by Adam Makos
The black Marine turned to one of his white buddies, who was still grinning and shaking his head in wonder.
“You saw him too?” the black Marine asked.
“See who?”
“That Negro pilot!”
“Really?” the white Marine replied. “I didn’t know we had Negro pilots.”
“I guess we do now.” The black Marine smiled.
In a jeep ahead, the FAC rode in the passenger’s seat and his radioman sat behind him. The FAC raised the radio handset as the Corsairs raced toward the reservoir.
“Well done, Iroquois flight,” he radioed. “If we ever meet, I owe you fellas a beer!”
Farther down the road, the pilot of the last Corsair wagged his wings.
CHAPTER 37
INTO HELL TOGETHER
That night, December 3, 1950
Aboard the USS Leyte
CHRISTMAS MUSIC WAS PIPING throughout the cabin, a steward was dropping ice into glasses, and the flight surgeon was bringing the brandy—but Tom and the others were too tired to celebrate.
In clusters, he and a dozen squadron mates waited around a long table where the steward prepared the glasses. Tom puffed a pipe, and Jesse and Cevoli conversed somberly at his side. Their arms were folded, their voices hushed.
Tom’s eyes admired his surroundings. This was the Flag Office, the admiral’s dining room when he visited. The walls were pale green, the chairs white and fancy. A framed Pacific map hung on the wall. At the rear of the cabin, blackout shades covered portholes. Outside, the wind howled in the darkness, thick with flurries.
The Leyte’s captain had opened the cabin as a reward, a place for the pilots to enjoy a drink, and each squadron was given a turn to relax—or at least to try to.
“I just can’t get it out of my mind,” Jesse said. “That one guy running, all covered in fire. After everything, he bothers me the most.”
Tom took a puff on his pipe. “The problem is you can’t see the guys you saved today, like you can see that guy on fire.”
Jesse nodded reluctantly.
“That’s not the only problem with napalm,” Cevoli said, lowering his glass. “From here on out, you’d better not get shot down.”
Jesse’s face sank, and Tom fiddled with his pipe. They knew what Cevoli was saying—a pilot couldn’t drop napalm on the enemy and expect anything less than torture if he was captured. Rumor had it that helicopter pilots at the Chosin were now dressing like ground Marines so that if they were shot down they could deny that they were pilots.
Farther down the table, Dad Fowler and Wilkie burned through cigarette after cigarette, still rattled by the day’s events. They had hit the Chosin, too, and returned to find a harrowing 57 mph wind racing over the flight deck. Wilkie surprised everyone by landing on his first try, when all the others, Dad included, missed and had to go around again.
And that wasn’t all.
Dad rested a tired hand on Wilkie’s shoulder. “Next time we drop napalm,” he announced, “Wilkie’s dropping first. He’s our new napalm man.”
The others nodded with approval. The flight had hit Chinese troops threatening the Hagaru base and Wilkie had laid his napalm the smoothest of everyone.
“Gee, thanks,” Wilkie said and took a drag. “I hope I got lots of foxholes.”
Dad grinned like a proud parent. Wilkie was becoming a professional before his eyes.
The familiar clinking of glass bottles sounded as the flight surgeon pushed his steel cart into the cabin. He walked from man to man and handed each a tiny bottle of brandy. Tom was too tired to pretend he wanted a scotch. Wilkie didn’t ask for a gin and tonic. No one pestered the man for a rum and Coke. They just uncapped their brandies and dumped the contents into the glasses.
Credit 37.1
Wally Madden
Jesse passed his bottle to Cevoli as usual. Tom and the others yawned as the stress of the day hit them. In another cluster, Marty slowly sipped the brown elixir. He had spotted the Fusen Reservoir that morning, he had dived through the clouds to confirm its identity, and he had led everyone to Chosin. But he brushed it all off as another day’s work.
Cevoli’s eyes lifted and he snapped ramrod tall. “Attention, CAG on deck,” he blurted. Tom and the others set aside their drinks and turned toward the doorway.
A short thirty-five-year-old man with a round face and bushy black eyebrows entered. He was Commander Wally Madden, the air group C.O., who had led the aerial armada that morning.
“Relax, relax,” Madden said calmly. “This will just take a sec.” Madden was a WWII veteran and one of the few pilots on the Leyte who could fly as well as Dad. On the way to Korea, he had checked himself out on a Corsair by simply reading the manual.
“I just dropped by the CIC,” Madden announced. “And thought you should hear this.”
Tom and Jesse glanced at one another. The CIC was the Combat Information Center in the tower, where messages came in.
“The lead elements of the Marine column just rolled into Hagaru,” Madden continued.
A collective sigh rose throughout the cabin. Tom and Cevoli grinned and even Jesse relaxed a little. That night, Dad Fowler would write to his mother: “Mark my words, history will show this to be the Marines’ finest hour.”
Madden raised a hand to silence the men. “Don’t get too excited,” he said. “Most of our guys are still out in the wild, so no letting off the gas now.”
Tom nodded in agreement.
With a wave of his hand, Madden exited.
An outburst of conversation and backslapping followed. Normally, Cevoli would have been the first to call in the flight surgeon and cajole the man into another round of brandies. But not tonight. He stepped front and center. “Okay, fellas, let’s wrap things up,” Cevoli pronounced. “Tomorrow’s gonna be a big one.”
The pilots nodded. Nearly everyone was scheduled to fly. Tom slugged down his brandy and the others ground out their cigarettes in ashtrays. The pilots filed from the room as if they were ready to fly right now, in the dark.
In the hallway, Tom looked, but Jesse was already gone.
—
A little after midnight, under the light of a lone desk lamp, Jesse’s pen swirled across the page. As he wrote a letter, his eyes fixed passionately on each word.
In the dark, Koenig lay in the lower bunk, under the sheets. The ship’s hum coursed through the metal walls. Now and then Koenig checked his watch. Both he and Jesse were slated to fly the next day and needed eight hours of sleep, or else they’d be removed from the roster. There were plenty of hours of darkness remaining, but Koenig wasn’t one to gamble.
Jesse slid aside a page after filling it with neat, upright cursive. He started writing a second. The incomplete drawing of his dream house was propped against the rear of the desk, yet he stayed focused on his letter. Koenig heard Jesse sniffling. He caught a glimpse of his roommate wiping his nose with his sleeve. Koenig closed his eyes and pretended not to notice.
Jesse gripped the pen tightly and wrote a third page, then a fourth. Finally, he set the pen to his desk and slid whatever he had written into an envelope.
The desk lamp snapped off and Koenig heard Jesse’s footsteps in the darkness. Jesse climbed quietly to his bunk, careful not to rouse his roommate. But Koenig was still awake. Above him, a flashlight clicked on. Koenig saw a glowing light on the ceiling and knew that Jesse was reading his nightly Bible passages. He had stopped sniffling, too.
Some time passed, maybe thirty minutes, maybe more. Koenig stared at the ceiling and waited.
Finally, the flashlight clicked off and the room became dark.
Jesse was ready.
The following day, December 4, around 1:45 P.M.
An envelope sat in a wire basket on a table in the ready room. The basket was labeled OUTGOING MAIL, and the envelope was addressed to “Mrs. Daisy Brown.”
Outside on the flight deck, Corsair 211 rolled slowly forward from the pack of planes. Its propeller whirled, i
ts nose angled skyward. Inside the cockpit, Jesse gently pushed the throttle with his left hand, where his Rolex lined his wrist. The plane’s nose blocked Jesse’s forward view and, like blinders on a racehorse, its folded wings blocked any side view.
Jesse leaned outside the cockpit and the prop blast buffeted his goggles and helmet. To the right of the propeller, a yellow-shirted deckhand backpedaled and pumped his arms: Forward! Jesse let the Corsair creep until the yellow-shirt held both hands high: Halt! Jesse stepped on the brakes and the Corsair squealed to a stop almost beside the tower.
Behind Jesse, Tom waited in Corsair 205. The two had been paired again after one of the ship’s “paddles,” a senior pilot named Hudson, had complained that he was always on the platform and never flying. So Cevoli took Hudson as his wingman, assigned Tom to Jesse’s wing, and bumped Koenig back to lead an ensign named McQueen.
Beside Jesse’s propeller, the yellow-shirt wrapped his arms over his shoulders, then fanned his arms wide: Spread wings!
Jesse lowered a lever and the wings unfolded like drawbridges. As the right wing lowered, the blue sky appeared, then the top of the ship’s tower, a clothesline of antennas, a billowing smokestack, then a flapping American flag.
As the wing settled fully, an incredible sight greeted Jesse. Up and down the tower, sailors and aviators crowded every deck, their arms draped over railings. Boyish awe filled their faces.
Marty, Wilkie, and other pilots watched from Vulture’s Row, and Jesse’s fan club crowded every other deck. The stewards had come out, as had cooks, mechanics, even snipes from the engine room. At the foot of the tower, the deckhands and the crash crew gazed up at the pilot in his cockpit. Everyone knew where the flyboys were headed and more men than ever had come out to show their support.
Now they could see that the next pilot was about to launch.
From behind Jesse, Tom saw it. On the tower, a man outstretched his arm and flashed a V-for-victory sign. Another man raised his fingers in a V. Then another, and another, until men on every deck were flashing Vs to Jesse Brown.
Tom thought the sign had died out after WWII and he’d never imagined that it would return during the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir. But it did.
Jesse looked up and extended a thumbs-up to the men on the tower. He turned back to his instruments.
It was time to go.
—
The ten Corsairs flew two by two over the wintery valley. Slants of sun cracked the dark clouds overhead and warmed the snowy hills in patches. From the perch of his Corsair, Tom leaned in his seat to scan the terrain five thousand feet below. Everyone knew that the Chinese occupied the hills leading up to the Chosin, yet from the air, the valley appeared cold and lifeless.
The hour-long flight had passed in silence. Ahead of Tom, the Corsairs of Cevoli and his wingman bobbed in the rough air. Beside him, Jesse flew tight-lipped. As the flight motored farther, the radio began buzzing with chatter. Tom could hear the excited voices of pilots from other squadrons—they sounded as if they were nearby. Jesse caught Tom’s attention with a wave and pointed forward.
At the end of the valley, Tom saw it materialize—a sea of green tent peaks bristling the snow and countless wisps of rising smoke. A tiny village lay to the right and earthen defensive lines ringed it all.
The sight reminded Tom of a painting from a history textbook, of a Roman legion camp on the snowy fringes of Gaul. But this wasn’t Gaul. To the left of the tents lay a dirt runway and behind the scene stretched an icy reservoir.
They’d reached the American base at Hagaru.
—
“This is Iroquois Flight 13,” Cevoli radioed the base. “We’re ten F4Us, checking in.”
“Welcome back, Iroquois flight,” the base dispatcher’s voice crackled.
Cevoli relayed his flight’s armament and fuel status. The dispatcher said he’d check and see if any targets were available. Tom’s face scrunched: A target shortage? It made no sense, not when a hundred thousand Chinese were reportedly ringing the base. But as the flight came closer, Tom could see why targets were in short supply.
Beyond the base, countless blue aircraft orbited over the reservoir and the hills to the east. Like gnats, they circled in various levels. They were navy Corsairs, Marine Corsairs, and Skyraiders, too.
“So, we’ve got a decent aerial umbrella stacked up,” the dispatcher clarified when he returned to the radio. “But we can use some road recon.”
He described a stretch of road for the flight to patrol where ten thousand Chinese troops had been spotted that morning, moving toward Hagaru. Tom glanced at his kneeboard map. The course would take them up the MSR to Yudam-ni and then deeper into the wild. They’d be in enemy territory all the way. Tom reached and flicked his gunsight to life. Someone had to do it.
—
Cevoli banked left and steered the flight around Hagaru to avoid any planes taking off.
Beyond his right wing, Tom saw the airstrip on the fringe of the base. Silver C-47s idled on the dirt runway while lines of men poured from the transports. Replacements were coming in from bases in Japan, another platoon or so of the five hundred Marines who had volunteered to be airlifted in. Beside the planes, clusters of wounded men waited to be airlifted out. By the battle’s end, more than four thousand men would leave Hagaru that way.
Cevoli leveled his wings toward the hills west of the base to begin the patrol. “There they are, boys!” he announced. “One o’clock!”
Tom edged forward in his seat for a glimpse. A dark line of vehicles and men snaked down from the snowy hills and inched into the base. Tom’s eyes lifted.
The last of the Lost Legion were returning.
Once these Marines trickled in, the base’s garrison would stand a fighting chance. Already, the two-thousand-man garrison had been joined by a relief force of four hundred Marines, soldiers, and British Commandos who had fought their way up from the south. Then a thousand survivors of the army’s task force had limped in from across the ice. And now came the last of nine thousand Marines from Yudam-ni. Within the hour, the Marine air wing commander at Hagaru would radio the Leyte and Philippine Sea to say: “[I] saw the 5th and 7th Marines return. They thank God for air. I don’t think they could have made it as units without air support….Tell your pilots they are doing a magnificent job.”
From his cockpit, Jesse glanced over at Tom. A smile stretched across Jesse’s face. Tom nodded. They could both see the column of Marines snaking down from the hills, and they both knew it.
There was hope.
Ten minutes later
Against a backdrop of gray clouds, the two blue Corsairs dived toward the snowy mountains. Tom glanced at Jesse as their planes plummeted side by side. Jesse’s helmeted head scanned back and forth, his eyes searching for a place to crash. He was going down, seventeen miles northwest of Hagaru, deep inside enemy territory.
None of the pilots had heard the gunshots over their engines. None had seen the weapons rise or fall from the snowy field. But now a vapor trail slipped from the belly of Jesse’s Corsair: a bullet had punctured the oil line. With every passing second, the oil was bleeding, the friction was rising, and the plane’s eighteen pistons were melting inside the engine.
High above, Cevoli leveled off the flight so he and the others could lend eyeballs to the search. Tom scanned the terrain beyond each wing. Rugged mountains stretched as far as the eye could see. The mountains bristled with woods and dipped into dark gorges. Patches of sun camouflaged the terrain, distorting its contours.
“Jesse, check your ten, might be a spot!” Cevoli announced.
Jesse glanced to his left. Tom saw it, almost level with his wing, a few miles north. A high, flat pasture lay atop one of the mountains. He could see down its full length. A mountain peak blocked the far end of the pasture and other peaks rose up to the left and right. But the near side lay open—an entrance.
“I’m taking departure,” Jesse radioed Tom. His Corsair broke leftward and he steere
d for the high pasture. Tom peeled after him. Following a short chase, he resumed his place beside Jesse’s wing.
“Let’s run through the checklist,” Tom said, trying to sound confident.
Jesse looked over, surprised to see Tom.
“Okay, Tom—go,” Jesse replied.
“Jettison napalm. Belly tank. Salvo rockets.”
The white napalm egg tumbled from Jesse’s plane, followed by a spare fuel tank. A few seconds later, rockets launched from Jesse’s wings and arced to earth.
“Flaps down!” Tom said.
Flaps dropped from Jesse’s wings.
“Fuel pressure dump!”
Inside his cockpit, Jesse stepped on a pedal by his right foot and cleared the explosive gasoline vapors from the main fuel tank. “Check,” Jesse said.
Tom glanced ahead. The pasture appeared to be about three hundred yards deep and as level a runway as they were going to get. But as they neared, Tom’s eyes widened with alarm. The pasture was anything but smooth—small trees and boulders jutted from the snow. Jesse saw them too and steered toward the left side of the pasture where the land sloped uphill. The snow there looked white and flat.
“Canopy back and locked!” Tom continued.
Jesse’s canopy slid backward and he lowered his goggles over his eyes.
How is he staying so calm? Tom wondered. He remembered Jesse as the same pilot who had incessantly read the Corsair manual back at Quonset Point. And it was Jesse who told one of the cockpit instructors, “I think that Corsair will kill me. I just have that feeling.”
From above, Cevoli and the others watched the two black-blue fighters descend, side by side, into the pasture.
“150!…140!…130!” Tom called out their speed so that Jesse could keep his eyes on the pasture. As the Corsairs went lower, the pasture stretched around them and the trees and rocks became taller.
The propeller blades on Jesse’s plane began to slow and show themselves until the four flat blades windmilled. His wings rocked—the plane was sinking. Jesse aimed for the slope and struggled to glide with a melted engine.