Formally entered World War 2 in December of 1941,
following the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor
in Hawaii by the Japanese.
Roughly six months later,
a 21 year old Alabama native named Henry Irwin joined the Army Reserve.
After nearly two years of additional military training,
Henry was made into a radio operator and was assigned to a B29 bomber.
A B29 bomber is this huge aircraft whose sole purpose is to drop bombs.
And so in February of 1945,
Henry and his B29 bomber unit were sent to the Pacific to do just that,
drop bombs on the Japanese.
Two months after arriving,
Henry’s B29 was tasked with being the lead bomber
in a group attack on a Japanese chemical facility
located about 125 miles north of Tokyo.
Aside from just operating his radio inside of the B29 occasionally,
Henry’s job was to organize the other planes in the attack
when their B29 was the lead attacker.
So the way he would do this
was by dropping a series of smoke bombs out of his plane.
And then once they touch the ground and all the smoke was coming up,
he would hop on his radio
and communicate with the other pilots in his sortie
and tell them to organize themselves
off of this visual reference point on the ground.
You basically have them fly to certain positions
relative to the smoke cloud.
And so once all the pilots have been organized into proper formation,
they would continue to their Target and commence their bombing raid.
For this mission, Henry was in his typical position,
right behind the front turret gun,
towards the front of the plane,
when his pilot told him to start dropping smoke bombs.
Henry did as he was told and so he pulled the lever
which opened up a chute on the bottom of the plane
and all the smoke bombs began tumbling out of it.
Now, as soon as he pulled that lever,
all of the smoke bombs that were in that particular chute were ignited.
They were on a timed fuse
and so they would tumble out of the plane
and then before hitting the ground,
they would ignite and then smoke would start billowing out of them.
But for some reason, after he pulled that lever,
a couple of the smoke bombs fell out of the chute,
but one of them kind of got turned around and as it tumbled down,
it kind of caught itself on the lip and bounced back up into the plane
and it struck Henry square in the face,
shattering his nose.
And then it ignited and literally lit Henry’s face on fire,
which instantly blinded him.
Smoke bombs are not considered lethal devices
because they do not explode the way typical bombs do.
However, make no mistake about it,
you would not want to be near a military grade smoke bomb
when it went off
in order for it to emit that very thick and long lasting Smoke.
That it does. The smoke bomb ignites a chemical fire within itself
that burns extremely hot. And so
when the smoke bomb came back inside the plane
and ignited right in front of Henry,
those chemicals landed on his face.
And so that’s why he caught on fire.
And if that wasn’t bad enough,
the smoke bomb also filled the plane completely with smoke,
making it impossible for the pilots to see anything.
Despite his burning and shattered face,
all Henry could think about was
if he didn’t get this smoke bomb off the plane
in the next few seconds, they were all going to crash and die.
So instead of trying to put out his burning face,
Henry began feeling around on the ground for the smoke bomb,
which, again,
is basically like a fireball.
And when he found it, he pulled it into his chest,
trying to smother it as best as he could.
And while his body completely engulfed in flames,
Henry began low crawling his way towards the front of the plane,
where he knew just by touch there was going to be a window.
And so as he agonizingly crawled.
He’s on fire. He finally gets to this window.
He can feel it above him,
and he manages to lift the smoke bomb up and throws it out the window.
And afterwards, he collapses in the ground,
and he passes out completely on fire,
fully expecting to die. A few seconds later,
the smoke Inside of the plane cleared
because now the smoke bomb was gone.
And the pilot, who would put the plane on autopilot,
but did have to drop significantly in altitude
because they were starting to stall,
finally could see again
and saw they were about 300 feet from hitting the water.
And so he was able to pull back and get them out of their dive,
and he narrowly escaped crashing into the water,
and he turned around and began flying back to base.
On this return trip, the crew,
who were unhurt, began assessing the damage,
and they saw Henry on fire on the side of the plane.
So they rushed over and they put him out with a fire extinguisher,
expecting him to be dead. But to their shock and horror,
he was still alive, as they gave him morphine for his pain
and expected him to die any moment.
But Henry didn’t die. Instead,
he was very cheerful on the flight all the way back to base,
and he would ask each of his crew members if they were okay,
and they would all say, yeah,
I’m just fine. It’s really you who were concerned about here.
When the pilot finally landed back at base,
Henry’s body had stiffened up so dramatically from being on fire
that the doctors couldn’t actually get him out of the plane
side door,
and so they had to dismantle the side of the plane to get Henry out.
So the doctors
Fully expected Henry was going to die
basically any moment from his horrible wounds.
But since he hadn’t yet,
they did everything they could to try to save him.
They put him through dozens of surgeries,
including one where they would try to remove the chemical flecks
from the smoke bomb that had embedded in his eyes.
And since these chemicals combusted
as soon as they made contact with oxygen,
every time they pulled out one of these flecks,
it would burst into flames
and very painfully burn Henry’s eyes a little bit more.
While Henry was undergoing all these surgeries,
the rest of his B29 crew immediately went to their commanding officer
and said, you have to put Henry in for the medal of honor.
The medal of honor
is the highest award you can achieve in the US military.
After the commanding officer heard the story of what Henry had done,
he agreed. And in record time,
he got the paperwork processed and got Henry approved for this award.
But there were no actual
physical medals of honour on the island to actually present to Henry,
and the officers and the rest of his crew
were worried Henry would die
before the actual medal
was shipped out to the island to be given to him.
And so the only medal of honour that was on this island
was inside of a museum behind a glass case.
And so one of the officers in Henry’s crew went into the Museum
shattered the case, took the display medal of honor,
and rushed to Henry’s bedside and put it around his neck.
And then after that, somehow Henry just didn’t die.
After dozens and dozens of surgeries,
Henry actually regained sight in one of his eyes
and regained the use of most of his body.
Henry would later be asked in an interview
what it was like to do this very heroic thing that he did,
and he would say, well,
you know, I only move the bomb 13 feet,
but 13 feet feels like 13 miles when you’re on fire.
Henry would go on to be honorably discharged from the military,
and he would spend the next 37 years
working closely with other burn victims,
trying to keep them positive and optimistic about their recovery.
He would also go on to have four children,
one of which became an Alabama state senator.
In 2,002, Henry died of natural causes at the age of eighty.