by Jon Stafford
“Mayday-mayday-mayday, enemy planes headed for Dubodura.”
The pressure built in his mind as the planes came closer and closer. There was no answer. He could see the enemy planes’ markings distinctly. Why isn’t Dubodura answering? he wondered.
As his plane clawed for altitude, Jimmy’s mind raced. He was trapped! He couldn’t get above them. There was no time! There was only one thing to do: dive away from them and hope for the best. Fear gripped him. Dive out, dive before they’re on top of you, his brain screamed.
From his experience, he knew better, that altitude meant life.
“Wait, wait!” he yelled.
The enemy planes were very close now, almost within firing range, and still well above him. The altimeter read only fifteen thousand feet, but he couldn’t wait any longer. He kicked the pedals over and dove.
The P-38 screamed straight down. His speed jumped: 260, 340, 390, 450. It wouldn’t be a long dive, he knew, but it had to be straight down if he was to have a chance. The hills below began to come into focus.
In only a minute it was time to pull out. He grabbed the stick firmly and pulled hard. It didn’t even budge! He had never had a P-38 in such a steep dive. The ground loomed up in front of him, and he panicked!
“Pull out now!” Jimmy screamed.
He stood straight up in the cockpit and pulled with all of his might. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the nose, laden with four huge fifty-caliber machine guns and an Oerliken cannon, began to come up.
The ground jumped before his eyes. Gravity pushed him down in the seat. Grey and white spots appeared before his eyes. He saw his wife’s face and then briefly lost consciousness.
His vision returned, and he found himself rocketing along just above the trees. Relief flowed through him.
“I made it! I got away. No man on Earth could follow that dive,” he called out, laughing.
He rubbernecked.
Four dots still followed him.
That can’t be! he thought. As his speed rapidly fell off, 395, 385, 375, the Japanese gained quickly.
Jimmy realized what had happened. The dives of the Zeroes, long and shallow, had been more than the equal of his short, violent one. He pushed his throttles hard again, just to be sure he was getting every ounce of power.
“Mayday-mayday-mayday,” he called into the radio, over and over. Why aren’t they answering? I can’t be more than fifty miles from Dubodura.
He checked every few seconds.The enemy planes continued approaching, growing from specks to larger and larger objects. Sweat began to pour down his face, a face contorted in pain as though his body were being jabbed with pins. He prayed that their dives must be wearing off as well.
In seconds that seemed like an eternity, the Japanese planes’ speed did taper off. Jimmy looked back at them constantly, wondering if it would be enough. They would be within firing range in moments.
Then he noticed something else. He was passing from the land of New Guinea out over the Pacific.
“Out to sea,” he mumbled, the sound entirely drowned by the motors. It was almost a death sentence.
Heading away from Dubodura, if he turned even slightly, the Japanese would turn inside him and he would be an easy target for a deflection shot. His only chance was to outrun them. He would have to forget about the radio. Even if it worked, help was too far away to do him any good.
Jimmy looked around again. The enemy was within range now, he judged, as the five planes raced along at about one thousand feet. Then he realized something. They were no longer gaining.
They’re no faster than I am, he judged. There’s a chance after all.
The enemy planes fanned out behind him. He thought each Zero might get one pass at him before their dives wore off fully. The one on the end was closest and would probably take his firing pass first.
Just as Jimmy realized that, the plane began firing at about four hundred yards. He could see the gun flashes on the wings. Sweat cascading down his face and down the inside of his clothing, he prayed that the shots would miss, but didn’t believe they would.
He huddled behind his armor-plated seat, but nothing happened. The first pilot had missed!
Jimmy watched as the first plane faded back, pushed by the recoil of its guns. As he looked back again, the relief he felt faded.
The second Zero angled toward him. He saw the wings twinkle, almost instantly followed by loud pinging sounds. Out of the corner of his eyes he saw about thirty holes from machine gun rounds appear in his left wing, like a sharp pencil poking holes through aluminum foil.
A bullet came through the back of the Plexiglas canopy, just missing Jimmy’s head, and ricocheted about inside.
The cannon shells hit harder. One made a large and jagged hole in the left wing, and two hit the back of the seat, bucking him forward violently.
The giant Lockheed plane flew on, seemingly undamaged. The engines were untouched!
Jimmy looked around just as the third plane made his run, and saw it firing. He ducked again. The seat had a contour piece for his head, but nothing for his feet. He put his tennis shoes up on the pedals as high as he could.
Again, nothing happened. The third plane had also missed.
He looked again. The Japanese planes had receded somewhat, but still hung behind him like pictures on a wall.
There were only three Zeroes now. He looked for the fourth, several times, in both directions. It was gone. It must not have been able to keep up.
Jimmy smiled, though he looked terrible. Here, just above sea level, the insidious humidity of the South Pacific pervaded the cockpit. Sweat was cascading down his body as though propelled from an unseen pump. His T-shirt was completely soaked as continuous beads of water ran down inside it, into his shorts, down his legs, and into his sneakers. He noticed none of it.
All he could think of was the trap he was in. He was well out to sea now, and while the enemy planes weren’t closing, they weren’t falling behind either.
Minutes dragged on. Jimmy crouched in his little canopy. It was almost like being in a closet. He wondered whether he would ever see his wife, Mara, again.
Thinking of her steeled his determination. I will find a way out of this!
No longer panicky, he checked the two fuel gauges at the left of the control panel. The dial marked “Rear” for the fuel tanks in the rear center of each side of the plane showed they were depleted. The “Front” tanks still had a full forty-five gallons in each: forty minutes left. No, thirty minutes at this speed.
What if he picked up slowly on the ailerons? The plane would rise, he knew, and if he did it slowly enough it would offer the Zeroes very little angle for a good shot.
Jimmy touched the controls, and the plane rose. He looked behind to see the Zeroes doggedly following. He was too afraid to smile, but soon he could see it was working. The P-38 was at its slowest at sea level. If he could just get her some altitude, get into lighter air, the engines’ power would be better used.
Over the next few minutes, he rose five thousand feet. The enemy was still hanging on behind him, but got no closer.
&nbs
p; In ten minutes he passed ten thousand feet. The superchargers began to kick in.
Soon enough, he reached seventeen thousand feet. The enemy planes began falling back, and as he turned back toward Dubodura, they could do nothing. Soon, they disappeared.
Now his chief worry was fuel. He throttled back on both motors.
The coastline appeared in a few minutes. Twenty more, and he began to recognize familiar landmarks.
Three hours almost to the minute after he took off on the supposed milk run, Jimmy made an uncharacteristically bouncy landing on the field at Dubodura. Once the plane came to a stop and the engines were powering down, he went still in his seat, shaking all over.
He became aware of a figure coming up beside the plane, waving at him to open the cockpit. As he did, he recognized the guy. It was the ground chief, shouting.
“You musta had some trouble, huh? Hey, why didn’t you call in on the radio? I just tested it and it’s good! We had planes in the air, buddy.”
Jimmy looked down at his radio. In a rush of awful clarity, he realized why no one had answered his calls. In his fear, he had completely forgotten to turn the radio on.
Strafing Run at Wewak
New Guinea, December 1943
In order to cover the attack by the First Marine Division on Cape Gloucester on New Britain Island, Washington ordered General George Kenney to strike along the coast of New Guinea with his Fifth Air Force. The target of the Army Air Force squadron Jimmy DeValery belonged to was the port of Wewak, 310 miles away.
An hour before, Jimmy had been grumbling, which was unusual for him. The ground crew hadn’t tuned up the engines on his plane, Mara, even though he’d requested it. His P-38 J model was not as fast as the new J-2s most of the other pilots had, and he worried he might lag behind the rest of his squadron in some crucial spot. He had fussed at Pete, his ground crew chief. Later, during breakfast, he wondered whether he’d asked too much. Pete’s crew put in a lot of long hours.
The sixteen silver Lockheed planes, with their 231 squadron numbers in black on their red tails, took off, one by one. Jimmy and his wingman, Tony Seegars, joined up with the planes circling the field awaiting them. They began turning toward the distant target.
It is good to be up in the air, Jimmy thought. It had rained even more than usual in the last few days, and everything on the ground was saturated beyond belief. It was hard to even breathe when it got that humid. The smell, like rotten vegetables, was perhaps even worse.
There was nothing on his person or in his possessions that was actually dry. His clothes had run so badly that there was little of the original green color left. Everything he owned was slimy or downright soggy. His B-4 bag, with his dearest possessions inside, was the worst: moldy and smelling like rotten leather.
The ink on the letters his wife Mara had sent had run so badly that he could no longer read them. It hadn’t stopped him from getting them out and trying though. He could remember almost every word without being able to see them.
Even his breakfast, with its powdered eggs and Spam, had been slimy and disgusting. He had made the same promise that millions of other American servicemen were to make: if he made it back home, he would never touch the stuff again.
Jimmy looked at the altimeter, now reading ten thousand feet, and smiled. Up here, he thought, the humidity clears out, and you can breathe easier. And it’s so much cooler!
It wasn’t that he was breathing easy about the mission. The coastal town of Wewak was an ominous name to many of the men. He had only seen it once, from about twenty miles out. But he was fairly confident. His squadron had developed into a great team, and he loved the men he fought and lived with, would do anything for them—especially his tent-mate Mickey Vivaldi, from Philadelphia, and Rickert, Seegars, and Freddie Davis in his flight.
Besides, this was the twenty-first time he had risen from the jungle to attack the Japanese from one base or another. He and the others were longtime veterans by now. They knew what they were doing. Jimmy had been on strafing runs, bombing runs, escort duty, and even on the mail run that time he had been bounced by that flight of Zeroes in the fall. He thought again about his plane, Mara, which he had named after his wife. It worried him that newer and faster Japanese planes, Tonys and Hamps, had arrived at the front in the last few months.
They were fifty miles into the mission now. Jimmy eyed the other fifteen planes in his squadron. Davis and his wingman, Rickert, were right in front of Jimmy, and Seegars was glued to Jimmy’s wing. He smiled thinking of young Seegars, only twenty and a recent replacement for Duns, who had been sent home. At twenty-four, Jimmy was the oldest pilot in the wing, and he would have to watch out for his young wingman.
He pulled his aluminum tray onto his lap and looked at his notes. Take off just after dawn. Rendezvous with the B-24s at some place called Veersma about 250 off and about 60 miles from Wewak. Escort them to the target, get them headed back, and then strafe the harbor area.
The squadron continued climbing, to twenty-two thousand feet, and then proceeded along at 250 miles per hour. Jimmy glanced ahead and behind to find his flight in position. All was in order. Mara was ready. Pete had said there were 500 rounds for each of the plane’s four .50-caliber machine guns, and about 150 rounds for the Hispano cannon.
They made the rendezvous point within an hour and circled, searching. There was no sign of the B-24s. What the hell? Jimmy thought, over the whine of the engines. He could hear Colonel Hazelton, the squadron commander, on the radio, trying to find out what had happened.
In a crackle of static, one of the bombers radioed back that they had been early and decided to go on ahead. Hazelton ordered the squadron to speed up to three hundred miles per hour to catch up.
Within a few minutes, Jimmy could see specks—the bombers—maybe fifteen miles ahead. Wait, he thought. There were too many specks, and thin trails of smoke were spewing from some of them. As the squadron drew closer, he saw the telltale yellow and red of the Rising Sun insignia on some of the distant planes’ undersides. The Japanese had jumped the unescorted bombers!
Two of the big bombers were in trouble, smoking and falling out of formation. Jimmy thought he could make out about thirty enemy planes, mostly Zeroes, but maybe some Hamps as well.
As the squadron drew close, the Japanese broke and headed for home. Jimmy watched as the shot-up bombers headed toward the coast and the open sea. If you had to crash, it was better to hit the ocean than the hellish jungle. They had all heard stories of crews going down in the jungle and never being heard from again. Submarines were supposed to be on duty off the coast. If you went down in the water, you had a good chance of being found.
One of the bombers was smoking from two of its four motors. Jimmy knew it would never make the coast. He watched it drop lower and lower until it crashed into the jungle. The tree cover closed almost instantly above the wreckage, leaving no sign that a crash had taken place. Not one chute, he lamented. Not one guy parachuted out. Damn, that’s bad luck. Seems like someone could have gotten out. He had to look away.
Ten more minutes of flight, and Jimmy could see Wewak below, even the big red smokestack that everyone was supposed to key in on. He watched the B-24 formation pivot, and then make their bombing runs west to east
, against scattered antiaircraft fire.
As the bombers turned south for home, the P-38s sliced off for their strafing runs. The flights were staggered, so that no one crashed into anyone else. Jimmy’s flight of four was to be last to hit the docks. They circled for some minutes, flying top cover as the other flights took their passes and cleared out.
Then it was their turn. They went into shallow dives from about twelve thousand feet. By the time they made their runs, they were speeding along on top of the waves at more than four hundred miles per hour. On the first pass, Jimmy picked out a little freighter that was already smoking from an earlier attack. He opened fire at about five hundred yards, and watched the .50-caliber slugs pour into the ship, going right through the sides.
As he pulled up to ten thousand feet, the radio came on. It was Rickert.
“I can’t see the target with that smoke.”
“Me neither,” Seegars shouted.
“Jimmy, how about you and me?” Davis asked.
“Sure.”
“Stick to my wing, Jimmy.”
As the two planes dove, the smoke got worse. Davis kicked the rudder over, and the two yawed to the right. The flak was much heavier than before, but Jimmy didn’t notice it much. He concentrated on targeting a warehouse by the water’s edge, watching the bullets pour into it.
Just as he reached the other side of the harbor and began to pull up, a tremendous explosion ripped into the plane on the right side. It seemed to blow up in his face. The left side of his head slammed against the Plexiglas canopy. The plane skidded to the left, almost out of control. Stunned, his instincts took over, and he righted the plane, narrowly missing a smokestack at the water’s edge.
As if in slow motion, Jimmy saw the smoke and debris coming from the right motor. But it did not concern him. His head was still spinning from the blow. In that moment, he was supremely confident that he was all right and in complete control, that he and his Mara would be fine. He had no idea of the seriousness of what had happened.
