B-29 casualties remembered

[Kyt]

Fateful WWII air raid in Japan has deep link to Louisville | courier-journal | The Courier-Journal

A solitary marker at Louisville's Zachary Taylor National Cemetery lists the names of 23 U.S. crewmen killed when their B-29 bombers collided over Japan during a raid on June 20, 1945.

Far from hometowns spread across America, their remains lie together in a single casket, buried on March 8, 1949.

For years, that's about all that George O'Connor and his family knew about the death of his Uncle Jack -- 2nd Lt. John O'Connor -- a World War II bombardier who died at 24.

Then in March 2006, the phone rang at George O'Connor's house in Falls Church, Va.

The man on the phone identified himself as Jerry Yellin, a former P-51 fighter pilot -- and he had a story to tell.

It is a story that would take O'Connor and Yellin thousands of miles away, to a 600-foot-high hilltop in Shizuoka, Japan, where today, they were scheduled to participate in a memorial service for the B-29 crewmen and the Japanese who died in the raid.

Near the end of the service, a battered canteen, recovered from the wreckage of one of the American planes, will be used to pour bourbon over a memorial built there four decades ago.

It's all part of an annual tribute that the O'Connors knew nothing about until Yellin's phone call in 2006, when he told them a story of courage and compassion among people he used to hate.
A fateful night in Japan

On the night of June 20, 1945, a swarm of 123 B-29s, based in Guam, bombed the city of Shizuoka.

The raid destroyed 60 percent of the city and killed 2,000 Japanese.

Like other fire-bombing missions in the Pacific, the planes flew low, between 5,000 and 6,000 feet above the ground. Crews could smell and taste the smoke from the fires below, and the heat from the conflagration created such tremendous turbulence that the aircraft would bounce like balls on a tabletop.

Somehow, O'Connor's B-29 and another collided over Shizuoka, where they crashed and burned.

According to Yellin's story, which he learned only a few years ago, one of the planes came down on a farm owned by one of the city's councilmen, Fukumatsu Itoh, who discovered two crewmen alive.

He tried, unsuccessfully, to aid them.

It was sometimes the case in wartime Japan that American bomber crewmen, even if they were dead, were mutilated by the local populace. In any case, Japanese military law required citizens to turn over to authorities any enemies, dead or alive.

Defying that law, Itoh decided to bury the Americans alongside dead Japanese, as a sign of dignity and respect.

When neighbors learned what he had done, he was ostracized for a time.

Later, Itoh became a Buddhist priest. And in 1967, he erected, at his expense, a Kannon -- a Buddhist deity embodying compassion and mercy -- to commemorate the lost citizens of Shizuoka, along with a separate 8-foot- high marble monument to the 23 American crewmen who died. Both memorials remain today on Mount Shizuhata as symbols of peace.
Taking up the cause

But the story continues beyond Itoh: Another man, Dr. Hiroya Sugano, who was 12 years old on the night of the B-29 raid, later discovered Itoh's memorials and in 1972, started the annual ritual involving the battered canteen.

Itoh, who has since died, told Sugano the story and gave him the canteen.

O'Connor said he was comforted to hear the story from Shizuoka, which Yellin has shared in phone calls to as many of the crewmen's families as he can reach.

Most comforting, O'Connor said, "is that there were people in the city of Shizuoka that were able to overcome hatred of their enemies and do the humane thing in burying the downed airmen."

During the war, Yellin flew 19 long-range missions from Iwo Jima over Japan, sometimes escorting the B-29s on their bombing raids, sometimes strafing airfields, railroad yards and other targets.

In an e-mail, Yellin said he "carried a deep hatred of the Japanese all my adult life."
Turning away from hate

Then, in 1988, his youngest son, Robert, married a Japanese woman, whose father was a veteran of the Japanese Imperial Air Force.

"Shortly after the wedding, I had a nightmare," Jerry Yellin said, "that my American grandchildren were flying across the Pacific to bomb Japan and my Japanese grandchildren were flying in the opposite direction to bomb America. They passed in the night, and I just couldn't let that happen."

Jerry Yellin later told his story in a Japanese television documentary.

Sugano, whose own daughter is married to a West Point graduate, saw the documentary and invited Robert Yellin to Shizuoka for the ceremony in 2005. A year later, Jerry Yellin attended the ceremony.

This year, decades after the memorial was built, a plaque will be placed with the names of the dead airmen.

In written remarks prepared for today's service, Yellin recounts being overwhelmed by what he saw and felt on his first visit.

"Symbols of peace and harmony between people, let alone nations, are hard to come by," Yellin wrote. "This site is sacred and holy through the actions taken by Mr. Itoh, Dr. Sugano and the citizens of Shizuoka City."

Sugano's prepared remarks include this: "Hate cannot be eliminated by hate."

O'Connor and his wife, Linda, who are making their first trip to Japan for the ceremony, will be the only family members of the crewmen to attend.

O'Connor said he's sad that his late father, George O'Connor Sr., couldn't go. The elder O'Connor was a Navy medic in the war and tried unsuccessfully for years to find out more about his brother's death.

"He didn't get to do it, but I'll close it out for him," O'Connor said.

Besides the O'Connors, Sugano and Yellin, this year's ceremony was to include American and Japanese government and military officials, and a former Japanese torpedo bomber pilot who took part in the attack on Pearl Harbor.

During the ceremony, O'Connor planned to praise Fukumatsu Itoh, noting: "Knowledge of Mr. Itoh's actions has brought me peace. I pray that, through me, the spirits of Jack's brother and my father George Sr., Jack's other brother Edward, and my grandparents, Margaret and Edward O'Connor, now have that same peace."

[Antipodean Andy]

A story of compassion. A side of wartime Japanese culture that, understandably and sadly, we have not heard of enough.