During the spring and summer of 1945 in America, a mix of joy and apprehension swept the land.
Nine months after General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “Great Crusade” for the liberation of Europe, images of American boys storming the beaches at Normandy sparked a new, electric excitement that jolted the national consciousness. The Allied victory there and the suicide of Adolf Hitler, followed by the final surrender of Nazi Germany, buoyed this optimism, for the end of the war in Europe seemed at hand. On May 8, by happenstance the birthday of new U.S. president Harry S. Truman, thousands of Americans cheered in the streets, reveling under confetti-laced showers along tickertape parade routes in Chicago, Miami, Los Angeles, and New York’s Times Square as they marked the final conquest of Europe. Across the Atlantic, people were also celebrating in the great capitals of America’s allies. As Winston Churchill’s powerful voice pronounced absolute victory over Nazi Germany, President Truman declared VE Day to be “the greatest birthday present” that he had ever received.
The jubilant frenzy was for good reason: no more GIs would die in the Kasserine Pass, Sicily, the Ardennes, Normandy, the Hurtgen Forest, and dozens of other places throughout Europe and North Africa that, before 1942, most Americans had never heard of. Yet beneath the veneer of the public celebration, the cruel reminder of war’s cost still lurked: two hundred fifty thousand Americans had perished in Europe. And apprehension remained over the prospect of an even bloodier war looming in the Pacific. As brutal as the war in Europe had been, defeating Axis ally Japan was projected to cost another one million American lives, meaning four times as many American soldiers would die in the Pacific as had been lost in Europe.
In March of 1945, as Americans from coast to coast awaited the final fall of the Nazis, a heroic group of young pilots on the other side of the world dug themselves into musty foxholes. On a lava-splashed hellhole called Iwo Jima, captured with the spilled blood of seven thousand U.S. Marines, the pilots of the Seventy-Eighth Fighter Squadron, many of whom had not yet seen combat, prepared for their final rendezvous with destiny. Their impending aerial assault on Japan would lay the groundwork for the Allies’ planned invasion of the island—potentially the bloodiest ground battle the world had ever known. Flying escort to an armada of American Superfortress bombers, they would rain hell on the Japanese capital, and more Japanese would die in Tokyo from their attacks than would later die at Hiroshima. But the missions would prove deadly for these American pilots as well; in fact, many had resigned themselves to the certainty of death even before the engines on their P-51 Mustangs roared in battle. Several would perish in the cruel waters of the western Pacific as vibrant young men, their hope and future abruptly sacrificed on the altar of freedom. The survivors would continue to battle the Japanese even after the last atomic bomb blast against Nagasaki on August 9.
Their story is the final chapter of the greatest war the world has ever known, and the war’s history is not complete until it is told: the heroic deeds of the Seventy-Eighth Fighter Squadron, culminating in the final combat mission flown by the man who would become the last living fighter pilot of World War II.