Above the Thunder (24 page)

After that, Vin and I both began to spot Nips all over the place, but usually out of cannon range.

My first fire mission on a live target came nearly two weeks after our arrival at Maffin. Company B of the 123d had crossed the Woske and moved up to the Sawar drome in one of the first of many patrols the task force conducted for experience and for keeping up with what the enemy might be doing. Vin and I alternated in keeping contact with Company B and a smaller patrol that had gone up toward Aftawadona. I happened to be overhead when the company reached the limit of its planned penetration and halted at Sawar Creek. Before starting their return toward the Woske, they needed to replenish their water supply,
so several men took canteens and crawled toward the bank of the little creek. At that point, a hidden machine gun opened on them and killed Lt. Walter Roper, a platoon leader—the first man of the 33d Division to be killed in action in World War II.

I searched from the air, and those on the ground did their best to spot the location of the lethal enemy gun, but for several minutes we did not succeed. The company dropped mortar shells blindly into the area across the creek. Then S.Sgt. Winfield Green volunteered to crawl forward and recover Lieutenant Roper's body. This drew more fire, and someone on the ground spotted the creek-bank bunker near the mouth of the stream. Its firing slit covered both the stream and the beach.

The location was described to me, and when I identified it I called our FDC with my first combat-fire mission, giving them map coordinates and the nature of the target. Since it was a point-destruction type of target, the mission was assigned to the 155 mm howitzer battery attached to us. The first round from that extremely accurate weapon burst a few yards beyond the creek, so I sent a sensing that would cause the range to be shortened with no change in deflection. The second round burst in the creek directly in front of the bunker, and I split the bracket and called for fire for effect—which, in a point-destruction type mission such as this, would be a series of single rounds fired by the same piece. But there was no need for a series: the first round, in effect, was a target hit. It laid open the top of the bunker, and Japanese soldiers came pouring out, running for predug foxholes in the flats beyond the creek. I counted eleven of them, and as they ran I noted a couple of secondary explosions—of their ammunition, I suppose—that completed destruction of the bunker and, I imagine, finished off a few wounded who had not gotten out.

Its mission had been completed, so Company B broke contact and withdrew rapidly down the beach, carrying the body of its unfortunate officer. It reached Maffin without further incident, and Staff Sergeant Green became first in the division to be decorated with the Silver Star for gallantry in action. I'm not certain, but I think I had become the first pilot, if not the first observer, in the division to adjust fire on the
enemy. It was rather late in the war, 13 September 1944, nearly three years since my only earlier shot at the enemy, the strafing dive-bomber over Schofield.

Vin and I saw and recognized the enemy and his installations and equipment more and more as days passed—but it was seldom easy. Japanese camouflage and concealment measures were excellent, and their discipline was seldom breached. In most situations, the Japanese soldier would freeze and not move a muscle if he thought he might be under observation but not yet detected. One ruse the enemy used successfully for a while against Vin and me at Maffin was to pretend that their good trucks were wrecks. They would carefully cover their tracks, park the vehicles in the same spots all the time, and do whatever they reasonably could to hide the fact that they had been moved. And they did most of their hauling at night.

Once, however, I wandered up to Foe Maoe when they either didn't expect company or had such an urgent task that they had to risk daylight operations. I spotted several of their trucks in a ragged convoy on the plantation road, and I looked at them carefully as I approached. But they were far out of our range—we had no responsive air support for such minor targets—so I just looked and then turned to leave. Looking back, I saw the trucks begin to move. I turned back toward them, and they immediately halted. I turned away and they started again. For about thirty minutes I tormented them that way. I guess they never caught on.

Although we often found worthwhile targets within our range, they seldom were as good as those we couldn't hit. This led us to consider alternative means of clobbering our neighbors across the Woske. We began to carry fragmentation hand grenades to throw at patrols we caught in the open, and sometimes we got a little effect with them.

Returning from a special long-range reconnaissance some thirty miles beyond Sarmi up toward Cap d'Urville, I was flying downwind, very low over the beach and looking into the shaded trails under the jungle, trying to see evidence of enemy movement of troops from the west into our area, which our intelligence staff suspected. In all that long and rather nervous trip, I saw but one Japanese. He was all alone, strolling along the firm
sand in the same direction I was going, fully equipped with field gear, his rifle slung. As I came along behind him, I suppose the noise of my L-4 was covered by the roar of the surf, and he didn't hear me until I was within a hundred yards of him. By then, I had the pin out of a grenade.

He stopped, turned, started to unsling his rifle, decided it was too late, and started running toward the jungle. From an altitude of about six feet, I rolled the grenade along the sand. He saw it coming and fell flat on his face. The grenade exploded just as it struck his side, and he was lifted a foot or two into the air. I had pulled up and into a steep left turn over the water, and I saw him immediately get up onto his feet. Clasping his arms around his stomach, he staggered about for a few steps, then collapsed and lay still.

Up to that point, I had thought only of attacking an enemy, but now I felt very sorry for the poor guy lying down there, a simple soldier who only a minute earlier had been walking peacefully along the pleasant beach, perhaps daydreaming of his home and family, and who now was a bloody hulk breathing his last. What bothered me was that it didn't have to be that way. I could just as easily have gone on my way and let him live, and I immediately wished that I had done so.

Sergeant Allen went out with me one day, and he took several frag grenades along, just in case. Sure enough, we caught a patrol of about a dozen men in a relatively open area, and he wanted to hit them. It was his first experience at dropping things from the air, but his first grenade hit right in the middle of the patrol, which had flattened on the ground. But the grenade bounced well away from them before it exploded.

“Go around again, sir. I'll get 'em this time!”

“OK. You get your grenade ready and I'll tell you when to drop it.”

Just as I was turning toward the Japs for the second try, I heard the flat pop that I knew meant a grenade had been armed. At the same time, I heard Allen curse loudly and emphatically. I looked back to see him reach under his seat for the deadly little bomb that had slipped out of his hand, and then he flung the hissing grenade out the door. It burst only a few feet from the plane, and Allen and the boys had lots of small fabric holes to patch later.

Until now, it had never occurred to me to wonder whether any of those Nip soldiers died from laughing at us.

Just at the west end of our beach strip was a corps battery of 155 mm guns—not howitzers, but guns, which have longer tubes and longer range. And they have a tremendous muzzle blast. I know, because they fired all four of them together one day when I was about a hundred feet above the muzzles on final approach to our landing strip. The corps battery also had a couple of pilots, and those lads seemed only too glad to leave the enemy-occupied parts of the region to Vin and me while they waited for movement to somewhere else. They did most of their flying eastward, and I don't blame them.

Late one afternoon I had completed registering our batteries on the base point and various checkpoints—a daily routine—and was about to land when FDC asked me to fly on eastward down the beach as far as my fuel supply would permit and see if I could find the two corps pilots. Both in one plane, they had flown off that way earlier in the afternoon. They had to be down somewhere by this time.

I flew a long way down the coast. I don't know how far. My fuel got dangerously low, but I hated to give up when just one more minute might discover them and perhaps save them from some horrible fate. And, sure enough, just at dusk, as I was actually starting to turn back, I saw the plane, sitting at an odd angle on the sand. As I flew toward it, I saw one of the pilots run from a native village nearby and climb into the plane. His radio was weak from earlier calls for help, but he managed to make me understand that they had intentionally landed to visit the village, had hit a log in the sand, and had washed out the gear and prop. The friendly villagers had assured them that there were no Japanese around anywhere and that they would be OK until help could be sent tomorrow, he said.

Before his message was finished, I was heading back toward Maffin, and in the last fading light I saw the fuel gauge hanging by its nose on the filler cap, indicating empty. The minutes from there on were long, indeed, and it was with exceeding great joy that I finally sighted the lights from HQ Btry tents among the trees. I called FDC as I approached
and asked them to get some light on the strip for me. They replied that Lieutenant Vineyard was getting some vehicles together and would have the strip lighted in just a few minutes.

“Hell, I can't wait! This thing is likely to quit any second. I've got to land now!”

I flew past where I knew the strip was, but I couldn't make it out at all. All I could see was the few dim lights in the tents back among the trees, but I knew the strip was right in front of them and six or eight feet lower. I also knew that the strip was not as wide as the wingspan of the L-4, and if the left wing didn't project over our sandbag dike, the right wing would hit either our crates or the trees.

I lined up and started in. I was on very short final when Vin came bouncing up in a jeep, shining its headlights across the approach end of the strip. That helped me some, but once I passed the jeep and flared for landing I could see absolutely nothing. I fully expected to wash out my ship, but she rolled right down the sand just as nicely as if I could see and guide her. As I came to a halt, Sergeant Allen came running with a flashlight to lead me in.

I wondered where in the hell that flashlight had been when I needed it. But Kennis Allen was much too conscientious and dignified a man for a whippersnapper like me to take to task. I knew there was some good reason for its not being seen before.

I blasted the tail around to follow Allen to our tie-down—and the engine quit, out of fuel. I swear it's true!

In our quest for longer range strike capability, the AAF maintenance people on Wakde were very helpful. Of course, it was Vin who made the contacts over there, and the first weapon he got for us was a supply of twenty-five-pound antipersonnel bombs. They were a type the AAF used in clusters, I suppose, for they referred to them as cluster bombs. These were too heavy for a pilot to handle safely alone, so we carried a bombardier when we used them, either one of the air section enlisted men or Vin and me riding double. Each of these bombs on its nose had a little spinner that required an eight-hundred-foot fall to release a safety ring and arm the fuse, and this handicapped us quite severely. Dropping from that high an altitude, we were not sufficiently accurate. So we held
the bomb out the door in the slipstream until it armed, and then we could drop it from whatever altitude we wished. We usually dropped them from four hundred feet, getting more accuracy and not too many fragments. We did a bit of damage with them but nothing real serious, as far as we knew. But the supply dried up after a few weeks.

And then Vin flew the
Arizona Keed
back from Wakde one day with a light .30-caliber machine gun mounted between the landing wheels. The armorers over there had taken this well-worn gun off of an AAF plane of some kind. They made a special bracket to sling it from the cabane “V” of the landing gear and ran tubular braces from the breech to the lower longerons of the L-4. On top of the gun they mounted a steel box that held 250 rounds of ammo. They put a storage battery on the floor between the pilot's feet and wired up a solenoid firing mechanism. It worked like a charm. The line of fire passed about two inches below the low point of the propeller arc, and it converged at two hundred yards with a line of sight across the top of the fuel filler cap. The gauge wire served admirably as a vertical reticule for the sight.

I can't give you full details of Vineyard's career with his Piper fighter, but I recall that he shot up at least one Japanese patrol and strafed some spots he considered worth the ammo. And he lit into a large building we had discovered in the jungle near the Foe Maoe Plantation. His tracers set the thatched roof on fire and the whole place burned to the ground. Only as it burned were we able to see indications that it might have been a hospital.