There was no transition that I could ever make myself remember. One moment I was trapped in my gunner's seat in the burning B-29B bomber just moments after the raid on Osaka. Air was whistling loudly through the shrapnel holes in the fuselage, spraying me with blood from the nearly decapitated Pete in the EWO's position beside me, and I was frantically searching for the lever on my ejection seat. And the next minute I was on the deck of a yawing Japanese fishing boat, trapped between the sturdy calves of a hulky nut-brown man and looking up into the slitted eyes of the chujenāas Goro and Jun, who I later encounter, told me Iwao wanted to be calledāthe boss. Sometime between those two points I had lost my Superfortress buddies and cashed out on my service with the U.S. Air Corps in its drawn-out attempt to bring Japan to its knees and end a world war that had already concluded in the European theater.
The man hunched over me was brandishing some sort of wooden-handled fishing spear, and my first thought after coming to in a sputter of water and vomit on the slippery deck of the vessel was that I was about to meet my bomber buddies on the other side.
I knew pretty precisely where I was. The last thing that was ringing through my mind as the Superfortress moaned and groaned in its disintegration was the pilot screaming a Mayday over the intercom and as far into the ether as he could project. We were coming down in Toska Bay on the east coast of the Japanese home island of Shikoku, having been hit by flak right after dropping our load on Osaka port and pulling up over the northeast point of Shikoku. We barely cleared the roofs of the cliff-top village of Aki on Toska Bay before heading into the drink and oblivion. I must have found the lever to my seat ejector at the very last moment. All I knew was that I was soaking wet and bloodied and bruised and could feel the groaning in very muscle and bone of my body.
I saw the Japanese fisherman stiffen and look out across the bay and, pulling together every fiber of my energy, I lifted my torso off the deck on my elbows and was barely able to see over the gunwale, my attention drawn to where the fisherman was staring. I saw the Japanese coastal naval vessel cutting across the waves out from the dock at the foot of the cliff at Aki. This would be it then. The fisherman would turn me over to the Japanese soldiers; he would then be the toast of the village, and I would be cannon fodder.
But that's not what was happening. The fisherman was nudging me with the blunt end of his spear, herding me toward a tangled web of fishing netting. He lifted it and motion for me to roll under it, which I did, and then he lowered it on me, hiding me effectively from view even as he was being hailed from the military craft.
I heard jabbering, which I came close to understanding, as I had been studying Japanese for months, trying to qualify as a radio intercept operator. I did manage to discern that they were asking the fisherman about a bakugeki-ki, which I knew meant bomber, and the fisherman was gesturing farther out into the bay.
I heard the naval craft motoring off, out into the bay, where they undoubtedly would find the flotsam they were looking for. My feelings were conflicted over whether I wanted them to find any of my buddies clinging to wreckage, still alive. In this late winter of 1945, the Japanese were getting desperate, knowing now the inevitable, but through their blind devotion to their emperor, being determined to take the rest of the world down with them. In our mission briefings, we were being constantly told not to expect any quarter or regard for the Geneva Convention if we were to fall into the hands of the Japanese, especially in their home islands.
It was with this thought that I trembled and shrank away from the fisherman when he came back to me, spear still held in strong, sinewy hands. But it was only to do what he could to get across to me that I was to remain under the netting and to be very quiet.
I spent the next couple of hours until night descended cowering under the netting, mentally and physically checking my body to assess the damage there, and wondering why I was getting this reprieveāand what sort of reprieve it was. And just trying to deaden my nerves. I wasn't dead yet. By all accounts I should be dead now, but I wasn't. I was living on precious, borrowed time.
In the darkest hours of the night, the fisherman quietly steered his boat back to the docks of Aki and stealthily motioned me to follow him. Keeping to the deep shadows, he guided me around the edge of the lower village, its inhabitants tucked safely indoors behind heavy blackout curtaining that protected the fisherman and me from their gaze as much as it protected them from the waves of U.S. bombers coming across overhead on ever-shortening intervals in their campaign to pound Japan into acknowledging defeat.
The fisherman who rescued me led me up a steep and winding lichen-slippery stone pathway rising against the side of the cliff, ever upward, until all that was above us was the clear, moonlit sky. At the very edge of the cliff, set apart from the upper village by tumbles of boulders and pine trees seemingly growing out of the rock itself, was a traditional Japanese dwelling of dark wood frame, white rice-paper paneling, and a grass roof. The man led me around the side of the building to a small garden right at the edge of the cliff. Most of this space was taken up with a series of shallow pools of water that let off steam in the cold March night air. Hot springs. As we came to the corner of the building, though, the man pulled me aside into the shadows. I could see into the garden and had a full view of the springs, which were partially hidden by dense foliage, but I could not be seen from the pools.
We were no longer alone. I could hear men's voices and soft laughter. Several men were in the pools. Flagons of wineāsakeārested on the stones bordering the pools of water.