Red Randall at Pearl Harbor

by R. Sidney Bowen

  “Who are you shoving, Randall?” he cried hotly. “Don’t try that rough stuff on me, see? I’ve got every right to keep that plane if I want to, Randall. And I’ve got a good mind to yank you right out of there.”

  “Better not try it, Joyce!” Red said through his teeth. And then as a wave of shame swept through him, he said, “I’m sorry I shoved you, Joyce. I really didn’t mean it that way. But I’m in a hurry. Honestly, I am. I can’t tell you about it, but I am. And thanks for coming down when you saw me.”

  “Yeah?” young Joyce shouted as Red ran up the Ranger a little. “A fine lot of thanks. And a fine guy you are, too. And if you’re in a hurry to practice flying the course, you can save it, Randall. You won’t have a chance next week. You wait and see!”

  But wait was one thing that Red did not do. He simply waved one hand for Joyce to clear away from the wing, and then taxied around and out into take-off position. Two minutes later he was in the air, gaining altitude steadily and heading up past Kaneohe toward Waikane. By the time he reached that section of Oahu, he had completely forgotten Jimmy Joyce and his shame for the way he had treated the Annapolis-bound youngster who had actually done him a favor by bringing Number Eight to earth when he was not bound to do so.

  Those thoughts, and other unimportant ones, occupied no place in his mind as he skirted the Waikane field and passed over the Koolauloa Range foothills to the shore and the endless stretches of sky-blue Pacific beyond. Every thought he had was about what he might see beneath his wings. Of course at first his imagination went on a holiday and played him all kinds of crazy tricks. But each time he spotted something suspicious, a second look proved it to be a patch of kiawe trees, or guava bushes, or a shadowy cut in the wild growth shoreline, or the shadow of his own plane, or a darker or lighter streak in the blue waters that lapped constantly against the shore.

  And so Red’s imagination went on a holiday, and it remained on a holiday as he flew countless figure eights around and about over the shoreline south of Molokai Island. And every moment of the time he peered down at the land and water below. So it was that he let out a startled grunt and stiffened in his seat when he suddenly looked up to rest his eyes, and found himself staring straight at a second Ranger-powered Fairchild in his section of sky. A big blue painted “6” was on the fuselage just back of the rear pit, and in the rear pit itself was the helmeted and goggled head of Jimmy Joyce, complete with one end of his familiar white silk scarf whipping and snapping back over the cockpit head rest.

  “You!” Red exploded into the roar of his engine. “What the thunder are you doing here? Go on, Joyce, scram! I’m here for a reason. Beat it! Two’s a crowd, see?”

  He emphasized his words with some very plain waving of his free hand. But if young Joyce understood, it did not bother him a bit. He simply waved gaily back and cut around and came over closer to Randall’s plane. Red made noises in his throat and glanced fearfully down at the water, as though he expected to see an honest-to-goodness Japanese submarine break surface and then crash-dive quickly because its commander and crew had sighted two and not just one plane in the air.

  Of course no Japanese submarine or any submarine broke surface as Red stared downward, but that did not make him feel any easier about Jimmy Joyce’s presence. In fact, he became even more annoyed with Joyce for obviously tagging along on something that was none of his business. He lifted one clenched fist to shake it and clearly gesticulate what would happen to Joyce if he did not clear out pronto.

  However, as he raised his clenched fist, he suddenly relaxed and let it drop back into his lap. There, off to the northeast, a large formation of aircraft came into view. The planes were several miles away and at a fair altitude, but as he peered at them they grew larger and seemed to be nosing downward toward the shores of Oahu. There were eighteen planes in all, and they were in two V groups of nine planes each.

  “Must be the planes Dad said were coming from the Mainland this morning,” Red grunted and glanced at his wrist watch.

  The hands told him that it was half a minute lacking of seven fifty-five. In an abstract sort of way he wondered what made him look at his watch. What difference did it make to him what time the planes from the Mainland arrived? None at all. And he took his eyes off his watch and fastened them on the approaching formation again.

  As he picked it out against the blue he expected to see it swerve from its dead-on course toward Waikane and veer more southerly toward Hickam Field. It didn’t, though. It kept right on coming straight and down toward Waikane. And then, suddenly, Randall’s heart seemed to stop beating completely. Every bit of blood in his veins froze stiff, and his brain went numb. The formation had shifted its position in the sky slightly, and the insignia on the wings and fuselages stood out bold and clear in the morning light.

  “Japanese!” Red gasped as he found his tongue. “Jap planes! Those are Jap planes. I can see the Rising Sun insignia. Those are Jap planes coming down here!”

  Chapter Seven – Lightning With Wings

  RED RANDALL’S CHOKED and strangled words seemed to come to his ears from a thousand miles away as he sat stiff in the seat, staring out through utterly disbelieving eyes at a formation of eighteen Japanese warplanes streaking down out of the glorious December morning sky toward the island of Oahu. Instinctively he tried to snap out of his trance, tried to get his stunned brain to functioning so that he might grasp the meaning of all he saw. But he was powerless to do anything.

  And then, as he sat frozen and staring wide-eyed, the oncoming Japanese formation shifted position again. Nine of the planes veered southward and down. The remaining nine held to a course straight for the Waikane section.

  “What are they here for? What’s the idea? Are they really Japs, or is this just...?”

  Red Randall scarcely heard his own words. Perhaps he actually never spoke them aloud. And then without warning it happened, and it no longer mattered what he had said, or how he had spoken it. As though the gods had cut a hole in the blue Hawaiian sky, six more Japanese warplanes seemed to appear out of nowhere. Red blinked hard and when he opened his eyes again, he was right smack in the middle of a flight of Japanese planes!

  In practically that same instant, thin, quivering ribbons of silver streaked out from a plane very close to him. They traced silvery paths across the air toward his Fairchild, and in the same split second he heard the savage yammer of aerial machine-gun fire.

  “Hey, watch it!” he gasped. And that was as far as he could get.

  The rest choked in his throat as he stared at half of his cockpit windshield. It was a mess of shattered glass that sprayed down into his lap, and the narrow dural framework was twisted like a pretzel. In the same instant he heard the high-keyed hum of metallic bees, and the pretzel-shaped dural windshield framework jumped and shook and then flew off and disappeared from view.

  The next thing he realized the Fairchild was in a power spin and twisting down toward the shoreline below. Whether he had thrown the craft into a spin, or whether heart-chilling fright had moved his hands and feet on the controls for him, he did not know. And he did not bother to figure it out. His ears were filled with the roar of many engines, including his own. And cutting through the thunderous roar was the sharp staccato yammer and chatter of aerial machine-gun fire.

  “They shot at me! They shot at me!”

  Over and over again he chanted those words in a high, strained voice that made his throat feel raw and burning. Cold beads of sweat poured off his face, and every square inch of his skin seemed to twitch and quiver, as though waiting for that horrible sensation he had never experienced in his life. The sensation of hot bullets slicing and chewing into his body.

  During those crazy, whirlwind seconds, however, flying instinct was at work. Somehow he managed to throttle the Ranger and pull the Fairchild out of its mad power spin. He came out of it with his brain spinning like a top, and for a moment or two everything in all directions was just a swimming blur. A swimming blur throug
h which came the heart-stopping hammering of aerial gunfire.

  Nothing, however, smashed and crashed its way into his plane. At least, he could feel nothing hitting the aircraft. Proof that he himself had not been hit lay in the fact that he could move his arms and legs, breathe and swallow and feel no pain. As a matter of fact, all he could feel was the wild, pounding thump of his heart against his ribs. That and the prop-wash rushing through the bullet-shattered windshield to hit him in the face.

  His vision cleared in a moment, and when it did he found that he was no longer in the middle of a tangle of silvery ribbons and flame-spitting Japanese warplanes. He was off by himself in clear air. But over to his right and just a little bit above his altitude were two Japanese attack planes cutting down toward a target from opposite sides. And that target was Jimmy Joyce in his Fairchild!

  Red tried to cry out, to shout an alarm to Joyce, but the words caught in his throat and stuck there. He saw Joyce make no effort to cut out under the withering fire pouring down from the two diving Japanese planes. True, the tracer streams from the Japanese guns were passing well clear of the Fairchild’s wings, but the fact that the Japanese were overshooting now did not mean they might not correct their aim in the next split second.

  And then, as though hidden springs had suddenly been released, Jimmy Joyce’s Fairchild whipped up over and down in a half roll. But Joyce had waited a couple of seconds too late. Through strained and aching eyes Red Randall saw the Fairchild’s tail sort of kick off to one side, then snap off at a point just back of the fin, and go twisting and turning off into thin air.

  “Jump, Jimmy!” Red screamed, unconsciously banking around toward the bullet-crippled plane. “Jump! Get out of there! Jump, Jimmy! Jimmy-y-y-y-y, jump!”

  Like a crushed and crumpled bit of paper tossed to the breeze, Joyce’s Fairchild skidded this way and that, half spun around, jerked in the other direction, and actually seemed to do cartwheels in the air. Way back in the far reaches of his mind Red Randall realized that the two Japanese attack planes had come out of their dives and were now arcing high up into the blue. But not for a second did he take time out to look at them. His eyes were on Jimmy Joyce’s tumbling plane. His gaze was riveted on that doomed aircraft slip-sliding and spilling downward. With frozen lips he sobbed out a broken prayer that Jimmy Joyce might be alive, that he might leap free of the doomed plane and take to his parachute.

  One year, two years, three years dragged by—so it seemed to him—and then Red saw Jimmy Joyce push and haul and hoist himself up out of his cockpit, get one foot on the cockpit rim and then fall rather than jump from his plane. Like a lump of brown clay his body shot straight downward, not even turning over once.

  Then suddenly the anxious watcher saw the tiny white puff of Joyce’s pilot chute pop up into the air. Almost at the same moment he saw it pull the main chute out of the pack. In the next instant the silk folds had been caught by the wind and had billowed into mushroom shape. And Jimmy Joyce was swaying back and forth at the ends of the shroud lines like a human pendulum hung in the sky.

  “Thank you, dear God! Oh, dear God, I thank you so! He’s safe! He’s all right. Jimmy made it! He made it! I…”

  The rest was never spoken, for at that exact moment Red Randall saw a sight that for a second or so his eyes and his brain simply refused to believe. Was he stark raving insane? Had he gone crazy completely? Was this just a dizzy nightmare of horror? Or was...?

  “No, no!” he screamed wildly. “You can’t! You can’t do that. No, no! No-o-o-o!”

  But the Japanese attack plane, undoubtedly one of the original two, did not stop. Its murderous pilot did not hear Red Randall’s piteous pleas. Nor would he have stopped had he heard them. The Japanese plane streaked straight down at Jimmy Joyce swaying helplessly in the air at the ends of his shroud lines. And an instant later the plane’s guns yammered and chattered, and a shower of silvery streamers cut a path down past Joyce, just missing him by practically nothing at all.

  “Darn you, no! You can’t! You can’t do that! You can’t, do you hear?”

  Even as the crazy, useless words spilled and dribbled off Red Randall’s lips he banked his Fairchild around, pulled up the nose slightly and went charging blindly up across the sky toward the diving Japanese plane. Maybe its pilot saw him, feared a collision with this stumpy little civilian plane. Or maybe the Japanese saw that his high-powered aircraft was now dangerously low to the shoreline, and a further delayed pull-out from his thundering dive might result in complete disaster. Or maybe it was for some entirely different reason. At any rate, as Red Randall went charging recklessly in with his unarmed Fairchild, the Japanese whipped one last burst of bullets down at the dangling Joyce, and then cut away from in front of Randall and went prop screaming around and high up into the blue.

  “Jimmy? Jimmy Joyce! Are you all right? Did he hit you? Can you land? Do you think you can land? Can you?”

  Red was whispering the words as he eased back his throttle and started coasting down through the air in wide circles. And every instant of the time he kept his gaze riveted on young Joyce. But the youth, who expected to go to Annapolis next fall seemed not to move a muscle. True, his two arms were upraised, and his two hands were curled about the shroud lines. But he did not let go to wave at Red. Nor did he so much as lift his head and look at the circling Fairchild. He simply hung there motionless on the shroud lines, save for the movements of his swaying body. He just hung there as though dead. Doomed and finished just as was his bullet-riddled plane, now a twisted water-logged bit of junk beneath the blue Pacific a good half-mile out from shore.

  “Oh, Jimmy, no!” Randall choked out, circling his plane in a bit closer. “You’re okay, Jimmy! You’ve got to be okay. He didn’t hit you, did he? No! You’ve got to... Jimmy! Jimmy boy!”

  The last was a shriek of inexpressible relief that burst from Red’s lips. Jimmy Joyce was not dead, and if he had been hit by any Japanese bullets, they had not found a vital spot, because he suddenly seemed to come to life. He pulled up his legs jack-knife style and switched his grip on the shroud lines and shock straps for a better and more workable grip. The ground was not very far below him now, and his drift was carrying him farther in shore, toward a flat level stretch of sandy ground that extended back inland between two shrub-covered foothills.

  In short, Joyce was preparing to touch earth. And a moment later he had landed. His parachute missed some kiawe trees by inches, but Lady Luck was with him. The mushroomed silk did not foul, and in the next instant he hit the ground, bumped and skidded along for a few feet, and then seemed to twist over and fall flat on his face as his chute silk caught on some bushes and wrapped itself about them.

  Red Randall’s heart remained frozen and lodged fast halfway up his throat, until he saw Jimmy Joyce slowly stir himself and finally push himself up to a sitting position.

  “Don’t move, Jimmy!” Red cried, and hauled his throttle all the way back. “Stay right there, Jimmy! I’m coming down!”

  Chapter Eight – December Seventh

  THE MEMORY OF fear and terror, and the shock of watching his friend’s narrow escape had their inevitable reaction on Red as he glided down toward the narrow flat stretch of ground that cut back from the shore. It was all he could do to hold his light plane steady and keep it from swerving one way or the other out of line. But Red Randall put that Fairchild down square in the center of the level strip of ground. And he set it down light as a feather, too, and braked it to a full stop.

  With a single motion he snapped open his safety harness and parachute strap buckles, and leaped from the cockpit. In ten strides he had reached Jimmy Joyce, where he sat on the ground off to one side, and had dropped to his knees.

  “Jimmy! Jimmy boy!” he gasped anxiously. “Are you all right? Are you hurt?”

  Young Joyce lifted his head and stared unspeaking at him for a moment out of eyes that faintly glistened with the close approach of tears. Then he swallowed hard and licked his lips.
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  “You...you saved my life, Randall!” he said in a husky whisper; “I saw you, Red. I saw you go at that Japanese plane. He was going to kill me, Red! He was trying to shoot me like...like... Oh, gee, Red! I...I can’t seem to talk straight.”

  A tingling lump formed in Randall’s throat, and it took quite an effort to swallow it. He put out a hand, hesitated, and then put an arm about Jimmy Joyce’s shoulders and squeezed hard.

  “Don’t bother talking, Jimmy,” he said. “It’s okay. Everything’s okay, now. But, boy! I sure thought you were a goner, Jimmy. I...listen!”

  Both boys huddled there motionless as the ground beneath them seemed to heave and sway and tremble, and a dull, rumbling roar rolled down upon them from all directions at the same time. And it did not stop. It went on and on and seemed to mount in its thunderous fury, ease off for a second, and then mount higher than ever.

  “Pearl Harbor!” Jimmy Joyce suddenly broke the silence between them. “The Japs are attacking Pearl Harbor! Hear that noise, Red? Those are bombs dropping on Pearl Harbor!”

  Randall started to nod, and then checked the movement as there suddenly came a louder earth shaking explosion close by. It came from behind them, beyond the Koolauloa Range. The earth seemed to heave them upward, and as the rumbling sound started to die away, it was sharply punctuated by furious machine-gun fire. They could not see the planes, but they could clearly hear the whine of over-revving engines and the screaming whistle of diving wings in the wind. Red tried to speak but had to swallow a couple of times to get the sawdust out of his mouth.

  “That was over at the Waikane field!” he finally gasped. “They must be bombing and shooting up the Waikane field, Jimmy!”

  Joyce looked at him out of eyes that were wide and strained and filled with puzzled alarm.