by Jon Stafford
Now, he was ordered to lose Mara II as well. He’d flown fifteen missions with her, and the idea of ditching her in the ocean was like asking him to cut off his arm. Sure, Skate would be right there to pick him up. Just like getting on an elevator, the intelligence officer had told him. Right, Jimmy thought sourly. He could just see the sub being late or lost, and him drowning in the ocean three hundred miles from the nearest landfall.
The Army had done a lot to make Jimmy’s mission succeed. Besides lengthening the strip, the wing had sent their chief mechanic, a guy named Breslow, down to work with Pete, his own crew chief, and they had worked all night just like the Seabees. It was great that all of these guys were behind him. Colonel Hazelton himself had spent most of an hour briefing him.
A wave of confidence came over the veteran. He and Mara II could do this job, however nasty it was. “If anyone can pull this off, we can,” he muttered.
It still wasn’t light enough to see the strip’s far end. But Pete was visible on the near end of the strip. He signaled Jimmy to start revving up the great Allison motors. As the rpms came up, great clouds of dust and debris blew up behind the plane.
Jimmy’s eyes met Pete’s. From the faraway look in the crew chief ’s eyes, he was getting the distinct feeling that Pete thought he would not come back. He looked away for a second.
The two 1,475-horse engines revved higher and higher but sounded flat. Another glance at Pete’s face told Jimmy that Pete thought so too. Finally, Jimmy throttled back and opened the window on the side of the cockpit.
“I can’t get but 3,450 out of them!” he yelled to Pete.
“That’s the best they will do in this humidity,” Pete yelled back.
As Jimmy revved the engines again, it began to rain. When the engines crested, he knew, he’d have to go. If it started raining any harder, he doubted he would be able to get off at all.
The left motor was reaching slightly higher revs than the right. When it came up to 3,475, he nodded to Pete, pulled the canopy shut, and took his foot off the brake. Mara II lurched ahead. She gathered speed very quickly, and to everyone’s surprise, even Jimmy’s, lifted off rather easily, clearing the trees at the end by a good hundred feet. Curving away from the field, he saluted down at all the men who had helped.
He needed to take up a heading of 28 degrees to get to Truk. First, he tapped the direction gauge at the top left of the controls, and then twisted the dial so that 28 degrees was now at the top. This made it easier to keep track of the heading. He throttled back to the 250 mile-per-hour speed Breslow had told him to use.
Within minutes, the weather cleared off nicely. He reached his altitude of three thousand feet. It was nice to be this far up: the terrible humidity lessened at this altitude and became almost bearable. He was flying into the sunrise, dawn becoming visible as a pale pink and gold glow along the horizon.
In less than an hour, Jimmy could just make out the eastern tip of Manus, an island in the Admiralties Group to the west maybe fifty miles off. The dark was giving way to a clear day with unlimited visibility. Past Manus he entered what he feared the most, what the colonel had called “the dead zone,” where there was no landfall for five hundred miles. He would have to fly directly across this area to reach Truk. On the way back he would have to radio Skate and then fish in, right in the middle of this great void, trusting that the sub would find him.
He made navigational checks every few minutes. He was bucking a head wind of thirty knots or more. That’s very unusual for this time of the year, he thought, for wind like that to come out of the north. The prevailing currents here most of the year are from west to east.
Slowly the miles went by, the great Allison motors straining with the weight but still singing their song. Carefully, Jimmy managed the fuel from the two massive three hundred-gallon drop tanks, taking thirty minutes’ worth from one, then the other, and marking the details down carefully on a chart he kept by his right foot. Once, far to the west, he saw the reflection of something. His heart sank for a moment, but he did not see it again. He concluded that it was one of the enemy search planes they’d told him to expect. I’ll have to be lucky, he thought. My life won’t be worth much if they see me coming. Luckily, he saw nothing for the rest of the three-hour trip.
The bright sun was well up in the sky, illuminating the ocean. He’d never flown over water very much. It struck him that the water didn’t look like water. It looked like a solid substance. Terrain, even New Guinea with its unending jungle sameness, had more depth to it. But the ocean from several thousand feet up looked foreboding, two-dimensional. It seemed like a gigantic grayish bedsheet going off in every direction.
Another hour passed in a blur of hot sun and engine noise. By 0810, with the headwind still holding, Jimmy figured he was about eighty miles from the center of Truk Lagoon and seventy miles from the target. As instructed, he brought Mara down to fifty feet to avoid the enemy radar. Still, he saw no sign of enemy planes. By 0825, his keen eyesight spotted the target, perhaps twenty miles off, a tall metal tower on a small island on the southern end of Truk atoll.
He was almost dead on target. That was a relief. His heart rate rose as he made his preparations to attack. Banking a bit to the right, he reached for a lever and dropped his two wing tanks, which were mostly spent anyhow. Then he throttled up to about three hundred miles per hour, intently scanning the sky in every direction, and turned on the control panel switch that armed the bomb.
Soon, just as Hazelton had briefed him, Jimmy began to fly up a corridor with small coral islands on each side. With half a mile to go, very inaccurate and light antiaircraft fire began to come in from his right. None of it came very close.
At 0831, after throttling back to about two hundred miles per hour, Jimmy pulled up on the stick and dropped his bomb from about 1,500 feet. He wheeled about, heading south, and looked back to see if he had hit the target. There was so much smoke rising, he couldn’t tell for sure.
I’m sure not going to swing around to take another look, he decided.
The sharp rattle of guns was opening up on him from all sides now. He pushed the throttles all the way forward and turned for home. As he got clear of the harbor, he came up in altitude and kicked the airspeed up to about 350. At this speed, the enemy would have to be on him immediately to have any chance of catching him.
Nothing followed. Twenty minutes and more than a hundred miles out, he stepped the engines back to 250. He began regular calculations of his position, and rubbernecked every few minutes to see if anyone was coming after him. It was hard to believe that he had gotten away with it!
The weather continued clear. Forty minutes later, with two hundred gallons of fuel left, Jimmy began looking for Skate. He was to meet the sub at 150 degrees west longitude and 4 degrees above the equator. After several minutes of staring at ceaseless ocean, he thought he saw the faint shape of a submarine, far ahead and a little to the west.
“Yes, there it is!” he yelled out, with a smile on his face. Sure is an ugly-looking thing, he thought.
He began his descent, pulling back on the throttles. The water looked calm, almost glassy. He figured it would be easy to set the plane down. He came closer and began a wide circle.
Looking out the corner of his eye, Jimmy was amazed to see the sub
submerging. What’s going on here? He wondered. Then he saw it: a big red Rising Sun insignia on the sub’s conning tower!
“Shit!” he blurted. It was a Japanese sub! He leveled Mara II and flew off to the south, then tried to raise Skate on the radio. Nothing!
Perhaps she was somewhere near. She might be submerged and eying the enemy sub through the periscope. Or maybe the Japanese had gotten her, sunk his intended rescuers.
I can’t stay around here waiting, he thought. I gotta get out of here! He turned back toward his base. He sure couldn’t fly around in circles—he was in the middle of the dead zone!
He’d gone from feeling almost safe to being completely lost. It’s 250 miles to the nearest landfall, he thought. I’d better cut my speed back to 160, and feather one engine.
Jimmy’s left hand went to the side of the cockpit. He didn’t have to look to grasp the red plastic ball of the right motor and pull it back. Soon, the engine, starved for fuel, coughed. The propeller quickly slowed, and then began windmilling. As the plane slowed, he worried over turning the motor off. Some guys don’t think feathering one motor saves fuel, he thought. I have no idea. I should have asked Breslow. But I never thought this would happen! I just don’t know what to do. Why did I trust the Navy?
He looked at the vital fuel gauges. I had 410 gallons when I jettisoned the wing tanks and attacked the radar station, he lamented. I roared out of there at top speed! I might as well have dumped the fuel out the window! He tapped on the fuel gauge. All I have left is a hundred! A hundred gallons! Where’s the nearest landfall? he wondered.
He spread his map over his knees and stared at it. There were some islands to the north, he noticed, Sae Island, and a little to the north, the Kaniet Islands. He wondered if they were controlled by the Japanese. Almost panicking, he scoured the map again, shaking his head. Then he saw it. Manus!
His mind raced. He thought: I passed it in the darkness, how many hours ago? It’s the nearest landfall that’s definitely not in enemy hands. MacArthur just invaded the place, though—how much of it is in Allied hands?
Then he remembered what the Colonel had said: “Seaadler Harbor on the eastern end of Manus is under our control.” But the center of the fifty-mile-long island would be closer—maybe by only five miles or so, but closer. Five miles farther to go could mean the difference between being alive or dead.
Jimmy studied the map. There was a Catholic mission on the coast near the middle of the island. It was his best chance, maybe his only chance. If I reach the mission, he thought, I can turn east toward Seeadler Harbor.
After a quick calculation, he came over to a heading of 192 degrees and readjusted the direction gauge. He checked the fuel level. Only ninety gallons were left.
“That’s not enough!” he cried.
Much of what followed, he later blocked out of his mind. He looked at the gauge every few seconds, what seemed like thousands of times. He stared ahead for land he knew could not yet be there, sweat pouring down his face, his heart pounding in his chest. Each gallon of fuel gone made cold panic rise inside him. It never stops dropping! he thought.
Finally, Jimmy thought he saw land, a headland just a little to the west.
“Yes, yes,” he brayed. “Land, maybe fifty miles off ! Twenty gallons! Not enough!”
His heart rate went higher still, a rate that would have brought on a stroke in an older man. As the miles tediously closed he became even more frantic. The gas gauge was on empty! He pounded on the little dial on the left of the panel.
For a time he completely lost control of himself, terror gripping him. He pounded on the instrument panel, screaming in a high-pitched, unearthly voice, lurching up and down in his seat.
“Please, please, please just one more mile,” he screeched. “One more is all I ask! Save me this one time! Please, help me! I don’t want to die. Oh God, don’t kill me like this! I’ve come so close. Please, please, please!”
Then the terrain of the island was there beneath him, rushing past. As he came over the beach, he could see the mission a mile or so to the west. Hurriedly wiping sweat and tears from his eyes, he circled to the left.
Then the motor stopped, the sound that had become a part of his very existence for almost six and a half hours sputtering out. He continued his circle, knowing the mammoth plane could not go far.
It coasted just far enough to get him about four hundred yards off shore, where he pulled back on the stick and landed softly in the ocean. He popped the canopy open, but the plane sank so quickly that he swam right out, into the cool water.
Jimmy laughed, elated. The sea was like glass. He could see the trees and the mission so clearly.
I can swim in easy! he thought. He inflated his Mae West life preserver and struck out for the beach.
But he pulled for naught. The neap tide, far stronger than he’d ever expected, kept pulling him back into the offshore depths. Within minutes, he was exhausted. The stress of the long flight had sapped what strength he had.
Damn, he thought, watching the shore recede. Then he was motionless in the sea, unconscious.
He awoke to shouting and hands hauling him out of the water. A hard thump, and he realized he was lying in the bottom of a canoe.
A man, brown-skinned, definitely not Japanese, leaned over him. Jimmy could hardly understand him over the excited chatter of the others in the boat and the slopping waves.
“We’re from the mission,” the man shouted. “We saw you come down in the water, and we figured you needed help.”
Jimmy smiled, dazed, watching the clouds rotate above him as the canoe turned and started heading back to shore.
I’ve made it, he thought. I’m safe. I’m going home to Mara and my baby.
Colonel Hazelton had been more correct than he knew: for Jimmy DeValery it had indeed been a very, very tough job. This one day plagued him and brought ringing back into his mind every bad memory the war held for him, and thus took years from his life. In the hundreds of months that followed, the memories never faded away. He teared over them too many times to count, and wept when he knew no one was around.
Part of it was losing his second plane. When his friends had been killed or rotated back home, Mara II seemed to be all he had left. He gave her credit for pulling them out of scrapes, getting off the ground with more weight than anyone could ask of her, and bringing him all the way back to Manus against all logic and science. Until the day he died, it never occurred to him that the headwind he encountered on the way to the target was the tailwind that made the difference in getting him to Manus. It was not that he had wanted Mara II to go to some replacement pilot. But he had lost her, forsaken her in the sea.
A larger part was the guilt he felt in surviving the war. He had watched others from his squadron—Tony Andreas, Dorsey, Billy Mayford, Forski, and Black—die so easily, sometimes in quirky ways that made their entire lives seem so trivial, as though it had not mattered that they had lived. And he had survived when he should not have, when the odds had been too steep. The largest part, though, was the sheer terror he had experienced during the run in to Manus.
A terrible, haunting shame pervaded his life. Even to his wife, whom he loved more than life, he could say nothing. W
ith her woman’s intuition, she understood better than he would have wished, and perhaps better than he did himself. And she knew that she must never ask him about it. Yes, he was grateful to be alive and have a family with a loving wife and two beautiful children, but he was alive and the others were dead. The war had brought him to the edge of a great void where he hung, and where the difference between what he regarded as the terrible unfairness of life and the darkness of death was scant. Thousands of times he awoke in a sweat, or lay in bed, seeing the same images of his friends being killed over and over again, just as clearly as the day they happened.
Gradually, with the passage of decades, he could manage to say some things to his grown children. He told them of being trapped by the Zeroes at Dobodura and of the “mistakes” he thought he had made at Wewak to lose Mara I. But of the fear that had gripped him at Manus, he could not speak. He never sought the sympathetic ears of his war buddies or his wife. He just bore it in his heart until the end.
The Gift
Mara and Jimmy’s Life
Do not beseech me to turn from and leave you.
Where you will go, I will go,
And where you stay I will stay.
Your people will be my people,
And your God will be my God.
Where you die, I will die,
And there I will be buried.
May the Lord punish me, be it ever so severely,
If anything but death separates you and me.
—Ruth 1:16–1:17
New International Version
Wilson, North Carolina, August 4, 1980
