B-29 Vet Finds Peace At Crash Site Gracious Japanese Welcome Him, Wife

He was beaten. He was starved. In a Japanese prison camp, Bob Goldsworthy’s feet went forever numb with cold.

The pilot of a B-29 bomber, Goldsworthy was shot down over Japan 53 years ago. Of his 12-man crew, five made it to the ground alive. Only three survived the nine-month imprisonment that followed.

Two weeks ago he and his wife left their home in Spokane and returned to Japan to stand on the ground where his plane crashed, visit the site of his prison camp and meet the widow of the pilot who destroyed his plane.

“It was like coming to the end of a book, finishing the last chapter,” Goldsworthy said of his trip. “I saw where it started and where it ended. The book is closed now. I felt good about it.”

For decades after World War II, Goldsworthy wondered where his plane, the Rosalia Rocket, crashed and what became of his lost crew members.

The answers came through Nori Nagasawa, a Japanese woman Goldsworthy and his wife met during a church service in Hawaii five years ago.

Nagasawa lived through the bombing raids wrought on Tokyo by U.S. planes such as Goldsworthy’s. But neither the destruction of Tokyo nor the brutalities of prison camp stood between the pair. They became friends.

With the help of a historian, Nagasawa found the Rosalia Rocket’s crash site. She also found the widow of the pilot who shot the plane down.

Chieko Kobayashi was in the hospital resting from a hip injury when Goldsworthy visited her two weeks ago. Sitting on the edge of her bed, the 70-year-old woman showed Goldsworthy a photo album and scrapbook she kept of her husband, Maj. Teruhiko Kobayashi.

“He was there in front of his airplane in his flying clothes, just like we posed,” Goldsworthy said.

After the war, Teruhiko came to the United States to learn how to fly jets. He visited the Grand Canyon and stood in front of the Alamo. But he never got to enjoy the long peace that followed WWII. He died in a flying accident in 1957.

Similarities stick in Goldsworthy’s mind from his meeting with Kobayashi. Scrapbooks, pictures of loved ones, wives with young children worrying their pilot husbands will never return.

“She was just a wonderful lady, as gracious as could be,” Goldsworthy said.

Wherever they went in Japan, Goldsworthy and his wife, Jean, were showered with graciousness. Japanese men took their lapel pins off and stuck them on his coat. One man gave him a Rising Sun tie clasp, another a pen. An 89-year-old man, small and stooped, insisted on giving the Goldsworthys a framed poem he had written. The couple doesn’t know what it says, but it hangs in their living room.

Even after all these years, the Japanese were eager to be friendly, to mend the fabric the war had torn, Goldsworthy said. At least four Japanese newspapers carried stories about the peace ceremony. A television news show ran a long live interview with Goldsworthy.

At the crash site of the Rosalia Rocket, Nagasawa had arranged a peace ceremony. The mayor of a nearby town and about 150 other Japanese attended. The group prayed for peace. The mayor spoke of the futility of war. Taps was played. Goldsworthy shed a tear remembering two crew members - friends - who were found in the wreckage of his plane.

He had wondered for 53 years what had happened to them. Now he knew. Nagasawa told him when he arrived in Japan.

Goldsworthy and the Japanese set a white cross in the earth at the crash site. It stands about 5 feet tall and bears the words “Going in Peace” in both languages.

The site is now part of a golf course.

It wasn’t the only surprise time had sprung. The prison camp where Goldsworthy ended the war is gone, replaced by a Chinese restaurant and surrounded by office buildings.

And what were yesterday’s scraps of survival are today’s history lessons.

At the Edo-Tokyo Museum, under a glass case and illuminated by bright lights, are Goldsworthy’s boots. They are the only part of his uniform to have survived his imprisonment in Japan.

They are accompanied by pages from his prison diary, pages from a book Goldsworthy has closed, but from which others are reading the lessons of war.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo; Map of site where WWII veteran shot down

MEMO: Cut in Spokane edition