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When Gordy Bumbaugh, now 85, landed on Guam with the 315th Bombardment Wing in June 1945, the reclaimed island housed 65,000 Air Corps and 78,000 Navy personnel and 59,000 Marines.
Bumbaugh, drafted into the Army Air Corps three years earlier, was now a tail gunner in a stripped-down B-29, the American bomber, the Superfortress.
The 99-foot-long planes initially flew bombing raids over Japan from Chengtu, China. When the Allies claimed the Marianias Islands, Saipan, Tinain and Guam, they immediately were established as air bases and supply depots.
The recapture of Guam by U.S. Marines in January 1944 was especially sweet since the Japanese had held the U.S. possession since two days after Pearl Harbor, Dec. 6, 1942.
The installations on Guam, an island of 216 square miles, began in the summer of 1944. When the Army's engineers and the Navy's Seabees were through, there were 8 million square feet of runways. Missions originating from Guam meant 500 fewer miles to Japan - about 3,000 - compared to the 3,500 round trip from China to Japan.
With the arrival of the 315th Bomb Wing (41st Bomb Squad, 501nd Bomb Group), the Marianias had more than 1,000 B-29s.
Like all the others, Bumbaugh's B-29 had art painted on the nose. It wasn't decorated with a scantily clad female, either. Its moniker, the Caboose, came after the craft lost an engine before leaving Grand Island, Neb. The crew joined the squad later.
Bumbaugh was one of 11 Caboose crew members who flew three or four sorties over the Philippines before being turned loose over Japan.
"If we'd arrived first, we'd have flown 10 missions to Japan, but we flew about five. We were at the tail end of the war. We were the caboose."
The 315th's B-29s had been modified to save weight to carry bombs and fuel. The upper and side turrets were removed. Bumbaugh manned the weapons at the very back of the aircraft, about 90 feet from the cockpit.
"I had a .20 millimeter and two 45 caliber machine guns in the tail. Thank heavens I never had to shoot at anybody. We flew high enough and fast enough there wasn't any opposition."
The Americans had begun a relentless bombing campaign over the Japanese Islands once the Marianias were used. Hundreds of B-29s attacked nearly every day for 154 days, March through August.
In February 1945, Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay, in charge of operations, ordered incendiary bombs added to the explosive mix, which targeted industrial areas. The factories and commercial complexes were surrounded by residential districts. In Japan, this could mean 100,000 people or more per square mile. During one mission, 83,783 Japanese were killed by the resulting fires and 40,918 injured. Nearly 16 square miles were reduced to ashes.
Bumbaugh was sent on one fire bombing mission. The B-29 could carry a 10-ton load of weapons. When the cannisters of napalm were released, they burst into flame on contact. In a country where the wood-framed houses had thatch roofs and paper walls, the devastation was considerable.
"You know what the housing was like in Japan. Touch a match to it and, boom, it wiped everything out. We flew back over the area shortly after that and you could see the fire had wiped out everything. How many people died you couldn't imagine.
"I shudder to think how many people were burned up alive. Everything on Japan was flammable and burned like dry grass."
During the 15- or 16-hour flights, all the tail gunner had for music was the four, 2,250 hp Patton-Whitney engines.
"There were 18 cylinders in each one, huge things. No one had heard of ear protection at that time. The noise took all my hearing," Bumbaugh said, gesturing toward a hearing aid.
His flights over Japan were almost at an end. Two months after his arrival on Guam, the Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima Aug. 6.
"My friend Harry Truman dropped the first one on my birthday in 1945 and the second one (on Nagasaki) three days later. The second one ended the war. That was all she wrote."
For added insurance, the 315th flew one last bombing mission Aug. 15 in upper Honshu, knocking out an oil refinery in Akita, 300 miles north of Tokyo. Approximately 100 B-29s were involved in the mission. En route back to Guam, the crews heard of the Japanese surrender.
By the time they landed, the B-29 had been in the air for 17 hours.
Bumbaugh came late to combat because he did what every soldier is advised not to do - volunteer.
While innocently waiting in line for his uniform issue, a supply officer came out and asked if anyone could operate a typewriter. Bumbaugh's hand went up.
He beat out requisitions for three years.
"Then I saw a special order, superceding all other orders, it was a request for gunners.
"So I told the captain I was going to sign up for gunnery school. He threatened to take my corporal's stripes. He didn't, though. I didn't care if he took them or not. I was going.
"The next month I made buck (sergeant), the next month I made staff (sergeant) and I was making over there what a captain made in the states. There was overseas pay, flight pay, all kinds of goodies."
Bumbaugh originally intended to follow a close friend, Glen Will Trout, into the Navy when he was a sophomore at Warsaw High School. The Navy wouldn't take Bumbaugh because of a shoulder problem.
"They turned me down because of a crippled left shoulder. I had an abscess on it when I was 5 years old. Come the draft, the shoulder was no problem."
Trout was aboard a ship that was part of one of the first convoys to Europe.
"There were German subs all up and down the East Coast at that time. They got to the tip of Greenland and that's where the Germans sank that ship. Glen Trout was Warsaw's first casualty in World War II. I would have been on the same boat with him."
The 1937 Warsaw High School graduate ended up seeing plenty of water, however, from the shores of Guam and from the air.
Although the war was over, he didn't get back to the states until December.
"I'll never forget spending that time in Guam. It was so moist, so wet. You'd take your boondoggers off at night, go to put them back on in the morning, they'd have hair on them that long," he said, holding a thumb and forefinger an inch apart to indicate the length of accumulated mold.
"The toads were that big," he said drawing both of his big hands into fists and holding them together to indicate the size of an average toad. "You had to be careful going down the road, because if you hit one, you'd go sliding down the highway!"
Bumbaugh returned to Warsaw and his wife, Geraldine. The couple, now married 64 years, live just east of Leesburg. He was a public accountant for 50 years.
