Pedro

🇺🇸A kid from Chicago was about to endure unimaginable suffering. At Midway, a 23-year-old American pilot escaped his burning torpedo bomber and parachuted into the Pacific. For years, the U.S. Navy believed he had simply vanished in battle. Then Japan surrendered, and a captured report revealed the horrifying truth: The enemy had taken him alive... His name was Wesley Frank Osmus, but everyone called him "Wes". --------------------------------------------------- Follow @Vanguard_WW2 to discover more extraordinary - and heartbreaking - stories from World War II. --------------------------------------------------- "Wes" was a Chicago kid who had joined the Naval Reserve in March 1940 to help pay his way through college. His instructors quickly recognized a talented and promising young aviator and encouraged him to enter flight training. "Wes" earned his wings in 1941. He could have returned to university. Instead, he chose to remain in the Navy. On June 4, 1942, Ensign Osmus took off from USS Yorktown in a slow and increasingly obsolete TBD Devastator, accompanied by his radio-gunner, Benjamin Dodson Jr. About 14 miles from the Japanese carrier fleet, Zero fighters riddled their aircraft and set a fuel tank ablaze. Burning gasoline began spreading through the plane. "Wes" desperately called Dodson over the intercom. There was no answer. Osmus bailed out. Dodson, probably dead or gravely wounded, disappeared into the Pacific with the burning aircraft. Japanese sailors spotted "Wes" during his descent and hauled him aboard the destroyer Arashi. Wounded and badly burned, the young pilot was beaten, humiliated, and tortured. Threatened with decapitation, he was forced to reveal information about the American carrier force. That evening, Arashi’s captain ordered his execution. A sailor struck "Wes" in the neck with a fire axe. The first blow failed to kill him, leaving the wounded American desperately clinging to a steel chain over the destroyer’s stern. A second blow ended his struggle. His body disappeared into the Pacific. After the war, American investigators questioned surviving Japanese sailors and reconstructed the murder. No one was ever prosecuted: the captain who ordered it and most of those involved had already died. Wesley Osmus received the Navy Cross posthumously. The U.S. Navy later placed the Chicago kid’s name on a warship: USS Osmus. His remains were never recovered. But his story was. May he rest in peace forever.

Five years ago today, 13 brave American service members were taken from their families and their country by an Islamic terrorist in Kabul, Afghanistan. We will never forget them, and never again allow our men and women in uniform to be so utterly betrayed.

There is a famous photograph from the Korean War of a young Marine officer scrambling over a seawall, rifle in hand, leading his men off the boats and into the fight at Inchon. The man in that picture, Lieutenant Baldomero Lopez, was dead within minutes of it being taken. He is one of the very few people on earth photographed in the last moments of his own life while earning the Medal of Honor. Lopez was a Tampa kid, the son of Spanish immigrants, sharp enough to earn his way into the Naval Academy at Annapolis. By September 1950 he was a Marine first lieutenant, and he came ashore in the assault waves at Inchon, the daring amphibious landing that turned the whole war around. That is where the photographer caught him, going up and over the seawall at the head of his platoon, straight into the teeth of the beach defenses. The beach was a mess of enemy bunkers and pillboxes, and one of them had his men pinned down with automatic weapons fire. Lopez did what a good officer does. He went after it himself. He crept up alongside the position, pulled the pin on a grenade, and raised his arm to throw it into the gun port. At that exact instant an enemy gun caught him, hitting him in the shoulder and the chest. The wounds knocked him backward, and the live grenade fell out of his hand and dropped to the ground right next to his own Marines. He was badly hit, bleeding, in shock. His arm no longer worked well enough to pick the grenade back up and throw it clear. He had a couple of seconds and one terrible decision to make. He could roll away and try to save himself, and let the grenade go off among his men. Or not. Lopez pulled the grenade in underneath his own body, wrapped himself around it with a sweep of his ruined arm, and took the entire blast into himself. It killed him. It saved the men around him. He was twenty five years old. His parents received his Medal of Honor. And that photograph of him going over the wall has hung in Marine Corps history ever since, a young officer forever frozen at the front of his men, seconds from giving up everything so they could live.

Michael Novosel had already been to two wars before Vietnam even started. Son of Croatian immigrants, raised in Pennsylvania during the Depression, he joined the Army Air Corps ten months before Pearl Harbor and by 1945 he was a captain flying B-29 bombers over Japan. He flew in Korea too. By the early 1960s he was a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force Reserve and a commercial airline pilot with a family, a man who had absolutely nothing left to prove. And then, at 41 years old, he decided he had to go to Vietnam. The Air Force had no room for another senior officer, so Novosel did something almost nobody does. He gave up his lieutenant colonel's rank, took a big step down to become an Army warrant officer, and went to fly helicopters. Not gunships. Dustoff, the unarmed medevac Hueys that flew into hot landing zones to pull out the wounded. He was old enough to be the father of most of the men he flew with, and he flew two tours. On October 2, 1969, near the Cambodian border, a group of South Vietnamese soldiers was surrounded by several thousand North Vietnamese in a fortified training area. They were out of ammunition, their radios were dead, and they were pinned in the open. Novosel flew in with no gunship cover and no fire support, alone, and went to work. He skimmed the ground under continuous machine gun fire while his crew hauled wounded men aboard. Six times the fire was so heavy it drove him out of the area, and six times he circled around and came back in from a different direction. When communication was gone, he flew low circles over the battlefield just to show the scattered men where to gather. Near the end, a wounded soldier lay right next to an enemy bunker. Novosel backed his helicopter in, tail first, hovering toward the enemy gun to reach the man. As they pulled the soldier aboard, automatic weapons opened up at point blank range, tore into the aircraft and wounded Novosel, and he lost control for a sickening moment before catching it and clawing back into the sky. He made 15 separate runs into that field. When it was done, he had saved 29 lives in a single day. President Nixon put the Medal of Honor around his neck in 1971. But the number that really tells the story is the one from his whole career. Over two tours, Michael Novosel flew 2,543 medevac missions and carried out more than 5,500 wounded human beings. One of the men he pulled out of a hot zone was his own son, also a Dustoff pilot in Vietnam. The very next week, his son flew in and rescued him after he was shot down. A father and a son, taking turns flying into hell to bring each other home. He stayed on flying duty for 42 years, the last World War II aviator still flying in the US military, and retired in 1984. He died in 2006 and lies in Arlington. In 2023 the Army renamed its home of Army aviation, Fort Rucker, in his honor. It is Fort Novosel now, named for a man who traded a colonel's rank for the chance to go back into the fire unarmed and bring the wounded out.