Richard Tregaskis and Superfortress Number 688

The copilot was the first one to notice the problem. Shortly after midnight on June 30, 1945, as the B-29 Superfortress bomber Number 688 reached the initial point on its bomb run, Lieutenant Paul R. Ceman announced: “Number 4 is gone.”

Veteran war correspondent Richard Tregaskis had been with the bright-silver aircraft—the most advanced of its time—and its ten-man crew since it had left its Kansas training base for combat service with the 315th Bombardment Wing on Guam in the Pacific. He and the others jammed together in the cockpit craned their necks to see what might be wrong with the 2,200-horsepower Wright Cyclone engine located on the outboard edge of the right wing. It appeared as if the engine had lost manifold pressure. “Looking out through the driving fog I could see no outward sign that it was out of commission: the big propeller seemed to be turning,” Tregaskis remembered. Still, the cabin floor had begun to vibrate—so much so that the tail gunner had called over the intercom expressing alarm, reporting, “We’re having quite a bit of trouble with vibration.”

The engine trouble occurred at an awkward time on the crew’s approximately 3,000-mile roundtrip mission as one of thirty-six B-29s set to strike the Nippon Oil Company’s refinery at Kudamatsu off the coast of Japan’s Honshu Island. As the bomber closed in on its target, and Tregaskis and the others struggled to don their flak suits and parachutes and put on their oxygen masks, the aircraft was surrounded by “a tight ocean of ‘soup’ and a needle-like torrent of precipitation drummed against the bombardier’s nose window,” Tregaskis reported. Those in the plane’s nose were keeping a sharp lookout for possible ice on the wings when the number four engine suffered what they later learned was a valve problem.

Number 688’s pilot, Captain Bob “Pappy” Hain, a veteran of dangerous missions over Europe in a B-17 Flying Fortress, remained unperturbed despite the glitches on this, only the crew’s second, mission against the Empire of Japan. Hain calmly commented about the vibration: “I don’t feel anything excessive.” The pilot remained confident, Tregaskis later noted, that the plane could reach the oil refinery and make it back to North Field on Guam, if need be, “with three or three and a half” engines.

Hain’s confidence in his plane and crew was rewarded, as the Superfortress made it to the target. “I unclipped my mask from my cumbersome oxygen bottle; it was too clumsy to permit movement and I wanted to see,” Tregaskis wrote. “I half stood up, peering into the fog over the top of the bombardier’s helmet. I saw flashes ahead; a blue flash stabbing through the mist, and next to it, a sudden rosy glow projected on the softness of the fog, to the left. These would be the bomb flashes of the B-29s ahead of us, and perhaps an oil explosion they had caused.”

Finally, the correspondent heard a report over the intercom, “Bombs Away!” As the B-29 plunged out of the fog and reached its top speed to avoid enemy antiaircraft fire and fighter planes sent to track it down, Hain, Tregaskis recalled, had a brief conversation with his precision-instrument operator, Lieutenant John Bond. “How’d it look?” Hain asked. “I think they [the bombs] were pretty close in,” Bond responded.  

Unlike the crew of the Superfortress he flew with, who were rookies in the fight against the Japanese, the Pacific theater of operations was familiar territory to Tregaskis, the veteran of the Doolittle mission, the Battle of Midway, and the invasion of Guadalcanal. What was new for the war correspondent was the publication that was printing his stories. Instead of having his dispatches distributed to U.S. newspapers by the International News Service, Tregaskis’s work appeared regularly in the pages of the SaturdayEvening Post, owned and operated by the Curtis Publishing Company in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

The Post had hired Tregaskis to produce a new series, “Road to Tokyo,” promising its subscribers that week by week they would share the dreams, heartaches, and heartbeats of the fighting men responsible for winning final victory over Japan. “Whether in the air, on sea or land he [Tregaskis] will live, eat, sleep, fight and sweat with them to bring you every week . . . the side of war you seldom read about,” the magazine promised in advertisements touting its new feature.

For his part, Tregaskis had been preparing himself physically for the grind of covering combat, walking ten miles and swimming an hour per day in a New York pool. When Post managing editor Robert Fuoss asked him if he really wanted to go to the Pacific, Tregaskis answered: “I don’t want to, but I think I ought to go.” His new situation offered him an opportunity to discover more about the “small personal conflicts which made up the bulk of a soldier’s, sailor’s or airman’s life,” Tregaskis later realized. “Even when he was in action, the dangerous moments were very few; the bulk of a man’s life was concerned with his friends and enemies in his squad or squadron, his likes or dislikes of his superiors, his letters to and from home, his liberties or leaves, the local females he tried to make or decided not to try to make.”

For his “Road to Tokyo” series, Tregaskis not only accompanied a B-29 crew for five missions, but he also flew in combat on a Grumman TBM Avenger torpedo bomber stationed on the USS Ticonderoga and followed General Douglas MacArthur’s military government section to Tokyo at the war’s end. It was not the first time Tregaskis had contributed to the Post, which praised him as “essentially a frontline reporter and one of the best.” The magazine’s February 24, 1945, issue included his detailed piece, titled “House to House and Room to Room,” on the street fighting he had endured in Aachen with soldiers of the First Infantry Division. With victory in Europe obtained by Germany’s surrender to the Allies on May 8, the Post intended to give Tregaskis free rein to report on what it hoped would be “human, intimate” tales of the men battling a nation, Japan, that had once haughtily proclaimed it was “looking forward to dictating peace in the United States in the White House at Washington.”

Tregaskis started his journey in America’s Heartland, at a processing base in Herrington, Kansas, meeting the veterans and rookies of the U.S. Army Air Forces he would fly with on bombing missions against Japan aboard one of the most complex machines ever devised to wage war—Boeing’s B-29 Superfortress, an aircraft with thousands of miles of wires, 50,000 separate parts, and a million rivets holding it all together. U.S. Army Air Forces general Henry A. “Hap” Arnold said that the idea for the long-range, four-engine bomber had been inspired by the early days of the war “when it appeared that England would go down to defeat, and there’d be no place where we might base our planes for future sorties against the Axis powers. Thus a much longer ranged bomber than any we then possessed would be essential to waging a victorious war.”

From the first, when he met the crew of Number 688 preparing to leave its Kansas training base for Mather Field in Sacramento, California, Tregaskis realized flying such a “huge but delicate machine” would be more complex than any other piece of military equipment he had ever encountered. (The B-29 was also the most expensive weapons project developed during the war, even outstripping the cost for the Manhattan Project that produced the atomic bomb.) “Even before starting engines, I found,” the correspondent noted, “the pilot must check on twenty-seven things, including the following: emergency-cabin press release (to let out oxygen from the air-conditioned cabins if something should go wrong with the pressurized machinery); hydraulic pressure, main and emergency; auxiliary power plant (to start engines); turbos (which provide high-altitude power and blow exhaust gases through a cooler to maintain cabin pressure); very-high frequency radio set; emergency landing-gear release for the new-type tricycle landing gear.”

The checklists for the other crew members housed in the plane’s nose were equally extensive, he added, and the details of each man’s responsibilities were honed after months of training. Superfortress Number 688 was also part of a revised series—B-29Bs—that were stripped of all guns (except for the tail position) and sighting equipment to save weight. It also had onboard the advanced AN/APQ Eagle radar unit was ten times more efficient than previous models when it came to bombing navigation, giving its operator a television-like picture of the ground, even through thick fog. “You had to treat the B-29 like a baby, but if you did right by it, it would really perform,” Tregaskis wrote.

Tregaskis had hoped he could join an intact, veteran crew rotating from service in Europe. He learned, however, that air forces officials intended to reshuffle and retrain European crews, and, if he wanted to fly out to the Pacific with a “typical crew, then I would fly by B-29, and that I would find only one or two veterans of the European war in said crew, at the most—perhaps a bombardier or navigator who had flown with the 8th or 9th or 15th [Air Forces], and the rest would be men who had never seen combat before.” Officials saw no reason for using the relatively light-load bombers used in Europe when a B-29 could carry five times as many bombs as a B-17 Flying Fortress or a B-24 Liberator, and carry such a load, the reporter noted, with “very little more gasoline, at greater speed, and with far smaller total ground facilities required for maintenance.”

By luck, Tregaskis drew an experienced pilot, Hain, a native of Hollister, California, and his navigator, Lieutenant Dean Coleman, who both had flown fifty missions together with the Fifteenth Air Force, returning from one raid on Naples with sixty-five holes made by flak peppering their Fortress. Because of his combat record flying missions over Italy, Germany, and Austria, the thirty-year-old Hain, nicknamed “Pappy” by his crew for his advanced age and receding hairline, could have returned to his family’s walnut farm. Asked by the correspondent why he decided to stick his neck out for another tour of duty, Hain said he had felt “kind of foolish, being hale and hearty, getting out now, with all the others gone. . . . And I mean gone for good.” He also pointed out that the opposition in Japan would not match what he had faced in the skies over Europe when it came to enemy fighters and antiaircraft batteries. “It doesn’t seem like there are many Jap fighters, and the flak isn’t going to be the same as with the mediums (medium bombers) in Europe,” Hain told Tregaskis. “We can get up to thirty thousand feet [in a B-29], and the flak isn’t so thick up there.”

Coleman shared Hain’s sense of duty but remained clear-eyed about the chance he took remaining in such a dangerous job. He pointed out to Tregaskis that out of the ninety-seven navigators in his original class, no more than thirty had survived their sorties over Europe; the odds looked grim for surviving the thirty-five missions over Japan that he needed for a ticket home.

It took three weeks for the crew of Number 688 to fly from Kansas to California and on to Hawaii, Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, and, finally, reach its home base on Guam in the Mariana Islands. “We could have done better by slow freight,” one of the crew groused to the reporter. For his part, Tregaskis was reminded of an sign he had seen in some of the Air Transport Command terminals he had visited: “If you have plenty of time, travel by air.”

During his long journey, Tregaskis became well acquainted with the aircraft’s officers and enlisted men. “But the crew of 688 is more than an average crew,” he wrote. “It is a sort of microcosm in which one of the great historical facts of this war can be studied: the shift of gigantic military power from one theater of war, where the greatest enemy has been crushed, to the other side of the world, to smash into the ground the third and last of the gangster nations.”

In addition to the European veterans, Hain and Coleman, the crew consisted of Ceman, the young copilot; Bond, the precision-instruments operator; Flight Officer Dominic “Moe” Martelli, the bombardier; Corporal Paul Angelo, radio operator and the self-confessed Don Juan of the outfit; Corporal Clarence Dawson, the hardworking engineer; Corporal Raleigh Marr, the tail gunner; and Corporals Art Manning and Ed Marchalonis, the gunners/observers. Although dedicated and professional, the crew could not help but think about the war finally ending.

As the crew and Tregaskis, dusty and tired, waited for transportation to their barracks after landing at Mather Field, the correspondent said that the “feeling of being in a strange place, and heading for stranger and more forbidding ones,” depressed them all. Ceman put the feeling into words when he said: “It looks like the last lap. I wish we were coming in, instead of going out.” The copilot misread Tregaskis’s sharp look at him as disapproval, and later went up to the reporter, showed him a photograph of his attractive wife, and noted she was the reason why he had said what he said. 

After ten long days of waiting at Mather Field—filled with briefings, paperwork, and postponements—Tregaskis and the crew finally flew on to Hawaii, staying there for four days. As an experienced visitor to the islands from earlier in the war, he had shared with his comrades that the evening air in Hawaii seemed like a “soft kiss on the cheek, that the place was really a land of a million flowers and rainbows, as it said in the song.” Tregaskis praised the view from the Pali mountain pass, the feeling of swimming in the surf at Makapu’u beach, and dining on fresh pineapple and papaya. Unfortunately, Number 688 was a combat crew and had to get to its assignment, Guam, with a minimum of delay, so, Tregaskis noted, they saw “mostly the unpleasant, war-ridden parts of Hawaii on our short stay.”

The bomber crew made sure to visit the post exchange to stock up on such essential items as shaving cream, soap, and candy bars, and were able to have lunch at one of the reporter’s favorite haunts, Honolulu’s Pacific Club, with fare far superior to the expected C-rations, pork loaf, and Vienna sausage waiting for them at other bases. They seemed to exist in a “sort of limbo between peace and war,” Tregaskis recalled. By this time, Hain had opened sealed orders giving the name of the island, beyond Kwajalein, where the crew would be based for its missions against the Japanese homeland—Guam, recaptured from the Japanese by the U.S. Marine Corps in August 1944. In addition to housing airfields for the B-29s, the island served as the principal naval base in the Central Pacific west of Pearl Harbor. “All of the crew had learned about it previously, through the grapevine. But it was nice to know officially,” Tregaskis noted.

Once on Guam as part of the 315th Bombardment Wing’s Sixteenth Bomb Group, Fifteenth Bombardment Squadron, Number 688—designated as Crew Number 7 in the squadron—had to undergo additional training, including target study, aircraft and ship identification, instrument calibration, and air-sea rescue operations. Before tackling targets in Japan, they also had to make shakedown missions against enemy-held islands, including Rota, only sixty miles from Guam, and a June 16 mission against the garrison on Truk in the Caroline Islands. 

Tregaskis made an important discovery while on one of these sorties—he found it nearly impossible to see the B-29’s bombs hit from his position in the aircraft. He had to wedge himself into the very point of the plane’s nose, next to the bombardier, with his “forehead pressed against the Plexiglas,” to see an occasional bomb strike far behind the plane. Even the bombardier did well if he could see the explosions made by three or four of his bombs. “The B-29 certainly wasn’t built for sight-seers,” Tregaskis observed.

Along with honing the skills needed to fly such a complex machine, the officers and enlisted men of Number 688 did a considerable amount of manual labor constructing their living quarters set among banyan, bamboo, palm, and breadfruit trees near North Field. Tregaskis lent a hand as the officers conducted some “moonlight requisitioning” of wooden boards for the floors of their tents in which they slept before their metal Quonset huts were ready to occupy. The group’s enterprising mess officer, Second Lieutenant Herbert R. Davis, had cultivated friendships with naval personnel and the Seabees, resulting in a dining hall that surpassed many of the same facilities Tregaskis had patronized at stateside airbases. With refrigeration available, Davis could offer roast beef, pork, and, on occasion, even steak. The special service officer also proved to be up to his job, offering recorded music over the speaker system at mealtimes and showing movies on a hillside open-air screen every night.

Camp construction progressed so quickly that personnel could “watch the Quonset huts rising and taking shape as days, even as hours passed,” Tregaskis wrote. An exchange of gifts helped procure materials outside the usual channels—a practice that became so widely known that Tregaskis heard some claim that if “you knew where to go on this island, you could receive the friendly gift of a Quonset hut, complete, in exchange for the friendly gift of eight quarts of whiskey.”

What Post readers did not learn from Tregaskis’s reports were some of the more dramatic personal conflicts the crew of Number 688 had to face with one another and especially with their superior officers in the group and squadron. Reflecting on his time with the aviators, Tregaskis said there existed a “slight feeling of jealousy” between Hain and Ceman. The young copilot believed that the veteran flyer did not trust him to make takeoffs and landings, and believed he was a better pilot. The two men were united, however, by difficulty with the squadron leader, Lieutenant Colonel Richard W. Kline, a West Point graduate who was known as “The Grommet,” because while other flyboys wore their caps without grommets, “giving them a shapeless, rakish contour,” said Tregaskis, Kline kept his intact to comply with regulations.

The correspondent recalled that some also resented Kline’s insistence that those under his command stand muster at eight in the morning following twenty-four-hour missions against Japan, even though they did not have to fly that day. Hain believed that Kline and other noncombat veteran officers were too strict about enforcing petty regulations, what World War II veteran and scholar Paul Fussell termed “chickenshit,” which he described as “behavior that makes military life worse than it need be: petty harassment of the weak by the strong; open scrimmage for power and authority and prestige; sadism thinly disguised as necessary discipline; a constant ‘paying off of old scores’; and insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances.” For Kline’s part, noted Tregaskis, the commander believed that Hain and his supporters were “sloppy and didn’t pay enough attention to discipline.”

These petty differences faded under the rigors of combat. For its first mission over Japan, Number 688 and other members of the Sixteenth Bomb Group were ordered to strike the Utsube River Oil Refinery near Yokkaichi on the evening of June 26–27. The mission was part of an effort by the American heavy bombers to cripple the Japanese petroleum industry, reducing the supplies of gasoline and lubricating oil to the enemy’s air force. The morning of the mission, Ceman, who was in good spirits, visited Tregaskis and expressed frustration that some officers thought they might not return. “If they think they’re going to die, why did they come over in the first place?” the copilot wondered.

At the briefing, the wing’s commanding officer, General Frank A. Armstrong Jr., a veteran of the bombing campaign in Europe, told his men that they might have an easy trip or it could turn out to be “a stinker.” Whatever happened, Armstrong said the crews had to have determination—“some call it guts. We don’t turn back, whatever we suffer. We will make history tonight.” Another officer warned them that the B-29s had the potential of facing 140 enemy fighters in the area, but they had one advantage, as they would be reaching the target on the heels of a daylight raid that had included approximately 400 bombers.

Tregaskis and the crew of Number 688 reached their aircraft at 3:45 p.m., about an hour and a half before the scheduled takeoff. They had plenty of preflight work, including having Martelli, the bombardier, pull the pins on the bombs to leave them free for release. “While Moe sweated over the job amidst the rows of fat, brown, ugly projectiles in the big bomb bay, the others were occupied with equally important tasks,” the correspondent wrote. While the crew set to work, a jeep pulled up to deliver two large metal boxes. “They would provide hot food, an experiment being tried out on two planes of our group,” Tregaskis noted. The dinner menu included meatloaf, boiled potatoes, and canned carrots and peas. “We were one of the lucky planes—the rest had sandwiches,” he wrote.

Climbing aboard, the reporter took his place between Bond and Angelo in the plane’s nose. Peering out of the plexiglass window, Tregaskis could see ahead of them the “long silver shapes of the 29’s moving across the horizon, where the taxiway turned into the runway. Their tails, like the sails of sloops on the rim of the sea, inspired the reflection that we were a long way from the Larchmont [New York] regatta.” 

As Number 688, weighing sixty-six tons with its bombload and gasoline, rolled down the runway for takeoff, Hain spotted in the distance a B-29 coming in for a landing on a field a few miles away. “Back from the daylight raid,” the pilot said to Tregaskis. As the bomber leveled off, the crew listened to a radio news summary relayed from San Francisco to the nearby island of Saipan, with the announcer noting: “Our air attack on Japan continues with increased fury.” Tregaskis thought that to the radio broadcaster the B-29 the reporter flew on was part of “a big war machine pouring death on Japan with continued ferocity. But here in the nose of No. 688 we were only six human beings passing a few hours of time before tonight’s test. The fury of the attack, if any, would be concentrated in a few fleeting minutes over the target.”

Early in the mission, the crew kept themselves busy with, of all things, paperwork. Tregaskis watched as Ceman made notations on his weather report, which had to be filled out every hour with information about position, altitude, winds, and airspeed. “Looking around me in the nose,” he reported, “I saw that almost everybody was occupied with some sort of form, all of them complicated.” Although Hain had no form to worry about, he had plenty to do, including monitoring the plane’s gas consumption and ensuring that the American installation on Iwo Jima knew of his aircraft’s approach, as the machinery that ordinarily produced the necessary identification signals from the plane was out of order.

Although on a mission that, if successful, would produce mayhem and destruction, Tregaskis was mesmerized by the sky’s beauty. He could see the universe divided into level halves—under them “the deep purple of the terrestrial half, the level, dark undercast over which we were cruising; and above us, the lighter, indigo half of the upper sky.” The bomber operated smoothly, feeling as steady, he recalled, as “if we were standing still. The engines were lulling us with their almost synchronous beat—a gentle rhum-rhum-m-m-rhum-m-bar-rum.”

When the B-29 reached the Nanpo Shoto group of islands, approximately 500 miles from the coast of Japan, the crew and Tregaskis began the tedious routine of putting on what he called the “impediments of air combat,” which included flak suits, parachutes, and oxygen masks (the crew could not pressurize its compartments in the high altitude because the plane’s camera hatch was open to film the bombing). Tregaskis gave up wearing protective clothing to guard against any flak that might penetrate the plane, as he did not have enough room for the flak suit, parachute, oxygen tube, and himself in the cramped space he occupied. With the lights extinguished, Tregaskis could see in the gloom that Hain, Ceman, and Martelli appeared as “huge apelike shapes, not at all human. Their faces were transformed into muzzles by the rubber masks, and their flak suits gave them the hunched magnitude of gorillas.”

The correspondent’s thoughts were interrupted by the harsh sound of an alarm bell warning about ice forming on the wings. Ceman used a signal lamp to see if there was any ice forming on the wings or propellers, but the fog was too thick. Hain remained unperturbed, noting that if the plane maintained its speed, they should be alright. Using the Eagle radar, Bond guided the B-29 in over the target for a successful release of its bombload. “From below came a burst of orange fire that lit up the sky around and overhead—a fiery corona that hovered, then faded,” Tregaskis reported. “And in the same moment the aircraft bounced sharply under our feet. I heard a sudden rattling sound; possibly hail, possibly antiaircraft fire.”

Once safely out to sea, the crew talked with one another about what they had observed while over the enemy refinery and took turns sleeping to overcome the exhaustion of their long, more than fourteen-hour mission. While Bond took over navigating, Coleman slumped over his charts, his glasses on his nose, mouth open, and snoring, Tregaskis noted, while Hain, with his red baseball cap pulled down over his eyes, also nodded off. The correspondent slept for a time, waking up to see the sun and hearing music from the radio station on Saipan. “Then we were turning into the sun,” Tregaskis recalled. “We came in sharply, leveled out and swept smoothly down the runway, landing with hardly a jolt.” Coleman noted that the veteran Hain had made a “very good landing for an old man after fourteen hours.”

As the bomber crew hauled their gear out of their aircraft, the ground crew found a hole from flak in Number 688’s rear bomb-bay door; it was the only plane in the group to be hit by enemy fire. Before he collapsed into his bunk at his quarters, exhausted from his experience, Tregaskis took time to compliment Hain for his intelligence, judgment, and luck—qualities that certainly helped to ensure a successful first mission for Number 688. Hain noted that he did not believe it was luck, but the grace of God, noting, seriously but not solemnly, “I think He kind of keeps an eye on us.” 

All the crew slept until dinnertime, and returned for more rest after they ate, pausing only long enough to shower and wash their dirty flying suits by hand. Tregaskis discovered that a mission on a B-29 was “a thick sandwich to chew, a twenty-four-hour slab of time, from briefing to landing, with plenty of work and worry all the way, but only a thin slice of excitement or fear in the center.”

As the B-29s pounded Japanese cities and industrial sites from bases on Guam, Tinian, and Saipan, naval aircraft from the U.S. Navy’s Fast Carrier Task Force 38, under the command of Admiral John S. McCain Sr., ranged up and down the enemy’s coast bombing and strafing any military target they could find in preparation for Operation Downfall, the invasion of Japan. From just fifteen miles offshore, battleships bombarded enemy factories at Kamaishi on the coast of Honshu Island. “However much propaganda a Japanese civilian will swallow,” Admiral William “Bull” Halsey Jr. noted, “it must have been hard for him to digest the news that certain American warships had been sunk when he had just watch[ed] them blast his job from under him.”

During the third and fourth bombing missions Tregaskis made with Number 688, he heard radio broadcasts describing the naval activity off the Japanese coast. Also, at the briefings before their missions, the heavy bomber crews learned that they could expect little enemy fighter opposition because the American navy had been knocking out Japanese planes on the ground. Tregaskis very much wanted to observe the carrier action, so he wrangled a spot on one of the big Essex-class carriers, the USS Ticonderoga, which had been launched in February 1944.

As he prepared to leave Guam, Tregaskis felt pangs of nostalgia for the time he had spent with Hain and his crew. While flying with them on their third mission, he jotted down in his notebook: “I’m fond of these guys—know all of them, now. It’s going to be tough not to know how they are making out.” 

At least Tregaskis was able to stay long enough to see the crew settle well into its tour of duty, including seeing the enlisted men promoted to sergeant; learn that Bond’s wife had given birth to a baby boy in Akron, Ohio; and share the pride that the crew had been cited for the air medal, signaling successful participation in five combat missions. He had faith, which was born out, that Crew Seven could take care of themselves and their aircraft. (The men of Number 688 completed eleven missions before the war’s end in the Pacific in August 1945.)