It’s Memorial Day Weekend. I thought I’d write one of those sad Let’s Remember Our Fallen War Heroes pieces. It’s about my uncle, except he wasn't a fallen hero, he survived WWII (he died over 10 years ago in his eighties). His story was more typical than it was sad.
His name was Herb and he was my father’s younger brother, and my favorite uncle. In the spring of 1943, soon after he turned 19 but before he got drafted, he signed up as an aviation cadet in the Army Air Corps. He spent the next 1½ years at various training posts.
He got uniforms, learned how to salute, spit polish his shoes, fold & wear his uniforms – this was the Army – these things take first precedence even if there was a war. He next did aviation training & flight school, pilot training for single engine and later multi-engine aircraft. He said everyone was at first considered to be a fighter pilot. Gradually they weeded out the guys who couldn’t pass the book learning or couldn’t handle flying. He passed that part, but was later shifted to become a multi-engine pilot. Apparently, he wasn’t aggressive or crazy enough to be a good fighter pilot. Eventually, after the Air Corps realized they were training far more pilots than they needed, many cadets were shifted to be air gunners or infantry. Because my uncle had completed a year of college he was shifted to navigator training. After that, he went to an additional school for celestial navigation – how to shoot the sun & stars to determine your location. It was taught by a Navy Captain and a Pan American Airlines navigator.
In late 1944, he was sent to an airfield in Nebraska where squadrons were forming with the new B-29 bombers that were being sent to the Pacific. After forming squadrons the new air crews flew to California, Hawaii, various islands, and finally Tinian, near Saipan and Guam. He was with the 313th Bombing Wing, 505th Group, 483rd Squadron. All the planes in the 505th Group had a Circle W painted on their tails.
Tinian is a small island that was turned into the world’s largest air base. By the summer of 1945 there were about 800 bombers there.
Each plane had a crew of 11, plus many more mechanics and support people. It took a major effort by the Navy to supply them with fuel, bombs, extra engines & parts, and food.
The Navy Construction Battalions (CBs or Seabees) built every facility on that island from six 8,000 foot runways, hardstands for 800 bombers, aviation fuel storage tanks & pipelines, the Quonset huts everyone lived in, dining halls & kitchens, water purification plant & more pipelines, to an ice cream factory. Oh, and also the unauthorized distillery.
The Seabees essentially owned the place, and they rented it out to the Army Air Corps. If you wanted anything, you could get it from the Seabees if you ‘cultivated’ friends & contacts with them. Early on my uncle learned the Seabees valued booze, but it was very hard to get whiskey mailed to you, as the Navy shipped and inspected all the mailed packages. Later he learned that whiskey, rebottled in Prune Juice jars would get through. But better than that was chocolate syrup. The ice cream plant on Tinian made lots of vanilla ice cream, but chocolate ice cream was a rarity. So my dad, in addition to the ‘Prune Juice’, sent his brother a dozen large cans of Hershey’s Chocolate Syrup. That made him and his squadron welcome friends of the Seabees.
My uncle’s first plane was named Stardust (he is on the front row left).
He said they painted the nose art themselves as they didn’t have the cash or ‘liquid assets’ to pay the several very good artists on the island. The Seabees had them all 'under contract'.
My uncle’s first combat missions were ‘training runs’ bombing the islands of Iwo Jima & Truk in late February 1945. His first missions over Japan were two of the three Tokyo firebombing raids in March 1945. They flew at low altitude (10,000-15,000 feet), at night, and dropped incendiary cluster bombs (an early version of napalm) instead of the high altitude (30,000 feet) daylight 'precision' bombing with demolition bombs they had been trained to do. He said he was too inexperienced to be really terrified. The resulting firestorm burned much of Tokyo and killed so many people that my uncle said you could smell burning flesh in the plane.
Tinian was about 1500 miles away from Japan, about 7-8 hours flying, each way. That was as far as the B-29s could fly while carrying a bomb load of at least 20,000 lbs. Rather than waste fuel while waiting to form up in squadron formations, each plane, or small groups of planes, would fly over the ocean separately. If possible, they would form up off the east coast of Japan for the bombing run, but as often as not, they didn’t wait. That’s why each navigator was taught celestial navigation; they were expected to get their planes to the target, and back, while flying alone. In contrast, the bombers flying from England to Germany, flew in large formations over land, where a few good navigators could lead the way, and in a pinch, a compass plus knowledge of the terrain was good enough to get back to England. The B-29 had a highly advanced (for the time) auto pilot that required the pilot’s manual control only during take-off, landing, and while over the target. These auto pilots were electro-mechanical computers with high-speed gyroscopes and vacuum tube amplifiers. The long flights over the ocean, in theory, allowed using the auto pilot while the navigator checked their position, every 10-15 minutes or so, and entered that directly into the auto pilot which would make course corrections. In practice, it required a navigator who knew his business as there wasn’t enough fuel to fly off-course for long. Lucky for my uncle, he turned out to be one of those who could do it right.
He eventually flew 33 combat missions, bombing various Japanese cities and mining the Inland Sea and especially the Shimonoseki Strait with naval mines. The bomber generals were not at all enthusiastic about the mining missions, but higher brass insisted, and it turned out to be highly effective. The 3 squadrons of the 505th Bombing Group got Distinguished Unit Citation medals for those missions.
Stardust, with my uncle aboard, crash landed on Iwo Jima in May 1945. According to his diary, my uncle’s airplane commander, a good pilot, would ‘lose it’ on combat missions. During all the training, he was clear headed & reliable, but over Japan, he got nervous, made rash dangerous decisions, as fear & panic got the best of him. My uncle’s diary entry for a mission over Nagoya on May 14-15, 1945 described how they lost an engine and a lot of fuel due to pure stupidity, not due enemy AA gunfire. They couldn’t make it back to Tinian. Instead, they flew to Iwo Jima, declared an emergency, but were told to ditch in the bay, as the airfield was flooded from a recent tropical storm. My uncle had taken the controls of the plane as his airplane CO was too ‘unreliable’ and the co-pilot, a ‘young kid’ on his very first mission was also too freaked-out to take the controls (my uncle had just turned 21). When he saw the 15-foot seas in the bay, he decided on his own to ignore the Marine orders to ditch, and instead made a water landing on the submerged runway. They dumped the remaining fuel, shut down all the engines & turned off the fuel pumps so there wouldn’t be fires. My uncle made his first & last B-29 landing dead-stick, no engine power. He was knocked unconscious and injured in the landing, but no one was killed, and his crew mates pulled him out of the wreck. The plane broke up into 3 sections as it hit the water covered runway. The photo was taken the next day after someone (probably Seabees) bull-dozed the wreck off of the runway.
The Marines wanted to arrest my uncle for disobeying their orders. Instead the Army whisked him back to Tinian, gave him a medal, and returned him to flight duty. That’s the military. In the 1970s, when I was in the Navy, he warned me about staying away from those Marines… and don’t worry too much if they threaten to arrest you.
He went down again a month later, and spent 2 days in a life raft in the Pacific before being rescued by a Navy flying boat. He wrote in his diary that watching his ditched plane sink was one of the worst moments he knew during the war.
Some other missions of note, on the day of the Hiroshima A-bombing, my uncle navigated one of the 3 weather planes that flew an hour earlier than the A-bomb plane and the 2 others accompanying it carrying cameras and observation gear. He flew over an alternative target, which was covered with clouds. On their return leg, about an hour east of the Japanese coast, the tail gunner reported seeing an enormously bright green-yellow flash in the distance. A number of aircrew remarked that fillings in their teeth tingled and felt hot. After landing they learned what had happened.
On VJ Day, Sept. 2, my uncle flew in the show-of-force mission over Tokyo Bay during the Japanese surrender. He was annoyed as it wasn’t necessary and it still involved a 15-hour round-trip over the ocean. After that, he flew several missions where they parachuted food & medical supplies to POW camps in Japan. Sometime in October, he navigated a B-29 from Tinian, to Kwajalein, to Hawaii, and finally to Sacramento, California. Just off-shore from San Francisco, over the Farallon Islands, an engine backfired and failed. They quickly shut it down, and made it to the airfield without further trouble. After landing, they pulled the magnetic plug from the #3 engine – it was covered with iron filings. An overheated piston had blown. From there, he was glad to take a much slower train across the country to go home.
So that’s my Memorial Day story. After the war, my uncle returned to college, went to dental school and later became an oral surgeon. He rarely talked about his wartime experience, only telling most of this when he was much older. After he died, my cousin showed me his photos & diary. The best photo of all was of him soon after the VJ day mission, standing with a few buddies, sharing a jar of ‘Prune Juice’.
