Above the Thunder (26 page)

It happened that Buzz was due to leave with his crew and their plane on a trip to Darwin, Australia, where the boys would get some well-deserved R & R while the plane was in maintenance. In preparation, Buzz had saved an entire Val-Pac full of cartons of cigarettes, because they cost him $1 a carton and were worth $5 a carton in Darwin. But his farewell to me was quite an emotional one. He climbed up into the belly of the B-25, then stuck his head back down to say goodbye once more, and I saw tears running up his forehead.

I caught a ride a few minutes later on a C-47 bound for Hollandia. En route, we flew right over Maffin Bay but they could not stop to let me off. At Hollandia, however, I quickly found another C-47 going to Wakde, and again I got a little multiengine copilot time.

It was dark when we landed at Wakde, and I barely had time to catch the last scheduled ferry run to Maffin. The ferry was an LCVP (Landing Craft, Vehicle and Personnel) operated by a sergeant of the Quarter master Corps. The only other passenger was Lt. Steve Allured of my battery. Steve and I stretched out on the cool steel deck and talked as the small craft wallowed along through the dark waves. It was an overcast night, pitch black, and there was nothing to see, so we just talked and smoked. But after more than an hour, I raised up and looked ahead, expecting to see the beacon light at Maffin Beach close at hand. There was a light not far ahead but it didn't look quite like the Maffin beacon. Far back down the beach to our left rear was a light that I could not identify, and beginning to fade over the horizon astern were the lights of Wakde.

Steve and I discussed the lights for a couple of minutes before I called the sergeant's attention to the light on the port quarter.

“Sergeant, what's that light back here to our left rear?”

“I don't know, sir. I've been wondering about that. There's not supposed to be anything down that way.”

“It looks just like the beacon at Maffin, doesn't it?”

“Yes, sir, but it's not. The Maffin beacon is right ahead of us here.”

“The trip seems to be taking longer tonight than usual.”

“Yes, it is. I guess there must be some unusual current along here, or something. But we'll be there very shortly, sir.”

I had a feeling that something was wrong, and I began trying to make out the horizon over the land to our left. It was very dark, but I could faintly see a long, low, flat-topped shape that could only be Mount Haako. With that as a reference point, I determined that the light toward which the ferry was heading was approximately at the point where I had burned the fuel dump at the entrance to Foe Maoe Plantation. We were within minutes of landing in the midst of the enemy, at least eight miles from the nearest point of our own lines, ten miles from Maffin Beach.

“Hey, Sergeant, we're heading for the wrong place. This light back here is Maffin. That one ahead is at Foe Maoe Plantation, in the enemy area.”

Standing at the wheel on his tiny armor-plate bridge, the sergeant chuckled.

“No, sir, this is Maffin ahead of us. I don't know what that is back there, but I'll report it when we get in and they'll probably investigate it.”

“Sergeant, I'm telling you, I can see the west end of Mount Haako right over there. If you land us up there at that light we'll all be dead within five minutes. Let's head back down the coast to the other light.”

“Sir, believe me, I make this run every day and lots of nights. I know what I'm doing. This is Maffin Beach right ahead of us. We'll be there in a few minutes and you'll see that I'm right.”

“If you take us in there, Sergeant, we'll never get out alive. Turn back to this other light. I'm Lieutenant Kerns of the 122d Field Artillery, and I'm telling you to turn right now. That's an order.”

“Well, OK, sir—but I'm going to be in a lot of trouble.”

“You won't be in any trouble, Sergeant. I'll take responsibility.”

The sergeant was not convinced of his error until we were close
enough for him to recognize the familiar scene at the little Maffin dock. He was astonished. He did not understand how he could have made such a mistake. Neither did I.

An AAF transport outfit equipped with C-47s spent a few days at Wakde while we were there. The pilots were amazed to learn that we regularly flew over Japanese territory in our vulnerable little planes, and they asked if we ever saw any enemy troops. Upon being assured that we saw them every day, they were still more incredulous, since they had been in the theater for months and had never seen an enemy. One of their number, a Lieutenant Scarr, asked Vin if he could go along on a flight and get a chance to see his first enemy soldier.

To be reasonably sure of getting Scarr a close-up look at a Nip, Vin took him far up beyond Sarmi and flew low along the beach, looking back under the trees. As they passed the mouth of a small creek, they saw a soldier sitting on a rock, washing his feet in the stream. Scarr had his pistol in hand, and he snapped a quick shot at the unfortunate bather as they passed. The man slumped over into the water and lay still. It was one of those one-in-a-million shots—which seem to happen with remarkable frequency.

It didn't take long for the engineers to get our new strip completed at Maffin, and as soon as they did we moved back to the main island. The strip was diagonal to the shoreline, and our takeoff lane was right over the Maffin dock. We always took off that way, because tall trees and 122d headquarters and firing battery positions near the other end made climbing out a bit difficult, but we landed in either direction. Along the inland side of the strip was jungle, with the perimeter a hundred yards or so out. On the other side was the camp of Company G, 123d Infantry. The strip was surfaced maybe thirty feet wide with PSP, and at two spots it had tracks of PSP where we could pull off the runway to our tie-downs. We felt as if we had our own AAF base.

You understand, I think, that the enemy could have made life much more interesting for us than he usually did. He didn't like our artillery,
he didn't like the occasional air strikes, he just didn't like to be seen; therefore, until he knew he had been discovered, he kept a very low profile, and even then, except for rifles, he was usually careful not to invest ammo unless there was a good chance of worthwhile returns. But when he did cut loose, he could be rather discouraging.

According to our S-2, headquarters of the bypassed Japanese forces in the area were in the seaward cliffs of Mount Haako. From those low bluffs, a slope with scattered coco palms ran down a few hundred yards to the beach road. The location was a hot spot, well beyond range of our cannon, so Vin and I had not been pressing our luck too much in there. However, on one particular day I decided to have a good close look.

I roared out over Maffin Dock that morning and headed northwest at treetop level behind Mount Haako. When I reached an area near the northwest end of the mountain, where it was still about four hundred or five hundred feet high, I suddenly cut right and climbed over the mountain, still near the treetops, bearing hard right to stay out of the antiaircraft fire I knew would be waiting for me if I got too close to the old fuel fire area. Descending on the ocean side, I was down to no more than a hundred feet above the trees as I passed over a rocky point where the beach cut in almost to the road. (The spot can be seen at the right end of the aerial photo of the Mount Haako area.) It was at that point, still more than two miles from the enemy headquarters, that a Japanese soldier appeared a short distance ahead, running hard down the middle of the road as if trying to outrun me.

Thinking about it later, it seemed to me that he may have been a decoy, sent out for the express purpose of leading me all the way into the trap. Or maybe he was running to man a gun in the local air defense setup. At the time, however, I thought only of striking at him, so I grabbed a rifle grenade, hastily pulled the safety pin, and dropped it like a tiny bomb as I came up behind the fleeing soldier. I really didn't expect to harm him, only let him know that I'd seen him and possibly scare him a little. Employed in this manner, the grenade ordinarily would have had little effect against personnel on the ground, but it was the great misfortune of that brave young man that the grenade detonated on some obstruction just above him, possibly a tree limb, and it appeared to me that the armor-piercing slug struck him squarely between the shoulders. He fell sprawling in the middle of the road.

MOUNT HAAKO AREA. These two overlapping aerial photos show the Mount Haako area. The cove at left is the site of the Japanese headquarters in the Maffin Bay area. At right, where the beach cuts in almost to the road, I hit a solitary Japanese soldier with a rifle grenade and received forty-seven holes in my L-4, including one that locked my right wheel and blew out the tire. Note the Japanese barge grounded on a reef near the right of the picture. The right edge of this picture almost touches the one on
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, showing the entrance to the Foe Maoe Plantation. The left edge of the photograph is about half a mile from the south end of Mount Haako and the maximum range of our 105 mm howitzers. At that limit, the enemy placed a big red warning sign by the road.

As if the explosion had been a signal, three machine guns opened fire at the same instant. There was a light gun behind me, a light gun ahead of me, and a single heavy machine gun that seemed to be just under my right wing. The air crackled and popped all around me as I put the L-4 over on its left wingtip and shoved down toward the water, scooting away from the beach at about a forty-five-degree angle and wishing the airplane were a submarine. The two light guns soon stopped firing, but the heavy machine gun just kept hammering away, and I felt as if every bullet and tracer was coming straight into my spine. I could see the tracers going by and hear the bullets striking the plane. Skinny as I was in those days, I involuntarily tried to make myself narrower, already feeling the bullet that I fully expected would find me at any instant. They were hitting the plane—how could they miss me?

But they did. The last burst died away and I ventured to turn parallel to the shoreline and make for home as I looked around to see what damage had been done.

I could see that the right wheel was damaged, the tire blown out, but the engine was running smoothly, the controls were all functioning, and there was no real problem—except, possibly, upon landing. I re ported the facts to FDC and told them I might have some trouble getting the plane down safely, so would they please have a medic stand by at the airstrip, just in case I should nose over? They would. I didn't really expect serious trouble, but I've always believed in being careful.

I set the L-4 down on the right side of the PSP-surfaced strip, with the right wheel held off as long as airspeed would allow. When the damaged wheel had to come down, I jammed my heel hard on the left brake as I opened the throttle and hauled back on the stick to hold the tail down. The plane veered off the PSP to the right into the black mud, with the tail so high the prop should also have hit the mud, but it didn't. As the tail started back down, I let off the back pressure and she settled gently into a normal attitude—except for the flat tire.

One of the slugs from the heavy gun had gone through the wheel and brake drum, locking them together. Sergeant Allen reported that he
and the crew patched forty-seven bullet holes in the fuselage and wings but found no other serious damage. There were quite a few vital parts inside L-4 #79608, but there was also a lot of empty space in there.