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By Al Zdon
Bill Connell flew one mission in World War II and spent the rest of the war in Japanese prison camps.
That wasn't quite what he had planned after
two years of training to be a Navy pilot.
Connell grew up in Seattle. "Every year, the Navy would have Fleet Week where they would bring in battleships, cruisers, destroyers. I was all over those
ships, and I was very infatuated with the Navy."
Still, when he had graduated from high school in June of 1942, he was faced with an array of choices on how to spend his next few years.
"I went
downtown to all the recruiter's offices, and then went home and spread the materials on the table. I asked my dad which one I should join. He said, 'None of them.' But I told him I was going to be
drafted soon, and I didn't want to go into the service that way."
His father told him to go back downtown and find the Navy aviation cadet recruiter and sign up for that.
"I was pretty sure that
with my grades in high school they wouldn't accept me, but I signed up anyway."
Connell was accepted, and he took a physical and an academic test and passed them both. A few weeks later, he was in
Yakima, Washington, learning how to fly Piper Cubs. Not long after that, the Navy told him to get on a certain train at the Seattle depot at a certain time. The scuttlebutt was that he and the other
cadets would be going to California to train.
"We spent three days on that train, and on the fourth day they told us we had arrived. It was about 5 in the morning and it was pitch black. I got off the
train and it was colder than all billy hell out. I said, 'Hey, this isn't California.' And the guy said, 'No, this is Iowa City, Iowa.'"
Connell spent three months at Iowa City learning flight basics,
three months in Olathe, Kansas, learning about flying larger aircraft, and then was on to Pensacola for the rest of his Navy flight training. He got his wings in December, 1943.
"The training was
hard. It was one third academic, one third military and one third athletic. We started at 5 a.m. every morning and went until after 6 every evening. They wore us out. But when I left Pensacola, my
muscles were has hard as a table top."
Like most trainees at Pensacola, Connell aspired to the glamorous life of the fighter pilot. "I really wanted to get into fighters, but it didn't
happen."
Next was DeLand, Florida where he learned to fly the Douglas SBD Dauntless, the Navy's version of a dive bomber. The last training was in Glenview, Illinois, where the new pilots had to
qualify with eight takeoffs and landings on a flight deck – on Lake Michigan.
"They created a flight deck on two old freighters, the Wolverine and the Sable. The funny thing was that these ships
powered themselves with paddle wheels."
Connell was now a qualified carrier pilot with about 300 hours of air time. He concluded his tour of the United States by going to Barber's Point Naval Air
Station in Hawaii.
"It was at that point the Navy switched to the SB2C. I loved the TBD. It was a heck of an airplane, and it was a better dive bomber. But the SB2C (the Curtiss SB2C Helldiver) was
bigger, faster, and it could carry more payload."
Connell's long journey to war next moved to the naval base at Eniwetok in the western Pacific where he joined a pool of replacement pilots. In a few
days, the young ensign was assigned to Bomber Squadron 2 aboard the USS Hornet.
After five days aboard the aircraft carrier, Connell was given his first mission, a bombing run over Chichi Jima, a
Japanese island about 150 miles north of Iwo Jima.
It was July 4 1944.
It was a day of firsts for Connell. "It was the first time I'd every launched from a carrier in the night, it was the first
time I'd taken up a full load of bombs, and it was the first time I'd be required to fly with the squadron."
Connell launched just before dawn. "I managed to keep the airplane in the air until I found
the formation. Then we were off."
The nine planes in the formation flew in three groups of three. "We started getting anti-aircraft fire when we were still six or seven miles from the target. And then
it quit. We flew over the island."
As the American planes were arriving at about 7 a.m., two Japanese freighters pulled into a harbor at Chichi Jima. They became the dive bombers' target of
opportunity.
The nine bombers switched to an echelon formation, one plane behind another in single file, for the attack. Dive bombers don't head straight for a target, because the aircraft will
"corkscrew" in the air. Instead, they flip over and then aim the nose of the plane at the target, a technique that keeps the bomber more stable.
They will then attack at a 65 or 70 degree angle and
release their bombs at about 2,500 feet.
"I had just made my move, and as I became inverted, a five-inch shell exploded right next to my airplane."
The explosion was catastrophic for the Helldiver.
"It knocked off six feet of my right wing, and, while I didn't know it right away, it blew the airplane in half. The tail was gone."
Connell's gunner, Ben Wolf, in the rear of the plane was
probably killed instantly by the shrapnel from the shell. "A piece of the shrapnel hit me on the top of the head, just enough to cut my skin. It really wasn't much of a wound, but it did get me the
Purple Heart.
"At first I was knocked out, but when I came to, I was still trying to fly the plane. I didn't know that half of it was gone. But I soon knew that I'd have to bail out. I dropped my
bombs. I don't know where they went. I thought I had given my gunner enough time to get out. I didn't know that he was already gone.
"So I stepped out of the airplane and opened the chute."
The
dive bombers had destroyed one of the freighters by this time, but the second freighter opened fire on Connell. "I could see the tracers coming up at me, but I was a pretty small target. I pulled on one
of the lines and then on another so that I was swinging back and forth."
He landed in the harbor where no American submarine could rescue him. "I took out my .38 revolver and actually put it up to my
temple. But then I said to myself, 'If they're going to kill me, they're going to kill me. The hell with it.' I put the pistol back in the holster."
Floating in his Mae West, after about 45 minutes
Connell was picked up by a harbor craft. "They pounded on me and kicked me. They worked me over pretty good. They didn't break any bones, but I was kind of in bad shape. Then they tied me up like a
mummy."
Ashore, the Japanese soldiers put the American pilot in handcuffs behind his back and put him into the sidecar of a motorcycle.
"Just then the sirens went off. Our second raid was coming
in. They brought me to what must have been the main air raid shelter on the island. I think there were four or five thousand military and civilians on the island, and most of them were in that shelter. I
was peeking from under my blindfold, and there were a lot of people there."
That night, Connell was brought to a tree and his handcuffs were tied to the trunk behind his back, partially suspending him
from the ground. "My butt was about 10 inches off the ground. I tried to put some weight in my feet which were sticking out, but it was too slippery. It was very painful at first, but after a couple of
hours my shoulders went numb and I couldn't feel anything."
Connell hung for 12 hours that night, and was finally cut down. "I couldn't move my arms, but the guards brought them out in front of me. I
looked down, and my hand looked just like a blue softball. It was so swollen that there was no space between the fingers. It was just a solid mass of flesh."
For the next several nights, Connell
was tied to a variety of trees but not in the torture position. At one point, a civilian with a rifle approached the prisoner. "He put the barrel right between my eyes, but then the guards chased him
away and took his rifle."
He was brought into a room for interrogation. He faced three officers and there was one guard on either side of him.
"I had been trained to give them only name, rank and
serial number, and that's what I did. Every time I gave that answer, the guards would pound on me. They'd hit me as hard as they could, knock me off the chair, then they'd put me back on the chair and
the questioning would continue.
"After two days of this, I was a bloody mess. I knew I had to give them some information, so I told them I was on the Hornet. They asked where the ship was, and I told
them something. How the hell did I know where the ship was? I don't think what I told them did them any good."
It was at this time that a coincidence may have saved Connell's life. "The Japanese found
out that they had two pilots from the same squadron. They decided that they'd take us back to Japan to question us."
After the war, Connell learned that nine other pilots and air crew were captured at
Chichi Jima after him, and that all nine were executed. "This was late in the war, remember, and the Japanese didn't have much shipping left. So they had to fly people around. They didn't want to go to
the trouble of flying them all. It was easier to execute them. I believe I was the last American to leave the island alive."
Connell was flown to Iwo Jima, and then put on board a Japanese bomber. "I
peeked under the blindfold and I could see a tall canvas bag next to me. Finally I figured out what it was. It was full of baseball equipment. The Japanese never went very far without their baseball
gear."
The next stop was the Japanese mainland. Lt. Dan Galvin, the other bomber pilot from the Hornet, had already been flown in along with his gunner. Connell and Galvin were taken to a small
prisoner camp near Ofuna, which before the war had been the Japanese "Hollywood."
In the camp, Connell was put into a cell by himself and kept in solitary confinement for 45 days. The cell was six
feet by nine feet, and had one window, about 18-inches square with bars on it.
"All prisoners have to learn how to use the time up. I would remember when I was a kid, and I'd recall all my flight
training. I even used to do spelling bees with myself."
Toward the end of this period, he was allowed to go outside his cell and sit on a small stool, but still not mix with the rest of the
prisoners.
"The prisoners would walk around the compound, and when they got close to me, they'd talk a little louder. One of them said, 'My name is Pappy Boyington and I'm a major in the Marine Corps
and I'm the commander of VF 224 and I was shot down over Truk.' "
Connell discovered he was in the same prison camp as the famous leader of the Black Sheep Squadron. "It's funny, but when I was still
training at DeLand, one of our group was a Marine pilot. One day he looked up from his newspaper at breakfast and said, 'Well, I'll be damned, they shot down old Pappy Boyington.' That was the first I'd
heard of him. Now, lo and behold, he was the first prisoner I met at Ofuna."
Boyington, who earned the Medal of Honor and the Navy Cross while shooting down 26 Japanese planes during the war, was the
natural leader of the 75 or so prisoners at Ofuna. "I had heard he was a mean son of a bitch, and I found out he was a mean son of a bitch. But we were both from Seattle, and we spent a lot of time
talking."
After a month and a half, Connell was allowed to join the other prisoners. He would stay at Ofuna for nine months total.
After some time, both he and Galvin were brought in to be
interrogated, side by side – an unusual technique for the Japanese. The officer in charge asked Connell his first question.
"We called him Handsome Harry because he was good looking. He had
studied at Columbia University."
Connell replied that in the presence of a superior American officer—Galvin was a lietenant — he must defer all questions to him. Connell was asked another
question, and he gave the same answer.
"In the Japanese military, that's exactly how it worked. After a while, he got so damned disgusted, he just told us to get out of there."
Life in the camp
dragged on. The prisoners were given food three times a day. They were provided with a sort of grain mush, and hot water with soy paste in it that passed for soup.
"Now and then, you'd find a little
piece of vegetable in it. The best thing was when you'd find a piece of gristle. You could chew on that all day."
The men spent most of their time talking about food. "Guys were from the North and the
South and all over. We'd talk about how the women from those areas prepared the food. We dreamed about food.
"One thing we didn't talk about was sex. Not at all. We just weren't interested in it. We
just wanted to stay alive and go home."
One incident Connell recalled at Ofuna was when the prisoners discovered that several submarine sailors who were in the camp were adjusting the rations so that
they would get more. "Pappy Boyington read them the riot act. Later on, those same sailors looked like they were giving up and were waiting to die. Pappy took them aside one by one and read them the riot
act again. He said to them, 'God damn it, you can't quit on me. I'll burn you. Nobody quits on me.'"
Connell, Boyington, and a group of 16 others were transferred to the Omori prison camp in April of
1945. "It was the headquarters of all the prisoner camps in Japan, and there were about 500 prisoners there."
Connell and the rest of the group from Ofuna, though, weren't allowed to fraternize with
the other prisoners. "We had picked up one officer along the way who the Japanese decided was a war criminal. Because we had talked to him, we were all considered war criminals."
Unlike Ofuna, the
prisoners at Omori were expected to work, and they did four-hour shifts picking up war debris and other manual tasks. They helped plant Japanese crops.
Except for lack of food, the treatment wasn't
unbearable. "We only lost one man in the main camp. The guards would come around at night and hit people with sticks. In fact, I still don't sleep well at night because of that. This guy was a little,
bitty guy, and I think they just hit him in the kidneys too hard. He couldn't eat, couldn't keep his food down, and he finally just starved and died."
On August 15, 1945, five months after arriving at
Omori, the men were out digging caves in a rural area. "They would let us out of the caves for a rest now and then, and when we came out, every radio in the area was on as loud as it could be. It turned
out it was the emperor saying that the war was over."
At the end of their shift the men were told to bring all their tools with them. "The guard made sure everybody had a tool, at least in the outer
ranks."
They then marched back to camp through several small villages. "Some of the people along the way were happy and excited. Others were very unhappy. I think they wanted us to have the tools in
case we were attacked. We only had one guard with us."
When they reached the main highway to the camp, they were passed by a truckload of "old" prisoners, those who had been in camps since Bataan and
the early days of the war, who were screaming and shouting at the top of their lungs with joy at the news.
Back in the camp, though, there was still considerable trepidation. It was well known in the
camps that the Japanese had threatened if they ever lost the war, they would kill all the prisoners.
"We devised a plan that as soon as a guard came in our room, two guys would attack him by putting
blankets over his head. We'd disarm him and use the weapon. It wasn't much of a plan, but we decided we'd put up one hell of a fight."
The next morning, though, no guards came through the
doors.
"In fact, there wasn't a guard around. When they left, they had even neatly stacked their rifles. They had flown the coop."
Four top American officers in the camp, including Boyington, took
over the leadership. The first thing they did was to create a provost marshall detachment and issue the men the Japanese weapons. Their job was to keep the civilians out of the camp, and the prisoners
in.
Days went by. "They had no trouble keeping the civilians out, but they had some trouble keeping the prisoners in. The old prisoners just wanted to get out and knock a few heads together. They were
a tough bunch."
After some days, the American military began dropping bags from B-29s on the prison compound. The large bags contained clothing, food, medical supplies and other materials to ease the
days. Connell and another prisoner found a box full of Clark Bars which they spent a half an hour trying to consume.
"You had to be careful. They didn't use any parachutes and those bags came down
awfully fast. It was like a bombing run."
Connell remembers those days mostly as happy times. The new prisoners finally got a chance to talk with the old prisoners.
"Our camp was right on Tokyo
Bay and we could look out there and see the whole American fleet, carriers, battleships, cruisers. One morning we woke up and they were gone, and that worried us a lot. But it was only because a typhoon
was coming in and they had to take the ships out to sea."
Finally, on the morning of August 29, two weeks after the war ended, three Higgins boats made their way across Tokyo Harbor and Harold
Stassen, the former governor of Minnesota, stepped out of one of them. He was in charge of prisoner release from the conquered empire.
"You should have heard the whooping and hollering. They dropped
the gate at the front of the boat and Stassen was the first man ashore. He was followed by 20 Marines who were armed to the teeth. They had tommy guns and grenades and bandoliers of ammo strapped around
them.
"Stassen said he was going to give us five minutes to gather our stuff and be ready to go. It didn't take me 30 seconds. I had all my personal belongings in a cigar box. I grabbed it and headed
for the nearest boat.
"When I tried to board, a Marine stopped me and said, 'You have to wait. The sick and wounded go first.' I looked at him and I said. 'I'm sick and tired, and I'm going home.' And
I just walked right past him. There was nothing he could do."
The ex-prisoners were brought to a hospital ship, where they were given a thorough physical.
Connell thought he had survived his 14
months in the camps in relatively good shape. When he flew his first and last mission he weighed 160 lbs. When he was liberated, he weighed 110 lbs. He had lost a tooth.
A few days later, however, he
looked down and saw that his ankles were swollen two or three times their normal size. "It turns out I had beriberi, which is a condition brought on by malnutrition."
While at the hospital ship, the
men were told they could send a telegram home, but they were limited to four words. Connell sent: "Well, happy, flying home." For his parents and sister, it was the first indication they had since the
middle of 1944 that their son was alive.
"My sister got the telegram first and she told my mother and they went crazy."
Connell was flown home, a rare occurrence in World War II, and spent time at
the Oakland Naval Hospital. Later he was transferred to a hospital in Seattle where he spent nine months convalescing, although he admits that his 14 months of back pay helped him to enjoy a few nights
on the town.
Connell opted to stay in the Navy. "I only had a high school education, and it looked like a good career for me. He resigned his active commission, though, after a few years and was in
school at the University of Washington when he got a call from the Department of the Navy that he was needed again. The Korean War had started.
In the end, he served 22 years, learned to fly
helicopters, and retired as a lieutenant commander. His last duty station was in Minneapolis, and he continued to live in Minnesota after he left the Navy. He owned an insurance agency for 23 years
before retiring for good.
He and his first wife, Mary Jane, were married 43 years before she died. They had four children, three of whom are living. He and his second wife, Winnifred, have been
married for 16 years and live in Edina.
As the years went by, Connell found that he had some pretty severe PTSD from his wartime experiences. "I was a mean guy, and I didn't know why." He was awarded
a 100 percent disability.
He can look back now, though, with some humor and detachment from his brief career on the aircraft carrier and his long stint as a prisoner of the Japanese.
"I only spent
five days on the carrier. I brought with me, though, a bottle of Four Roses and a bottle of Southern Comfort. Those yahoos in my squadron must have had a happy time drinking to my
memory."
(Connell's story is also told in some detail in the James Bradley book Flyboys.)
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