December 1945: US investigator Robert Groh visits the graves of the four airmen killed in the incident Investigative Division Reports #226, Source: Gregory Hadley

By sifting through oral and written records, interviews with survivors, and reports from local villagers, Hadley managed to reconstruct a complete account of the fateful incident. After parachuting from the burning plane, the airmen were scattered. Bombardier Clinton Wride and tail gunner Florio Spero reached ground safely, but were lynched by the villagers; Spero was killed after emptying his pistol at the mob. Following an attack by the angry crowd, radar operator Max Adams died of head injuries. The rest of the crew survived, though they would certainly have been killed had Japanese soldiers not arrived with orders to detain them for questioning. Jordan and his men were taken to Tokyo for a series of brutal interrogations by the much-feared kempei-tai, or Japanese secret police.

Most readers are familiar with the broad outlines of the Pacific War. But Hadley’s achievement in Field of Spears is to focus in on the experiences of a single air crew and the villagers they encountered. In an extremely personal way, his account brings home the suffering, sacrifice and, ultimately, the horror of war.

For Hadley, the story began shortly after his arrival in Niigata in 1992, when he first heard about the downed B-29. Yet his investigation only started in earnest ten years later, when a friend asked him why the city had been dropped from a list of possible atomic bomb targets.

“I began to wonder if the B-29 was on a reconnaissance mission,” he recalls. “I thought that maybe shooting it down saved Niigata.”

Hadley’s investigation soon led him to the US Air Force’s “pumpkin missions,” in which a B-29 would drop a bomb of the same size and shape as the atomic bomb on a potential target. He even exchanged emails with the late Brigadier General Paul Tibbets, the commander of the fabled Enola Gay, which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. His research revealed that Jordan’s downed B-29 had nothing to do with removing Niigata from the list.

“It was too flat,” he says. “All the other cities were within valleys, so that when you dropped the atomic bomb, the force would hit the walls and come back and do twice as much damage.”

So what, wondered Hadley, was Jordan’s B-29 doing over Niigata? A local historian mentioned that some wreckage of the plane could be found in a nearby field. Apparently, the farmer, Choei Shimizu, would be happy to get rid of it. Hadley jumped at the chance to help in the excavation, but soon had second thoughts.

“It was like you were digging up pieces of a recent automobile accident,” he recalls. “You felt you were one step from digging up cold dead bodies.”

As they unearthed the 45kg chunk of fuselage, Hadley was interested to note that Shimizu seemed both excited and relieved. The tainted soil that they turned over was bluish-grey; nothing grew in it. Shimizu had been a very young boy on the night that the B-29 had crashed on his family’s land. And Shimizu’s aged father would not talk about it.

Hadley discovered a similar taboo when he tried to talk to other villagers about the incident. In an effort to get the locals to open up, he emphasized his long association with Niigata and that his wife’s family was from the area.

“Even then, some 60 years later, people were still scared to talk about it,” he says. “They were ashamed. And, like the fragments in the field, I had to piece the story together.”

Hadley’s research led him to the archives of the National Diet Library. He discovered that American investigators had managed to track down the graves of the crewmen killed in Niigata and repatriate their bodies back to the US. However, the villagers covered up the lynching of the crew, convincing the officials that all the airmen had died during the B-29’s crash landing. Until the publication of Field of Spears, the villagers’ account was the official version of events.

In fact, Hadley discovered that five of Jordan’s crewmen were still alive. This revelation opened up a wealth of new leads, yet it also presented some difficulties.

“It was really hard making cold calls to strangers about something that was the most traumatic experience in their whole lives,” he recalls. “But I was pushed forward by this growing obsession to learn what had happened to these people.”