“It sounds so close,” she said, “like it’s coming right over us. Do you think—”
A brilliant, vertical column of light suddenly appeared from the direction of Airfield One—an anti-aircraft searchlight. Then there was another, and in a few seconds, half a dozen more searchlights were scanning the night sky.
“The Japs sure don’t think it’s one of theirs,” Jock said.
Chapter Forty-Three
To the crew onboard Peggy V, the searchlight beams sweeping the sky before her looked like fingers of death. The beams hadn’t found her yet, but once they did, she’d be a sitting duck, clearly illuminated for the anti-aircraft gunners.
“We need to get this the hell over with,” her pilot announced over the interphone, his words tumbling rapidly from his mouth. Panic had raised the pitch of his voice nearly an octave, making him sound like a terrified child. The sudden revving of her four engines was an unmistakable signal to the rest of the crew: the pilot had rammed her throttles forward to the stops.
“Hold on, skipper,” the navigator said as he scrambled to complete his last calculation before the drop. “If you change speed, it’s gonna screw the numbers up! We’ll never get on target!”
The navigator drew the last line of position onto the chart, completing the intersection of his celestial plot with the Iron Range signal. He was happily surprised to find they were much closer to the target than he thought they’d be—but they were off course by a few degrees. If they held this course any longer, they would miss the target by several miles. If Peggy V sped up, he’d have to calculate the release point all over again—and there wasn’t enough time for that.
“Navigator to pilot…come left, heading two niner five…and for God’s sake, skipper, keep the speed at one eight zero!”
The searchlight beams kept dancing across the sky in broad arcs, but they still hadn’t found Peggy V. Ahead of her, pinpoint flashes of orange light began to dot the darkness. It was hard for the crew to judge exactly how far ahead the flashes were. For a brief moment, they seemed captivating and harmless—almost beautiful. But that moment passed quickly, for they remembered even beautiful things can kill.
“Shit…flak,” the pilot said, fixated on the light show playing before him. He shoved his hand against the throttles again, hoping—praying—for more power, but they were already as far forward as they would go. He knew each of those orange flashes was the explosion of an anti-aircraft shell, 75 or 105 millimeters in caliber. In daylight, you’d be able to see the hideous puff of black smoke that lingered, suspended in the air long after the flash. If a shell detonated close enough, it would send red-hot metal fragments tearing through the ship—and through him. Peggy V continued to accelerate slowly but steadily toward the deadly mayhem.
“Skipper, are you gonna turn or what?” the navigator said, his voice now climbing in pitch to match the pilot’s. He had already accepted the pilot had no intention of reducing speed.
Turn…maybe that’s not such a bad idea, the pilot thought as he jerked the control wheel counterclockwise. Throw those Nip gunners off a little. The big bomber responded reluctantly—almost grudgingly—as she banked left.
At a speed of more than three miles a minute, they were less than one minute from the target. The navigator’s final calculation would be simple arithmetic—still an approximation, but one that should be close enough. Close enough for government work, as the instructors in flight school used to say. The bomb bay doors were opened; the navigator picked his second on the stopwatch’s face for release, calling them out to the bombardier as they ticked down.
Five…four…three…two…one.
Bombs away.
Peggy V’s crew held their collective breath as she plowed west-northwest, lighter now without her bomb load, able to climb higher or fly faster at the pilot’s option. Once again, he chose speed. The searchlights had never found them; the anti-aircraft fire had remained just a benign fireworks display, never scarring them or their plane. They’d been told that Japanese anti-aircraft techniques were primitive and almost useless in the darkness. That knowledge came as little comfort, however, when you were the target.
Just when they thought they were clear, one more moment of panic was forced upon them. A lone searchlight beam appeared and a few orange flashes dotted the sky, this time much too high above them to be of concern. The threat evaporated quickly in their wake, and over the emptiness of the Gulf of Carpentaria, they began to breathe again.
“That last bit of flak…we probably passed over some Jap warship sitting off Weipa,” the pilot said, his voice returning to its normal register as he guided his aircraft to the safety of a higher altitude.
It was time to set a course for home. The navigator was already deep into the task. It was a simple exercise: fly south to clear the stream of bombers following you to the target before turning southeast, back to Cairns. As soon as he picked up his plotter, his error struck him like a punch to the gut:
That computation for that last leg before the release point...the speed…I did it in knots instead of miles per hour. A schoolboy’s mistake. We didn’t drop those bombs where we thought we did. We were short. A couple of miles short.
So short, in fact, the 500-pound bombs from Peggy V—all eight of them—cut their deadly swath through the position occupied by Melvin Patchett and all but three of the men of Task Force Miles.
Jock’s head jerked southward, toward the sound of the impacting bombs. “That doesn’t seem right,” he said. “They’re dropping too far inland, I think.”
Jillian grabbed his chin and pulled his face back in the direction of the Mission House. “Never mind,” she said. “Pay attention to what we came here for.”
What we came here for—the killing of Colonel Najima. The ultimate decapitation of the Japanese command. J.T. Guess was curled tight into his firing position, waiting for the colonel to appear. Even in the darkness, Jock could tell his sniper was calm and focused, ready to put that final, gentle squeeze on the trigger the moment his target entered the crosshairs.
“You got enough light?” Jock asked Guess.
“Plenty.”
Jock was relieved to see just how right he had been: the Japanese in the Mission had become completely disoriented by the bombs, even though they fell a few miles away. Sergeants and lieutenants barked orders that did little more than add to the confusion. It seemed every Japanese soldier was running in crazy circles, trying to process answers to the three questions that suddenly held sway over his continued existence:
What just happened?
What am I supposed to be doing about it?
How do I keep myself from getting killed?
Japanese soldiers and comfort women—a dozen or more of each—began to spill from the Mission House, adding to the bewildered throng. “Right on cue,” Jock said, not bothering to keep his voice down. “Surely, that house is gonna empty in another second or two.”
“Be patient,” Jillian said, “those men who just ran out are ordinary soldiers, not officers.”
The colonel’s driver, who had been sleeping soundly in the front seat, was now doing a fidgety dance alongside the staff car. He alternated between holding the rear door open in anticipation of the colonel’s hasty arrival and crouching low against the car’s fender, seeking cover.
“So where the hell is this colonel?” Guess asked, his voice placid, his eye still glued to the rifle’s scope.
“Good question,” Jillian replied.
Miss Directed, the second B-17 in the conga line of bombers, was less than five minutes behind Peggy V and having just as difficult a time finding the target. Her navigator had never fully given up on the wavering Mossman signal. He kept trying to interpolate that oscillating needle in his radio compass into a usable bearing. It worked, after a fashion; when she dropped her bombs, they were only slightly more inaccurate than Peggy V’s. This load sketched its line of destruction across the southern edge of Weipa Mission settlement. It bisected the nor
thern end of Yellow Vermin Road, killing several truckloads of Japanese soldiers being rushed back to defend Airfield One. It also wiped out the docks, sinking Jillian’s remaining four boats and a number of Japanese barges tied up there. The final bomb in the train landed squarely on Jillian’s icehouse, blowing the building and its contents to smithereens.
Jillian’s vantage point was some 500 yards away from where the icehouse had stood only moments ago, too far to see clearly in the dim light but close enough to sense the devastation that had just befallen her. But she found one serendipitous glimmer in the terrible scene: Sato’s body was hidden in the icehouse.
“Well, at least we don’t have to worry about getting rid of Sato anymore,” she said, her voice deadpan. “Your Air Force blokes just took care of that for me. But overall, I’d say your flyers aren’t very good at their jobs.”
Colonel Najima’s car still stood before the Mission House. It was unattended, its driver having joined the mob of Japanese now scurrying north, away from the bombs that had just fallen.
“What the fuck happened to the colonel?” Jock asked.
Jillian’s reply was adamant. “He’s still inside.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m positive, Jock. He never came out.”
Mike McMillen hadn’t said much of anything since the four of them arrived at this sniper’s nest. He could sense the plan unraveling, though, and the irritation in his hoarse whisper was obvious. “He’s still inside…that’s just swell,” McMillen said. “What the hell do we do now, Captain?”
There was no hesitation at all in Jock’s reply. “We go in after him.”
Second Lieutenant Ernest Smith had never been a night person. A Midwestern farm boy, he believed in rising before dawn and hitting the sack early. He had dreaded his first night shift as officer-in-charge at the Mossman radio station, and the experience was proving to be 10 times worse than the anticipation. He could hardly keep his eyes open. Parked in the rolling chair behind the OIC’s desk, his body felt detached from its surroundings, like it was packed in thick cotton. It hurt to hold his eyes open.
An officer can never fall asleep on duty, he chastised himself. What kind of example would that set for the men…especially a goldbrick like Corporal Stanley Welsh?
Ernest Smith cursed the bad luck that had given him the cantankerous Corporal Welsh as senior radio operator this night. Since coming on duty at 2200, Welsh had ignored him, for the most part, only acknowledging his presence when he needed a message approved or log entry signed. When Smith asked Welsh if the station was ready to comply with Special Operations Order 6-107, Welsh had merely grunted and nodded once. Lieutenant Smith took that as an affirmative.
The requirements of Special Operations Order 6-107 were concise: Mossman was to broadcast a continuous wave carrier on a specified frequency—at full power of 450 watts—commencing at 2300 hours. This signal was to remain on the air until 0600 hours of the following day. Radio traffic on other frequencies was to be handled as normal. No other explanation for the continuous signal was given in the order, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out what was going on. The Air Force would be flying around in the dark, something they didn’t do very often. They needed radio beams to help navigate in the dark. At precisely 2300, Smith watched as Welsh closed the key on the designated transmitter while grumbling something that sounded like, Fucking HQ and their stupid orders…they want the Japs to home right in on us. The corporal then flopped into his chair, put his feet up on his console, and became deeply engrossed in an old copy of Life magazine.
It was now 0215, and Lieutenant Smith decided the only way he’d ever manage to stay awake through this 12-hour night shift was to stay on his feet. He decided he’d check on the transmitters that lined one wall of the station. There were four of them, each a rack of electronic components two feet wide and twice as tall. Three transmitters were in standby mode, their vacuum tubes warmed up but sending nothing over the air. The fourth was broadcasting the continuous signal per Special Operations Order 6-107. Smith scanned the row of meters on the transmitter’s front panel several times before the alarm went off in his sleepy head:
This thing isn’t putting out full power! Nowhere near it! It’s not tuned properly!
“CORPORAL WELSH,” Smith said, rousing himself from his sleepwalk by the sheer volume of his command voice. “WHY IS THIS TRANSMITTER NOT TUNED FOR FULL OUTPUT? IT’S PUTTING OUT LESS THAN FIFTY WATTS.”
Stanley Welsh was actually startled by the lieutenant’s harsh tone. He had never heard Smith raise his voice before. But Welsh knew he’d been caught in the act: I’d better snow-job this dumb shavetail before he tries to stick it up my ass.
“What do you mean, Lieutenant? Something gone wrong with the transmitter?”
“Nothing’s wrong with the damned transmitter,” Smith said as he spun the knobs and watched the meters climb to full scale. “You didn’t tune it properly.”
Welsh made a show of tapping the meters and tweaking the knobs himself, trying to find something—anything—to discredit the lieutenant’s correct assumption.
Smith pulled the copy of Special Operations Order 6-107 from the clipboard on the wall. He waved the sheet of paper in Welsh’s face. “You’re aware this order specified full power, Corporal?”
“That just don’t make no sense, Lieutenant,” Welsh said, still grasping for the upper hand. “It’s against SOP to broadcast a continuous signal at full power. It’s an invitation for the Japs to bomb us. You know that.”
“Direct orders supersede SOP. You know that, Corporal. Are you telling me you ignored orders and detuned this transmitter on purpose?”
“I don’t know why you’re getting on my ass, Lieutenant. Can’t a guy make a little mistake every now and then?”
“This was no mistake, Welsh. God only knows what problems you’ve caused. You’re relieved from duty and restricted to quarters, pending court martial.”
Welsh played his last card. “If this station didn’t follow orders, I ain’t the only one who’s gonna get court martialed. You’re the officer-in-charge, ain’t you?”
“Your concern is touching, Welsh…but I’ll take my chances. Now get out of my sight.”
Chapter Forty-Four
Before Lieutenant Smith retuned the Mossman transmitter to full power, two more B-17s had stumbled toward the target and dropped their bombs. The next plane behind Peggy V and Miss Directed was The Wanderer. Her name proved to be appropriate as she scattered her bombs wildly into the forest some five miles south of the target, nowhere near any human beings. All the searchlight activity miles to the north—and the probability these searchlights further identified the target area—did not vex The Wanderer’s crew greatly as her bombardier toggled the drop switch.
Five minutes behind The Wanderer came Beauteous Belinda. More by stroke of luck than any airman’s skill, she was fairly close to being on course. Her bombs would have landed within a few hundred yards of the designated coordinates—if they had actually fallen when her bombardier hit the drop switch. Something in the electrical circuitry that released the bombs in sequence malfunctioned. As Belinda flew on past the drop point, her crew struggled to fix the problem with the bomb release. They debated turning around and trying again, this time using the manual bomb release lever. That maneuver was unanimously rejected; it was simply too dangerous. There were eight more aircraft strung out behind Belinda in that long, invisible line. The odds of colliding with one of them was just too great.
Almost 90 seconds past the drop point, they gave up their tinkering with the faulty circuit. As they prepared to close the bomb bay doors, the electrical bomb release circuitry suddenly came alive, as if some magic hand had fixed the problem. All eight bombs released and plunged into the dark void below. Beauteous Belinda’s crew gave a collective shrug: a war machine can be as cantankerous as a woman. Her pilot began the turn south, the first leg of her homeward journey.
Halfway through the turn, Beauteous
Belinda was jostled by a shock wave. Her tail gunner reported there had been the flash of an enormous explosion in their wake a few seconds before the wave hit. The explosion had probably been at ground level, but in the darkness, with no visual reference, he couldn’t tell for sure. The gunner didn’t notice that last searchlight tracking his plane had extinguished simultaneously with the explosion.
Beauteous Belinda’s crew would never know just how lucky they were that night. Instead, they were sick with worry. The explosion might be one of the other bombers crashing. Worse, it could be one of the others colliding with their accidental stick of bombs and exploding in flight. They never imagined the true source of the explosion: they had just sunk the only Japanese warship—a destroyer—lying at anchor off Weipa.
As she went to the bottom, so went the regiment’s only remaining radio link to the Japanese headquarters at Rabaul.
For the navigators onboard the eight remaining aircraft in the conga line, finding the target suddenly got much easier. The Mossman signal had stopped its wild dance around their radio compass dials and settled down to a rock-steady bearing, a bearing solid enough for precise course adjustments. They had no idea how the four planes before them had fared; strict radio silence had been maintained. But the eight navigators knew they now had a far better chance of getting a bomb close to target than their predecessors in the conga line.
The navigators of the first four ships, bombs gone and on courses for home, shared the same thought when they noticed the return of the Mossman signal: Son of a bitch! NOW it decides to get strong! Oh well…at least it’ll make finding our way home a whole lot easier.
They knelt in a circle as Jock laid down his plan to storm the Mission House, sketching its details in the dirt beneath the dim red glow of his flashlight. Jillian listened intently, fascinated by his focus and the infectious enthusiasm he radiated. Guess and McMillen obviously were, too. She wasn’t sure whether to chalk it up to pure leadership on Jock’s part or simple charisma. Either way, it was working its magic. By the time Jock said, “Let’s show these bastards what the American soldier can do,” his two men had been whipped into such a blood lust they looked ready to take on the entire Japanese Army.
Long Walk To The Sun (Jock Miles WW2 Adventure Series Book 1) Page 26
