Above the Thunder (10 page)

For three nights we had been out on the ground with no cover or bedding of any kind except our clothing, so even the command car was a welcome prospect. But there was another problem: mosquitoes! Neither on Oahu nor anywhere else have I ever seen them more numerous or voracious than they were at Btry C that night. Onderdonck pulled his shirt up over his head and snored peacefully, but neither Bylotas nor I could sleep. Every bit of exposed skin throbbed and burned and itched, and the night was filled with the high-pitched whine of thousands of humming wings. Already exhausted and our nerves on edge, the two of us slapped and scratched and floundered about and cursed. At one point, for the only time in my life, I gave serious consideration to suicide, just to be free of those infernal insects. The loaded BAR was a great temptation. But then Bylotas said, “Hell, Kerns, we may as well go out on the perimeter. It can't be any more miserable than this.”

Leaving Onderdonck asleep in the truck, we walked down the road to the bend where the first sergeant had said the perimeter crossed. There we lay down on the road itself with our rifles pointed through a
closed farm gate toward a hillside that sloped gently away in the starlight. It was much better there; there was a slight breeze and few if any mosquitoes. My morale began to rise a bit.

Then there was a shot somewhere down the woodline to our left. Then another somewhere else—and another—and two or three together. Soon the entire perimeter was rippling with rifle fire as the tired and disgusted soldiers released their tension. I asked Bylotas if I might fire, too, and he said hell yes, he'd join me. We aimed our weapons at the hillside and blazed away.

Immediately, from right under the muzzle of my BAR, there arose a loud outcry of pain and anger. There in the ditch, unseen and unheard by us until then, were two Btry C troopers whose ears had been slapped by the muzzle blast of our guns. We apologized and held our fire, but the rest of the troops went on firing for quite a while. We heard that a dead cow was found on the hillside next morning.

But we were not present to see the dead cow. As soon as dawn made our departure legal, Bylotas, Onderdonck, and Kerns, Inc., wasted no time in vacating the premises of Btry C. Home had seldom looked so good to us as it did that morning, with good chow, our own friends and officers, the issue of blankets and canvas cots, tents to sleep in, and our barracks bags with clean clothing. And there was the friendly Lister bag with plenty of water to drink. We were soldiering properly once again, with mosquito bars in place.

Before the week was out, Burnis Williamson and I were sent to Kalihi Valley, where there was a pair of 240 mm guns on 360-degree Panama mounts that had been assigned temporarily to Btry A of the 89th for coastal defense on our side of the island. Pending installation of wire lines, communication was a problem, the puny SCR-194 radios being totally unable to reach over the mountain wall at the head of the valley. Williamson and I were to use an SCR-178 low frequency continuous–wave (CW) radio-telegraph outfit to handle communication of fire commands and other essential data between Btry A and the 89th's FDC.

Kalihi was not at all bad, although it did have its drawbacks. Today there are a highway up the valley and tunnels through the mountain to the Kaneohe side, but in 1941 the pavement ended far down toward
Honolulu, and Btry A's position was at the end of a dirt track, still a considerable distance from the head of the canyon. The canyon was a dead end, nearly always clouded over and usually raining. If the rain ceased, a sure way to start it was to fire the 240s. Williamson and I shared a pup tent floored with several copies of the Honolulu papers, which soon became soaked and moldy, as did our blankets. Our feet were always muddy and wet, so our practice was to crawl into the tiny tent, put our muddy feet on the mosquito bar to hold it down, and seldom take off our shoes and leggings. Like the other men, we ate standing out in the perpetual rain, occasionally draining the rainwater out of our food—along with numerous gnats. But we solved the communication problem and proved our worth to Colonel Bledsoe.

The last house up Kalihi Valley was the home of a family named Militante, and Williamson and I made friends with them. This paid off most handsomely when Christmas came, because they invited us to a luau-style Christmas dinner—which we enjoyed while sitting at a table inside a house, just like civilized people. We were envied by the other boys, with whom, incidentally, we also enjoyed the Army's usual holiday turkey and trimmings. It was a memorable Christmas for us.

By the time we returned to HQ Btry, soon after Christmas, it had moved to a location on the Maunawili Ranch in the Kailua area. Maunawili is the famous beauty spot where, according to tradition, Queen Liliuokalani was inspired to compose the classic Hawaiian song, “Aloha Oe.” Battalion headquarters was in the main ranch house, while HQ Btry was around the modest residence of the ranch manager, a Japanese American whose name, as I recall, was Iwanaga. The battalion FDC was some distance down the road in a dugout lighted with the first fluorescent tubes I ever saw. The radio section occupied a camouflage-painted shack under a huge mango tree in the manager's yard and, to the envy of the rest of the battery, was given access to the cold-water showers in his separate bathhouse. Life wasn't at all bad for us there.

But there was much to be done before Oahu could be secure. The 25th, like its sister division, the 24th, was at only about 60 percent of its authorized combat strength. Much of its equipment—such as our old radio sets—was obsolete. Before the end of December, our ancient French 75s were replaced by new 105 mm howitzers. We had never seen one of the new quarter-ton jeeps that were to become ubiquitous, nor the new FM (frequency modulated) radios. We still used the blue denim fatigues and barracks bags, still had the flat British helmets, still depended on the AAF for aerial observation. We had no prepared positions for our CP, our weapons, our OPs, and the many other facilities needed for island defense against invasion.

Privates Ralph Park, Burnis Williamson, and Maurice “Pappy” Downs, Oahu, 1941.

We worked hard at supplying the deficiencies, including training new men who came in with only basic training, knowing nothing of any special function. We began receiving more elaborate equipment, more modern materiel that made necessary varying degrees of retraining of experienced soldiers and officers. Meanwhile, internal security remained a matter of serious concern, and most men spent at least a couple of hours on guard duty each night after a long, hard day of work.

At some point, Williamson and I shared another choice assignment. With only an SCR-194 for communication, we established a temporary special OP on the narrow nose of a ridge overlooking Kailua. Our principal duty was to observe and report at five-minute intervals the position of any object we spotted at sea. With our carefully oriented BC-scope, we were to measure horizontal and vertical angles to such objects, while back at the FDC the chart operators would translate those angles into the actual positions of the objects. The most interesting thing I can recall our having sighted was a bad ly listing aircraft carrier that proceeded very slowly southeastward to round the island toward Pearl Harbor.

About a hundred yards below our OP was a house built on a large rock formation in which our ridge terminated. A day or so after our arrival, a young girl came up from the house and told us that her mother would like to have us locate our post inside the house, a proposition that sounded very good to us. We found that the house had a large section of windows in an arc that surveyed perfectly our area of interest. Inside the windows was a long, cushioned window seat, and there we set up and reoriented our BC-scope. From our viewpoint (in every sense) it was ideal.

We learned that the husband and father was a broadcasting executive in Honolulu and, because of gasoline rationing, was staying in the city except for occasional visits; therefore, only the mother and daughter were at home. The house was built to conform to the natural formation of the rocks, some of which projected through the floors or walls and served as furniture. On one of these rocks was a large guest book and, beside it, the largest candle I've ever seen, sur rounded by a massive accumulation of drippings. They told us that the candle was placed there and burned for one hour on the day the house was first occupied and again on each anniversary of that date. The guest book contained signatures and addresses of many famous people whose names I recognized—one, I recall was Pearl S. Buck. Williamson and I felt honored at being asked to sign.

From left: Sal Crupi, Ralph Park, Billy Mulherin, and “Pappy” Downs, in front of the camouflaged shack in the Maunawili Ranch manager's yard.

But our enjoyment of the plush OP was short-lived. Because of the triangulation requirements, it was necessary for us to inform FDC of our new location and altitude above sea level. It didn't take long for one of the officers at the FDC to notice the change, and it was back to the ridge for Williamson and Kerns. We soon returned once more to the HQ Btry area.

The author copying Morse code received by SCR-161 radio, 1941.

Colonel Bledsoe had retained a couple of his old French 75s and mounted them on two trucks. He called them his roving guns. Whatever their limitations, these improvised self-propelled pieces with their ancient ammunition were useful in training officers in the conduct of fire. Impact areas on Rabbit Island and offshore rocks were designated, and service practices were conducted.
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During one of these firing sessions, Ralph Park and I were detailed as radio operators to relay fire commands from the OP to the gun position. In charge of the firing was Major Ferris, the former HQ Btry commander, who had been promoted and made battalion S-3 (operations and training officer). After all the officers had fired, Major Ferris asked Colonel Bledsoe if he might let Private First Class Kerns fire a problem. The colonel appeared just as surprised as I was, but he said, “Why, certainly. If he knows the procedure, let him fire.” Major Ferris designated a target for me and I stepped up to the BC-scope just as if I knew what I was doing.

But I didn't. Major Ferris knew I had picked up some knowledge of
gunnery, but I think he gave me credit for more than I knew. The procedure for this practice required the observer not merely to sense where the rounds landed relative to the target but to measure the deviations with the scope, carry out a rather complex mental calculation using several factors, and come up with fire commands that went directly to the guns without the intervening services of an FDC. I had never done such a thing before. But I had heard and, in many cases, repeated into a microphone, the commands that had been sent to the roving guns that day. I had remembered the adjusted data for many of the targets out there on Rabbit Island, and my target lay between two of those. Standing at the BC-scope, I mentally interpolated between the adjusted elevations and deflections for those two targets, respectively, and came up with data for my target. I fitted this into an otherwise fairly simple command sequence and called it out confidently to Park. He relayed it to the guns. The two bursts that resulted bracketed the target for range, deflection correct.