Once They Were Eagles (7 page)

Back at our tent, we lighted a candle and sat on our bunks and talked for a few moments. Then we adjusted our mosquito nets and stretched out nude, sweating again from the mild exertion of having walked from the showers.

The dark, heavy, green foliage pressed in on us almost visibly, working its way back over the area that had been cleared. Jungle birds, tree lizards, and frogs called to each other with eerie, screeching cries. Rain began to pound on our tent and run off its sides in solid sheets. It was like a scene from the movie
Rain.
Now I really understood what the phrases “coming down in buckets,” “raining in sheets,” and “frog strangler” meant. It was as though a giant had suddenly dumped an entire swimming pool onto our tent.

I raised my netting and put my hand out under the solid stream; the water was as warm as a YMCA pool.

It was only nine o'clock, but we had to be up at 4:00
A.M.
, and that would give us seven hours of sleep, we thought.

We thought wrong.

It started with a dull humming inside my head. It grew louder and louder. I shook my head and turned over, but the hum—now a wail—persisted, beating and beating at my brain. Then I heard a scuffle of feet, thuds, the crash of bodies moving through the jungle. I suddenly sat up, bumping my head on my mosquito net support pole.

An air raid! It was 1:00
A.M.

Nothing happened for a few minutes, so we stepped outside the tent. It was clear and bright. The rain had stopped. A full moon illuminated everything, and I knew what “Bomber's Moon” meant.

Boyington, Bailey, Reames, and I—we were a strange sight, naked
except for steel helmets and field shoes; shirts and trousers wouldn't have been any help.

Suddenly, a searchlight flung its long finger upward, probing the sky like a surgeon probing a wound for a bullet. Another one flicked on, and another and another, fingers interlocking and opening and moving about relentlessly.

We could hear the uneven drone of unsynchronized engines.

“Yes, that's Charlie,” said Bailey.

The searchlights continued their restless movement until one passed across the enemy formation; it jerked back and clung there. The others quickly swung and there, like tiny moths caught in the glare of our lights, were six Japanese bombers, making no effort to evade. Our antiaircraft opened up. Ka-bloom, boom; ka-bloom, boom; one after the other the shells burst, at first low and to one side, then closer and closer as the directors began to get the range.

A shell burst alongside one of the flanking planes; it faltered a moment and then began to go down in a long flat glide, trailing smoke.

Like the roar at a baseball game when a batter hits a home run, a cheer went up all over our camp.

“Time to get in our foxholes,” said Boyington.

“Nobody has to tell me that!” Doc Reames said, who was already in his.

The rest of us started toward our foxholes and ended up diving in when we heard the whistle of bombs. Down on our hands and knees, we heard them come closer, and then the earth shook with the concussion as they detonated. Bits of rock and coral bounced down the sides of the hole. We crouched there for ages, our shoulders hunched against another blast.

When we crawled out, everything looked the same. Twenty minutes later, the all-clear sounded; we went back to bed.

I woke immediately the next time I heard the siren. It was 2:35
A.M.
, and Washing Machine Charlie was back. This time it was a lone plane. He flew a straight course in spite of the lights, made no effort to dodge either them or the AA bursts, which came close but never touched him. Once again we ended in a scramble for our foxholes, and the bombs crashed somewhere toward the strip.

We were hardly back on our bunks when the siren wailed again. By the time the all-clear sounded, it was four o'clock and time to get up.

Breakfast consisted of grapefruit juice, chicory coffee, and creamed hamburger on toast—which Marines had awarded the expressive and alliterative title of “shit on a shingle,” or SOS.

The air raid sirens wailed again as we climbed into the trucks to go to the strip. Since no planes could be seen, however, and the Black Sheep were scheduled to take off at five o'clock for a rendezvous with a convoy coming up from the south, we started out. The moon had gone down. All lights were out. Everything was soft, warm, clinging blackness.

Our driver, who would rather have been in a foxhole, wound up the truck in second gear and raced at 45 miles an hour down the slippery coral road to the airfield. We rounded the curve at the bottom without mishap and straightened out on the road that crossed a long open area.

Suddenly, the antiaircraft batteries sprang to life and the searchlights came on again. Our driver jerked on the emergency brake and jumped out of the skidding truck, leaving us in a heap on its floor. We scrambled out and lay down in the muddy ditch along the road, feeling more than a little exposed.

The flight of bombers passed over us and unloaded some of their eggs before the lights lost them. We lay there awhile till the lights had all flicked off, leaving the island blacker than it had been before. Then we piled into our truck, and our jittery driver raced once more toward the strip.

We hadn't gone half a mile when the AA opened up again, and once more we scrambled out and flopped into the ditch. But this time we climbed back into the truck as soon as the planes passed over us, realizing that even if they had released their bombs directly overhead, they would fall some distance away.

We reached the field at ten minutes to five, and the Black Sheep were gathering their gear when the AA started again. We sprinted for a huge foxhole, covered with coconut logs and sandbags, beside our ready tent. Not all of us made it. A stick of antipersonnel bombs walked right down the taxiway, past our tent and past our foxhole, one bomb detonating within 30 feet of us.

I still have the tail fin off that bomb, and the scar it made.

One of the mechs dived under a truck that had been parked only a short time. Bomb fragments were flying all around, and in the midst of it, we heard an agonized groan from under the truck. We tried to help the man out.

“Don't touch me. I'm hit bad. Blood all over.”

In the beam of the flashlight, we could see him huddled face down, his head on his folded arms. The “blood” was warm oil dripping from a hole in the crankcase of the truck's engine.

Later that morning, Harper had a new name: “The Mole.” During the air raid, he'd hit the ground on his hands and knees and hadn't wasted time to get up; instead, he had scuttled along the ground on all fours, dived into the huge open foxhole, and then tried to burrow into the side of it.

Repeated bombings or not, we still had our Task Force cover to get off. The pilots were only five minutes late despite the confusion.

The Task Force was bringing men and supplies for our beachhead at Barakoma, Vella Lavella, north of us. Black Sheep pilots, in four- and eight-plane divisions, covered the convoy two hours at a stretch all day long, relieving each other on station.

At 1:30, Bill Case came in, reporting downing a Zero. I had hardly finished recording his success when a plane called our control tower requesting clearance for an emergency landing. It was “Wild Man” Magee.

He nursed his crippled Corsair into the groves, eased down carefully as though he were handling a crate of eggs, and then rolled free. As he flashed by us, we could see that one tire was flat, and jagged tears showed in his tail, fuselage, and wings. The actual count was 30 bullet holes.

“I got off late because I had to change planes at the last minute,” Magee told me. “Then I couldn't locate my flight, so I joined with three other Corsairs over Vella Lavella.

“We spotted 30 dive bombers heading toward Bougainville. We nosed over, gained speed, and came up under them in a low stern pass. One of them pulled off to the side and I followed him, giving him three medium bursts. He caught fire in the middle and went down burning.

“At this time, I spotted 15 dive bombers heading for our shipping off Barakoma. I'd lost the other Corsairs by then, and our batteries were throwing plenty of stuff up at the dive bombers, but I knew they couldn't get them all. I pushed over and went down at them.”

“All by yourself?”

“Well, yes, there were no other friendlies around. I caught them about 100 feet off the water and made a high side pass at the formation. One broke loose, and I chopped his tail off. He nosed over and crashed in the water.

“The dive bombers jettisoned their bombs and headed for home, so I picked out a straggler and started a high side pass at him. I passed over him before I could get in an effective burst, so I circled and made another high side at him. He turned in to me, and we came head-on. I gave him a long burst and saw pieces of his cowling and fuselage flying off. Then he nosed under me.

“I was going to circle and finish him off when I heard that old typewriter sound and saw holes begin to appear in my right wing. I kicked hard left rudder and then hard right alternately and dived toward our AA. Looking back, I could see four Zeros on my tail. They pulled off as I went down, so I circled and climbed back on station.”

“You climbed back on station?” I asked him. “When you knew your plane had been shot up? Why didn't you come home?”

“I hadn't been relieved yet. There were no other friendly planes in sight, so I thought I'd better stay. In about 15 minutes a flight of New Zealand planes showed up, and I came on in.”

“You ought to get the Navy Cross for that performance, Maggie. I'm going to write up the recommendation.”

“Hell, I don't want any medals,” he said. “Just killing the yellow bastards is enough fun for me!”

But I wrote up the recommendation anyway, and Maggie did receive the Navy Cross.

On the ground, Magee was quiet, reserved; in the air he was a junior edition of Boyington, a wild man, man-handling his plane like a cowboy bulldogging a steer. But he could fly with a delicate touch, too. Three days later, his engine was hit while he was strafing Japanese barges and quit as he flew parallel to our field. Instead of bailing out and letting the plane go into the water, he brought it in.

Life at Munda was grim. The pilots were flying all day, everyday. One or two divisions were up at 4:00
A.M.;
others were never in until after dark. Doc Reames and I were up with the first and waited at the field for the last.

It wouldn't have been so bad if we could have slept at night, but enemy air raids were nightly occurrences, usually spaced so as to prevent our getting more than an hour or two of sleep at a time.

The food had a nauseating sameness about it—Spam, beans, dehydrated potatoes, and SOS. Flies ranged regularly from the bodies of the dead Japanese, still unburied, to the “heads” (toilets) and onto our food. Dysentery (“GI runs”) was common. We all had a dull laugh one day when Doc brought in a piece of literature he'd received in the mail. Prepared by a board of doctors and surgeons in Washington, it was a detailed report on the importance of proper nutrition for pilots. Never, it said, should pilots be fed greasy foods or beans. Fruits and green vegetables should be regularly on their diets.

“Does it say anything in there about fried flies, stewed flies, boiled flies, or just plain flies, Doc?” asked Bragdon.

At night, tree toads chirruped in the jungle. Sometimes they
crawled into our tent, along with lizards three or four feet long that looked like something out of a lost world.

Huge coconut crabs scraped across our floor at night, often dragging our shoes about. Rats as big as cats pilfered our belongings. One night, one of them chewed on Burney Tucker's thumb as he slept, after he inadvertently flung his hand outside his mosquito net.

It rained regularly. Everything was mildewed. You washed out your shirt in a bucket of water and hung it up in your tent to dry, and it stayed damp for a week. Our foxholes, although covered by the tent, seeped full of water.

One night during an air raid, I stood nude above my foxhole and shone my flashlight down into it. It was four feet deep in muddy water. Two rats had fallen in and were swimming about, unable to climb its straight slippery sides.

“I'm not jumping into that, bombs or no bombs,” I vowed. But when the bombs began to fall, I jumped in, all right, and thrashed about in the dark, beating off the rats as they tried to climb up my chest and back.

We had no night fighters at Munda then, so all we could do during raids was sit and hope our antiaircraft fire would knock the bombers down or scare them away.

Tired of these sleepless nights, Boyington requested permission to fly one night to try to knock off one of our nocturnal visitors. He took off at one o'clock one morning and stayed up for four hours. Enemy planes were all around us all night long. They'd close in when Boyington dropped down to get off of oxygen, and then circle away as he climbed to meet them. That night we had only one alert; no planes came close, no shots were fired, and no bombs were dropped.

A good many thousand men blessed Pappy for giving them the first uninterrupted night's sleep they'd had in a long time.

Boyington landed at 5:00
A.M.;
at 5:40 the sirens sounded. Four Black Sheep were among those scrambled to intercept the enemy; John Begert was knocked down by a bomb blast as he ran to get into his plane, but sustained only a few cuts, scratches, and bruises.

The other three Black Sheep and two pilots from another Marine squadron got off and were directed out on two separate courses. The other squadron's pilots sighted the enemy bomber, chased it for
75
miles, and shot it down.

We hoped that would slow up the air raids, but the next night we had an alert in the middle of evening Spam. We stumbled across the muddy clearing and sat down on our cots in our tent. No planes appeared; no searchlights went on.

“Let's go down and get our showers,” suggested Bailey.