In the closing months of World War II, the U.S. Navy sailed with near impunity off the coast of Japan. U.S. submarines had relentlessly sunk Japanese merchant ships carrying oil, raw materials, and foodstuffs back home from that country’s overseas empire; B-29 Superfortresses had incinerated vast sections of its industrial cities; the U.S. Navy had bombed selected Japanese coastal targets and shelled port cities. But the fanatical Japanese resistance encountered throughout the Pacific war increased proportionately as the conflict came to the Home Islands. Such was the experience of U.S. forces on Iwo Jima and Okinawa. It soon would be discovered by naval aviators attacking targets at low level over Japan proper, including myself. Captured airmen rarely survived an enraged populace in these latter days of the war.
In June 1945, Air Group One boarded the Essex-class carrier USS Bennington (CV-20) being repaired in Leyte Gulf off the Philippine island of Luzon. Less than a week before, a typhoon had crumpled 30 feet of her flight deck. The damaged section had to be removed and replaced before the carrier was declared operational and ready to take aboard a new air group. The loss was considered an ill omen by the more superstitious sailors.
AG-1 was composed of a fighter squadron (VF-1) with 37 F6F Hellcats, a fighter/bomber squadron (VBF-1) with 37 F4U Corsairs, a torpedo squadron (VT-1) with 15 TBM Avengers, and a dive-bomber squadron (VB-1) with 15 SB2C Helldivers. I was a radioman/gunner in a Helldiver, and my pilot was Ensign Harold Meyer. When we first paired off in flight training, at 24 years of age he was the oldest man in the squadron, and at 17 I was the youngest. We had been flying together for several years, a tall thin Nebraskan and a six-foot, rail-thin Bostonian—“enough skin and bones to make one good man,” as a fellow officer commented.
The relationship between the two of us was built on the military chain of command, that of an enlisted man to an officer. Our age difference reinforced this hierarchy. I never questioned his flying skills, whereas some crewmen, close in age or even older than their pilots, challenged their pilots’ skills, disturbing their peace of mind and poisoning their relationship. From my coign of vantage, Ensign Meyer was in charge because he flew the plane; my job was to protect him, myself, and the aircraft we flew. He respected my skill as a radar/radio operator and tail gunner; I trusted his flying abilities. Both of us were taciturn, myself more so, being much younger and with limited experience. On the other hand, Ensign Meyer exhibited a maturity that commanded my respect. He enjoyed his fellow officers but refrained from engaging in their wilder antics, with his flying reflecting this self-discipline.
At no time in our relationship, either in flight or on the ground, do I remember addressing Ensign Meyer by his first name or its abbreviated form, “Hal.” It proved an invaluable attribute that avoided familiarity at the expense of performance. Even a professed mistake was accepted with equanimity, such as the time he was jolted by our sudden launch from the catapult and fell forward on the stick. The plane barely cleared the wave tops. He addressed me over the intercom with “That was close, Westy.” The admission only confirmed my faith in him.
The technique of dive-bombing had been developed by the U.S. Navy in the prewar years, copied by the Luftwaffe with their famed Stuka dive bomber, and reached its apogee of success in June 1942 during the Battle of Midway. In a single day, U.S. Navy SBD Dauntless dive bombers sank four Japanese aircraft carriers, mortally wounding three of them in all of five minutes; no other naval engagement of the 20th century matched that feat.
Dive-bombing involved approaching a moving target at about 14,000 feet, beyond the reach of most antiaircraft fire of that period; beginning a steep dive from about 10,000 feet; and then releasing the bomb while retaining enough altitude to pull out of the dive and clear any low obstacles, such as ship’s masts, high tension wires, trees, nearby mountains, etc.
Dive-bombing proved extremely effective against ships underway insofar as the dive-bomber pilot could easily compensate for any evasive change of course by a ship, whose antiaircraft gunners must continually change their defensive angle of fire. However, the opposite held true for attacks against heavily defended naval installations or other such stationary military targets. The hazard of low-level attacks, anything less than 2,000 feet, has been repeatedly experienced in every conflict since World War II. Before that war ended, dive bombers were being replaced by fighter bombers delivering the same ordinance payload. In due course, all such flying techniques were replaced by “smart bombs” delivered by drones with pinpoint accuracy.
Our first carrier strike took place on 10 July against Hyakurigahara Airfield outside Tokyo. Task Force 38 was cruising about a hundred or so miles off the coast of Japan. In the event of trouble and having to ditch the aircraft, we had been advised that a submarine would be on picket duty a few miles offshore. Our approach to the target was faultless, as we had practiced it many times during training, but the aerodynamics of the airplane had changed dramatically with a full load of fuel, bombs, and ammunition. We had never flown with such a fully loaded aircraft.
Our dive over the airfield was almost 90 degrees—the only time in combat we experienced one so steep. The pullout was at treetop level, and the gravity factor so strong I momentarily blacked out. The gravitational forces rippled the metal covering of the wings and sucked the fuel from the sump pumps, resulting in a stalled engine. I quickly regained consciousness in time to return a short burst of .30-caliber machine-gun fire at the low-level ground fire tracking us from the airstrip we had just bombed. Ensign Meyer had his own problems trying to prevent the airplane from crashing and gave the order to prepare for ditching in the ocean several miles away.
With no understanding of the finality of death now possibly facing both of us, my mind raced through the memory of my mother’s ritual of reading the headlines of The Boston Globe and then quickly turning to the obituary pages to comment on the passing of “Tapper Manning, who worked with your father,” or “Margie Sullivan, with whom I shared the telephone switchboard in the Boston exchange.” “Gee,” I thought, “won’t Mom be glad to see my name in the obituary column!”
Preparing to exit the aircraft upon landing in the water, I shouted over the intercom to Ensign Meyer, “You’re the best of pilots.” In that infinity of lapsed seconds the engine reignited, enabling the ensign to gain control of the damaged plane and ask over the intercom, “What did you say, Westy?” “Nothing, sir.”
A lone Hellcat fighter attached itself to us as we sought the safety of our fleet. On reaching it we received priority for an emergency carrier landing. We crash-landed on the flight deck, colliding with a crash barrier, before safely climbing down from our cockpits. The airplane was stripped and then pushed overboard, and landings resumed. Although somewhat shaken by this event, I chalked it up to the common misfortunes of war.
U.S. naval aviation forces, as opposed to Marine and Army ground forces, had limited experience attacking heavily defended naval installations, with the exception of Truk Atoll, a Central Pacific anchorage for the Japanese Combined Fleet. An attack in mid-July 1945 on Yokasuka Naval Base at the entrance to Tokyo Bay damaged the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) battleship Nagato with the U.S. Navy suffering some aircraft losses. But the prize remnants of the IJN were moored in Kure Harbor on the Inland Sea. Kure Naval Base had been one of the main staging areas for the attack on Pearl Harbor three and a half years earlier.
Nestled in a series of terraced hills, the base had all the advantages of defense. At the same time, as a consequence of aerial mining, submarine operations, and fuel shortages, no Japanese surface vessel, let alone a warship, could move from a dock or port on the Inland Sea. Although the warships were disabled dinosaurs, they bristled with multiple antiaircraft guns and enjoyed the added protection of shore batteries. As a target, the Kure Naval Base had no operational value, but such a large collection of IJN ships proved too tempting for the U.S. Navy. Aircrews would soon learn what such “victory hubris” would mean for them; “victory disease” had betokened disaster for the Japanese navy at Midway.
For three alternate days beginning 24 July and ending 28 July, U.S. carrier planes attacked the Kure Naval Base twice a day, an early morning strike followed by a midday one. The coordination of so many aircraft from so many carriers was an awesome planning task for any fleet commander. As a consequence, the same plan of attack was generally replicated on each successive day. The Japanese defenders could anticipate the approach vectors and altitude of their antagonists’ attack. So predictable were our dive-bombing runs and so intense the antiaircraft fire that the usual 10 percent monthly attrition rate of aircraft loss quickly escalated.
On our final, 28 July, strike on Kure, we had close by the usual colored blossom markers of different antiaircraft batteries that were shooting at us on our approach to the target. We dove through this deadly barrage. It was like going through a shower and not expecting to get wet. Ensign Meyer performed a perfect dive and unloaded a 1,000-pound bomb that landed squarely in the middle of a battleship, the Hyuga. We cleared the target at a safe height and hurtled down the several-miles-long bay while exposed to all manner of ground fire.
Under the circumstances, attempting to return machine-gun fire from the rear seat was futile; getting away from the gauntlet of ship and shore fire directed against us was far more important. With my canopy covering shut to increase airspeed, and now a rear-seat observer and witness of the chaos we’d just escaped—planes not pulling out of their dives, others spiraling out of control from antiaircraft fire, smoke everywhere from shell bursts, burning ships, and explosions in all quarters—I momentarily hit a wall of terror and in my excitement shouted over the telecom to Ensign Meyer: “Let’s get the f— out of here!”
I’d not been known before or since to use that word in normal discourse—such was the panic and terror of the moment. Ensign Meyer calmly replied, “Westy, we’re doing 420 knots”—a speed rarely achieved in a dive bomber. Whether on subsequent flights or for the rest of my life, never again did I permit total fear proximate to paralyzing terror affect me; it’s just not worth the pain.
Once outside the killing zone of Kure Bay, we climbed to gain altitude for the return trip to the Bennington, and Ensign Meyer spotted a lone SB2C from our air group. He brought our plane abreast of what proved to be a crippled plane with a wounded radioman/gunner. Ensign Meyer told me to signal the gunner via blinker light for signs of his consciousness. Between bouts of recognition of my signals and recourse to passing out, the radioman/gunner, Marvin Bradshaw, was instructed to jettison his two canisters of machine-gun ammunition and his twin .30-caliber machine guns, even as the pilot was dropping his empty wing tanks and disposing of wing-mounted rockets, to lighten the plane and conserve fuel.
Flying for some time in an empty sky, it was a relief to make radar contact with the destroyers screening the fleet. The Bennington was alerted to the condition of the damaged aircraft and the wounded aircrewman, and the plane was cleared for an emergency landing. After it came in, wheels up, the pilot climbed out, and deck personnel gingerly removed the wounded aircrewman, who was whisked down to the ship’s infirmary. Later that evening I went to see him but was advised he was heavily sedated. The next day he was transferred to a fleet hospital ship, and I never saw or heard from him again. He remains in my memory as one brave young man, who although wounded, mustered the strength to cast overboard a set of twin .30-caliber machine guns when most of us needed assistance to mount them in their socket after removal for cleaning.
An aircraft metalsmith repairing flak-damaged planes on the hangar deck later told Ensign Meyer and me that he ceased counting when upward of 50 or more holes were detected in the plane we had flown on this last operational strike over Kure. The three days of air strikes on Kure Naval Base during the last days of World War II were extremely costly for U.S. carrier aviation, with losses surpassing those of the more significant three-day Battle of Midway.
Third Fleet commander Admiral William F. Halsey wrote in his memoir, Admiral Halsey’s Story, that Vice Admiral John S. McCain, Task Force 38’s CO, “strongly opposed our strikes against Kure. He and his staff considered the Japanese Fleet only a minor threat; they wanted to use our air strength against other, more profitable targets.” And in The Fast Carriers, Clark G. Reynolds put the raids’ American toll at “133 aircraft and 102 airmen—a frightful loss.” But as Halsey pointed out, the attacks were highly successful, and by sunset on 28 July, “the Japanese Navy had ceased to exist.”
The necessity of refueling at sea, provisioning the ship, replacing aircrews and aircraft, all conducted in bad weather, limited our flight operations for the next two weeks. We made several air strikes in the Honshu archipelago on ships hiding in secluded anchorages and on targets of opportunity like trains, ferries, etc.
This late stage of the war had bred a weary fatalism in us all, and we had become inured against hope for a quick ending to the war. The war was not winding down, it was heating up to a white hot frenzy of an entire peoples, the whole nation of Japan, seemingly hell-bent on suicide rather than surrender.
My U.S. Navy flight log for 15 August reads, “Character of flight: Strike Tokyo, type of machine SB2C-4.” It proved to be the last U.S. naval air offensive of World War II. On that August morning, our plane left the carrier deck in a murky overcast. After circling to get into formation, we headed due west for Tokyo. The orders were to strike selected targets there not yet obliterated by B-29 heavy bomber raids. Some talk had been circulating, really rumors, of a possibility the war might soon end—something about a bomb of unimaginable destructive force. Skeptics that we were, we retorted, “Golden Gate in ’48.”
To this day, in my mind’s eye, I can see the gradual unfolding of the horseshoe bay leading to the city of Tokyo, and ten miles from the target hear the radio order: “Jettison all bombs, unarmed.” Someone questioned the message with “What’s up?” only to be told: “Good news.” My wingman, Doug Page from New York City, rolled back his Plexiglas cockpit cover and in celebration fired his Smith & Wesson .38 revolver into the air. Less in jubilation than in stunned awareness of the answer to my prayer, I stared at the unarmed bombs falling to the bay below.
That evening, the fleet received one of its strongest air attacks from disgruntled Japanese officers contesting the conclusion of hostilities. As I stood on the catwalk bordering the flight deck of the carrier and glazed at the phosphorescent wake alongside the ship, a sailor from the engine room came alongside. We discussed the events of the day. Aware that my conversation lacked the usual conviviality of flight crews with ship’s company, I asked him would he like a drink.
From time immemorial alcohol has been a postcombat soporific, and the U.S. Navy continued this tradition by offering a small medicinal cup of brandy to pilots and aircrewmen returning from strikes. I had saved some of mine for just such an event as this night. After producing the half pint or so of brandy, I gave it all to this unknown sailor from belowdecks, who registered surprise at my largesse. An overwhelming gratitude had motivated me in what would become a lifetime of trying to say “Thanks.”
A Wounded Helldiver Limps Home
During Bombing Squadron One’s 28 July afternoon mission against Kure, the Helldiver flown by the unit’s CO, Lieutenant Commander Andrew B. Hamm, was shot down and Lieutenant (junior grade) John R. Wagner’s plane was severely damaged. Ensign Meyer and Aviation Radioman Second Class Westwater later received Air Medals for their roles in the attack that day and helping guide Wagner’s plane back to the Bennington. The following excerpt from the squadron’s action report at the National Archives describes Wagner’s ordeal.
Lt. (jg) J. R. WAGNER, Jr., flying wing on Lt. Comdr. HAMM, narrowly escaped being shot down over the target. At the moment he released his bomb at 2500 feet, the plane was struck by heavy AA. The explosion flipped the plane over onto its back and shook it violently. Lt. WAGNER regained control by pushing forward on the stick with both hands and also bracing one knee against the stick to keep the plane on an even keel. Once out of the target area, he took a quick check of the situation. One of the horizontal stabilizers had been nearly shot away and there was a big hole in the rudder. His gunner, M. R. BRADSHAW, ARM2c, had been wounded in the foot by shrapnel which had come up through the open bomb bay. His ship was nearly 200 miles away. The distance was no problem, but WAGNER couldn’t take one hand from the control stick long enough to pull the plotting board out of its slide and figure his navigation.
At this point, a squadron mate, Ensign N. J. E. MEYER, flew alongside. He noted the damage done by flak and led the way home. Lt. WAGNER sighed with relief as he saw the carrier. The rest would be easy. But the tail hook wouldn’t drop from its socket. It had been damaged by flak. A landing in the water was considered but rejected because the wounded gunner might not be able to get out. So was a deck landing with wheels because the certain barrier crash might further injure the wounded man. Ordered to pull up his wheels and come in for a belly landing, Lt. WAGNER responded perfectly. The plane skidded to a stop at the first barrier.