POW Leavitt escaped a burning plane in WWII

Seven thousand feet over Tokyo, Staff Sgt. Harold Leavitt’s B-29 bomber was struck by flak, and then one of its four engines exploded.

“You felt the vibration. It was vibrating and shaking that plane like it was in a storm,” the Naples retiree recalled. “I took off my headphones and went for the fire extinguisher.”

In the early hours of May 26, 1945, the plane’s cabin filled with smoke. Positioned closest to the burning engine was 1st Lt. George Jensen, the left blister gunner. He received burns to much of his body.

Then the plane's commander, 1st Lt. Alvie Brooks, Jr., ordered his men to abandon ship.

"By that time, the plane was so full of smoke and heat that you couldn't breathe," Leavitt said. "There was no oxygen."

The radio operator, Sgt. Charles Couchman Jr., jumped through the open bomb bay doors. Leavitt moved to an exit hatch at the rear of the plane, but he found the right blister gunner, Staff Sgt. Glidden Lurvey, blocking the way.

“I was getting burned on my backside, so I kicked one guy out,” said Leavitt. "He hesitated to jump and I kicked him out."

Leavitt grabbed the opening with both hands. As he tried to pull himself out of the plane, the Air Force ring on his left pinky finger got caught on a metal strut. For a moment, Leavitt thought of the .45-caliber pistol in his chest holster.

"I had a .45 on, and I said I'm gonna blow that finger off," he said.

But then Leavitt yanked on his left arm one last time — “You get such strength when you're in trouble," he said — and his hand came unstuck. He dived into the open air.

“When I jumped out of that airplane," he said, "my life went before me."

Two weeks ago, Leavitt celebrated his 94th birthday at his favorite Naples hangout — Homer Helter’s Antique & Military Mall on Shirley Street — where he dined on birthday cake and was surrounded by the familiar faces of local veterans and their supporters. Leavitt has socialized at Helter’s store for 23 years, ever since he moved to Naples from St. Louis, where he made a successful career in furniture sales. He lives with his wife, Charlotte, an antiques dealer, and raised four adult children: Lisa, Shelley, Sandy and Marc.

Today, Leavitt is the last surviving member of his 11-man aircrew.

“It hurts,” he said. “Why did I live and the other guys didn’t? Why? There’s no answer. I have to live a life for them.”

Leavitt visits Helter's shop because he finds the conversation with fellow veterans to be therapeutic. When he goes there, he wears his prisoner of war baseball cap, and he often carries a folder with his war records.

On one sheet of paper, he carries a list of those 11 names.

"They were the best men in the world," he said. "The best buddies I ever had."

Born in St. Louis on Aug. 11, 1922, Leavitt grew up in love with airplanes. “It was an obsession with me as a young boy,” he said.

At the start of World War II, Leavitt was working as an aircraft riveter on an assembly line in St. Louis. He built B-17 and B-24 bombers for the Curtiss-Wright Corp., then the largest aircraft manufacturer in the United States. At first, Leavitt was granted a deferment from the military because his industrial job was considered vital to the war effort.

The 1940s were a time when women flooded into the American workforce. Before World War II, women represented 1 percent of workers in the U.S. aircraft industry. But by 1943, women were 65 percent of that industry's labor force — at least 310,000 workers.

In Leavitt's division, there were three men and about 75 women.

“It was one hell of a problem,” he said. “What made me go to the service was all these gals bothering the hell out of us.”

Leavitt enlisted in the Army Air Corps in December 1943.

The Boeing B-29 Superfortress featured several innovations for its time — a navigational radar, a pressurized crew cabin and a remotely operated fire control system for aiming its four defensive machine gun turrets. Two of the B-29s, Enola Gay and Bockscar, would deliver the atomic bombs to Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and 9, 1945.

Leavitt's B-29, named In the Mood, featured a custom painting of a pinup girl on the left side of the plane’s nose. Assigned to the 20th Air Force, 313th Bomb Wing, 505th Bomb Group, and 483rd Bomb Squadron, the plane was based on the Pacific island of Tinian. Powered by four radial engines, its only mission was to fly the 3,000 miles round trip to bomb industrial cities in the Japanese home islands.

Brooks, the pilot of In the Mood, had a newborn daughter at home he’d never seen, so he always volunteered the aircrew for extra missions in the hope that the men could reach their quota sooner. The missions could last 18 hours round-trip, and Brooks pushed the men to fly every third day.

The co-pilot, 2nd Lt. Paul Monahan, had a reputation for smoking and drinking a lot, but Leavitt didn't mind.

"Overseas, he was one of the best pilots we ever saw," said Leavitt. "He was excellent."

On May 25, 1945, as he prepared for his 42nd bombing mission, Leavitt felt something out of place on the Tinian runway. Normally during preflight checks, a Catholic priest came to assist Leavitt’s aircrew in rotating the B-29’s four propellers. This chore would circulate oil in the engines. It didn’t matter that Leavitt was Jewish — he always interpreted the priest as a good sign.

“That mission, the priest hadn’t shown up for our preflight checks,” said Leavitt. “And you could tell there was a difference. We knew something was wrong. That was an omen."

Close to midnight, 464 Superfortresses winged through the night sky over Tokyo, laden with incendiary bombs. They flew at low altitude, under 10,000 feet, in order to deliver their bombs more accurately on the target. In the Mood flew as a pathfinder — one of the lead aircraft that would mark the target.

Leavitt navigated by radar, using Mount Fuji as a key landmark. When the weather was bad, or the target invisible, the radar operator could steer the aircraft and order “bombs away.”

The Japanese defenders fought back fiercely. From the ground, they aimed searchlights to detect the pathfinders and concentrate their anti-aircraft gunfire. The Japanese sent fighter planes, ground-to-air rockets, air-to-air rockets and bakas — suicide planes — to knock down the American bombers.

On that night alone, 26 B-29s were lost, each with at least 11 men on board. One hundred more aircraft were damaged.

Inside Leavitt’s airplane, the men opened the bomb bay doors and released their deadly cargo. To this point, the mission had proceeded smoothly. But before the bomb bay could be shut again, Japanese searchlights found them. Flak exploded the No. 2 engine, on the left side of the plane, and the cabin filled with heat and smoke.

Six men never got out: pilots Brooks and Monahan, navigator Charles Plitt, bombardier Elmer Ferkel, engineer John Wright and fire control operator Halden Adrion.

Leavitt and four other men — Charles Couchman, Glidden Lurvey, John MacGuire and George Jensen — parachuted to earth.

Leavitt’s parachute dropped him on a road surrounded by rice fields. The moment he hit the ground, he saw a Japanese woman right in front of him with a child strapped to her back.

“I almost fell within 5 or 10 feet of her, and I can still hear her screaming,” he said. “Oh man, she was paralyzed.”

Leavitt didn’t wait around.

“I ran like crazy. Eventually I got into a rice paddy field,” he said. “I was scared, tired and exhausted.”

When Leavitt couldn't run any farther, he crawled into a drainage ditch. There he inflated his Mae West (life jacket) for a pillow, and went to sleep.

“When I woke up, it was still dark,” he said. “I heard sirens, vehicles and commotion everywhere. And I realized the ditch was full of feces.”

A single Japanese farmer was the first to discover Leavitt's hiding place in the morning. Leavitt grabbed the farmer and yanked him down into the ditch.

“I had my hands around his throat to choke him to death,” he said.

But during the struggle, the farmer screamed and got the attention of others. More farmers arrived and took Leavitt as their prisoner. Eventually — and before the farmers could find a tree from which to hang him — Japanese soldiers showed up to take Leavitt into custody.

The soldiers transported Leavitt to the horse stables in the palace of the Japanese emperor. There was room in the stables for only 96 men, and they were already full. So the Japanese executed 55 of the prisoners to make room for the new ones.

In the stables, there were no toilets or running water. The prisoners wore their same flights suits every day for the next four months. They were subjected to interrogations and torture. They lived on a diet of rice and water. From May until September, Leavitt’s body weight dropped from 179 pounds to 114.

Also living in the horse stables was Jensen, the gunner who was burned inside Leavitt's airplane. Jensen was never supposed to be on that flight over Tokyo on May 25, but as the gunnery officer for the 505th Bomb Group, he needed to log flight hours. So he replaced the regular gunner on Leavitt's plane for only one mission.

“Jensen was burned from his head down to his buttocks,” said Leavitt. “He had blisters that were so bad that he was delirious. I don’t know how he stood the pain.”

At one point, Leavitt asked the Japanese guards to summon a doctor for Jensen. Members of the Kempeitai, the Japanese military police, took Jensen away.

"He did not survive," Leavitt said. "They executed him two weeks before the war ended by poisoning him."

On Sept. 2, 1945, in the aftermath of two atomic bombs dropped from B-29 bombers, Japan formally surrendered to the Allies. Four men from In the Mood — Couchman, Lurvey, MacGuire and Leavitt — walked out of their prison camp alive.

To this day, Leavitt still remembers one of the toughest moments of his imprisonment.

“One of the men from my crew was crying for his mother,” he said. It was their first night as POWs. “I told him, ‘We don’t cry here. We’re going to give them no reason to think we’re substandard to them. We’re going to fight. We're going to stand up and be men. And we’re going to stay alive.’ ”