Above the Thunder (25 page)

And then it was my turn to try the gun. I had two definite targets in mind before I took off from the beach strip, and I headed directly to Foe Maoe. The
Arizona Keed
felt strange to me, since I wasn't used to flying it, but it clearly was very nose-heavy with the gun, the ammo, the battery, and me, all in the front. The balance provided by the SCR-610 radio and its power-pack back on the chart board behind the rear seat was barely adequate to make the plane flyable.

I passed over the jungle inland from Mount Haako and came over Foe Maoe Plantation from the rear. At about a thousand feet, I flew down the plantation road until I saw the first element of my target: two “destroyed” trucks off to the left of the road near a creek, close
together. I dove on them, building up speed to about the redline, and when I thought it was time I pressed the firing switch.

As the tracers raced out in front of the plane, I could very distinctly feel deceleration from the recoil. The nose wanted to tuck under. But I could see the bullets kicking up dust around the nearest truck and out of the trash that camouflaged it. A man leaped from the cab and flopped into a nearby hole. I shifted my fire to the second truck and tried to put the bullets into the engine. And then, very quickly, I was past the trucks and heading for the second and bigger of my targets.

Across the beach road from the junction of the plantation road, a large dump of fuel in drums occupied the space between the beach road and the beach itself. There were scattered coco palms in the dump and palm fronds had been laid over the drums, but the nature of the installation had long been evident to us. And so, as I passed the trucks, now down to about two hundred feet and skimming along at about 120 at full throttle, I headed for that fuel dump. I watched the bullets knocking dust out of the palm fronds, I saw the tracers disappearing into the drums, and I watched for something to happen. It began to look futile, but just as my last rounds went out, I saw a small explosion and a couple of drums rolling around. Then I passed over just above the palms and kept going on out to sea for about a half mile before turning down the coast for home.

It was noon when I landed, so I immediately went to the officers' mess tent, where most of the HQ and HQ Btry officers were having lunch. But as I walked up there, I heard someone at the EM mess tent yell, “Three cheers for Lieutenant Kerns! Hip-hip—” And then all the men yelled “Hooray!”—and repeated it three times.

It's a fact that I had no idea why the men were cheering me and all the officers smiling.

“What's that all about?” I asked.

“Haven't you looked up toward Sarmi?” someone replied.

I stepped outside the tent and looked. A column of oily black smoke was rising high into the clear noon sky. Occasionally a balloon of red flame would rise like an elevator from the base of the column until it dulled and was lost in the billows of smoke. Even from ten miles away, it was an impressive sight. A squadron of A-20 attack bombers had
recently hit the area without any such dramatic display—although the squadron lost two planes and four men in the attack. I felt a little bit like Frank Luke, back from another successful balloon busting. An aerial photo later showed that the fire went far past where I had hit the fuel dump and advanced through other supplies of some kind as it moved toward Sarmi and out of the picture.

But General Myers, too, had been impressed by the big smoke far up the coast, and he wanted to know how it came to be. Since the gun was on his plane, Vin was elected to explain. He later told us that General Myers, with tongue in cheek, chewed him out for several minutes, lecturing him about compliance with directives prohibiting weapons on artillery airplanes (the AAF didn't like competition, I guess); and then, taking his tongue out of his cheek, told him, “Get that damned gun off of that plane!”

Soon after that, we were forbidden to drop any object from our planes except message bags and smoke grenades. It put a bad crimp in the private war of Vineyard and Kerns.

There came a day when the situation at the beach strip became unmanageable. For several days we had been fighting a losing battle against the surf, and on this day we were overwhelmed. The dike vanished in rolling waves and shifting sand, and it was getting worse by the minute. Vin was in the air, we had significant combat action going on, and I would soon have to relieve him. I had FDC tell Vin to plan on returning to Wakde at the end of his mission, and I got the men busy loading our truck, ready to be taken to Wakde on the ferry as soon as possible. With Sergeant Allen and his toolbox in my L-4, I began my takeoff run down what used to be our private airstrip.

I started my run just as a wave broke, hoping I could get airborne before the next wave came in. I almost did but not quite. I went roaring down the beach, the wave came roaring onto the beach, and when we met, the L-4 disappeared in a cloud of spray. Out of that it came waddling like a duck, barely rolling but its engine still roaring. Maybe I could beat the next wave. Well, I almost did, but not quite. Again the heavy spray drenched us and brought us nearly to a standstill, but we came out with the throttle wide open as we went on down the beach, already far past the end of what we had considered our strip.

FOE MAOE PLANTATION ENTRANCE. The straight road running inland from the coast passes the north west end of Mount Haako and runs into and through the middle of the seven-hundred-acre plantation (not cultivated during the war). The fuel dump I burned on that same flight was just left of the road intersection, between the coast road and the beach. This road junction was about ten miles northwest of our nearest positions.

Unknown to Allen and me, most of HQ Btry was watching us, and they were having the biggest laugh of all their time in New Guinea. Some were literally rolling on the ground as they watched the stubborn little airplane trying so hard to fly but being repeatedly defeated by the surf at the critical instant and momentarily vanishing in the white spray.

I don't know just how many times we hit the surf, but it was many. We did not completely circle the island of New Guinea on this takeoff run, but we were far from the old airstrip before I finally managed to stagger off in a three-point attitude and coax the L-4 to remain just above the water until it slowly picked up enough speed to climb. And then we headed across the eight miles or so of water to Wakde—with Allen and me soaked to the skin and water running out of every drain hole the plane had.

At Wakde, we made ourselves at home in the wingless fuselage of a wrecked C-47 and tied our L-4s down nearby. We soon made a telephone connection with our S-2, and we were doing business as usual.

Flying from Wakde was fine, except for the fact that we were across several miles of ocean from our battalion. General Myers got the engineers busy building us a strip at Maffin, but it took time. Meanwhile, we hobnobbed to some degree with the AAF people who, permanently or as transients, inhabited the aircraft maintenance base there.

Air traffic was light, so our lack of radio communication with the tower was not a serious handicap. The long runway enabled us to take off in whatever direction suited us, regardless of wind, and the tower usually let us go as we wished. We'd taxi out to the runway near our C-47 home and swing around to face the tower. They'd give us a green light and away we'd fly. But on one occasion, this informality led to a near tragedy.

It was to be our last patrol of the day. I taxied out, faced the tower, and—most unusual—got a red light. However, this was followed almost immediately by a green light, so I swung my tail toward the tower and
accelerated out onto the runway, heading west into the low-hanging sun. I was hardly more than airborne, no more than a hundred feet above the surface, when I had just a feeling, not a real sighting, of something between me and the sun. I rolled hard to my left, and as I did so a P-40 slid by on my right so close that his right wing almost hit my landing gear. But it didn't hit, so I continued on my mission and soon forgot all about the incident.

When I returned at dusk, there was a P-40 lying on its back in the middle of the runway, and when I went into our abode Vin told me that I was to call the base operations officer immediately. As soon as I had reported to our S-2 by phone, I called the officer. He lit into me without a preamble, saying that I had disregarded a red light and taken off in the face of traffic, causing the crash of the P-40 and injury to its pilot. I insisted that the red light had been followed by a green—but it began to dawn on me that the green light must have been intended for the landing P-40, which had been right in line beyond me as seen from the tower.

I was beginning to visualize myself as a nonflying type when someone interrupted the base operations officer and he told me to hold on. Soon he came back on the phone with an entirely different tone and said that the P-40 pilot had regained consciousness and had said my L-4 had nothing at all to do with his crash—in fact, he hadn't even seen me at all, which made me very glad indeed that I had sensed his coming. He was making an emergency landing because of trouble with the fighter's hydraulic system, and his brakes had locked up on touchdown, causing the nose-over. So I was off the hook.

My best pre-Army friend was C. C. “Buzz” Perkins, a good old West Virginia boy living in Ohio, now a radio operator and gunner on a 5th Air Force B-25 based at Sansapor, far up at the west end of New Guinea on the Vogelkopf. When three pilots from his outfit showed up at Wakde to take home three of their ships, I got a three-day leave of absence from Captain Ryan and flew as copilot with a Lieutenant Hull in one of the Mitchell bombers. That was a big deal for me, although it was nerve-racking to hold position on the right side of our “V” formation. From the right-hand seat, I could see absolutely nothing of the lead ship except the top of the arc of its port propeller, and it made me most
uncomfortable. I would ease out and down a bit so I could see more, but Hull would impatiently order me to close back in. Of course, from his seat he could see the entire plane, and I think he got a kick out of harassing me.

We refueled at Biak Island, where I saw the only Red Cross doughnut girls I ever saw during the whole war, so far as I can recall. To receive such services, you must be at the right echelon of the right outfit and in the right place at the right time, and I guess I never was. And then we were off to Sansapor.

In order to associate freely with Buzz and his enlisted friends, I removed my insignia of rank and passed as a private. That was easy for me. I looked like a yardbird to start with. I had a good visit with my old buddy and greatly enjoyed the navy beans served at their mess. They were sick of them, but I hadn't seen my favorite kind of bean in ages. My appetite took no notice at all when a machine-gun opened fire on the nearby defense perimeter and all my gun-shy companions in the serving line hit the deck. They had been running low-level missions to Celebes (now Sulawesi), where machine guns gave them hallelujah every day. And, in fact, they were celebrating the rescue a day or two earlier of their colonel, who had been downed on Celebes.

The story current among these wild-blue boys had to do with the fact that the rescued colonel was known to be the well-to-do owner of a large ranch in Texas. In expressing his gratitude to the young soldier who had sighted him and brought about his rescue, the colonel told him that whatever he wanted he could have. “Just name it,” he invited.

“Well, sir,” said the lad, “if you will just get me a discharge I'll go on home and take care of our ranch.”

I heard there another tale in which the hero was a former member of my old outfit, the 89th FA Bn, in Hawaii. I had been acquainted with him but, unfortunately, I can't recall his name. He had transferred to the AAF in the early months of the war and had become a B-25 crew member; I believe they called him a flight engineer. On a bombing mission, his plane had been set upon by a number of Japanese fighters and riddled with bullets. Miraculously, the plane continued to fly, but every member of the crew was killed except the engineer, who got the dead pilot out of
his seat and took over the controls. By some quirk of fate, he managed to get away from the fighters and flew the ship back to Sansapor. When he contacted the tower, he was ordered to bail out rather than try to land the plane, but he refused, thinking someone aboard might still be alive. Anyway, he said, the only parachutes he could reach had been damaged by the gunfire and were not reliable. So he brought the plane down. And he was successful in the landing until near the end of his rollout, when he veered off to one side and nosed into a dirt revetment. He was not seriously hurt.