George and I dove first. I poured a long burst into the first enemy plane that approached, and a fraction of a second later saw the Nip pilot catapult out and the plane itself break out into fire.
George screamed over the radio: “Gramps, you got a flamer!”
Then he and I went down lower into the fight after the rest of the enemy planes. We figured that the whole pack of our planes was going to follow us down, but the clouds must have obscured us from their view. Anyway, George and I were not paying too much attention, just figuring that the rest of the boys would be with us in a few seconds, as usually was the case.
Finding approximately ten enemy planes, George and I commenced firing. What we saw coming from above we thought were our own planes—but they were not. We were being jumped by about twenty planes.
George and I scissored in the conventional thatch-weave way, protecting each other’s blank spots, the rear ends of our fighters. In doing this I saw George shoot a burst into a plane and it turned away from us plunging downward, all on fire. A second later I did the same to another plane. But it was then that I saw George’s plane start to throw smoke, and down he went in a half glide. I sensed something was horribly wrong with him. I screamed at him: “For God’s sake, George, dive!”
Our planes could dive away from practically anything the Nips had out there at the time, except perhaps a Tony. But apparently George never heard me or could do nothing about it if he had. He just kept going down in a half glide.
Time and time again I screamed at him: “For God’s sake, George, dive straight down!” But he didn’t even flutter an aileron in answer to me.
I climbed in behind the Nip planes that were plugging at him on the way down to the water. There were so many of them I wasn’t even bothering to use my electric gun sight consciously, but continued to seesaw back and forth on my rudder pedals, trying to spray them all in general, trying to get them off George to give him a chance to bail out or dive—or do something at least.
But the same thing that was happening to him was now happening to me. I could feel the impact of the enemy fire against my armor plate, behind my back, like hail on a tin roof. I could see enemy shots progressing along my wing tips, making patterns.
George’s plane burst into flames and a moment later crashed into the water. At that point there was nothing left for me to do. I had done everything I could. I decided to get the hell away from the Nips. I threw everything in the cockpit all the way forward—this means full speed ahead—and nosed my plane over to pick up extra speed until I was forced by the water to level off. I had gone practically a half mile at a speed of about four hundred knots, when all of a sudden my main gas tank went up in flames in front of my very eyes. The sensation was much the same as opening the door of a furnace and sticking one’s head into the thing.
Though I was about a hundred feet off the water, I didn’t have a chance of trying to gain altitude. I was fully aware that if I tried to gain altitude for a bail-out I would be fried in a few more seconds.
At first, being kind of stunned, I thought: “Well, you finally got it, didn’t you wise guy?” and then I thought: “Oh, no you didn’t!” There was only one thing left to do. I reached for the rip cord with my right hand and released the safety belt with my left, putting both feet on the stick and kicking it all the way forward with all my strength. My body was given centrifugal force when I kicked the stick in this manner. My body for an instant weighed well over a ton, I imagine. If I had had a third hand I could have opened the canopy. But all I could do was to give myself this propulsion. It either jettisoned me right up through the canopy or tore the canopy off. I don’t know which.
There was a jerk that snapped my head and I knew my chute had caught—what a relief. Then I felt an awful slam on my side—no time to pendulum—just boom-boom and I was in the water.
The cool water around my face sort of took the stunned sensation away from my head. Looking up, I could see a flight of four Japanese Zeros. They had started a game of tag with me in the water. And by playing tag, I mean they began taking turns strafing me.
I started diving, making soundings in the old St. George Channel. At first I could dive about six feet, but this lessened to four, and gradually I lost so much of my strength that, when the Zeros made their strafing runs at me, I could just barely duck my head under the water. I think they ran out of ammunition, for after a while they left me. Or my efforts in the water became so feeble that maybe they figured they had killed me.
The best thing to do, I thought, was to tread water until nightfall. I had a little package with a rubber raft in it. But I didn’t want to take a chance on opening it for fear they might go back to Rabaul, rearm, and return to strafe the raft. Then I would have been a goner for certain.
I was having such a difficult time treading water, getting weaker and weaker, that I realized something else would have to be done real quickly. My “Mae West” wouldn’t work at all, so I shed all my clothes while I was treading away; shoes, fatigues, and everything else. But after two hours of this I knew that I couldn’t keep it up any longer. It would have to be the life raft or nothing. And if the life raft didn’t work—if it too should prove all shot full of holes—then I decided: “It’s au revoir. That’s all there is to it.”
I pulled the cord on the raft, the cord that released the bottle of compressed air, and the little raft popped right up and filled. I was able to climb aboard, and after getting aboard I started looking around, sort of taking inventory.
I looked at my Mae West. If the Nips came back and strafed me again, I wanted to be darned sure that it would be in working order. If I had that, I could dive around under the water while they were strafing me, and would not need the raft. I had noticed some tears in the jacket, which I fully intended to get busy and patch up, but the patching equipment that came with the raft contained patches for about twenty-five holes.
“It would be better first, though,” I decided, “to count the holes in this darned jacket.” I counted, and there were more than two hundred.
“I’m going to save these patches for something better than this.” With that I tossed the jacket overboard to the fish. It was of no use to me.
Then for the first time—and this may seem strange—I noticed that I was wounded, not just a little bit, but a whole lot. I hadn’t noticed it while in the water, but here in the raft I certainly noticed it now. Pieces of my scalp, with hair on the pieces, were hanging down in front of my face.
My left ear was almost torn off. My arms and shoulders contained holes and shrapnel. I looked at my legs. My left ankle was shattered from a twenty-millimeter-cannon shot. The calf of my left leg had, I surmised, a 7.7 bullet through it. In my groin I had been shot completely through the leg by twenty-millimeter shrapnel. Inside of my leg was a gash bigger than my fist.
“I’ll get out my first-aid equipment from my jungle pack. I’d better start patching this stuff up.”
I kept talking to myself like that. I had lots of time. The Pacific would wait.
Even to my watch, which was smashed, I talked also. The impact had crushed it at a quarter to eight on the early morning raid. But I said to it: “I’ll have a nice long day to fix you up.”
I didn’t, though. Instead, I spent about two hours trying to bandage myself. It was difficult getting out these bandages, for the waves that day in the old South Pacific were about seven feet or so long. They are hard enough to ride on a comparatively calm day, and the day wasn’t calm.
After I had bandaged myself as well as I could, I started looking around to see if I could tell where I was or where I was drifting. I found that my raft contained only one paddle instead of the customary two. So this one little paddle, which fitted over the hand much like an odd sort of glove, was not of much use to me.
Talking to myself, I said: “This is like being up shit creek without a paddle.”
Far off to the south, as I drifted, I could see the distant shore of New Britain. Far to the north w
ere the shores of New Ireland. Maybe in time I could have made one or the other of these islands. I don’t know. But there is something odd about drifting that I may as well record. All of us have read, or have been told, the thoughts that have gone through other men under similar circumstances. But in my case it was a little tune that Moon Mullin had originated. And now it kept going through my mind, bothering me, and I couldn’t forget it. It was always there, running on and on:
“On a rowboat at Rabaul,
On a rowboat at Rabaul …”
The waves continued singing it to me as they slapped my rubber boat. It could have been much the same, perhaps, as when riding on a train, and the rails and the wheels clicking away, pounding out some tune, over and over, and never stopping.
The waves against this little rubber boat, against the bottom of it, against the sides of it, continued pounding out:
“… On a rowboat at Rabaul,
You’re not behind a plow …”
And I thought: “Oh, Moon Mullin, if only I had you here, I’d wring your doggone neck for ever composing that damn song.”
About six months after World War II was over, and before I had a chance to answer a letter I received from Moon, who was then stationed in Japan, I read of his death in the newspaper. I still felt that it was my duty to write his parents, so I wrote a kind of letter different from my others, as I was as much in the dark as they were concerning Moon’s last flight.
* * *
23
* * *
The past appears to be the present sometimes, as I may have mentioned before. And the present sometimes appears to be the past. And there is the future in mind, also, for all of us, but I personally find myself much better off not worrying about either the past or the future. Merely taking care of the present is all I can handle.
But perhaps this tiny medallion I always wear from my neck on a slim gold chain is a sort of connection with all three. Or even, perhaps this is what all religions, the same as all talismans, are expected to be—a connection.
Unlike so many flyers I know, even those in my own outfit, I have not always worn a good-luck charm. Today, as we know, a good many such so-called charms are on the bottom of the ocean. So I do not consider this medallion one as such. At least not in the ordinary sense, for it represents to me something even bigger than that, and I never will part with it.
Nor did I have it even at the time I was knocked down. It was given to me afterward, long afterward, and after a series of circumstances that, if described the easiest way, would have to be described as “peculiar.”
In regard to the word so loosely described as “religion,” I used to go to the Protestant services sometimes with some of the Protestant pilots in the squadron, and at other times I’d go to Mass with the Catholic pilots. Indeed, I once heard a padre in Guadalcanal give one of the meatiest Easter sermons I ever heard. Instead of going on at great length on something that didn’t interest the boys, he spent about an hour telling the boys why they should write home more often to their folks.
“Explain to your folks,” he said, “that Guadalcanal is not a hellhole any more,” which it wasn’t at that time. “Your people back home think that you’re living an awful life out here. Let them know that you’re getting along fine, that you have plenty of food and are not always being bothered by Japanese bombers. It isn’t fair to let your people think that you’re suffering when you’re not.”
It was about one of the most sensible Easter talks one could expect to hear. And even now, today, so many of us who were out there are expected to answer such questions as which made the best chaplains, the Catholics or the Protestants. My answer would be that it depended on the circumstances as well as the man.
Because on my records I was listed as a Protestant, and still am, it was up to a Protestant chaplain to preach my funeral services after I had been “killed.” Nor was it until years later, after I was released from the Japanese prison camp, that I had the opportunity to thank him for the nice things he had said about me. He was quite a boy. At our airstrip, while we were flying, he had lived in a tent with the Catholic padre and a rabbi, and I had asked him, “Gee whiz, how do you three get along?”
He had just laughed and said: “Well, I’ll tell you. We’ve gotten along wonderfully here for months. I get along fine with them as long as they don’t try to convert me!” I liked him for that.
The Japanese military have a little prayer of their own, too, which I was to learn later. Any chaplain, whether Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish, would have to agree that even this Japanese prayer had something in it too; I say this even after I had listened to it in Japanese for some eighteen months. It would be given each morning and afternoon while all of us were in formation.
At first I could not figure out the prayer, so I asked someone what it meant. He told me that it meant that they would be kind to those less fortunate than they were, and guide the weak, and so forth. The way he described it to me it meant just anything that would be similar to one we would give in any of our own religions. So any one of them who would live up to that prayer, the same as any of us who could live up to the Lord’s Prayer, could not be too far off his base.
Mentioning our own assortment of padres, I cannot help think that the Catholic chaplains had a knack usually of stealing the show. They seemed extraordinarily congenial in their special efforts to get along with the boys. They seemed to try hard to talk the boys’ language and to try to understand them. In fact, some of their language couldn’t be used after the boys got home here.
There was one Catholic chaplain, in Espiritu Santo, whom I used to like to go over and talk with on rainy nights, and we never talked about religion. From him I learned something about their organization and how they had helped the Allies in the Pacific. He told me that the Church had known all about this Pacific war long before it ever started, and that the Church knew what islands were going to be taken, and how the Church quietly had removed all the German priests from these islands ahead of time, even from the islands we were on then, and had replaced them with American and French priests. The reason the Church had been able to do this, the padre explained, without any of the German priests being suspicious, was that instead of transferring them they gave them all promotions and moved them back to the Vatican. This was to prevent their helping the Japanese, of course, and yet they had no idea at the time of what was going on. Whether they would have or not, the Church removed all temptation very cleverly.
On one of the down-pouring nights, as I was trudging along through the coconut trees near the fighter strip, I was very nearly drowned in my attempt to get to my cribbage-playing pal’s tent. In order to get the proper coral for constructing a runway or taxi way the bulldozers had taken the coral from the ground, leaving behind long pits. Some of them were ten or twelve feet deep, and they were left open. The pits had been completely filled with rain water, and in the darkness they resembled many of the roadways, which were also covered with water. By accident I happened to walk into a water-filled pit on my way to the padre’s, wearing hip boots and a heavy raincoat. The suddenness, combined with the extra weight, made it almost impossible for me to crawl up the vertical sides submerged in the water. I must have struggled nearly twenty minutes before I got out. While I sat beside the ditch, waiting to catch my breath, I realized that I had had a near miss.
It was pleasant while talking or playing cribbage with my friend. We occupied ourselves until the wee hours of the morning by smoking long black cigars and quietly sipping brandy. I never seemed to get drunk when I was with this man, though. Apparently I must have been seeking something, although I wasn’t quite certain what it might be. This man seemed to possess what I needed.
Even at that time, I am positive, I realized that fame or fortune could not be the answer. I was seeking happiness and peace of mind, but the way to get these eluded me. Fortunately, for me, I know now that spiritual things are the only answer.
Yet out of it all, and in regard to
this tiny medallion of mine, I hardly know just how to classify my attachment to it, whether faith, or trust, or part of something I believe I am just beginning to understand.
When, after being shot down, I finally got aboard my little raft, and no clothes on, I found that I had something clutched in my hand. It was a small card that had been sent to me by a Catholic nun from Jersey City. The card was soaked with sea water then, of course, as I held it and looked at it and wondered why I had it. And it was then I remembered how, a couple of years previously, passing through Jersey City, I had given a talk to a Catholic orphanage, and a couple of little girl orphans took a fancy to me. So, when I was out in the South Pacific long afterward I had sent this nun some money to buy dresses for these two little orphans, and the nun had mailed it to me.
Please don’t get the idea that I had turned noble, because I hadn’t, not in the least. I had won a considerable sum of money playing poker with some starry-eyed second lieutenants who had more money than they knew what to do with. But it bothered me, and I would have gladly given the money back if I’d thought they would accept it. Nor was I the type of person who gambled with his own squadron mates, for I didn’t like the idea of people firing guns behind me when they owed me money. I gambled with people I didn’t have to fly with.
So that is how I happened to think of the nun. But I didn’t think of her and the orphans until I had spent all I could on whisky while in Sydney.
I had paid little or no attention to the card when I received it, but absently had stuck it in my jacket pocket, the pocket that happens to be above the heart. But why now on the raft I had it in my hand, water-soaked though it was, I never will know. Yet, for some peculiar reason, I now looked at it more closely than I had before. It was a picture of a lady with a baby in her arms, and there was a boat on a stormy sea. On the back of it I could make out the blurred lettering of a lengthy prayer. I read it over time after time, while drifting there. I probably read it over forty or fifty times, and it seemed to give me a great deal of company, and I was sickly unhappy when later the Japanese, after taking me, also took the card away from me.
Baa Baa Black Sheep Page 24
