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  At 1:21 a.m., inside Red’s B-29, some 20,000 feet over Halloran’s prison cell, so much smoke was rising from Tokyo that it was hard to observe details on the ground anymore, and updrafts were buffeting the aircraft. Gen. Tommy Power decided it was time to break radio silence and flash the first strike report back to General LeMay and prepare to turn back for Guam.

  Power passed the message to Red, who tapped the report in code over the radio: “Bombs away—General conflagration31—Flak moderate to heavy—Fighters none.” This would be music to General LeMay’s ears. Things seemed to be going well and a colossal firestorm had been ignited. Power and the crew estimated the fire-damaged area at 15 square miles, which wound up being very close to the actual figure: 15.8 square miles. Once they were clear of the Tokyo area, Power told Red to relay their expected arrival time to Guam so LeMay could meet them on the runway.

  The receding glow of the Tokyo firestorm remained visible from the tail gunner’s window of the City of Los Angeles for 150 miles before it slipped below the horizon. For the last two hours of the return flight, General Power took the controls from Captain Simeral. When the B-29 landed at Guam’s North Field at 9:00 a.m., after a mission lasting fifteen hours and four minutes, General LeMay was on the tarmac to meet it. General Power shouted down to LeMay from an open cockpit window, “It was a hell of a good mission.”32 He rushed out of the aircraft and unfurled his marked maps beside the runway to point out the highlights to the commander. LeMay wore the faintest grimace of a smile. American casualties turned out to be relatively low.

  An exhausted Red and his crewmates quickly left the airfield and retreated to their quarters to sleep.

  Gens. Lauris Norstad, Curtis LeMay (with pipe), and Thomas Power review Power’s battle notes, taken aboard Red Erwin’s B-29, on the tarmac at Guam immediately after the most destructive air raid in human history, March 9–10, 1945. (US Air Force)

  At the Pentagon, when Gen. Hap Arnold received the first reports of the raid, he was elated. He sent a cable to LeMay: “Congratulations. This mission shows your crews have the guts33 for anything.”

  General Power noted, “That fire raid was the most destructive single military action34 in the history of the world. In fact, that raid caused more casualties than the atom-bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If you had sat up there as I did and watched the fire develop, you would understand that. The best way to describe what it looks like when these fire bombs come out of the bomb bay of an airplane is to compare it to a giant pouring a big shovelful of white-hot coals all over the ground, covering an area about 2,500 feet in length and some 500 feet wide—that’s what each single B-29 was doing! . . . They started fires everywhere. Of course, Tokyo was a highly inflammable city, and as the fire swathes widened and came together, they built up into one vast fire.”

  The human and material damage to Tokyo was staggering to consider. As a result of the three-hour attack, at least 80,000 people had been killed, with some estimates at close to 100,000. One million people were left homeless. And more than 250,000 buildings were destroyed, consisting of nearly 16 square miles of the Japanese capital. A Tokyo police official wrote that his department could not issue a complete report “because of the horrifying conditions beyond imagination.”35

  A US Army publication soon announced, “The great city of Tokyo—third largest in the world36—is dead. The heart, guts, core—whatever you want to call everything that makes a modern metropolis a living, functioning organism—is a waste of white ash, endless fields of ashes, blowing in the wind. Not even the shells of walls stand in large areas of the Japanese capital. The streets are desolate, the people are dead or departed, the city lies broken and prostrate and destroyed. The men who accomplished the job study the photographs brought back by their recon pilots and stand speechless and awed. They shake their heads at each other and bend over the photos again, and then shake their heads again, and no one says a word.”

  Eight days after the raid, on March 18, Emperor Hirohito overruled his staff and insisted on seeing the most damaged areas near the Sumida River for himself, since information from his officials seemed confused. The emperor put on his riding boots, general’s uniform, and ceremonial sword and slipped out of the imperial palace grounds in his armored Mercedes-Benz 770 maroon limousine, which was appointed with a red-and-gold chrysanthemum pennant. The motorcade proceeded at 20 miles per hour with only a small motorcycle escort so as to not attract potential fire from American aircraft.

  The emperor did not have to go far to see the ruins of his capital city, as the maelstrom had stopped barely a mile from his palace. He absorbed the devastation of rubble, wreckage, ashes, and streams of sewage from the car windows and briefly stopped to talk with some stunned survivors and local officials, some of whom were so dazed and in shock from the bombing that they neglected to bow to the royal figure. Then he went back home.

  In a rational universe, Emperor Hirohito would have stopped the war then and there. The Americans obviously now had the power and the will to pulverize his empire into oblivion. Incredibly, Hirohito already knew this. It was clear to anyone capable of reading a map that Japan had lost all forward momentum since the Battle of Midway in June 1942, barely six months after the Pearl Harbor attack. Japan had been retreating ever since.

  Even as far back as June 1943, in fact, Hirohito had directed Prime Minister Hideki Tojo to ask the military leadership where the Allies would be stopped. The blunt reply from Tojo’s advisor was, “Neither the Army nor the Navy can possibly draw up a plan37 to stop them.”

  But whether Hirohito was blinded by arrogance, cowardice, cluelessness, or helplessness in the face of his fanatical military advisors, he permitted the bloodbath to continue after the devastating March 9–10, 1945, raid for another five months, as countless human beings suffered and died.

  Many Americans, including Red Erwin, thought the US military had no alternative to the firebombing assault on Japan, since the Japanese government and military showed little intent to surrender unconditionally and vowed to defend the island nation from invasion down to the last man, woman, and child.

  “We would have been forced to just mow down literally millions of civilians to take Japan,” recalled Don Thurow, an intelligence officer. “The bombing we did, horrendous as it was, saved Japan, saved Japanese culture and saved millions of Japanese lives, plus a few of our own, probably including my own.”

  After the war, some American servicemen said they had no qualms about the firebombing. Gunner Ed Shahinian explained that he “never considered as to whether I was killing38 babies or dogs or animals. We were doing a job and that’s all we cared about.”

  Others had spiritual doubts and questions about the things they witnessed and took part in, such as B-29 veteran Robert Rodenhouse. “I’m sort of a religious person,”39 he said. “I was brought up with a strong faith. And I couldn’t understand why there was a God that would permit that to happen, and use me to see that it was being done, you know. And it bothered me a lot. It bothered me a lot. And I never forget I wrote home to my pastor about that, and he says, ‘You know, that’s a secret that’s known only to God. He did what He wanted to have done.’”

  This was the beginning of a five-month firebombing campaign against the Japanese mainland that an aide to Gen. Douglas MacArthur described as “one of the most ruthless and barbaric killings of noncombatants40 in all history.”

  The victims were “scorched and boiled and baked to death,”41 Curtis LeMay later said. “Killing Japanese didn’t bother me very much42 at that time,” he added. “I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal. Luckily, I was on the winning side.” LeMay admitted to occasionally thinking of flashing, horrific images like “a child lying in bed with a whole ton of masonry43 tumbling down on top of him,” but he observed that, in order to do your job and keep your sanity, you had to banish such thoughts from your brain.

  For Red Erwin’s part, the horrors he witnessed seemed like th
e only way to end the war as fast as possible and thereby stop the world’s suffering.

  Emboldened by the results of the Tokyo raid, over the next eight days, General LeMay launched hundreds of B-29s on fire raids against the cities of Nagoya, Osaka, and Kobe. On the night of March 13, 274 B-29s appeared over Osaka, Japan’s third-largest city. When their bombs detonated on the 150-acre military arsenal there, the colossal multiple detonations shook 70-ton Superfortresses in the air one mile overhead.

  One bomber, Topsy-Turvy, was suddenly pushed 7,000 feet up to 12,000 feet, flipped over, and fell 10,000 feet before the pilot stabilized it.

  In another plane, the bombardier was hurled into the copilot’s lap and then slammed into the controls, and the captain was thrown out of his seat as the plane flipped on its side. They all survived.

  After eight such raids, the B-29 force ran out of incendiary bombs, and LeMay ordered a pause for the exhausted air and ground crews.

  While these follow-up raids were not as destructive as the Tokyo raid of March 9–10, the Americans decided they had discovered a potentially war-winning formula: low-level area bombing of military and civilian targets with incendiaries, including urban areas, which could fatally grind down Japan’s war capacity and morale. Mass civilian casualties were an inevitable by-product. The apparent success of LeMay’s strategy salvaged the reputation of the US Army Air Force in the Asia–Pacific theater and set the Allies on a new and presumably faster course to victory over Japan.

  For Japan, this was the beginning of a wave of fire that would rage through the spring and summer of 1945.

  For Staff Sgt. Henry “Red” Erwin, his personal day of reckoning would come less than five weeks later, on April 12, 1945.

  Meanwhile, in Alabama, Red’s wife, Betty, waited for her man to come home. The newlyweds had dreams of finding a nice house and starting a family together, and they couldn’t wait to enjoy married life. But they’d only been married for three months before Red was off to war.

  During this time, when Red was in combat over the Pacific, Betty continued to exchange letters with him, but no one has ever found those letters. Maybe they were just too personal and painful for her to hold on to.

  “Once the war started like that,44 you didn’t know where they were, you didn’t know if they were alive or dead,” explained Dolores Silva, one of the millions of American women who were left behind. “You didn’t know if you were going to get a letter from them and then find out that they had died right after they had written the letter. So, it just kept building up inside of you.”

  While the war ground on and casualties kept rising, many wives and families were understandably horrified by the steady flow of news headlines, letters, telegrams, and rumors. Some mothers spent hours in their houses of worship and prayed for their sons.

  In Louisiana, Jackie Greer used a map to trace the path of her boyfriend across Europe. “Following that war was the best history lesson45 I ever had,” she recalled decades later. “I got a big map, and every day I’d get crayons out. Every day. Certain colors meant this group is here. Certain colors meant they’d moved there. And I kept up with that war. I learned more about Europe than I had ever learned at school.”

  Jeroline Green of Kansas explained, “There was a sense of urgency46 because you didn’t know what or when or how. The war might be over in another day or it might last for another hundred years.”

  Some six million women joined the workforce by 1943, and almost half of them were working in military industries, like the mythical Rosie the Riveter, whose government-created slogan was “We Can Do It.” Many women volunteered for war-related organizations like the Red Cross and for military support jobs, such as driving trucks, flying cargo planes, rigging parachutes, and serving as radio operators. About 350,000 American women served in uniform around the world as volunteers for the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC, later called the Women’s Army Corps), the navy’s Women’s Reserve (WAVES [Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service]), the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve, the Coast Guard Women’s Reserve (SPARS), the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPS), the Navy Nurse Corps, and the Army Nurse Corps.

  At home, wrote historian Stephen Ambrose, women “became proficient cooks and housekeepers, managed the finances,47 learned to fix the car, worked in a defense plant, and wrote letters to their soldier husbands that were consistently upbeat.”

  Nancy Potter from Connecticut, who was, like Betty Erwin, a teenager, reflected on how the war affected her and her peers: “I think for girls and women,48 and perhaps boys and men, of my generation the war forced them to grow up prematurely. It made them far more serious about the bare realities of life: life, death, values. It robbed them, in a sense, of some childhood.”

  In Alabama, women made up one-fourth of the labor force in defense industries, and many women volunteered for the Red Cross, the Army-Navy USO Club, or one of the military auxiliaries. Women who had been public schoolteachers found jobs as welders at the Mobile shipyards at four times the salary. Civilians helped the war effort with war bond drives, clothing drives, and scrap drives for metals and rubber. Rationing was widespread, especially for daily staples such as sugar, gasoline, meat, and coffee.

  For her part, in the desperate months that her brand-new husband was off to war, Betty Erwin kept her little piece of the home front secure for Red’s eventual return by spending time with his and her families and by sending him letters of love and encouragement.

  All the while, she prayed and yearned for him to come home safe—and soon.

  Chapter Four

  DAY OF DESTINY

  ON APRIL 12, 1945, RED ERWIN’S LIFE CHANGED FOREVER.

  At 2:00 a.m., Erwin and his crewmates assembled at their aircraft on Guam’s North Field for takeoff on their tenth combat mission. It would be one of the longest distance missions ever attempted against Japan from Guam, a round trip of 3,041 miles.

  Their target was the Hodogaya Chemical Plant at Koriyama, in Japan’s Fukushima Prefecture, 120 miles north of Tokyo. The target was of great strategic importance, as it produced one-third of Japan’s tetraethyl lead, a main component of high-octane aviation fuel used in combat aircraft.

  The City of Los Angeles was designated as the lead plane, or pathfinder, in a stream of eighty-five bombers from the 314th Bombardment Wing assigned to take part in the mission, in addition to a parallel mission against the same target on the same day by eighty-two B-29s of the 313th Bombardment Wing.

  As usual, Capt. George “Tony” Simeral piloted the City of Los Angeles, and on this day, his superior officer, the Fifty-Second Squadron’s commander, Lt. Col. Eugene Strouse, originally from Muscoda, Wisconsin, would ride along as an observer, making a total of twelve men on the mission. They planned to be over the target at 12:35 p.m., bombing from altitudes of 7,000 to 9,000 feet. Clear visibility was expected. Their bombload was a mix of demolition and incendiary bombs.

  On earlier missions, the thing Red hated most was the helpless, exposed feeling of exploding antiaircraft shells peppering the sky around the City of Los Angeles, creating concussions that rocked the giant aircraft. Sometimes Red felt as if the pilot was about to lose control of the plane, and the enemy shells were so thick you could walk across the sky on them.

  When the B-29s neared the coast of Japan, radio-linked spotters in picket boats alerted the rudimentary but sometimes lethal enemy military defense network. Antiaircraft batteries peppered the sky with exploding shells, and fighter planes scrambled to attack them. But once the B-29s committed to their flight path, there was little they could do in the way of evasive maneuvers—they were under ironclad orders to continue straight to the target, no matter what.

  Beyond the myriad dangers and unknowns that bombing missions to Japan held, Red was grappling with an intensely personal, private event on this day. His wife, Betty, had recently told him in a letter that she had suffered a miscarriage of a pregnancy that would have resulted in their first child. The experience of miscarr
iage can produce significant feelings of grief, anxiety, depression, and isolation in women, and it can also damage men’s psychological and social well-being. Both Betty and Red were resilient, but the miscarriage was a devastating blow to both of them, and the impact was magnified by the thousands of miles of separation and by their knowledge that Red was regularly embarking on combat missions that could easily get him killed.

  To save fuel, B-29s typically flew individually to an assembly point off the Japanese coast; then the squadron regrouped into a tight formation for the attack. On this day the assembly point was the small volcanic island of Aogashima, 223 miles south of Tokyo.

  As the City of Los Angeles approached Aogashima, it was 9:30 a.m. and the morning sun illuminated the horizon. Following standard attack procedure, Captain Simeral moved his lead plane into a circular arc and signaled radioman Red Erwin to prepare to drop a series of three multi-colored smoke grenades and one white-phosphorus bomb through a three-and-a-half-foot chute in the plane deck. These flares would tumble from the bottom of the plane to mark the assembly point for the other planes, which were spread out over dozens of miles. The planes would rally on the flares and form into a broad formation. This was an extra duty for Red, and he’d done it many times before in training and in combat. The opening for the chute was near his feet in the radio operator’s compartment.

  First, Red dropped the smoke grenades through the chute. Then he picked up the 20-pound, 16-inch-long steel canister containing the explosive white phosphorus, carefully pulled the arming pin to set the six-second delayed-action fuse, and dropped it into the chute. Red was barearmed and bareheaded and wore a life preserver flotation device over his shirt.

  The phosphorus bomb was supposed to fall several hundred feet, and then detonate into a huge, highly visible midair shower of fire and yellow-and-white smoke trails to mark the rally point. The phosphorus burned at over 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit and produced a spectacular explosion visible for dozens of miles.