Above the Thunder (17 page)

We had gone about a mile on the way when we came upon a certain corporal of the headquarters personnel, a man who later would repeatedly prove himself unworthy of his chevrons. He lay beside the trail, begging everyone who came along to give him a drink of water. Everyone I saw as we approached refused him, saying he had refilled his canteen at the foot of the mountain and had no more need than they did. He didn't deny that, but said he was dying for water. Being a very softhearted fellow, I offered him a sip of my meager supply, cautioning him not to take it all. I had to pull it away from him to save a few drops.

And on we climbed. At the top of the mountain, Capt. Phil Ryan, the HQ Btry commander, was checking off his men as they arrived. I told him I didn't think the dying corporal would be up, so when everyone else had checked through and gone on the way back down, I went back down with Ryan. We found the corporal still lying beside the trail, still begging for water. He claimed he was unable to walk a step farther, so big Irish Ryan hoisted him to his shoulders and carried the whining varmint back down to the camp.

Breakfast, with coffee and water, was on hand at earliest light next morning, and Rohr and I were first in line, believe me. And then we
began the last eighteen-mile stretch back to Camp Clipper. Trucks and ambulances following the troops were rapidly filled with those who really couldn't cut it or who simply quit trying. Only two things kept me going: my self-respect and my gold bars. I marveled at the stamina of a couple of our sergeants who marched side by side, chests out, singing lustily like French revolutionaries in some romantic movie. They never seemed to weaken, but for the last few miles every step I took required renewed determination and a maximum physical effort. The old mess tent never looked as good as when Rohr and I finally dragged ourselves into it late that afternoon.

Long freight trains pulled up on the Southern Pacific. We loaded the whole division on them and hauled it up to Camp Stoneman at Pittsburg, California, riding in the boxcars with our equipment, halting for mess prepared by our own cooks in the boxcar kitchens they rigged up. Although it was midsummer and the weather very hot, we traveled in our winter wool ODs, our commanders hoping that enemy spies would think we were being sent to some cold clime—but it wasn't so. After a few days of processing, we shipped down the bay on ferries and boarded ships at San Francisco, bound for Hawaii. The 122d went down on the ferry
City of Sacramento,
and our transport to Hawaii was the former Moore-McCormack liner SS
Brazil.
It was mid-July when she stood off Port Allen, Kauai, and we debarked. Div Arty HQ, the 123d Regimental Combat Team (RCT)—including the 122d FA Bn—and certain other elements would be on Kauai, the remainder of the division on Maui and Molokai.

The 33d Division's mission in the Territory of Hawaii was twofold: to provide defense of the western islands and to continue its preparation for service elsewhere in the Pacific theater. Kauai, “The Garden Isle,” western most of the major islands of Hawaii, was a choice location.

On Kauai, the 122d FA Bn put HQ and HQ Btry, of which the air section was an element, in a patch of forest about four miles from Lihue on the road to Kalaheo. We lived in small wood and tar paper shacks scattered about among the trees and ate in a larger shack that had screens against flies. Our firing batteries, in tactical positions for defense of our sector of the island, had living accommodations similar to ours. Our primary mission, of course, was training for combat missions in the southwestern Pacific area.

Just a week after our arrival on Kauai, we lost my friend Lt. Ray Rohr. On the day before our debarkation, Captain Ryan had called a meeting of the HQ Btry officers, at which he gave instructions for duties in debarkation and occupation of our camp ashore. Rohr had been informed of the meeting but went to sleep and missed it. Captain Ryan spoke to him quite severely and restricted him to the unit area except for duty for two weeks, effective upon debarkation.

We had been on Kauai a week, and I was officer of the (OD) day for the battery. I was in my quarters, reading
The Book of Boners
and laughing like a fool when Capt. Oliver Miller, the battalion doctor, looked in at the door to see what was so funny. As I was telling him, someone came running and yelling for him. He took off on a run. I got up, put on my gunbelt, and followed him, thinking there might be trouble the OD should look into.

When I reached Doc Miller's side, he was kneeling beside a man who lay on a stretcher on the ground beside the access road at the edge of the camp. There was blood on his jacket, his face was gray, his eyes sunken—I didn't recognize the man, and I asked Doc who it was. He replied, “It's Lieutenant Rohr. He's dead.”

We had just that day received reissue of our sidearms, which had been shipped overseas in custody of the supply element. Rohr had picked up his .45-caliber pistol and had gone into the dugout that sheltered our tactical switchboard, where, as the battery's communication officer, he spent much of his time. According to Private First Class Bales, the switch board operator on duty, Rohr sat leaning against a table, reading a magazine that lay on the table, while toying idly with his pistol beneath the table. The discharged bullet passed completely through Rohr's body, piercing his heart, and lodged in a heavy wooden door behind him. I remembered how, only two weeks before, Rohr and I had stood on a deck of the
Brazil
and watched the Golden Gate fading in the distance. He had remarked, “Some of us are seeing that for the last time.”

Ray Rohr's death was officially recorded as a suicide, but I've always believed it was just a tragic accident. Many times had I seen him reading in the same way Bales described, always with some object in his hands, turning it over and over without being conscious that he was doing so. I think he just forgot that he was playing carelessly with a deadly weapon. Although I had only known Rohr for a few months, I had come to like him very much. He was just a big farm boy from North Dakota, simple and honest. It was hard to hold back the tears as I helped carry him to his grave at Koloa.

For a few weeks, we pilots, being second lieutenants and having no planes to fly, got a generous share of undesirable details, like supervising
construction of unit latrines and garbage pits. When the planes finally arrived, direct from the factory, we hauled them to Isenberg Athletic Field at Lihue. There we uncrated, unpacked, assembled, rigged, and checked them out. And then we undertook a program of refresher training for ourselves, sharpening up our flying skills and getting used to working with our battalions.

About this time, we received new instructions for marking our planes, and we repainted the wing to eliminate the red dot in the center of the star. Someone had decided that it could be confused with the Rising Sun insignia of the Japanese. We may also have added the white bars on either side of the star at that time; if not, it wasn't long afterward that we did.

Our training program, which also included a lot of just plain fun, went along without incident except for one night when Brisley, flying a night fire mission over the mountain foothills, got into a sudden rainstorm, lost his visual horizon and his orientation, and had a hair-raising time getting out of it. Night weather flying without attitude instruments is a very tricky business.

In our L-4H ships, the SCR-610 radio, with power pack, was mounted on the chart board aft of the rear seat, its whip antenna sticking up through a grommeted hole in the Plexiglas. We never used the wire antennas provided with the planes, which were supposed to be let out behind after takeoff, stabilized by a small drag sock. In fact, we removed them. The SCR-610s were in the first generation of frequency-modulated equipment, and they had only two channels, crystal controlled. We used one for our own battalion FDC and the other for the Div Arty liaison channel. Since we flew from the front seat and the radio was behind the rear seat, it was not easy to switch channels in flight. Even with my long arms, I had to unbelt, half stand, and stretch to my full reach to operate the channel selector.

Hal Davis was incredibly skillful in flying the L-4. For instance, when we were doing our night flying at Lihue we used one improvised pop-bottle flare pot at the approach end of the short field and two of the same a few yards apart at the far side. Our approach was across two cane fields, the one nearest the landing field being up to a height of about two feet, and another just beyond that one up about six or eight feet high. On dark nights when the ground could not be seen from a plane—nor our unlighted plane seen from the ground—we'd hear Davis line up on the flare pots, cut his engine, and start his whispering glide toward Isenberg Field. After a bit we'd hear the taller cane start to slap his wheels, and there'd be a murmur from his engine as he added a bit of power to maintain that altitude. Then the cane-slapping would stop as he reached the edge of the tall cane, and soon we'd hear the two-foot cane start to slap, the engine murmuring again. Then the cane would be heard no more, and the engine would cut back to idle as he left the edge of the two-foot cane, touching down on Isenberg with his tail wheel almost on the boundary road beside our approach flare. He did that many times, disdaining the “feeling-for-the-ground” tail-high approach the rest of us used.

The author at Isenberg Field, with Hal Davis's cane fields in the background.

One of Hal's greatest pleasures was rat racing. Of course, he was usually the leading rat, the others trying to follow his lead. After a while, however, it seemed that I was the only one left who was still foolish
enough to try to follow him. One of his favorite tricks was to make a tight 360 over a cane field with his wingtip plowing the cane blades. Only once did I try to follow him through that maneuver, and his prop wash just about threw me. Even when I did it alone, the wash from my own plane nearly pulled me in as I completed the circle. But Hal did it with apparent ease.

On one unusual occasion when I was leading and Hal was following, I threw my plane on its side and slid between two tall palms that were maybe less than the wingspan apart. As I did, I felt a jolt and realized that I had torn out a radio antenna for the occupants of a nearby house. Of course, Hal came through behind me with nothing to hinder him, but the broken wires had slashed the fabric on my wings and cut deep grooves in my tires.

During a Div Arty CP exercise, Vin and I were asked to make a surprise raid with flour-bag “bombs” on Div Arty HQ at Kalaheo. We did so with great joy, using small paper bags filled with a mixture of flour and the red volcanic dust that makes up much of the island soil. One of my bombs went through the roof of a tar paper shack belonging to the signal corps carrier pigeon section. Looking back, I saw the door burst open and two men run out, bounding like deer across the area and looking back at the cloud of dust and flour billowing out the door behind them.

That gave us the idea of bombing the little strip near Hanapepe where Brisley and Spendlove based their planes for the 124th. We hit them just after dawn one morning, plastering the place quite liberally. It was so much fun that we decided to do it again the next day. As we flew in the calm air of early morning, maintaining our two-plane formation with sober dignity, as if our mission were of grave consequence, we spotted two L-4s going just as soberly in the opposite direction. We knew it was Brisley and Spendlove heading for our field, so we wasted no time in completing our mission and hightailing it for home. They had splattered our area quite well but had done no damage, and we felt relieved and happy with our little game. But soon the phone rang. It was Brisley, and he proposed the restoration of peace. Our first raid had put a hole through a wing of one of their planes, and that was not fun. We agreed, and that ended that.

Vineyard and I had continued to fly from Isenberg after the others moved away, since our battalion headquarters was only about four miles up the road. Isenberg was a good field, and our tents were in the corner farthest from the road and from Isenberg Gym, which was used then as a USO canteen. Our men lived with the planes, but Vin and I lived with the battalion. It wasn't bad from the viewpoint of convenience and comfort, but it wasn't so good in case of trouble; and, after all, we were there to help defend the island in case of attack. So the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Roland P. “Bud” Carlson, directed us to establish an airstrip no more than a mile from the battalion CP.