“He couldn’t remember.”īut if he asked him about a special code used on that last mission, the response was always there, even at the end of his life.
“I could go to my dad and ask him ‘Daddy what did you have for breakfast yesterday?’” Wilson said. Wilson said that his father was most proud of three things during the war - that he was on the longest bombing mission, that he flew over the USS Missouri as the Japanese high command surrendered, ending the war, and that he was on a mission to bomb the main railroad access that would have helped stall the Japanese should there have been a land invasion by the United States.Īnd it is that mission and the code words that never came to abort a strike on the Marifu Railroad Yards at Iwakuni, Japan, that emerged when memory failed his aging father. He and other Marines were sent to China to accept the surrender of masses of Japanese troops after the surrender.ĭavid Wilson, a co-historian of the 6th Group and son of one of its members, maintains a lifelong personal connection to it through his late father, Staff Sgt. We weren’t even allowed to talk about atoms, didn’t even know what they were.”įor Haynes and others like him, mopping up continued. They took off from Tinian, but until they bombed, we didn’t know anything. “We found out after they dropped it,” Higgins, 96, said. USO entertainers pose for photos on B-29 bomber wing while visiting troops in the Pacific during World War II. Maybe the biggest news of the war came to the soldiers on Tinian almost as an afterthought. They flew one mission that was 19 hours 40 minutes long, likely the longest in the history of the war and covered 4,400 miles to reach and mine a harbor in Korea that still had Japanese forces. His plane alone, “Flak Alley Sally” tallied 141 bullet holes in it from the anti-aircraft fire his crew took over Japan. “I don’t think anybody talked about it, we were all scared,” Vincent said. We were going on missions and getting shot at.”īut, as good soldiers do, these Air Corps members continued on the mission.
“When they first came, we wondered what in the world were those guys doing,” Vincent said. They asked, but the new guys were kept off at a distance and didn’t really talk much with the other crews. Higgins and Vincent heard rumors about this new group and noticed that they’d painted the same unit design on the tail of their planes, even though they weren’t part of the 6th. Seemed funny, but he didn’t take much notice. 6, 1945, Koser was leading flights over Tinian as they prepped for more missions when he noticed more planes than usual in the 6th Bomb Group formation. Unknown to the Tinian crews or the Marines slogging through the island campaign, a new weapon was on its way.Ī few weeks before Aug. He missed the taking of the island but was likely one of the bodies to be flung ashore on mainland Japan in the seemingly inevitable invasion. John Haynes, 90, was only 15 years old when he landed on Okinawa. Though the tide had turned, ground troops and aircrews had no illusions that the Japanese military would simply surrender.ĭespite months of sustained bombing and island after island falling, they continued to fight. He remembers seeing flashes of light from Iwo Jima as Marines took the island to provide bombers a refueling and stopover on their missions to the mainland. Vincent, 97, was only 19 years old when he flew as a co-pilot on early missions out of Tinian to Japan. They claimed as many or more casualties and laid waste to as much territory in an even larger city. Though the first A-bomb changed warfare forever, the bombing runs on Tokyo, some experts argue, may have done as much or more to devastate the Japanese military’s will to fight. (Bill Webster/6th Bomb Group Association) B-29s in flight off of Tinian during World War II.