Baa Baa Black Sheep (27 page)

We could fly to Bougainville at any altitude we chose. The main thing to remember was always to be on top of the enemy before starting to work on him, and never stay on the bottom of one of these heaps any longer than absolutely necessary.

In regard to breaking this later axiom, I certainly broke it in shooting down the third Zero, for I chased him all the way down to the water and was just starting to climb sharply, looking for more targets, when five Zeros jumped me.

Thank God, there was a small cloud nearby, and about all I could do was to keep going in and out of it. Every time I came out, two or three of the Nips nailed me with lead. Then I would have to execute a flipper turn and duck momentarily back into my cloud again. This routine seemed to go on until my whole body seemed to become dry. The dryness, starting in my mouth, gradually worked down my throat, then down to my stomach. Finally, despite all the gymnastics I was doing in that cockpit, I got so dry I had to fumble down to my web belt, get my canteen off, and take a drink of water.

In the midst of all this some clown up in the sky hollered out over the radio: “Where’s the fight? I want to get into the fight.”

This is when I made that answer to him that the pilots repeated to me later, after we were down on the ground. It seems that during my thirst and my trouble, I had yelled back over the radio: “Jesus Christ, you silly son of a bitch, if you want to shoot Zeros so damn much, come down over the
Farro Islands at three thousand feet. I’ve got five of ’em cornered here.”

But I still wish that today we, or somebody, could have made full-sized motion pictures of some of these bigger fights. It would have been good to know whether my Black Sheep, among others, had really been so photogenic, after all.

In the latter part of October the Allies had counted upon seeing the last of Japanese air resistance on Bougainville, but instead we were to receive word through our intelligence that one hundred replacement fighters from the Rabaul area had been flown in recently. This seemed to verify the Chinese saying “One cannot kill a dragon by chopping pieces off its tail.” This was like my own life: When I counted upon something being completed, so that I would be able to loaf, new problems always came up.

One of these B-24 escorts, a total flop as far as a mission went, turned out to be one of the most thrilling as far as 214 was concerned. The bombers had taken us somewhere in the neighborhood of Bougainville in some bad weather; they had tried to get above it and could not; they tried to get below it and could not. The lot of us were completely surrounded by clouds, and this was all there was to it.

I had kept a dead-reckoning track as best I could, but with the task of following someone else in this weather I knew it was far from accurate. The bomber leader would not answer when I called: “Bomber One from Fighter One—take the fighters back to base.”

Two thoughts were bothering me: one, the bombers would mill around long enough to lose us over that vast ocean, and the other, the fighters stood a good chance of running low on fuel. Time after time I tried to make a contact
with the bomber leader, who was supposed to be navigating and was in charge of the whole formation. His radio was working, for I could hear his communications with the other bombers, and these were loud and clear. Again I called: “Bomber One, please take the fighters home.”

B-24

No direct answer was to come, but there was an answer, so to speak, because the next transmission I heard left no doubt as to what was going on.

“Break formation. Every man for himself.”

I could see the bomber’s breaking formation. This was it. Then I called the fighters, ordering them to close up on my plane immediately, for I knew the bombers were lost, and that none of my pilots even had a prayer of plotting a track while escorting a formation.

This was a stunt most of them did when they had the feeling of really being lost. Everybody would break up and each one would try to find his own way home, which a lot of times ends up pretty sadly for someone, usually the fighters. In such a case the fighters have little or no idea as to where they are, added to their lack of navigational equipment.

Below was solid overcast. There was solid overcast in all directions. I very calmly gathered my boys together, because there was a chance of exciting a few. From my plot of the
track-out it became obvious that we were going to have to navigate like a crow, or our gas supply would never take any of us to our home base.

Still not wanting to make anybody nervous, I gradually lowered the outfit down through the clouds, down more than twenty thousand feet, until I came to the water. You could see from about fifty feet above the water. I watched the whitecaps through my rainswept windshield.

I knew from my dead reckoning that we would have to fly north in order to hit any islands. I flew due north and ran into a spot on the south shores of Bougainville. Bougainville, I knew, had some mighty high terrain. I followed the white coral beach around until I flew directly over the heavily fortified airstrip of Kahili, in order to get an accurate fix. I was paying no attention to any ground action in a mess like this, for I had a difficult enough time recognizing the airstrip from fifty feet up.

Nobody fired at us because no one on the ground could see through this fog either. But at that point I turned due east and flew over another familiar airstrip, the Japanese-held island of Ballale. Everyone was familiar with the course home from these targets, I knew, so in going across this water between these two enemy airstrips I was proving that I knew where I was just to keep confidence in my squadron.

Though I often referred to these boys as “my clowns,” it was with the same sort of affection that they referred to me, I presume, as Gramps. But because of my age and longer experience I was able to save them from a lot of silly mistakes that young pilots make and thereby lose their lives.

The majority of pilots in the war were not shot down by the enemy; they were killed in operational accidents in taking off from the fields, in getting lost in the fog, and so forth, not by enemy fire.

Between the two airstrips we saw five fairly large Jap AKs. It was a temptation to stop and shoot at them, but I knew that if I ever took a shot at these I would have my clowns all spread out, and then they would never get back home.

So I forwent the pleasure of shooting at these Jap ships, although a couple were within forty feet of us. We didn’t fire at them, but from then on flew practically two hundred miles in solid overcast. Once in a while we could see whitecaps,
just fifty feet below us, and this was about all we could see. But my boys remained all bunched in, not more than twenty feet apart, and that was the only way we kept together in that weather.

Finally I got them all home except Emrick, and he made a water landing right off Vella airstrip. He was picked up by a PT boat and saved.

This feeling, this trust they showed, that I could take them home through the fog was one of the greatest I ever had in my life. Or perhaps anybody could have. I wish I could experience it again—now—in some of their present anxieties.

One of the chaps in this flight was a fairly savvy boy, and without any orders from me or from operations, the high command, he got his plane regassed and took off. Of course nobody knew what he was doing, but he flew back through those two hundred miles of fog and found those Japanese AKs and strafed them until he was out of ammunition. I rather imagine that he killed practically everyone aboard all five.

When Jack Bolt finally returned to our field and made his report, it was up to me to bawl him out. I called Jack into my tent, my office, and told him that what he had done was strictly against my orders, and that it was up to me to chew him out.

“I’m not going to bother chewing you out, Jack,” I told him. “You know yourself that you disobeyed orders. But I’m going to write you up for a Navy Cross.”

This boy was awarded the Navy Cross.

Or, as I was told by “Chesty” Puller
*
years ago, there is only a hairline’s difference between a Navy Cross and a general court-martial. As far as I was concerned, Louis Puller had the habit of always hitting the nail on its head, and is the greatest Marine I know of.

It is not my intention to take credit for being a great navigator, because I was far from it. My only idea was to instill confidence and lessen panic. Furthermore, I was always breaking established rules the same as they were, and we would all have to look out for each other, for the good of ourselves and the good of the war.

For instance, I mentioned once before how I liked to sleep, how during these long days in the hot tropics I never seemed to get enough sleep, especially when going on these long tiresome missions up into enemy territory, mile after mile over South Pacific waters. It was a tiresome ride. The only comparison I can make is to someone’s being strapped up in a chair in the living room and told not to move for five hours. This might give some idea of what it was like to go on one of these missions.

During these missions into enemy territory I used to envy the bomber pilots, who had automatic pilots in their planes. So, for lack of an automatic, I would take along rubber bands and pieces of string, and I would rig these up on the instrument panel and on the brackets on the side of the cockpit, and I would have them all fixed up so that I could sleep most of the way going up to enemy territory. I would loosen my safety belt and half crawl out of my parachute straps, and then I would doze off.

Rarely would I have to glance at the altimeter, for I was able to tell by the sound of my engine whether I was going up- or downhill. So, without opening my eyes, I would just reach out and tap the rear string, and everything would sound right and I could doze off again.

If one wing dropped, I would lurch over to that side, gently tap the rubber band, and when the adjustment was made and I was sitting on an even keel, I would doze off once more.

It may seem funny that someone would go to sleep on the way to enemy territory where there were enemy planes, but I knew that I had many young eyes in the squadron that could see farther than I could. There was one young chap named Bourgoise, who could spot enemy planes forty miles away. I never could see them until I got within about twenty miles of them. So I had no fear of ever being jumped by planes as long as I had all these young eyes with me.

Another thing, we were not supposed to smoke in planes because of the fire hazard. But I am an incessant smoker and I liked to smoke at any time I was in the plane, except when I was in actual combat. So I would wait until the Japs got in the right position. During this time, though, I would be smoking. But just before we started to go down on these planes, I
would crack my hood open on my plane and toss out my cigarette butt.

But back in the rendezvous of our tent McClurg, who had been flying on my wing for a while, told me one night: “I always know when we’re going into combat. I always know because you always flop back your hood and flip out your cigarette, and something is going to start in the next few minutes.”

So accustomed do we become to our habits that I would have been unaware of this cigarette gesture being a signal if Bob McClurg had not told me during one of these gab-fests.

In a previous chapter I mentioned how equally unaware people can be of giving encouragement. An accidental word, or a thoughtful gesture, may mean everything to somebody at some time—perhaps months later.

I have been on the receiving end of such words. But just to demonstrate how, during these gab-fests, we also may give them without fully realizing what significance they may have for others at some future pinch, I will tell about “Murderous Manny” Segal, now a well-known Marine Corps ace.

He was not with my squadron, but with one of those whose members used to drop into our tent to talk things over, how to solve mutual problems, and how to get away from various types of planes.

Years later, and after I was released from prison, I happened to see Segal again. And his words were:

“I always wanted you to come back,” he said. “I wanted to thank you. On that mission you were shot down on I came back with over four hundred holes in my plane. A Jap got on my tail, and I remembered one thing you said one night in the tent on how to get away from a Tony. I did what you told me and finally shook him. If I hadn’t remembered, I would still be out there.”

Naturally I had forgotten all about having told him. Nor can I clearly recall the incident of the telling. But it goes to show how help can be distributed around, and without being formal about it, without going to classes or lectures. We just talk informally, now the same as then, and from these talks—well, who knows?

One of the other things for which I am most grateful to my Black Sheep is something else they taught me. They
taught me that—and it may sound stereotyped, but it isn’t—they taught me that you can get along fine with the American boy if you show him and lead him and do not try to order him or drive him.

Never send somebody out on a mission that you, as squadron commander, would not go on yourself, and always take the first of what promises to be ugly or bad missions. Strafing missions are missions that pilots always dread. Whenever you had one of these, if you took the first strafing mission, you would find that eventually, instead of trying to ditch these missions, all of the pilots practically would be begging to go on them.