Space

by James A. Michener

  On graduation day at Annapolis, two United States senators appeared to cheer Penny when the newlyweds came out beneath the canopy of crossed swords-Grant, Republican of Fremont; Glancey, Democrat of Red River-and each kissed the bride for the delighted photographers. Mrs. Grant, who did not accompany her husband to Annapolis, was freshly disturbed when the pictures appeared in her hometown newspaper.

  KOREA

  LIEUTENANT (junior grade) John Pope drew the worst assignment of his career on a bitterly cold January day off the coast of Korea when a sailor aboard the carrier Brandywine shouted, “Hey! Chopper coming in!”

  Pope and other pilots on stand-by moved to the railing of the ship, stamped their feet to keep warm, and watched as an Air Force copter came low over the freezing waters, circled professionally, and dropped neatly onto the designated square. The bearer of bad news was a colonel in his forties, a no-nonsense type who strode across the deck to greet the captain of the ship, who passed him along to the Carrier Air Group commander. Within minutes all Navy pilots were called to the briefing room belowdecks.

  “Problem’s simple,” the colonel said as he stood with pointing stick before a map of the two Koreas. “The North Korean air force consists of a few native pilots, a lot of Chinese and a handful of very good Russians who fly out of sanctuary up there beyond the Yalu River. We have no complaints. Our F-86s are knocking the hell out of them in one-on-one combat. Our only wish is they’d send more MiGs down the alley, because if they do, we’ll crucify them.”

  Pope thought: Standard Air Force doctrine. When do we get to the point? The colonel, as if he had heard the question, said, “So why am I here? I’ll tell you why I’m here. The damned Koreans have come up with a gimmick [177] that’s giving us real trouble. With the best F-86 pilots in the world, we can’t handle it, and frankly, gentlemen, I’ve come here to enlist your help.”

  With his wand he pointed to an imaginary channel leading down the west coast of Korea to Inchon, the seaport used by the American forces, a center of great cargo dumps and gasoline depots. “The little bastards have built themselves what we call the Slow Boy, a small, cumbersome plane made largely of wood. Flies only at night, reflects practically no radar signal, carries a healthy load of small bombs, and operates on a Who-gives-a-damn? principle. That is, it flies very low, and if it sneaks through and bombs one of our dumps, fine. If it gets shot down, who cares?”

  The colonel laughed at the crudity of this tactic, then grew serious. “Trouble is, it works. They keep getting through. Our F-86s are no damn good trying to spot those plywood crates slipping in. Our gunners don’t find them. So our ammunition dumps keep exploding. What we need is four or five of you Navy men who are practiced night fighters. With your heavier, slower planes. Police that corridor and knock hell out of the Slow Boys.”

  He said no more, but the CAG commander took the podium and said crisply, “Washington and Hawaii approve. We’re detaching a group of four F4U-5NL night fighters to K-22 as of now. Lieutenant Pope will be in charge,” and he rattled off the names of the other three. “You will take off at 1300. Briefing starts immediately. That’s all, gentlemen.”

  K-22 was situated only forty miles from where the Brandywine rolled in the heavy seas. It perched on the extreme eastern edge of snowbound Korea on a small peninsula jutting out into the Sea of Japan, and every American aviator who served there acquired a tricky little habit that would remain with him the rest of his life. It concerned airplane takeoffs.

  It wasn’t the perpetual fog which gave trouble, nor the proximity to the sea. It was the water in the gasoline; it gave no trouble once the plane was airborne, for then rapid fuel consumption permitted the engine to ingest the small amount of water without danger, but on takeoff it was hell.

  [178] Since a plane on taking off needed every ounce of forward thrust, even the slightest dilution by water could prove fatal, and that was no figure of speech, because the plane, just as it was about to lift into the air, would find itself choking. It would gasp, then stutter, then start that dreadful plunge, ending with a sardonic explosion. The rotten gasoline which had refused to lift the plane into flight now exploded in ghostly flame, burning the pilot to death.

  At K-22 that winter five planes had burned on takeoff, and pilots not on flying duty sat in the rude mess hall tensed up whenever a fellow pilot was on the strip preparing to take off. Conversation would halt. The young men would lean forward. Everyone would listen to the engine as it revved up, trying to detect any stutter. When the plane started down the runway, the nervous pilots would try not to look at one another. They just sat there, tense, listening.

  Roar-roar-roar! The pilots could visualize the plane as it sped toward the sea, gaining speed, reaching for the go-no-go point. The listeners waited. Roar-roar-roar! This time the supply of fuel continued unbroken. The plane sped north toward the waiting enemy at the Yalu.

  No one mentioned the takeoff or its successful completion. Occasionally one of the grounded pilots would sigh, as if completing a prayer, but he refused to speak of the water in the fuel, nor did he congratulate the pilot who had made the roger-dodger takeoff. Bright conversation resumed. The acey-deucy games continued, until the next flight. And that was the tricky little habit John Pope acquired at K-22. He fell silent when a fellow pilot was trying to get his plane into the air.

  Since K-22 was an Air Force base, lined with those sleek F-86 Sabre Jets, Air Force personnel manned the facilities, which meant that Pope’s three Navy fliers were outsiders, and therefore at a disadvantage, but Pope was a master pilot now, cautious, brave, unusually capable, and he proposed to take no guff from anyone. His logbook showed more than nine hundred hours in seven distinct types of aircraft, with numerous entries in red indicating night flights.

  He stowed his gear where the sergeant indicated, accepted the cot he was assigned, parked his F4U where [179] told, and instructed his three associates to keep a low profile: “Our job is to find those Slow Boys.”

  He was not allowed to stay aloof, because with healthy curiosity the Air Force pilots wanted to know about his plane. “It’s a relic, really.” he said. “World War II. You probably knew it as the Corsair, the ones the Marines used to shatter the Jap air force in the islands. Marvelous plane. Big, heavy, absorbs punishment like a tank.”

  “Why the funny designation? All those letters and numbers?”

  “You know the saying: “There’s a right way, a wrong way and the Navy way.” The F means fighter, and it was fearsome. The U is our way of indicating the manufacturer, in this case Chance-Vought, one of the best. The 4 means the fourth prototype in this series. I understand 2 and 3 weren’t much, but with 4 they hit a winner. The 5 means the fifth major improvement in this version. The N means night fighter, and the L means it has de-icer boots and some other ingenious stuff to combat lousy weather.”

  “Jesus!” a captain said. “You have to be a graduate engineer to know the name of your plane. But why is it so heavy and so slow?”

  Pope considered this logical question for a moment, then said, “You fly the F-86? Well, it’s a gazelle. My F4U is a rhinoceros. In the jungle, there’s a place for both.”

  “But the heaviness?”

  “You land your F-86 on flat terrain. You can run three thousand feet before you hit the brakes. We land on a carrier. We stop within one hundred feet. In effect, we have no brakes.”

  “How do you stop?”

  “It’s rather exciting. You’re up there making about a hundred eighty knots. Midnight. Far ahead you spot your carrier. Lots of blue lights. The red wands of the landing officer glowing. You cut back to about a hundred knots, drop your gear, your flaps and especially your tail hook. And you put your plane right down on the deck of that plunging ship.”

  “How can you see the landing area? At night? With no lights?”

  “You can’t. You trust the lighted wands and-slammo! Your hook grabs the wire and you stop with one terrific [180] jerk. That’s why our F4Us have to be so heavy
. To withstand the shock of that grabbing wire.”

  “And if your hook misses it?”

  “Tough luck. You slam straight ahead into the barriers, a tangle of wires strung above the deck. They smash the plane but usually spare the pilot.”

  “And if you miss?”

  “You get swim pay. If you’re around to collect it.”

  His new assignment was a curious one. He slept all day, rose at dusk for breakfast, climbed into his F4U, and taxied out to the end of the darkened runway, where he assumed strip alert. This meant that he sat in his plane hour after hour, all lights out, pitch-black everywhere, getting his eyes accustomed to the night and waiting for the signal “Slow Boy coming down!” Then he leaped into action, but mostly he just waited.

  To civilian observers it seemed fearfully exciting, and one New York Times reporter wrote: “A flight into darkness, a faint dim signal on the radar, a swift pursuit, the tap-tap-tap of the forward machine guns, an explosion filling the sky when the enemy cargo is hit, and then the flaming debris floating past like wounded butterflies at some misty lakeside.” The reporter had been to Harvard, and he had a good ear, a good imagination, but what endeared him to the pilots at K-22 was his appealing habit of paying for drinks at the mess, where he listened to aviator talk.

  To Pope the night patrol was something quite different, as he said in a letter to Penny: “You spend eighteen nights on strip alert and nothing happens. You go up four nights and find not even a shadow in the moonlight. Finally you spot something coming south, but it’s a flock of birds. And on the rare night when you do intercept an enemy, the guy on your wing shoots him down.”

  What Pope did enjoy were the orders that arrived occasionally: “Tonight ignore the Slow Boys. Seek targets of opportunity and knock them out.” Then he ranged solo across all of North Korea like some swooping eagle trying with his keen night vision to spot enemy activity on the ground below. He loved the sense of freedom such activity produced, the sheer joy of flying through unencumbered space, enfolded in a darkness which he alone commanded.

  [181] He was seeking trains. Daylight attacks by the Air Force and Navy had so paralyzed Korean transportation that no train dared move when it could be seen; they crept out at night, running swiftly from one hiding place to the next, carrying an immense amount of war supplies to the various fronts.

  “It’s unbelievable what a Communist repair crew can do after we bomb the hell out of one of their rail lines,” the Air Force colonel had said in one of his briefings. “At ten in the morning we can tear up five hundred feet of track, then strafe the wreckage all day, and next morning they have the thing repaired. That night, trains sneaking down as usual.”

  Speaking directly to the Navy fliers, he said, “It’s not easy. Korea’s a hilly place. A lot of tunnels in this land. So when you come roaring in and smash one of their boxcars, what do they do? Uncouple it, leave it standing, and speed the engine into some tunnel where you can’t get at it. What you men have to do is knock out the engine. And that won’t be easy.”

  One night Pope did spot a train. The stars were brilliant in a moonless sky, and when he returned to K-22 he swore that he saw the train clearly in the starlight: “I came in low, knocked two of the boxcars off the track. And you know what happened next.”

  “The engine ducked into a tunnel?” a Navy flier asked.

  “With fifty or sixty undamaged boxcars.”

  After this had happened a few times, the F4U detachment held a think session at which they devised a bold strategy which, if it worked, would take care of any North Korean train caught between tunnels: “We’ll knock it so flat that even the blind photo birds will be able to find it.”

  The photographs were important, because the armed forces had discovered that pilots were so enthusiastic, and such congenital liars, that little credence could be given their exaggerated claims. Confirming proof was essential.

  “I came in low,” a blazing-eyed pilot would report, “and dead ahead stood this train. Tat-tat! I knocked it twenty feet off its tracks.” But when more sober fliers went out to find the derailed train, they usually found nothing. So the custom grew that as soon as a pilot reported a kill, recco planes went out to photograph the scene, and when they [182] got shots of an engine on its side or a string of boxcars burning at the mouth of some tunnel, the squadron celebrated.

  Why were the photographs so important? Certainly the Air Force did not imperil reconnaissance planes merely to prove that some hotshot Navy pilot was a liar. The true reason lay deep within the psychology of the aviator: medals were awarded not on hearsay but on incontrovertible proof of performance. A pilot could sit in the bar of the officers’ club night after night, claiming kills, and no listener took him seriously unless some other flier supported his report with substantial evidence. And that’s why the photographs became so important, especially with the night fighters.

  In daylight combat, a wingman could confirm, or a ground observer who saw an enemy plane come down in fiery parabola, but at night it was almost impossible for a fellow pilot to witness anything. There was, for example, the Air Force pilot at K-22 who returned to base morning after morning claiming that he had overtaken one of the plywood night invaders and had blown him out of the sky. No one saw these kills. No one could inspect the ground behind enemy lines to identify the shattered plane, but the high command was so eager to create the illusion in Washington that it was dominating the skies that it gave this windbag a medal with two clusters.

  And that was the heart of the matter. Combat aviators hungered for medals. They took unparalleled delight in the ribbons, the glittering medals which testified to their heroism. Only rarely in the mess did an aviator say anything which indicated that he considered himself a hero, but even the quietest man wanted the decorations which silently proclaimed that fact. For an additional medal, men would lie, exaggerate, falsify, support friends in hopes that friends would support them on some later claim; above all, they would take the most outrageous risks in order to qualify for one more ribbon.

  It was fatuous. It was juvenile. But it was also the essence of the heroic experience, for armies had found that whereas men would fight for many noble reasons-home, country, family, hatred of oppressors-the best men fought best for the good regard of their fellows, and the time honored proof of their regard was the medal. In the years [183] when John Pope and his fellow officers were flying their night combat missions against enemy flak and the hazards of weather and sudden mountain heights, each man was receiving $263.63 a month, lousy food and cheap whiskey. What compensated them for the enormous risks they were taking was the respect of their fellow pilots and their intense love of aviation.

  That was why John Pope, when he went out one wintry night to test the new strategy of killing trains, was careful to inquire as to whether a photographic plane might be available next morning.

  “A Marine from K-3 flew in this afternoon with a soupedup photo Banshee. Raring to go.”

  “Tell him to be ready.” Pope did not predict garrulously that he was determined to bag a train; to do so would have been alien to his pattern, for he was the quiet type, efficient, even retiring. He knew that few men could fly an airplane better than he, or handle it more efficiently at night, but he never spoke of his skills. In a crowd of young men in civilian clothes he would be one of the last to be identified as an aviator, and even in military uniform he resembled an effective staff officer or a photographic reconnaissance interpreter, a photo bird.

  On this night, as soon as dusk fell, he climbed into his F4U, with its massive load of ammunition for strafing and its bombs for heavy work, and taxied to the far end of the runway, where he assumed his position of strip alert. He waited. Staring at the Sea of Japan, he watched the grand procession of stars as they rose from the waters: the Bull reared his horns above the sea, followed by the huddling Twins. At nine the Lion crept out, and at midnight he had a clear view of the bold star he had studied so longingly in the hours before dawn on that
first night with the borrowed glasses: red-gold Arcturus flaming like a beacon.

  He slid open his window so that he could lean out and see the stars overhead, and there was Orion the great hunter: I’m a fair country hunter myself, and tonight I get me a train.

  It was well after midnight when the signal came for takeoff, and when he checked the sky one last time to ensure his orientation, he saw that Orion was skidding toward the western hills and dragging with him the heavenly animals: They’re getting out of my way. Thanks.

  [184] Steadily he applied power to his engine and listened approvingly to the swift acceleration of the propeller as it strained against the brakes. Suddenly he lifted his toes, the F4U surged forward, and as he roared down the runway he realized that every pilot within hearing distance was listening to his progress, even though apparently asleep; they were praying that the gasoline would be good and that he would soar aloft, but he was not the least bit uncertain, or afraid, or clenching his teeth. He was supposed to take off from K-22 at 0134 and he intended to do so. To fail would be unthinkable. If there was water in his gasoline, it could wait till he got airborne.

  In more than a hundred precarious landings on the chopping deck of a carrier he had never once supposed that he might fail to engage the restraining cable, or plow into the parked planes on the deck, or plunge off the end of the deck and die trapped in his plane. His job had been to get the plane safely down, and he always did, night or day, storm or fair. His job this night was to prove the efficacy of the new tactic and he roared aloft to do so.

  Since K-22 was positioned well below the battle line to protect its fuel dumps from intruding Communist planes, he spent his first minutes heading due north, which carried him well out to sea, but when his instruments indicated that he must be at least forty miles into enemy territory, he turned west, dropped to a thousand feet, and began searching the valleys.