’ heads. Four more pilots, headed toward their aircraft to begin combat air patrol, were also ambushed and killed by the Japanese.

  Even amid the chaos, it was abundantly clear an intelligence failure had led to the island mistakenly being declared secure on March 16. Hundreds of Japanese had remained hidden underground, burrowed in caves and subterranean labyrinths. Like ghosts rising from a graveyard, they crawled out of their holes by the dozens, brandishing their weapons in a last stand against the enemy and committing their bodies to suicide for the emperor. Around the camp, these desperate men huddled in craters, lobbing grenades into the Americans’ tents. Yelling “Banzai,” they leaped from cover and made suicidal charges towards the structures, brandishing bayonets and rifles.

  The American pilots, for their part, weren’t infantrymen, and they preferred fighting in the skies rather than on the ground. But they were determined to fight back as the Japanese made their last stand on Iwo Jima. All around the camp, the lightly armed airmen grouped together in tents to resist the Japanese. Most were carrying .45-caliber pistols; they faced a field army with rifles, bayonets, hand-grenades, and other explosives.

  Among the grittily determined Americans was Crim. Seeing his commander’s tent had been partially brought down by a grenade, he crouched low and ran through a wave of Japanese bullets, successfully reaching the tent to check on the group leader and his staff. “It was a hell of a mess,” he described later in his diary. “They had all been hit by grenade fragments and there was blood all over. Ken Powell had been raked with shrapnel from ankle to waist and was bleeding profusely.”

  The northeastern corner of the camp, where Powell’s tent was located, had been hit hard. In one tent, occupied by five pilots of the 531st squadron, the results were disastrous: two men, Lieutenants Woods and Mattill, were killed instantly by exploding hand grenades, while three others, Lieutenants Cheney, Wailes, and Miller, were badly wounded. The Japanese quick-stepped into the tent to established a command post. Off to the side, Cheney and Wailes were moaning in pain. This irritated the Japanese, who slit the officers’ throats. Miller, the final member of the pilot quintet, feigned death for several hours.

  Meanwhile, as the cacophony of rifle shots and men screaming in agony from bullets and shrapnel ripping into their bodies pierced the night air, Dr. George Hart, flight surgeon for the Forty-Sixth squadron, swung into action. Hart, a native of Lake Placid, New York, dashed through a slew of bullets to set up a temporary field hospital in a bulldozed depression. It was there Crim dragged Powell, who was still bleeding profusely. Dr. Hart started immediate emergency treatment on his wounds. With his commanding officer secure, Crim returned to the battle.

  The Japanese had continued to attack pilots inside their tents by throwing grenades into the structures and firing into them. Many pilots lay bleeding and injured inside, requiring Crim and whoever he could find to conduct a tent-by-tent sweep as they tried to relocate injured pilots to the field hospital. He found helping hands in Major Sam Hudson, the commanding officer of the 531st Fighter Squadron, and Lieutenant Harry Koke. With Hudson in charge, all three men, bullets whizzing by their heads, checked each tent, working methodically and dodging shrapnel from mortars and grenades. “We operated as a team, two covering the tent while one raised a flap and looked in,” Crim later wrote. “The wounded we found, we’d put on a blanket and drag back to Dr. Hart.” They had their work cut out for them—a number of the men had already been shot or injured by shrapnel.

  Fifteen to twenty minutes later, just as the trio reached the far side of the camp, a platoon of Japanese soldiers, who were hiding in three tents they’d taken over, opened fire. Crim and Hudson managed to dodge the sudden barrage of bullets, but Koke was hit. Despite this, he stayed with Crim and Hudson as long as he could as they moved on to investigate the larger tents, looking for comrades needing medical assistance. After checking several structures, however, Koke’s blood loss required he get back to the field hospital for treatment before losing consciousness. Koke peeled off, while Hudson and Crim kept searching.

  Once they were satisfied all the wounded had been evacuated to the field hospital, they went back on the offensive. Organizing an armed line with a third comrade, Technical Sergeant Philip Jean of Texas, from the 549th Night Fighter Squadron, they moved through the camp, shooting at the Japanese with their .45-caliber pistols. Even in the Army Air Force, those boys from Texas were good with guns. During those early morning hours of March 26, 1945, Jean became an American hero. Operating a Browning Automatic rifle with the proficiency of a U.S. Marine, he squeezed off fifty rounds against the enemy, single-handedly killing up to eleven Japanese in the dark of the night, all while under fire himself. Though Jean would survive the night and even his deployment on Iwo Jima, he would never set foot on the soil of his beloved Texas again.
He was later lost at sea, then declared missing in action, with his official date of death April 1, 1946. His body was never recovered, nor is there a grave for him. His memory, however, is today reflected in a solitary marker at the Tablets of the Missing in a Honolulu cemetery. He received a Purple Heart posthumously, but the failure to also recognize his heroism with a Silver Star remains a question mark, if not a travesty. Perhaps, if he had only lived longer, his deeds would not have faded so quickly in the annals of history.

  And yet, that night, he struck back with fury, as did many of his fellow Americans. He was a fitting representative of the brave, intrepid, non-commissioned airmen who fought like ground warriors in the face of some of the most vicious fighters known to man.

  Meanwhile, before reinforcement arrived from the Army, the handful of Marines still left behind and other enlisted men working as aircraft mechanics, gunners, and crews picked up pistols, carbines, and rifles and started taking the fight back to the Japanese. Approximately two hours after the ambush started, Captain Robert J. Munro of the nearby Fifth Marine Pioneer Battalion drove up with a handful of Marine engineers and a truck filled with ammo, including hand-grenades, rifles, and automatic weapons. The length of time it had taken them to arrive was understandable, albeit tragic. Just as they had done at Pearl Harbor, the Japanese had achieved the element of surprise. The Americans, having declared victory, had already reduced the internal security on the island, shifting their primary defenses from boots on the ground to radar and fighter aircraft. The troops who remained were scattered in other parts of the island, which contributed to the delay in first recognizing the emergency, then reacting in a timely manner.

  The geography of the island hadn’t helped, either. The tents housing the sleeping members of the Twenty-First Fighter Group and the newly arrived members of the 549th Night Fighter Squadron were set up on the north side of Airfield No. 2. At the time, Airfield No. 3 remained under construction by U.S. Navy Seabees and was still unoccupied. The construction, in fact, was proving to be an engineering challenge. Not only had the Seabees started it while the field was still in a war zone, but building runways long enough and strong enough to land a B-29 Superfortress on solidified lava and ash proved difficult. The initial portion of the work—to prepare the sub-grade for the landing strip—required the Seabees to bulldoze and then move about two hundred thousand cubic yards of rock and volcanic ash. The lava rock weighed around twelve hundred pounds per cubic yard. Overall, the Seabees moved about 240 million pounds of lava rock just to strip down the future runway and prepare it for the sub-grade of the landing field. The two runways already completed were nearly a mile in length, and most of the departing Marines, Army units, and others, including U.S. Navy Seabees, were camped either along the coastal region to the southeast of Airfield No. 1 or between the base of Mount Suribachi and the southwest end of Airfield No. 1. That meant most of the Army was over a mile away from the Twenty-First Fighter Group’s camp and outside the immediate earshot of gunfire erupting there. Jerry and the men of the Seventy-Eighth Fighter Squadron, meanwhile, along with the other squadrons of the Fifteenth Fighter Group, were also camped well over a mile away from their counterparts of the Twenty-First.

  But when the Marines finally did arrive to assist the Twenty-First, the momentum began shifting against the Japanese. Munro and his Marines started a tent-by-tent sweep of the north section of the camp, hunting the enemy. As the Marines pinned the Japanese down with rifle fire, arriving U.S. Army personnel joined in the tent search. The pilots and mechanics, meanwhile, using the superior weapons supplied by the Marines, also targeted the Japanese with a vengeance.

  Hudson and Crim continued attacking together, firing and killing every enemy soldier in sight. Moving in tandem towards a ravine on the other side of the camp, the duo spotted a pillbox in a nearby trench. While the Army checked the airmen’s tents, Hudson and Crim decided to check the pillbox. Any Japanese inside were about to get shot.

  As they crouched down and approached, a Japanese soldier reached out of the pillbox and tossed a grenade at Hudson. Hudson tried to maneuver out of the way, but the grenade exploded at point-blank range, blowing off his helmet, three of his fingers, and destroying his carbine. He was alive, but had been taken out of the fight.

  Crim had to think fast. His comrade needed help, and he needed it now. As the Army and Marines turned up the heat on the Japanese, Crim locked arms under his commanding officer and started dragging Hudson across the camp toward the field hospital.

  Meanwhile, a Marine tank rolled into the area, first positioning at the top of the hill and then moving into the trench, taking aim at the pillbox, which would be the enemy’s last line of defense. By now, more troops from the U.S. Army’s 147th Infantry were joining the fight that had spread throughout the camp. Overwhelmed by the Americans’ surging numbers, it was only a matter of time before the Japanese were defeated. The fire from the Marines’ tank, combined with the rifle fire from Army and Marine units, broke the back of the enemy. With a handful of exceptions, any Japanese not killed in the firefight committed suicide.

  By nine a.m., the bodies of ninety-eight Japanese lay strewn throughout the Twenty-First Group’s compound. Another 232 dead Japanese were scattered across the ravines, bomb craters and on the open ground. More lay around the pillbox which the Marines and Army had blistered with bullets and grenades. Eighteen Japanese had been captured—the last of their army left alive on the island.

  With the surprise massacre finally extinguished, the Americans’ victory on Iwo Jima was complete. But the price had been devastating. Forty-four members of the command had been killed, including eleven pilots. Upwards of a hundred airmen were wounded. Some eventually returned from the hospital to fly again. Dr. Hart, the only medical officer on duty near Central Field, later received a Silver Star for his heroics. Crim, meanwhile, replaced the wounded Hudson as commanding officer of the 531st Fighter Squadron; he would lead the Twenty-First Group on its first mission the next day: the strafing of Haha Jima.

  CHAPTER 11

  Jerry Hopes for a Chance

  March 30, 1945

  On March 30, 1945, General Moore ordered a large group of Mustangs to execute a round-trip practice fight from Iwo Jima to Saipan. Knowing the first strike on Japan was just days away, Moore wanted to test his Mustangs to see how they’d hold up under longer flight conditions. The one-way flight from Saipan to Iwo Jima was 725 miles, only twenty-five miles shorter than the distance from Iwo Jima to Japan. It was actually the same route Jerry, Beckwith, and others had taken when they first arrived on Iwo Jima from Saipan. Then, distance hadn’t been an issue, since they planned on landing at Iwo Jima rather than turning around and flying back to Saipan. On the planned trips to Japan, of course, there would be no opportunity to land halfway—not if the pilots wanted to come back alive, anyway. The round-trip mission to Japan would take eight hours and be arduous on both Moore’s pilots and their planes. The P-51s had never been pushed to such limits. Hence, Moore and General LeMay wanted to get at least one “practice run” under the pilots’ belts.

  Moore selected a hundred pilots for the test flight, including Jerry. Although being picked for the test flight did not mean automatic selection for the actual mission to Japan, those chosen held out hope that if they performed well on the test flight, they would be included.

  That, however, turned out to be a big “if.”

  The results of the test flight were disappointing. Mechanical problems forced a number of P-51s to land in Saipan, unable to complete the round-trip journey. Others had to turn and fly back to Iwo Jima before even reaching Saipan. Altogether, nearly half of the P-51s on the test flight failed to complete the round-trip.

  The development raised concerns for LeMay and Moore. They’d known from the beginning that with such a large amount of planes in the sky, it would be hard to achieve across-the-board perfection on a test run. But issues—even minor ones—with fifty percent of the planes proved worse than they’d ant
icipated. And if one factored in Japanese fighters and ground-based antiaircraft that would be launching enemy fire toward the American planes, the potential problems compounded. Soon, all the planes that started the test flight were back on Iwo Jima, and Moore put his squadron mechanics and planners to work on identifying problems that had occurred during the test flight, with instructions to engage in aggressive problem-solving and corrective procedures.

  Jerry, meanwhile, had been one of those who managed to complete the test flight to Saipan and back without encountering any problems. He hoped this would catch his commanding officer’s attention and guarantee him a slot in the big mission.

  But he was dealing in a world with no guarantees.

  As March gave way to April, the anticipation among the American pilots stationed on Iwo Jima reached its highest point since their arrival. The date had been set for their first, massive, joint air raid on Japan with the B-29s: April 7.

  At long last, this was it.

  But when April arrived, it brought something else: rain. The first four days of the month, it rained so heavily and frequently that no flight operations were conducted. After a month of near-perfect weather, it now seemed like the rain would never stop.

  And so the men of the Seventh Fighter Command, anxious and ready to fly, were subjected to yet another form of discomfort. Based on weather forecasts, the mission date had been circled on the calendar. Their hearts pounded each time they looked at it, hoping to see their names on the mission list. Three hundred were competing for a mission of only one hundred slots.

  For the next few days, Jerry could only bide his time and focus as the intelligence officers revealed plans for the attack. The pilots gathered under the primitive Quonset hut that had been erected for intelligence briefings and received information about the specific target for the mission: the Nakajima Aircraft Engine Factories west of Tokyo. Those factories had built engines for at least thirty-seven different military aircraft, mostly fighter and bombers, including Kamikaze aircraft that had been flown into U.S. ships. Taking the plants out would be a significant step in crippling the Japanese war machine.