Baa Baa Black Sheep (36 page)

After we had been put into the Betty and had taken off the second time, we found out that there was only the pilot, co-pilot, Suyako, a guard, and one rear gunner. They were the only ones in the plane besides ourselves.

The music of the engines in a plane makes everybody drowsy, and I noticed that all except the pilot and co-pilot were practically asleep, and this started me thinking. I also had the bonds on my hands so loose that I could have pulled my hands free in a second’s notice if I desired. But one of my six mates must have read my thoughts, or maybe he heard me mumble them, because he whispered: “Greg, I pray you, don’t try to make an escape and take over this plane.”

None of my Black Sheep would have talked like that, and everything would have been so damned easy if
only
I had had five of them there with me. All we would have had to do was knock over this guard. He was the only one with a gun handy.

We then could have taken this plane over and have manned it ourselves. I always did believe it, and this is why I still kept getting mad with disappointment later. A person just can’t do such things alone. But with five little helpers, five Black Sheep, we could have done it. I
know
we could have done it. We could have knocked out all the crew, or have killed all the crew, and have come flying this Betty back into our own territory.

We could have brought in that planeful of Japanese bodies and made a water landing just outside our own field’s gunfire. Of course, that is, if our own side didn’t shoot us down first. But I want you to forget it as I have, and get on with my arrival in Truk, which I experienced in February 1944, and again and again on television in later years.

It is not that I am necessarily camera-shy, because I doubt that I am, but these days I almost convince myself when, as I watch television, somebody once again happens to show that excellent Navy carrier picture
The Fighting Lady.
The sequence in this film that always interests me the most (because I am in it, though on the ground) is that big raid by our carrier planes on Truk. And during the showing there is just enough ham in me to want to point out “where I am.”
But the pit in which I am trying to seek cover shows up much better than I do. It is far more photogenic. But just the same, should my wife be sitting next to me, I can always point to the contents of that pit and say: “Honey, there’s daddy-oh. Give him a hand. What an actor.”

It seemed that this bomber in which the Japanese were carrying us prisoners just could not keep out of trouble.

After being flown from Rabaul to Truk we landed on a field at Truk but did not merely come to a stop. It happened to be the roughest, shortest of landings, intentionally I know now, I have ever experienced or ever hope to. Immediately we were all thrown out of the plane, practically on our heads. We thought it was just some more rough stuff but, because we had edged our blindfolds, we could see that down the runway came a Navy F6F, spraying .50-calibers all through the Nip aircraft standing there in front of us. The piece of transportation we had just crawled out of went up before our eyes in flame and smoke, and so did nearly every other plane we could see around there. It was one of the best Navy Day programs I ever expect to see, the first task-force raid on the island of Truk.

Suyako and the Nips in the plane with us booted us along the ground down the airstrip until we came to this shallow pit I mentioned, and there they threw us into it. I had been stumbling all over everything because of my blindfold, which, owing to the low bridge on my nose, pressed right against my eyeballs, and until I wiggled the blindfold free a little I couldn’t see a thing. I envied those boys with the big hooknoses. They could walk right along and see about two feet in front of themselves when they were blindfolded.

At this time, though, I must say that Suyako used some of what he must have learned while being educated in the Hawaiian Islands. If we had arrived at Truk before the raid, and the raid had happened a few minutes later, we would have had to stand out in this field blindfolded and tied up during the whole thing, which lasted the better part of two days. But during the confusion (he told us all about this later) he was able to throw us into this pit without being hampered by the Japanese on the field. In other words, Suyako saved our lives.

From this small pit, after wiggling our bandages so we could see, we got a worm’s-eye view of a real air show. I
could not keep my eyes below the pit level. I just had to look and see what was going on. There was so much excitement I couldn’t do any differently. I just had to see those Nip planes, some of the light planes like the Zeroes, jump off the ground from the explosion of our bombs and come down “cl-l-l-l-ang,” just like a sack of bolts and nuts.

The planes caught on fire and the ammunition in them began going off. There were twenty-millimeter cannon shells and 7.7s bouncing and ricocheting all around this pit. Some of these hot pieces we tossed back out of the pit with our hands. All of this, or a lot of this, is shown in the motion picture, too, but obviously from an angle much different from ours. The picture also shows how one of the two-thousand-pound bombs had its center of impact only fifteen feet from the pit we were in, and shows the crater there after the explosion.

But what
The Fighting Lady
cannot include, unfortunately, is the close-up dialogue of which we were participants there in the pit. Things happened that would have gone well on the sound track, I think, little scenes that seemed to have no specific rhyme or reason and yet were all a part of it—the raid on Truk—as seen from the ground.

Nambu Type 14 (1925)

During a momentary lull, for instance, a Japanese pilot came down and landed his Zero, jumped out and started running over to the edge of the field where the Nips had a lot of caves. On the way across he happened to glance in this pit the six of us were in, and he stopped and looked in at us.

He was wearing one of those fuzzy helmets with the ear flaps turned up, and he looked in at us, as surprised as we were, then composed himself and said in English: “I am a Japanese pilot.”

During this time we stayed huddled down in the pit because we were not supposed to be able to see him through our blindfolds. “Buck” Arbuckle whispered: “Who does he think he’s kiddin’?”

Then he repeated himself: “I am a Japanese pilot. You bomb here, you die,” and patted the leather of the case containing his Nambu automatic pistol.

I couldn’t take any more; it all seemed both so funny and hysterical at the same time that I could contain myself no longer. I stuck my elbow into the rugged chap next to me. Don Boyle, of New York City, who was in the same predicament I was. I said something to him that later he laughed about and repeated to me. While glancing back up at the Nip pilot I had said: “With all the God damn trouble we got,
ain’t
you the cheerful son of a bitch, though.”

Whether this lug was serious we never knew, for he didn’t even get another chance to talk to us. The last we saw of him his short legs were busy hopping over obstructions, the ear flaps of his fur helmet wobbling up and down so that he gave the appearance of a jack rabbit getting off the highway. His conversation and threats had been rudely interrupted by the death rattle caused by another Navy F6F’s .50-calibers, crackling down the runway as it came just a matter of a few feet from our pit.

Meanwhile something else happened that was not quite so funny, and I figured it was up to me to do something about it. One of the boys in the pit was praying out loud: “Oh, dear God, oh, dear God, I know we’ll never get out of this …” and so on.

I couldn’t take any more of that, either, so I shook the boy and said: “Jesus Christ, Brownie, won’t you shut up? I know we’re all praying, but you don’t need to do it so God damn loud in that direction, do you?” And then, remembering
how lucky I had always been, I added in a quieter voice: “Brownie, crawl over to me, and stay next to me. I know
I’m
still lucky enough to get out of this mess.”

Around late afternoon Suyako and the guard who had accompanied us in the plane came over and looked in the pit. I guess they were as amazed as at anything they ever had seen. They expected to see six mangled bodies in the pit, yet there were six people in there without a scratch on them other than the wounds they already carried up from Rabaul. They took us out of the pit and said that we would have to stay over in a wrecked building at the edge of the field until darkness. Suyako said: “Don’t pay any attention to anybody who comes near you or kicks you or throws anything at you. We’ll get you through this all right.” It was a great feeling to hear him say that.

After darkness they led us, all six of us tied together, across the field. They told us they would have to take the blindfolds off because, with the place so torn up, they couldn’t drag us through. There were huge pieces of concrete upended, plane parts scattered all over, and the place was a shambles.

They put us in little boats to take us across to another, small island. They told us not to look around or we’d be struck. We were struck, because it was too hard to resist the sight of four ships still burning out in the harbor. When we landed we were put in some kind of a bus and taken to a navy camp, and there all six of us were put in a tiny cell about the size of a small half bathroom. We could not lie down. We stayed in there all hunched up, which was the best we could do. But the main point of all this, anyhow, was the raid on Truk and the part we “played” in it. In the film we are, I suppose, what would be called extras.

Our quarters at Truk were unique, I thought. The cell was neat and clean, and looked as if it had been built recently
by a carpenter who knew his business, for there wasn’t a single joint through which we were able to see light from out of doors. Of course, I had no way of knowing but I rather imagined that the builder had merely one prisoner in mind when he measured the boards, not six.

There were three openings through which fresh air had the slightest chance of entering while the door remained closed and locked. One barred window was in the door, but this was always covered by a tightly woven matting on the outside, so the sunlight could not enter the interior. There was another opening in the bottom of the door where the Japs shoved in our food, but this was also covered by matting. The only other hole looked as if the carpenter had omitted a six-inch board in the floor. The missing portion of our deck was no accident; it was omitted for a purpose and was meant to be used as a toilet by the occupant.

Throughout the following day until midafternoon our Navy planes came back, again and again, and on several occasions bomb fragments struck the building we were in. When we heard a really close one coming our way, it was fantastic to see six men get flat on their bellies in such a confined space so quickly. The first time we accomplished this spectacular feat Arbuckle laughed and said: “I knew six could lie down in this much space, but I thought half of them had to be female.”

As welcome as that carrier raid had been, I, for one, was a completely content individual when they finally ceased coming over. Naturally, the six of us were making book on various aspects of the situation, odds being good for the United States to win the war, but the odds for surviving our own bombs were slim.

The heat was almost unbearable in this closed-off cell, for after all the Truk atolls are located practically on the equator. We peeled off what few clothes we had in an effort to cool down a little. The odor from our own filth and sweat was bad enough, but the slippery, slimy contact when we had to move, rubbing against each other, was even more unbearable.

The islands of Truk are a good example of those that get slight rainfall during the course of the year. Because of this we found that thirst, the same as others have found through thousands of years, is far worse than starvation. All the time we were confined in this cell, sixteen days, because water
was very scarce in the vicinity of Truk, each of us prisoners was rationed to three small cups of water per day. Our lips became swollen, so had our tongues, and our mouths felt so stuffed full of cotton that we could hardly make an articulate sound out of them.

The guards in this prison camp didn’t beat us, because Suyako and the guard who had come along with us told them we were very old prisoners and had been captured a long time ago. Suyako probably didn’t have a difficult task selling them this because of our long hair, beards, and emaciated bodies. For this reason they never struck any of the six or hauled us out of the cell to beat us.

The third morning a Nip we had never seen before pulled back the bamboo matting from our door window and looked in at us, smiling with friendliness. There was more gold in that toothy grin than I had ever seen in any mouth. “Too bad,” I thought, “Chiang-Kai-shek’s gang isn’t here, because those gold-mad bastards would go crazy if they saw this guy.”

Then gold-mouth said in what sounded like English: “Ohio,” and smiled again.

Figuring the guy spoke our language, I said: “No, Idaho, I’m from Idaho.”