A great local event for the Greatest Generation
WWII veterans gather for a salute at Fort Sam Houston
Gerald Auerbach was a B-29 navigator who flew missions against Japan — 21 in all.
A couple involved dropping food and other supplies to Allied troops in POW camps, but one was a March 9, 1945, firebombing mission that claimed more than 100,000 lives in Tokyo.
The bomber was the biggest yet produced, called the Superfortress, and on that raid they flew in a “stream” — one plane after another. Auerbach’s plane was toward the tail end, and by then Tokyo already was ablaze.
“I quit navigating when we were 150 miles from Tokyo because we could see the glow, the fires that were already burning,” said Auerbach, 95, recalling the horror of total war at a gathering of veterans Tuesday.
The bombardier took the plane over an area that had not yet caught fire “and then we unloaded our incendiaries,” he said.
The heat below was so powerful it forced the plane to rise from 5,000 feet to 12,000 feet.
More than 50 World War II veterans, at least five of them 100 or older, were at the gathering at Joint Base San Antonio-Fort Sam Houston, where they were saluted by a crowd of civilians and military led by Brig. Gen. Walter Duzzny, the deputy commander of U.S. Army North.
The ceremony, sponsored by Gold Star Families Survivor Outreach Services, brought old soldiers, airmen, sailors, Marines, and members of the Merchant Marines from the San Antonio area and their families together. Organizers said they had been unable to fly to France in June for the 75th anniversary of D-Day.
They included D-Day survivor Andrew Reyna, Guadalcanal and Peleliu veteran Arthur Munoz, and Tuskegee Airman James Bynum, who served in ground crews for the famed unit from the Normandy campaign through the Battle of the Bulge.
“Representing those of us that are currently serving in uniform, I would like to say that this is really about a legacy. A legacy, a standard, that was set for us by the World War II veterans that you see here today,” Duzzny told the audience.
Cpl. Cyrus Avey turns 101 in a few weeks. A San Antonio native, he spent 15 months in the Pacific as a mechanic, writing letters home to his parents and wife, Ruth, practically every day.
The war had turned in favor of the Allies by the time he went to Guam, Saipan and other locations that brought B-29 crews closer to in Japan. He remembers up to 100 bombers flying there at a time.
At night, the airmen would listen to Tokyo Rose, who mixed big band and country-western music with news reports that were surprisingly informative given her role as a Japanese propagandist.
“She would tell us roughly how many airplanes went down, didn’t make the mission, and sure enough when we got to counting them … they were pretty accurate,” Avey said.
The firebombing of Japan remains controversial, causing more immediate casualties than either of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Auerbach, who lives in Schertz, doesn’t feel bad about the mission.
“Why should I, with all the things they did to everybody else?” he asked. “We had to stop them some way. Yeah, I felt bad in a way, but sorry, you had it coming to you, you know?”
Munoz, a retired San Antonio police homicide detective who spent 23 years on the force, served in the Pacific as a private with the 1st Marine Division.
He first fought on Guadalcanal, where he and his comrades had never seen combat.
“We were all new fighting the Japanese, from the captain down to the privates. What do you call it? On the job training for everybody,” Munoz, 95, laughed.
“After two months on Guadalcanal, only six prisoners,” he added. “They’re fighters. They don’t give up. And those poor six guys probably were so full of dysentery and malaria they couldn’t commit harikari, I guess.”
The fight to take Peleliu, he said, was bad, but it’s not something he can recall. Munoz’s amphibious craft got hit. He and two others escaped, but everything over the next three weeks remains a big blank.
“I don’t remember. I don’t remember Peleliu,” he said.