Reluctant Warriors

by Jon Stafford

  Barely conscious, he flew blithely away from the harbor, in the wrong direction.

  It was several minutes before he was fully aware of his surroundings again. There’s wind coming through the canopy, he thought. That’s strange. He looked at the Plexiglas. There are holes in it, he observed, not comprehending.

  Next, he realized that the plane wasn’t responding to the stick. He knew instinctively that something was wrong with the right motor. He looked at the smoke billowing out of it. The twelve-foot Hamilton-Standard propeller had stopped. One of the blades was sticking straight up.

  The motor stopped, he thought, in a complete quandary. Something was very, very wrong. Slowly, dizzily, he looked at the left motor to see if it was all right, and then at his compass on the left side of the control panel.

  It read 350 degrees. For a few moments, he didn’t know what that meant. Then, he recalled the briefing by Colonel Hazelton.

  “If you get in trouble,” Hazelton had said, “just take the heading of 132 degrees. It’ll bring you back here.”

  His mind was still clouded, but Jimmy nevertheless recalled clearly the Colonel looking downward and tapping his foot on the floor. Not knowing how much trouble he was in, he concentrated on the image of the colonel’s foot.

  Then, dutifully, almost like a robot, he brought the machine around, slowly banking to the right until the compass lined up on 132 degrees. He had no idea that he had flown almost fifty miles in the wrong direction.

  As he worked the stick, sudden pain flared in his right arm. It seemed on fire!

  Jimmy looked at his arm and noticed his blood spattered on the right side of the canopy. And his arm would barely move! Every movement he made to correct the plane’s trim was almost more than he could bear.

  I’ve trained for this, he thought, blinking and shaking his head to clear his brain. He thought back to his advanced training at Eglin Air Base in Florida: how he had resisted holding the stick in the left hand, and then almost crashed into the beach.

  “Switch,” he muttered. “It’s okay.” It did not feel as awkward as before, but the truth was he had the touch of an elephant.

  He looked again at his right arm. He could see blood dripping from it onto the cockpit floor, and thought of his jungle kit with its bandages. He reached for it with his right arm without thinking, and excruciating pain shot up all the way up his shoulder. I’ll wait, he thought, grimacing and nodding slowly.

  With his head spinning, Jimmy thought of his wife, Margaret Ann, his Mara. She appeared before his eyes, seemed so real that he thought he might reach out and touch her. He smiled, thinking how he had loved her all of his life. He saw her now as he had first seen her, on the swing at the elementary school playground all those years before. He thought of their baby, Claire, now eleven months old, whom he had never seen. Despite his disorientation and pain, he thought: I would trade my life to see Mara and our baby together, just once see them both.

  His thoughts were becoming more coherent with every passing minute. He’d been in the air for three hours now. The altimeter read 4,800 feet, which he guessed was all right. Then, he began to think of his speed. He wondered what it was.

  In a moment, he remembered: all he had to do was check. He was already looking at the controls. He moved his gaze an inch to the left. The dial read “MPH” in small letters. Two hundred, it said. He had to think for a few seconds to understand what two hundred meant. Go slower, he thought. More speed will only use up the fuel.

  Jimmy’s left hand went almost automatically to the throttles on the left wall of the cockpit. After a thousand-plus hours of flight experience in a P-38 cockpit, he didn’t even have to look for the correct metal lever covered with the red plastic ball, or think about how far to pull it back. Slowly, the plane’s speed dropped to 160 miles per hour.

  His brain cleared, and his brow furrowed as the depressing truth came to him quite clearly. He was alone and hurt, and a long way from base in a shot-up plane. The gas gauges weren’t working. Maybe the fuel had bled out through the damaged motor and was about gone. Maybe the left motor would stop soon.

  The radio! Why hadn’t he tried the radio? He was used to operating it with his left hand. He switched it on, but there was nothing, not even static. He tinkered with it for a minute or so, then gave up.

  He realized that air was coming into the cockpit from below as well as from holes in the Plexiglas. He looked down at the floor and noticed a large hole in the right side of the fuselage, near his right foot. He could see the jungle passing by below, in swaths of brown and green. How much damage had Mara taken?

  A reflection far off to the right drew his attention. It had to be a glint off something metal. There it was again! He watched it move. It approached slowly, almost on a parallel course, and not much higher. He throttled up a bit, knowing that if was an enemy plane, he was a sitting duck.

  He watched, anxiously. In a minute he could see the plane clearly: another P-38 slicing across his path, on a heading of maybe 120 degrees. Its tail bore the yellow markings of the 261st squadron, which was based forty miles from his.

  Mara was now traveling at 190 miles per hour. Jimmy turned, painfully, to parallel the new plane. As he came alongside it, he saw that both its engines were working, but its canopy and nacelle were a shambles, riddled with bullet holes. He looked at the pilot: a big man, slumped over the stick, obviously badly hurt.

  Slowly, the pilot turned toward Jimmy, and seemed to look directly at him. But their eyes never met.

  The planes were less than seventy feet apart now. With great effort, Jimmy reached for the radio. It was still dead. He tried signaling with his left hand and shouting: “One hundred and twenty degrees will take you out to sea!”

  There was no response. Jimmy shook his head. He wanted to help the other pilot, at least keep him from crashing in the trackless jungle, but the other man didn’t even seem to realize he was there.

  “Buddy, I got to go. I got to live, go back to my wife and child.”

  As he throttled back to 160 and went back to 132 degrees, the yellow-tailed plane continued on its doomed course. He watched it drop out of sight, into the trees.

  Jimmy sat up a little in the seat. “I’m not going to go like that,” he said to himself. “I’m going to make it!”

  His wife came into his thoughts again. He could see her so clearly, this time standing in their kitchen and laughing that time he’d dropped the eggs all over the floor. Her voice, mock-scolding: Use the sense the good Lord gave you, Jimmy DeValery.

  His wound had stiffened. He thought it was time to try bandaging his arm again. He reached for his kit. Again the pain was beyond anything he could stand, and after several minutes of agonizing and accomplishing nothing, he gave up.

  Jimmy felt exhausted and faint, his eyes having trouble focusing on the jungle below. The stress had weakened him a great deal and he was far less conscious. The jungle is so mesmerizing, he thought. It stretches on and on and on and on, all the way to the horizon. I am just creeping like an ant in a field. Will it never end? He could never remember being so tired.

  Jimmy could barely keep his eyes open. He decided he would have to make a crash landing before he blacked out. With his left hand, he checked under his l
eft armpit, confirming that he still had the .45 he usually kept in a holster there. I’ll need it to survive in the jungle, he thought calmly. And I’ll need my jungle kit too. His eyes fixed on his canteen.

  In an instant he realized what had happened. With the blood loss and sweating, he had become seriously dehydrated! He grabbed the canteen, ignoring the renewed pain reaching for it sent up his arm. He unscrewed the cap and drank. The water, which he normally disdained as smelling like fuel oil, gave him an immediate jolt, as though it were pure caffeine.

  He gulped half the canteen and almost instantly felt better and more alert. He checked his speed and altitude; both were fine.

  Five minutes later, he spotted something on the ground far to the west. It looked like the old abandoned airfield at Bena Bena! He studied landmarks as his plane flew past.

  “It is Bena Bena!” Jimmy shouted. That meant he was only a few miles away from Nadzab! “I’m going to make it!”

  The situation had changed so quickly that Jimmy had little time to enjoy it. All he could manage was a feeble chuckle. I must concentrate, he thought. I’m not safe yet.

  In another ten minutes he could see Nadzab. Perking up, he nevertheless would not allow himself to get giddy. With no way to radio the field, he made a slow circuit and attempted to lower his landing gear. Considering the damage to the plane, he thought the right wheel might not come down. When its green light failed to come on, he knew it had not.

  I’ll have to make a belly landing. That means Mara will never fly again. I’ll lose my ship! Jimmy thought. He looked around at his beloved plane.

  “Forgive me, but this is the only way I think I can live through this,” he muttered.

  He came around for one more circuit of the field, and then raised the landing gear that had come down. As he approached, he throttled back and came in.

  As his speed died, the huge Lockheed plane seemed to almost hover over the crude strip. Jimmy pulled back slightly on the stick and the nose came up. For an instant, it seemed as though Mara would gently float in, like a paper airplane, and come to a stop without a scratch.

  Then the seven-ton machine hit the ground; horrific grinding and smashing sounds roaring up around him. The plane, or what remained of it, ground to a skidding stop across the concrete, the underside nearly torn off.

  Jimmy sat up as much as he could in the slightly squashed cockpit, staring woozily through the cracked Plexiglas. Several of the men were running up the strip, shouting, drawn by the noise of the crash. He recognized the guy in the lead: his wingman, Tony Seegars.

  A great feeling of relief came over Jimmy. Tony made it back! he thought. Then the combination of shock and humidity hit him like a thirty-pound soccer ball against his chest.

  His body went limp as his friends and ground crew carefully lifted him out of the plane. He happened to glimpse one of the men’s watches as they did.

  It was 1130 hours. Only 1130? Feels like an eternity since we left, he thought. Just my luck, to get back just as the day starts getting really disgusting.

  A Dip in the Sea

  New Guinea, April 1944

  Captain Jimmy DeValery walked alone toward the briefing room for the thirty-fifth time. He gloated just a little bit, a slight smile on his face. He wondered if anyone else he passed knew that this would be his last mission. After thirty-five missions, he qualified to be rotated home out of this hellhole.

  He took a seat in the middle of the room as the other pilots gathered. Then, the tall and angular Colonel Hazelton entered and began the briefing.

  Jimmy didn’t listen very closely for the first several minutes. He expected some sort of run up the coast again, and planned to get the details in the map briefing later. Then, he heard the word volunteer, and his attention fixed fully on the Colonel’s voice.

  “Men,” said the Colonel, “this is not my idea, or some stunt by General Kenney and his people. This comes straight from the top, General Arnold in Washington. The Navy wants this job done and we were volunteered because we are the closest group to the target. It is a very, very tough job. You know I have flown every mission with you. I would do this one myself, but the word came down yesterday from General Guest that no one above the rank of Captain would be considered. The pilot must have a P-38 J-2 because of the extremely long range, be an excellent navigator, and have a good record of bombing accuracy.”

  Major Franklin stood first, followed by all of the other squadron leaders, all above the rank of Captain. They were followed by other pilots, all young Lieutenants.

  The Colonel looked at each man with the respect that comes from risking lives together. “Bob,” he said looking at the Major, “Craig, Jim, you know I can’t take you for this one. And you young guys don’t have the experience. Thank you, though.”

  By this time Jimmy was squirming in his seat. He could navigate as well as most of the guys, and his bombing was good enough. It was obvious to him: there was no one else! It was like a spotlight was suddenly shining on him.

  Due to his broken arm from the Wewak mission, and then his bout with malaria, he was the only one left from the original wing that had come to Port Moresby. All of the others from his original squadron had either been killed or rotated home. Even his old wingman, Tony Seegars, had gotten his final mission last month and was gone now.

  As he looked around the room, Jimmy saw that the others knew too. Several of the younger guys turned and glanced nervously back at him. He wasn’t entirely sure he was up to this, physically speaking. He had come overseas with a robust 170 pounds on his five-foot-eight frame, but had lost forty pounds because of the malaria and almost died. With little to eat but powdered eggs and Spam, he had gained little of his weight or strength back. A milk-run mission would be one thing, but this?

  For a moment he stewed, thinking how unfair—and unexpected—this was. Then, he stood up.

  At 0430 hours the next morning, it was still completely dark. Jimmy looked at his watch in the dim illumination of the cockpit light. It was the second watch and the sixth watchband he’d gone through over here. The leather watchbands would just rot, and finally the watch would warp in the humidity too.

  As he taxied the plane toward the other end of the runway, he passed the Seabees in the faint light of the oil lamps. They were still working on the end of the runway. He had heard them all night, cutting down trees and putting another fifty yards on the runway’s length, so that his very heavily laden plane would have a better chance of taking off.

  Silhouetted against the darkness by the lamps, the men began to line up to watch, to see if it had been worth it. There were about a hundred of them, haggard and dirty from their labor in the terrible humidity. They had done all they could. Jimmy was obliged, and he nodded to them from his open canopy as he passed by. He tried to look cheerful, tried not to think of the tremendous pressure he was under.

  His thoughts turned to his plane, Mara II. Loaded down with a thousand-pound general-purpose bomb and over a thousand gallons of aviation fuel, she was like a huge and ungainly duck totaling almost 21,000 pounds. Has anyone ever gotten off with this much weight before? he wondered. Even on the long strike to Hollandia, she had been only about 1,700 pounds. In a few minutes, he came to the other end of the runway, some 4,
800 feet away from the Seabees.

  The Seabees made him feel less angry about his bad break of not being given a milk run and a ticket home. No one could say he had not done his part. He’d definitely taken his share of chances over thirty-four missions. Still, he wasn’t sure anyone deserved this one: an 850-mile flight to Truk Lagoon to bomb a radar station for the Navy.

  The American carrier groups had plastered the western edges of the Central Pacific, starting with their big raid on the islands of Palau three weeks before. The word was that they would now swing back eastward, blasting every Japanese stronghold one by one. Truk had to be on the target list, or they wouldn’t have dumped this mission on the Army. The radar station had to go, Jimmy figured, so the Navy fleet could move toward Truk and not be seen.

  Besides trying to take off with Mara II so heavily loaded, he had worried most of the sleepless night about making the rendezvous with the submarine Skate. The plan was to land in the water on the way back, because the airplane couldn’t fly the whole seventeen thousand-mile round trip lugging the bomb halfway. He would have to part with his second plane. As he stopped and pivoted the plane into position, he thought of his first Mara, badly shot up on the Wewak raid and destroyed when he was forced to crash-land.

  Jimmy had blamed himself, feeling that he had done a poor job on the mission. He remembered sitting on the back of a Jeep after he crashed. He had wept looking at Mara on the runway, a hopeless wreck with her twisted props and torn-out underside.

  Doc Peters had examined his broken arm, and he had laughed upon finding the shard that had fractured Jimmy’s ulna sticking out plain as life, obscured only a little by his blood. Jimmy, still staring at his smashed plane, hadn’t thought it funny at all.