Means of Ascent (13 page)

Lyndon Johnson sat, seat belt on, parachute and harness bending him forward, as the
Heckling Hare
jounced down the bumpy runway and then laboriously groaned its way into the air with its heavy bomb load. The plane kept climbing—the squadron had to get over the Owen Stanley Range—and for a while, at fourteen thousand feet, the air was thin, but he had been warned that this would happen, and had been told that it wouldn’t last long. The
twelve B-26s divided into three formations, each formation a staggered V shape of four bombers; the
Heckling Hare
was in the third position in the last V. They flew for about an hour. Then they were nearing the target. In front of them, the first two formations were settling into their bombing runs, and then suddenly Captain Greer alerted his gunners: there were Zeroes ahead—ahead and above them. And then, without warning, the
Heckling Hare
staggered, and all
at once Johnson could feel the plane slow down and begin to lose altitude; the generator that controlled the right engine had failed. Immediately, the plane began to drop behind the formation, and the
Heckling Hare
turned to head home. And then, in McCredie’s words, “All hell broke loose.”

A lone Zero was bearing in on them, charging across the sky. Bullets were smashing into the plane, and cannon shells were bursting against it, like shotguns being fired right beside your ear. The plane began skidding across the sky, diving wildly, trying to climb, diving again, then swerving, weaving, as Greer frantically jerked it through the air. Somewhere in those first few moments the pilot jettisoned the bombs to lighten the plane. “Here he comes!”
someone screamed, and the Zero, which for a
moment had overshot them because of Greer’s maneuvering, was boring in again, and again the B-26 shuddered as it was hit. Its own guns were in action now, filling the plane with a steady rumble; it shuddered and shook from the recoil of the big machine guns in the tail and waist, the fuselage was filled with the roars and the explosions, and the smell of powder, and all the time the plane lurched and screamed back
and forth through the air as Greer worked the rudders side to side—for long moments without result: “We were getting hit all over the place,” McCredie says. “You could feel the bullets banging into the airplane. And those cannon shells …” The Zero was suddenly gone, and Greer was heading for a cloud bank that could spell safety, when suddenly a wave of seven more Zeroes was around them, and bullets and shells were smashing into the
Marauder again, and again the plane was skidding and weaving wildly across the sky. And then McCredie, firing from the nose, had his machine gun jam, and Greer shouted at him to get back to one of the waist guns, and he started to crawl back along the narrow passageway, and as he did, he saw their passenger.

Lyndon Johnson was standing stooped oyer, so that he could see out that little window, and what he was seeing was three Zeroes. One would fake a pass, and when the guns of the B-26 followed him, the other two would come screaming straight in—straight at the plane, straight, it seemed, at that window, straight at him—with the leading edges of their wings spitting bullets, until, at the very last instant, the Japanese pilots dropped and zoomed under the
B-26. “
It was the kind of sight that scared you out of your wits,” McCredie was to say. Johnson was looking steadily out the window. He turned as McCredie crawled by, and held up three fingers. He pointed out the window. “There’re three out there to the left,” he said calmly. And he smiled. McCredie took a look—one look—“I figured they were still laying off. But they were coming straight at us and
firing! … The guns and cannons were all firing at us.” McCredie pushed past. As he did, Johnson grinned at him “cool as a cucumber.” Things seemed to get worse. The sky was filled with flashing wings with red balls painted on them as the Marauder struggled for the clouds.
Radioman-gunner Lillis Walker had to leave his waist gun to crawl forward to the radio and find out if Seven-Mile Strip was clear for a landing.
“
It was rough.… The Zeroes stayed with us, working us over, like they were having … target practice.” And then, as he crawled, “There was this passenger of ours.…” The passenger wasn’t looking out the little window any longer. He had pulled out a stool, and was standing on it and looking out the navigator’s bubble on top of the plane. There was a better view from up there. “From
up there,” Walker was to say, “that’s a sight to scare the living daylights out of you. A couple of Zeroes were in front of us, and coming in, firing everything they had, and you’re looking right
into the face of death when
that
happens.” Lyndon Johnson, the physical coward who was afraid of a fistfight, was looking into that face. He was, Walker was to say, “just as calm as if we were on a sightseeing
tour.… Bullets were singing through the plane all around us and we were being hit by those cannon shells, and he was—well, just calm, and watching everything.” He got down off the stool, so that Walker could push past to the radio. Walker recalls what Lyndon Johnson said as he passed. “Boy,” Johnson said, “it’s rough up here, isn’t it?” And Walker recalls what he said in reply: “Yeah, I’m always scared up
here.” And he recalls what Lyndon Johnson did next. “He burst out laughing at me. I’m sure he felt exactly the way I did, but he just didn’t show it. He didn’t show it a bit.”

Then, at last, they were in the clouds, and safe. After a while, they were home. Greer brought the plane in, nursing the bad engine, touching down without a jar. The crew climbed down to the ground. Several officers were rushing up to see if the Congressman was all right, but before he turned to them, Johnson had a last word for the crew. “It’s been
very interesting,” he said. Then he grinned again.

N
INE OF THE OTHER
eleven Marauders returned to Seven-Mile Strip shortly after the
Heckling Hare
, having dropped their bombs on the Lae airfield and raced for home through the Zeroes, some of the Marauders skimming the ocean so low that the vacuum created by their propellers kicked up little whirlpools on the waves. Ambulances sped out, and wounded men were carried off the planes and taken to a makeshift hospital. Then came a wait as
Johnson stood there with officers and men, until, finally, another plane appeared, riddled from nose to tail, the belly of the ship so shredded that the landing gear couldn’t be lowered. A pilot ran to a radio, and talked the ship down to a belly landing; it slid to a halt in a cloud of dust. Then there was another wait, but there was no plane at the end of it. Many of the airmen had known there wouldn’t be. They had seen one B-26, hit by shellfire from a Zero, fall
through the sky, thick black smoke pouring from an engine, and crash into the water with shattering impact. Everyone aboard it was killed. That plane was the
Wabash Cannonball
, the plane in which Lyndon Johnson had been supposed to fly. In it when it crashed was his movie camera—and Lieutenant Colonel Francis Stevens, who had taken his seat.

L
YNDON
J
OHNSON
had seen combat, had been
in
combat, under fire, if only as an observer. The next day, he headed home, at five-thirty a.m., boarding the B-17 that would carry the two Generals and other highranking
officers as well as himself and his surviving fellow observer, Sam Anderson, back to Australia—first to Darwin, and then on the long flight south to Melbourne, where
Johnson and Anderson would catch a Coronado PB2Y back to the United States.

On the trip home, there was one more adventure. During the first leg, over what Johnson later was to recall as “El Paso desert country” between Darwin and Clencurry, the plane’s navigational equipment failed, and the pilot became lost. After vainly flying for four hours in a box search pattern (continually increasing the size of the boxes in hopes of finding a recognizable landmark), with the Generals and other officers crowded into the cockpit
giving advice, the pilot, with fuel and daylight running out, decided to land the plane in a pasture not far from a windmill and a ranch house. With the officers and Lyndon Johnson huddled in the rear—Johnson was holding on to the tail guns for support—so their weight would act as a brake to slow the plane after it landed, they hit the ground with scarcely a jolt. Australian ranchers suddenly appeared, and, recalls one of the crew, “
Right away
Lieutenant Commander Johnson gets busy. He begins to get acquainted. They tell him where we are and some of them go off to get a truck to take us into town where we can telephone, and more keep coming, and Johnson is shaking hands all around, and he comes back and tells us these are real folks—the best damn folks in the world, except maybe the folks in his own Texas. Pretty soon he knows all their first names, and they’re telling him why there ought to be a high tariff
on wool, and there’s no question he swung that county for Johnson before we left. He was in his element. I know he sure swung the … crew. He can carry that precinct any day.”

And there was a medal. After an hour-long cross-country drive over rutted roads to the nearest town—Winton—with the local sheriff, who arrived with several ancient cars, an uneventful flight the next day to Melbourne, and five days of rest and briefings, Johnson and Anderson were suddenly summoned to General MacArthur’s office on June 18, a few hours before they were scheduled to leave for the United States. Appearing irritated at Johnson, MacArthur
said that of course Anderson had had to take part in the air raid since he was an Air Force observer, but that he couldn’t understand why an observer for the Navy had risked his life. Johnson replied, according to Anderson, that “
many of the airmen knew that he was a Congressman from Texas—that many were his constituents—and that he wanted to show them he would face the same dangers they had to face.” MacArthur then listened for a
while to what Johnson and Anderson had to report. As they were about to leave, he suddenly said that he had posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, an Army medal second only to the Congressional Medal of Honor, to Colonel Stevens. Then he told the two men he was awarding
each of them the Silver Star, the Army’s third-highest decoration. After a somewhat awkward pause, MacArthur said: “
We don’t have any Silver
Stars out here. And the citations haven’t been written yet.” There was a supply of ribbons in his outer office, he said; “you can pick [them] up, and start wearing them.”

And, as in so many crucial episodes in Lyndon Johnson’s life, there was illness. Hardly had the big Coronado flying boat lifted off from Melbourne when he took to a bunk on the plane, feeling
“terrible,” and during the nine-hour flight he developed a fever. After their arrival in New Zealand that evening, Anderson brought him to a local hospital, where, Johnson wrote in his diary, he “
got insulted.” Navy doctors
ordered him to the sick bay of a submarine tender in the harbor, but the next morning, anxious to get home, he refused their advice to stay, and flew on. That day, he began to shake badly with a chill and a high fever. Anderson and crewmen wrapped him in blankets; the pilot wanted to return to Nouméa, but Johnson insisted they continue homeward. By the time the Coronado set down that night in Suva, in the Fiji Islands, however, his fever was 103.6, and in bed in a hotel there
he became delirious, and began vomiting. In a Navy hospital, sulphalhyzel brought his fever down, but when the Coronado left the next morning, it left without him. He had asked Anderson to get in touch with Admiral Nimitz in Pearl Harbor, and inform him of his condition. Nimitz immediately sent doctors to Suva, and after four days in the hospital Johnson left for Pearl Harbor, where he remained for treatment at the Navy Hospital until July 7, when he began the three-day flight to
Washington, arriving there weighing 180 pounds, twenty-five less than when he had left. By July 10, White House aide Daniels would write, “
Lyndon Johnson [was] back from his politically essential plunge into the Pacific.”

On July 9, President Roosevelt released a directive ordering all congressmen in the armed
forces to return to Congress. Of the eight Congressmen then on active service, four, including
Vincent Harrington of Iowa, who was later killed in action, reacted to the order by resigning from Congress so that they could stay in uniform. Four, including Johnson, resigned from the armed forces. (In explaining his resignation, Johnson was to
say, “
I had been ordered out of uniform and back to Washington by my Commander-in-Chief.”) He was back in the House, out of uniform, within a week after his return.

T
HE STORY
of Lyndon Johnson’s service in the armed forces during World War II, brief though it may be, nonetheless reveals violently clashing
contradictions in his character.

During his 1941 senatorial campaign, except for an occasional reference
to “scrubbing the deck of a battleship” as an ordinary sailor, he had repeatedly promised to “be fighting in the front line, in the trenches, in the mud and blood.” But he had known when he had promised to “tear up my draft number” that he would not
have
a draft number—it was, indeed, at least partly so
that he would not be eligible for the draft that he had had the foresight to obtain a commission in the Naval Reserve. (And, naturally, since the commission was as a Lieutenant Commander, scrubbing the deck of a battleship—or performing any other function of an ordinary sailor—was not a possibility, either.) He could, of course, have torn up the commission and obtained a draft number (or could have enlisted), but he did not do that.

What he did do, in obedience to orders that he himself had a hand in drafting, was to spend the first five months of the war trying to further his political future, while ensconcing himself in precisely the type of bureaucratic “safe, warm naval berth” he had promised to avoid. For five months, he delayed and stalled, making no serious attempt to get into combat while having what his sidekick John Connally was to call “a lot of fun.” And
when, after six months of the war had passed, he finally did enter a combat zone—when he no longer had any choice, when “for the sake of political future” he
had
to get into a combat zone, and get there fast—he went not to fight (in the trenches or anywhere else), but to observe. Despite flying more than 20,000 miles to reach that combat zone and return home, the only brush he had with the war there was to fly as an observer on a single mission,
at the conclusion of which he left the combat zone on the next plane out.