KILLED AND CANNIBALIZED
WHILE A POW OF THE JAPANESE
Chichi Jima Island is 620 miles south of Tokyo and part of the Bonin Island Group. The island is small, only five miles by three miles in size but during World War II the island was critical to the Japanese communications services who used it as a strategic radio relay link. Near the end of the war the island was defended by approximately 23,000 Japanese troops when the Navy began routine bombing raids to neutralize its defenses. Beginning in mid-1944, American aircraft carriers began launching missions to fly into the teeth of Chichi Jima’s lethal antiaircraft guns, somehow dodge the shells aimed at them, and release their bombs onto the reinforced concrete communications facilities on top of the island’s twin peaks.
A gruesome incident on Chichi Jima that occurred late in the war was not revealed to the American public until 2003 and has become known as the Chichi Incident (or the Ogasawa Incident). In essence, Japanese soldiers reportedly tortured, killed and ate as many as eight American airmen being held as POWs – an act of cannibalism. Unfortunately, Aviation Ordnanceman Third Class Grady Alvah York Jr. was one of the victims of this horrific incident. He was reportedly born in Florida during 1925. Historical records reflect he joined the Navy from Florida and following recruit training became a gunner aboard a three-man Grumman TBM Avenger bomber.
On the morning of February 18, 1945, AOM3 York was the gunner on the TMB-3 Avenger bomber BuNo 22904 which departed the carrier USS Bennington with a flight of Avengers to attack Chichi Jimi Island. The other two crewmembers on the plane were ENS R. T. King, pilot, and ARM3 James Wesley Dye Jr, radioman. On arrival over Chichi Jimi they flew into very heavy antiaircraft fire which struck the plane and tore off a portion of the left wing. King temporarily lost control and thinking the plane was going to crash, he ordered his two crew members to bail out. York and Dye successfully deployed their parachutes and landed in shallow water near Chichi Jima where they were soon taken prisoner by Japanese troops. Historical records are mixed concerning ENS King as some indicate he stayed with his plane and somehow managed to fly back to the Bennington although other records report the plane crashed and ENS King did not survive.
Historical records are in agreement concerning Dye and York and reflect when taken prisoner they were tied to a tree alongside a third POW, a pilot of another plane which had been shot down. Here the trio reportedly remained for three days, unfed and left alone. When the trio was untied they were held in confinement until a superior Japanese officer ordered that Dye and York be executed and that portions of their bodies be fed to soldiers. It has been written that York was again tied to a tree and Japanese soldiers struck him with bayonets before an officer beheaded him with a sword.
Following the close of World War II, interrogation in 1946 of Japanese who served on Chichi Jima Island disclosed the gruesome information that some of the Japanese troops on Chichi Jima practiced cannibalization in connection with their Boshido Spirit Warrior Indoctrination which included the belief that the act imparted a part of the victim’s soul into the consumer. In 1947, the Japanese officer who ordered York’s death was tried for War Crimes, executed by hanging, and buried in an unmarked grave on the island of Guam where the trial was held. The officer who beheaded him spent several years in prison for his role. Although U.S. authorities were aware in 1946 of the horrific facts surrounding the Chichi Incident, the sordid details recorded in secret transcripts of the war crimes trials were not made public until 2003 to spare the family from distress. The remains of AOM3 Grady Alvah York Jr. were never recovered and his name is engraved in the Courts of the Missing at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Submitted by CDR Roy A. Mosteller, USNR (Ret)
