You look past the helmet of the man ahead as he stamps. You see a row of upraised left hands, each grasping a silvery hook that runs like a trolley on a cable lengthwise through the plane's cabin. Every broad, white linen static line, you observe, is looped over the paratrooper's wrist and over his left shoulder to the center opening of the chute pack. None is wrongly under his wrist. At least nobody ahead will get fouled and have to be propelled through the door football-wise.
Now it seems almost silent, for the motors' thick voices have lowered to the gentlest whisperings. This is the instant for which everything has been planned—all the days of roadwork, the weary exercise, the maddening rehearsals on mocked-up platforms, the monstrous packing of fighting, eating and communicating equipment.
The jump master's wind-torn face becomes set behind its twisted, jowly expression. “Jump!” he shouts in a loud voice, as though the plane's motors were not stilled.
From the uplined men there bursts a wild shout in which the jumping cry, “Geronimo!” is mingled with other raw-meat gutturals more expressive than the wary cry of an Indian chiefs name.
You catch a glimpse of the first men leaping and vanishing into space. The line is melting away. The noisy cabin is getting emptier and lonelier.
You feel yourself pushed from behind. You push, too, hugging up close against the pack of the swollen man ahead. There is no time for any calculation in the doorway. There is no time to get set and make again that same kind of jump which, on your baptismal plunge a few days ago, earned you the simple but golden praise of “Good exit” from the officers watching below.
No, this time it seems more as though the door came up to you than you to the door. One second you're between those two conspicuously vacant rows of seats with your fists tightened around your hook. You're thinking about space—how empty it is and what a lot of it there is underneath. So much of nothing to jump into. You can see clouds on the horizon, and you're so low that the green rims of the mountains show through the window.
You are in the door, and because you are near the end of the line, the jump master himself is now standing, ready to follow the last jumper into space. His is the only face you have seen since standing up and it is tense, anticipating his jump.
Then you are on the threshold, with a cold wind in your face and the grey tail of the plane in the left corner of your eye. An upside-down tumbling blob is falling about fifteen feet below. Your predecessor is still attached by the static lines of the umbilical cord to the plane as you cross the threshold.
And then you are in space, you are out in the great vastness of the world and falling. Like an animal you close your eyes. You have been taught to count “one thousand, two thousand, three thousand,” as loudly as you did so well when jumping off the mocked-up platform. But there are no words in you. You are counting farther in the vast pulse of the new outdoors. Your eyes are shut. You are seeing with sensation only. It is totally silent out here in space. You are completely alone, tucked in a half-ball, arms crossed mandarin-style. Your right hand, biting into the left side of your emergency chute, is ready to draw across and pull its red metal ring at what would be the “four thousand” count.
Suddenly hands seem to place themselves around your shoulders and waist. You get yanked back. Your fall is stopped with a jerk, like being tackled in football from behind. Your head is snapped back, and that foetal curve in which your body protectively coiled itself is abruptly opened. Your legs dangle straight, and you become conscious of having heavy feet. Your eyes open, and everything is blue and airy and silent all around except for one long disorderly choppy carpet called the world, which happens to be slanted up beside your ear but takes the position where it is lying just under you.
You've stopped falling. The earth—yes, that's what it is down there—is far away. Its patchy rug stretches all the way to the horizon ahead.
The air is beautifully quiet. Ahead, dangling and twisting, reaching up arms to their suspension cords or grabbing helmets knocked askew by their opening shock, is a long line of your comrades. Everybody is falling together, lined up just as they were in that noisy cabin with its ugly open door but with the difference that they are suddenly spaced much wider apart, stepped down like a staircase—the man ahead seemingly on your level, but the lead man so much lower you realize that all are actually sloping in an inclined row of white chutes.
You look up and see the most lovely sight of all, lovelier than an outspread landscape. It is the white silk canopy of your chute overhead. It has recovered from its opening shock before you have. The edge of the white panel still is palpitating—more gently than your heart—breathing with a slight give-and-suck motion as it feels the cushion of air. It looks like a big white sea anemone, breathing underwater, calm and regular. You are falling, but you are falling safely.
After glancing up, you raise your arms to the “risers,” the four webbed straps by which you dangle. A pair vee upward from each shoulder. To get a good look at the 28-foot white silk billowing so beautifully, you grab each pair of risers and spread them. If light shines through rifts in the chute, you have “blown” the panel. Then you can pull the red handle of the emergency chute, strapped to your chest. With both chutes open you get nearly the same rate of descent, because pushing against each other the two big silken mushrooms partially deflate.
Usually after your chute snaps open, you oscillate like a pendulum in space. It is agreeable to know you are safe, but this motion is the most dangerous element in jumping. It is not vertical fall at a gentle rate of 14 to 20 feet a second that is perilous, but a sidewise swing on the ground. No soldier is so vulnerable as a paratrooper lying with a broken leg on a field, trussed in equipment from which he cannot free himself.
At this moment, when the white static line which opens the chute is left behind, pasted by the wind to the plane's fuselage, each paratrooper ceases to be a jumper and prepares to fight.
The deadly metronomic oscillation, which every puff of wind accentuates, can be stopped only by another stunt with the risers. Having grasped both pairs and examined the inside of the canopy, the swinging paratrooper shifts his hands and grabs the risers diagonally—either the front left and rear right, or the front right and rear left. Then he starts “climbing,” or pulling down on the thick webbing. This flattens the parachute into an oval like a meat-dish cover. The wind causing the oscillation slips by, and the swings become shorter.
Parachutists share one thing with aviators; the higher they are, the safer they feel. Yet safety is denied in all directions: if the jump is high they present a target to the enemy for a dangerously long time, while if dropped from low altitude they may be unable to check their pendulum swings in time to prevent broken legs.
U.S. Army jumpers have been dropped in combat from 400 feet or lower.
While halting his oscillation, the infantryman studies the ground. On a small sandtable in a corner of the parachute repair shed, he has often seen this land pattern in miniature, with trees indicated by pinches of moss on sticks, and rivers by torn strips from chute panels. Now here is the real thing below him.
Contrary to the general view, trees are not dangerous in themselves. Though canopies entangled in branches can cause costly delays, injuries in trees are no more numerous than injuries suffered in landing on the ground. What the chutist fears is rocks and, above all, water.
Parachutists struggle with their risers because they are trying to steer. The main problem is to land with the wind either from the rear or from the front. If the chutist hits the ground while sweeping sideways, the crash can knock him out or cripple him. Landing “squared away” downwind, the paratrooper knows that he can take up the landing shock by tumbling forward. Or if the wind is blowing in his face, the ground carpet unrolling at his feet instead of being hauled away behind him, the paratrooper gets ready with a backward tumble.
In the last few feet, the ground rushes up swiftly. The chutist's last act before hitting is to take a deep breath and give a simul
taneous pull downward on both pairs of risers, using all the strength he possesses. The vicious pull lessens the landing shock by increasing the pressure of air imprisoned in the canopy, hence slowing his falling speed.
Rolling as he lands, the chutist comes to his feet, sometimes amid the silken mesh of suspension lines. Throwing them off, he jumps to his feet, unlimbers his short carbine and begins unsnapping the chute harness. If the billowing chute is pulling him over the ground, he outdistances it by running in a half circle downwind until he gets on the other side of the chute. As the chute turns, it is deflated.
Sometimes the paratrooper is under fire. Without stopping in the exposed middle of the field, he dogtrots as fast as his overloaded pack will let him to the “assembly point.” The deflated chute lies on the ground. Parachutes are expendable and so, too, in the grim way of war, are paratroopers; it will be recovered by us if we win, by the enemy if we lose.
And that's what it's like to jump as a paratrooper.
THE SERVICEABLE WRECKS OF NEW GUINEA
1944
The battle for New Guinea was a war between two shipwrecks. No historian will ever tell it that way. Yet without those two rusty, bomb-distorted hulks, one Japanese, one Allied, the duel for air dominance over the ex-German mandate of New Guinea and the Australian territory of Papua might have gone far differently.
Like felled lighthouses, immutable to tides and weather, the two wrecks lie on the northern and southern coasts that slope up to the 16,000-foot wet green roof of the Owen Stanley Range. They lie almost opposite each other, the Allied victim on a bluish-green top branch of Australia's Great Barrier Reef in the Coral Sea just outside Port Moresby, and the Japanese corpse off Gona on a submarine appendage of the manifold coral labyrinths of the Bismarck Sea. These two wrecks were the pylons of the race for air power over New Guinea.
Flattened on the darkened foredeck of a prowling PT boat, the writer drifted one night past the Japanese wreck. An enemy bomber, hunting for coastal creeping LSTs and LCIs, hummed through the stars. Sagging overhead like a building ready to fall, fishes swimming in phosphorescence through her bulkheads, the Japanese merchantman seemed forever bound for that nearby beach she would never attain.
Escaping Japanese often made their way out in native outrigger lakatois over three miles of tepid, tropical sea to their wreck. They would hide in the slanting, shattered cabins, ransack the sea-soaked stores for rice and small cans of infantry tunafish, and hope for rescue. When they had an officer to give them orders, they would build machine-gun nests on the starboard side, away from the binoculars of our beach patrols. From these nests they shot up covert fusillades, in the half light of dawn or sunset, at low-flying attack bombers on their way north to strafe Rabaul.
Often search parties were sent to the wreck with hand grenades and dynamite and orders to give the cadaver a thorough de-lousing. Scraps of rice and fish would be found behind the flaky brown lifeboat davits, and fresh .50-caliber jackets in the scuppers. But the stowaways were deep in the half-flooded, labyrinthine depths. It is never easy to dig the Japanese from his dugout; in this weird wreck, where anemone and coral clung and glowed in the Venetian corridors, it was impossible.
On a brilliant day, crammed piggyback in a single-seater P-38 photographic plane, head jammed against the shoulder of Lieutenant Fred Hargesheimer, the writer took a buzzing look at the other shipwreck: our own freighter that lies on the reef off Moresby. Even from the air, and over two miles up, one could see it was scribbled over by fifty-calibers. Unlike the slanting Nipponese merchantman, this wreck sat squarely upright on its reef, like a battered drunkard proving a doubtful sobriety. Had the freighter been pierced in those repeated bombings of Moresby in the first year of war, when our Kittyhawks, American-and Australian-flown, were far outnumbered by Zeros? Or did some Japanese sub, patrolling the mouth of the glaring Torres Strait, nail her in those evil, difficult first days as the freighter slipped outside the heavy net at Moresby? Nobody was certain.
Hargesheimer circled at 10,000 feet, then stabbed a finger. The twin tails of the P-38 arose and we went down in an ear-stopping dive. The water came up fast, as though the sea were a blue enameled basin, daubed with the off-green and white of the coral reefs. Just when it seemed our nose would dip the waves, Hargesheimer pulled back the stick and we were off in a flat glide, roaring over the wavecrests, scattering schools of flying fish to veer away. The wreck was ahead.
She must have once been black. Now she was sourly rusty, burned, chewed by bullets and cannon shells like an old shoe worried at by dogs—the eyelets of her portholes torn apart, the heel of her fantail half ripped away and sagging. Whatever skipper had beached her on that reef had beached her well. Great bomb holes had torn her sides. The Coral Sea lapped her vitals. Her stack seemed made of bronze lace. Her bridge and superstructure, the brow and visage of a ship, looked like the punch-bitten face of a hobo prizefighter. Yet for all her mutilations, she still rode astride her reef. And her wounds were honorable; those marks in her side were made by friendly bombs, if there is such a thing. For this anonymous freighter was the true victor of the battle of the Bismarck Sea. Here, lagging on a reef outside Moresby, lay the tackling dummy of Pacific air power. The stuffing was leaking out, the uprights were sagging; even the dummy's name had been stricken from Lloyd's. Yet this dummy had taught tackling to the squad that saved New Guinea.
New Guinea, and Australia with her, was twice rescued by U.S. air power. The first time was the Battle of the Coral Sea when two American aircraft carriers, the Lexington and the Yorktown, halted a combined Japanese task and invasion force attempting to round the corner of New Guinea southbound—a critical and desperate encounter in which much went wrong, a wild act of defense for navyless Australia by an ally which had lost most of its force at Pearl Harbor. When the Battle of the Coral Sea was over, the remnants and bodies of the Lexington were scattered across the sea approaches to Port Moresby, from gold-veined Misima Island to where the Mud People at the mouth of the Fly River grub out their insect-tormented existence.
Ten months later there took place off New Guinea another far different battle of air power against sea power for the salvation of Australia. Rehearsed, practiced, and methodically executed, the Battle of the Bismarck Sea was the turning point of MacArthur's campaign. A reported 22 Japanese vessels left Rabaul and crept down western New Britain through the Bismarck Sea into the Huon Gulf. Their task was to relieve the Emperor's fading garrison at Lae, whose supply barges had been lacerated by PT boats. Not one vessel arrived. For three days that convoy underwent the bitterest, most systematic lashing of air power any seaborne force encountered. Fortresses, Liberators, Mitchells, Bostons, Lightnings, Kittyhawks, Airacobras and Australian-flown Hudsons cut the Japanese force into smoking hulks and oily eddies. Most of the Japanese troops stayed below decks and went down with their transports. Bodies were scattered over miles of water. The sharks feasted.
How was the convoy's annihilation made possible? Only by the tackling dummy on the reef outside Moresby. For it was here that skip-bombing, deck-level bombing, and masthead bombing were first tested in the Pacific.
Where should you drop your bomb: fifty feet from the side of the Whatsis Maru, or twenty? Should the bomb be skipped in, like a flat stone making one hop before it strikes? Or should it be slugged in close to the waterline in a shoestring tackle? What are your chances of a hole-in-one in the smokestack? … In many long hours of rehearsal on the old wreck such questions were answered.
When should the high-level bombers loose their falling patterns of death, when the mediums, and when should the Water Level Limited go in? What is the right moment for strafing, the specialty of the Australian Beaufighters and the American A-20s? What should be the cue of torpedo-carrying specialists like the Hudsons?
All these delicate timings, aimed to exploit every weakness of a convoy, had been reckoned in the hilltop headquarters of the Fifth Air Force long before the Japanese admiral led his doomed column past the fum
ing volcano of Rabaul. We decided, in those months, how the Battle of the Bismarck Sea was to be fought. As Lieutenant General George Kenney, the little ex-fighter pilot who commands the Fifth, might say, we planned it that way. The wreck on the reef outside Moresby made it possible to rehearse, at the very edge of the aerial front, these new tactics.
There were casualties. No bombing range, even back home in the United States, is without them. More than one B-25 picked himself up from deck level too late, caught the freighter's goalposts with a wing, and went in to death. Sometimes a bomb skipped too far out would jump the riddled torso and explode on the other side. More than one P-39 was lost determining how close, for a fighter, is too close.
But the old wreck was always there. Whatever new stunt they thought up to test on it, however big the bomb and terrible the impetus, the old freighter absorbed the punishment. She was the Durable Malloy of all the Pacific, and like that famous stumblebum who absorbed poison, was run over, frozen, beaten and thrown into the East River, the ancient hulk took everything slung at her, without dishing any out.
The Japanese wreck, on the other side of the Hump, had a double role in the battle for New Guinea. First, it was a memorial.
When the Japanese were halted at the China Strait by the Lexington and Yorktown, they drew back just long enough to prepare at Rabaul another invasion force for New Guinea. Seven American A-24 Dauntless dive bombers, remnants of that same outfit which had tried to stop the Japanese at Bali, went out to meet them. The war was eight months old; our experience was thin. Something went wrong about the rendezvous with the top cover of Airacobras—the lone P-38 in New Guinea in those days was a gunless photographic job—and only two crews of the A-24s got back. But one of the crews that was missing, before they died, launched the bomb that put that Japanese merchantman on the reef between Buna and Gona. They died, but provided themselves and their comrades with a tombstone.
Weller's War Page 51
