How this story surfaced
The flight engineer of Crew #6636 was Fulio A. “Joe” Villani, my grandfather. He didn't say much about the war. He wrote some of it down, though, and he kept things: twenty-one square photographs from one flight in August 1945, and the papers that explain them.
The rest of the archive is paper. The squadron's typed history. A memoir and a 1998 letter from Chet Rogers, the navigator. A letter from Norman Hamilton, the co-pilot. My grandfather's own handwritten pages. What follows comes from those documents, mostly in the airmen's own words.
The squadron
The 20th Combat Mapping Squadron formed on July 23, 1942 in Colorado Springs. The airbase wasn't built yet, so its first officers worked out of the Alamo Garage downtown. It became the first multi-engine, long-range mapping unit sent into a combat theatre, flying the F-7, a B-24 Liberator with cameras where the bombs used to go.
From late 1943 the squadron worked across the Southwest Pacific, Nadzab to Biak to the Philippines, flying unescorted and usually alone, deep over enemy territory, to bring back the imagery invasions were planned on. On October 24, 1944, two of its F-7s made the first Air Force sightings of the Japanese fleet steaming toward Leyte, four battleships among them, and radioed the warning ahead of the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the largest naval engagement ever fought.
Weather and mountains killed more of its crews than Japanese guns did. Lt. Barstow went down in the mountains west of Nadzab. Lt. Harms and his crew disappeared coming home through bad weather. Three men died on the Tacloban strip when a crashing C-46 hit their parked F-7. And three days after the cease-fire, squadron photographer Sgt. Anthony Marchione was killed when his B-32 was attacked over Japan, probably the last American combat death of the war.
The crew
Crew #6636 formed in July 1944 at Mountain Home, Idaho, around pilot John J. Jones, a Nebraska schoolteacher before the war. They trained in war-weary B-24s shipped back from overseas, planes so worn that some went down on training flights and burned with everyone aboard. The crew ran from 18 to 27 years old. Watching those crashes, Rogers wrote later, was when they started to see what their part in the war was going to be.
That fall the Army picked them for photo mapping and sent them to Will Rogers Field in Oklahoma City, where photographer Tom Tobin joined. In January 1945 they boarded a C-54 in California under sealed orders. Jones opened them a few hours off the coast: Nadzab, New Guinea. Nobody aboard, the navigator included, had ever heard of it. They joined the 20th in February 1945, on Hamilton's birthday.
From Mindoro and later Clark Field they flew mapping runs across the theatre: Luzon first, then long unescorted legs over the China Sea to Hainan, Saigon, Hong Kong, Formosa, and Korea. Flak bracketed them over the Sabatang Islands. In an airplane famous for engine trouble they never lost an engine and never aborted a flight. Rogers put that record down to the engineer's preflights.
In July 1945 the squadron moved up to Okinawa, roughly halfway to Japan. The crew pitched tents on hills facing the ocean and lost most of the camp to a typhoon. Japan was close now.
The flight over Hiroshima
The bomb fell on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Three or four days later, Crew #6636 was briefed to photograph what was left. Rogers planned the mission himself, coordinates, mileage, winds, and fifty-three years on he could still walk through the flight almost minute by minute.
The engineer's memoir covers the part the briefing didn't. The evening before, while preflighting the plane, the crew hid a roll of film under the flight deck. Next morning they were escorted out to the aircraft and searched. “No small cameras,” they were told, and circle for landing instructions when you get back. An hour into the flight the deck panel came up and the film came out.
The run north was easy flying, a clear day, whitecaps on the sea giving Rogers his wind drift. He fixed their position at the coastline, called his ETA to the flight deck, and started looking for the city. He couldn't find it and blamed cloud cover. Then Jones came on the interphone: the clouds were breaking, and he thought it was right below them, a little to the right. “I looked down and there it was spread out under us,” Rogers wrote. “By this time the whole crew was looking and thinking about the lives lost and the thousands injured.”
The official work came first. Roughly eight overlapping flight lines at 26,000 feet, east side working west, Rogers steering by railroad crossings and roads, then flying the plane through the bombsight while Tobin's cameras ran. The same methodical routine they'd flown over a hundred targets, run now over a city that was gone.
Then Jones made the call that put this flight outside the official record: “Let's go down to a couple thousand feet and take some pictures with our own unofficial camera.” Hamilton took the controls and the rest of the crew crowded the waist windows with the smuggled film. They were low enough to see everything. Low enough, both accounts agree, to see people packed around the train station, trying to leave on the only transportation the city had left. Nobody looked up.
The flight nearly ended badly. Hamilton had carried them over a harbor holding what remained of the Japanese Navy, warships whose gunners had no reason to believe the war was over. Jones ran back to his seat, poured on the power, and dove the old B-24 out to sea at its top speed. Three weeks later, on September 2, the same crew circled Tokyo Bay while the surrender was signed on the Missouri below them.
The photographs from that roll are below.