In September 1944, nine American flyers went into the water off the Japanese island of Chichijima. One was pulled from the sea by a United States submarine and lived to become president. The other eight were taken ashore, beaten, and beheaded, and parts of four of them were eaten by the officers who ordered their deaths. Neither outcome was an accident.
Both had been decided years before on paper by two governments that had each made up their minds about what a downed enemy flyer was for. Chichijima is a volcanic dot in the Bonin Islands, about six hundred miles south of Tokyo. It held a radio station, a seaplane anchorage, and a garrison of some twenty-five thousand men who had nowhere to go and almost nothing to eat. American carriers had been hitting it since June.
By September the strikes came in waves, and with each wave came the men who did not make it home, floating in their dye marker stains, waiting to see what reached them first. What reached them was the whole point. Two machines had spent the previous two years deciding in advance what to do with such a man. One was built to kill him.
The other was built to go out and pull him from the ocean before he drowned and before the first machine got to him. They had grown up on opposite sides of the same war, and for most of that war they never touched. Off Chichijima they crossed at last over the same handful of men on the same days in the same square of sea. The place to start is the morning the Japanese mainland stopped feeling safe.
On April 18, 1942, sixteen B-25 bombers under Jimmy Doolittle came in low over Honshu and put their loads on Tokyo and four other cities. The physical damage was minor. The insult was not. Tokyo had promised its people the home islands could not be touched, and now they had been, by planes that lifted off an American carrier and flew on toward China rather than turning back.
The response was a law written to kill them. On August 13, General Shigeru Hada issued military order number four, which the world later called the Enemy Airmen’s Act. It declared that any flyer who bombed Japanese soil was a war criminal subject to trial and death, and it was drafted to reach backward in time so it could be applied to the men already sitting in the cells. No provision in international law supported any of it.
Tojo wanted a deterrent, and he admitted as much after the war under questioning. The captured Doolittle crews were the test case. The trial in Shanghai lasted a single day. The accused were not told the charges in a language they understood, were forbidden to put up a defense, and were convicted anyway of strafing civilians, something the prosecution never bothered to prove.
Five of the eight had their sentences commuted to life. The other three, First Lieutenant Dean Hallmark, First Lieutenant William Farrow, and Sergeant Harold Spatz, were driven to a cemetery outside the city and shot. American accounts put the date at October 15, 1942. The Japanese tribunal records put it at the 14th, and the one-day gap has never been settled because the men who could have settled it were the men who fired the rifles.
Roosevelt knew and said nothing. Releasing the news would have meant admitting the raiders had been caught, and the raid was being sold at home as a clean triumph. The families were left to wonder, and the policy that killed those three men hardened into the policy for the rest of the war. It did not stay confined to bombing crews.
During the Battle of Midway in June 1942, three Navy airmen were fished out of the Pacific by Japanese warships, questioned, and killed. Machinist’s Mate Bruno Gaido and Ensign Franco Flaherty were lashed to weighted fuel cans and dropped over the side of a destroyer to drown. A third man, Ensign Wesley Osmus, took an axe to the head and went off the stern. None of the three had bombed a city.
They had been in the water when the wrong ship found them, which by the middle of 1942 was reason enough. By the count of the postwar investigators, something close to 130 Allied flyers were put to death inside Japan alone in the last year of the war, most after courts that ran a few minutes. One of them, a B-29 gunner named Sergeant Algy Ogonus, was asked at his sentencing whether he had any last words. He told the room he did not hate any of them, that they had done their duty the way he had done his, and that he hoped the war would end soon and leave peace behind it.
Then they tried to behead him, botched it, and finished him with a pistol at point-blank range. That was one of the two machines. The other machine began, as these things often do, with a problem of money and morale, rather than mercy. A carrier pilot was the single most expensive thing the United States Navy built.
He cost eighteen months and a small fortune in fuel and instructors to train, and when he went into the sea off an enemy island, all of it went down with him unless someone reached him fast. The Navy was losing trained men it could not replace, and it had something already in those same waters that could surface and lift a man aboard. The answer had been sitting under the water the whole time. In operational order 49, dated December 1942, submarines posted off Wake Island for a bomber strike were told, almost in passing, to recover personnel as needed.
The bombers all came home that night, and the boats had nothing to do, but the idea was now on paper. By early 1943 it had a name, the Submarine Lifeguard League, and the crews gave the work a vocabulary of its own. A downed pilot was a Zumi. The fighters that flew cover for a rescue were chickens.
The waterproof emergency radio a floating airman cranked to call for help weighed thirty to forty pounds and went by the name, with no recorded irony, of the Gibson Girl. Charles Lockwood, who ran the Pacific Submarine Force out of Pearl Harbor, pushed the program hard. His boats were already the deepest reaching ships the Navy had, working alone hundreds of miles past the range of any Allied surface vessel. Now he had them park in plain sight off Japanese airfields on the surface in daylight and wait to catch whatever the strikes shook loose.
The hauls grew. In the spring of 1944, the submarine Tang sat on lifeguard station through the carrier strikes on Truk and brought up twenty-two aviators from the lagoon and the water around it. Tang’s skipper, Richard O’Kane, sank more enemy tonnage than almost any captain in the force, and he counted those twenty-two men among the things he was proudest of. There is a hard footnote to that.
Six months later, Tang was killed by one of her own torpedoes, which ran in a circle and came back into her hull, and O’Kane finished the war starved and beaten in a Japanese prison camp. Some rescues were stranger than others. The boats worked out a trick they called scoping for when a flyer was down so close to an enemy shore that surfacing the whole submarine meant taking fire from the beach. The boat would stay under with only its periscope showing, creep up to the raft, and let the airman take hold of the scope itself.
Off Haha Jima, a pilot named Beckman held on to a periscope while the submarine towed him five miles out until it was clear of the shore guns and could come up to bring him in. None of this was charity. The Navy went and got those pilots because trained pilots were scarce and expensive, and because a flyer who knew a submarine was waiting flew harder than one who knew he would drown alone. The decency was real, and it sat on top of cold arithmetic, and the arithmetic came first.
It cost the force something to do this. Fifty-two American submarines were lost in the war, and lifeguard duty asked a boat to do the most exposed thing a submarine can do: sit still on the surface in daylight within range of an enemy’s guns and wait for a man in a raft while the chickens overhead tried to keep the enemy honest. The clearest version of the difference played out off Formosa in October 1944, when the submarine Sailfish came up in full view of the enemy to recover twelve Navy flyers who had ditched after a strike. There was a private history in the choice of boat.
She had begun the war as the Squalus, which sank on a test dive off New Hampshire in 1939 and took twenty-six men down with her before she was raised from the seabed, renamed, and sent back to fight. Japanese sampans were already standing out from shore for the same men, meaning to take them prisoner, which on that side of the war sat one short step from a death sentence. The boat did not turn away. She brought her deck gun to bear, sank a sampan and a patrol craft while the airmen were still in the water, and pulled all twelve aboard.
That brings it back to Chichijima. On September 2, 1944, a flight of Avenger torpedo bombers off the light carrier San Jacinto went in against the radio station on the island. The third pilot to push into his dive was a twenty-year-old lieutenant junior grade named George Bush. Flak caught his aircraft on the way down and lit the engine, but he held the dive, put his bombs onto the radio tower, and pulled off the target trailing smoke.
With the cockpit filling and the plane dying under him, he told his two crewmen, Radio Man Second Class John Delaney and Lieutenant Junior Grade William White, to take to their parachutes. One chute was seen to open. Neither man lived, and the record never gave Bush a clean account of which of them had jumped, a gap he carried for the rest of his life. Bush went over the side, opened his head on the tail as he cleared the plane, came down in the water, and climbed into his raft as Japanese boats put out from the island to take him.
American aircraft overhead strafed the boats and drove them back. He paddled, sick and bleeding and certain the boats would reach him before help did. “I was crying, throwing up, and swimming like hell,” he said afterward. Then the sea in front of him opened and a submarine came up out of it.
For one long moment, he had no idea whose it was. It was the Finback, on lifeguard station off the Bonins, and the first thing the future president said as he stood dripping on her deck was that he was happy to be aboard. He did not get off again for a month. A rescued flyer became for the rest of the patrol one more body in a crowded hull, and Bush stood lookout watches while the boat hunted her way home.
The man who later sat in the Oval Office spent the weeks after his own rescue helping a submarine search the sea for other men in the water. Eight other flyers shot down over that same island in those same weeks were not met by a periscope. They were met by the garrison. The eight had not all come down on one day or one flight.
They were taken from the sea and the slopes around the island across a run of raids that lasted from the summer of 1944 into the next spring. The garrison kept most of them alive for a stretch, working them for what they knew about the carrier strikes before the order came to be rid of them. Lieutenant General Yoshio Tachibana’s men held those airmen, starved them, worked them over, and then killed them. They beheaded some with swords, ran others through with bayonets, and killed the rest with sharpened bamboo.
Floyd Hall, Marvel Mershon, Glenn Frazier, Grady York, Warren Vaughn, and the others died within sight of the same water that had just handed Bush back to his own side. Then, with the island blockaded and the food running out, officers under a major named Matoba cut flesh from four of the dead and ate it, in one instance serving a man’s liver at a drinking party for senior officers. They told one another it carried strength. The Navy that pulled Bush out of the water spent years making sure the country never heard the rest.
The tribunal records were sealed, and one lawyer who worked the case gave the reason without flinching. The Navy did not want the families at home to learn that their sons had been eaten. The reckoning came on Guam in 1946 and 1947. Thirty Japanese personnel stood trial in connection with the killings, and the court ran into a strange problem partway through.
Neither military law nor international law had ever named cannibalism as a crime, so the prosecutors charged the officers with murder and with preventing the honorable burial of the dead. Tachibana, Matoba, and a captain named Yoshi were convicted and hanged. Most of the enlisted men were out of prison inside eight years. Tojo had said the executions were meant to frighten American flyers away from Japan.
It failed. The raids did not slow. They grew heavier and pressed in closer until the home islands the law was written to shield were burning one city at a time. From 1943 to the end of the war, submarines on lifeguard duty pulled more than five hundred flyers out of the Pacific.
The memorial at Pensacola puts the count at 518. The Naval Institute’s own history will commit to nothing tighter than more than 500. The total has never quite been pinned down, which suits a program that started life as a single line in an order about bombing Wake Island. George Bush flew 58 combat missions, came home, married, raised a family, and lived to be 94, and a great many people know his name.
Almost no one can name Floyd Hall, or Grady York, or Marvel Mershon, the men who went into the same water around the same island in the same few weeks and were reached by the wrong hull. What separated them was not skill, and not the kind of luck that gets written up afterward. It was which thing found that square of ocean first, a periscope or a patrol boat.
On Chichijima in September 1944, the distance between those two was the distance between a man who became president and a liver served at a party.
