Saipan’s old WWII ghosts

By William H. Stewart
Military Historical Cartographer

The following is the second part of a three-part series of eyewitness accounts and personal experiences of the World War II Pacific war as recorded as described by Ernest R. Bartley to William H. Stewart.

Ernest R. Bartley returned to Saipan in August 1993 after an absence of 49 years to attempt to exorcise some “old ghosts” as he put it from memories carried from the days of his youth. Thoughts and recollections of flights, fights and friends, especially those of fallen crew members of the numerous B-29’s flown from Saipan’s airfields. “Bart” was a 25-year-old captain in the Air Force from Lincoln, Nebraska, who flew the third B-29 ever to land on Saipan and flew the first mission over Japan on Nov. 24, 1944, taking off from what would later be called Isley Field, the island’s single serviceable airstrip at the time. Bart was with Air Force Gen. Henry “Hap” Arnold’s 20th Air Force, 21st Bomber Command, 73rd Wing assigned to Saipan. There were five Wings within the command, two assigned to Tinian, the 313th and 58th, and two on Guam, the 315th and the 509th Composite Group, which was to drop the atomic bomb. This Group was later assigned to Tinian.

Each Wing had four Groups of three squadrons each with 10 planes in each squadron, of which at any one time during the early days, only about six or seven aircraft were considered serviceable and available for mission deployment. These giants of the air would take off the runway where the present international airport is located and fly east out over Magicienne Bay. Shortly after daybreak, squadron after squadron would lift off the edge of the runway at one minute intervals and then turn in a northerly direction for the 1,270 nautical mile flight to their targets in Japan. After a flight of some six hours they would reach their checkpoint above Mount Fuji, Japan’s most sacred mountain, where Bart recalled, “you would turn right for Tokyo or left for Nagoya.” Japan’s fighter pilots knew very well that their beautiful snowcapped volcano was a critical navigation point for the B-29 crews and it was there that the Japanese would rise in their Zeros and other fighters to attack the silver bombers from the south. The production facilities of this formidable Japanese aircraft was often the target of the B-29s. Even so, by the time the war ended the Japanese would have produced 10,449 of the improved A6M Mitsubishi fighter aircraft.

In those early months the first squadrons to take off from Saipan were, of course, the first to arrive over Fuji and sometimes, the former bomber pilot recalled, although not always, the first squadrons on the bomb run escaped the wrath of the Japanese defending interceptors since it was often the appearance of the B-29s that signaled the alert for the fighters to take off. The first American squadrons from Saipan had time to complete their bombing mission, turn and start the long flight back to the island before the heavily armed fighters could reach their attack altitude. The squadrons taking off from Saipan in the middle of the formation were the ones that caught hell as the Japanese were already aloft and waiting for the silver beasts like angry hornets with a deadly sting. The last group of Super fortresses to leave the airfield at the southern end of Saipan were usually the luckiest as they would arrive over Japan at about the time the fighters exhausted their fuel and ammunition and had to return to their bases to refuel and rearm. Bart recalled, “The squadrons in the middle of the takeoff line had the most dreaded position and time slot as all crew members knew what was in store for them. Most of the time my squadron and later Group were assigned to the middle takeoff positions and we always hoped to be either the first or the last squadron to leave on a mission, but our wing commander kept us in the middle—this provided a measure of relief and hope for the squadrons we followed in as well as those that were flying in back of us. Their crews worried less, if that was possible under the circumstances and, in a small way, they felt slightly safer as the odds were a little more in their favor that they might escape the deadly attacks on us. I supposed those crews felt some small comfort and maybe they performed their mission with more precision and efficiently—I don’t know.”

“Our wing commander may have thought so as well and kept the same squadrons in their accustomed departure positions. He must have thought that it was better to have two squadrons (or later Groups) more or less believing they had some sort of ‘edge‚’ and felt safer for it than to constantly move men and planes around within the takeoff period.”

“Decisions like that are made during wartime. Anyway, we almost always had to fly in that dreadful middle position that was certain to catch the full force of the Japanese fighters and some of my men paid for it with their lives.”

In the early days Ernest Bartley flew the middle position in many different aircraft, among them the famous B-29 with the identification marking of “T Square 8, “Joltin’ Josie,” which later in the war left Isley Field, failed to gain altitude and crashed into Magicienne Bay. It is still there.

Bartley remembered the fuel capacity of the great planes and the long flight distance that required six or seven hours to reach their destination and an equal period of time to return to Saipan or Tinian. “Cruise control was always our concern. For this reason we would fly at low altitudes until nearing Japan, then we would climb to 29,000 feet or so for the bomb run. On the way back we would enter a slow descent in an effort to ‘stretch’ our dwindling fuel supply. Many did not have the fuel to make it back or were so shot up that they went down in the water.”

“The Japanese didn’t pay too much attention to a single B-29 flying overhead; witness the fact that the Enola Gay did not encounter any resistance. It’s strange that the Japanese had intelligence about some of the movements of our B-29 squadrons. I remember listening to Tokyo Rose on the radio and between her playing the recorded music of Glen Miller and other popular bands of the day she would make remarks about arrival details of the B-29 program and various U. S. Army Air Force personnel en route to the Marianas. This type of information was top secret and we were absolutely forbidden to mention anything about the program in the United States or elsewhere but somehow complete orders to our air crews would get to Tokyo. No one knows how they obtained this vital information.

“We had old maps of Japanese cities but they were not very good, we relied upon aerial photographs taken by our photo reconnaissance group, which were excellent in discerning ground features and targets.

“By the end of the war the 73rd Wing had lost 1,033 men killed in action. Several were killed on Saipan as a result of Japanese air attacks on Isley Field. The Japanese pilots were after the B-29s and would make a bombing sweep on our aircraft approaching the parked equipment from the west. They knew it was a one-way trip for them and that they would never return to their base. In a way you could say that these sorties were the first Kamikaze missions.

“You can’t begin to comprehend the valor of those Marines who took Saipan so that the country might have an air base from which to launch operations to wage war against the Empire. You can’t imagine the furious fighting the Marines and the Army’s 27th Division had to endure on Saipan’s tortuous terrain. After the island had been secured we were pretty much confined to its southern end around the airfield. We were under orders not to wander around over the island but once I did visit the Marpi area and stumbled onto a cave that had been hit by Marine flame throwers—the charred remains of Japanese soldiers were still inside. This was in October, three and a half months after the fighting.

“I was later transferred to Guam and remember that very soon after the Japanese surrendered, two Japanese officers flew to Guam with maps marking the locations of Prisoner of War camps in Japan and elsewhere. Within forty-eight hours we launched missions with our B-29s filled with medical supplies, food and clothing that were dropped at low level over the camps marked POW on the roofs of buildings. The Russians had sent two liaison officers to Guam and they had somehow obtained a copy of the Field Order that the B-29s flying these mercy missions would carry ‘full turrets‚’ which meant that all guns would be armed. The Russians opposed this order and the aircraft flew unarmed. Then an aircraft of the 873rd squadron flew across the China Sea on a single plane mission, wings marked as a POW flight, and was shot down by the Russians. Upon learning of this attack on an unarmed American aircraft that was flying a mission of mercy, General LeMay summoned the Russian Liaison Officers to his office and, while awaiting their arrival, we were sort of lounging around, not knowing what had happened. LeMay appeared casual, calm and relaxed until the Russians were escorted in, whereupon the General launched into a raging tirade against the Russians and called them every foul name he could think of, curses only the Devil himself could conceive. He told the Russians, “From now on our planes will fly armed, bring on your #@%&*## fighters and we will shoot them down.”

Ernest Bartley’s visit to Saipan was 48 years to the day since the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima. He visited the old airfield, remembering the roar of engines long since silent and traveled to Marpi Point to see for the last time the rocky cliffs marking Saipan’s northern coast. Cliffs that he had flown over so many times in 1944 and 1945 on the way to Japan and a promontory that he anxiously looked for upon his return from bombing missions.

As I sat in his room at the Summer Holiday in Garapan that rainy and windswept Sunday afternoon in August 1993, Bart looked at me and said, “I have done a lot of things in my life since the war—but nothing has ever come even close to those experiences. The war was the high point of my life.”

I left the hotel and walked into the remnants of a tropical storm’s feeder bands that left 20 inches of rain on the island that day. Within minutes an earthquake shook Saipan that measured 8.1 on the Richter Scale—and I wondered what Bart thought about that; my guess is very little.

Leaving Saipan to resume his position as a professor at the University of Florida, he didn’t mention if the “ghosts” of his memory returned with him. I expect they did.

(William Stewart is the author of Saipan In Flames and Ghost Fleet of the Truk Lagoon, both books documenting the Pacific conflict.)