Saturday, April 7, 1945
When the crest of the orange sun broke over the Pacific at 5:22 a.m. on April 7, Jerry was up, wired, and ready to get into the air. In a war zone, the dawn always brought a measure of uncertainty. There could be bigger days to follow, or this could be his last day on earth. Even at twenty-one, Jerry had learned that no man could totally control his destiny. A million things could go wrong today: mechanical failure, bad weather, antiaircraft fire, a sudden influx of enemy forces with no escape route for the Dorrie R and her companions. Jerry had already seen more than enough death to know that not a single day should be taken for granted.
But this knowledge didn’t make him afraid to live, or to do what he came to do.
The three hundred B-29 bombers that Jerry and his fighter group were going to protect today were already in the air, having taken off in the dark hours of the morning from Saipan. Jerry headed over to the Quonset hut for the final briefing: while the main force of B-29s would bomb the aircraft factories, another handful of B-29s and P-61s would fly alongside the P-51s to Japan, solely for the purpose of providing navigation for the P-51s (both the P-61s and the B-29s had radar/tracking systems). That smaller group of B-29s would not fly over Japan; rather, they would remain offshore while the invasion force carried out its strikes, then help navigate the fighters back to Iwo Jima once the bombing mission was complete. Also, in addition to the backup Mustangs, eight more P-51s would provide “top cover” for the rescue U.S. submarine below, as well as the B-29 navigators at the rally point just off Japan. The backup planes not called on for the attack over Japan would then turn back to Iwo Jima, accompanied by the P-61s.
Before long, Jerry was strapped into the cockpit of the Dorrie R as it sat on the airfield. He glanced out at the other Mustangs, all awaiting the go signal. The B-29s were approaching, the pilots knew, somewhere in the southern skies. And soon they appeared, an incredible sight of over a hundred single-engine fighter planes, painted in their aviation battle gray.
Jerry looked down at his grounds crewmen. Thumbs up were exchanged, and then at seven a.m. precisely came the signal for the planes to start their engines. Jerry fired up the Dorrie R, and the hum of her seventeen-hundred-horsepower engine joined the roaring chorus filling the air. The sound grew into a thunder so great that it shook the ground. The ground controllers began to motion the pilots into a takeoff position. One by one, the P-51s began rushing down the runway and lifting into the morning sky.
Picking up more speed and slicing through a slight layer of ground fog, the wheels of the Dorrie R broke contact with the earth. The end of Airfield No. 1 disappeared under her wings, and the Mustang nosed upward. A moment later, Jerry pulled her out of the takeoff line and over the ocean, the distinctive granite features of Mount Suribachi now down to his right. He swung the Dorrie R around and lined up in the “four finger” formation, assuming the “wingman” position with the Yellow Flight. The first leg of the flight plan called for a rendezvous with the B-29s over Kita Iwo Jima, or “North Sulfur Island”—the small, jagged area of about two square miles located approximately fifty miles north of Iwo Jima. Once this had been accomplished, the fleet turned toward Tokyo.
Because of the long range of the mission, the Mustangs were carrying two supplemental 110-gallon fuel tanks, one under each wing, enough fuel for the initial flight to Japan. As the Japanese coastline came into sight, each P-51 hit a switch that dropped the spent fuel tanks into the bay. The tanks had served their purpose; now, the planes needed to lighten their load for the upcoming dogfight with enemy aircraft.
The planes began crossing Suruga Bay, one of the two great inland bays in the Americans’ flight path. To the west of the bay was the Japanese mainland. Off to the north, Jerry witnessed, for the first time, a landmark he’d seen so often in pictures: the great, snow-capped peak of Mount Fuji, looming twelve thousand feet into the sky. He remembered the intelligence officer’s briefing from the previous morning: “When you fly across Suruga Bay, focus your gun cameras on the tip of Mount Fuji. In that way, we will be able to evaluate your film when you fire your guns at the enemy.”
Jerry trained his .50-caliber guns on the mountain, and felt a sense of excitement, knowing that the city of Tokyo awaited just seventy miles beyond. On a clear day, they said, that great snow-capped mountain could easily be seen from the Japanese capital city. The Americans’ flight path would take them near some of Japan’s most populated areas: the neck of the Izu Peninsula (between Suruga Bay and Sagami Bay), past the Yokosuka peninsula (between Sagami Bay and Tokyo Bay), and then, once they crossed the Tokyo Bay, the land surrounding Tokyo, and the city itself. The projected time over the target, if all went well, was estimated to be about fifteen minutes. However, no one expected the Japanese to wait until the planes were over their target before striking.
By design, the Seventy-Eighth Fighter Squadron flew in the right front quarter of the Americans’ formation as they soared closer to Tokyo. The prime position was largely due to Vande Hey’s and Jim Tapp’s reputations as pilots; General Moore knew that they would make a formidable “one-two” punch, and based on military intelligence, the general believed that the Japanese had no pilots who could match them. The spot in the formation meant the Seventy-Eighth would be the first to fly over Japan; it also meant they might catch the first waves of Japanese Zeros awaiting the American aircraft. The American command, frankly, hoped that the Japanese planes would come out and fight. An experienced Mustang pilot would trump an experienced Zero pilot. Nearly four years after Pearl Harbor, the Americans had the superior fighter planes. Nothing in the world could trump the P-51 Mustang. If the Zeroes came out en masse, perhaps the P-51s could inflict significant damage to the Japanese air defenses in one mission.
At 10:20 a.m., as the Americans flew over the waters of Suruga Bay, the first enemy fighter appeared. The Ki-44 Shōki, referred to as a “Tojo” Fighter, approached quickly from the west, flying in on a hostile vector from the Japanese mainland. Its target was the American B-29s. The heavily armed Tojo carried four 12.7-millimeter machine guns (some Tojos also had two twenty-millimeter cannons). If it got a clear shot at a B-29, its guns were lethal. In addition, plane’s agility made it a dangerous threat to American bombers.
The question mark when facing these war machines, however, was the competency of the Japanese pilots. Since 1942, the Japanese airmen had taken a pounding when going up against the air defense of the U.S. Marines and the pilots of the U.S. Navy. Beginning with the battle of Midway, when the outnumbered U.S. Navy struck a severe blow against the Japanese by sinking all four aircraft carriers in the Japanese task force, Japan suffered a loss from which she would never recover. U.S. military intelligence believed that many of Japan’s better and more experienced pilots had been killed earlier in the war and that the P-51s today would be facing less experienced pilots compared, for example, to those who had attacked Pearl Harbor.
Suruga Bay and the Sagami Gulf are two great inland bays near the landmark Mount Fuji.
Now the Blue Flight of the Forty-Sixth Fighter Squadron broke off and gave chase to the Tojo, becoming the first American squadron to open fire on the Japanese over Japan. The American quartet scored multiple hits against the outnumbered enemy aircraft, and watched as the Japanese fighter veered away.
Within minutes, however, a Japanese Ki-45 Toryu “Dragon Slayer” managed to penetrate too close into the Americans’ air space. The tip of the American air armada had flown within five minutes of Tokyo when something told Major John Piper, the commanding officer of the Forty-Seventh squadron, to look overhead. Piper spotted the Dragon Slayer about a thousand feet above the American planes, ready to strike. The aircraft—a twin-engine, heavily armed, long-range fighter—was one of Japan’s best weapons against the B-29.
The Americans had to get the Dragon Slayer out of there.
Piper pulled up on his stick, and the other three planes in his Red Flight broke into a pursuit maneuver. The Dragon Slayer, outnumbered four to one, would have nothing of it. As soon as the Mustangs locked in, the Dragon Slayer initiated a steep dive, rushing toward the waters of the bay. Piper and his men had to make a quick decision: either they chase the Ki-45 all the way down to the water, and probably catch and destroy him, or they remain on post at eighteen thousand feet to continue protecting the B-29s. With the Dragon Slayer now out of play, Piper’s squadron chose to resume their defensive position guarding the B-29s. As much as Piper wanted to give chase, he had to keep his eye on the ball. He and his men were there, first and foremost, to protect bombers.
The pattern repeated as the Americans crossed Suruga Bay: more interceptors appeared, only to be taken down by the P-51s.
Meanwhile, the men of the Seventy-Eighth, despite their prominent position, had yet to be challenged by the Japanese. By 10:30 a.m., they had crossed over from Suruga Bay to Sagami Bay. As the planes made landfall for the final phase before the attack, Japanese antiaircraft fire picked up considerably. Down below and out front, the sky began to fill with waves of black streaks and smoke rising from the ground.
Over in Yellow Flight, Jerry kept his hands on his yoke and eyes peeled on the horizon for incoming enemy craft.
Below, the industrial area of the Nakajima Aircraft Engine Factory came into view. The sight from the late morning sky resembled the photographs the pilots had studied in their intelligence briefings. From the air, the buildings of Japan spread over several acres, a labyrinth of squares and rectangles rising from the ground. Within minutes, the men of the Seventy-Eighth had led the bombers over their targets, and now, from their position high above, they held the best vantage point in the world for watching the bombers do their work.
“I saw little dots of light spring from the ground as the bombs exploded,” Jerry wrote later.1 “Wave after wave of bombers dropped their cargo inside the squares of fire on the ground. We fighter pilots were in a constant state of alert; Japanese fighters were all over the sky and the aerial battles between us were fierce. We had to protect our ‘Big Brothers’—the B-29s as they droned on and on over the target. When I had a chance to look down, I could see fires raging. All of the city, it seemed, was on fire.”
Just as the B-29s opened fire, Tapp spotted yet another Dragon Slayer nearby, vectoring into attack mode—the Seventy-Eighth’s first opportunity for engagement. Tapp broke off in pursuit. Maneuvering his Mustang into close range, Tapp opened fire, his bullets ripping into the enemy aircraft’s engine. Tapp’s wingman, Lieutenant Maher, also opened fire, but it wasn’t clear if he scored a hit. Tapp, meanwhile, knew his fire had struck the plane, but didn’t know if he’d destroyed it. Having chased the Dragon Slayer out of the way, he and Maher pulled back up to twenty thousand feet to resume their protective position of the bombers.
A second threat swooped in, however, this time a Kawasaki single-engine Ki-61 Hein, identified by the U.S. Air Force as a “Tony.” Externally, the Tony presented a long, sleek-looking design, with the cockpit set well behind the engine in the center-forward position. Faster and more maneuverable than the twin-engine Dragon Slayer, the Tony—which looked almost like the P-51s—could strike with quick and lethal effectiveness. Tapp had to take it out or risk losing a slew of bombers.
The pilot pushed down on his plane’s throttle to close the gap between the two aircraft, then pulled back to avoid overflying the target. After closing within a thousand feet of the Tony, Tapp opened fire. The enemy craft burst into flames, and Tapp pulled away. It was his first sure shoot-down—known as a “kill” in military aviation—of the day. The pilot turned around a second later and saw the Japanese pilot bail out, his parachute deploying and his body dangling down below.
There was no rest, however, for the American pilot. Tapp noticed a B-29 under fire by an unidentified enemy fighter attacking the bomber from the rear. He tightened his circle, and getting an angle on the Japanese fighter, opened fire. The enemy aircraft burst into flames, began spinning out of control, and fell to earth.
Kill number two.
The Japanese planes were everywhere, it seemed. Six more (this time, single-engine fighters) approached. Tapp bore down on one of them and opened fire again. A second later, the Japanese plane broke up, its wing splintering off, both the plane and wing soon crashing below. It marked the third plane Tapp had downed within minutes. He also actually fired at a fourth plane and struck it but hadn’t realized it had been shot down. He was later given credit for the kill after other pilots reported it. Overall, his heroism that day would go down as one of the greatest feats in the history of the Air Force.
The B-29s lingered for a total of forty-five minutes over Tokyo, unloading their fire on the Nakajima Aircraft Engine Factory and other targets and reducing them to seas of burning rubble. As always, however, there was a cost: “The fighting and the flak was intense,” Jerry described later.2 “At one point I saw one of our B-29s get hit, and the right wing fell off. The plane burst into flames, and then, as if it was all being photographed in slow motion, one parachute came out, then a second, and a third; then the huge, lumbering plane just keeled over like a ship in the water, went into a spin, and fell from the sky. Of the twelve crew members on board, only three had bailed out.”
As their bombing on Tokyo concluded, the B-29s and their P-51 escorts began turning south for the flight back to Iwo Jima. Halfway between Tokyo and Mount Fuji, a call came in over the radio from one of the B-29s.
“Bushmaster Leader! We got an inbound bogey approaching from 12 o’clock high! Repeat, inbound bogey at 12 o’clock high!”
The phrase “12 o’clock high” was used among American military aviation personnel to describe the location of attacking enemy aircraft based on the imagery of a clock face. The bomber was considered the center; the term “high” meant above the bomber, while “level” meant at the same altitude and “low” meant the enemy was below the bomber. Enemy fighter pilots preferred this “12 o’clock high” location, because the target aircraft had difficulty spotting the attacking fighter, which was in the bomber’s “blind spot.” For the aggressor, this proved the best position from which to get a shot at the bomber’s wings and engines.
Vande Hey looked up through the top of the Mustang’s glass cockpit into the blue skies above. Sure enough, the twin-engine Japanese Ki-45 “Dragon Slayer” was about to take a shot at the B-29.
Vande Hey pulled back on the stick of his plane, Jeanne VII, and put it in a climb, bringing the Dragon Slayer into his gun sights. He fired a quick burst from his .50-caliber, striking the aircraft and sending it into an evasive maneuver. Not a shoot-down, but good enough for the time being. The threat, at least, had been removed.
A minute later, he spotted a twin-engine Japanese Ki-46 “Dinah” moving in. It made a diving turn to the right, again, targeting the American bombers.
Vande Hey set an immediate intercept course, closed on the enemy, and opened fire. This time, his bullets sprayed into the engine and right wing of the enemy aircraft. Debris flew off the plane, and the Dinah burst into flames. Vande Hey quickly broke off to avoid a mid-air collision with the crippled fighter. Jerry, soaring several hundred feet above with the Yellow Flight, saw the Dinah fall to the earth. The shoot-down of the Dinah marked Vande Hey’s third confirmed kill of the war.
The pilot rejoined his squadron, which pushed on toward Iwo Jima. Remarkably, the American P-51 pilots’ casualties for their first mission over Japan had been low. One pilot did not return: the P-51 flown by Lieutenant Robert Anderson from the 531st Squadron was spotted by his fellow pilots burning and on a crash pattern over Tokyo. Anderson never bailed out and lost his life that day. A second P-51, flown by Captain Frank Ayers of the Forty-Seventh Squadron pilot, ran out of fuel on the flight back to Iwo Jima. Captain Ayers was more fortunate than Anderson—he bailed out near the U.S. Navy destroyer on watch in waters just north of Iwo Jima and was picked up by a U.S. Navy search-and-rescue team. Meanwhile, Jerry and the rest of the Seventy-Eighth landed back at Iwo Jima without losing a single plane from their squadron.
Later that evening, after hitting the hot tubs and grabbing a hot meal, Jerry and his squadron mates attended the post-mission intelligence de-briefing in the squadron Quonset hut. There, they learned that only three B-29s—out of the hundred that had flown the mission—had been lost. By contrast, at least twenty-one Japanese fighter aircraft had been shot out of the skies over the Japanese mainland, and the B-29s had unloaded tons of deadly and destructive fire on Japanese ground targets.
All in all, the first joint long-range mission against the Japanese homeland had been a smashing success, with the American pilots inflicting far more damage on the enemy than they had suffered. Eventually, the air raid of April 7 would be remembered as the greatest accomplishment in the history of the Seventh Fighter Command. Just as their fellow patriots had done at Normandy, these pilots had taken the fight directly to the shores of the enemy under heavy fire. Many of the men also enjoyed a bit of personal satisfaction that the raid had come on April 7, subtle vengeance for what the Japanese had inflicted on December 7, 1941, at Pearl Harbor.
But the stubborn Japanese were far from finished. Brainwashed into a kamikaze mentality and prepared to commit suicide for their emperor, they refused to surrender, and remained capable of dealing a deadly blow to the Americans.
This would be a long air-war of attrition, the American intelligence officers told their pilots that night, followed by a dreaded invasion of the Japanese homeland itself. For Jerry and the men of the Seventy-Eighth, the real war was just beginning. Mortal danger, as always, loomed over the horizon.