Means of Ascent (12 page)

The tour was conducted in the shadow of a war that was going badly. While the big Coronado had been crossing the Pacific, the Japanese had been capturing island after island. It was during Johnson’s stopover in Hawaii that the first rumors of a great naval battle in the Coral Sea had begun trickling in; by the time he landed in Nouméa the rumors had become reports: of defeat, and of the loss of yet another aircraft carrier, the
Lexington
. With the
Japanese now not only on New Guinea but on New Britain and Portuguese Timor, Australia itself was filled with fears of impending invasion—and of impending abandonment by its battered American ally. The lack of equipment was borne home to the three observers when they learned that the plane assigned by MacArthur as their transportation, an early-model B-17 Flying Fortress named
The Swoose
, had been grounded by lack of spare parts; after several days touring the
Melbourne area, they were flown north on an ancient Australian airliner, first to Sydney, then to Brisbane, and finally to Townsville, in northern Queensland, for a visit to
Garbutt Field, headquarters of the 22nd Bomb
Group. At a final briefing just before they left for Garbutt, they were told that a battle was shaping up at that moment, at a place called “Midway.”

W
HEN
L
YNDON
J
OHNSON
arrived at Garbutt Field, on June 6, he found himself in a landscape almost as flat and barren as a desert; the trees were small and stunted, the undergrowth sparse. Amid the trees stood tents—old and frayed—and planes, twelve Martin B-26 Marauders of the 22nd Bomb Group, twin-engined medium bombers much smaller than the four-engine Flying Fortresses he
had seen near Melbourne. Not one of the Marauders was unscarred. The three observers walked among them, looking at the blackened marks left by fires, at the small, neat bullet holes, at the gaping punctures caused by shell fire from Japanese guns, at the jagged, gleaming shards of metal that protruded from them. One Marauder, which had evidently been forced to come in with its landing gear retracted, lay tilted on its side, the tip of one wing on the ground, the propeller on that
wing bent and blackened by fire. The other wing pointed to the sky; the engine on that wing, jolted loose by the crash, hung down. Around the planes scurried mechanics, frantically trying, with almost no spare parts available, to get them ready again for combat, hammering, welding, threading belts of fresh ammunition into machine guns. Other members of the ground crews were hoisting bombs, slim 100-pounders, big 500-pounders, into open bomb-bay doors. Watching them were crew members.
Exhaustion and tension showed on their faces. Their uniforms were ripped and tattered. Some, because their uniforms had worn out and there were no new ones available, had donned Australian shorts, bush hats and cowboy boots. Some wore fresh bandages, stained with blood. Lyndon Johnson may have tried—and, for six months, had succeeded—to avoid being in a combat zone. He may have arrived in one finally only for what
Jonathan Daniels had called
“the sake of political future.” But whatever the reason, Lyndon Johnson was in a combat zone now.

I
F ONE CHARACTERISTIC
of Lyndon Johnson was a boundless ambition, another was a willingness, on behalf of that ambition, to make efforts that were also without bounds.

As an NYA director to whom “hours made no difference, days made no difference, nights made no difference”; as an unknown twenty-eight-year-old running his first, seemingly hopeless campaign for Congress against seven older, better-known opponents, a race in which he drove himself so ruthlessly that a fellow politician, a man who worked terribly hard himself, said, “I never knew a man could work that hard”; at every
stage in his adult life—as Congressman’s secretary, Congressman, senatorial
candidate—he had displayed a willingness to push to their very edge, and beyond the edge, the limits not only of politics but of himself. In every crisis in his life, he had worked until the weight dropped off his body and his eyes sunk into his head and his face grew gaunt and cavernous and he trembled with fatigue and the rashes on his hands grew raw and angry, and
whenever, at the end of one more in a very long line of very long days, he realized that there was still one more task that should be done, he would turn without a word hinting at fatigue to do it, to do it perfectly. His career had been a story of manipulation, deceit, and ruthlessness, but it had also been a story of an intense physical and spiritual striving that was utterly unsparing; he would sacrifice himself to his ambition as ruthlessly as he sacrificed others. If you did
“everything
, you’ll win.” To Lyndon Johnson, “everything” meant literally that: absolutely anything that was necessary. If some particular effort might help, that effort would be made, no matter how difficult making it might be.

It would be made even if the effort required was the one that was, of all efforts, perhaps the most difficult for him to make.

One prominent aspect of Lyndon Johnson’s makeup, particularly notable because of the rough-and-tumble world in which he had been raised, was his attitude
toward physical danger, real or imagined. To Johnson City boys, wrestling and fistfights were normal parts of growing up. Lyndon Johnson had displayed a conspicuous hesitancy and timidity at participating in these activities, or at riding an unruly horse or diving from a not very high bank
into the Pedernales River—at any of the routine rough-housing of youth. And at college, if a fellow student, antagonized by him, approached him to fight, Johnson would immediately, without a single gesture of resistance, fall back on a bed and kick his feet in the air with a frantic windmilling motion to keep his foe away, while yelling, “
If you hit me, I’ll kick you! If you hit me, I’ll kick you!”—a
scene which astonished other students, one of whom says: “Every kid in the State of Texas had fights then, but he wouldn’t fight. He was an absolute physical coward.”

Whether or not this view, widespread among his fellow students, is correct, certainly Lyndon Johnson had never been casual about his physical well-being; on the contrary, he had always been unusually anxious to avoid even the slightest exposure to violence, danger or risk. Never, in any physical encounter, had he conspicuously displayed courage.

But if courage was needed now, it would be there.

Lyndon Johnson was in a combat zone now, but he was in it only as an observer, not as a combatant. Yet recall by the President was imminent; he was never going to be “in the trenches” or “on a battleship”; this trip as an observer was to be his only direct participation in the war. And if he was never going to be a combatant, if the closest he could get
to fulfilling his campaign promise, the only means
now left to him of protecting his “political future,” was to
see
combat—then he was going to see it.

On the night of his arrival at
Garbutt Field, and on the next day, he, Anderson and Stevens talked to the airmen of the
22nd Bomb Group, hearing about the missions they had been flying.

The missions were mostly against the Japanese air base at Lae, on the northeast coast of New Guinea, and Lae was a tough mission. As Martin Caidin and Edward Hymoff report in their 1964 book,
The Mission
, the best available account of Johnson’s experiences in the Pacific, just getting to the target was tough. Since, at nine hundred miles from Garbutt Field, Lae was outside the range of a B-26, the Marauders flew first to “Seven-Mile Strip,”
a primitive little American base hacked out of the New Guinea jungle on the south side of the Owen Stanley Range that towered up to ten thousand feet between it and Lae. The flight from Garbutt Field to “Seven-Mile,” as it was called, was over the ocean. The men knew what was in that ocean: as one said, “so many sharks that we could fly low and actually see their fins and bodies cutting through the water.” Occasionally, for sport, the machine gunners fired
at the fins: then the water would turn red as other sharks tore apart those that had been killed or wounded. Just a week before, a badly hit B-26, returning from Lae, had fallen into the ocean; a Japanese pilot was later to write that he had seen “thirty or forty” sharks swarming around the crew members as they scrambled frantically to get into a life raft. “Suddenly one of them thrust his hand high above his head and disappeared. The others were beating
frantically at the water. Then the second man disappeared. I circled lower, and nearly gagged as I saw the flash of teeth which closed on the arm of the third man. The lone survivor, a big bald-headed man, was clinging to the raft with one hand and swinging wildly with a knife in the other. Then he, too, was gone.…” After refueling at Seven-Mile, the Marauders took off for Lae—from a runway, surrounded by mountains and jungle, that was too short, that ran up and
down a hill, and that was pocked with bomb craters so hastily filled with dirt and stones that sometimes the wheels of the heavily loaded planes would sink into one; just taking off from Seven-Mile, the pilots told the three observers, could be “pretty hairy.” And almost as soon as they had taken off, they were over the Owen Stanley. Since a B-26 carried no oxygen equipment, the pilots sometimes attempted to fly through the passes in the rugged range,
often during turbulent tropical storms (there were no facilities for forecasting weather), before swinging out over the ocean again—the Solomon Sea, it was called off New Guinea—for the best bombing approach to Lae. Antiaircraft fire over the target was heavy. The young men standing talking with Lyndon Johnson had flown through it so many times that they had
given nicknames to various gunners; the most dangerous, they told him, was the one whose
bursts followed so hard on one another that they had named him “Rapid Robert.” And then there were the Zeroes, which would roar up to meet them, or swoop down on them, out of the sun. Johnson had heard reports that the Japanese fighter planes were less maneuverable than American planes; the American pilots corrected him: the Japanese planes were more maneuverable, they said. And, they told Johnson, the Japanese pilots were
good
. The three observers—the
two Lieutenant Colonels and the Congressman in khakis—stood listening as they were told about the bombers that had been shot down, and about the planes that, battered, with one engine gone, had struggled home—over the ocean, and the sharks. The young airmen standing there at Garbutt Field that day, in their bush hats and shorts, had, Anderson was to recall, a “jaunty air,” but as Lyndon Johnson talked to them, he was talking with men who were so familiar
with death that they had evaluated its relative forms. One pilot described a recent crash in which a B-26, failing to clear the trees, had plowed into them and exploded in a great fireball. When the three observers expressed horror, the pilots told them that they didn’t understand: after a crash, an explosion was a blessing, since the men in it died instantly; the alternative was burning to death in the wreckage. But the airmen’s matter-of-factness could not conceal the
odds against them: two weeks before, six B-25S from another squadron had raided Lae; five of the six had been shot down. Although the exact percentage of American bombers lost on raids against Lae in 1942 is unknown, one estimate is that on a typical raid, between fifteen and twenty-five percent of the planes did not return. The men with whom Lyndon Johnson stood talking among the battered planes of the 22nd Bomb Group were men who were face to face with death every time they took
off on a mission. The following morning, their escort, Brigadier General Marquat, told the three observers that the 22nd Bomb Group’s next mission against Lae would take place in two days, on June 9. Arrangements had of course been made for Anderson, as the Air Force observer, to fly on the mission, Marquat said, and now Stevens, Anderson’s associate in Washington, said he was going also. There was no reason, Marquat made clear, for Commander Johnson to go: he was an
observer for the Navy, and the Navy had no connection with this mission. Commander Johnson said he was going too.

A
FTER AN EARLY DINNER
at Garbutt Field on June 8, Johnson, Anderson and Stevens went to bed. The twelve Marauders had already taken off for Seven-Mile Strip, where they would refuel for the flight to Lae; the three observers were to be picked up at two a.m. by a B-17 that was bringing
two Generals and other high-ranking observers to Seven-Mile to watch the Marauders take off.

A message had been sent ahead to the strip’s commanding officer, Brigadier General Martin F. Scanlon—as Scanlon recalls it, “that an important Congressman would be arriving.” The B-17 got to Seven-Mile late, so that the Marauders—loaded, fueled and ready to go—had to wait on the runways for the planeload of officers to land. But from the moment Lyndon Johnson stepped off the B-17 onto that rough little airstrip in the jungle,
wearing khaki pants and shirt, a bulky, dark-blue Navy jacket without sleeves and his uniform cap, and, with a broad smile, shook hands with General Scanlon, he put everyone at their ease. “Affable, nice … doing a job and making very little fuss about it,” was how Scanlon was to remember him. Introduced to Lieutenant Willis G. Bench, on whose B-26, the
Wabash Cannonball
, he had been assigned to fly, he shook hands and was led to his seat on
the plane. Crouched over—there wasn’t space enough in the Marauders for a man six-feet-three-inches tall to stand erect—he climbed into a narrow compartment behind the cockpit.

There was a further short delay before takeoff. During it, Johnson stepped off the
Wabash Cannonball
and walked away to urinate. Climbing back into the plane, he discovered that his seat had been taken by Colonel Stevens. Johnson was later to recall that he had told Stevens that he had been on the plane first, but Stevens, he said, “just grinned” and told him to “find another plane.” Shrugging, Johnson got off the
Cannonball
—he left behind his movie camera and film—and walked over to another B-26, the
Heckling Hare
. Standing under the painted caricature on its fuselage—of a rabbit dropping bombs from a flying carpet—he asked the
Heckling Hare’s
pilot, Lieutenant Walter H. Greer, if he could ride on his plane. When Greer agreed, the tall man in the Lieutenant Commander’s cap turned to the six other members of the
bomber’s crew and said he would like their permission, too, and when they gave it, he displayed during the several remaining minutes before takeoff “the amazing
talent for meeting and greeting,” for striking up instant friendships and intimacy, that had been astonishing people all his life. Sergeant Claude McCredie, the bombardier, was setting bomb fuses in the bomb bay, one of the last actions before takeoff, and Johnson started to ask him
questions. “I was startled at the questions,” McCredie was to say. “We’ve had the ‘wheels’ that came poking around before, but it was more effect than anything else. You can tell at once if a man really is interested.…” Then Johnson approached the tail-gunner, Corporal Harry Baren, and asked him his name. “We started to kibitz around,” Baren said. “The moment you started talking to him, you liked the
guy.” Liked him so much, in fact, that “it suddenly dawned on me that this guy was really going along to Lae with us”—and Baren warned him of what was coming. “You’re out
of your goddam mind,” he said. Baren and McCredie, who was listening, both recall the Corporal saying, “This ain’t no milk run, believe me! You don’t need to come along and get shot up to find out about conditions here, or the
things we need: we’ll
tell
you that.…” Johnson, Baren and McCredie were to recall, explained that “he had come to the Pacific to find out for himself what conditions were, and that the only way a man could ever know what things were like was to go out and see them with his own eyes, and to experience it for himself.” And when Baren again “told him just how rough it was up there … all he did was grin.” He
kidded with the crew until the Marauders’ engines, which had been idling, began to thunder, and Greer shouted down to his crew to board the plane. Donning a parachute—the harness had been adjusted for a shorter man, and there was no time to change it, so Johnson couldn’t stand erect, but once inside the plane, he had to hunch over anyway—Johnson climbed into the cramped fuselage and sat down in a small cubicle on the right side of the plane just behind the
cockpit. Across the narrow passageway, on the left side of the plane, was a small window. A clear plastic bubble, the “navigator’s dome,” was above him. If he stood on a stool, he would be able to look out the dome across the top of the plane.