Field of Spears: The Last Mission of the Jordan Crew

A little over a year ago, English professor Gregory Hadley received a letter from the daughter of a B-29 bomber captain. In the closing weeks of WWII, her father’s plane had been shot down 10km southeast of Niigata. Hadley, who teaches at Niigata University of International and Information Studies, had been trying to track down the man’s family for several years.

The captain’s fate was a key element in "Field of Spears," Hadley’s vivid chronicle of an obscure, though dramatic, wartime incident. Excerpted in Japan’s popular Sekai magazine and reviewed in journals in Japan, Britain, and the U.S., the book has been gathering attention both here and abroad.

Now that Hadley received his letter, just one thought troubled him: had he got the man’s character right?

On July 20, 1945, Captain Gordon Jordan’s B-29 was the lead bomber in a five-plane raid to drop anti-shipping mines into Niigata harbor. The port had been targeted by the US Air Force 6th Bomber Group because it connected Japan with its colonies in Korea and Manchuria. At that point in the war, it was one of the Axis power’s few remaining supply lines.

Hadley’s book describes the captain—known as “Porky” to his men—as a plump, hard-drinking Southerner with a Clark Gable mustache. Easily the most flamboyant of the B-29 crew, Jordan was also a superb pilot. But he put his men’s safety first and was elated to be given that night’s mission. It was supposed to be a “milk run” over a poorly defended Japanese city, one that would have left the crew with just three more missions to fly before they could return to the U.S.

The B-29 had orders to detour out to sea on its long way back to the base on Tinian Island in the northern Marianas. But the weary bomber crew took a shortcut across the city and was hit by a crack anti-aircraft unit that had been recently relocated from Tokyo. Theirs was the only plane ever shot down in Niigata. The B-29 passed into local mythology—along with the claim that all the crew had been killed in the crash.

In fact, as Hadley discovered, only the co-pilot went down with the plane. Jordan and nine of his crew parachuted into the rice fields near two villages. This was the “field of spears” of the title: villagers throughout Japan had been trained to use sharpened bamboo pikes to repel an anticipated American invasion. The local residents arrived at the crash site armed with these weapons, and far more deadly farming tools.

Only weeks before Captain Jordan’s raid, B-29s had hit Niigata with mines, sinking a harbor ferry and drowning a number of schoolchildren. Air attacks against Japanese cities had been accelerating all that year—a few months previously, hundreds of aircraft firebombed Tokyo, killing some 100,000 people. Hated and feared, American airmen had become known across Japan as kichiku bei-ei, or “demonic beasts.”

The stage was set for a horrifying encounter.

By sifting through oral and written records, interviews with survivors, and reports from local villagers, Hadley managed to reconstruct a complete account of the fateful incident. After parachuting from the burning plane, the airmen were scattered. Bombardier Clinton Wride and tail gunner Florio Spero reached ground safely, but were lynched by the villagers; Spero was killed after emptying his pistol at the mob. Following an attack by the angry crowd, radar operator Max Adams died of head injuries. The rest of the crew survived, though they would certainly have been killed had Japanese soldiers not arrived with orders to detain them for questioning. Jordan and his men were taken to Tokyo for a series of brutal interrogations by the much-feared "kenpei-tai," or Japanese secret police.

Experiences of single captured air crew

Most readers are familiar with the broad outlines of the Pacific War. But Hadley’s achievement in "Field of Spears" is to focus in on the experiences of a single air crew and the villagers they encountered. In an extremely personal way, his account brings home the suffering, sacrifice and, ultimately, the horror of war.

For Hadley, the story began shortly after his arrival in Niigata in 1992, when he first heard about the downed B-29. Yet his investigation only started in earnest 10 years later, when a friend asked him why the city had been dropped from a list of possible atomic bomb targets.

“I began to wonder if the B-29 was on a reconnaissance mission,” he recalls. “I thought that maybe shooting it down saved Niigata.”

Hadley’s investigation soon led him to the US Air Force’s “pumpkin missions,” in which a B-29 would drop a bomb of the same size and shape as the atomic bomb on a potential target. He even exchanged emails with the late Brigadier General Paul Tibbets, the commander of the fabled Enola Gay, which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. His research revealed that Jordan’s downed B-29 had nothing to do with removing Niigata from the list.

“It was too flat,” he says. “All the other cities were within valleys, so that when you dropped the atomic bomb, the force would hit the walls and come back and do twice as much damage.”

So what, wondered Hadley, was Jordan’s B-29 doing over Niigata? A local historian mentioned that some wreckage of the plane could be found in a nearby field. Apparently, the farmer, Choei Shimizu, would be happy to get rid of it. Hadley jumped at the chance to help in the excavation, but soon had second thoughts.

“It was like you were digging up pieces of a recent automobile accident,” he recalls. “You felt you were one step from digging up cold dead bodies.”

As they unearthed the 45-kg chunk of fuselage, Hadley was interested to note that Shimizu seemed both excited and relieved. The tainted soil that they turned over was bluish-grey; nothing grew in it. Shimizu had been a very young boy on the night that the B-29 had crashed on his family’s land. And Shimizu’s aged father would not talk about it.

Hadley discovered a similar taboo when he tried to talk to other villagers about the incident. In an effort to get the locals to open up, he emphasized his long association with Niigata and that his wife’s family was from the area.

“Even then, some 60 years later, people were still scared to talk about it,” he says. “They were ashamed. And, like the fragments in the field, I had to piece the story together.”

Hadley’s research led him to the archives of the National Diet Library. He discovered that American investigators had managed to track down the graves of the crewmen killed in Niigata and repatriate their bodies back to the U.S. However, the villagers covered up the lynching of the crew, convincing the officials that all the airmen had died during the B-29’s crash landing. Until the publication of "Field of Spears," the villagers’ account was the official version of events.

In fact, Hadley discovered that five of Jordan’s crewmen were still alive. This revelation opened up a wealth of new leads, yet it also presented some difficulties.

“It was really hard making cold calls to strangers about something that was the most traumatic experience in their whole lives,” he recalls. “But I was pushed forward by this growing obsession to learn what had happened to these people.”

The author eventually traveled to the U.S. to meet several survivors, who provided copies of wartime diaries that he was able to quote in his narrative.

By interviewing the crew members, Hadley learned about their lives after the war. Navigator Milton Garin had become a successful New York businessman. Paul Trump, another navigator, became a Lutheran minister. The author describes these postwar careers in a lengthy epilogue, revealing that no matter how the lives of the crew unfolded, each man struggled with his wartime experience.

After "Field of Spears" was published, Hadley sent a copy to the one surviving crew member who had refused to talk to him. Walter Wiernik, the plane’s radio operator, now a recluse without even a telephone, quickly wrote back.

Apparently, the book helped Wiernik deal with some very painful memories, particularly of his captivity. This experience was something that the crew members, who had seldom met after the war, had kept to themselves, but confided to the diaries that Hadley had used in the book.

“It really made a difference to him,” the author recalls. “People are saying he’s a different person now. It’s not like an Ebenezer Scrooge sort of transformation, but some of that burden, some of that pain has been lifted from him.”

The one survivor that interested Hadley the most was Captain Jordan, whose postwar career was something of a mystery to the other men. Rumored to be an alcoholic, he had died in 1977 at the relatively young age of 59. When news of Hadley’s book reached Jordan’s hometown, people there put him in touch with the captain’s daughter. That’s when the fateful letter arrived.

Like Wiernik, Diana Jordan was a recluse—she didn’t even have a telephone. She was also dying of cancer. With some trepidation, Hadley opened her letter to find out what she and her brother felt about how he had portrayed their father.

“They were shocked and grateful to learn what he had gone through. It helped explain a lot,” says Hadley. “People say it gave her another year of life.”

In her letter, Diana Jordan recounted the day her father returned home from the war. For months, he had been presumed dead. When he got off the train, no one in his family recognized him. Gone were the Clark Gable mustache and the cheerful plump face. A thin, bald old man stood before them.

During his postwar years, the ex-bomber pilot tried his hand at everything from flying guns to South America to crop dusting cotton plants. When his drinking got the better of him, he managed a pizza parlor. “He didn’t battle alcoholism,” his daughter claimed, “he embraced it.”

But Diana Jordan’s most vivid memories had to do with the walks her father took them on during the dead of night, or how he often drove their car on an empty tank of gas, or turned it around to chase down a storm. She concluded that he just felt children needed to be scared sometimes. As she put it in her letter to Hadley: “They need to know there’s something out there that can take your father away in the night, something that can turn good people into monsters.”

Today, Hadley maintains that the effects of wartime experiences remain corrosive long afterward. “It takes three generations for a culture to deal with a war. There’s the generation that goes through it. Then the one that has to deal with those traumatized people. And the third generation tries to understand it, to make a legacy of it.”

"Field of Spears: The Last Mission of the Jordan Crew" is available from Amazon.com. For signed copies from the author, email hadley@nuis.ac.jp for details.

This story originally appeared in Metropolis magazine (www.metropolis.co.jp)

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