No Ordinary Joes (34 page)

Tim knew that when he got out of that bunker, he would find the sonuvabitch who snitched on him and beat the hell out of him. (
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I.D. photo taken of Gordy when entering the POW camp in Japan, October 1943. (
Photo Credit i12
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“In the fifties I bought a little boat to take my son sailing,” Bob Palmer recalled. “He was my life.” (
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“My men called me the Big V,” Chuck Vervalin said. “But not to my face.” (
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When Bob saw Barbara again after almost thirty years, the first thing he said was, “Oh my God, you’re as beautiful as ever.” (
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Bob had trouble buying his son Marty’s claim of PTSD. “That’s a convenient scapegoat. Strange, there were none from World War II and Korea … only Vietnam.” (
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“You never really get over losing a child,” Chuck Vervalin said. (
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A sign greets visitors to Gordy’s house in Central Oregon: “Two people live here—one nice person and one old grouch.” (
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“For a long time, I felt like I lived in his shadow,” Tim McCoy, Jr., said about his father. “Now I feel like I stand in his light. He’s been one hell of a mentor.” (
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J
arred out of sleep in the middle of the night by the air-raid siren, Tim McCoy rolled out of his bunk to join the other hundred men lining up by the front opening of the barracks. It was mid-March 1945. These middle-of-the-night air-raid alerts had become an almost nightly feature of life at Fukuoka #3, and they were increasingly irritating for Tim and everyone else. It was the same drill every night—spend two or three hours huddled and shivering in the shelter, return to the barracks, and then get up in a couple of hours and trudge off to work in the steel mill, exhausted and sleep deprived.

Part of what made the air raids wearisome was that nothing ever happened. Rumor had it that a lot of other parts of Japan were getting bombed, but so far not Fukuoka or Yawata. Surprisingly, at least to the POWs, the Americans hadn’t bombed the nearby power plant, which seemed to be such an inviting target with its six huge smokestacks. Not that the men were complaining. They all knew that a bombing raid on the power plant most certainly would spell doom for them.

With the American invasion and capture of Saipan, Guam, and Tinian in the Marianas, America’s bombing strategy had changed. The first attack launched from the Marianas targeted the Nakajima Aircraft Company’s Musashi engine plant just outside Tokyo on November 24, 1944. A total of 111 B-29s took off, but engine problems, cloud cover, and a jet stream with winds as high as 200 mph at precisely the high altitudes the planes were
flying made accurate bombing impossible. Only 24 of the planes dropped their bombs anywhere close to the intended target; damage was minimal. In December and January, the bombing raids across Japan continued, but in addition to the other problems faced by the American planes, Japanese defenses were becoming more effective; the Americans suffered considerable losses and many of the captured downed airmen were beheaded. In late January 1945, General Curtis LeMay was transferred to run the B-29 campaign from the Marianas and improve the success ratio.

LeMay temporarily suspended the raids on Japan, diverting the B-29s to capture Iwo Jima, considered vital to the air campaign because it could be used to base fighters capable of escorting the B-29s to Japan, as well as provide an emergency field midway between the Marianas and the Japanese targets. On February 19, 1945, LeMay decided to destroy industrial feeder businesses and disrupt the production of weapons vital to Japan. Instead of using the high-explosive bombs that had been previously employed, he would switch to incendiary bombs, which he hoped would cause general conflagrations in the large cities. The high-altitude, daylight attacks would be replaced by low-altitude, high-intensity incendiary raids at night. To increase bomb loads, the B-29s were reconfigured, reducing their structural weight. The new strategy was to drop the bombs from altitudes of only 5,000 to 6,000 feet. By flying lower, the planes would no longer have to struggle against the jet stream and could fly below most cloud covers. This would save wear and tear on the engines and preserve fuel. LeMay was confident that the Japanese night fighter forces were weak, although he admitted that flak losses could be substantial.

Another new strategy had been added to American bombing. At the beginning of the war, FDR directed that only military targets be bombed. This differed from the British approach, which targeted cities following the German bombing of Rotterdam in May 1940. But with the American bombing of Berlin in March 1944, the rules had changed. Cities and civilians were now targets, including those in Japan.

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In the dark, the guards hustled the men out of the barracks, assembling them next to a fence behind the kitchen building, not far from the power plant. On the other side of the fence was a small hill. A guard opened a gate in the fence, and the men passed to the other side, ducking and crawling into a deep, dark hole—the bomb shelter. The only illumination was the guard’s flashlight.

The roof and sides of the shelter were corrugated metal propped up with tree trunks and branches. To Tim, it seemed like even the slightest shock wave would bring tons of earth crashing down, burying the POWs inside.

Once everyone had crammed together on their haunches, the guards backed away, closing and locking the door behind them, leaving the men no escape.

In silence, the men waited. They had been through this many times before, and each time there was no attack, only the discomfort and dirt of being penned together inside the shelter. Tim felt the sand fleas crawling up his ankles.

Adding to their tension was the knowledge that the Japanese had lined the edge of the shelter with dozens of sticks of dynamite, with a fuse running back inside the camp. Should the guards choose, they could light the fuse and bury the POWs, leaving little trace that they were ever there.