Dear Ms. Parker,   My son, who lives in Chicago, has urged me to write to you and tell you the story of my landing the first B-29 on Okinawa during World War II.  He read an article you had written about being invited to speak at WWII Bomb Group reunion and believes that you and your readers may find this story very interesting. I will be 79 years young in December and was just a 21-year-old kid from a small town in Ohio at the time of this flight.  Regretfully our 9th Bomb Group Association has disbanded because the numbers of those of us alive are getting so small.  We have held many reunions over the last 14 years but there are only 4 of us left from our crew of 11.    I was the pilot* of an Army Air Forces B-29 from the 5th Bomb Squadron, 9th Bomb Group, of the 313th Wing, based on Tinian in the Mariana’s Islands.  For a brief time the 9th Group had been assigned the mission of laying mines in all of the approaches and many of the bigger harbors in Japan to cut off shipping coming into Japan from China, Korea, Formosa (Taiwan), and Indo-China.   On the night of May 24-25, 1945, 31 airplanes from our group including ourselves had been assigned a mission to lay mines in the western approaches to Shimonoseki Straits. near Fukuoka harbor, which was a major port on the northwest coast of Kyushu Island.  Each airplane flew singly, navigated for themselves, laid their mines individually, took photographs of the radar scope as they were dropping the mines so our Navy knew where they were, and returned alone with no radio contact with others of the group. We carried 7 two thousand lb. mines with parachutes attached to slow their entrance into the water.  Some of the mines were acoustic, some magnetic, and some capable of measuring the weight of the ship passing overhead and set to explode only if the ship was large.   We left our base on Tinian Island at about 10 pm.  Our mine release altitude was about 5,000 ft or less.  By good or bad fortune, however, one felt about it, our mines straddled a Japanese Cruiser.  At that altitude, even though it was in the darkness of the night, we took heavy anti-aircraft fire from the Japanese Cruiser as well as shore batteries.  When we left the target area at 0433 am and turned back southeast to go between Kyushu and Shikoku, we felt we didn’t have enough fuel to return to Tinian Island, our base in the Mariana’s Islands, because the tanks were showing less fuel remaining than we expected and we didn’t know how many holes we might have taken from the ack-ack fire.  We had been briefed that the weather at Iwo Jima was bad, possible heavy rain and zero visibility, and the airfield would probably be closed. So the Airplane Commander, Capt. Alvin P. Bowers, and I made the decision that we would proceed to Okinawa, which was closer than Iwo Jima.   We flew down the east coast of Kyushu Island but out to sea far enough that we thought the Japanese fighters would not come out to attack us. We flew around the southern tip of Okinawa, which was still heavily occupied by Japanese forces, and turned back north toward Yontan airbase, which we had been briefed, could be used in an emergency. Just after daylight as we approached the area of Yontan, we could see huge muzzle flashes from the battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and other ships of the Navy bombarding the land installations of the Japanese near the city of Naha.  At every salvo from those huge guns on the battleships the shock waves would shake the airplane so badly that we thought our own fire had hit us.  As we were flying over our Navy we kept trying to contact the tower on Yontan air base to no avail.  Then we noticed that there were huge fires from burning airplanes on the sides of the runway at Yontan.    A Japanese medium bomber, code named Sally, had followed a Navy night-fighter down the approach to Yontan, landed gear up on the runway. Japanese paratroopers had jumped out of the crashed airplane and had run down the lines of C-54’s, B-24’s, and other Navy and Marine planes and had thrown grenades into the airplanes setting them on fire.  The Marines in the flak towers along side the field had lowered their 40mm anti-aircraft guns and were shooting at the Japanese soldiers, but also probably hitting some of the planes. In the midst of this melee, we are trying to get landing instructions. We couldn’t get any response on the normal VHF channels and so we lowered our trailing wire antenna and sent out calls on the 500-watt Collins set we carried in the B-29, all the while crisscrossing back and forth over our Navy fleet several times and constantly being shaken by the shock waves from the Navy guns.   Finally someone calls us on the VHF radio and tells us to land at Kadena which is a Marine F4U mud fighter strip about 3-4 miles south of Yontan. (Brief magazine says it was 5,000 feet but it looked awfully short to us when we were used to seeing 9,000 ft. of paved runway on Tinian).  We located Kadena, lined up using maximum flaps with lots of power since it was such a short narrow field, hoping to keep the airplane just above stalling speed so that we could stop on the runway. Just as we are touching down, a road-grader starts across the runway about ¾ of the way down the runway.  Both Bowers and I are putting maximum pressure on the brakes and praying that we can miss the road grader because a collision would be a disaster. We blow out one tire, and after coming to a stop, we learn that a second one was torn so badly that it would have to be replaced before we could take off again.   The Marines greeted us quickly and towed the B-29 into a fighter revetment backwards, so at least some of the B-29 would be protected in case a Japanese bomber or fighter attacked.  The wings protracted out over the revetment on one side.  The Marines were in a hurry to get the B-29 somewhat protected because the Kamikaze’s were attacking the fleet in the harbor four to five miles away, and we were all concerned that this big silver monster would be spotted.   The Marines procured a 6X6 truck and took our engineer, Lt’s. Bowen (Bombardier) and Blas ( Navigator) and others of the crew to Yontan airfield because someone knew that B-24 tires would fit B-29’s, and two tires were obtained from the damaged B-24’s.  The crew observed first hand the battle damage at Yontan as well as dead Japanese soldiers. (This scene is depicted in the Brief magazine).   In the meantime because Capt. Bowers and I were the pilots, we were kept well underground.  The Marine Corps Operations Center, mess hall, living quarters, etc. was deep underground to keep from being hit by attacking aircraft or being surprised by Japanese soldiers.  On Iwo Jima, Kamakaze soldiers had infiltrated the fighter pilot encampment one night and slashed and killed many Army Air Force P-51 pilots.    We talked with the Marine fighter pilots, who were coming and going all day long on short flights intercepting the incoming Kamikaze’s, listening to their stories and having them listen to ours. One Marine pilot gave me a sheer black kimono that he had acquired on the island, and I still have it at home today.  While taking a short trip top-side to see the progress on the “Ready Teddy” we watched one Marine pilot come in to land with about 5 ft. of the left wing missing after having hit the engine of a falling Japanese airplane.   Eventually the tires were replaced, our B-29 refueled, and we taxied out to the end of the runway to takeoff.  I locked the brakes, went to maximum power (54 inches of manifold pressure) on the four 2,200 hp engines and released the brakes.  Because we had been refueled but only with enough to fly the 6-7 hours back to Tinian, our takeoff was relatively short, and we climbed rapidly to clear ourselves from any potential ground fire from the Japanese Army. Brief magazine describes the takeoff as perfect but I won’t attest to that.  It certainly wasn’t our normal routine to fly off a narrow dirt 3-5000 ft fighter strip.  We left Okinawa for Tinian about 3:30 pm having landed at 7 A.M. and landed back at Tinian at 10:30 P.M.- so we had been gone over 24 hours.  Fortunately our United States air defenses were so intense that we did not see any Japanese fighters on the way out.  All of the time we were on Okinawa, the bombardment by our Navy ships was continuous, as was the dive-bombing by our planes on Naha**, and the almost continuous attacks of the Kamikaze’s on our fleet.   In the B-29 Very Heavy Bombardment Squadrons, the pilot is the right seat pilot and the left seat pilot is called the Aircraft Commander. In our case, however, do to a good close agreement between Capt. Bowers and myself; I did much of the flying in all of our missions.  In this case, Bowers had been drinking with the Marine off-duty flyers, so I flew the B-29 back home to Tinian.   A review of the Okinawa campaign by the Army and the Marines will show that the battle for Naha was one of the most deadly battles fought in the Pacific campaign.