Ex-GI Steps Back Into a Mystical Past 45 Years After Plane Crash

Thirteen days after the Japanese surrendered, on Aug. 28, 1945, tail gunner Norman Martien and his 10 fellow crew members boarded a bomber in Saipan.

Their mission: to drop medicine and food into POW camps in Japan.

The clouds were thick and low by the time the warplane reached Japan’s Oga Peninsula. The pilot, 1st Lt. John M. Cripps Jr. of Derby, Conn., dropped the plane below the solid overcast--and directly into Mt. Honzan.

The tail section--which held the sole survivor, the unconscious 19-year-old tail gunner--snapped off and ended 50 feet from the plane.

When Martien came to, the plane’s body was still burning fiercely, setting off ammunition and flares. Martien huddled inside the tail section until the explosions subsided, then kicked out a window and crawled to safety.

After the fire died down, Martien returned to the tail section, wrapped himself in a parachute and slept.

He was awakened early the next morning by voices and saw about 20 Japanese policemen, all armed with swords, climbing toward the bomber.

“I was scared to death,” he recalls, “because they could have taken one of those swords and cut my head off and nobody would have known anything about it.”

To his surprise, they bowed to him.

It would be 45 years before Martien learned that just two weeks before the crash, an old woman on that remote peninsula of northern Japan had had a dream. In it, she saw a B-29 crash into Mt. Honzan, and one American walk away from the wreckage.

To the villagers, the lone American survivor was a sacred symbol of peace.

Norman Martien’s life since the crash has not been an unusual one. Discharged in 1946, he went home to Louisiana and married his childhood sweetheart, Rosemarie Chennault, the youngest daughter of Gen. Claire Chennault of “Flying Tigers” fame.

He got his degree in chemical engineering from Louisiana Tech, and with two sons and a daughter in tow, took a series of jobs at plants in Louisiana and Tennessee. He divorced and remarried. In 1987, he retired to Springfield, La.

Then, in 1989, Martien received a letter from Ryojiro Watanabe, president of the Japanese American Cultural Society. It seems that many of the readers of the largest newspaper in Akita prefecture wanted to meet him.

Unbeknown to Martien, the first stone memorial dedicated to the crash was erected in 1946 at the school where he was treated for a sprained ankle.

In 1964, a huge stone monument was erected on Mt. Shinzan, next to the mountain where the plane crashed. And every year, on the anniversary of the crash, the Japanese hold a Buddhist service at the Mt. Shinzan monument to remember the crew and the old woman’s vision.

Watanabe’s brother, Seiichrio, was editor of the Akita Sakigake newspaper. The paper had chronicled Martien’s story dating back to the 1945 crash and had been trying for three years to locate him and the families of the dead crewmen.

Finally, Ryojiro Watanabe wrote a letter to then-Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney, and the Veterans Administration tracked Martien down through his veterans’ insurance.

The Japanese invited Martien and his wife to visit Japan; the Rotary Club in Oga, Akita, raised the funds.

And so, in 1990, Martien returned to Kamo, the small village at the foot of Mt. Honzan, to a reception that was just as friendly as the one he had received 45 years before.

Schoolchildren waved American flags. All the townspeople came out, among them some of the rescuers who had carried him down the mountain on a stretcher, and the woman who tended his wounds.

“I went up to them and hugged their neck,” he said. “I had always wanted to go back over there to thank them, but I never could afford it.”

And there was Eiichi Ishikawa, one of his rescuers. “He and I call each other brother,” Martien said.

All those many years ago, the villagers had treated Martien and then carried him by stretcher five miles to a waiting automobile. It took him to Funakawa, the largest town on the peninsula, where he was given further medical attention and put up in a hotel.

The next morning he was driven to Akita City, where he was met by a police car with Ishikawa’s father, his interpreter and the first English-speaking person he had met since the crash. The Japanese put him up in the city’s best hotel and assigned a bodyguard for him.

Meanwhile, the Japanese had gathered the bodies of the other crew members in rice bags at the crash site, brought them to Akita and cremated them. The urns were placed in the Episcopal church. Martien attended the Christian funeral service conducted for them.

He eventually flew the urns to Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters in Atsugi, Japan. After another Christian funeral service, the urns were buried in an American cemetery there.

Twelve days after the crash, Martien returned to Saipan. He wrote a letter to his parents telling them of the crash and his experiences. Two days after his family received his letter, they got a telegram from the U.S. government--Martien, it said, was missing in action.

On his return to Japan in 1990, Martien and his wife were flown by helicopter over the Sea of Japan, taking the same approach he made in that ill-fated B-29.

The Martiens unveiled a post the Japanese put next to the memorial. On it, the initials of all the crewmen had been carved in English and Japanese.

The priest who led the Buddhist memorial service was the grandson of the woman who had had the vision of the lone survivor.

“They declared as long as any of them were living, and as long as their children and grandchildren were alive, they promised they would do this,” Martien said.

Martien, too, came away with a mission: to find the families of his dead comrades, and let them know about the memorials and annual ceremonies held in their honor in Japan. “To make these families find some peace after all these years--that their family members were so special, not just another casualty,” he said.

Now 70, Martien contacted the Associated Press, hoping some of the surviving family members would see the story about the crash memorials and their lost loved ones. The AP, working with the Army Personnel Center in St. Louis, obtained a list of each crewman’s last known hometown during the war and set out to find any living relatives.

Mary Lou Lord of Derby, Conn., remembers “Uncle Buddy”--John Cripps, the pilot. The family, she says, was never told that his body had been found. For years, she has been haunted by fears that he had never been given a proper burial, that his bones were rotting in a field.

“I got to say I feel relief. At least I know where he is--none of us knew where he was,” said Lord, 53.

The family had just a “little church ceremony” for Cripps. She was overwhelmed by news of the Japanese rituals and memorials.

“I can’t get over that. It happens in their country and at one time we were their enemy,” Lord said. “I am astonished.”

Staff Sgt. Virgil Gene Lanning was a gunner. His family was putting up hay out on the farm the day they heard about the crash. The 19-year-old gunner, who quit high school to enlist, was the youngest of six children.

His 84-year-old brother, Merle Lanning of Austin, Colo., said the family decided to leave his brother’s cremated remains buried overseas.

A memorial bearing his name and those of local residents who never returned from the war was put up in the town’s cemetery. But this family never knew about the memorials in Japan; nor did the family of Sgt. William A. Blair, another gunner on the B-29.

“Then I was the enemy; now it looks like I am a friend to them,” said Chauncey Blair, William’s 73-year-old brother, also a World War II veteran.

Chauncey Blair can’t even remember the date of the crash, but it thrills him that the Japanese commemorate that event each year. “I like the idea,” he said. “I feel better about it.”