Many posts at TheyWereSoldiers specifically pertain to the military service of Jewish soldiers in the Second World War. Inevitably, one of the themes that follows is the experience of Jewish prisoners of war in the European and Mediterranean Theaters of War, given the nature, ideology, and aims of Germany during that conflict. Such posts as…
January 14, 1945 – A Bad Day Over Derben
Eighteen Days from Home: Corporal Jack Bartman (April 20, 1945)
Double Jeopardy Remembered – The Reminiscences of a Jewish Prisoner of War
The Reconstruction of Memory: Soldiers of Aufbau – Jewish Prisoners of War
… focus on this topic directly, while many of my other posts – particularly those specifically covering Jewish military casualties in WW II, some of which mention American POWs at Berga-am-Elster, Germany – touch upon this in passing.
What of the experience of Jewish servicemen captured in combat against Japan, whether in the Pacific, or, the CBI (China-Burma-India) Theaters of War? In the United States armed forces, the total number of Jewish military personnel captured in the Pacific Theater – soldiers, Marines, and sailors captured during the war’s opening months during the fall of Corregidor and Bataan, and later on, aviators in the Army Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps – was vastly fewer than those captured by Germany, Italy, Hungary, Rumania, and Bulgaria. This is an indirect reflection of the greater magnitude of the Allied war effort against Germany and its European allies, relative to that against Japan.
Based on my investigation of a very wide variety of documents and sources, I’ve determined that a total of 686 Allied aviators – from the air arms of all Allied nations – survived Japanese captivity. (See this post, albeit the numbers therein need revising…) This number indirectly reflects several factors inherent to the Pacific air war, and over all, indicates the hauntingly low probability of an Allied flier – once captured – actually surviving Japanese captivity through and specifically beyond Emperor Hirohito’s announcement on August 15, 1945 of Japan’s surrender.
Of the thirty-five Jewish aviators captured by the Japanese during combat missions from among all branches of the American armed forces between 1942 and August 7, 1945 (…information about the latter date here…), First Lieutenant Henry Irving Wood (0-789035), was one of the nineteen who survived the war. A fighter pilot, he was shot down on October 1, 1943 during a bomber escort mission to Haiphong, French Indochina, a regular destination for American combat aircraft in a war that that began some two decades later.
Though I mentioned his name some five years ago (2018) in a post about the experiences of 1 Lt. William S. Lyons – Revenge of the Tiger – only very recently did I discover that there has long existed a complete account of his experiences. This comprises a full chapter – a revealing chapter – in Wanda Cornelius’ and Thayne R. Short’s 1980 book DING HAO – America’s Air War in China -1937-1945. As described by Short in the book’s introduction, “Of dramatic importance was Henry I. Wood, who chose Wanda and me to reveal his 36-year-old secret by walking into the 1978 [November 18, to be specific] reunion of the Seventy-fifth in Nashville, Tennessee, when everybody had thought him dead in flames over war-torn China in 1944. An entire chapter tells his story.” Here, the by-1978 civilian Henry I. Wood relates the events of his last mission, his capture, imprisonment, mistreatment, and eventual return to American military control.
Lt. Wood’s story is presented in full, below. It begins with a portrait (from DING HAO) of him sitting in his P-40, and is accompanied by maps, images of Missing Air Crew Reports, and, War Crimes Case File Index Cards from NARA Records Group 153 (Records of the Judge Advocate General’s Office) which pertain to postwar depositions or reports about his experiences. In these, Lt. Wood mentions the names of several American (and one Chinese) military personnel, and these are accompanied – in dark red text, like this – by insertions giving the full names and serial numbers of these people.
I have absolutely no idea if the account in DING HAO was written by Mr. Wood and provided to Cornelius and Short, or, if it’s a transcription of either a cassette recording (this was in the ancient, pre-digital world 1978, after all) or a one-on-one interview. Such information isn’t given in the book.
What about Henry I. Wood, the person? He was born on July 11, 1918, in Jacksonville, Florida, the son of Isadore Raymond (1883-1945) and Josephine Harris (Hughes) (1890-1979) Wood, and had two brothers, one of whom was Bernard Bear Wood (10/6/21-12/26/85). The family’s wartime address was 2217 Herschel Street, in Jacksonville. His paternal grandmother was Adaline Silverberg Wood.
Information about his MIA status appeared in the Jacksonville Commentator on October 21, 1943, and in an official Casualty List released by the War Department on November 5 of that year. His name does appear in American Jews in World War II; it’s on page 86.
His loss in combat is covered in Missing Air Crew Report 759, which indicates that he was missing in P-40K 42-46250.
Henry Irving Wood died on October 28, 1986. I have no information about his postwar life, or, his place of burial.
Isadore and Bernard were two of Isadore and Josephine Wood’s three sons. Their third son, RM 2C David Robert Wood (5519400), born on Oct. 6, 1921, did not survive the Second World War. A crew member of the USS Albacore (SS-218), commanded by Lt. Cdr. Hugh Raynor Rimmer, he was one of eighty-five men killed when their submarine struck a mine and sank on November 7, 1944, just off Cape Esan (east of Hakodate), Hokkaido, Japan. (See also…) There were no survivors. His name is memorialized on the Tablets of the Missing at the Honolulu Memorial in Hawaii.
Henry I. Wood was one of eight 23rd Fighter Group pilots who survived as POWs. The names of the seven others are listed below, along with their serial numbers, squadrons, date of capture, type of aircraft flown upon their “last” mission (and when known, the aircraft serial number and pertinent MACR number), the location of the POW camp where they were interned, and, their state of residence. Of those USAAF Fighter Groups from among whom men survived as POWs of the Japanese, only the 311th Fighter Group had more men who returned from Japanese captivity, with ten POWs surviving the war. And so, the names:
Lucia, Raymond W., 1 Lt., 0-427755
74th Fighter Squadron
POW 3/19/43; P-40; No MACR
Omori Headquarters (Ofuna) – From Glendale, New York
Reported in News Media 4/12/1943
Pike, Harry M., Lt. Col., 0-024110
Headquarters Squadron
POW 9/15/43; P-40; MACR 15584
Omori Headquarters (Ofuna) – From Westbury, New York
Reported in News Media 10/19/1943
Quigley, Donald L., Maj., 0-432207
74th Fighter Squadron
POW 8/10/44; P-40N 43-23400; MACR 7349
Shanghai POW Camp, Kiawgwan – From Ohio
Bennett, Gordon F., 1 Lt., 0-797926
74th Fighter Squadron
8/29/44; P-40N 42-106318; MACR 8017
Shinjku, Tokyo – From Massachusetts
Thomas, James E., 2 Lt., 0-812174
118th Fighter Squadron
POW 9/4/44; P-40N 43-22800; MACR 8115
Shanghai POW Camp, Kiawgwan – From Kentucky
Taylor, James M., Jr., 2 Lt., 0-817130
75th Fighter Squadron
POW 11/11/44; P-51C 43-24947; MACR 10078
Shanghai POW Camp, Kiawgwan
Parnell, Max L., 2 Lt., 0-686010
118th Fighter Squadron
POW 12/24/44; P-51C 43-24984; MACR 10967
Shinjku, Tokyo – From Georgia
Neither the War Crimes Case Files nor Wood’s story in DING HAO make any reference to the implications of his being a Jew, in terms of his experiences as a POW, probably because there simply weren’t any, this almost certainly never having been focus of interest by his captors to begin with. Of course, this would presume a nominal awareness on their part about Jews and Judaism beforehand, which I doubt was manifest in the rank and file of the Japanese military at that time.
Admittedly conjecture on my part…! I think that during the 1930s, while there was likely some familiarity with Christianity among the Japanese people, knowledge about Jews was essentially limited to the very few who were members of economic or social elites residing in the United States as college or university students, or, military attaches and diplomatic personnel. In that context and setting, any awareness that emerged “about” Jews would probably have been a sort-of-caricature derived from popular culture, rather than a result of direct interpersonal interactions.
This was a definite aspect of what befell Second Lieutenant Joseph Finkenstein (0-730433), a fighter pilot in the 339th Fighter Squadron of the 347th Fighter Group, 13th Air Force. Born in Denver on April 20, 1921, he was the only son of Frank Israel (9/27/88-2/4/66) and Dora R. (Goalstone / Udelson) (10/29/92-1/9/67) Finkenstein, and the half-brother Joe Louis and Rita Pellish, Dora’s children from a prior marriage. The family resided at 718 ½ South Ridgeley Drive in Los Angeles.
The insignia of the 339th Fighter Squadron insignia, from a2jacketpatches.
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These two photos of Lt. Finkenstein are via Rita Pellish Diamond. First, his graduation portrait…
…and second, here he’s standing on the wing of a PT-17 Stearman (probably 41-8959) during Primary Training. If I have the serial correct, based on the Aviation Archeology database, the photo may have been taken in 1942, at Ocala, Florida.
– .ת.נ.צ.ב.ה. –
…Tehé Nafshó Tzrurá Bitzrór Haḥayím
May his soul be bound up in the bond of everlasting life.
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Joseph Finkenstein did not survive the war. He was missing in action on his eighth combat mission, during the “Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre” of February 14, 1943, P-38G “21”. Though the MACR covering his loss (#585), his IDPF (Individual Deceased Personnel File), and, NARA Records Group 153 are devoid of any information about his ultimate fate, a Japanese propaganda broadcast transmitted to the American West Coast on November 24, 1943, and recorded by the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service (NARA Records Group 262) – the text of which was never incorporated into his IDPF – definitively confirms that he was captured.
The text of the broadcast, almost certainly abstracted from a transcript of his interrogation, reveals that his interrogator (or interrogators?) took particular note of Finkenstein having been a Jew, with Joseph’s residence in Los Angeles implying that the interrogator (a member of the Japanese military? – the Kempei Tai?) subscribed to antisemitic caricatures about Jews prevailing in the American entertainment media, likely from pre-war residence in the West Coast.
Joseph Finkenstein’s name appears in a War Department Casualty List that was issued to the news media on March 11, 1943, and also in the records of the National Jewish Welfare Board, but most definitely not in the 1947 compilation American Jews in World War II. The records of the American Battle Monuments Commission – which indicate that his name is commemorated on the Tablets of the Missing at Manila American Cemetery – note that he was awarded the Air Medal and Purple Heart.
Though Joseph Finkenstein’s fate will never be known among men, based on the general location where he was lost, I believe that he was imprisoned at Shortland Island. Later, he may well have been transported to Rabaul, New Britain, the latter being the location where 2 Lt. Wellman H. Huey – also of the 339th; also lost on February 14, 1943; who also never returned – is definitely known to have been held captive.
Here’s Lt. Huey’s Class 42-I graduation portrait, from the United States National Archives collection “Photographic Prints of Air Cadets and Officers, Air Crew, and Notables in the History of Aviation – NARA RG 18-PU”.
The body of literature pertaining to the experience of Jewish POWs of the Japanese is – unsurprisingly – extraordinarily small, but what does exist is utterly compelling. I know of four books in this limited genre. They are:
Barbed-Wire Surgeon, by Alfred A. Weinstein, M.D., MacMillan, 1956
Chaplain on the River Kwai – Story of a Prisoner of War, by Chaim Nussbaum, Shapolsky Publishers, 1988
These two were penned by members of the Army Air Force:
They Can’t Take That Away From Me – The Odyssey of an American POW, by Ralph M. Rentz, Michigan State University Press, 2003
ETA Target 1400 Hours or Hi Ma, I’m Home, by Irving S. Newman, 1946 (unpublished manuscript)
I’m sure that there exist other yet-unpublished manuscripts, collections of letters, and diaries, but whether these will reach publication by now, nearly eight decades after the war’s end, is problematic.
Also problematic is the question of whether, in the “fundamentally transformed” America of 2023, there remains – and will remain? – an interest in history.
Truly, the past is a very different country.
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So, onward to Lt. Wood…
Here’s his Craig Field (Alabama) graduation portrait, also from the Photographic Prints of Air Cadets and Officers, Air Crew, and Notables in the History of Aviation – NARA RG 18-PU. (Specifically, Box 102.)
xx
And now, his story from DING HAO…
Introduction
Of dramatic importance was Henry I. Wood, who chose Wanda and me to reveal his 36-year-old secret by walking into the 1978 reunion of the Seventy-fifth in Nashville, Tennessee, when everybody had thought him dead in flames over war-torn China in 1944. An entire chapter tells his story.
Lt. Henry I. Wood, Prisoner of War
Lt. Wood, in the cockpit of what is presumably his “personal” P-40 Warhawk, at the 23rd Fighter Group’s base at Kweilin, China
Insignia of the CBI (China-Burma-India) Theater, which appears on the left shoulder of Lt. Wood’s jacket.
On October 1, 1943, sixteen P-40s of the Seventy-fifth escorted bombers over Haiphong. Over the target the bombers made direct hits on installations and upon completing their runs turned the formation for home. Suddenly enemy Zeroes struck and in the battle, four Zeroes crashed to destruction. Lt. Henry I. Wood, pilot of one of the P-40s, disappeared in the brief interval of fighting. So read the record of that fateful day. The men believed Wood to be gone forever since he did not return to base. He arrived in China early in March of that year, a few days before the Fourteenth Air Force was activated. This was his thirtieth mission. He had downed a bomber the previous June or July in combat. Years afterward, Wood recalled all that had happened to him after he was shot down on October 1, 1943.
This example of the 75th Fighter Squadron insignia is from Flying Tiger Antiques.
The October 1 mission had been postponed three separate limes due to bad weather, and finally, instead of taking off during the morning, we took off shortly after noon. The mission was uneventful until we got over the target at Haiphong when the B-24s dropped their bombs. I had been scheduled to lead the right rear flight and Don Brookfield [1 Lt. Donald S. Brookfield, 0-430778, 75th FS, 23rd FG, 4 victories], who already had orders to go home, elected to go with us. He took the flight and I look the echelon as the clement leader. Of the eighteen fighters who were doing the escort, two didn’t join up. One was my wingman and one was Brookfield’s. So I flew wingman for Brookfield and only two of us were guarding the right rear. We were at about twenty-one thousand feet and the bombers at twenty thousand when we went over the target.
After the bombers dropped their bombs and turned northeast, instead of heading back to base, Brookfield for some reason kept staying over the target. But at twenty thousand feet we couldn’t see much but smoke, so we got quite a bit behind the main formation, about one and a half miles behind to be precise. Antiaircraft fire was hitting us all around. I took a severe hit from “AA” fire and was picking up my microphone to call Brookfield, when we were hopped by about thirty fighters. Brookfield peeled off to the left and I peeled off to the right. I dove down approximately five thousand feet, picking up considerable speed, and turned up into the last part of the bomber formation.
The last Zero had left the fighters and had gone to the bombers and it began a half roll through the tail bombers. And as I pulled up to the loop, one of the Zeroes came out in front of me, and I fired my guns. He still hadn’t dropped his bamboo wing tanks, and he flamed immediately. I flew within fifty feet of him and saw his wing disintegrating as he went down. My own engine seemed to quit but I didn’t think much of it, because often in a high angle of attack and after firing six .50s, the airplane tends to stall out. So it didn’t immediately dawn on me that it had stopped. I just nosed over to pick up airspeed, and then I realized that I didn’t have a working engine.
The antiaircraft fire had hit the tail section of my airplane. At that time the P-40’s control surfaces were fabric, but the rest was metal. I could see most all of my right aileron and most all of my right elevator. The rudder was pretty badly damaged, and I didn’t have good control of the aircraft. I leveled off and looked around to see if anybody was following me.
Then I dropped down to see if there were any more Zeroes. I couldn’t jump because I knew they would shoot at me in midair. Next I tried everything I could think of to get the airplane engine going again, but I couldn’t get it to come to life. I turned off and on all of the switches, even doing the ridiculous thing of turning off and on the gun switch.
I theorized that I had taken a hit earlier from the “ack ack” or possibly from the fighter that first fired at me, before pulling away when I dove. It must have nicked the gas line and when I fired my guns, the vibration shook it where it wouldn’t feed.
Many years later Wood learned about a similar incident from another Seventy-Fifth Fighter Squadron member, Charlie Olsen [1 Lt. Charles J. Olsen, 0-789937, 1 victory]. Olsen said that his plane engine once quit and restarted at twenty-five hundred feet, and when he got it back to the base they found several aircraft with belly tanks full of some sort of green slime. The belly tanks had been shipped over from the United States and were not properly cleaned out before being put to use. The slime moved up to the carburetor and caused the engine to cut out. Therefore, Wood came to the conclusion that perhaps it was green slime which killed his engine rather than a hit in the carburetor.
I got low to about eleven hundred feet as indicated, and I knew I was near a small village northeast of Hanoi, probably about thirty miles from the city. And I jumped. What I did to make sure my plane was destroyed was to trim it up nose heavy, crouch down in the seat, and when I was ready to go, I was in a stooping position. I just pushed the stick forward. In theory, if you did that you would do a back flip out of the airplane. I didn’t do a back flip. I did sort of an angle flip over the side. I used to dive in high school, so I just tipped my body naturally, instinctively, and it is a good thing that I did because as I turned and went by the horizontal stabilizer, it was just about two inches in front of my nose. And my feet just cleared the vertical stabilizer. As soon as I realized I was clear of the airplane, I counted two and pulled the ripcord. It is a good thing I pulled it when I did because I was almost too low to jump. I was in some low foothills, and I fell backward, forward, and backward again and on my back swing, or my third one, I hit the ground.
A wind caught the chute dragging me until it collapsed up the hill about fifty feet. My face was scratched a little. I disengaged the chute. This was about 4:30 in the afternoon and there was still considerable daylight in Indochina at the time. So I took the chute down the hill with me into a rice paddy, because I knew I was too deep into enemy territory.
Missing Air Crew Report 759
Lt. Wood was flying on my wing when the bombers went into their run. I last saw him when the escort made a turn following the bombers from the target. Major Brady (B-24, Flight Commander) states that he saw a P-40 and a zero make a head-on pass; the zero exploded and the P-40 went straight down smoking badly. This was probably Lt. Wood. Other bomber crews reported a pilot parachuting from a P-40 shortly after leaving the target.
DONALD S. BROOKFIELD,
1ST Lt., Air Corps
From Carl Molesworth’s book 23rd Fighter Group – ‘Chenault’s Sharks’ , this painting by Jim Laurier – of Lt. James L. Lee’s P-40M number 179 in late summer of 1943 – is a representative view of a 75th Fighter Squadron Warhawk during the time-frame of Lt. Wood’s service in the squadron. Note that the squadron insignia appears on the fin, over the painted-out serial number. Unfortunately, MACR doesn’t list the side number of the aircraft Lt. Wood was flying on his last mission.
I got into the paddy and laid down between the growing rice there. In about twenty minutes I could see activity come into the rice paddy, coolies, natives, and later men in uniform. I just laid real still and several times within twenty or thirty feet of me they would come by, but they didn’t see me. The parachute was wadded down beside me in the water. After dark, about nine o’clock, I decided I could move. I got up cautiously. My parachute was soaked but there was a little fishing paraphernalia in there, and I took it out along with a machete, some C-rations, and a chocolate bar from the pack. I look them with me toward the little village I had seen as I was coming down in the parachute. About a quarter until ten, I came to the edge of this village, which was a compound composed of mud huts arranged in a circle. I worked my way all around the wall until I came to the entrance. Entering, I saw several people standing by a fire. Immediately a dog began to bark. And I said in Chinese, “I am your very good friend.” I was hoping I was anyway.
And as I started over to these natives at the fireplace, there was an elderly man of about sixty there. He held up his hands to indicate to the rest of them to be quiet, and I walked over to him, reaching for my little booklet called a pointee-talkee. I turned my leather jacket inside out to show I had a Chinese-American flag, and I pointed to the place in the book which said I was an American pilot, to help me, that my government would pay him well. This happened the day after payday and I had a good bit of Chinese yen which I did not know was any good to them or not, but I pulled it out anyway. I gave it to him indicating that be would get much more if he could hide me and work me back into China.
He apparently knew no English but motioned to me, indicating that things were all right and took me into one of the little mud huts. They gave me some cold boiled water and scrambled eggs. I was sitting on the floor by a little table eating the eggs and drinking the water when something caused me to be apprehensive. It was a noise, a kind of dull thud. It was probably a rifle butt striking the side of the mud hut. What had happened to me was that a platoon of Japanese soldiers led by a lieutenant and a noncom who could speak some English had come to the village. They had been brought there by the people I had talked to. I had asked for the Chinese guerillas. They had sent for the Japanese troops instead.
The locals were probably too scared to hide me because they were afraid they would be killed if they were caught. I indicated from the book for them to hide me. They took me to the next room, but there wasn’t any real place to hide because there wasn’t anything there besides thatch rugs on the floor and a small table in the corner. I held up a couple of these rugs over me in the corner. Then suddenly, the room lit up and I could hear these gruff voices which I presumed were saying “hands up” in Japanese. I didn’t move. Somebody snatched the rug. I stood up with my hands up.
I was not treated rough initially, surprisingly enough, as I had been led to expect I would be. They did take my jacket off and search me thoroughly, and the one which could speak some English said, “Never mind. Never mind.”
He took me to the other room where I had been eating and motioned for me to finish. I had suddenly lost my appetite. In fact I was so confused (and even though I had fairly good intelligence – later I graduated with honors from college) by being treated nice, that I asked them through the pointee-talkee what Chinese troops were doing in this area? And there was an uproar – a sound of laughter when one of them read it to the others. Finally the tall one who kept saying. “Never mind. Never mind,” said, “Ha. Ha. You think we Chinese. We Japanese.”
It was a big joke to them, but not to me. They then tied my hands behind my back and put some of the troops in front of me. They had cattails which had been dumped in kerosene which were lit and we started traipsing through the rice paddies, with troops in front and back of me. And it was pretty slippery trying to walk through the rice fields and every once in a while I would start to go down. I was afraid that somebody would shoot me in the back thinking I was trying to escape. I had no such ideas at the time, being in the middle of a bunch of Jap soldiers.
After about forty-five minutes or an hour we reached a road where they sent up some flares and indicated to me to sit down. While we were sitting there one of the soldiers took the chocolate bar they had taken from me and offered me some. And I said thank you to him. They all laughed. They thought it was funny since they had taken me prisoner and confiscated my food and here I was thanking them for offering me something to eat. In about thirty minutes, a big truck came down the road and we all piled into it. It had an open bed with low sides. I stood in the middle with the rest of them hovering around me. My hands were still tied. We came to a compound which was apparently a troop training area because there was a number of barracks. I was taken inside one of the buildings with an extremely mean-looking Japanese. The only other Japanese I had seen like him was when I had shot down a bomber on another mission and flew almost into the nose of his plane before I cut under it. And I could see the pilot’s face there. I had apparently killed the copilot and the pilot was just staring at me through the canopy.
This mean-looking fellow had on a kimono, not a uniform, and he apparently was the man in charge. I found out the next morning he was a captain, and he was definitely in charge of the outfit. The man glared at me, and through one of his subordinates, he told me to answer his questions or he would cut off my head.
And I nodded my still intact head that I understood. He then asked me what my rank was and I told him first lieutenant. He then asked me how many planes were in my formation. I said to ask one of his pilots who was up there on the mission. He must not have liked my answer because he became even more enraged. And he had someone tie my hands behind my back, to the back of the chair and my feet to the runner of the chair. Then he took out some paper towels and took his own neck and wiped it and removed his sabre from its sheath, indicating to me that he was going to cut my bead off.
He then had someone tell me to answer his questions and I nodded that I understood and be asked the same questions again. I told him that I did not have to answer questions of this nature. He then ordered his soldiers to carry me outside where there was a big bonfire. They set the chair down with me in it, and at that moment I was convinced I was going to be killed.
I had always been told that one’s life flashed before you if you were going to die. Mine didn’t flash before me. But I had already done some thinking along these lines during the afternoon. I had been very apprehensive. Then I went to the compound and met the natives, and I got a glimmer of hope that they were going to hide me.
And I thought, “This is going to be rough on my mother as she has six boys in service, and I am going to be the first to go.” And the last thing I thought about as he started to bring down the sword was how I used to have to wring chickens in the neck, and my mother plucked them afterwards when I was a kid. I could see me squirming around with the reflexes going and I thought to myself, “I’m not going to give him the satisfaction of seeing me squirm.’’ So all I could think of was to stick my neck way back as far as possible so he could have a good clean whack.
Down came the sabre, stopping just an inch above my neck. He did that twice and then he said something in Japanese and untied my legs. He untied my hands from the chair but left them tied behind my back, took me over to a tree, tied my hands to the tree, and wound the rope around my whole body and the tree.
He apparently gave them instructions, “Ready! Aim! Fire!” in Japanese because they all brought their rifles up to bear and they all clicked on empty magazines. He did that twice. Then it began to dawn upon me that he was apparently just trying to scare me, that they were stiff wanting the information or I would already be dead.
They took me to a guard compound or jail and put me on the floor and took off all my clothes except my shorts. My hands were tied behind my back and hands tied to my feet. They laid me on the concrete floor and put a hard bag of cement under my head. I would have been much more comfortable lying flat. And then they proceeded to beat me with long sticks which looked like broom handles. Some of the officers took off their boots and began beating me too. And I lapsed into unconsciousness. Several hours later, I awakened and all of them had gone.
NARA Records Group 153 Case File 56-41 (August, 1946)
1st Lt. Henry Irving Wood states that he received a beating following his capture at Luc Nahm, Indo China, by a roving detail of Jap soldiers, but does not know their names or any unit designation.
This document, from NARA, is a summation of Case Files 56-41 (above), and both 58-132 and 61-47 (see both below), and is based on an interview of Lt. Wood that occurred at Letterman General Hospital in San Francisco on October 9, 1945. Due to the circumstances and nature of his treatment by the Japanese, as well as the near-impossibility of specifically identifying any of his captors, let alone locating them postwar, further investigation was fruitless.
This map shows the location of “Luc Nahm” (actually, Luc Nam) then French Indo China, and now, Vietnam…
…while this map, at a smaller scale than above, shows Luc Nahm to the southwest, and Guilin (Kweilin) China – the 23rd Fighter Group’s base during the time frame of Lt. Wood’s service – to the northeast.
In this guard compound the guards were sitting along a bench with a noncom in charge, and one of them had apparently brought some incense because I had been bitten badly by mosquitoes and didn’t realize it until I came into consciousness. As my awareness came back and the mosquitoes were still chewing on me, that was really the worst part so far because I couldn’t scratch the bites.
Shortly before dawn, I noted the noncom in charge kept reading a big heavy book, which was probably a Japanese-English dictionary. He came over to me showing a little paper with writing on it. Looking at it he said, “You are very brave man. My maundy you go to New York.” My maundy is a Chinese term meaning “later.” Why a Japanese would use a Chinese word, I don’t know. But that is what he said.
I had never heard of a prisoner being expatriated from Japan so I was very skeptical of what be said. And then a humorous thing happened. Just as he finished saying the words, the paper still in his hand, an officer walked in and the Japanese soldier jumped to attention. He said something which sounded like Jejugius and presented arms, even though they were indoors. And I could see what he had in his hand was carefully camouflaged so that the officer could not see it. I am sure he would have caught hell if indeed he had written there what he said to me and somebody bad seen it.
The next morning about ten o’clock, my uniform was given back to me and I was told to dress and put the jacket on with the flag outside. I was paraded in front of a large formation of Japanese troops while the captain in charge was speaking lo them. I didn’t know what he was saying about me.
NARA Records Group 153 Case File 61-67 (August, 1946)
Lt. Henry Irving Wood states they were marched through the streets of Canton and Hanoi, China, in a ceremony exhibition before the Jap Army during Oct. 1943.
Later in the afternoon I was put in a truck again and taken to Hanoi. I recognized the town when we got there to the suburbs because there were a good many signs in French and English which the Japanese had not obliterated. I was taken to a beautiful occidental type building in the heart of Hanoi, led inside, and the ropes were taken off my hands. Shortly later. I was seated in a nice dining hall with china and silverware.
A very nicely dressed man in Western style clothing, a Japanese, came in speaking with an Oxford accent and told me he was sorry I had been mistreated the night before and wished to assure me this was not the Japanese’ nature. But I should realize that there was a war going on and sometimes troops from the field got upset. He said I would be treated well in the future, and he just wanted to talk to me a little. He didn’t often get a chance to talk with an American. I didn’t believe that.
It turned out that his name was Ariaa and he was the Japanese premier for French Indochina at the time. It became obvious in a very short time with him trying to converse with me, that he was trying to discuss military information with me through seemingly irrelevant conversation. First he asked me where I was born. Where did I live? Did I have brothers and sisters? Apparently these questions were innocuous.
Then he said, “How did you like the place you were flying out of in China? Where was that?”
Of course I refused to answer the questions. And I told him in a nice manner that I didn’t mind talking with him, but there were things of obvious military significance and he must realize it. After he understood he wasn’t making any headway, he apologized, said he had to leave and that I would be served a nice meal right at the table I was sitting at. And again he apologized for the behavior of the Japanese. As he left the room other Japanese came into another door and immediately tied me up and hustled me down to a basement where they had made some cells by taking a large room and segregating them with four-by-fours from the floor to ceiling with an inch space between each board. They stripped me of all my clothes except my shorts, made me get down through a little door like an animal cage into one of the cells where there were four native Vietnamese, I presume. They indicated for me to sit on the floor like the others were doing with knees crossed and with my hands folded across my knees. So I sat there for a while and naturally that got tiring, so I leaned back and when I did, I was yelled at in Japanese, and a long thin stick came through the bars and I was knocked in the bead.
So I learned that I was supposed to be sitting and not lying down. I was kept in this room for five days without food. I was allowed to have water twice a day. They got us up in the morning and put us to bed at six at night and allowed us water and took us to the ben jo as they called it, which was the bathroom, consisting of a little slit in the floor.
At the end of the fifth day, they brought me a big fish head which was supposed to be a delicacy in that area. I still wasn’t hungry enough to cat a fish head, but later on during my incarceration, I would have gladly eaten it.
The next morning after offering me the fish head in the middle of the morning, they took me out of the cell and into a room where there were a number of Japanese in a big ring on the floor and others sitting behind them in chairs. And that is where they started pressuring me in earnest about intelligence. I let them know that all I would tell them was my rank, name, and serial number. They tried to talk me into the information by being innocuous in their questioning like Ariaa had done. They felt that if I talked they would get their information. After they questioned me about an hour and a half, they put me back into the cell. That afternoon about three o’clock, they took me out again and told me that I had to talk. They were tired of talking to me in this manner, and they expected me to answer the questions. When I refused to answer, they locked the windows. There was this little device I called a windlass. They put wires on your wrists and put it around your finger and tightened it gradually, pulling the finger back until it broke. They didn’t break my finger but it was very painful. And they also took a hammer and you can still see the scars on my hand where they broke the bones. This went on for several days, and after the second day, they initiated a new procedure where they had a ladder which was inclined at about a forty-five-degree angle to the wall. Then they tied me to the ladder with my head low, and they put water-laden heavy towels over my face where I would choke and gasp and eventually pass out. Then they would bring me to and ask the questions again. This went on for about three weeks.
NARA Records Group 153 Case File 58-132 (August, 1946)
1st Lt. Henry Irving Wood, states he was imprisoned at Nanking, China, and placed in solitary confinement for about 21 days. Received severe treatment.
Then they took me to an airfield where I had been on an escort mission a time or two when the B-24s had bombed them. While I was at the airfield up in a high room, but not in a control tower, there was an air raid alarm. Everybody became very excited and they were bustling me out of the building and into a truck. There were a number of trucks trying to leave the field with troops on them. No pilots were trying to take off because they apparently felt that the American planes were imminent which they were. They had not received the alarm in time. But there was a road which paralleled the runway. And as we were leaving I looked up and I could see the B-24s at a high altitude and barely make out the fighters with them.
I knew that the bombs bad already been dropped and were on their way and sure enough in a matter of seconds, the bombs were dropping all around us. I had extremely mixed feelings – I was hoping that they would blast the hell out of the Japanese, but I sure didn’t want to get hit It was a real terrifying feeling to be in that situation. We continued on down the highway for several miles, got into ditches on the side of the road, and stayed there for an hour. Then we got back into the trucks and went back to the airfield. Unfortunately the bombing had not been accurate, almost all of the bombs had gone off parallel to the runway about three hundred yards from the road we had traveled. A couple of the bombs had hit the field, and one bad hit a large hangar where a number of airplanes were housed, and there was considerable damage to the planes as I could see fires still burning. I could see the damaged airplanes.
Later on during the day I was put on this airplane, a Lockheed Lodestar, along with some Japanese passengers, and there were four guards with rifles and bayonets accompanying me and a Japanese captain in charge of the troops. In the course of the flight it was very pleasant. This particular officer was very courteous, and he indicated he understood English but he could not speak it well though he could write it. He showed me pictures of his children and said he had been away from home five years. He made no attempt to interrogate me for information. He also offered me some of his chow because they apparently didn’t have any box lunch for me on the plane. He gave me some cheese and a sandwich and I could tell from the course of the sun that we were flying along the southern China coast over towards Taiwan. And sure enough we landed on the island.
For the first time in several weeks I had an enjoyable couple of hours, apparently while the plane was being refueled. I got to lie outside in the open on the grass near the runway. It was a beautiful sunny day and in no way was the captain in charge attempting to hamper me. I had come through some pretty difficult times in the course of the flight, from a mental condition. Several times I felt that I might have had the opportunity to get out of the seat in a hurry, run up to the front of the plane. There was a “stepover” in the Lodestar which was approximately two and a half feet high, separating the cockpit from the area for the passengers. I kept thinking that if I could realty get up there and grab bold of the pilot’s wheel, I could spin that plane in with everybody on board and accomplish something besides being a prisoner.
I could never bring myself to do it, but I would have never reached the cockpit if I had tried. I’d have been stabbed in the back or shot. But I bad some real tough times worrying whether I should try or not. I had been in excellent health at the time I went down. My main activity in Kunming – I wasn’t a gambler or a player of bridge – was working out with weights and doing a little running and push-ups and reading a good many books. My health was good at age twenty-five and I was in top physical condition before my capture. My health had not deteriorated rapidly in their hands. After the first five days I had a fair diet with rice in the morning with some sort of Chinese vegetables and the same thing in the evening. I was getting an adequate diet even though it wasn’t the most palatable one.
We eventually landed again, and I ascertained that I was in Nanking. What made me realize that was I was again in solitary but not made to sit on the floor this time. I was allowed to walk around all I wanted to. The room was approximately eleven feet long and five feet wide, so I paced up and down that room most of the day. It was right near the entrance of a large compound, and I could see into a large courtyard.
The second day I was there a big black car came up with general’s flags on it and a man got out. I am sure it was the man they called “The Tiger of the Orient.” He was the Japanese general in charge of that area. He simply came over and looked at me through the bars, didn’t say anything, looked at me for about thirty seconds, and turned around and walked away.
Again I stayed in this cell for approximately three weeks because I was making marks with my fingernails on the wooden bars, four-by-fours, but wider spaces between them than the ones before, about two and a half inches. One day they came in and said I would be moved that day. They had not tried to interrogate me at all in Nanking and this morning they told me why they had stopped questioning me.
They told me they had captured a Chinese pilot named Chen [2 Lt. Ping-Ching Chen – Survived as POW] who was in my unit and that he had been badly wounded and they had been able to get all the information they wanted. And I found out later that what they said was true because I was taken to a prison camp with him and he said he had been wounded – his leg bad been broken and he was shot in the arm. Apparently under the severe mistreatment he had and the painful conditions, be told them things they wanted to know.
Missing Air Crew Report 759
Lt. Chen was flying on my wing when the formation left the target area. He remained in his position for approximately fifteen (15) minutes. When my flight turned back to protect two straggling bombers, Lt. Chen was missing.
THOMAS W. COTTON,
1st Lt., Air Corps
From Nanking we traveled to Shanghai where I was put into a large prison camp. At that time, it held Italian prisoners from a ship that had been scuttled in the harbor at Shanghai. It also contained some civilians from Wake Island, Marines from Wake Island, and the North China Embassy Guard. It was a well-formed prison camp, and I simply was put into a cell by myself for approximately one week and then released with the general prisoners. I remained in this camp from December of 1943 until late May 1945.
Other than two bad personal experiences in the long stay at the prison camp, it was not particularly bad other than the lack of communication with the outside, poor diet, and very little recreation. We normally worked nine days and then were off one day.
My first bad experience was when I was asked to work by Maj. Luther Brown [Major Luther A. Brown, 0-3815, POW Dec. 8, 1941], who was a Marine major acting as executive officer for Colonel Ashhurst [Colonel William A. Ashurst, 0-000028, POW Dec. 8, 1941], who was the senior American officer in charge of the camp. Brown had ordered me to go to work in a garden with other Americans which stood within the compound. I told him I didn’t feel like I or any other prisoner should work.
He attempted to reason with me, saying that he was in charge and this work was not of any particular help to the Japanese. It helped get us our own food and was of some value. It was up to him to make a decision like that, and it was not up to me as an individual to decline or accept.
I still felt it was my own individual decision and I told him so. He went over to a Japanese noncom named Neasaki [Lt. Myasaki], who was in charge of this particular detail. Neasaki walked up to another prisoner who had a shovel, grabbed it, and hit me on the side of the head with it as hard as he could. It knocked me to the ground. I was stunned. And when I got back up Major Brown told me he was sorry, but if I didn’t work, I would get similar treatment. That was my first experience with any collaboration by an American with the Japanese. I later found out that within a small group there was considerable collaboration.
NARA Records Group 153 Case File 58-108 (January, 1946)
1st Lt. Henry Irving Wood states on or about 10 Nov 1943, while a PsW at the Shanghai War Prison Camp, he was engaged in a detail of hauling dirt within the camp compound area. Lt. Myasaki seized the shovel which he was working with and struck him a heavy blow in the face; he then turned and struck 2nd Lt. Robert E. Greeley, M.C., also in the face. Myasaki was involved in torture treatments, such as water treatment, breaking fingers with a windlass contraption and numerous beatings. Col. Otera was Jap commanding officer.
In fact volumes of information on it were filled out in Manila at the end of the war, but nothing was done by the psychiatrists or attorneys. They felt that a lot of what we said, due to living under such bad conditions for such a long time and to our mental health, was imagined. But that wasn’t so. It wasn’t until the Korean War that they realized that we were brainwashed and that there were Americans who collaborated with the enemy after they became prisoners.
I decided I had better go to work, that I didn’t want to get whacked anymore since I was a lone individual in the crowd. Life was bearable except for the dairy drudgery of going out to work on days when it was cold and sleeping in a building that wasn’t heated and observing some American prisoners, including Major Brown, sleeping on innerspring mattresses with big trunks full of canned food from the Marine ship stores which they had been able to salvage in Peking. They were treated differently from the rest of the prisoners too. The reason why they were being treated differently, I found out, was they surrendered lo the enemy. You can’t blame them for surrendering. They were the embassy guards when the war broke out, and these people were the ones who had been fraternizing with the locals on a daily basis, the Japanese who occupied Peking at the lime. And as the embassy guards, they were good friends with them, drank with them, danced with them, fraternized with them, and the Japanese gave them twenty-four hours to surrender. For doing this, they were rewarded. There was no attempt to dispose of the military hardware they had, which consisted of guns and bayonets and food. Anyway, whatever arrangements were made, the former guards kept their personal clothing, watches, trunk loads of food, and it was shipped from Peking to the prison camp in Shanghai. Their goods were maintained in a separate warehouse, and they were allowed to use it and no one else.
I found out that before I came to the camp, the Wake Island Marines, the ones that defended Wake Island, were put into the camp and Major Brown would not allow them to associate with the Peking Marines. Here was a group of Marines who had been undergoing harsh mental treatment and some of whom were wounded, and they weren’t even allowed to associate with other Marines, who were the former embassy guards. It took months before Major Devereaux, who after the war became a brigadier general, was able to resolve the situation with Major Brown and get him to share some of the clothes with the other prisoners.
Besides Brown, there must have been between sixty and eighty people from the embassy guard, including several officers, a number of captains who enjoyed the favors. Major Brown allowed everybody from the former guard better treatment than the rest. It may not have been the others’ nature to take advantage of the situation while fellow Americans were deprived, but Colonel Ashhurst apparently made the decision and Major Brown implemented it because Ashhurst said he was a sick man and put his executive officer in charge. Finally Devereaux apparently overcame the situation. He had been the commander at Wake Island.
Otherwise there was just minor ill-treatment when they would call a shakedown, like trying to find out why so much electricity was being used at the camp. Some of the men had been taken to town to build a rifle range on “front days.” They called it Mt. Fuji, but it was just a hill. On a “front day” the Japanese would take us and mistreat us, telling us that there were severe conditions on the front. We were well protected, so we should be mistreated because our [sic] comrades were having a rough day at the front. There was a song we made up. “With a front day every day out of nine / They run a short load (we’d push cars up this hill and we’d push a light load if we thought the Japanese weren’t watching) / Then Yaza day is a day of rest / Yaza day … Yaza day. …”
Eventually, in May of 1945, treatment wasn’t as harsh as usual and we received two Red Cross boxes.
Then Colonel Otaru, who was the Japanese commander at the camp, indicated we would be moved. We were transported in boxcars from Shanghai beginning in late May of 1945, on up through Manchuria down through Korea to Pusan on the southern tip, where we were put into a large encampment with one water spigot for the entire camp.
We were kept in the camp mostly out in the open for four days, and we didn’t know what we were waiting for. But apparently they were waiting to put us on a ship to take us up by rail to Hokkaido, the northern island, where they had in mind to put us to work in the mines. It was a real rough trip, and the only time any prisoners escaped en route was a time when five escaped by cutting barbed wires late at night. We were separated in two ends of the boxcar with barbed wire, and in the center of the car was the Japanese guard. There was a small window in each end with wire over it. They were able to cut the wire by putting a little commode there and placing a blanket up for a screen and fooling the guard by making him think they were just going to the bathroom there. And they were able to work the barbed wire loose and five slipped out into the night before they were discovered.
Then we left Pusan on a ship. We were crowded into the hold where we stood up. I don’t know how many hours we were on there. But it must have been between thirty-six and seventy-two hours on board, and there was no room between the bodies. Then we were moved across the Tsushima Straits, into Japan proper onto Honshu island, put on small Japanese railroad cars, eighty to a hundred of us on each car, lying on the floor, under the seats, on the seats, up in the baggage baskets. They had heavy opaque screens over the windows so you couldn’t see what was going on outside. But we were so tightly packed in there that there were several places we cut the screens and could see the vast devastation of the countryside that the B-29s had wrought It was just at ground level for blocks on end close to the railroad tracks. In one place we saw hundreds of railroad cars which had been destroyed. And every now and then there was a B-29 raid and we would huddle up in the cars in some subterranean chamber. They were really trying to protect us at that time.
We finally reached the island of Hokkaido, the northern island and were taken to a small mining town called Ashamitzabetsu. At that time they separated the officers and the civilians and the airmen for the first time. I felt they were trying to protect us and give us more consideration than they ever had before, or they wouldn’t have done that.
So on the third day they ordered us to go to the mines and I refused to go. I was the only one out of eighty-three of us (among them were Marines, an orderly, two Navy medics, and several enlisted men who had been put in with the officers). Brown was still in charge of the camp. I refused to go out. I was ordered to stand at attention by the Japanese this time. Brown finally lost all of his friends he had in the move, and he had been mistreated several times himself for the first time since his incarceration. So I stood at attention all day long, from when they first went out at seven o’clock in the morning, and I was still standing at attention when they returned at five o’clock in the afternoon.
They ate and I was still at attention at ten o’clock that night. Every time I moved, and I couldn’t help but move, I was beaten by a particular guard standing over me at the lime. He hit me with a rifle butt
But I must have accomplished something by my tenacity at that late stage in July of 1945 because the next day, instead of standing at attention again, and instead of taking me out to the mines, they put me lo work at a pookey party. Pookey was a plant very much like an elephant ear, edible if you did a lot of boiling. I was taken out with several Japanese and two other Americans, and we went out to the forest. There were streams and low mountains, and it was beautiful country. There we cut pookey. It was carried back to camp and boiled for our food. And for the rest of the time I went on pookey parties, and they made me the rice cook for the camp. So I never did work in the mines with the rest of the prisoners.
On August 14, the commandant of the camp, the first lieutenant did not come to the camp. No one was taken out to work. No one was taken out to pookey parties, and we realized something must be going on. Three days later some lieutenant colonel whom we had never seen before came in and told us the story that the Americans had some horrendous bombs but the Japanese would never surrender. They also kidded us about being cowards for surrendering and said the Japanese would always commit hari-kari before surrendering
But the Japanese people as a whole had given in due to the horrendous weapons, he said. And we were to wait there and see what was going to happen to us. Well, I didn’t want to wait, even though I was urged by Colonel Ashhurst and Major Brown, whom I had no use for, to wait and see what would happen. I felt we should be fed better and have better care, and I talked another officer, Lieutenant Rouse, into leaving with me. We simply walked out of the camp.
We ignored the guards who hollered something to us and kept walking. They didn’t do anything. We went down to the center of the little town to the railroad station and kept saying, “Sapporo! Sapporo!”
We ended up on a railroad train car, were transferred to another one and onto a third, and by the time we got to Sapporo on the third train, there was a Japanese noncom who spoke very good English and who asked us why we left camp. We told him we understood there were some American Air Force officers in Sapporo and we wanted to be taken to them. And sure enough, we were taken to a place where there were eleven men under Maj. Don Quigley, who turned out to be a squad commander of the Seventy-Fifth Fighter Squadron of which I bad been a member. He came to China after I did and became squad commander before he was shot down. For the next few days, we lived like kings. Quigley got on the ball and got us on tours of the farms, universities, and even a small group to church. Instead of being treated like prisoners, we were treated like tourists. And we had plenty to eat, eggs, all sorts of vegetables, good meat, things we had been told earlier weren’t available. I was real glad that I had the nerve to walk out of camp along with Lieutenant Rouse, who was a bomber pilot. [1 Lt. Richard R. Rouse, 0-735669. Member of 11th Bomb Squadron, 341st Bomb Group, 14th Air Force, captured November 11, 1943, during mission to Yochow, China, in B-25G 42-64757. Aircraft shot down by anti-aircraft fire and crashed with all six crew members surviving. Five of the six eventually survived war as POWs, being interned at Shanghai POW Camp. Loss covered in MACR 1106.]
After a few days, one of the Japanese soldiers said the Americans would be coming in and they would be dropping supplies first and for us to go out and mark an area where they could drop them. And they did. They dropped big fifty-five-gallon drums from parachutes with clothes and food in them. We had good food, good shoes, and uniforms again.
But some unfortunate things happened, too. I remember when I was in the Shanghai camp there was an enlisted man, a Marine who was always in good humor even though in terrible health. He almost died several times. A Captain White, a Marine non-flying officer, had marked the drop for the camp where this Marine was, and he didn’t make the people stay far enough from the area. And this sick Marine and two others were standing close to where the drum came in. The parachute slipped off it, and it killed all three of them standing together. This man had been captured at the outbreak of the war, the first day of the war, and he was killed by one of our own air drops at the end of it.
Several days later we were taken to an airfield where Americans had flown in some DC-3s and some P-51s. And we were flown to the Philippines. Army Air Corps men were flown to the Philippines and the Navy-Marines were flown to Guam. We arrived at the Philippines September 12, 1945. There we were plainly told after we revealed all of the tales of the Shanghai prison camp personnel, not to talk about it again. We were interrogated several days by psychiatrists and by American attorneys, who were members of the armed forces and civilians, and we had to sign statements that we would not relate any of this when we got home or else we could not be taken home before we were cleared.
They didn’t want any of this information in the newspapers. And they didn’t want to believe us, and they didn’t want us knocking any other Americans. It was all right to tell about any atrocities of the Japanese, but with Americans we were supposed to show our patriotism. Luther Brown had gone through the Naval Academy and was promoted to colonel before he retired. And nothing was ever done to him. They wouldn’t believe that an American officer would do what he did. He was such a party boy at Shanghai that he had become real stout, but after getting in prison camp, he decided to take care of himself, and he slept in a private room with an innerspring mattress and worked out with weights.
I returned to the States October 8, 1945.
Notes
Crew members of B-25G 42-64757
Pilot: Rouse, Richard R., 1 Lt., 0-735669 (California)
Co-Pilot: Townsend, Alton Lloyd, 2 Lt., 0-672253 (Louisiana)
“On November 10, 1943, as a co-pilot on a low altitude mission over Yochow, China, Alton and a crew of 5 others were shot down and captured by Japanese and held in a Chinese prison camp for 10 days. Because of the treatment the Chinese received, Alton and the crew were grateful to be Americans! The six American prisoners were taken down the Yangtze River by boat at which time the Americans bombed the boat, not knowing Americans were on board; 2 of the 6 member crew escaped the boat—one drowned and one was picked up by a fishing boat and returned to the Japanese who had to move the prisoners to another boat to continue down river. They were interred at the Allied Prisoner of War Camp at Shanghai, China. Later the Japanese transferred Alton and his remaining crew with 1000 to 1100 other prisoners of war packed in rail cars through Manchuria to Korea and then in the hull of a boat crossing the Sea of Japan from China to the Northern Island of Japan, Okido.”
Navigator-Bombardier: Walsh, George T., 2 Lt., 0-741817 (Missouri)
Flight Engineer: Penka, Carl Steven, S/Sgt., 38165009 (New Mexico)
Radio Operator / Gunner: Hogue, Harold Franklin, S/Sgt., 18166447 (Arkansas)
Gunner: O’Brien, David J., Sgt., 32471178 (Died during escape attempt) (New York)
Sino-Japanese air operations on October 1, 1943
from
Sino-Japanese Air War 1937 – 1945 (by Håkan Gustavsson)
20 P-40s and P-38 escorting 22 B-24s pounded Haiphong warehouses and harbour. Some 40 Japanese interceptor rose to meet them in an air battle lasting some 40 minutes. 30 Japanese aircraft were claimed to be shot down (!) for the loss of three P-40s.
2nd Lieutenant Chen Ping-Ching from 75th FS, 23rd FG, was shot down at 15:30 over Haiphong and he bailed out of P-40 42-45906 (MACR 758). 1st Lieutenant Thomas Cotton reported:
“Lt. Chen was flying on my wing when the formation left the target area. He remained in his position for approximately fifteen (15) minute. When my flight turned back to protect two straggling bombers, Lt. Chen was missing.”
1st Lieutenant Henry L. Wood (0-789035) from 75th FS, 23rd FG, was also shot down at 15:30 over Haiphong in P-40K-1 42-46250 and was missing (MACR 759). 1st Lieutenant Donald Brookfield reported:
“Lt. Wood was flying on my wing when the bombers went into their run. I last saw him when the escort made a turn following the bombers from the target. Major Brady (B-24, Flight Commander) states that he saw a P-40 and a zero make a head-on pass; the zero exploded and the P-40 went straight down smoking badly. This was probably Lt. Wood. Other bomber crews reported a pilot parachuting from a P-40 shortly after leaving the target.”
The third P-40 crashed-landed and the pilot, Wang Te-Min, was killed. [Sharks Over China: Lt. Te-Min Wang, CAF, Oct. 1, 1943, “KIFA engine trouble; en route to Haiphong; P-40”]
2nd Lieutenant Akihiko Nishidome (NCO79) of the 25th Sentai and Sergeant Major Yasuo Hasegawa (NCO86) of the 33rd Sentai were killed over Haiphong.
Other References – Books
Cornelius, Wanda, and Short, Thayne, DING HAO – America’s Air War in China – 1937-1945, Pelican Publishing Company, Greta, La., 1980
Jackson, Daniel, Fallen Tiger: The Fate of American’s Missing Airmen in China, Master’s Thesis presented to Faculty of Department of history, Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, Tx., December, 2017
Molesworth, Carl, Sharks over China: The 23rd Fighter Group in World War II, Castle, Edison, N.J., 2001
Molesworth, Carl, 23rd Fighter Group – ‘Chenault’s Sharks’ (Aviation Elite Units 31), Osprey Publishing, Oxford, England, 2009