Combat- Parallel Lines

by William Peter Grasso

  “Speaking of rounds, sir,” Sean said, “these ammo shortages are killing us. I’m still coming up empty on that white phosphorous I asked for. I’d really love to fire a couple of them willy petes straight into that tunnel and burn the shit out of the chinks inside. I could go back and rummage the ammo dump again, but you probably want me to stay here.”

  “Damn right I do,” Grossman replied. “I need you to figure out how and when we’re going to get your flame tank into that tunnel.”

  *****

  Lee Grossman wished he hadn’t been so right; once darkness fell, it seemed like half of China was probing the wooded high ground on which he’d positioned his task force. CCF forces hadn’t broken through anywhere and were probably falling by the hundreds to American artillery, mortars, machine guns, and small arms. But in the dark of night, no GI could tell how many casualties he was inflicting. Old hands like Grossman knew it wouldn’t be much different than daylight fighting: Unless your target was standing right in front of you, you never knew who you shot, anyway…

  If you shot anybody at all.

  All the GIs knew was that no Chinese had gotten close enough to hurl grenades into their fighting holes. Not yet, anyway.

  GIs looked in awe at the tracers arcing through the sky, interwoven like stitches in a crazy quilt, desperate to believe that no living thing could possibly survive in their midst.

  But the Chinese kept coming.

  “They’re feeding through that fucking tunnel,” Grossman said as his frustration swelled. “Where’s the goddamn Air Force?”

  Sean was pressing the headphones tight against his ears, straining to hear every transmission from the aircraft through the bedlam all around him. “Five minutes out,” he was finally able to tell Grossman.

  The first aircraft overhead was Firefly, the C-47 that dropped strings of incredibly brilliant flares. Plodding across the sky at slow speed, she’d only released the first flare when several large-caliber anti-aircraft guns began firing at her, throwing bright green tracers that crisscrossed in the air as they sought their target.

  “Those rounds are coming right from Dog Bone Ridge,” a startled lieutenant said.

  “No, they’re not,” Grossman replied. “The darkness just makes it seem closer. They’re actually shooting from the other side of Dog Bone, probably right from Highway Twenty-Four.”

  “You mean where Second Division is supposed to be, sir?” the lieutenant asked.

  “Yeah,” Grossman snarled. “Exactly where they’re fucking supposed to be.”

  “Firefly’s bugging out,” Sean reported. “Too hot, he says. One flare’s all we’re gonna get. And the damned thing’s not even close to being on target.”

  Not even close: the flare was drifting down well to the east, casting only long, trembling shadows across the barren terrain in front of Task Force Grossman. Occasionally, a group of CCF soldiers were caught running through a sliver of the flare’s silvery light, only to vanish back into darkness before weapons could be brought to bear on them.

  Then Sean heard another voice on the radio. He recognized it instantly.

  “Hey, it’s my little brother bringing in a flight of bombers,” he told everyone in earshot.

  “How the hell can you tell?” Grossman asked.

  “Ain’t no mistaking that Brooklyn mouth, Major. He’s gonna know my voice the minute he hears it, too.”

  “That’s great,” Grossman replied. “So maybe they’ll stick around and actually do something for us? Unlike that useless flare ship?”

  “He better…or I’ll beat his puny little ass black and blue, officer or not.”

  Then, thinking the officers around him might mistake his big brother bravado for insubordination, he assured Grossman, “With all due respect to present company, of course, sir.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Sergeant. Just get him to kill some chinks…and quick, okay?”

  Keying the mike, Sean said, “Switchblade Leader, this is Cobra Five-One. You wouldn’t be Maggie and Paddy’s baby boy, would you?”

  “I might be,” came Tommy Moon’s reply, “but I’m only Half the Dodger fan you are.”

  “See, I told you, sir,” Sean said to Grossman. “That’s my little brother Tommy…eh, make that Major Tommy Moon. That business about Half the Dodger fan…that’s code. Half’s his nickname. Always has been.”

  “Half Moon?” Are you kidding me, Sergeant? How come?”

  “Let’s just say he ain’t the biggest guy in the world, sir. But he makes up in brains what he lacks in size.”

  “Good,” Grossman replied. “We could use a flyboy with brains right now.”

  *****

  Moon’s Menace VI was now a SHORAN-equipped B-26, the only aircraft so equipped in the four-ship Switchblade Flight. Besides Tommy in the pilot’s seat and Hank Roth as navigator, the third crew member was the SHORAN operator, Captain Frank Martin, who was tucked into the old gunner’s compartment in the aft fuselage. There was no longer any room on board for a gunner or his twin .50-caliber turrets. They’d been displaced by Martin and his electronic gear. A dome antenna for the system was installed where the upper turret used to be. The lower turret had been removed completely to save weight; the cutout where it once was had been faired over with sheet metal.

  This was the ship’s first combat mission utilizing SHORAN. The system’s name was an acronym for short-range navigation, but its intended utilization was as a precision radio-guided computing system that allowed putting bombs on target in any condition of visibility, even blind. That was the intention, and it had been achieved with reasonable success during the several practice exercises they’d flown. But the training flights had all been under near-ideal conditions. On this first operational mission, however, Tommy and his crew were finding out the hard way that achieving the intention wasn’t always possible:

  SHORAN might be real good for dropping stuff on a fixed target from 14,000 feet, if we can even get a fully loaded B-26 up that high. But for a close tactical support mission at low altitude—like this one’s suddenly become—it’s useless.

  “I can’t give you the due east attack vector you’re asking for, sir,” Martin insisted. “With the ground station alignment we’ve got here, due east isn’t one of the four possible target vectors the system computes. We’re off by forty degrees. Are you sure you can’t use a vector of one-three-zero degrees?”

  Tommy replied, “We’re trying to drop an egg full of napalm into a tunnel mouth, Frank…in the dark, for cryin’ out loud. It’s straight in or nothing.”

  The use of the word nothing alarmed Hank Roth, the navigator. “You’re not thinking of aborting, are you, sir? I mean…with your brother and all down there…”

  “No, Hank, we’re not going to abort…not on my brother or anybody else who asks for our help. Let’s figure out how we can get this done. You know the exact coordinates of this holding orbit we’re in, right?”

  “Affirmative, sir. I’ve got it dead on the money.”

  Of course you do, Tommy thought. You always know exactly where we are.

  “And the coordinates Sean—I mean my brother, Cobra Five-One—gave you for the tunnel mouth…do they make sense?”

  “Yes, sir. They jive with the chart perfectly. We’re holding eight miles north of the tunnel.”

  “Okay,” Tommy said. “All we need now is two reference points in the sky guiding us in.”

  “In the sky, sir?”

  “Yeah. Let’s see if the ground-pounders can pull this off.”

  He called Sean: “Cobra, this is Switchblade. Can you give me goalposts with illum for a heading zero-niner-zero approach? I need two rounds…one at four miles from target and one at one mile. We’ll give you their heights of burst in a second. Stand by.”

  Sean replied, “Can do on the goalposts. Standing by.”

  Roth was more than a little confused. “Goalposts, sir? What are we talking about?”

  “It’s a little trick we used to do against th
e Krauts, Hank. It helped guide us to a hard-to-see ground target. During the day, we’d use white phosphorous airbursts. The smoke from the burst would hang in the air for a couple minutes, the farthest one from the target high, the closer one low, marking a descending line of approach to the target. All you had to do was fly right over those puffs of smoke. Doing it at night—with parachute flares which’ll be dropping constantly—that’ll be a little tougher. But it’s all we’ve got.”

  “Have you ever done this at night before, sir?”

  “Nope,” Tommy replied.

  “Why can’t the ground guys just mark the target with some burning white phosphorous?” Roth asked.

  “Take a good look down there, Hank. You see all that shit exploding? Mortars, artillery, tank rounds…what do you think the odds are we’ll line up on the right burst?”

  He didn’t need to add, And what if we line up on our own guys by accident?

  As Hank took that long look, Tommy added, “But with a napalm fire…well, it’s usually pretty easy to pick one of them out. Nothing else burns like that. And once we light it off, we’ve marked the target for the ships coming in behind us.”

  “Okay, I get all that,” Roth said, “but how do we see the target on our run? Even with the goalposts, we’re still going to be looking into a dark hole.”

  “You’re right, Hank. That’s why the searchlight ship is going to fly on our left wing. When we pass over the one-mile illum flare, I’ll tell him to switch on the light. We’ll see that tunnel mouth clear as day, I’ll bet.”

  “I understand, sir,” Roth said. “How steep a descent do you want?”

  “No more than three thousand feet per minute. Anything more than that will make aiming a real challenge. And figure in an additional two hundred feet of burst height to the far flare and five hundred to the near one. That should be about right to compensate for their drop while we turn to the attack run.”

  “Coming right up, sir.”

  While Roth whizzed through his computations, Sean came back on the radio, advising Tommy of the anti-aircraft guns’ location.

  Not missing a beat, Roth jotted the guns’ coordinates as Sean spoke them. Transposing those numbers to his chart, he said, “That flak is down in a valley. If we come in low like you want, sir, they won’t even see us until we pop up over the hill.”

  Tommy asked, “Once we clear that first hill, how far to the hill on the other side of that valley?”

  “About half a mile.”

  “They probably won’t have time to get a bead on us…or the ships coming in behind us, either. Our bomb release height…is it higher than those hills?”

  “Affirmative, sir.”

  “Well, you can’t beat that with a stick,” Tommy said. “Give those burst heights for the flares to my brother while I get the rest of the flight into position. We’ll turn to target over the four-mile flare.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The next ninety seconds would be brutally busy for the crew of Moon’s Menace VI. The goalposts illum rounds were in the air; they’d pop their flares any moment. When they did, Tommy would fly the ship toward the highest flare, the one farthest from the tunnel mouth. From there, he’d turn toward the lower flare and begin the attack run.

  “One more time,” he asked Roth, “what’s the highest terrain?”

  “Eighteen hundred feet,” the navigator replied.

  With the ship at 3,000 feet, Tommy allowed himself a moment of confidence in his plan. But it was just a moment. Even though he’d learned to trust Hank Roth’s skills, and the navigational data computed by both Roth and Martin—the SHORAN operator—had agreed precisely, there’d always be that shadow of a doubt, the tiny but nagging certainty that even the most experienced pilots and navigators can make mortal mistakes:

  Nobody’s perfect. We all screw up sometimes, especially when things are happening fast…

  And the chances for those screwups increase astronomically in the dark.

  He’d lost count of the pilots who’d crashed in darkness into terrain they’d known perfectly well was there. But for any number of mystifying reasons, they hadn’t grasped that they were on a collision course with it.

  Tommy had one more question: “No other point along the bomb run is higher than six hundred feet, right?”

  “Affirmative, sir,” Roth replied.

  The artillerymen had done their job splendidly; the high and low flares they’d fired popped from their shells simultaneously, three miles apart, providing a visible descending path to the low-level napalm drop on the tunnel mouth. Moon’s Menace VI skimmed over the farthest flare just seconds after it deployed, turning hard left as she began a brisk descent—at 2,000 feet per minute—toward the lower flare, which marked one mile to the target. Maintaining the 185 miles per hour Roth had calculated as optimum for the attack, the ship was on course to overfly the lower flare in slightly less than sixty seconds. Once that point was reached, Tommy had ten seconds to acquire the tunnel mouth in the glare of the searchlight ship just off his left wing and make final corrections. Once those precious seconds were gone—whether he’d dropped her load of napalm or not—he’d have to pull up sharply to clear Dog Bone Ridge and a second hill a half mile beyond, which stood three hundred feet taller.

  They were halfway to the lower flare when Martin, the SHORAN operator, said, “With all due respect, we’re not supposed to be doing this with a SHORAN ship. This equipment is too critical to be put in jeopardy by—”

  But Tommy cut him off, saying, “And you’re not supposed to be talking right now, Frank.”

  When Martin tried to continue his protest, Tommy interrupted him again: “Shut the fuck up, Frank. I’m real busy right now.”

  Per the plan, the searchlight ship’s beam switched on when they reached the low flare. From a thousand feet up, the tunnel mouth and the tracks leading to it looked as if they were part of some elaborate model train setup, brightly lit yet colorless in the dazzling light.

  The initial sight picture was better than Tommy had hoped. It took little in the way of adjustment to make it perfect. All he needed to do was jog her slightly left and raise the nose a few degrees…

  “Two seconds,” Roth said, the urgency in his voice impossible to mistake.

  Tommy pickled the napalm canisters away in one.

  Then the ship was climbing rapidly skyward. Dog Bone Ridge was already behind them.

  “Anybody shooting at us?” Tommy asked Martin, the only man on board with a rear view. “We must be over those flak guns by now.”

  “No tracers coming at us,” Martin replied, his tense voice raised an octave. He was new to combat flying. His anxiety confirmed it.

  Tommy asked Switchblade Two—the next ship in the attacking column—if the napalm fire was giving a good visual of the target.

  “You’d better believe it, boss,” came the reply. “We won’t be needing any searchlights to find this one. How’s that flak on the other side?”

  “Nonexistent, for now,” Tommy replied. “Recommend you hold the easterly heading on your climb-out. That should give you the least time in the chinks’ target box. If they figure out there are multiple ships, they’ll start throwing up blind rounds. Don’t try to turn until you’re past that second hill. Use it for cover all you can.”

  Then he added, “If you can’t make out that second hill, wait twenty seconds into the climb-out after the drop before turning.”

  *****

  Sean and Lee Grossman were well pleased with the napalm attack by the four B-26s. “Look at that,” Grossman said. “They even got some of it a little way inside the damn tunnel. Was that your brother in the first ship?”

  “I think so, sir.”

  “Well, he’s got a set of brass balls on him, coming in low like that, spreading that flaming goo like hot butter. It sure took the wind out of the chinks’ attack.”

  Sean smiled. “He always says that a flyboy can’t hit nothing unless he gets right on top of it. I guess we j
ust got the five-dollar show.”

  “Yeah,” Grossman replied. “Now it’s our turn.”

  “That blaze’ll die down in a couple more minutes,” Sean said. “Then I’ll roll in with the flamer.”

  “You sure leading with the flame tank’s the way to go, Sergeant?”

  “Affirmative, sir. Chinks and gooks hate getting that burning shit spit at ’em worse than anything.”

  “I’m still worried, though,” Grossman said. “Narrow as that tunnel is, once you’re inside, there’s no way out but to back up.”

  “Not necessarily a bad thing, sir. It stops us from having to show our weaker sides.” Then Sean asked, “Do we have radio contact with them clowns at Second Division yet?”

  “Still trying. But so far, no dice.”

  “That ain’t good,” Sean replied.

  *****

  The flame tank—a Sherman with the coaxial machine gun in the turret’s mantel replaced by a flame-throwing nozzle—rolled through the dying flames from the air strike, clearing a path along the railroad tracks for the company of infantry behind her. Crossing the scorched earth, the foot soldiers took some small solace in not being cold for once; until the frigid night air regained its grip on the tunnel mouth and surroundings, their path into the tunnel was like walking across a toasty radiator.

  “Just don’t touch the rails with your bare skin,” a platoon sergeant warned. “They’ll be hotter than hell for a while.”

  A smart-mouthed GI replied, “You don’t really think we’re gonna take our gloves off, do you, Sarge?”

  “It ain’t your hands I’m talking about, dimwit. It’s your face—when the chinks start shooting at you and you kiss the ground. You don’t want to ruin that pretty puss of yours for the ladies back home, do you?”

  Sean figured the flame tank was about as well-equipped for the task as he could make her: We got a full tank of flame juice, so we can shoot liquid fire for a solid minute. We ain’t seen or heard a chink tank anywhere around the tunnel, so I ain’t real worried about having to go head to head with one unless it’s been in there all along. And if they got an anti-tank gun or two tucked inside somewhere, they’ll be shooting at our vehicle’s thickest armor.