A Microhistory of World War II: Dogfight over Tokyo

Dogfight over Tokyo: The Final Air Battle of the Pacific and the Last Four Men to Die in World War II. John Wukovits. New York, NY: Da Capo Press, 2019.

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In Dogfight over Tokyo, Wukovits ties this microhistory to the lives of the last four naval aviators to die in the Pacific War. Unfortunately, the brief lives of these four young officers are insufficient to carry the weight of an entire book and instead Wukovits presents the reader with a narrative history of Naval Air Group 88, which was assigned to USS Yorktown. He writes from the viewpoint of the young pilots of the air group, tells us about their thoughts and missions, but adds little to our understanding of the purpose of the final Allied naval air operations of the Pacific War. The result is a book  produced for those seeking an intimate view of the end of this war, not an analytic history of the air group. While the book does succeed in putting a human face on these men; the most valuable portion of the book is Wukovits’ summary of the way in which the air group was formed and how it trained the assigned naval aviators.

Most  books about the final phase of the Pacific War detail the firebombing of Japanese cities, raise questions concerning dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or participate in a debate whether U.S. actions or Soviet intervention forced the Japanese to surrender. The authors of such works examine these events from Japanese, Soviet, or American vantage points. There are very few that concentrate on the final months of naval, air, and ground operations the continued fighting in the Philippines, Burma, the Netherlands East Indies (Indonesia) or in China.[2] The approach Wukovits employs tells the reader about the air operations of a single air group on a single aircraft carrier. At the same time there are very few macro studies of the immediate aftermath of the Japanese surrender in August 1945.[3]

While Wukovits’ study commemorates and celebrates the end of the American naval aviators’ war in the Pacific, the title is misleading. The last dogfight only occupies a small fraction of the penultimate chapter and further, this action did not take place over Tokyo. A better title could have been The Pacific War’s Final Air Battle and the Last Four American Naval Aviator Casualties. The book is also handicapped by the author’s pacing of the events and the turgid writing style. Wukovits is not able to transcend his sources or go beyond the flat unemotional style of the action reports.

An F6F-3 aboard USS Yorktown has its "Sto-Wing" folding wings deployed for takeoff. (Wikimedia)

The history of Naval Air Group 88 provides readers a brief overview of the ways the United States Navy trained its pilots for the air war in the Pacific. The pilots and crew that manned this group began training in 1943; it took two years of training before these squadrons were ready for combat. The training that produced them was modeled on an automobile assembly line. During World War II, the U.S. Navy’s pilot training program had the same stages as the army aviation program—pre-flight, primary, basic, and advanced—except basic flight added a carrier landing stage for fighter and torpedo- or dive-bomber pilots. Wukovits uses surviving letters and oral history interviews to relate the training experiences of these pilots.

The reader follows these men through flight preparatory school, pre-Midshipman School, and Midshipman School. This portion of their training lasted eleven months and after successfully completing it, they graduated and were commissioned as Ensigns in the U.S. Naval Reserve. They spent the next two months acquiring the rudiments of flying. Primary Flight School at Naval Air Station Pensacola taught basic flying and landing. Basic Flight School was broken into two parts: part one taught instrument flying and night flying and part two taught formation flying and gunnery; an additional third stage for single-engine aircraft pilots taught carrier landing. Advanced Flight Training qualified the pilot on a single-engine fighter, dive-bomber or torpedo bomber or a multiple-engine transport, patrol plane or bomber. The graduates of this program were classed as Naval Aviators and received gold Naval Aviator wings.

Each graduate had around 600 total flight hours, with approximately 200 flight hours on front-line Navy aircraft. Pilots who washed out were assigned to the fleet as Ensigns. Between 1942 and 1945, the U.S. Navy’s flight training program produced 61,658 pilots—more than 2.5 times the number of pilots as the Imperial Japanese Navy.

Given the relative plethora of its resources, the U.S. Navy rotated experienced pilots to the training schools and kept a new stream of pilots, crews, and aircraft flowing to the fleet. The deployed air groups were a mixture of experienced veterans and new men. The book’s chronology shows this in outline. However, the reader is not given a picture of the quotidian life aboard an aircraft carrier in 1945.[4] If Wukovits had explained the way the aircraft carriers functioned and the ways the different departments and their roles fit together, he would have made life on the carrier vivid. He would have shown the contrast between the ship’s crew, assigned to Yorktown for the duration and the air groups, which were rotated. The reader would have seen the and the way the air group functioned, which would have made the lives of these two groups more understandable and would have shown how the tensions of combat affected the ship's company and the air group.

Wukovits narrates the stories of the aforementioned four young Ensigns by alternating accounts of their life in the Navy with accounts of their youth in Depression-era America. From the surviving letters, interviews with families and service members, contemporary regional newspaper accounts, radio transcripts, and relevant archival records, the picture that emerges reveals four young men who lived relatively normal lives, and who were filled with patriotic fervor after the Pearl Harbor attack. They were also imbued with a sense of adventure and a desire to fly. It must be admitted that the interview subjects were recalling events that had occurred more than seventy years ago.

An F4U Corsair fires on a Japanese stronghold on Okinawa in June 1945 (Lt David D. Duncan/Wikimedia)

From July to August 1945, the Third Fleet cruised unopposed in Japanese territorial waters, destroying inter-island shipping, bombarding coastal towns and transportation infrastructure. As Robert Guillan has noted, the unhindered passage of the U.S. Navy by Japanese forces convinced many ordinary Japanese that the war was indeed lost. However, the Japanese militarists who ran the government did not pay attention to the opinions and beliefs of ordinary Japanese people.[5] Wukovits describes the air operations that were destroying Japanese shipping, infrastructure, and the remnants of the Imperial Japanese Navy in detail and pays special attention to the weather conditions, the density of anti-aircraft fire and the actions of American submariners and seaplane pilots who rescued downed pilots off the Japanese coast, describing all of these aspects of air operations from the perspective of the pilots of Naval Air Group 88.

He also points out how the officers and men of the task forces and task groups were puzzled by the continued pressure on Japan, when they considered the war to be practically over. The Army Air Forces had been firebombing Japanese cities since March 1945 and American submarines were slowly strangling Japan, depriving it of fuel and food.

Wukovits describes the sailors’ reaction to Admiral William Halsey and the continued operations. He is portrayed as a demon motivated by a desire for revenge. In this the author follows Samuel Eliot Morison’s judgment in his operational history of the U.S. Navy in World War II. Nevertheless, given Halsey’s orders and what the American government knew about the internal debate in Japan over surrender, the continued air strikes were justified because there was no indication the Japanese would surrender according to the demands laid out in the Potsdam Declaration. The pilots are puzzled by these continued operations as they considered the war to be over and were mystified by continued Japanese resistance.

The climax of Wukovits’ story, the dogfight, is clouded in mystery. While we have the American Action Reports, there is no indication that any written or oral Japanese sources survived. Since the aerial engagement took place after Admiral Nimitz canceled operations but before the Japanese people and military were officially informed of the government’s acceptance of the terms of the Potsdam Declaration, the Japanese records may have been destroyed in the two week interregnum before the occupation formally began. War is filled with ironies and it is a cruel twist that these men died knowing Japan had surrendered. It is also ironic that this was the first time the squadron was involved in a dogfight.

Verse from John Maxwell Edmonds on a memorial in Britain (WIkimedia)

In sum, this latest of Wukovits’ micro historical studies adds little to the debates and knowledge about the final months and weeks of the Pacific War as it concentrates on the operations of a single naval air group operating off the coast of Japan. He builds his narrative using surviving letters, interviews with families and service members, contemporary regional newspaper accounts, radio transcripts, and relevant archival records. The different types of sources Wukovits relied upon caused disconcerting shifts in tone and he was unable to get beyond the flat narrative of the official reports. The most valuable contribution the author makes is detailing the way the U.S. Navy trained its aviators and the way it assembled its naval air groups. The book can only be recommended for those desiring a more human picture of the way these naval aviators were trained and their thoughts and feelings about the war.

The last chapter deals with the effect of these young men’s deaths on their families and loved ones from August 1945 to the present. Although this war ended more than seventy years ago, for those who remember these men, the war has never ended. As I write this on Veterans Day 2019, I also remember John Maxwell Edmonds’ verse inscribed on a marker in the war cemetery in Kohima in northeast India: “When you go home tell them of us and say, for your tomorrow, we gave our today.”

Lewis Bernstein holds a Ph.D. in history from The University of Kansas and has taught the histories of China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam for 20 years at several universities and then worked for 23 years for the U.S. Army culminating as Division Director, Force Structure and Unit History Division, U.S. Army Center of Military History. He is currently retired and lives in Arizona.

This article appeared originally at Strategy Bridge.

[1] Devotion to Duty: A Biography of Admiral Clifton A. F. Sprague (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1995); Pacific Alamo: The Battle for Wake Island (New York: New American Library, 2003); Eisenhower: A Biography (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); One Square Mile of Hell: The Battle for Tarawa (New York: NAL Caliber, 2006); American Commando: Evans Carlson, His WWII Marine Raiders, and America’s First Special Forces Mission (New York: NAL Caliber, 2009); Admiral "Bull" Halsey: The Life and Wars of the Navy's Most Controversial Commander (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2010); Black Sheep: The Life of Pappy Boyington (Annapolis:Naval Institute Press, 2013); For Crew and Country: The Inspirational True Story of Bravery and Sacrifice Aboard the USS Samuel B. Roberts (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2013); Hell from the Heavens: The Epic Story of the USS Laffey and World War II's Greatest Kamikaze Attack (Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2015); Tin Can Titans: The Heroic Men and Ships of World War II's Most Decorated Navy Destroyer Squadron (Da Capo Press, Da Capo Press, 2017); Soldiers of a Different Cloth: Notre Dame Chaplains in World War II (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018).

[2] These authors include Thomas R.H. Havens, Valley of Darkness: The Japanese People and World War II (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1978), Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore E. Cook, Japan at War: An Oral History (New York: New Press, 1993), Robert Guillan, I Saw Tokyo Burning: An Eyewitness Narrative from Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima (originally published 1979; New York: Doubleday, 1981), Louis Allen, The End of the War in Asia (London: Beekman Books, 1976), Richard Frank, Downfall: The End of the Japanese Empire (New York: Random House, 1999), David Glantz, Soviet Operational and Tactical Combat in Manchuria, 1945: 'August Storm' (New York: Routledge, 2003), and the Pacific War Research Society, The Day Man Lost: Hiroshima, 6 August 1945 (New York: Kodansha America, 1981) and Japan's Longest Day (New York: Kodansha America, 2002).

[3] These include Ronald H. Spector, In the Ruins of Empire: The Japanese Surrender and the Battle for Postwar Asia (New York: Random House, 2007), Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Wars: Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 2007), and David P. Chandler, Robert Cribb and Li Narangoa (General Editors), End of Empire: 100 Days in 1945 that Changed Asia and the World (Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Press, 2016).

[4] A succinct account may be found in Commander James C. Shaw, USN, “ Introduction: Fast Carrier Operations, 1943-1945,” in Samuel Eliot Morison, History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, Vol. 7: Aleutians, Gilberts and Marshalls, June 1942-April 1944 (paperback reprint ed., Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2002; original ed., Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1951), pp. xxvii-xxxix.

[5] Robert Guillan, I Saw Tokyo Burning: An Eyewitness Narrative from Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima (originally published 1979; New York: Doubleday, 1981).