By the summer of 1945, turning flat ground into an American airfield was a process governed by paperwork at every stage. Aerial photographs, drainage surveys, and measurements of the coral beneath the soil all went into a base development plan, assigned a phase and a priority, and handed to engineer battalions with a deadline attached. The plan for the Ryukyu Islands called for eight airfields on Okinawa alone. Beside it sat a smaller scheme for a single island off the northwest coast, to be developed as an advanced airbase.
That island was Ie Shima, nine square miles of farmland and coral, with one flat tableland across the middle and a limestone hill at the eastern end. By the middle of May, the island held a field hospital under canvas. The 36th Field Hospital had eleven Army nurses flown down from Saipan, and it was there that the price of the development plan was counted out in individual men. On the night of May 25, Japanese aircraft came over in waves from just after eight in the evening until five the next morning.
At least seventy bombs fell on the nine square miles. One landed in a Navy area and demolished a dispensary, killing twenty-four men and wounding twenty-one more; several of the wounded were survivors of a landing ship torpedoed off the same beach the week before. The 36th filled up and sent an urgent call to the station hospital at the far eastern end of the island, which had been ashore for less than two weeks and was not set up to receive anyone. It was working within the hour.
The airstrip was undamaged. Twelve weeks later, on a Sunday in mid-August, an Army engineer on that island sat down in his tent and wrote to his parents. He started straightaway, he told them, because he wanted it on paper while everything was fresh in his mind. He had just watched what he took to be the most important event in the world that day.
The flat tableland in the middle of Ie Shima had been bought before it was ever fought over. The Japanese government had purchased almost all of it from Okinawan farmers, everything west of the hill out to the western beaches and from the northern cliffs down to the main southern highway, at one yen and eighty sen for every 366 square feet. It became a military reservation with airstrips on it. The reasoning behind that purchase was sound, and it was the same reasoning the Americans brought to the island three years later.
Flat ground inside fighter range of somewhere that matters is worth more than the farm sitting on top of it. Two armies that agreed on nothing else agreed on that. By the first months of 1945, the garrison had reached the opposite conclusion and set about making the ground worthless. They cut trenches across their own runways, turned farmhouses and tombs into firing positions, drove tunnels through the ridges, and buried mines across every approach.
Engineers pulled 225 tons of mines and unexploded bombs out of that soil in the first three weeks after the fighting stopped, and men kept getting hurt by the ones nobody found. The landing came on April 16, behind half an hour of naval and aerial bombardment. The fighting took six days and ended on the twenty-first with a flag on the limestone hill. It cost the 77th Division 172 men killed, 901 wounded, and 46 missing.
On the twentieth, with the shooting still audible from the cemetery, the division held a memorial service for Ernie Pyle, who had been shot through the temple two days before on a road at the edge of Ie town. Nearly 5,000 of the defenders died on the nine square miles of ground. Fifty were taken alive. The island’s farming families, who had spent the winter carrying stone and digging for the garrison, came under American control in their thousands.
Then the place had to be made fit to work in. Freshwater came out of two holes in the ground; the main point on the north side gave 30,000 gallons a day, lifted over a bluff of 240 feet that was all but vertical, through canvas hose two and a half inches across. Engineers opened 56 miles of road by May 10. Eighty-four thousand tons of stores crossed the beach in four weeks.
Aircraft sprayed the whole island with DDT, and two malaria detachments came ashore to count mosquitoes. None of this was for the garrison holding it. It was being built for an army that had not arrived, one meant to go on from there to Kyushu in November. The first fighter squadron flew in for good on May 13, 32 Thunderbolts of a squadron of the 318th Fighter Group shepherded down from Saipan by a Superfortress.
Four days later, the group flew its first mission off the island, a night strike against airfields in southern Kyushu. It lost a pilot on the same run two nights after that. In Tokyo, on the morning of August 15, a wireless message arrived from Manila, setting out in detail how a defeated empire was to approach its conqueror. It required a competent representative, empowered in the name of the emperor, accompanied by advisers from the army, the navy, and the air forces, the last of whom was to know the airfields around Tokyo in detail.
The party would fly in a Japanese aircraft, unarmed, painted white overall, carrying green crosses on the fuselage and above and below each wing, large enough to be made out at 500 yards. It was to hold voice communication in English on a stated frequency. It would fly to an airfield on Ieshima, which the message said would be marked by two white crosses laid in the middle of the runway. It was to approach on a heading of 180 degrees and circle the field at 1,000 feet, or lower if the clouds sat lower, until American fighters came up to bring it in.
In every signal about the flight, the code designation would be the word Bataan. Tokyo answered that it could not manage the 17th as ordered, the time allowed being too short. Tokyo also asked what the phrase about certain requirements meant. Manila replied that the signing of surrender terms would not be among the tasks of the men sent.
On the eighteenth, the emperor appointed Lieutenant General Torashiro Kawabe, deputy chief of the Army General Staff, to head 16 men, and the staff spent the day assembling the information the Americans had demanded. On Ieshima that same week, the engineers were finishing something. The 805th Engineer Aviation Battalion had been quarrying coral out of the island’s interior since the end of May and laying it as runway B, 7,000 feet long, meant for Superfortresses, the first strip in the Ryukyu Islands built by Americans from nothing. By the battalion’s own account, they finished it on August 10.
The two aircraft lifted off from Kisarazu Naval Air Station on the eastern shore of Tokyo Bay at 7:18 on the morning of August 19. Both were Mitsubishi bombers of the type the Allies called Betty. One was a passenger variant. The other was a bomber with its guns stripped out and bullet holes still in it, and both had been whitewashed in a hurry by brush.
They turned northeast first, away from their own airfields, because Japanese naval aircraft had fired on American reconnaissance flights since the ceasefire, and a naval air commander outside Tokyo had wanted these two shot down. Then they came south, made the cape at the southern tip of Kyushu around 11, went out on the ordered heading, and began circling above cloud some 36 miles north of the island. Mitchells of the 345th Bomb Group came up to meet them, with Lightnings holding station overhead. A Flying Fortress of an emergency rescue squadron flew the whole leg alongside, carrying a motorized lifeboat slung under its fuselage on a parachute.
Nobody wanted to lose these men in the water at this stage. The crossing took five and a half hours. The first Betty touched the coral at 12:46. Men had been posted along both sides of the runway at intervals of about six feet, with rolls of barbed wire behind them, and behind the wire, the rest of the island had come to watch.
The heat was savage, and the light coming off white coral and white paint was hard to look into. One of the Bettys had lost part of the glazing at the tail position, and the man sitting there was in plain view as the machine settled. He looked out at the lines of Americans, at the crowd standing in the gullies alongside the strip, and went forward out of sight. Both pilots taxied with the canopy open, the captain standing up out of it to guide the turn, which put propeller wash across several thousand spectators and turned their backs.
Up near, the white paint was streaked, and the old red markings showed through it. The crosses had been done with more care. Base operations sent Manila a short signal, saying the visitors were down, in the loose phrasing of men who knew the war had stopped, promising to slick you word when departing for your paradise. One truck crew drove up to the perimeter fence and raised the dump bed to make a grandstand about 15 feet off the ground.
From up there, they watched five men in heavy flying clothes climb down out of a Betty into that heat and stand waiting for a pair of jeeps. What the delegation was looking at through those windows was four months of work. The ground under them had been farmland in March. It now carried three airstrips, one of them nine days old and built for bombers that would never need it.
It held 56 miles of road, a field hospital, a station hospital, fighter groups that had been striking southern Kyushu since May, a photographic reconnaissance squadron, anti-aircraft battalions, water points, stores dumps, and a Red Cross canteen that stayed open around the clock. Two Douglas Skymasters waited on the hard standing with their engines cooling, four engines apiece, polished. Beside them, the Bettys looked like something out of an earlier war. There were enough Americans on that island for two or three thousand of them to push through a line of guards out of sheer curiosity and not be missed from anywhere.
Four months earlier, there had been nothing on that ground but farms, a trench system, and a cemetery. They were airborne again inside half an hour and on the ground at Nichols Field south of Manila by 6:00 that evening, met by General Willoughby and a party of officers who spoke their language. Quarters on Dewey Boulevard, then a drive through a city that American and Japanese troops had destroyed around its civilians six months earlier, and up the steps of the ruined city hall with samurai swords hanging almost to the ground. They sat down a little after 9:00 across a long black table in a room hung with maps.
General Sutherland ran the meeting. MacArthur never appeared. Translators worked all night copying the charts and tables the delegation had brought and turning the American requirements into accurate Japanese by morning. Kawabe asked for extra time before the landings on the grounds that he could not predict what his own army and his own people would do.
Sutherland gave him three days. Then Kawabe was handed four documents: the requirements of the Supreme Commander, a draft of the Imperial Proclamation, General Order Number One, and the Instrument of Surrender itself, the paper that would be signed in Tokyo Bay. The two flight crews spent that time on the island under guard. A group of Americans climbed onto the wing of the first Betty and had their photograph taken standing on top of it.
They left Manila at 1:00 in the afternoon on the twentieth and were back on Ieshima that evening, 18 hours after they had left it. One Betty got away at 6:41 with twelve people aboard, ten passengers and two crew, carrying the documents. The other stayed on the island with the rest of the party. Somewhere over the coast of Shizuoka before midnight, the tanks ran dry.
The pilot put the machine down in shallow water off the shore near Hamamatsu, a city that battleships had shelled in July and bombers had worked over until there was not a great deal left of it. Nobody died. The men waded out of the surf holding the papers that told Japan how its own occupation would be carried out, and local fishermen helped them in through the dark. They went on to Tokyo by road and reported to the premier about seven hours behind schedule.
On the flight out, the Americans had sent a rescue aircraft with a lifeboat slung under it. On the way home, there was nothing overhead at all. The other Betty left Ie Shima at 7:09 the next morning with thirteen aboard, and Tokyo signaled Manila in the clear that it had reached the capital at 2:00 in the afternoon on the twenty-first. What the American files do not explain is why it waited a day.
One account has it swinging off the runway while taxiing and breaking its landing gear. Another has it off the taxiway and bogged in soft coral. The message traffic out of Ie Shima states only that the second aircraft would leave in the morning and gives no reason. The completion date of the runway they came down on rests on the engineer battalion’s own history and on nothing else that has surfaced.
What the signals do fix, beyond argument, is the hour each machine left, how many people were in it, and when it arrived. Neither Betty had much of a career afterwards. The one on the Shizuoka shore was past repair and stayed where it lay. The other reached Kisarazu and was broken up before long, together with what remained of its companion, though the accounts disagree about whether that was damage or a decision somebody took.
The men did better. Every one of them who had flown out of Kisarazu on the morning of the nineteenth was in Tokyo by the afternoon of the twenty-first, and the instrument of surrender had come off a beach in the dark in somebody’s hands. The first American troops landed in Japan seven days later.
