Reluctant Warriors (3 page)

He watched, anxiously. In a minute he could see the plane clearly: another P-38 slicing
across his path, on a heading of maybe 120 degrees. Its tail bore the yellow markings
of the 261st squadron, which was based forty miles from his.

Mara
was now traveling at 190 miles per hour. Jimmy turned, painfully, to parallel
the new plane. As he came alongside it, he saw that both its engines were working,
but its canopy and nacelle were a shambles, riddled
with bullet holes. He looked
at the pilot: a big man, slumped over the stick, obviously badly hurt.

Slowly, the pilot turned toward Jimmy, and seemed to look directly at him. But their
eyes never met.

The planes were less than seventy feet apart now. With great effort, Jimmy reached
for the radio. It was still dead. He tried signaling with his left hand and shouting:
“One hundred and twenty degrees will take you out to sea!”

There was no response. Jimmy shook his head. He wanted to help the other pilot, at
least keep him from crashing in the trackless jungle, but the other man didn't even
seem to realize he was there.

“Buddy, I got to go. I got to live, go back to my wife and child.”

As he throttled back to 160 and went back to 132 degrees, the yellow-tailed plane
continued on its doomed course. He watched it drop out of sight, into the trees.

Jimmy sat up a little in the seat. “I'm not going to go like that,” he said to himself.
“I'm going to make it!”

His wife came into his thoughts again. He could see her so clearly, this time standing
in their kitchen and laughing that time he'd dropped the eggs all over the floor.
Her voice, mock-scolding:
Use the sense the good Lord gave you, Jimmy DeValery.

His wound had stiffened. He thought it was time to try bandaging his arm again. He
reached for his kit. Again the pain was beyond anything he could stand, and after
several minutes of agonizing and accomplishing nothing, he gave up.

Jimmy felt exhausted and faint, his eyes having trouble focusing on the jungle below.
The stress had weakened him a great deal and he was far less conscious.
The jungle
is so mesmerizing
, he thought.
It stretches on and on and on and on, all the way
to the horizon. I am just creeping like an ant in a field. Will it never end?
He
could never remember being so tired.

Jimmy could barely keep his eyes open. He decided he would have to make a crash landing
before he blacked out. With his left hand, he checked
under his left armpit, confirming
that he still had the .45 he usually kept in a holster there.
I'll need it to survive
in the jungle
, he thought calmly.
And I'll need my jungle kit too.
His eyes fixed
on his canteen.

In an instant he realized what had happened. With the blood loss and sweating, he
had become seriously dehydrated! He grabbed the canteen, ignoring the renewed pain
reaching for it sent up his arm. He unscrewed the cap and drank. The water, which
he normally disdained as smelling like fuel oil, gave him an immediate jolt, as though
it were pure caffeine.

He gulped half the canteen and almost instantly felt better and more alert. He checked
his speed and altitude; both were fine.

Five minutes later, he spotted something on the ground far to the west. It looked
like the old abandoned airfield at Bena Bena! He studied landmarks as his plane flew
past.

“It is Bena Bena!” Jimmy shouted. That meant he was only a few miles away from Nadzab!
“I'm going to make it!”

The situation had changed so quickly that Jimmy had little time to enjoy it. All
he could manage was a feeble chuckle.
I must concentrate
, he thought.
I'm not safe
yet.

In another ten minutes he could see Nadzab. Perking up, he nevertheless would not
allow himself to get giddy. With no way to radio the field, he made a slow circuit
and attempted to lower his landing gear. Considering the damage to the plane, he
thought the right wheel might not come down. When its green light failed to come
on, he knew it had not.

I'll have to make a belly landing. That means
Mara
will never fly again. I'll lose
my ship!
Jimmy thought. He looked around at his beloved plane.

“Forgive me, but this is the only way I think I can live through this,” he muttered.

He came around for one more circuit of the field, and then raised the landing gear
that had come down. As he approached, he throttled back and came in.

As his speed died, the huge Lockheed plane seemed to almost hover over the crude
strip. Jimmy pulled back slightly on the stick and the nose
came up. For an instant,
it seemed as though
Mara
would gently float in, like a paper airplane, and come to
a stop without a scratch.

Then the seven-ton machine hit the ground; horrific grinding and smashing sounds
roaring up around him. The plane, or what remained of it, ground to a skidding stop
across the concrete, the underside nearly torn off.

Jimmy sat up as much as he could in the slightly squashed cockpit, staring woozily
through the cracked Plexiglas. Several of the men were running up the strip, shouting,
drawn by the noise of the crash. He recognized the guy in the lead: his wingman,
Tony Seegars.

A great feeling of relief came over Jimmy.
Tony made it back!
he thought. Then the
combination of shock and humidity hit him like a thirty-pound soccer ball against
his chest.

His body went limp as his friends and ground crew carefully lifted him out of the
plane. He happened to glimpse one of the men's watches as they did.

It was 1130 hours.
Only 1130? Feels like an eternity since we left,
he thought.
Just
my luck, to get back just as the day starts getting really disgusting.

A Dip in the Sea

New Guinea, April 1944

C
aptain Jimmy DeValery walked alone toward the briefing room for the thirty-fifth
time. He gloated just a little bit, a slight smile on his face. He wondered if anyone
else he passed knew that this would be his last mission. After thirty-five missions,
he qualified to be rotated home out of this hellhole.

He took a seat in the middle of the room as the other pilots gathered. Then, the
tall and angular Colonel Hazelton entered and began the briefing.

Jimmy didn't listen very closely for the first several minutes. He expected some
sort of run up the coast again, and planned to get the details in the map briefing
later. Then, he heard the word
volunteer
, and his attention fixed fully on the Colonel's
voice.

“Men,” said the Colonel, “this is not my idea, or some stunt by General Kenney and
his people. This comes straight from the top, General Arnold in Washington. The Navy
wants this job done and we were volunteered because we are the closest group to the
target. It is a very, very tough job. You know I have flown every mission with you.
I would do this one myself, but the word came down yesterday from General Guest that
no one above the rank of Captain would be considered. The pilot must have a P-38
J-2 because of the extremely long range, be an excellent navigator, and have a good
record of bombing accuracy.”

Major Franklin stood first, followed by all of the other squadron leaders, all above
the rank of Captain. They were followed by other pilots, all young Lieutenants.

The Colonel looked at each man with the respect that comes from risking lives together.
“Bob,” he said looking at the Major, “Craig, Jim, you know I can't take you for this
one. And you young guys don't have the experience. Thank you, though.”

By this time Jimmy was squirming in his seat. He could navigate as well as most of
the guys, and his bombing was good enough. It was obvious to him: there was no one
else! It was like a spotlight was suddenly shining on him.

Due to his broken arm from the Wewak mission, and then his bout with malaria, he
was the only one left from the original wing that had come to Port Moresby. All of
the others from his original squadron had either been killed or rotated home. Even
his old wingman, Tony Seegars, had gotten his final mission last month and was gone
now.

As he looked around the room, Jimmy saw that the others knew too. Several of the
younger guys turned and glanced nervously back at him. He wasn't entirely sure he
was up to this, physically speaking. He had come overseas with a robust 170 pounds
on his five-foot-eight frame, but had lost forty pounds because of the malaria and
almost died. With little to eat but powdered eggs and Spam, he had gained little
of his weight or strength back. A milk-run mission would be one thing, but this?

For a moment he stewed, thinking how unfair—and unexpected—this was. Then, he stood
up.

At 0430 hours the next morning, it was still completely dark. Jimmy looked at his
watch in the dim illumination of the cockpit light. It was the second watch and the
sixth watchband he'd gone through over here. The leather watchbands would just rot,
and finally the watch would warp in the humidity too.

As he taxied the plane toward the other end of the runway, he passed the Seabees
in the faint light of the oil lamps. They were still working on the end of the runway.
He had heard them all night, cutting down trees and putting another fifty yards on
the runway's length, so that his very heavily laden plane would have a better chance
of taking off.

Silhouetted against the darkness by the lamps, the men began to line up to watch,
to see if it had been worth it. There were about a hundred of them, haggard and dirty
from their labor in the terrible humidity. They had done all they could. Jimmy was
obliged, and he nodded to them from his open canopy as he passed by. He tried to
look cheerful, tried not to think of the tremendous pressure he was under.

His thoughts turned to his plane,
Mara II.
Loaded down with a thousand-pound general-purpose
bomb and over a thousand gallons of aviation fuel, she was like a huge and ungainly
duck totaling almost 21,000 pounds.
Has anyone ever gotten off with this much weight
before?
he wondered. Even on the long strike to Hollandia, she had been only about
1,700 pounds. In a few minutes, he came to the other end of the runway, some 4,800
feet away from the Seabees.

The Seabees made him feel less angry about his bad break of not being given a milk
run and a ticket home. No one could say he had not done his part. He'd definitely
taken his share of chances over thirty-four missions. Still, he wasn't sure anyone
deserved this one: an 850-mile flight to Truk Lagoon to bomb a radar station for
the Navy.

The American carrier groups had plastered the western edges of the Central Pacific,
starting with their big raid on the islands of Palau three weeks before. The word
was that they would now swing back eastward, blasting every Japanese stronghold one
by one. Truk had to be on the target list, or they wouldn't have dumped this mission
on the Army. The radar station had to go, Jimmy figured, so the Navy fleet could
move toward Truk and not be seen.

Besides trying to take off with
Mara II
so heavily loaded, he had worried most of
the sleepless night about making the rendezvous with the submarine
Skate
. The plan
was to land in the water on the way back, because the airplane couldn't fly the whole
seventeen thousand-mile round trip lugging the bomb halfway. He would have to part
with his second plane. As he stopped and pivoted the plane into position, he thought
of his first
Mara
, badly shot up on the Wewak raid and destroyed when he was forced
to crash-land.

Jimmy had blamed himself, feeling that he had done a poor job on the
mission. He
remembered sitting on the back of a Jeep after he crashed. He had wept looking at
Mara
on the runway, a hopeless wreck with her twisted props and torn-out underside.

Doc Peters had examined his broken arm, and he had laughed upon finding the shard
that had fractured Jimmy's ulna sticking out plain as life, obscured only a little
by his blood. Jimmy, still staring at his smashed plane, hadn't thought it funny
at all.

Now, he was ordered to lose
Mara II
as well. He'd flown fifteen missions with her,
and the idea of ditching her in the ocean was like asking him to cut off his arm.
Sure,
Skate
would be right there to pick him up.
Just like getting on an elevator
,
the intelligence officer had told him. Right, Jimmy thought sourly. He could just
see the sub being late or lost, and him drowning in the ocean three hundred miles
from the nearest landfall.

The Army had done a lot to make Jimmy's mission succeed. Besides lengthening the
strip, the wing had sent their chief mechanic, a guy named Breslow, down to work
with Pete, his own crew chief, and they had worked all night just like the Seabees.
It was great that all of these guys were behind him. Colonel Hazelton himself had
spent most of an hour briefing him.

A wave of confidence came over the veteran. He and
Mara II
could do this job, however
nasty it was. “If anyone can pull this off, we can,” he muttered.

It still wasn't light enough to see the strip's far end. But Pete was visible on
the near end of the strip. He signaled Jimmy to start revving up the great Allison
motors. As the rpms came up, great clouds of dust and debris blew up behind the plane.

Jimmy's eyes met Pete's. From the faraway look in the crew chief 's eyes, he was
getting the distinct feeling that Pete thought he would not come back. He looked
away for a second.

The two 1,475-horse engines revved higher and higher but sounded flat. Another glance
at Pete's face told Jimmy that Pete thought so too. Finally, Jimmy throttled back
and opened the window on the side of the cockpit.

“I can't get but 3,450 out of them!” he yelled to Pete.

“That's the best they will do in this humidity,” Pete yelled back.

As Jimmy revved the engines again, it began to rain. When the engines crested, he
knew, he'd have to go. If it started raining any harder, he doubted he would be able
to get off at all.

The left motor was reaching slightly higher revs than the right. When it came up
to 3,475, he nodded to Pete, pulled the canopy shut, and took his foot off the brake.
Mara II
lurched ahead. She gathered speed very quickly, and to everyone's surprise,
even Jimmy's, lifted off rather easily, clearing the trees at the end by a good hundred
feet. Curving away from the field, he saluted down at all the men who had helped.

He needed to take up a heading of 28 degrees to get to Truk. First, he tapped the
direction gauge at the top left of the controls, and then twisted the dial so that
28 degrees was now at the top. This made it easier to keep track of the heading.
He throttled back to the 250 mile-per-hour speed Breslow had told him to use.

Within minutes, the weather cleared off nicely. He reached his altitude of three
thousand feet. It was nice to be this far up: the terrible humidity lessened at this
altitude and became almost bearable. He was flying into the sunrise, dawn becoming
visible as a pale pink and gold glow along the horizon.

In less than an hour, Jimmy could just make out the eastern tip of Manus, an island
in the Admiralties Group to the west maybe fifty miles off. The dark was giving way
to a clear day with unlimited visibility. Past Manus he entered what he feared the
most, what the colonel had called “the dead zone,” where there was no landfall for
five hundred miles. He would have to fly directly across this area to reach Truk.
On the way back he would have to radio
Skate
and then fish in, right in the middle
of this great void, trusting that the sub would find him.

He made navigational checks every few minutes. He was bucking a head wind of thirty
knots or more.
That's very unusual for this time of the year,
he thought,
for wind
like that to come out of the north. The prevailing currents here most of the year
are from west to east.

Slowly the miles went by, the great Allison motors straining with the weight but
still singing their song. Carefully, Jimmy managed the fuel from
the two massive
three hundred-gallon drop tanks, taking thirty minutes' worth from one, then the
other, and marking the details down carefully on a chart he kept by his right foot.
Once, far to the west, he saw the reflection of something. His heart sank for a moment,
but he did not see it again. He concluded that it was one of the enemy search planes
they'd told him to expect.
I'll have to be lucky
, he thought.
My life won't be worth
much if they see me coming
. Luckily, he saw nothing for the rest of the three-hour
trip.

The bright sun was well up in the sky, illuminating the ocean. He'd never flown over
water very much. It struck him that the water didn't look like water. It looked like
a solid substance. Terrain, even New Guinea with its unending jungle sameness, had
more depth to it. But the ocean from several thousand feet up looked foreboding,
two-dimensional. It seemed like a gigantic grayish bedsheet going off in every direction.

Another hour passed in a blur of hot sun and engine noise. By 0810, with the headwind
still holding, Jimmy figured he was about eighty miles from the center of Truk Lagoon
and seventy miles from the target. As instructed, he brought
Mara
down to fifty feet
to avoid the enemy radar. Still, he saw no sign of enemy planes. By 0825, his keen
eyesight spotted the target, perhaps twenty miles off, a tall metal tower on a small
island on the southern end of Truk atoll.

He was almost dead on target. That was a relief. His heart rate rose as he made his
preparations to attack. Banking a bit to the right, he reached for a lever and dropped
his two wing tanks, which were mostly spent anyhow. Then he throttled up to about
three hundred miles per hour, intently scanning the sky in every direction, and turned
on the control panel switch that armed the bomb.

Soon, just as Hazelton had briefed him, Jimmy began to fly up a corridor with small
coral islands on each side. With half a mile to go, very inaccurate and light antiaircraft
fire began to come in from his right. None of it came very close.

At 0831, after throttling back to about two hundred miles per hour, Jimmy pulled
up on the stick and dropped his bomb from about 1,500 feet.
He wheeled about, heading
south, and looked back to see if he had hit the target. There was so much smoke rising,
he couldn't tell for sure.

I'm sure not going to swing around to take another look
, he decided.