Lieutenant Robert Merklein gets ready to take off in his P-51, Available Jayne, on the very first land-based fighter mission departing from Iwo Jima to attack mainland Japan on April 7, 1945.
P-51 Pilot, Iwo Jima
Forty-sixth Fighter Squadron, Twenty-first Fighter Group, Seventh Air Force
You hope you have the skill, that you can shoot straight and fly right and keep out of trouble, and that the bad one doesn’t get you.
Lieutenant Robert Merklein gets ready to take off in his P-51, Available Jayne, on the very first land-based fighter mission departing from Iwo Jima to attack mainland Japan on April 7, 1945.
I really wanted to find someone who had flown a plane at Iwo Jima during the war, and I first learned about Bob Merklein from his nephew, Jim Stanek, of Newport, Rhode Island. Merklein and I later spoke at length on the telephone in November 2006. He and his wife had recently moved from Houston to a retirement home in Sugar Land, Texas. In talking about his experiences during the war, he used the word luck a lot, as it applied to his survival. But as his story indicates, it was clear that he had made a lot of his own luck. He was a handsome pilot, and he named his plane Available Jayne. This chapter tells why.
“The battle started February 19, as everybody knows, and I arrived March 22, while it was still going on, four days before that last banzai attack, March 26. We’d been sitting down at Tinian, and that attack scared the hell out of us because we weren’t prepared for it, you know, at five o’clock in the morning. The Japs would take over Motoyama No. 2 at night and the Americans had it during the daytime. There was a lot of fighting after they said the island was secure, before we even got there. From our tent area on up there was fighting on that north end, and then in the evening the marines would come right by our area with their dead and wounded. There was a bunch of ’em, I’ll tell you. But it’s war, you know. They still fought a hard battle for more than a month after I arrived.
“I was right in the middle of that banzai attack. For some reason or another when we landed there on the twenty-second, they had put up tents to the northwest. Why they put us up there, toward the area where the majority of fighting was still going on, I don’t know. But anyway, on the twenty-sixth at five o’clock in the morning these three hundred Japs came out of the caves and hit our tent area.”
While they were not supposed to take part in combat, black marines serving on Iwo played a significant part in defeating and killing the attackers. The Japanese, armed with automatic weapons, bayonets, swords, and hand grenades, had made their way underground from the northern end of the island to an assembly point just north of Motoyama No. 1, near the western beaches. Attacking in a gap between two garrisoned units preparing to debark the island, they struck the bivouac area, a tent city for the Seventh Fighter Command. Patrick Mooney, the historian and an expert on the battle, notes: “The Army Air Force units in the bivouac did not have observation or listening posts out. They were not prepared for combat. They were living aboveground, in tents. There were also Marine shore parties, supply troops, antiaircraft gunners, and Seabees. The Japanese came into that area and killed forty-four pilots in their sleep with swords and bayonets. Eighty-eight were wounded. The quick reaction of the Fifth Pioneer Battalion, a white unit, and the Eighth Ammo and Thirty-sixth Depot, both black, pinched off the Japanese and then swept through, methodically killing, wounding, or capturing the Japanese. They saved what could have been a real catastrophe for the troops in the area. Nine marines were killed, and thirty-one wounded. Eighteen Japanese were taken prisoner.” Private James M. Whitlock and Private First Class James Davis of the Thirty-sixth Depot, both blacks, were awarded Bronze Stars. Private First Class Harold Smith was killed while several other black marines were wounded. First Lieutenant Harry L. Martin of Bucyrus, Ohio, led the fight against the infiltrators and was himself killed. The last marine to die in action on Iwo Jima, he posthumously received the twenty-sixth and last Medal of Honor awarded for the battle.
“It took the marines three hours to get us out of our tent because we had Japanese right outside in a shell hole,” Merklein recalled. “We could hear them talking just like I’m talking to you. Of course bullets and shrapnel were flying around, and all we could do was hit the deck in our tent. Finally, when the sun came up, we heard a loudspeaker coming from the south, the direction our tent was facing, and they said, ‘Anybody left in the pilots’ area, yell out!’
“Well, the Japanese didn’t know we were in the tent, and of course it was just a piece of canvas. They were so close, right on the other side of the canvas at the back wall of my tent. All they had to do was lift the tent and roll a hand grenade in there and we were done for. Later in that shell hole they found over twenty-five Japanese dead. Around our tent there were six more, just spread around, and everything from the ground up was just shrapnel holes and blood and guts on the tents and the ground pretty well blown apart. Most had already been wounded during the battle for Iwo because they came out of the caves. They had some American equipment on them. They came out of tunnels from the north.
“Anyway, finally, we saw some movement to the south, and we waved a towel or something, and they spotted us. They yelled over the speaker to get ready to get up and run. The order finally came about nine o’clock and we had one wounded guy in the tent. We drug him, and I remember diving into a garbage pit they had made. I landed on my flight surgeon, and he had a marine who was split wide open on his lap.
“A couple guys in my squadron actually did get to fire at the Japanese because they were on the farther side of the tent. My tent area got hit first, and that’s why we were basically trapped there and couldn’t do anything. We were lucky to get out. I was in the second row of tents. When we got there, I picked a tent out in the first row and then changed my mind and went back to the second row. Everybody in that first tent I picked out got killed. So you know you just luck out sometimes.”
“I was born August 7, 1922, and graduated from high school in Madison, Wisconsin, in June of 1941. I wanted to join the service well before Pearl Harbor was attacked because my two brothers had already been in for a year. One was drafted, and the other belonged to the National Guard.
“The general sense was that we were going to be in the war; it was just a matter of time. Then, when the war broke out, I joined. At that particular time I was not interested in politics, so I wasn’t paying much attention to the isolationist debate. I signed up with the Army Air Corps right after Pearl Harbor. They called me on January 20, 1942. I always wanted to fly, but I never expected it because I didn’t have any college.
“After the preliminaries at Fort Sheridan, Illinois, we went down to Keesler Field in Biloxi, Mississippi, which they had just opened up. We took all kinds of exams to help decide what guys were going to be doing. It was decided that I would go to the Casey Jones School of Aeronautics in downtown Newark, New Jersey. It was a civilian school with a government contract. I was there about six months learning aircraft mechanics, and I enjoyed every minute of it. Then they sent me to Columbus, Mississippi, where I started working on advanced trainers, the AT-17 and AT-10. It was a flying school. The planes weren’t armed.
“Things were building up fast in Army Air Corps. But I always had this thing about flying, and as far as I knew at that time you had to have the two years of college. I got my ratings pretty fast, and by the time I made buck sergeant I decided to sign up for gunnery school and at least be a crew member on a bomber, just a gunner or radio operator on a B-24 in combat, something like that. They had ten or eleven members in a crew, four officers and the rest enlisted. That’s what I was going after. Turned out all you needed was a physical.
“Well, I got to know the girl at post headquarters, and I’d go over there every noon at lunchtime to check and see if they’d given me my orders, and she got to know me. I have no idea what her name was. This was November of 1942, and one day she said, ‘Bob, why don’t you try for aviation cadets?’ And I said, ‘I don’t have the college.’ She said, ‘Well, they got this new program where you take eight hours of written exams, and if you pass, you can be a pilot. Why don’t you do that?’
“I had just taken all this mechanical stuff, and I wasn’t that long out of high school, so I was used to taking tests. Anyway, I passed and got accepted into the program, and January 1 of ’43 I was at Nashville, Tennessee, for a month. That was where they decided if you were going to be a pilot or a bombardier or whatever. Of course most of the guys wanted to be pilots. When it was time for the list to come out, we all ran to the bulletin board, and I was lucky enough to be chosen as a pilot. So nine months later, on October 1, 1943, I got my wings and became a second lieutenant.
“Of course it was one of the great experiences of my life, but the training was so intense and we’d all worked so hard as cadets we almost felt like we deserved the wings. But it was quite a thrill. Becoming a second lieutenant was fine, but the main thing was getting the silver wings. It was a dream come true because I had never thought it could happen.
“They sent us to Tallahassee [Florida], and from there they sent me to P-39 school, in Thomasville, Georgia. I had about ninety hours by the time we graduated in January. By the time I graduated I had the P-17 Stearman, an open-cockpit biplane, and the BT-13, the basic trainer, the AT-6, and ten hours of P-40 time. So I was on the road to fly anything. I hit it at just the right time. They moved you around, to Maxwell Field, to Douglas, Georgia, back to Alabama, then Marietta, Georgia, where I graduated from. The washout rate was 50 percent.
“It was up in Tallahassee where I met Sarah Jayne Pitts. Tallahassee was a pilot replacement pool, and they had the state teachers’ college for women there, and all the guys would date the gals from the college. She said she was available for a date, so when I got to Iwo Jima, I decided to call my P-51 Available Jayne. That’s the way she spelled her name. I dated her for several weeks.
“Then they shipped me to California to go overseas. We were there two or three weeks on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay, right next to Alcatraz. In fact, the ferry that took us out there stopped by Alcatraz to drop off prisoners.
“We got on a big Navy boat and thought we were going to combat. Everybody wanted to go to combat. I got off at the Hawaii Islands and said, ‘Gee, I wouldn’t mind spending a week or two here,’ and by God I got stuck there for a whole year. I mean it was fun, but it wasn’t combat. We went from P-39s to P-38s, and that’s when we thought we were going to combat. Then, about November of ’44, they said, no, you’re going to get 51s. They put us aboard an aircraft carrier the first of February, I think. We went to Guam, where they off-loaded the 51s. We went up to Tinian, then to Saipan, and sat there waiting for number two airfield to open up on Iwo Jima.
“After the banzai attack, we lived in foxholes for three or four weeks. Hell, everybody was gun happy after dark, and everybody was shooting. So we dug down deep and lined the hole with sandbags so our heads would still be below the surface when we’d lie on an army cot. We were living on C and K rations.
“I was in the Forty-sixth Fighter Squadron of the Twenty-first Fighter Group of the Seventh Air Force. There were three different squadrons to a group. There were about thirty in a squadron, so there were eighty to ninety planes in a group. They were all P-51s until the P-47s came along later.
“The P-51 was the most advanced fighter that I flew, and it was actually designed after the British got into the war with Germany. It carried six fifty-caliber guns, three on each wing. We had what we called practice missions to Chichi Jima and Haha Jima, one hundred to one hundred fifty miles away. We could take five hundred pounders with us and strafe because we didn’t need drop tanks. But on the long missions we started off with heavy one-hundred-ten-gallon wing tanks, two of ’em. Then we graduated to two one-hundred-sixty-five-gallon tanks. We’d carry them as long as we could and then drop them before we went in to strafe.
“We had two airfields, all 51s, and the P-47s started coming in just about the time I left there. It was a big deal. You don’t read about it, but we had a lot of planes there. Of course the Navy fighters were going in off aircraft carriers and strafing three or four weeks before we hit because they could get up pretty close.
“I was lucky enough to be on the very first land-based fighter mission to Japan. That was April 7, and we were one hundred fifty planes flying out of number two airfield on Iwo Jima, escorting B-29s, which came from Guam and Tinian, over the target. It was seven hundred fifty miles to Japan from Iwo, fifteen hundred round trip. We were to rendezvous over Japan.
“They had a stripped-down B-29 we would meet over Iwo, and that plane would do the navigation for us on the way up. He’d get us up there, and we’d break off for our mission. We’d have a rendezvous point afterward, but a lot of times we never caught up to the B-29 on the way back. We also had what we called our Uncle Dog, a radio in the plane that we could home in on the B-29. All we had beyond that was a compass. It was all dead reckoning, and I was good at it.
“The missions, to different parts of Japan, lasted almost eight hours. Sometimes we escorted B-29s, sometimes we just strafed, depending on the mission. Then we had sea patrol off Iwo. Weather was our biggest problem. We always hit at least one front going up there or coming back. On June 5, 1945, we lost twenty-seven airplanes and twenty-five pilots just due to the weather. I happened not to be on that mission. There was always at least one weather front between Iwo and Japan, and we’d try to fly under it or we’d try to fly over it, and they just got discombooberated that day. The weather was so bad they shouldn’t have even gone.
“But you do just luck out sometimes. My plane got hit three different times, but I didn’t even know it till I got back. It was tracer fire from the ground: It was pretty; it had a curved arc coming up at you. I remember on one mission we strafed this airfield and pulled out over some water, and I happened to look down, and I said, ‘My God, it looks like somebody’s throwing gravel on the water,’ and hell, those were shells hitting the water that they were firing at me.
“I finally did get to shoot down a plane. It was my last mission. It was on the east side of Tokyo Bay on May 29, 1945. I didn’t know it was my last mission, but I was lucky enough to get one Japanese aircraft. It was a Tojo. I can’t remember the number. We had a flight of four, and we had already escorted the B-29s, and we were heading for the rendezvous point where everybody shows up to fly back to Iwo, and as we were approaching the rendezvous point, we saw these two planes above us. We realized they were enemy planes, so we took off after them. Our flight leader took the one to the right, and I took the one to the left and just chased him down.
“He didn’t fire back at me. He was trying to escape. He dove toward the ground, and I caught up with him and got him with the fifties. My wingman said he bailed out. We saw flames on the airplane where I hit him. I never did actually see him bailing out.
“The Tojo looked like a P-47, but it was one of the newer fighters. But by that time most of their pilots, the good ones, had been killed.
“For the return to Iwo, we didn’t have cross runways. There was only one, and the fighters had to come in first because they had less gas than anybody: On that last mission all I had was five or ten gallons left when I landed after shooting down the Tojo. You had to be an optimist back then. You felt confident; you figured it was going to happen to somebody else, not yourself. That’s why they wanted young guys, I guess.
“It was all very interesting. If we weren’t on a mission and the B-29s were coming in low on fuel or damaged, we’d go up and watch them land with the engines shot up. We all gathered around for that. I don’t know how many were saved, but it was a bunch. They were flying a lot of missions, and there were a lot of wrecked B-29s on Iwo Jima. They were just junked, too bad to try to fix up after they made their emergency landings.”
While the seizure of Iwo Jima was intended largely to provide an emergency halfway stop for B-29s returning from attacks on Japan, space was extremely limited, and pilots were strongly encouraged to continue on to Saipan or Tinian if at all possible.
“They discouraged the B-29s from landing. They had a colonel in the tower, and if he thought they could make it back to Guam or Saipan, he wouldn’t let them land. But I’ve seen B-29s bellying off the shore of Iwo. There were too many landings going on at one time, and they had to do something, so they ditched them. The B-29 was a good airplane to ditch in shallow water. I saw one float for at least five days before it sank. The cabins were pressurized.
“When the war started, they used to give you a Distinguished Flying Cross for shooting down a plane. But then it got so common they’d give you the Air Medal instead. All I got was three Air Medals and some campaign ribbons, nothing real exciting. But anybody who’s been in combat has been through that kind of crap. There’s no hero stuff. I just lucked out. You hope you have the skill, that you can shoot straight and fly right and keep out of trouble, and that the bad one doesn’t get you. I figured I at least paid for my cadet training because I shot one down. It was hard to find them. The higher ranks were always out in front. They were trying to get their glory, and you can’t blame them.
“The reason that eighth trip was my last mission was we got back that night and the squadron commander came up to four of us who had been in the squadron over a year and he said, ‘I’ve got to send somebody to Victoria, Texas, to learn about the K14 gun-sight, a brand-new self-computing gunsight, and I need a volunteer to go learn it and then come back out here,’ Well, the other guys were married, and I wasn’t. He said ‘I’ll give you till tomorrow morning, and if nobody volunteers I’ll have to choose somebody.’ We’d all been out there at least eighteen months, and everybody was looking for a rotation back home. If you went to this gunnery school, you had to come back to Iwo. You had to learn this new gunsight and then come back, and that would extend your tour. So I talked it over with my buddy, and I said, ‘Hell, I’ll come back and probably get my captaincy.’ I wanted to stay with the squadron.
“By golly, they sent me back and the war ended three days before school was out. I went to sign off the base to go back to Iwo, and I cleared the post, but the squadron commander wouldn’t sign my papers. And all my records were on Iwo Jima. So I sat there and just junked airplanes up to Arkansas, stuff like that. I never got any of my stuff back.
“I had to wait from August 15 until November 29, and I finally got my records from Iwo, and by that time I was pretty well PO’ed from the delays and being pushed around, and then they closed the base. I couldn’t even get my four hours of flying time in.
“I’d met my wife-to-be by then, so I said, ‘Hell, I’ll get out.’ Which I did. We got married March 2, 1946, and then I joined the National Guard for about three and half years. That was the extent of my flying career.”
It turned out his wife-to-be, Laura, had herself dated a pilot while she was a student at the University of Texas in Austin during the war. And just as Bob had christened his plane Available Jayne, that fellow Laura was dating had named his P-51 for her. There must have been a lot of that going around.
“I stayed in Texas. She was an only child, and I’d been out of snow country four years and just decided to stay down here in Houston. We raised our family here and made a living. I was in the lumber business about forty years. It was my father-in-law’s. He didn’t have any sons, and one day he called me up and said, ‘Would you like to join me?’ So my wife and I talked it over, and he was a man of his word and well liked in Houston. It just worked out.”
Bob and Laura had a boy and two girls. By the winter of 2006 they had one grandchild, about the time they were downsizing into a retirement home.
“It’s not home like we used to know, but it’s working out. There’s a bedroom and a study—nine hundred and twenty-five square feet. When you’re downsizing from twenty-six hundred square feet and four bedrooms and a den, there’s a lot to get rid of.
“I had wanted to rejoin my squadron because I figured they’d be going to Japan. I wanted to stay in the Air Corps. I loved flying, you know. But things just didn’t work out, so the story’s not too interesting.”