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Today's episode is about an incident that was kept top secret by the US military until 2004.
The story is unbelievable, but it is the twist at the very end that you're going to remember.
This episode is the remastered audio from This Island Kept a Dark Secret Until 2004, which is a very popular video on my YouTube channel.
There are several very graphic sequences in this story.
As such, listener discretion is advised.
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Okay, let's get into today's story.
It begins here.
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Chichijima is a small Japanese island about 500 miles south of the Japanese mainland.
During World War II the Japanese put a base on this island and they put two radio towers at the top of the two mountains on the island.
These radio towers became integral to the Japanese communication and surveillance operations in the Pacific during the war.
And so, at that time, the island was heavily fortified, with up to 25000 troops and huge anti-aircraft guns.
Because of the island's obvious strategic value to Japan, the Americans wanted to take it from them.
But American military strategists advised against that, saying that any amphibious landing of this island would result in massive casualties for Americans, and the Japanese would likely just repel the attack anyways.
And so the Americans decided to go with the next best thing, which was to attempt to bomb the two towers and cut out their communications.
So, in June of 1944, american aircraft carriers, which are those huge, huge ships that planes can take off of and land on, they headed for the island of chichijima and once the island was completely surrounded, the americans began launching their pilots to try to take out these towers.
But the Japanese fought back in a major way and, despite taking heavy casualties on their side, they repelled every American air raid and kept them from bombing their towers.
After several months of these failed missions over Chichijima, the American military leaders were incredibly frustrated.
They knew this was going to be a difficult mission, but they didn't expect it to be this difficult.
However, this island was so strategically important that the Americans knew they had to just keep on sending pilots in until they took out these towers.
And so in September of that year, the Americans were back to planning another raid over Chichijima Island.
And one of the pilots selected to go on this particular raid was a 20-year-old named George, who actually was the youngest pilot in the United States Navy at the time.
But despite his age he had actually flown in several combat missions already and had actually been shot down already and had to eject into the ocean and was subsequently rescued.
On the morning of this raid George, along with his two-man crew, which was his radio operator named Del, and his door gunner named Ted, they boarded the plane, and then, at 715 am, George and his crew took off, along with dozens of other American aircraft that were part of this operation.
George immediately climbed above 8 000 feet, because that would put them outside of anti-aircraft gun range, and so the way this mission would work is all these pilots would fly over the island and then, in order to drop their bombs, they would have to dive down below 8 000 feet and then manually drop their bombs and then try to get back up above 8000 feet and out away from the island.
And so George had run missions like this before, and so he was one of the first to actually make that dive down to the island.
And as soon as he went below 8,000 feet, the island just erupted with anti-aircraft gun fire.
And so all these rounds are coming up.
Flak is popping all over the place.
And George almost immediately notices the side of his plane gets hit.
But the plane's stable enough that he decides he's just going to keep on diving down and complete the mission.
And he's yelling back to Ted and to Dell to hold on.
And they get all the way down to 3000 feet when George releases two 500-pound bombs that are direct hits on the radio tower he was assigned to bomb.
But at this point, George's plane is now engulfed in flames.
It can barely fly.
And so George is again yelling at Ted and Del to hold on.
He's pulling back on the lever and he begins to turn himself away from the tower out towards the water.
And he manages to fly away from the island, but he can feel the plane starting to go down.
Now, George had previously been shot down before, and what he learned from that is how important it was to fly as far away from the enemy as you possibly can before you bail out of your plane.
Because if you bail too early and you land in the water right near where the enemy is, you'll just get captured.
And so George was holding onto that lever and keeping his plane up as long as he possibly could.
And so he's flying and getting lower and lower and lower and closer to the water.
And Ted and Dell are yelling at him that they got to jump out.
Meanwhile outside, the other planes that had sustained damage, the other American planes, Their crews are already bailing out, but George is saying no hold on.
And he keeps going farther and farther, until he's so close to the water that it's practically too late.
And then he gives the order to jump out of the plane.
George abandons his controls.
He leaps out the door and he hits his head on the back of the plane as he leaps out.
But his chute would open up right before he hit the water and it would save his life.
As soon as George hits the water and he comes up for air, he's under his parachute.
And so he's trying to get his parachute away to get a breath of air.
He disconnects his parachute from his shoulders.
He clears the parachute and he's looking around and he sees his plane that is now being flown by no one go crashing directly into the water.
And so immediately he's looking around for Ted and Del's parachute to make sure they're okay, but he doesn't see any parachutes anywhere.
However, George notices a life raft from his plane had miraculously just landed like 10 feet away from him.
So he swims over to the life raft, he climbs inside, and once he's in there, all he's thinking about is ted and dell.
So he's yelling for ted, he's yelling for dell, but he's not getting a response, And so George turns around in the raft.
So now he's facing towards the island and, to his horror, way off on the horizon, right near the edge of this island, are Japanese patrol boats that are speeding in his direction.
He knows they're coming to get him and the other people that had jumped out of these planes.
And so George turns back around.
He leaps onto his chest on the front of this raft and he starts using his hands to swim as fast as he can away from this island.
The whole time he's screaming out for Ted and Del in hopes he's going to find them.
Little did he know that both of them had not survived the crash.
One had not even jumped out of the plane and had died on impact, and the other had jumped out, but their parachute had not inflated.
And so George is swimming as fast as he possibly can.
And he's yelling out for Del and for Ted.
And he's looking, but he doesn't hear them.
He doesn't see them.
And he knows that not only is he not going to find his friends, but there's just no way he's going to out swim these boats.
And so at some point he just turns around and sits in the raft and he's looking towards these patrol boats and he knows that at some point they're going to come up here and they're going to capture him.
And all he can think about is how guilty he feels about Ted and Del and he starts second guessing his decision to keep that plane flying as long as he did and make them bail out so late, And he's thinking I probably got them killed.
And then he thought about his wife and he wondered if he'd ever see her again.
And then he turned towards these Japanese boats that were much closer now but still fairly far away.
And he began mentally preparing himself for captivity.
But before he could be captured, American aircraft come storming in overhead and they go flying past him towards the island and they start dropping bombs and strafing these Japanese boats that were coming out to get George.
And so George is thinking, oh, my goodness, what luck.
He turns around, he gets back on his chest and he starts swimming as fast as he can, trying to get away, knowing that these boats are totally preoccupied with the aircraft overhead.
And for two hours George used every ounce of strength he had to swim as far as he possibly could away from this island.
But at some point, he was just so unbelievably exhausted, he just could not paddle any farther.
And so he's just laying on this raft when he hears the sound of something coming out of the water and he turns and he sees the periscope of an american submarine coming out of the water.
And seconds later the crew of this american submarine comes right up alongside him.
They grab him out of the raft, they put him in the submarine and he was saved.
Besides George, Ted and Del, there were eight other American airmen that had to bail out of their aircraft because they were badly damaged following this raid.
And so originally those eight people were not recovered and they were believed to have drowned at sea.
But that actually was not true.
The US government figured out fairly quickly what happened to them, but the details of what happened to them were so gruesome the government decided they did not want to tell anyone.
They especially didn't want to tell the parents and loved ones of these eight airmen because they believed if they heard the true account that would be too traumatic for them.
And so they made the details of these eight deaths totally top secret.
But 60 years later, in 2004, an author named James Bradley discovered transcripts from a post-World War II Japanese war crimes trial held in Guam, where Japanese military leaders confessed to what they did to these eight captured Americans.
This is the true account.
Unlike George, these eight other airmen bailed out almost immediately after they got out over the water.
And so that placed them in the water very close to the island.
And so, before the American aircraft could come in and save the day, like they did with George, These eight airmen were scooped up by the Japanese and brought back to the island.
The Japanese soldiers on this island for the past several months have been getting constantly bombed by American aircraft, inflicting a very high casualty rate.
And so these soldiers hated the Americans and they wanted revenge against the Americans.
And so suddenly you have these eight American prisoners on this island with no one to protect them.
And so what do you think happens?
The Japanese decide they're going to exact their revenge on these eight men.
Within 24 hours of being captured.
The eight men were kind of huddled up in one section of the island when one of them, Marv Mershon, who was 19 from Long Beach California, was grabbed by a Japanese commander, stood up and moved to the central area within their military camp And they tied him to a tree and this commander encouraged all of the other soldiers to beat and kick Marv.
And so, all day long, soldiers were coming up and just beating the crap out of Marv, and Marv is tied to the tree.
He can't do anything.
And these seven other prisoners are forced to just watch because they can't do anything.
And so that night the same commander comes back and he unties Marv from the tree and he tells these seven other prisoners to stay where they are.
And this commander and several other Japanese soldiers.
They take Marv and they march him away from the group into the jungle and they march him over to this freshly dug grave.
And standing next to the grave that Marv would have seen is this Japanese soldier carrying a sword.
And so Marv is told to walk up to the edge of this grave.
They tell him to kneel down in front of this grave, and they let him smoke a final cigarette.
And apparently Marv very calmly smoked the cigarette.
And when he was done, the man with the sword put a blindfold on Marv and then told Marv to extend his neck.
And as soon as he did, he was beheaded.
Afterwards, they buried him inside of this grave.
That night, one of the high ranking Japanese generals on the island, a man named Yoshio Tachibana, who was an alcoholic and was notorious for his sadistic tendencies with prisoners.
He was sitting around drinking having a good time when he decided that his soldiers, they needed to prove they had what he called the fighting spirit, and the only way they could show they had this fighting spirit was by consuming human flesh, And so Tachibana ordered his soldiers to go exhume Marv from his shallow grave.
And then Tachibana sent over one of his surgeons and he told him to remove Marv's thigh.
The surgeon goes over, he surgically removes Marv's thigh, he gives it to one of the cooks and the cooks they make this huge meal using Marv's thigh and they serve it to Tachibana and his other high-ranking officers and some soldiers.
And apparently Marv's thigh tasted so good with soy sauce and with sake that Tachibana ordered his soldiers to go back and cut more meat off of Marv, which they did.
Within a month of Marv's execution and consumption, Tachibana decided that he wanted to eat more human flesh, and he wanted his soldiers to eat more human flesh because he and a number of the other officers were superstitious that this could make them stronger and it would be good for their stomach and it would be good for their health.
And so they decide they're going to kill more of the american prisoners and eat them.
And so they brought the seven remaining american prisoners out to the rifle range.
And once they were all out there, one of the japanese officers grabbed 25 year old floyd hall from missouri.
They pulled him out of the group and they walked him over to the middle of this range and they tied him to a wooden stake in the ground.
And once he was in place Tachibana who was there he ordered the other Japanese soldiers to work on their bayonet work on Floyd Hall.
And so, one by one, these soldiers would go up and plunge their bayonets into Floyd Hall's chest, into his stomach, until he ultimately died.
Once he was dead Tachibana, who had brought along his surgeons for this very reason, He sent them out to remove Floyd's liver and his gallbladder, right in front of the now six living prisoners.
They're watching this happen right in front of them.
And then, once his liver and gallbladder have been removed and wrapped in cellophane paper to preserve them, These surgeons walked back and stood on the edge because they knew this was not the last execution of the day.
And so the other six prisoners are looking around, wondering what's next.
And then one of the commanders walks over and he grabs another one of the prisoners.
His name was Earl Vaughn.
He was 22 years old from Texas.
And as soon as he was grabbed, he knew he did not want to face the same fate Floyd did.
And so right away, he became defiant.
He wanted to die more quickly, and so he began yelling Semper Fi at the Japanese, and he kept extending his neck and pointing up at his neck, indicating he wanted a clean and quick death.
Behead me.
And so the Japanese.
They tried to strap him to this wooden post because they wanted the other soldiers to work on their bayonets with him.
But it was just too difficult with Earl.
He put up such a fight and he kept putting his neck out that finally one of the soldiers did pull him down and he was beheaded.
And then again the surgeons came running out into the field and, in plain sight of the now five remaining American captives, they removed Earl's liver and his gallbladder and then wrapped them in cellophane paper to preserve them.
And then they took Floyd and Earl's organs and they went back to the cooks to have them prepared and that night all the high-ranking officers on the island feasted on Earl and Floyd.
Within a few days of Floyd and Earl's murders, the other five captives were also executed in a similar fashion, one by one in front of their comrades, and two of those remaining five were also consumed.
And unfortunately, one of those two was not executed beforehand.
Instead, they had pieces of their body surgically amputated, and then those pieces would get cooked and eaten.
And when they were done eating them, they would just come back and cut off more and more and more until there was nothing left to eat.
At that point, that prisoner was executed.
They did this in order to keep their meat fresh.
After the war was over, 34 Japanese soldiers, including General Tachibana, were tried for war crimes.
For their atrocities they committed against these eight prisoners of war.
They were all found guilty and they were all hanged and buried in unmarked graves in Guam.
The other men on the island that witnessed these atrocities and didn't do anything about it or participated, but in some sort of secondary way they were also tried for war crimes, found guilty and sent to jail.
But all of them were released after eight years.
George was 80 years old when he finally learned about the atrocities on Chichijima Island that he so narrowly escaped.
He, like everyone else that was learning about this, was horrified and disturbed, but more than anything, George felt a deep sense of guilt for having survived.
But what we can all say for sure is that George did not waste his second chance at life.
George H.W.
Bush would go on to become the 41st President of the United States of America.
And his son, also named George Bush, would go on to become the 43rd President of the United States of America.
Two world leaders who would change the course of history forever, who never would have been if George Sr had bailed out of that plane near Chichijima Island just a few seconds earlier.
Think about that.
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