In honor of Fourth of July, I wanted to share this wonderfully written email from my grampy - the original family writer.
Dear
Ones:
The stuff
that saturates newspapers and e-mail this time of year set off some
reflections. As a kid, the Fourth of July was to me second in
importance only to Christmas. Beginning
with our January birthdays, my brother and I saved our pennies
for the day in late June when we would spend hours in Klingansmith's
store laboriously selecting fireworks. We sought the biggest
bang for our buck well before the phrase was invented. And year after
year, Bob and I staged one great Fourth of July celebration after
another.
But
my most memorable Fourth of July, ever, was in 1945.
As
you know, I was a Navy pilot. In late 1944, I was assigned to a
squadron that flew large, four-engined airplanes equipped for aerial
mapping. On the morning of July 4, 1945, ours was one of four
squadron planes that took off from Iwo Jima and set a northerly
course for the island of Honshu, Japan. We had been told
that battered elements of the Imperial Japanese Fleet might
be hiding along the shore of Tokyo Bay. We were to fly up to
Tokyo's front door and try to find and photograph them.
As
we neared Honshu, wispy cirrus began appearing above us and
below, a blanket of clouds could be seen at 10,000 feet covering
the land ahead. Shortly, a dozen P-51 Army fighters assigned
to fly cover for us materialized, dropped their auxiliary tanks and
took up their positions. Ahead, someone spotted the snow-clad cone
of Mt. Fuji poking up through the gray blanket which by then obscured
everything below.
The blanket
extended as far as we could see, so as we neared the most promising
target area, we decided to go down and find out what lay beneath.
We popped out of the cloud layer at about 7,500 feet only to find
another thick layer below at two or three thousand feet. Mt. Fuji
now presented us with a view of only its middle - a truncated cone
suspended between cloud layers which obscured both base and summit..
Our
chances of locating and photographing anything on the ground appeared to be
nil. We were flying in the white middle layer of an Oreo - socked
in above and socked in below. Nevertheless, our quartet split
into pairs, in an attempt to cover opposite shores of Tokyo Bay
simultaneously. A half hour of nothing followed - no flak, no enemy
fighters. We just droned along, unsure of where we were, with clouds
above and below. Radio traffic began picking up. The P-51 guys
began muttering about fuel. This was mission was futile, crazy, not worth
the risk, a waste of time. Everybody wanted to bag it and go
home.
Then, "Jesus,
look at that!"
Dead
ahead was a rapidly widening hole in the blanket below. And
there, bathed in rain and gray cloud wisps, was a large jumble of
ships lying at anchor or berthed at makeshift piers. A miracle, a million
to one shot! There followed much yelling on the intercom -
making sure that our photographers were catching every element
of the scene below. We passed over the hole in less than a minute,
then banked sharply for another pass. But the hole in the
blanket had closed.
Our
fighter escort lit out for home shortly after. We nosed
about for another half hour in the cloud sandwich hoping for another
hole, then turned South, also. Once back on Iwo, there was no
celebration. It had been a long, tense day.
Next
day, I'm told, there was an article in the New York Times headed,
"Navy Discovers Remnants of Japanese Fleet."
Happy
Fourth of July.
Love,
Grampy
