Above the Thunder (20 page)

While I can recall many details of my time in Kauai, strangely, I don't remember much about our leaving it. We did not take our airplanes with us, but I don't recall what we did with them. I do know that when we moved out of our airstrip we left no sign of our passing—except for a few tent stake holes in the ground and a small wooden sign that read: “
OLD LATRINE
4/44.”

At some time in my life I rode a small, gray ship that seemed to be constructed of nothing but steel, and it was called
Shanks.
I believe that was a ride from Kauai to Oahu to board the prewar Pacific cruise liner
Matsonia,
which I had often seen docked at Honolulu. It had been gleaming
white then, with the Matson Line's big “M” on its stacks, but now the ship was in wartime gray and her upper decks were all but hidden by dozens of gray life rafts on their skids. Gun tubs had been built for her five-inch deck guns. But I don't remember boarding the
Matsonia.
It's a blank spot in my memory. I only recall heading out over that hazardous ocean aboard her, having no idea where she was bound.

Inside her big gray hull, the
Matsonia
carried the officers and men of the 123d Infantry Regiment and the 122d FA Bn. There may have been men from other units; I'm not sure. It was an administrative move, as distinct from a combat movement, so our equipment was stowed as cargo, not ready for immediate use upon debarking.

Being an officer, I was assigned a stateroom on an upper deck—with seven other officers; it was so crowded we could hardly move when we were all in there. I took my meals at a designated table in the former grand dining salon, as scheduled, always with the same two officers sharing the table with me. One was Lt. Melvin Harker of my unit, and the other was a Navy lieutenant commander who was the ship's senior navigator. Harker and I cultivated the navigator's friendship, in hopes of getting some advance info as to our destination. He told us that we were on a course that would take us near Palmyra and the Christmas Islands. When we reached that point, he would be permitted to open another sealed envelope and learn the next destination.

We were without escort in an ocean where Japanese submarines roamed in search of big juicy troopships like the
Matsonia,
so she was constantly zigzagging along her effective course in hopes of spoiling the aim of any enemy torpedo man and fooling anyone who might try to guess her real course after only brief observation. Strict blackout was observed, and a dire fate was planned for anyone caught throwing anything, even a cigarette butt, overboard. Only designated members of the ship's crew were permitted to dump trash, and only shortly after dark each evening.

We crossed the equator at a point I have forgotten, but which must have been somewhere between Baker and Jarvis Islands. Shellback ceremonies were conducted, but since there were so many Polliwogs, only representatives elected by their unit personnel got the full treatment by
King Neptune's Court. Those representatives then had the privilege—in fact, the duty—of initiating the other members of their respective units. Phil Ryan represented HQ Btry. I received a secondary treatment: I had my hair clipped right through the middle from front to back, then I was slung with my head down over the side of the ship while a bucketful of seawater was poured over me. It was brief but impressive. I've lost the Shellback Certificate I was issued that day.

We were going into a region where tropical fevers were as great a hazard to the unprepared as the enemy himself. Worst of all was malaria, and the new medical miracle against malaria was Atabrine, a little yellow pill with an abominably bitter taste. We had to take five a day for five days to get an initial concentration of the stuff built up in our systems. It was quite common for the pills to come back up, and when they did, we immediately took five more. After the five days, the dosage was reduced to only one pill—one a day as long as you remained in the South Pacific. Fingernails, toenails, and whites of eyes turned yellow, but malaria, which had almost defeated the early divisions in New Guinea, was no longer a major problem.

The first land I saw after leaving Oahu was a blue bulk, low on the horizon off our port beam. Our navigator friend said it was Espiritu Santo, an island in the New Hebrides. Passing there, we were entering the Coral Sea, and one morning, after passing near a number of very small green-forested islands, we anchored in Milne Bay at the extreme southeastern tip of the huge island of New Guinea. The day was not over, as I recall, before we set sail again, and a couple of days later we landed at Base F, the big staging area at Finschhafen.
⁴
It was May 1944, and the war was definitely going our way.

Our advance party had set up a tent camp for us at Finschhafen. Being rushed and shorthanded, they had pegged only the four corners of each tent, leaving the rest to be done by the main body upon its arrival. But it was late and we were tired when we got there, so we just sacked out for the night. I was not much surprised or disturbed when, during the night, the fell and its rough canvas lay directly on top of me. I just went back to sleep, lulled by rain beating on the slack cloth.

Morning came, announced by much cursing and splashing about as others around me made their way out from under their fallen tents. I swung my feet over the side of my field cot and was shocked to find that muddy water was only two inches from my back. Shoes and assorted items of clothing floated together with other debris in a camp that had become a muddy lake. It was an appropriate introduction to New Guinea.

The 33d Infantry Division with attached 33d Division Artillery Battalion landed at the big staging base at Finschhafen, May 1944, and then the division artillery moved farther up the coast to Fortification Point (Map from Sanford Winston,
The Golden Cross
).

Without planes for the moment, Vin and I once again got more than our share of the dirty details as the 33d began demonstrating the basis of one of its nicknames, “The Camp-Building Division.” Ditches were dug to drain the camp area, and many tons of caliche were hauled in to pave roads and paths through the mud, while wooden duckboards floored our tents. Before long, we were quite comfortable. And training started once more.

But for the Div Arty commander, Base F was totally unsuitable as a training area. Chanting, in his Mississippi accent, “Gotta git mah boys some trainin',” he talked General Clarkson into letting him move Div
Arty some forty miles up the coast to a modest cape called Fortification Point. Up there was open, hilly country with patches of woods and large areas of tall, brown kunai grass; we could do some shooting at targets we could see, and there was no one to bother us except one small Australian outfit—which was no bother at all. The serious problem would be logistics, because the only land route to the point was passable only by jeep, and when the monsoon rains came it would be utterly impassable. Beaches did not exist there, only steep banks of loose small boulders along the shore, not good for landing craft.

Div Arty built its new camp at Fortification Point, and the air section of the 122d was sent up to prepare an airstrip for the entire Div Arty. Vin and I selected a level shelf between the camp and the Massewang River, half a mile away. To ensure its usability during heavy rains, it was necessary to ditch the sides and ends of the runway and surface it with PSP, that marvelous pierced steel planking that surfaced so many airfields during the war. The engineers had us so low on their priority list, however, that the chance of having them do it for us was hopeless; but they agreed to loan us a small bulldozer and supply us with PSP. Because we had to clear an approach lane through a grove of trees, they also agreed to let us have some dynamite, primer cord, blasting caps, and fuse. Vin and I had both been trained in Hawaii to use explosives, and we figured we could learn to handle the bulldozer.

We constructed ditches along the strip, carefully sloping the shoulders so they offered no big problem for a plane taxiing across them, although they were about eighteen inches deep. Vin was the chief engineer, but we took turns driving the bulldozer. An LCV (Landing Craft, Vehicle) from Base F brought up our PSP, and we piled it beside the strip, ready to be laid over the mud—for the rains had already hit us. And that's the way things stood one rainy afternoon when Bortz and Mossman flew up from Finschhafen to see how we were coming along and to bring us a case of dynamite and some other explosives. The plane they came in was an old L-4A that Bortz, with his gold leaf and Princeton brass, had scrounged from I Corps. It was an unflyable heap at first, but he had cannibalized other wrecks for parts, and the Div Arty crew had finally got it flying. It had the tail number 1167. When 1167 came over that afternoon, we tried to wave them off, since the freshly graded strip was
nothing but deep mud and puddles of water. We knew that even if he got down safely he'd not be able to fly out that night. But Bortz came in anyway. On landing, he lost control, ran off the runway, and bounded over the pile of PSP, fortunately doing no more damage than tearing some fabric. The plane was still flyable.

They unloaded the explosives, commented on our progress, and started to leave for Base F. It was almost completely dark by that time, but nothing daunted our fearless Dick Bortz. Despite the best arguments of Vin and me, away they went. Lined up as far back as he could get, Bortz held the brakes until the engine was at full speed, then started rolling. The plane slewed from side to side in the mud, but slowly gained speed and soon disappeared from our view down the dark runway. Over the sound of the engine we could hear mud splattering up against the wings and tail surfaces, and there was an occasional big splash as she hit a puddle of water. And then, suddenly, the engine sound died and we saw the silhouette of the tail appear above the dark horizon and disappear again.

We found 1167 upside-down in a large pool of muddy water just off the end of our runway, but Bortz and Mossman were unhurt. Our men worked all night on the plane. The prop was broken and cracked, but they trimmed it down to rebalance it and reinforced it with doped fabric. They patched some holes and cleaned the mud out of the engine. They beat out the cowling to approximately its original shape. By daylight, they had checked the rigging and the controls and pronounced the ship flyable. Sergeant Allen did admit that, since we had not yet received all of our supplies, he'd had to use pocket handkerchiefs instead of regular airplane fabric for some of the patches. After an early breakfast, Bortz and Mossman were up and away.

Well, we got the PSP laid and we cleared our approach through the patch of jungle, making fullest use of the explosives to knock down trees too big for our little bulldozer to push over. This led to two memorable incidents. In the first, Vin drove the bulldozer over a large log, and as the nose dropped on the other side it threw him out of the seat and spread-eagled him over the engine hood. The bulldozer kept grinding on across the landscape while Vin frantically scrambled back into the seat and in control of the situation.

The 122d Field Artillery Battalion Air Section planes and ground crew on its new “airbase” at Maffin Bay, 1944. Note the PSP surface. From left: Wendell Young, Kennis Allen, Ted Kinsch, and Eddie Janes.

In the second incident, we came upon a large tree that was the beloved home of a colony of the largest and fiercest ants I have ever encountered. Several times they drove us away when we tried to place explosives on the tree. Finally, Allen tied string around his trouser legs and collar, put on gloves and tied the wristlets over his sleeves, and generally made himself as antproof as reasonably possible. We strung several blocks of dynamite on a length of primer cord and capped and fused the whole thing, and then Allen dashed in and tried to fasten it around the tree before the ants could get to him. On the first try, he
dropped it and ran back out. All of us fell on him like maniacs, beating the ants off him. Then he ran back in, and this time he got the belt fastened before he had to dash back out to take another beating from the rest of us. On the third trip he lit the fuse, and we beat him again as we all ran to get safely away from the blast. That was the last big tree on the approach. Our airstrip was finished.