The Fly Boys
Authors: T. E. Cruise
A new world brought fresh challenge.
They rose to meet both
.
HERMAN GOLD
He had a fine son, but a reluctant heir—and feared that Gold Aviation was destined to die with him.
STEVEN GOLD
Record-setting World War II flying ace and Medal of Honor winner, he knew the button-down world of his father’s company could
never be his.
BENNY DETKIN
He wanted to kill Nazis, but when they sent him to the Pacific theater instead of Europe, he shot those Zeros right out of
the sky.
SUZY GOLD
Still stunningly attractive, she sought the men who wouldn’t threaten her loyalty to the memory of her heroic husband.
DONALD HARRISON
A Gold only by marriage, he felt like the bastard son, challenged by both the brother-in-law and stepson who bore the stratospheric
standards set by the…
Wings of Gold: The Aces
Wings of Gold Book III: The Hot Pilots*
Published by
POPULAR LIBRARY
*
forthcoming
POPULAR LIBRARY EDITION
Copyright © 1988 by Warner Books, Inc.
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First eBook Edition: September 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-56707-7
Contents
1943–1945
FLYBOYS OVER NEW GUINEA—
Massive Bomber Attacks on Jap Strongholds—
Philadelphia Tattler
ALLIED TURBOJET PROJECTS REVEALED—
Brits and Yanks Disclose Their Top-Secret Jet Airplane Research—
Aviation Industry Weekly
NORMANDY INVASION PRESSES ON—
Nazis Fall Back After Bitter Fighting at ‘Omaha Beach’—
Miami Daily Telegraph
JAPS INITIATE AIRBORN SUICIDE ATTACKS AT LEYTE GULF BATTLE—
Jap Pilots Crash Their Airplanes Into Our Ships—
Call Themselves
Kamikaze
—‘Divine Wind’
Boston Times
FDR DEAD—
Vice President Truman Takes Oath of Office—
New York Herald
JAPS VOW TO DEFEND HOMELAND DOWN TO LAST
MAN, WOMAN, CHILD—
Millions Mobilized in Civilian Defense Corps—
Baltimore Globe
HITLER DEAD—
RUSSIANS TAKE BERLIN—
NAZIS SURRENDER—
Washington Star Reporter
AWESOME NEW WEAPON USED AGAINST JAPAN—
Jap City of Hiroshima Leveled by A-Bomb—
Los Angeles Tribune
(One)
USAAF Advance Air Base
Tobi Point, New Guinea
19 August 1943
Lieutenant Steven Gold, wearing khaki overalls, his .45 in a shoulder holster beneath his yellow Mae West, settled into the
cockpit of his fighter. He pulled his canvas helmet over his close-cropped blonde hair and plugged in his radio earphones,
but left the Lockheed Lightning’s plexiglass canopy raised against the sweltering tropical heat.
He waited until his ground crew was clear, and then started the P-38’s twin liquid-cooled Allison engines. The engines sputtered
in complaint for a few moments before wheezing to a roaring fury in a cloud of blue smoke. All along the ready line the fifteen
other swallow-tailed, twin-engine P-38 fighters that made up the squadron were adding their voices to the clacking piston
chorus.
Lieutenant Gold affectionately patted the P-38’s scarred instrument panel. The joke was that his fighter had so many Jap bullet
holes in it that the mess hall wanted to requisition it as a noodle strainer. It was true that the mottled green and tan exterior
of the P-38 was pocked with patched holes, but it was also true that this mount had taken good care of her previous owner,
a captain who’d been rotated out of the squadron after an illustrious twelve-kill career. The twelve scarlet “meatballs” on
the fighter’s forward fuselage had been painted over. Her new owner would have to rack up his own score.
But there’s not much chance of me racking up that score today
, Steve brooded as he waited the operations officer’s red flag signal to take off.
Today the squadron was flying a bomber escort mission, and Jap fighter resistance was expected to be light. A lot of pilots
would have been grateful for that, but Steve thought the situation stunk. As far as he was concerned, multiple opportunities
to wax Zeros was the only thing that could make up for being stuck out here in this godforsaken, vermin-infested jungle, literally
under the Japs’ noses.
Tobi Point was a forward air base tucked in between the emerald wall of vegetation and the indigo Solomon Sea. It was a tent
and tin hut village under a camouflage-net ceiling, clustered around a single hard-packed airstrip less than seventy miles
down the coast from extensive Jap airdrome complexes. The strategy behind Tobi was that a fighter squadron so near the enemy
could, in addition to flying bomber escort, hit and run like a swarm of angry wasps.
Until, of course, the Japs happened to
find
the wasp’s nest, Steve thought, and then reminded himself that fighter pilots were like toilet paper: absolutely essential,
and totally expendable.
Steve hurriedly turned down the gain as a deafening squawk of radio static filled his headset.
“Big birds approaching, hombres,” the squadron’s leader, Major Wohl, announced. “Saddle up!”
The major was from Texas, and liked to remind everyone of that fact by peppering his easy drawl with lots of “you-alls” and
“hombres” and “buckaroos” and so on.
“We’ll be moving out in a few minutes, men,” the major continued. “Lieutenant Gold, you-all come in, please. Over.”
Steve keyed his throat mike. “Yeah, Major? Over.”
“Lieutenant, this time around I want you-all to fly as my wingman, over.”
“I don’t see why I have to sit on the bench, sir,” Steve protested. What a wingman did was watch his leader’s back. It was
a crucial job, but in combat the wingman hardly ever got a taste of the enemy, unless it was sloppy seconds.
“Lieutenant,” Wohl began patiently, “how old are you?” He paused. “Nineteen, I seem to remember.”
“Roger, Major.”
“And you’re already an ace, right? Lieutenant, you-all just lay back today. It’s gonna be a long war.”
“Roger, Major,” Steve repeated, disappointed.
“And don’t sound so down in the dumps,” Wohl chuckled. “You’ve only been with us a couple of weeks. You’re the new kid on
the block. I want to make sure you know the program, how we operate. I run a tighter herd than Cappy Fitzpatrick, that old
hombre you
used
to ride with.”
“Roger, Major.”
“All right, then,” Wohl said, sounding satisfied. “Here they come,” he told his squadron.
Steve, looking up, saw the bombers. There were twenty of them, flying high and looking like glinting silver crosses stitched
in orderly procession against the deep blue sky.
He lowered his canopy, trapping several two-inch, spindly legged mosquitoes inside the cockpit. He idly squished them against
the plexiglass with his finger, thinking,
Fortunes of war
. Out on the airstrip’s edge the ops officer was waving his red flag.
“All right, let’s ride,” Wohl said.
Steve opened his throttles, building up rpm’s, waiting his turn as the pairs of P-38s moved out onto the airstrip. When it
was his turn to roll, he felt a twinge in his knee as he worked the rudder pedals. He ignored the sharp stab of pain. He’d
gotten used to it.
Last April he’d been flying combat air patrol out of Guadalcanal, with Major Cappy Fitzpatrick’s fighter squadron, when a
Jap managed to lock on to his tail, putting a bullet through his leg in the process of chewing up his airplane. Steve had
managed to turn the tables on that Jap, knocking him out of the sky. It had been his fifth kill, the one that made him an
ace, but at the time he’d had other things on his mind. His fighter was so badly shot up that he was forced to ditch at sea.
Air-sea rescue eventually fished him out of the drink. He’d spent some time convalescing in the hospital, and then had a couple
of weeks’ R&R, which he spent back home in California with his folks. When he came back on active duty, he was promoted to
first lieutenant and assigned to Wohl’s outfit at Tobi Point. Since then, he’d flown a few routine patrols, but had not met
up with the enemy. Steve was feeling a little anxious about that. He figured that surviving being shot down was like falling
off a horse, the idea being to get right back into the thick of it to dispel any self-doubt about courage or competence.
Once all sixteen fighters were airborne the squadron formed into four flights of four each. The bombers dropped down to about
twelve thousand feet as the four flights of snarling P-38s rose to meet them. The fighters then took their positions all around
the big bird formation—as Wohl would have put it, like cowpokes riding herd.
It would be a short ride to the target, a Jap airdrome on the coast. Once over the target the squadron would fly high cover
for the bombers. If enemy fighter resistance turned out to be as light as was expected, the P-38s were to do some mop-up strafing
after the bombers were done.
The bombers were light twin-engine airplanes: North American Mitchell B-25s and GAT AC-1s. They were attack bombers: deck-level
lawn mowers modified with extra-capacity fuel tanks and a half-dozen .50-caliber machine guns sticking like whiskers out from
underneath their chins. The bombers would go in fast and low, strafing the Jap airstrips while dropping parafrags: twenty-five-pound
bombs suspended by midget parachutes. The parafrags wafted lazily down from the sky, giving the low-flying bombers plenty
of time to get away before they exploded into wicked clouds of shrapnel.
Steve heard a clicking through the static in his headset. “Hey, Lieutenant Gold,” somebody said. “Settle an argument some
of us had the other day. Aren’t you Herman Gold’s son? Over.”
“Roger,” Steve replied wearily, knowing what was coming.
“Hear that, guys? I told you so! Hey, Lieutenant Gold! Your old man owns Gold Aviation and Transport, right? He’s got millions!
Wasn’t it your father’s company that built these AC-1 BuzzSaw bombers we’re escorting?”
“Roger,” Steve muttered as he scanned the clear blue sky and the thick green coastline for signs of the enemy. The P-38’s
teardrop canopy afforded excellent visibility, if a pilot wasn’t too lazy to take advantage of it.
“I guess we better take extra good care of these bombers, else Lieutenant Gold will tell his daddy on us,” another pilot cracked.
“Or maybe Gold will just repossess his daddy’s bombers….”
Steve forced himself to keep his mouth shut. He knew from past experience that this was a no-win situation. If you too readily
joined in the joking, you were a horse’s ass; if you complained, you were a sore-ass. Meanwhile, he irritably thought that
maybe Major Wohl was more spit and polish than Cappy Fitzpatrick, but at least Cappy knew enough to enforce radio silence
en route to a target.