“Oka-a-y,” Mick said. “I can see getting off the deck. I can see maybe getting set up on a cruiser or even a battlewagon, if there’s enough moon, or star shells, maybe. But here’s the problem: You gotta know when to drop and, more importantly, when to pull out.”
“Ain’t no problem, there, Lieutenant. You drop when the little bastards look up, squint real hard, see you comin’, and start to say oh-shit in Japanese.”
“Actually, Major, you drop when there’s enough altitude left to pull up and get away, and that depends on being able to see the horizon. That’s real hard to do in the dark.”
“Did I say it would be dark? It won’t be dark. There’s always plenty of light around here when them big ships come. Burning tents, oil drums, airplanes, ammo dumps, even the jungle burns sometimes. Lots of damn light.”
Mick shook his head and grinned. The major finished his whiskey. “The real problem,” he said, “is the strip, and that’s because it’s usually full of big-ass holes.”
“So where do we land?”
“I propose to land on the beach, Lieutenant,” the major said. “Them bastards never shore-bomb the beach.”
Mick just stared at him. He’d seen the beach when they’d landed this afternoon. It was maybe forty feet wide, steeply slanted, with palm trees right alongside. “Any more of that whiskey in there, Major?”
“You bet,” the major said with a grin. There was some noise outside, and then the rest of the flight came pushing through the tent’s flaps. “And did I say welcome to Cactus?”
Outside the big black cloud arrived, releasing a torrential rainstorm that momentarily drowned out any further conversation.
Land a Dauntless on the beach in the dark, Mick thought. These guys had been out in the jungle far too long. On the other hand, the bombing mission sounded interesting. The Japs would never expect dive bombers coming off Guadalcanal at night. For a damned good reason, he had to admit.
* * *
The next morning Mick joined the rest of the hung-over pilots in the Ops tent at daybreak. He’d been assigned to a single tent out along the runway, halfway between the duty strip and some crude hardstands back in the woods. The Marines had learned from bitter experience not to keep aircraft anywhere near the airstrip at night. The Jap cruisers had started using special fragmentation warheads on their shore-bombardment shells, which reduced unprotected parked planes to metal shreds. The major, not noticeably any worse for wear except for a slight tremor in his hands, gave the brief.
“Morning, Breakfast Clubbers,” he said, pulling down a well-oiled plastic map of the island. “Welcome to yet another fine Navy day on Guadal-fucking-canal. Here’s today’s deal.”
He told them that a two-regiment push had begun that morning north of the Matanikau River and that they would be providing air support for the grunts.
“For our lone carrier new guy, the bombs are small, two-hundred-fifty-pounders, but the advantage is you can carry four under each wing, and a two-fifty will tear up some Jap ass when they’re in one of their holes.”
Mick raised his hand. “Who controls the strike?” he asked.
The major smiled. “It ain’t a strike, Lieutenant. It’s escort duty. We fly in two-plane sections. Each section works for a forward air controller, what we call a FAC. A FAC is a second lieutenant with a radio, a view of the forward areas, and a death wish. Your section comes up on the FAC’s freq and you get a target. One guy rolls in on the target, the other guy flies cover in case the Nips have an AA gun nearby the target. You drop, you climb out, you wait for the next call. Once you’re out of bombs, you become the wingman, your buddy becomes the bomber. When you’re both dry, you RTB, rearm, refuel, go do it again until sundown. The FACs have a mortarman with ’em so they can use willy-peter smoke rounds to mark the targets. Friendly front lines will be given in local landmarks, such as a buncha Marines waving at you and pointing at the bad guys. It’s easy, actually.”
“Bandits?” someone asked.
“We get Jap bombers from time to time, sometimes twice a day if the weather’s good. We keep fighters up on CAP stations. The funny thing is, the Nips don’t seem to coordinate their fighters with their bombers, so y’all should not see any Zeros.”
“If we do?”
“Pickle your baby bombs and go get ’em, Lieutenant. That’s why God put those fifties in your wings.”
“Are there gunners for our SBDs?” another pilot asked.
“Negative,” the major said. “It saves weight for more bunker bombs.”
There were no further questions.
“That’s it, then, boys and girls,” the major said. “Breakfast on the flight line. And remember, out here we never come back with live ordnance. Find something suspicious beyond friendly front lines and crap on it if you’re out of called targets. Okay? Let’s roll.”
Breakfast consisted of a cigarette, a canteen cup of serious coffee, and a warm mystery-meat sandwich, slathered in ketchup, mustard, and hot sauce to hide the mold. Then they launched. Mick figured that if he ran out of fuel, he could burp in the general direction of the engine and it would keep right on going.
FIVE
By early November, Mick had settled into the Cactus Air Force. They bombed, strafed, dodged friendly artillery shells whizzing through their assigned airspace, missed things and hit things. It was obvious from the radio that the ground troops were very happy that they were there. It was, Mick discovered, more fun than fleet work, and when they finally quit at sundown, he always felt like he’d done some good work for Jesus, as the major irreverently put it.
As his section came in for a landing one evening, later than usual, he noticed a couple of Seabee dozers working out on the narrow beach. One was dragging its blade backward, smoothing down the sand its treads were packing. The other was pushing over palm trees, dropping them onto the sand strip. When they all rendezvoused in the O-club tent, Mick asked the major about the dozers.
“As you saw, there ain’t really a beach here,” he said. “Not like back in the World, anyway. So they’ll tear up a fifty-foot-wide strip of palm trees parallel to the water, level it, smooth it all out, and then lay the dead trees back out on the sand. That way, when Washing Machine Charlie comes for his nightly look-see, he don’t see a landing strip. He sees a buncha dead trees. But if he could look closer, he’d see that each tree has a wire attached to it. One dozer can run the beach after dark and pull every one of those things out the way. Tomorrow evening, see me after chow, and we’ll go take a pasear down there.”
Oh-oh, Mick thought. He’d been hoping the major had forgotten about his crackpot idea of going up at night. He’d done night hops at P-cola during training; they all did, but it was tacitly acknowledged that only specially trained pilots would do night ops, and they would be fighters, not bombers. Dive bombers over water were strictly visual weapons. Bombers over water at night had no visual reference to tell them when to pull out of a dive, and all that light the major had joked about would be at the airfield and not out in the sound.
Supper was a metal tray of Spam chili served over a glop of sticky rice, captured from the Japs when the Marines’ own food supplies had run out. When Mick started to weep and wheeze from the chili heat, the O-club mess sergeant brought him some thick slices of bread and a quart of beer.
“Eat it all, boys and girls,” the sergeant said. “This is the last meat night unless we get us a transport sometime soon.”
Mick left the O-club tent an hour later, still trying to find his voice over the lingering fire of the chili. Thinking of Spam as meat required a certain suspension of disbelief, but it had actually tasted pretty good as soon as the fire overwhelmed his taste buds. The S-2—the intelligence officer—had provided the pilots with some special Spam cans to drop over the jungle. Spam on each end and a grenade with the pin pulled stuffed in the middle. The word was out that the Japs were starving, and the Marines thought it only fair to share.
Some of the guys had stayed to drink,
but Mick was tired and didn’t want another hangover. Because of the late hour, there were, of course, no lights along the airfield or anywhere else within the American perimeter. He knew roughly where his tent was back in the margins of the airfield, but he’d never tried it on such a dark night. He fished out his red-lens flashlight to find his way to his hardstand tent. A figure with a rifle appeared out of the dark.
“Whoa, there, Nelly,” the Marine said softly. “Douse that fuckin’ light.”
Mick stopped and turned off the flashlight. “How do I find my way back to my tent, then?” he asked.
“You get one of us to take you, Lieutenant,” the man said, shining his own red flashlight on Mick’s flight suit for just an instant before switching it off. “Otherwise, a sniper will put one through your head.”
“They that close?”
“Oh, yeah. They send out onesies and twosies after dark, put ’em in trees out there in the jungle with a seven-seven. You show a light, you’ll git you a toe tag. Follow me, sir.”
Mick obeyed the unknown Marine, grateful for the help. It fascinated him how loosey-goosey things were here at Henderson Field as compared to the carrier Navy, and yet how well the Marines had wired their hard-won base to take care of important business.
The sentry left him at his tent, reminding him to show no lights and to make sure he knew the way to his bunker. Mick knew where the bunker was in relation to his tent, but he’d never actually gone down into it. By then he could see reasonably well using the meager ambient starlight, so he walked the thirty yards from the tent cluster to the bunker, which was basically a dozer-scrape in the ground protected by palm-tree logs and sandbags. He groped his way down the crude steps, turned right and then left through the direct-fire baffle, and turned on his flashlight. The bunker was twenty feet long, twelve wide, and some ten feet below the surface. There were three benches made of planks and ammo boxes shaped in a U around the sides of the bunker. The overhead, which was made of steel shipping pallets, was supported by palm-tree trunks spaced every three feet across the wet dirt floor. The air was even hotter and more oppressive than topside and smelled faintly of eau de latrine. There was an inch of muddy water on the floor, and a rodent of some kind scuttled away when he turned on his flashlight.
He backed up the sandbag steps and went to his tent, where he checked his cot for insects and snakes with the dim red light, arranged the mosquito netting, and dropped onto the cot with an audible sigh. He knew the Marines out in the bush had no such luxuries as a net and a cot, and he wondered how they stood the constant insect assault. He left both tent flaps open to get some air, although it didn’t seem to make much difference. He felt for the M-1 carbine under his cot and lifted it to lie next to him. He remembered the Marine gunnery sergeant during plebe summer indoctrination grasping a rifle in one hand and his crotch in the other while reciting: This is my rifle, this is my gun. One is for killing, the other’s for fun. He made sure it was chambered and then set the safety.
He exhaled forcefully, sending forth a cloud of garlic and hot sauce. He thought he could hear small insects falling to the ground outside the net. Damned good chili, even though he thought he could feel the Spam moving around a little. Spam did that.
* * *
The next day passed pretty much like every other day at Cactus. Evening meal had been so-called hand-grenade stew on more Jap rice. It was made by taking all the different kinds of canned C-rations, blending them together, and pronouncing it stew. The troops had even more interesting names for it, and the hot sauce was in great demand. Afterward, Mick started back to his tent but then remembered that the major wanted to see him. He went to the Ops tent to find him. The major was studying a sheaf of radio messages at the back of the tent. When he spied Mick, he waved him back.
“Coast watchers on Choiseul reportin’ three Jap heavy cruisers and some tin cans headed our way. They should arrive sometime between zero two and zero three hundred hours. I propose to go hunting, and I need me a wingman.”
“How much moon we got?”
“Little over three-quarter, twenty-three hundred moonrise, with clear air. I’ve got the dozers pulling palms right now. Let’s go take us a little walk.”
They went down a long path to the beach area, where one dozer was hauling palm trees off the flattened sand while two more waited at the far end of their makeshift runway. The major said the strip was a little over two thousand feet long.
“This won’t support an SBD,” Mick said, feeling the packed sand with his flight boots.
“I was able to ‘borrow’ some of the repair rolls of Marsden matting for this little deal. They gonna lay down one section of metal, wide enough for us to launch side by side, for one thousand feet of takeoff roll.”
“I understand that the main runway might not be there when we come back,” Marsh said, “but why can’t we take off on the main?”
“Because we won’t know the sneaky bastards are here until shells start landing. We’ll only get one shot at this, so we can’t launch early and take a chance that they show up late with us outta fuel. We have to wait for the shooting to start. Then we launch.”
Mick kicked the sand once again. “I can see us getting off here, but coming back?”
“They’re gonna leave this metal here once we launch. If they need it over on the main, they’ll roll it up, and then we’ll do it the hard way.”
“Automatic ground-loop,” Mick said.
“Nah,” the major said. “We’ll be at least a thousand pounds lighter when we come back. You feather the prop, keep her real flat, slightly nose up, and come in gear-up. Drag your hook like you was tryin’ to get a carrier wire, then ease her down into the sand. Piece’a cake.”
Mick looked at the major in the darkness. He was grinning like a Cheshire cat. Mick realized he was looking at a madman.
“Think of it this way, Lieutenant,” the major said. “This’ll surprise the hell out of them Japs. They’ll go back tonight, report goddamn night dive bombers operating over the ’Canal? Spook ’em good. We can only do it once, but they won’t know that.”
We’ll only do it once because we’re both going to be dead, Mick thought. “You do understand that the opportunities for vertigo here are just about unlimited.”
“What the hell, Lieutenant, you know how to do this. I’m a fighter guy, but I’ll just do what you do. C’mon, whaddaya say?”
The man is NAFOD, Mick thought. No Apparent Fear of Death, as they called it back at Pensacola. He had terminal cancer of some kind and didn’t care if he flew himself and his tumor into the sea.
Mick did care. On the other hand, the major had a point: The Japs would in fact be stunned. Right now they owned the night. American dive bombers working at night would really upset their planning. Even better, they’d have to assume there was an American carrier in the area that they hadn’t known about.
“Okay,” Mick said. “Just once, though.”
“That’s all the planes we have,” the major said helpfully. “Brief at twenty-three hunnert, strip-alert launch, probably go up around zero deuce thirty.”
The fun actually didn’t begin until 0240. Mick and the major had been sleeping in their respective cockpits at the northwest end of the ribbon of Marsden matting since 0030. Each of them had two of Mick’s five-hundred-pounders strapped under his wings and a full load of fifty-cal. The starting crews had draped mosquito nets off the wings and slept on the hard-packed sand underneath the planes.
At 0240 what looked like heat lightning appeared behind them out over the sound, followed by the rolling thunder of heavy guns. A minute or so later there were corresponding explosions inland, to their right, as the incoming began landing on and around Henderson Field. The crews scrambled out from under the planes to start their engines. Once they were ready, Mick saluted the major and began his roll. The major waited until Mick’s plane was ten lengths ahead of him and followed suit, not wanting his engine to ingest too much sand.
Between
the moonlight and his fully night-adapted vision, Mick could see pretty well. He lifted off while still rolling on metal, cleaned up, flattened out to gain airspeed, and then began his climb. He didn’t look back—it was the major’s job to fly form on him. They went southeast, keeping low, and then curved back around to head way out over the sound to avoid flying through the arc of the shells being lobbed into Henderson Field by the Japanese ships. Mick couldn’t see the ships yet, but he could see their muzzle flashes.
“Arming now,” he called to the major. “Taking angels eight.”
“Roger eight.” The major sounded cool, calm, and collected. Mick did not feel any of those things. Takeoff had been the easy part.
At eight thousand feet they got a good view of what was going on at the airfield. There were some fires burning where the runway should have been. Closely grouped explosions showed where the cruisers’ salvos were landing.
We should have brought flares, Mick thought. He could see the guns flashing and the shells landing but still could not make out the actual ships.
“Can’t see ’em,” he reported.
“Me, neither,” the major said. “They gotta be creepin’ down there somewhere.”
“Let’s go down-moon,” Mick said, hoping for a silhouette. There was no point in making a dive into the gloom below if he couldn’t see the target. He put his barge into a gentle turn toward the azimuth of the moon and then continued around 180 degrees to fly away from the darkened ships below. After a few minutes, he told the major he was going to drop down to angels three and fly back up-moon. The major rogered and followed him down.
From three thousand feet he was able to see the flashes of all three ships firing and establish a rough lineup on their formation. He still couldn’t see the ships themselves, but maybe if they flew right by them, then went right and executed a two-seventy, they might get a silhouette. The problem with that was that they’d be bombing at right angles to the ships’ movement, whereas doctrine called for dropping along the ships’ line of advance to maximize the target footprint.
Pacific Glory Page 7
