We’ll pull it off or we won’t. That’s the truth of it.
POTTINGER:
Talk about going along for the ride: These two go blithely about their bloody work without a thought for the rest of the crew. The have ice water in their veins. And neither asked if damaging a ship was worth the life of every man in this plane. Or anybody’s life.
They’re assassins, pure and simple, and they thought they were invulnerable.
Of course, the Japanese were assassins, too.
All of these assholes were in it for the blood.
One hundred knots is glacially slow when you’re going to a fire. I was so nervous that I had trouble sitting still. Despite my faith in Pottinger’s expertise, I kept staring into the darkness, trying to see what was out there. I didn’t want to fly into a mountain and these islands certainly had ‘em. When Pottinger said we had reached the mouth of the channel between the two, we turned north. Blindly.
As we motored up the channel at two thousand feet, I wondered why I didn’t want to put off the moment of truth, till tomorrow night, or next week, or next year. Or forever. I decided that a man needs a future if he is to stay on an even keel, and with Rabaul up ahead, the future was nothing but a coin flip. I wanted it to be over.
Pottinger and Varitek, the radioman, were on the radar; they reported lots of blips. We came up the moonpath and looked with binoculars: We counted twenty-three ships in the harbor, about half of them warships and the rest freighters and tankers. Lots of targets.
“I think the one in the center of the harbor is a cruiser,” Modahl said, and passed the binoculars to me. As he turned the plane to the north, to seaward, I turned the focus wheel of the binoculars and studied it through his side window. With the vibration of the plane and the low light level — all we had was moonlight — it was hard to tell. She was big, all right, and long enough, easily the biggest warship in the harbor.
“Looks like a cruiser to me,” I agreed. I lost the moon as I tried to focus on other ships. Modahl turned the Witch 180 degrees and motored back south. This time the harbor was on my side.
“See anything that looks like a carrier?” he asked.
“I’m looking.” Destroyer, destroyer, maybe a small cruiser … more destroyers. A sub. No, two subs.
“Two subs, no carrier,” I said, still scanning.
“I’d like to bomb a carrier before I die,” Modahl muttered. Everyone on the circuit heard that, of course, and I thought he should watch his lip. No use getting the crew in a sweat. But it was his crew, so I let the remark go by.
“The biggest ship I see is the cruiser in the center,” I said, and handed back the glasses.
“Surrounded by cans. When they hear us, everyone opens fire, and Vesuvius will erupt under our ass.”
“We can always do a destroyer. We can send one or two to the bottom. They are excellent targets.”
“I know.”
We turned and motored north again. He waited until the moonlight reflected on the harbor and studied it again with the binoculars. Pottinger was standing behind us. He didn’t say anything, kept bent over so he could look out at the harbor.
“The cruiser,” Modahl said with finality. He told the crew, as if they didn’t know, “We are off Rabaul harbor. The Japs have twenty-three ships there, one of which appears to be a cruiser. Radio, send off a contact report. When you’re finished we’ll attack.”
“What do you want me to say, Mr. Modahl?”
“Just what I said. Twenty-three ships, et cetera.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Tell me when you have an acknowledgment.”
The cruiser lay at a forty-five-degree angle to the moonpath, which had to be the direction of our approach since we were bombing visually. To maximize our chances of getting a hit, we should train off the four bombs, that is, drop them one at a time with a set interval between them — we were going to try to drop the bomb that had hung on the rack at Buka. On the other hand, we could do the most damage if we salvoed all four bombs right down the smokestack. The obvious compromise was to salvo them in pairs with an appropriate interval between pairs — that was Modahl’s choice. He didn’t ask anyone’s opinion; he merely announced how we were going to do it.
Hoffman consulted the chart. If we managed to get up to 250 mph at weapons release, an interval of two-tenths of a second would give us seventy-five feet between salvos. Modahl knew the math cold and gave his approval. Hoffman set two-tenths of a second on the interval-ometer.
“How low are you going to go?” Pottinger asked. The cockpit lights reflected in the sweat on his face.
“As low as possible.”
“We’re going to get caught in the bombs’ blast.”
“Every foot of altitude increases our chances of missing.”
“And of getting home,” Pottinger said flatly.
“Get back to your station,” Modahl snapped. “The enemy is there, and I intend to hit him.”
“I’m merely pointing out the obvious.”
“Take it up with Commander Jones the next time you see him.”
“If I see him.”
“Goddamn it, Pottinger! That’s enough! Get back to your station and shut the fuck up.”
The crew heard this exchange, which was one reason Modahl was so infuriated. Right then I would have bet serious money that Modahl and Pottinger would never again fly together.
We flew inbound at three thousand feet. Modahl had climbed higher so he could dive with the engines at idle and still get plenty of airspeed. I was used to the speed of the Dauntless, so motoring inbound toward the proper dive point — waiting, waiting, waiting — was like having poison ivy and being unable to scratch.
“Now,” he said, finally, and we both pushed forward on the yokes as he pulled back the throttles and advanced the prop levers. The engines gurgled … and the airspeed began increasing. Modahl ran the trim forward. Down we swooped, accelerating ever so slowly.
The cruiser was dead ahead, anchored, without a single light showing. The black shapes on the silver water, the darkness of the land surrounding the bay, the moon and stars above … it was like something from a dream. Or a nightmare.
I called the altitudes. “Nineteen, eighteen, seventeen …”
He pushed harder on the yoke, ran the nose trim full down. Speed passing 180, 190 …
Every gun in the Jap fleet opened fire, all at once.
“Holy …!”
Fortunately, they were all firing straight up or randomly. Nothing aimed our way.
The tracers were so bright I would clearly see everything in the cockpit. The Japs had heard us — they just didn’t know where we were. Why they didn’t shoot away from the moon was a mystery to me.
“Eleven … ten … nine …”
Even the shore batteries were firing. The whole area was erupting with tracers. And searchlights. Four searchlights came on, began waving back and forth.
A stream of weaving tracers from one of the destroyers flicked our way … and I felt the blows as three or four shells hit us trip-hammer fast.
“Five … four …”
Modahl was flattening out now, pulling on the yoke with all his strength as the evil black shape of the Japanese cruiser rushed toward us. The airspeed indicator needle quivering on 255 …
“Three …”
“Help me!” he shouted, and lifted his feet to the instrument panel for more leverage.
I grabbed the yoke, braced myself, and pulled. The altimeter passed two hundred … I knew there was some lag in the instrument, so we had to be lower … The nose was coming up, passing one hundred …
We were going to crash into the cruiser! I pulled with all my strength.
“Now!” Modahl shouted, so loud Hoffman could have heard it without earphones.
I felt the bombs come off; two sharp jolts. Dark as it was, I glimpsed the mast of the cruiser as we shot over it, almost close enough to touch.
As that sight registered, the bombs exploded �
�� right under us! The blast lifted us, pushed …
Modahl rammed the throttles forward to the stops.
The Witch wasn’t responding properly to the elevators.
“The trim,” Modahl said desperately, and I grabbed the wheel and turned it with all my strength. It was still connected, still stiff, so maybe we weren’t dead yet.
Just then a searchlight latched on to us, and another. The ghastly glare lit the cockpit.
“Shoot ‘em out,” Modahl roared to the gunners in the blisters and the tail, who opened fire within a heartbeat.
I was rotating the stiff trim wheel when I felt Modahl push the yoke forward. His hand dropped to mine, stopping the rotation of the trim wheel. Then the fifties in the nose lit off. He had opened fire!
Up ahead … a destroyer, shooting in all directions — no, the gunners saw us pinned in the searchlights and swung their guns in our direction!
Modahl held the trigger down — the fifties vibrated like a living thing as we raced toward the destroyer, the engines roaring at full power. With the glare of the searchlight and tracers and all the noise, it looked like we had arrived in hell.
And I could feel shells tearing into us, little thumps that reached me through the seat.
We were rocketing toward the destroyer, which was shooting, shooting, shooting …
Another searchlight hit us from the port side, nearly blinding me. Something smashed into the cockpit, the instrument panel seemed to explode. Simultaneously, the bow fifties stopped, and the plane slewed.
Modahl slumped in his seat.
I fought for the yoke, leveled the wings, screamed at that idiot Hoffman to stop firing, because he had opened up with the thirty-caliber as soon as the fifties lit off and was still blazing away, shooting BBs at the elephant: Even though we were pinned like a butterfly in the lights, in some weird way I thought that the muzzle flashes of the little machine gun would give away our position.
My mind wasn’t functioning very well. I could hear the fifties in the blisters going, but I shouted, “Hit the lights, hit the lights” anyway, praying that the gunners would knock them out before the Japs shot us out of the sky.
We were only a few feet over the black water: The destroyer was right there in front of us, filling the windscreen, strobing streams of lava-hot tracer. I cranked the trim wheel like a madman, trying to get the nose up.
The superstructure of the destroyer blotted out everything else. I turned the trim wheel savagely to raise the nose and felt something impact the plane as we shot over the enemy ship.
More shells tore at us, then the tracer was arcing over our wings. One by one the lights disappeared — I think our gunners got two of them — and, mercifully, we exited the flak.
The port engine was missing, I was standing on the rudder trying to keep the nose straight, and Modahl was bleeding to death.
He coughed black blood up his throat.
Thank God he was off the controls!
Blood ran down his chest. He reached for me, then went limp.
Three hundred feet, slowing … at least we were out of the flak.
The gyro was smashed, the compass frozen: The glass was broken. Both airspeed indicators were shot out, only one of the altimeters worked …
Everyone was babbling on the intercom. The cruiser was on fire, someone said, bomb blasts and flak had damaged the tail, one of the gunners was down, shot, and—
Modahl was really dead, covered with blood, his eyes staring at his right knee.
The port engine quit.
Fumbling, I feathered the prop on the port engine. If it didn’t feather, we were going in the water. Now.
It must have, because the good engine held us in the sky.
We were flying straight at the black peninsula on the western side of the bay. We were only three hundred feet above the ocean. Ahead were hills, trees, rocks, more flak guns — I twisted the yoke and used the rudder to turn the plane to the east.
We’ll go down the channel, I thought, then it will be a straight shot south to Namoia Bay. Some islands north of there — if we can’t make it home, maybe we can put down near one.
* * *
The gunners lifted and pulled Modahl out of the pilot’s seat while I fought to get the Sea Witch to a thousand feet.
Varitek had caught a piece of flak, which tore a huge gash in his leg and ripped out an artery. The other guys sprinkled it with sulfa powder and tried to stanch the bleeding … I could hear the back-and-forth on the intercom, but they didn’t seem to think he had much of a chance.
Dutch Amme climbed into the empty pilot’s seat. He surveyed the damage with an electric torch, put his fingers in the hole the shell had made that killed Modahl. There were other holes, five of them, behind the pilot’s seat, on the port side. Amazingly, the destroyer hadn’t gotten him — someone we had passed had raked us with something about twenty-millimeter size.
“Searchlights … That’s why Joe Snyder didn’t come back.”
“Yeah,” I said, refusing to break my fierce concentration on the business at hand. I had the Cat out into the channel now, with the dark shape of New Ireland on my left and the hulk of New Britain on the right. From the chart I had seen, that meant we had to be heading south. Only 450 nautical miles to go to safety.
“The hull’s tore all to hell,” Amme said wearily. “When we land we’ll go to the bottom within a minute, I’d say. You’ll have to set her down gentle, or we might even break in half on touchdown.”
Right! Like I knew how to set her down gently.
Amme talked for a bit about fuel, but I didn’t pay much attention. It took all my concentration to hold the plane in a slight bank into the dead engine and keep a steady fifty pounds or so of pressure on the rudder, a task made none the easier by the fact that my hands and feet were still shaking. I wiped my eyes on the rolled-up sleeve of my khaki shirt.
The clouds were gone, and I could use the stars as a heading reference, so at least we were making some kind of progress in the direction we wanted to go.
“Tell radio to send out a report,” I told Amme. “ ‘Searchlights at Rabaul.’ Have him put in everything else he can think of.”
“Varitek is in no shape to send anything.”
“Have Pottinger do it. Anybody who knows some Morse code can send it in plain English.”
“You want to claim the cruiser?”
“Have him put in just what we saw. People saw fire. Leave it at that.”
“With Mr. Modahl dead … it would look good if we claimed the cruiser for him.”
“Do like I told you,” I snapped. “A hundred cruisers won’t help him now. Then come back and help me fly this pig.”
Ten minutes later Amme was back. “Some flak hit the radio power supply. We can’t transmit.”
FIVE
When the sun rose Varitek was dead. The mountains of New Britain were sinking into the sea in our right rear quarter, and ahead were endless sun-speckled sea and open, empty sky. Right then I would have appreciated some clouds. When I next looked back, the mountains were lost in the haze.
Dutch Amme sat in the left seat and I in the right. Both of us exerted pressure on the rudder and worked to keep the Witch flying straight. We did that by reference to the sun, which had come up over the sea’s rim more or less where we thought it should if we were flying south. As it climbed the sky, we tried to make allowances.
I also kept an eye on the set of the swells, which seemed to show a steady wind from the southeast, a head wind. I flew across the swells at an angle and hoped this course would take us home.
Our airspeed, Amme estimated, was about 80 mph. At this speed, with a little head wind, it would take nearly seven hours to reach Namoia Bay.
Fuel was a problem. I had Amme repeat everything he had told me as we flew down the strait, only this time I listened and asked questions. The left wing had some holes in it, and we had lost gasoline. We were pouring the stuff into the right engine to stay airborne. The upshot of a
ll this was that he thought we could stay up for maybe six hours, maybe a bit less.
“So you’re saying we can’t make Namoia Bay?”
Amme thrust his jaw out, eyed me belligerently. This, I had learned, was the way he dealt with authority, the world, officers. “That’s right, sir. We’ll be swimming before we get there.”
Of course, the distance and flying time to Namoia Bay were also estimates. Still, running the Witch out of gas and making a forced landing in the open sea was a surefire way to die young. I knew just enough about Catalinas to know that even if we survived an open-ocean landing in this swell and were spotted from the air, no sane person would risk a plane and his life attempting to rescue us. Cats weren’t designed to operate in typical Pacific rollers in the open sea.
If we couldn’t make Namoia Bay, we needed a sheltered stretch of water to land on, the lee of an island or a lagoon or bay.
There were islands ahead, some big, some small, all covered with inhospitable jungle.
Then there was Buna, on the northern shore of the New Guinea peninsula.
“What about Buna?” I asked Amme and Pottinger, who was standing behind the seats. “Can we make it?”
“The Japs are still in Buna,” Amme said.
“I heard they left,” Pottinger replied.
“I’d hate to get there and find out you heard wrong,” Amme shot back.
So much for Buna.
I had Pottinger sit in the right seat while I took a break to use the head. The interior of the plane was drafty, and when I saw the hull, I knew why. Damage was extensive, apparently from flak and the bomb blasts. Gaping holes, bent plates and stringers … I could look through the holes and see the sun reflecting on the ocean. The air whistling up through the wounds made the hair on the back of my head stand up. When we landed, we’d be lucky if this thing stayed above water long enough for us to get out of it. Hell, we’d be lucky if it stayed in one piece when it hit the water.
As I stood there looking at the damage, feeling the slipstream coming through the holes, I couldn’t help thinking that this adventure was going to cement my reputation as a Jonah with the dive-bomber guys. They were going to put me in the park for the pigeons. Which pissed me off a little, though there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.
The Sea Witch Page 5
