Vanished (20 page)

Many pilots in the unit would have ignored the question, but Dixon was a new arrival. Though he was the most senior man on the mission,
he’d spent most of the war in Panama, where the rules of radio discipline were not as strict. After a few seconds, the radio crackled. It was Dixon—not only answering the question, but ignoring the code. “Coming in at 11,500 feet,” he called. Then he added that he was flying 157 miles per hour.

There was a moment of stunned silence before a third voice came on, flat and dry: “I hope the Japs didn’t hear that.”

They did. As the Dixon squadron crossed the southern bay of Koror, they flew into a battery of explosive shells. All six planes reeled in the onslaught, but Dixon took the worst. A large hole opened at the base of his right wing and his fuel tank ruptured, spraying fire into the air. He struggled to control the plane, but it was too late. The wing tore off. The plane corkscrewed down. A man’s body shot into the air, plummeting down without a parachute. The fuselage streaked across Koror, smashing into the north shore, while the lone wing fluttered into shallow water beside a small island.

Back on Wakde, the Big Stoop boys retreated to their bunks. They had watched the crash up close and the sight was sickening. “
Commanding officer of 372nd
got anti-aircraft right up through bomb bay,” one man wrote in his journal. “Went down in flames. Landed in target area. No one got out. Never had a chance. Terrible sight.” Johnny opened up a letter from Katherine. She mentioned that an older man was flirting with her at work, and he flew briefly into a rage before Jimmie calmed him down. “
That boy still doesn’t realize
how much responsibility he has now,” Jimmie wrote to Myrle. “But that is something they will have to work out for themselves.”

—

A
LOW MALAISE WAS SETTLING
over the camp. As the last days of August crept by, the men began to realize that Palau was unlike any target they had seen. In their first five missions, they
lost more than forty men
, and privately each man had to confront the shrinking of his own
odds—the likelihood that, on missions to come, he would lose good friends, at least.

Increasingly, commanders worried about morale. “
This war is beginning to get rough
,” the adjutant wrote in his action summary. “It will take a hell of a lot more than Bob Hope to improve their poor morale. It has become a critical situation. . . . The men are true Americans and will see the deal through, but there is no question that they are pretty bitter about the whole situation.”

For the Big Stoop boys, the final night of August passed slowly. They were scheduled for an early-morning flight to Palau, their first mission since the Dixon crash, but as they shuffled into their tent to lay out gear and write letters home, none could mention their previous mission or the one to come. If they knew they were going to fly with a new pilot, they kept it from their letters as well. As ever, they avoided the subject of the war, giving their last letters home an eerie cheer.

“Dear Folks,” Earl Yoh wrote. “
How is everyone at home
? I am feeling fine. I suppose the boys have started to school and have a grudge against their teachers. How is Dad? Is he still working? How is Grand Pa and Grand Ma? Tell them I said hello. You can also tell George and Anne I said hello. Mom, I increased my allotment yesterday to $75. I don’t know if it will come out of September pay or not. Is that other coming through alright? Well, I guess I had better say Good Night for now. Love, Your Son, Earl.” At the bottom, he added, “God Bless You.”

Jimmie, meanwhile, was deep into a love letter to Myrle. If his writing was occasionally florid, it was nevertheless remarkable from a man with a grade-school education. “
Sweet
,” he wrote, in what would become the last letter in Myrle’s collection, “my mind is nearly a blank tonight, for I am all took up with thoughts of you and home. Maybe it won’t be too long until the day when I will be home, and we will be together again. With your arms around me, I can forget all this, and settle down to spending years with you. Gee, what a glimpse of you would be worth! I’ll have lots of time for just feasting my eyes on you. How I miss you! Sweet Darling,
tomorrow is a busy day, and I have to get up early. So I’ll stop for tonight, and tomorrow I’ll do better. But you know I love you with all my heart, and will for always. Tell the folks hello, and write as often as you can. Good night, Sweetheart. With all my love, Jimmie.”

—

T
HEY GATHERED AT THE AIRSTRIP
before dawn. It was a morning like any other. In film shot by a unit cameraman that day, the sun over Wakde airfield gleams against the silver B-24s while ground crews bustle through familiar routines on the coral runway. A little after 6 a.m., the crowd of airmen began to climb aboard the fleet, each man moving into his position with the burnished confidence of a veteran flier.

Since their arrival three months earlier, the Big Stoop boys had flown nearly a dozen ships, including the
Babes in Arms
, the
Dina Might
, and several with no name, but that morning they were scheduled to fly airplane number 453, the same plane that Norman Coorssen had flown without them on his observation flight to Yap. Now it would be their turn to fly the same plane without him.

The reason for Coorssen’s absence that day may never be entirely clear. He was the only man from the Big Stoop crew who wasn’t present. A few others were relatively new additions, like flight engineer Robert Stinson, who joined the crew in July, and co-pilot William Simpson, who was the third man to fill that role. Photographers also came and went, depending on the mission. Since their arrival on the islands, the Big Stoop boys had flown with five different combat cameramen on a total of nine missions. Their favorite photographer was Mario Campora, a bulky young man from western Massachusetts with a tangle of brown hair and the delicate features of a child. Campora had only flown with the Big Stoop boys three times, but he fit in so well that they’d invited him to join the crew photo in July.
He was scheduled to fly
with them again that morning, but he woke up with a throbbing cold and resigned himself to a day of rest. Instead, they got photographer Alexander Vick, another familiar face.
Vick had been with them on their last mission. In fact, every man on the plane had been on the prior flight—except Jack Arnett.

No Army document can explain why Arnett took the helm that morning, and no living veteran of the Long Rangers knows. At least two possibilities remain. If the unit historian Jim Kendall was right, then the Big Stoop boys were not scheduled to fly at all, and they were rushed onto Arnett’s plane only after his crew refused to board. But in letters written the night before, the men seemed to know they were scheduled for the mission. Jimmie Doyle referred to a busy day ahead and the need to wake up early—the same language he always used on the night before combat. The other possibility is that the Big Stoop crew was scheduled to fly all along—and it was Coorssen who failed to board the plane, and Arnett who was the replacement.

This much is certain: by September 1, 1944, Jack Arnett had been ejected by at least one crew. Six weeks earlier, the men who trained with him in Tonopah had thrown him off their plane. Only
two members of that crew, and the wife of a third
, survive. But all three recall the incident in detail. Arnett, they say, was an exceptional pilot, but he could be abrasive and imperious. Where officers like the Big Stoop navigator Frank Arhar followed the advice to “laugh with your men,” Arnett was known to bark orders and demand extreme obedience. “
He was bossy
, and whenever he spoke something, he expected you to do just that,” said Jack Pierce, the top-turret gunner who trained with Arnett in Tonopah. “Well, the boys didn’t want to do exactly what he said—and they let him know it.”

According to Martha Raysor, whose husband, Jim, was on the same crew, the tension between Arnett and the men was apparent even before they left the United States. “
He thought he was better than the rest
of them,” Raysor said. “One time, they were all traveling in California, and gas was at a premium, and Jim says, ‘Well, if you want to go by my folks’, my dad can probably give you some gas because he works for the oil company.’ So they drove there, and the rest of them went in and had
something to eat. But Arnett wouldn’t get out of the car. He was an officer and my husband was not, and he wouldn’t lower himself.”

As Pierce recalled it, the tension only grew in combat. Among other problems, Arnett began to drink. “A lot of us were drinkers,” he said, “but not on the aircraft. He would go into the airplane with a bottle in his hand. My position on takeoff was to stand between him and the co-pilot, so I got to observe what went on. Many times I saw him with a bottle at the steering apparatus.”

By the second week of July, the crew had seen enough. The officers confronted Arnett about his domineering manner, but the conversation did not go well. Arnett threatened to have them punished for insubordination. In desperation, they turned to the enlisted men for support. “The word got to us through the other commanding officers,” Jack Pierce said. “He was planning to let them go and keep the enlisted men. Well, they objected to it, and we stuck with them.”

Faced with a disintegrating crew, squadron commander Jack Vanderpoel came up with a tidy solution.
Another pilot, Charles McRae, had been sidelined for weeks
with an ear infection, and was coming back into rotation. Vanderpoel assigned McRae to take over the Arnett crew, and he gave Arnett the crew that had flown with McRae in training.

As Arnett began flying with his new crew, there was no sign of conflict. On the contrary, his record remained stellar.
Twice
, on missions from Los Negros to Yap, he was forced to turn back when an engine failed, but each time, he managed to bring home his plane and crew safely. By September 1, he had been flying with his second crew for seven weeks—the same amount of time he had spent in combat with his first. Perhaps the second crew had also seen enough of Arnett. Perhaps, in the final days of August, they, too, refused to fly with him. Or perhaps Jim Kendall was mistaken about which Arnett crew “voted him out.” There are no surviving members of the second crew to ask.

Nor did Arnett’s family have any inkling of his troubles. Like so many other families, all they would know in the years to come was the
threadbare agony of a lost child. At their home in Charleston, West Virginia, his parents hung a portrait of Jack above the fireplace, staring at the amber-eyed kid who got in trouble for questioning his teachers—the kid whom even
a close cousin
, Carolyn, remembered as “private” and “aloof.” His brothers, Marvin and Warren, would always remember Jack as
their mama’s pet
, the one who could get away with shooting blossoms off the flowers in the garden, while their mother, Dessie, would always cling to Jack’s last letter home, in which he promised that the war had not hardened his heart. “They have not made me hate anyone,” he wrote, and she pasted the words into a scrapbook of photos bound in a thick blue cover with the title “A Book without an Ending.”

—

S
ITTING IN THE COCKPIT
of the 453, Arnett watched the first planes in the formation lift off. Anywhere else and it would have been a comical sight. One by one, they rolled to the head of the runway with the languid majesty of a great beast, turning to gaze down the long, white airstrip that stretched across the island, but the moment the pilot leaned on the throttle, the illusion of grace vanished—the plane lurching forward, bobbling and clattering wildly on the uneven surface, disappearing into the hollow, and then charging up the other side toward the water. In Tonopah, the Army had spent a small fortune paving runways for B-24 training, but on Wakde, it was clear that they might as well have trained on the desert floor.

When Arnett’s turn came, he guided the 453 through the same gauntlet, gripping the controls and bracing himself in the cockpit as the plane hurtled forward, until at last the pandemonium gave way to the easy vibration of flight. Wakde Island shrank below until it was just a speck fading behind them.

The mission plan called for the usual eighteen-plane formation, with six from the 372nd Squadron in the lead; then six from the 424th, including Arnett’s; and finally, six ships from the 371st bringing up the rear.
Together, they would fly northwest to another satellite island, Niroemoar, then they would angle north for the journey to Palau. As they closed in on the archipelago, three planes from the lead squadron would split off, circling north over Babeldaob on a reconnaissance mission, while the remaining fifteen planes would converge into a box formation for the strike. Their target was a string of buildings at the center of Koror—government facilities, a power plant, a sawmill, and a school.

No battle plan survives contact with the enemy, but the plan that day didn’t come close. Within twenty minutes of takeoff, one plane in the Big Stoop squadron began losing oil and had to turn back. Then, halfway to Palau, the formation ran into a squall, and as they tried to steer around it, the Big Stoop squadron went one way while the remaining two squadrons went the other. By the time they all emerged on the far side of the storm, the Big Stoop was far behind.

As a tactical matter, this could hardly have been worse. The original plan called for the Big Stoop to cross near the middle of the formation. Now they were so far behind, they weren’t in the formation at all. They would reach the islands several minutes late, with every gunner on Koror waiting.

Watching the islands grow on the horizon felt like staring at an oncoming train. Plumes of smoke trailed up from the bomb blasts left by the first two squadrons, and the sky glittered with shrapnel streaming down. The squadron pulled close together. They had learned from experience to make themselves into a small target. “
When we first got there
,” a gunner on the mission, Al Jose, recalled, “we’d tell the guys who came in close to us, ‘Get away! Get away!’ But after a while, we realized that we wanted it tight, and we were shouting, ‘Come on in!’”