by Adam Makos
Tom hurried down the steps from Vulture’s Row. Cevoli should have stopped him—the flight deck was a dangerous place during engine warmup, but Cevoli wasn’t one to wield authority. Some of the squadron’s pilots whispered that he was second-in-command only in name, because he spent more time joking and playing backgammon than doing his paperwork.
At the base of the tower, Tom opened the steel door and stepped onto the flight deck, wearing borrowed goggles. A blast of wind buffeted him. The carrier was steaming into the wind at nearly 40 miles per hour so the pilots would have lift when they launched.
Ahead lay a daunting obstacle: Propellers whirled from the noses of four Corsairs in the front row, like thirteen-foot buzz saws. Tom knew he needed to hurry—any minute, the deckhands would receive the signal to pull the chocks.
Tom took a step forward and felt his feet slide. Oil from countless engine drippings had slickened the wood. Choosing each step carefully, as if he were wearing bowling shoes, Tom crept toward two Corsairs in the center. He turned sideways and began shimmying through the narrow gap between them. Their 2,250-horsepower engines popped and sizzled and their yellow-tipped blades reached for him. Tom felt hot engine exhaust on the back of his neck and thought, This is nuts! As he snuck between the planes’ folded wings, young deckhands looked up at Tom from the wheels as if he were indeed crazy.
Credit 24.1
Bill “Wilkie” Wilkinson and his wife, Mary, a month before the war
Tom broke into the open space behind the first row of planes. Their prop blast buffeted his back, pushing him toward the second row of spinning propellers. Tom braced on the slippery deck. He knew the rule: If you fall, stay down—spread your arms and legs to stay flat! If a man rolled into a propeller, it wouldn’t be pretty. Ahead, Wilkie glanced around the nose of his Corsair and beckoned. Tom lowered his chin and continued.
Scampering up on Wilkie’s wing, Tom grabbed the canopy railing and held on for dear life. Farther up the nose, the propeller spun and its prop wash made breathing difficult. The smell of spent gasoline filled Tom’s nose and hot plumes of exhaust licked his ankles. Angry machines and whirling propellers surrounded him.
Wilkie grabbed Tom’s arm to steady him. “Thank heavens!” he shouted, his voice clipped with a New England accent. Beneath Wilkie’s helmet and goggles was a slender face with blue eyes and a thick chin. “Wilkie” was twenty-two-year-old Bill Wilkinson, a rookie who had gone straight from Yale University to navy flight school and who had gotten married mere weeks before the Leyte sailed.
“What’s the matter?” Tom shouted.
Wilkie explained that he had run a check of the magnetos and seen that insufficient electricity was flowing through the engine cylinders. “I might have a bad spark plug!” Wilkie added. The engine had thirty-six spark plugs, two per cylinder.
Tom leaned into the cockpit to see for himself. He didn’t doubt Wilkie’s judgment; everyone in the squadron knew that the youngster had as much flight time as a veteran. As a boy, Wilkie had soloed at sixteen after working nights in a grocery store to pay for flying lessons. Following his solo, he refused to play contact sports, only allowing himself to ski, in order to avoid injuries that could compromise his pilot’s physical exam.
As he scanned the instruments, Tom kept his goggles lowered because the planes’ prop blasts sometimes flung wooden deck slivers through the air. With Tom watching, Wilkie turned a knob to test the current.
Tom turned to Wilkie. “Yup, RPMs are low!” he shouted. Wilkie’s face sank with dismay. He’d called for Tom, the assistant maintenance officer, for a reason. If he told a mechanic about the problem, he’d be forced to shut down the engine and sit out the mission. That wouldn’t help his case with the skipper, who already disliked the new guys.
Several deckhands huddled behind the wing of Wilkie’s plane, trying to surmise what Tom was doing up there.
“A spark plug’s probably fouled with carbon buildup!” Tom shouted to Wilkie. He told the young pilot to rev up the engine and then thin back the fuel mixture, to allow less fuel and more oxygen into the cylinders. This would make the cylinders burn hotter, which could burn away any carbon on the spark plugs.
“Don’t touch the throttle, just let it cook!” Tom added. He slapped Wilkie on the shoulder and climbed down to the deck. Tom wound his way to the tower, turned, and watched.
The yellow tips of Wilkie’s propeller spun faster as he revved the engine to a higher power setting. Only the top of the young pilot’s helmet showed as he studied his instruments. Tom glanced at his watch as the minutes slipped past.
“Clear the deck for launch!” the loudspeaker sounded.
Wilkie’s head suddenly lifted in the cockpit. He looked over to Tom and flashed a thumbs-up, followed by a wave. All thirty-six plugs were firing correctly. Tom returned the wave, entered the tower, and shut the steel door with relief.
—
“Plane recovery in progress!”
Three hours after takeoff, the loudspeaker blared throughout the hangar deck as Tom performed his maintenance duties. Amid a row of parked planes, he lowered his clipboard and glanced at his watch. It was nearly 9:30 A.M. They’re back, he thought.
The loudspeaker blared again: “Repair 8 to the flight deck!” Tom set down his clipboard. Something was wrong if the crash crew was being called in. Mechanics began moving in small groups toward the rear of the deck. Tom asked one of the sailors what had happened.
“A damaged Corsair is coming down, sir,” the sailor said. “Number three elevator.” The sailor hurried away, eager to see the first battle-damaged plane.
Tom followed the exodus through the string of hangars, his eyes wide with alarm. His friends were on that flight—Jesse and Koenig, and the new guy, Wilkie. At the rear of the deck Tom joined the sailors in glancing anxiously at a square platform in the ceiling. The contraption was the plane elevator, a means of delivering aircraft to and from the flight deck. Chains clinked and the elevator began descending. Sunlight poured in and water showered from the elevator. A Corsair sat at the platform’s center, dripping wet. Tom studied the sky through the opening in the flight deck. There wasn’t a rain cloud in sight. Tom glanced back to the dripping plane. What the heck?
The elevator settled into the floor and the men crowded closer. “Good grief,” Tom murmured. Black holes spanned the Corsair’s left wing and deep dents marked the engine cover, as if fists had punched the plane. The large white number 203 on the nose was pitted and scraped. Corsair 203 didn’t belong to one pilot or another; everyone alternated planes.
Tom ducked under the nose to check the other wing. It was also full of holes. He began a mental checklist. We’re gonna need two new wings. Tom shook his head. It was awful soon to be dipping into the spare parts. As he ran his hand along the punctures in the wing, his eyes narrowed.
A gooey brown substance bled from the holes. Tom swiped a finger and examined it. “It’s mud, all right,” he announced. The deckhands murmured, unsure how mud could wind up in an airplane.
The bullhorn interrupted their thoughts. “Now hear this!” a sailor’s voice bellowed. “Now hear this! A message from the skipper of Fighting 32.” This was the new routine—after each combat mission, the flight leader would report the results to the ship’s crew.
A pause followed as the microphone changed hands. “This is Lieutenant Commander D. T. Neill, skipper of Fighting 32,” the gruff voice announced.
The skipper explained that he had led ’32’s patrol over Wonsan Harbor that morning. “We had good hunting, although pickings were slim,” he said. “We knocked out some shore batteries and trucks on some islands.”
Tom nodded to himself. The mission was important. The 1st Marine Division was due to land at Wonsan Harbor to open a new front on Korea’s east coast, as they had in the west. But until the navy softened up the harbor’s defenses, the Marines weren’t going anywhere.
“Overall, we encountered little resistance,” the skipper added. “Just one p
lane banged up and no one hurt—a mighty good start.”
Now Tom was really curious. He had seen the damaged plane and wondered: Who took the first lumps?
—
The film projector’s beam cut through the darkness and onto the blank screen in front of Tom and his squadron mates. Shadows crossed the screen as other officers took their seats, hands laden with coffee or soda. Zippos flickered and cigarettes glowed.
In the rear of the dining room, sailors loaded film onto a projector’s reels. The dining room had been transformed into a theater and Fighting 32’s ready room had been dismantled, the curtains parted, the tables wheeled aside to make room for the ship’s officers, both pilots and sailors. Thirty-two’s ready room held one advantage come time for the nightly movie: The squadron always got the best seats. Now the pilots filled up the first two rows and Tom sat with Jesse and Koenig. In the hangar deck, enlisted sailors would be watching a film of their own.
The projector’s wheels began turning, the beam of light flickered, and voices hushed. Every few days, a helicopter landed aboard the Leyte to circulate the latest movies.*2 An intelligence officer snapped to his feet. “Gentlemen, we have a treat for you tonight,” he announced. “You’re about to see a smattering of gun camera film from today’s missions, courtesy of Fightin’ 31, Fightin’ 32, and Fightin’ 33!” Exaggerated whistles and clapping arose from the audience; Tom leaned forward in his seat.
The screen filled with life. In blotchy color, the gun camera flew low over a stretch of rugged seaside hills. The camera filmed ahead, unobstructed, from behind a panel of glass in the plane’s right wing. The men were seeing an island in Wonsan Harbor, from treetop height.
The footage showed one strafing attack after another against coastal pillboxes, a warehouse, a sampan—anything of military value. The screen flickered with each new splice of film, each shot from a different plane. The audience clapped and hooted, and some jokesters imitated explosion sounds.
A fresh clip appeared from a new camera angle. Rough waves flowed toward the viewer as the pilot raced for a concrete watchtower on a beach. Marty’s wingman elbowed him. The film belonged to one of them—they had struck the same target.
The camera shook as the plane’s guns fired. Orange bolts arced toward the tower and sparks flickered up and down the concrete structure. The audience cheered. Just before the plane could collide with the tower, the camera lifted and filmed the blue sky as the pilot climbed over the target.
A grin stretched across Marty’s face. Despite the strikes on the watchtower, somehow, the enemy there had fired back. Marty whispered to his wingman, “Remember when you asked Dad, ‘What are all those flashes?’ ” The wingman nodded. “ ‘Why, someone’s shooting at you,’ ” Marty said, imitating Dad’s deadpan reply.
The screen flickered again, and the island appeared from a bird’s-eye view, looking down. The camera dived toward a cave on a rocky promontory. The barrel of an enemy cannon took shape where it jutted from the cave. Koenig’s youthful face lifted with life. “Jesse, it’s your cave!” he said. Jesse’s eyes perked at the sight of his film.
Of the targets that day, the enemy’s artillery was at the top of the aviators’ list. The enemy would roll the cannons from the caves, snap off some shots at American vessels, then roll the cannons back inside and disappear. Until the artillery was knocked out, the Marines couldn’t land.
As Jesse’s plane dived closer, the island stretched in the film’s frame. The cave’s mouth grew wider and enemy soldiers appeared, scurrying like ants. In a yellow flash, a long narrow rocket streaked from Jesse’s wing. The weapon trailed black smoke and flew unguided toward the cave like a bottle rocket.
As the rocket neared the cave’s mouth, the audience leaned forward to see the impact. The camera suddenly flicked upward and filmed the sky as the pilot climbed away. The audience groaned. They wanted to see the explosion.
“Did you hit it?” a pilot called out. “Any secondaries?”
Before Jesse could reply, his defender spoke up. “He sure did!” Koenig said. “Right in the kisser!” Koenig told the men around him how flames had leapt from the cave and smoke had poured out the holes in the roof. Jesse just shrugged and smiled. Several seats over, Dad nodded with approval—Jesse’s technique had been sound; a pilot was supposed to pass at least eight hundred feet over his target to avoid being hit by shrapnel or debris. The skipper didn’t even smile or turn to congratulate Jesse. A naval aviator was supposed to hit the target.*3
The screen flickered again and a small black truck appeared on a gravel road. The truck was likely a Ford or Chevy given to the Soviets during WWII and later resold by them to the North Koreans. Scrubby trees obscured the truck as it motored between the stands. The pilot was attacking so low he nearly skimmed the earth.
“It’s Koenig!” a pilot whispered.
Koenig swept his hand nervously over his brush cut.
This one’s gonna be a doozy! Tom thought.
The truck rolled into a clearing and the audience braced for the machine guns’ golden sparks—the pilot was clearly too low for rockets. The camera raced closer and the truck grew larger. “Fire, Bill!” a pilot joked. “Fire!”
Tom grinned and saw Koenig’s eyes locked on the screen. The camera raced so close that fabric could be seen rustling over the truck’s bed.
In a yellow flash, a rocket shot through the camera frame, toward the truck. The audience gasped. An orange fireball burst and filled the screen. Tom shot back in his seat. Mud and pieces of truck were flung skyward and seemed to hang there as the camera punched through the debris cloud. Darkness momentarily filled the lens. When the plane emerged and light returned to the picture, a dark crack ran through the camera lens, and mud slid down over the picture.
The audience roared with laughter. Koenig sheepishly covered his head with his hands as his buddies shook him.
“And that, my friends, is how you waste a $75,000 Corsair to kill a $500 truck!” someone announced. “I’ll take that math any day!” joked another man.
Koenig turned to the hecklers and played along: “Yeah, but you don’t know what that truck was carrying!”
In the front row, Dad folded his arms. On their return to the ship, he had made Koenig land last so that he wouldn’t block the deck if his plane crashed from the damage. When Koenig did land, so much mud had covered his plane that the crash crew needed to wash down the Corsair before sending it below for repairs. He was the first to damage his plane but he wouldn’t be the last; by the deployment’s end, six more of the squadron’s Corsairs would be damaged by pilots who flew through their own shrapnel.
After the gun camera viewing, the nightly movie rolled. In the midst of the film, Jesse leaned over to Koenig and whispered, “Bill, are you going to start carrying your camera?” Koenig had bought a compact camera in Japan but no one had seen him take any photos yet.
“No,” Koenig said. “If I have to bail out or ditch I could lose it.”
“Too bad,” Jesse said, fighting a smile. “I thought it could come in handy the next time you smash the one in your wing!”
Koenig rolled his eyes.
Through the light that spilled from the projector’s beam, Tom saw his buddies: some hazing one another, some fixated on the big screen. He had spent countless hours imagining this, their first day at war, and he had expected something scarier and bloodier. Deep down, Tom wanted to become a veteran of a “real” war, one that mattered, like World War II.
A thought crossed his mind, followed by a pang of guilt.
This is it?
* * *
*1 The CIA assured the secretary of state that the Soviets would hold the Chinese back from intervention. An October 1950 CIA report read: “While full-scale Chinese Communist intervention in Korea must be regarded as a continuing possibility…barring a Soviet decision for global war, such action is not probable in 1950.” When reporters asked the secretary of state if the Chinese would enter the war, he declared t
hat it would be “sheer madness.”
*2 When Father of the Bride played, starring the ship’s darling, Elizabeth Taylor, all viewings were standing room only.
*3 The following day, October 11, the skipper would experience engine trouble and make an emergency landing at the newly secured Wonsan airfield. A South Korean general presented him with captured North Korean and Soviet battle flags, which he brought back to the Leyte as souvenirs.
CHAPTER 25
TRUST
Nine days later, October 19, 1950
Near Songjin, North Korea
AT FIRST THE VALLEY was gentle and calm.
The dawn’s warm light spread across the trees that covered the mountains, revealing leaves ablaze in autumn yellows, reds, and browns. Shadows clung to the mountains’ furrows and mist floated through the peaks. The sea was close, just a few ridges beyond.
From the south came a sound, soft like the buzz of a mosquito but lower in pitch. Then the sound grew louder.
A dirt road ran along the valley floor and connected small farms and fields. On the road, a young Korean boy and his sister pulled their goats by the reins. The children stopped when they heard the sound and turned in its direction.
Farther up the road, an elderly farmer repaired a fence in his field. He heard the sound, lowered his tool, and looked to the south. The sound was still growing, though the morning sky remained empty.
Still farther up the road, several middle-aged women carried baskets across a stone bridge. They also paused and turned south. The sound was clear now, a roaring, throaty buzz.
At the opening to the valley, they appeared—eight Corsairs silhouetted against the morning sky. The planes flew low, hugging the road, lower than the telephone poles. Their propellers whirled and a bomb hung from each plane’s belly.