(Final part of a three-part series. Read part one here, and part two here.)
My father, Major Thomas C. Colt Jr., having spent the last year at the Bombardier and Air Gunners School at El Centro, California, finally got his ticket to “go out” on May 27, 1944, to an island in the mid-Pacific to contribute to the war effort.
After a layover at Pearl Harbor, he eventually landed at Majuro Atoll in the Marshalls, which he described as “the land of Nordhoff and Hall, in Mutiny on the Bounty and Hurricane.”
Majuro Atoll was a short stay before he was transferred to Engebi at Eniwetok, also in the Marshalls, which, at the time he arrived in August, was the most advanced of the central Pacific bases.
An old friend from his Pensacola days, Col. Daniel Torrey, arrived in October to take command of the Marine Air Group and my father was quickly promoted to operations officer, organizing an intensive re-training program that involved “some new technique and things we haven’t been doing out here and the whole prospect got everybody very excited.”
He described his last few months as “a movement in crescendo. The quiet month with the wing at Majuro, the slow months learning the job at Engebi, the building up of the work, and now the sudden culmination of activity and heavy responsibility.”
One of his heavy responsibilities was leading a fighter squadron on a strike to the Japanese-held island of Ponape in the Carolines. He described the experience in quite lyrical language in a letter to a friend:
I twice took two of our fighter squadrons in Corsairs out on strike to the Carolines. The sea, for such distances, has a rather terrifying and desolate immensity, given an uncanny beauty by the mountain ranges of cumulus clouds, hiding in their shining masses violent storms, turbulence and blindness.
We passed down the valley of the clouds, climbed through their passes, or over their peaks, until finally in the distance appeared a thin white line on the sea of breakers on a reef, with behind it the green mass of the Jap island, its peaks hidden in the clouds. And as we approached the island, a tenseness crept over us, and our divisions dispersed according to the tactical plan.
We moved over a cloud, and then suddenly there was a wide rift, and plain below us, like a tiny cross on the landscape, the crossed runways of the airfield, was our target. A few moments of calculating, a few seconds of business in the cockpit, then a slow roll over on my back, letting the nose drop, slowly, carefully, bringing the sign on the target, while the air shrieked and quivered with the growing speed. Quick adjustments of the trim tabs, one hand on the stick, two feet on the rudders, firm and gentle, other hand feeling for the bomb release; eyes glued through the sight, stealing quick glances at the altimeter, concentrating, yet noting subconsciously a myriad of tiny flashes, spitting nastily into the sky, from the landscape all about the target.
The target expands before my eyes – now, pull – then back on the stick, head between the knees – full throttle – all the soup we’ve got and we wish for more – this valley leads to the sea, under the clouds – there’s the reef; then back on the throttle, yearn for altitude, a couple of swallows, level out to the rendezvous, another swallow – what the hell am I shaking for – then come moment of circling at the rendezvous, counting my ‘chickens,’ anxiously, impatiently; then the division close up, and we pick up our course, and head back up the cloud valleys, settling down to the distances, to our rock.
Years of training and experience, months of organizing and planning, hours of travel to a target, maybe all of sixty seconds in contact with the enemy – a good summary of war in the air.
My father would celebrate Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s and a rather significant birthday on Feb. 20, 1945, on his rock at Eniwetok. “I fear I had a very melancholy birthday. But then why not – 40 years old and a year away from my dear ones.”
The last time he was home was on his birthday the year before. But he did not have the luxury of wallowing in his pity for long because his Group was gearing up to move onto the front lines of the war, which was now at Iwo Jima. He was sent on a survey trip to observe combat on Iwo Jima with a few generals. This was on March 22, four days before that battle ended.
That was not, repeat, not a very nice place. Everyone up there agrees that the Japs did a magnificent defensive job. It looked like a literal version of Hades.
He did pick up some valuable pointers and learned the hard lesson of what life was like in the middle of hostilities, becoming intimately acquainted with foxholes.
On April 30, my father landed on Okinawa. The battle at Okinawa had commenced on April 1 and was given the nicknames “typhoon of steel” in English, and tetsu no ame (“rain of steel”) or tetsu no bōfū (“violent wind of steel”) in Japanese. The names referred to the ferocity of the fighting, the intensity of Japanese kamikaze attacks, and the sheer numbers of Allied ships and armored vehicles that assaulted the island.
It would also prove to be the bloodiest and costliest battle as far as casualties. During the 82 days of this battle, approximately 20,000 allied troops were killed and 40,000 to 55,000 wounded. Between 77,000 and 110,000 Japanese troops were killed and between 40,000 and 150,000 civilians killed.
My father’s group would end up spending from May 2 to June 28, 1945, on Ie Shima, an island off the northwest coast of Okinawa. They had to build the air base from scratch around an air strip that had been occupied just days before they arrived. Subject to almost continuous air raids alerting them to Japanese aerial attacks, roving Japanese soldiers, active mine fields and monsoon rains that created a noxious stew of decayed bodies and a stench that permeated the senses, they succeeded in putting their planes in the air to carry their share of the air action within two weeks.
The group consisted of five tactical squadrons, a service squadron and a headquarters squadron averaging six-hundred flying hours a day. In a report my father wrote, he touted his group’s accomplishments:
During the last thirty days of my service with the Group, it achieved its largest score, 72 Japanese planes confirmed destroyed in the air. I take perhaps the greatest satisfaction however in recalling that in the nine months of my service as Operations Officer, I lost only eight pilots, seven of those being lost at Okinawa.
Not surprisingly, the number of letters to Belle dropped off precipitously during that time period as conditions were not conducive to writing. In one of the handful of letters he wrote, he explained to Belle:
I know I should write you regularly and often to reassure you of my welfare. That I think of you constantly and longingly is too patent to require frequent repetition. But the period of great quagmire left me such a worn-out mess each evening I could use what remained of daylight only to scrape off the viscous mess, dirty up another towel, and fall on the bed.
A few days ago the twenty inches of rainfall a day ceased, and the dawn came clear and brisk, and brought us the complimentary period of the great trembling. Comes the end of the day, the sirens blow, and instead of writing, the time is spent at the mouth of the fox holes. Sometime about midnight, we get a respite and turn in, not happily, however between 0300 and 0400, we get blown out of our beds, literally. Two nights ago, we had a most spectacular oil dump explosion.
Even this letter was interrupted by an air raid. As he continued writing he tried to add some levity to the situation, but it is easy to see through the bravado:
Back from the fox hole . . . half hour later. I may get discouraged some one of these times and just in case I do, I love you, and I’ll scrawl a signature in the dark. You just don’t leave a light on after the whistle blows. The boys are so nervous they’ll shoot it out for you. And I blame them not a wit. One freak bomb got 32 of them last night. The damn Nip snuck in undetected – it happens now and then. I woke up on the floor to a horrible ‘crump’ – I’m so well trained now I automatically fall out of bed when that old whine begins – In fact any strange noise in the night makes me fall out of bed, or come up with my pistol cocked and ready. My only worry is doing the right one at the wrong time.
One noted casualty during the battle at Okinawa was Ernie Pyle, the celebrated field journalist who was tragically killed by Japanese machine gun fire at Ie Shima on April 18, 1945, two weeks before my father arrived on the island. Pyle wrote an article in August 1944 about the challenges of life after wartime:
Thousands of our men will soon be returning to you. They have been gone a long time and they have seen and done and felt things you cannot know. They will be changed. They will have to learn how to adjust themselves to peace.
My father returned home physically intact but a different man from the one who’d left three years earlier. He did not adjust well and within five years he was divorced from his first family and starting a new family with my mother. The casualties of war did not all occur on the ash heaps of the battlefield.
(Susannah Colt of Whitefield is a retired New Hampshire attorney attempting to be a writer. Email: susannahbcolt@gmail.com.)