Devotion Read online

  Credit tp.1

  Copyright © 2015 by Adam Makos

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  BALLANTINE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  All interior maps by Bryan Makos of Valor Studios, Inc.

  Photo credits can be found on this page.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Makos, Adam.

  Devotion : an epic story of heroism, friendship, and sacrifice / Adam Makos.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-0-8041-7658-3

  eBook ISBN 978-0-8041-7659-0

  1. Hudner, Tom, 1924– 2. Brown, Jesse Leroy. 3. Korean War, 1950–1953—United States—Biography. 4. Korean War, 1950–1953—Campaigns—Korea (North)—Changjin Reservoir. 5. Rescues—Korea (North)—Changjin Reservoir—History—20th century. 6. Fighter pilots—United States—Biography. 7. African American fighter pilots—Biography. 8. United States. Navy—Officers—Biography. 9. United States. Navy—African Americans—Biography. 10. Interracial friendship. I. Title.

  DS918.A553M36 2015

  951.904’245092273—dc23 2015023955

  eBook ISBN 9780804176590

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Christopher M. Zucker, adapted for eBook

  Cover design: David G. Stevenson and Bradford Foltz

  Cover illustration: David G. Stevenson, based on images © National Archives and Records Administration, Elena Gaak, and Florin Stana

  v4.1

  a

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  1. Ghosts and Shadows

  2. The Lesson of a Lifetime

  3. Swimming with Snakes

  4. The Words

  5. The Renaissance Man

  6. This Is Flying

  7. So Far, So Fast

  8. The Ring

  9. The Pond

  10. One for the Vultures

  11. A Time for Faith

  12. A Deadly Business

  13. A Knock in the Night

  14. The Dancing Fleet

  15. The Reunion

  16. Only in France

  17. The Friendly Invasion

  18. At First Sight

  19. On Waves to War

  20. The Longest Step

  21. The Last Night in America

  22. The Beast in the Gorge

  23. Into the Fog

  24. This Is It

  25. Trust

  26. He Might Be a Flyer

  27. Home

  28. The First Battle of World War III

  29. The Sky Will Be Black

  30. A Chill in the Night

  31. A Taste of the Dirt

  32. When the Deer Come Running

  33. Backs to the Wall

  34. A Smoke in the Cold

  35. The Lost Legion

  36. Burning the Woods

  37. Into Hell Together

  38. All the Faith in the World

  39. Finality

  40. With Deep Regret

  41. To the Finish

  42. The Gift

  43. The Call from the Capital

  44. The Message

  Afterword

  Photo Insert

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Photo Credits

  By Adam Makos

  About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  FROM ACROSS THE HOTEL LOBBY, I saw him sitting alone, newspaper in hand.

  He was a distinguished-looking older gentleman. His gray hair was swept back, his face sharp and handsome. He wore a navy blazer and tan slacks, and his luggage sat by his side.

  The lobby was buzzing, but no one paid him any special attention. It was fall 2007, another busy morning in Washington, D.C. I was twenty-six at the time and trying to make it as a writer for a history magazine. I had a book under way on the side but no publisher yet in sight. The book was about my one and only specialty—World War II.

  The day before, I had heard the distinguished gentleman speak at a veterans’ history conference. I had caught part of his story. He was a former navy fighter pilot who had done something incredible in a war long ago, something so superhuman that the captain of his aircraft carrier stated: “There has been no finer act of unselfish heroism in military history.”

  President Harry Truman had agreed and invited this pilot to the White House. Life magazine ran a story about him. His deeds appeared in a movie called The Hunters, starring Robert Mitchum. And now here he was—sitting across the lobby from me.

  I wanted to ask him for an interview but hesitated. A journalist should know his subject matter and I was unprepared.

  He had flown a WWII Corsair fighter, I understood that much. Reportedly he had fought alongside WWII veterans and fired the same bullets and dropped the same bombs used in WWII. He was a member of the Greatest Generation, too.

  But he hadn’t fought in World War II.

  He had fought in the Korean War.

  To me, the Korean War was a mystery. It is to most Americans; our history books label it “The Forgotten War.” When we think of Korea, we picture M*A*S*H or Marilyn Monroe singing for the troops or a flashback from Mad Men.

  Only later would I discover that the Korean War was practically an extension of World War II, fought just five years later between nations that had once called themselves allies. Only later did I discover a surprising reality: The Greatest Generation actually fought two wars.

  The gentleman was folding his newspaper to leave. It was now or never.

  I mustered the nerve to introduce myself and we shook hands. We made small talk about the conference and finally I asked the gentleman if I could interview him sometime for a magazine story. I held my breath. Maybe he was tired of interviews? Maybe I was too young to be taken seriously?

  “Why, sure,” he said robustly. He fished a business card from his pocket and handed it to me. Only later would I realize what an opportunity he’d given me. His name was Captain Tom Hudner. And that’s how Devotion began.

  —

  True to his word, Tom Hudner granted me that interview. Then another, and another, until what began as a magazine story blossomed into this book. And the book kept growing. I discovered that Tom and his squadron weren’t your typical fighter pilots—they were specialists in ground attack, trained to deliver air support to Marines in battle. So what began as the story of fighter pilots became a bigger story, an interwoven account of flyboys in the air, Marines on the ground, and the heroes behind the scenes—the wives and families on the home front.

  Over the ensuing seven years, from 2007 to 2014, my staff and I interviewed Tom and the other real-life “characters” of his story more times than we could count. All told, we interviewed more than sixty members of the Greatest Generation—former navy carrier pilots, Marines, their wives, their siblings. This story is set in 1950, so many of the people we interviewed were still young for their generation. They were in their seventies and early eighties, with sharp, vibrant memories.

  At times, I stepped away from Devotion to work on my World War II book while my staff kept plugging away on Devotion. They had help, too. The historians at the navy archives, the Marine Corps archives, and the National Archives were practically on call to aid our research.

  Over those seven years we worked as a team—the book’s subjects, the historians, my staff, and I—to piece together this story. Our goal was for you not just to read Devotion but to experience it. To construct a
narrative of rich detail, we needed to zoom in close. Our questions for the subjects were countless. When a man encountered something good or bad, what did he think? What facial gestures corresponded with his feelings—did his eyes lift with hope? Did his face sink with sorrow? What actions did he take next?

  More than anything, we asked: “What did you say?” I love dialogue. There’s no more powerful means to tell a story, but an author of a nonfiction book can’t just make up what he wants a character to say. This is a true story, after all, so I relied on the dialogue recorded in the past and the memories of our subjects, who were there.

  Time and again we asked these “witnesses to history” to reach into their pasts and recall what they had said and what they had heard others say. In this manner, we re-created this book’s dialogue, scene by scene, moment by moment. In the end, before anything went to press, our principal witnesses to history read the manuscript and gave their approval.

  I owe a debt of gratitude to these real-life “characters” of Devotion, people you’ll soon meet and never forget—Tom, Fletcher, Lura, Daisy, Marty, Koenig, Red, Coderre, Wilkie, and so many others. Devotion was crafted by their memories as much as it was written by me.

  —

  There was another level of research that this book required. I needed to see the book’s settings for myself—all of them, from New England to North Korea. So I hit the road and followed the characters’ footsteps to the places where they grew up, flew, and fought.

  That journey led me from Massachusetts to Mississippi, to the French Riviera and Monaco, to a port in Italy, a ship off the coast of Sicily, and back to the battlefields of the Korean War. I had been to South Korea before on a U.S.O. tour, but never to that shadowy land to the north—North Korea.

  But before the book was done, my staff and I went there too. We traveled to China and then into that misty place known as “the hermit kingdom,” the land where some Americans enter and later fail to reemerge. Our trip to North Korea is a story in itself, but let’s just say I owe its success to Tom Hudner.

  —

  As Devotion neared completion, I struggled for a way to describe this interwoven story to you, the reader. My prior book—A Higher Call—had been easy to categorize. It was the true story of a German fighter pilot who spared a defenseless American bomber crew during WWII.

  It was a war story.

  Devotion is a war story, too.

  But it differs in that it’s also a love story. It’s the tale of a mother raising her son to escape a life of poverty and of a newlywed couple being torn apart by war.

  It’s also an inspirational story of an unlikely friendship. It’s the tale of a white pilot from the country clubs of New England and a black pilot from a southern sharecropper’s shack forming a deep friendship in an era of racial hatred.

  As I was editing the last pages of this manuscript, the answer hit me. I knew how to categorize Devotion.

  The bravery. The love. The inspiration.

  This is an American story.

  CHAPTER 1

  GHOSTS AND SHADOWS

  December 4, 1950

  North Korea, during the first year of the Korean War

  IN A BLACK-BLUE FLASH, a Corsair fighter burst around the valley’s edge, turning hard, just above the snow. The engine snarled. The canopy glimmered. A bomb hung from the plane’s belly and rockets from its wings.

  Another roar shook the valley and the next Corsair blasted around the edge. Then came a third, a fourth, a fifth, and more until ten planes had fallen in line.

  The Corsairs dropped low over a snow-packed road and followed it across the valley, between snow-capped hills and strands of dead trees. The land was enemy territory, the planes were behind the lines.

  From the cockpit of the fourth Corsair, Lieutenant Tom Hudner reached forward to a bank of switches above the instrument panel. With a flick, he armed his eight rockets.

  Tom was twenty-six and a navy carrier pilot. His white helmet and raised goggles framed the face of a movie star—flat eyebrows over ice-blue eyes, a chiseled nose, and a cleft chin. He dressed the part too, in a dark brown leather jacket with a reddish fur collar. But Tom could never cut it as a star of the silver screen—his eyes were far too humble.

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  An F4U Corsair

  At 250 miles per hour, Tom chased the plane ahead of him. It was nearly 3 P.M., and dark snow clouds draped the sky with cracks of sun slanting through. Tom glanced from side to side and checked his wingtips as the treetops whipped by. Beyond the hills to the right lay a frozen man-made lake called the Chosin Reservoir. The flight was following the road up the reservoir’s western side.

  The radio crackled and Tom’s eyes perked up. “This is Iroquois Flight 13,” the flight leader announced from the front. “All quiet, so far.”

  “Copy that, Iroquois Flight,” replied a tired voice. Seven miles away, at the foot of the reservoir, a Marine air controller was shivering in his tent at a ramshackle American base. His maps revealed a dire situation around him. Red lines encircled the base—red enemy lines. To top it off, it was one of the coldest winters on record. And the war was still new.

  —

  The engine droned, filling Tom’s cockpit with the smell of warm oil. Tom edged forward in his seat and looked past the whirling propeller. His eyes settled on the Corsair in front of him.

  In the plane ahead, a pilot with deep brown skin peered through the rings of his gunsight. The man’s face was slender beneath his helmet, his eyebrows angled over honest dark eyes. Just twenty-four, Ensign Jesse Brown was the first African American carrier pilot in the U.S. Navy. Jesse had more flight time than Tom, so in the air, he led.

  Jesse dipped his right wing for a better view of the neighboring trees. Tom’s gut tensed.

  “See something, Jesse?” Tom radioed.

  Jesse snapped his plane level again. “Not a thing.”

  Through the canopy’s scratched Plexiglas, Tom watched the cold strands blur past at eye level. The enemy was undoubtedly there, tucked behind trees, grasping rifles, holding their fire so the planes would pass.

  Tom clenched his jaw and focused his eyes forward. As tempting as it was, the pilots couldn’t strafe a grove of trees on a hunch. They needed to spot the enemy first.

  The enemy were the White Jackets, Communist troops who hid by day and attacked by night. For the previous week, their human waves had lapped against the American base night after night, nearly overrunning the defenses. Nearly a hundred thousand White Jackets were now laying siege to the base and more were arriving and moving into position.

  Against this foe stood the base’s ten thousand men—some U.S. Army soldiers, some British Commandos, but mostly U.S. Marines. Reportedly, the base even had its cooks, drivers, and clerks manning the battle lines at night, freezing alongside the riflemen.

  Their survival now hinged on air power and the Corsair pilots knew it. Every White Jacket they could neutralize now would be one fewer trying to bayonet a young Marine that night.

  “Heads up, disturbances ahead!” the flight leader radioed.

  Finally, something, Tom thought.

  Tom’s eyes narrowed. Small boulders dotted the snow beside the road.

  “Watch the rocks!” Jesse said as he zipped over them.

  “Roger,” Tom replied.

  Tom wrapped his index finger over the trigger of the control stick. His eyes locked on the roadside boulders.

  When caught in the open, White Jackets would sometimes drop to the ground and curl over their knees. From above, their soiled uniforms looked like stone and the side flaps of their caps hid their faces.

  The rock pile slipped behind Tom’s wings. He glanced into his rearview mirror. Behind his tail flew a string of six Corsairs with whirling, yellow-tipped propellers. If any rocks stood now to take a shot, Tom’s buddies would deal with them. Tom trusted the men behind him, just as Jesse entrusted his life to Tom.

  After two months of flying combat together, Tom
and Jesse were as close as brothers, although they hailed from different worlds. A sharecropper’s son, Jesse had grown up dirt-poor, farming the fields of Mississippi, whereas Tom had spent his summers boating at a country club in Massachusetts as an heir to a chain of grocery stores. In 1950 their friendship was genuine, just ahead of the times.

  —

  Tom caught the green blur of a vehicle beneath his left wing. Then another on the right.

  He leaned from side to side for a better view.

  Abandoned American trucks and jeeps lined the roadsides. Some sat on flat tires and others nosed into ditches. Snow draped the vehicles; their ripped canvas tops flapped in the wind. Cannons jutted here and there, their barrels wrapped in ice.

  Tom’s eyes narrowed. Splashes of pink colored the surrounding snow. “Oh Lord,” he muttered. The day before, the Marines had been attacked here as they fought their way back to the base. In subzero conditions, spilled blood turned pink.

  “Bodies, nine o’clock!” the flight leader announced as he flew past a hill on the left. “God, they’re everywhere!”

  Jesse zipped by in silence. Tom nudged his control stick to the left and his fifteen-thousand-pound fighter dipped a wing.

  Sun warmed the hillside, revealing bodies stacked like sandbags across the slope. Mounds of dead men poked from the snow, their frozen blue arms reaching defiantly. Tom’s eyes tracked the carnage as he flew past.

  Are they ours or theirs? he wondered.

  Just the day before, he had flown over and seen the Marines down there, waving up at him, their teenage faces pale and waxy. He had heard rumors of the horrors they faced after nightfall. That’s when the temperature dropped to twenty below, when the enemy charged in waves, when the Americans’ weapons froze and they fought with bayonets and fists.

  Aboard the aircraft carrier, Tom and the other pilots had become accustomed to starting each morning with the same question: “Did our boys survive the night?”

  —

  With a deep growl, the flight—now just six Corsairs—burst into a new valley northwest of the reservoir.

  Frustration lined Tom’s face. The enemy had remained elusive so the flight leader had dispatched the rearmost four Corsairs to search elsewhere.