A Dawn Like Thunder

by Robert J. Mrazek

  After a brief search, Pete Peterkin found the place where his and Swede’s tent had stood. Some of the spare parts for the Avengers he had kept in it were still there, but they were scattered all over the ground. His personal belongings had disappeared. The only thing he decided to keep as a souvenir was a six-inch-long piece of shrapnel that had impaled his pillow and pinned it to the ground.

  Bert Earnest and Jack Barnum’s tent was gone, too, although Bert found his small, green carry-on bag. His Japanese sword had been lying under his cot, and it was still there in the black soil, partially buried. Otherwise, the only item he recovered from his personal effects was a shredded page from a letter he had been writing to Jerry Jenkins at Smith College.

  “It’s really not so bad here, darling” was one of the few legible lines.

  Fred Mears found his tent intact, although punctured with dozens of splinter holes. He took the time to exchange his pajamas for shredded khakis. Outside his tent opening, he found the butt plate of a Japanese cannon shell. It was fourteen inches in diameter. He could have eaten a prime rib dinner on it, with room for mashed potatoes and Yorkshire pudding.

  Ski Kowalewski’s tent was also relatively undamaged. Inside his seabag was the small pocket Bible he always carried. It was embedded with several pieces of shrapnel.

  Judge Wendt had had hundreds of dollars stashed in the bottom of a bag in his tent. Unfortunately, the tent was gone, along with the bag. The only thing he found was a small scrap of a twenty-dollar bill.

  After they had surveyed the damage, Chief J. C. Hammond and Pete Peterkin went down to the airfield to take a look at their airplanes. The first Avenger they came to was totally destroyed, nothing more than a fuselage without wings.

  As he was looking at the metal shrapnel from the big round that had smashed the plane to pieces, Pete noticed something unusual. Several rounds had been been made up of iron radiator caps, some of them clearly identified with the markings of their American manufacturer. It was the end product of the United States having sold so much scrap iron to Japan before the war.

  The remaining five Avengers were riddled with steel splinters that had severed hydraulic lines, electrical circuits, and control wires. Several of the wing sections were damaged beyond repair.

  Swede’s quest for vengeance was clearly going to be delayed for a while. After examining the planes, Chief Hammond didn’t believe any of them could be made to fly again.

  As far as the rest of the Cactus Air Force, its striking capacity was reduced to almost nothing. There had been thirty-nine Dauntless dive-bombers in the dispersal areas around the field before the shelling. Only seven could still fly. With the Avengers gone, those seven dive-bombers were all that was left to attack the Japanese warships or bomb the enemy’s rapidly expanding ground positions on Guadalcanal.

  Forty-one men in the vicinity of the airfield had been killed, with many more wounded. Vandegrift’s main radio communications center had been demolished. The Pagoda was half-destroyed, and was soon bulldozed. Almost all of the aviation fuel not already destroyed in the earlier bombing raids had gone up in flames, along with most of the ammunition depots.

  General Vandegrift radioed that it was “absolutely essential avi-ation gas flown here.” There was no time to wait for its delivery by ship. The fate of the Americans at Guadalcanal hung in the balance.

  The only good news in the wake of the shelling attack was that twenty-four of the forty-two fighter aircraft at Henderson Field had survived. Once their stocks of aviation gas were replenished, they would be able to continue the aerial fight against incoming Japanese fighters and bombers.

  Shortly after midday, a wave of forty-four Japanese fighters and bombers came over to bomb the field. They were unmolested by the American fighters, and dropped their payloads on several dozen aircraft, although most of them were already wrecks. An hour later, a second wave of attackers came over to hit whatever was left standing. This time, a handful of fighters went up to meet them, shooting down four of the bombers.

  Later that afternoon, Swede brought all of the pilots, crews, and support personnel in Torpedo Eight together at the airfield. He told them that the Japanese ground campaign was probably going to begin any time now, and that a naval invasion force might arrive that same night.

  They had no planes left to fight the enemy in the air, he said. In the days ahead, many of the men in the squadron would probably be sent back to Espiritu Santo. He wasn’t sure when that would happen because the transports were taking out the wounded first.

  Swede told them he planned to stay behind with a complement of officers and men in the hope that they might soon get replacement aircraft. In the meantime, every man in the squadron would be issued a helmet, a Springfield rifle, and plenty of ammunition.

  He would now lead the squadron up into the hills, he said, and offer their services to the Marines on the front lines. If worse came to worst, and the Japanese took the airfield, maybe they could escape by boat from the other side of the island.

  Taking along whatever they still had, the men began walking toward the ridges south of Henderson Field. As he plodded along with the others, Fred Mears came to the conclusion that the whole thing was pretty hopeless. If the war depended on how well he could aim and fire a Springfield rifle, they were in a lot of trouble.

  They were about five hundred yards from the outer line of the Marine defense perimeter when Pete Peterkin saw a Marine officer coming toward them carrying a Thompson submachine gun. The Marine asked who they were and where they were going.

  Swede explained their situation and said they were hoping to dig in with the Marines somewhere along the line. The officer told them he would be delighted to have them bivouac with his company along the ridge. Within an hour, the enlisted men were constructing canvas-roofed shelters inside the perimeter of his camp. Several tents were erected for Swede and his officers next to the Marine officers’ own command tent.

  That evening at supper, they learned that their host was thirty-six-year-old Major Michael McGinnis Mahoney, a Marine who had served eighteen years in the Corps, rising in rank from private to major while fighting in the jungles of Nicaragua and the Philippines.

  Now he was in command of a special weapons company in the 7th Marines, which had arrived almost a month earlier. Each night, Mahoney sent out his men in small scouting parties to patrol beyond the more lightly defended parts of the line along the Lunga River. They had succeeded in stopping several penetrations by Japanese night fighters.

  The Yale-educated Peterkin found Mahoney to be an amazing character, someone largely self-taught, who had earned his college degree taking correspondence courses. He was both passionate and knowledgeable about poetry and sculpture, among other pursuits not shared by most Marines. At the same time, his admiring men affectionately referred to him as “Machine Gun” Mahoney for his prowess with the Thompson.

  Aside from the major’s remarkable personality, Fred Mears was impressed with Mahoney’s talents in training his company cooks. The evening stew, fashioned with the same materials provided to other units, was incredibly good. Afterward, Mahoney shared his dwindling supply of cigars with them.

  When he went to bed that night, Fred’s confidence was restored. He no longer had any doubts that the Marines would hold the field, even when Japanese ships began shelling the airfield again later that night. None of the shells came remotely close to their new positions, and Fred had his first good night’s sleep in weeks.

  Out of the Ashes

  Thursday, 15 October 1942

  Guadalcanal

  Torpedo Squadron Eight

  In the fullness of dawn, six Japanese transport ships steamed into Sealark Channel and began disembarking thousands of troops within plain sight of the Marine defensive positions northwest of Henderson Field. Flying low cover over the enemy transports were dozens of carrier-based Zeroes.

  It was a brazen reflection of the Japanese certainty that the Cactus Air Force had been obliterated. They we
re close to being right. Only six Wildcat fighters could be sent up to confront the Zeroes, and that was only by scavenging fuel from damaged aircraft. One Zero was knocked down for the loss of one Wildcat.

  Up in the hills south of the airfield, Pete Peterkin started his first morning at Major Mahoney’s camp with a plate of hotcakes. They were the best he had ever tasted. After finishing his coffee in the mess tent, he got together with Chief Hammond to discuss the possibility of repairing one of the wrecked Avengers.

  The two of them hiked down to the airfield to take another look at the planes, only to discover that the Cactus air staff had written them off in a report they were preparing for General Geiger. They told Peterkin and Hammond not to waste their time.

  Hammond spent the rest of the morning crawling through the five Avengers, detailing each problem with Pete taking notes alongside him. When he was finished, Hammond said there was an outside chance he could rebuild one plane from the remains of the rest.

  As soon as they reported back to Swede at Major Mahoney’s camp, he wanted to know how long it would take them to do it. A couple of weeks, maybe, said Hammond, if he had enough men to help him. Swede told them he wanted the plane ready for him to fly by October 22, one week away.

  Two of Torpedo Eight’s air gunners, Judge Wendt and Bert Edmonds, volunteered to go out on a sniper patrol with some of the Marines in Major Mahoney’s unit. They went off carrying their new Springfield rifles, forty-five-caliber pistols, extra ammunition, and hand grenades.

  An hour into the patrol, the two fliers had fallen behind on the narrow trail when a single shot rang out ahead of them. Wendt and Edmonds scanned the dense canopy around them, but didn’t see anything. After waiting for a minute or two, they slowly went forward on the trail.

  A dead body was lying ahead of them. When they came up to it, Wendt saw that it was one of the young Marines who had been leading their patrol. Wendt had flown plenty of dangerous missions as Swede’s turret gunner, but the sight of the dead Marine terrified him.

  Firing back at a Zero that was attacking him with machine guns blazing was one thing. This was another. When the other Marines came back to pick up their dead comrade, Wendt and Edmonds went straight back to camp. It was their last patrol.

  In the afternoon, twenty-four Japanese bombers protected by a cloud of Zeroes made several runs on Henderson Field, ripping up the metal matting on the runways and damaging more planes on the ground.

  The Americans did give the Japanese one bloody nose that day. Someone remembered that there was a buried cache of fuel drums near the airfield, and the precious aviation gas was used to launch a flight of Dauntlesses. They went straight for the transport ships that had been unloading men and equipment near the defense perimeter. Although the transports had unloaded most of their cargo, the Dauntless pilots sank three of them before they could return to Rabaul.

  That night, two heavy cruisers and a destroyer squadron arrived in Sealark Channel to pound Henderson Field again. More than twelve hundred shells landed on the airfield and its support facilities. When Geiger’s staff did its daily count of available aircraft early the next morning, the Cactus Air Force could mount only nine Wildcats, eleven newly patched Dauntlesses, and seven P-39 fighters.

  Friday, 16 October 1942

  Guadalcanal

  Torpedo Squadron Eight

  The work to construct a Frankenstein Avenger began early that morning. After breakfast, Pete Peterkin and Chief Hammond led a detail of men back to Henderson Field to get started.

  Hammond selected the plane he thought had sustained the least amount of overall damage, and made an evaluation of everything that needed to be replaced or repaired. Its huge Wright engine was nothing more than twisted steel, and they would need to exchange it with a relatively undamaged engine from one of the other hulks. Of greater magnitude was the job of replacing one of its wings. The equipment needed to do both jobs had been destroyed.

  While Chief Hammond considered those problems, mechanics began cannibalizing cockpit instruments, cables, hydraulic lines, and wiring from the planes that would never fly again.

  Their work was hampered by the resumption of artillery fire from Japanese field guns to the west of the airfield. A few came uncomfortably close. At first, the men would run to a shelter whenever an incoming round whistled over. After noticing that Chief Hammond seemed oblivious to it, they tried to follow his example and keep working.

  Later that morning, Pete Peterkin took a break from the work to say good-bye to the pilots of Torpedo Eight who were returning to Espiritu Santo. Bruce Harwood, Bob Evarts, Jack Barnum, Bob Ries, and Bill Esders were all leaving. Swede had ordered Gene Hanson, Bert Earnest, Fred Mears, and Aaron Katz to stay.

  Katz was no longer the target of Swede’s barbs. Perhaps it was because of his brave decision to make a low-level attack against the Japanese warship after his engine had been hit. Whatever the reason, Swede didn’t bait him anymore.

  A group of Torpedo Eight’s enlisted personnel was also leaving that day aboard the destroyer McFarland, which had just arrived at Guadalcanal after bringing forty thousand gallons of aviation fuel to the beleaguered Cactus Air Force.

  The destroyer would be heading back to Espiritu Santo as soon as its crew transferred the aviation fuel to an oil barge that was tethered alongside. While the crew pumped the gas to the barge through a fuel hose, the men from Torpedo Eight and the other squadrons were sent aboard.

  Fourteen men were leaving from Torpedo Eight. Pete Peterkin shook hands with each one and wished him well before they boarded a Higgins boat for the ride out to the destroyer.

  Once aboard ship, Bill Magee and Bert Edmonds, the young gunner in Harwood’s crew who had accompanied Judge Wendt on the sniper patrol, found a place to sit together next to one of the iron bitts bolted to the deck. Ski Kowalewski found a place above decks next to the potato locker.

  Walking back up the beach, Pete Peterkin was thinking that the men he had just seen off were damn lucky when he heard the sound of aircraft overhead. Nine enemy dive-bombers were nosing over to make bombing runs on the McFarland.

  The McFarland’s crew had managed to transfer about half of the forty thousand gallons of gas to the barge. A crewman quickly used an ax to sever the fuel hose, and other sailors cut the lines tethering the vessels together.

  As the McFarland picked up speed, the first bombs began to fall. Magee and Edmonds were sitting shoulder to shoulder. The last thing Magee remembered was Edmonds pointing up at an approaching bomber.

  The first bomb landed directly on the oil barge, setting off an inferno and instantly cremating its crew of sailors and the Marines who were helping to transfer fuel. Another bomb fell on the fantail of the McFarland, detonating its rack of depth charges, and blowing the stern off the ship.

  The intensity of the blast caused the bow of the destroyer to leap out of the water. Near the stern, a hailstorm of steel splinters killed twenty-seven men and wounded dozens more. Ski Kowalewski was one of the fortunate ones, protected from the blast by the potato locker.

  When Bill Magee regained consciousness, he was lying on the deck of a PT boat. It was night. His chest hurt and he was hacking up blood. Someone came over to check on him, and Bill asked if he knew what had happened to his friend Edmonds.

  The sailor didn’t know, but said that they were headed for Tulagi, and maybe he would find him there. When they got to the island, Bill found out from one of the other men that Edmonds had been killed by flying shrapnel.

  Why him and not me? wondered Magee.

  Wednesday, 21 October 1942

  Guadalcanal

  Torpedo Squadron Eight

  Swede had assigned eighteen men to build his new plane, and Hammond worked them in twelve-hour shifts. With the airfield blacked out at night, canvas tarps were draped over the Avenger, allowing mechanics with lanterns to continue working inside.

  In just five days, the aircraft had been stripped of its damaged parts and put back together again wi
th pieces from other planes. Pete Peterkin had found a Japanese truck with a hoisting apparatus mounted on its rear bed. The hoist was used to remove an undamaged Wright engine from one of the Avenger hulks and swung into position for the connection to be made to the engine housing of the new creation.

  One of the plane’s wings had been smashed. After they cut away what remained of it, Pete rounded up fifty Marines to lug a replacement wing from one of the wrecks and brace it in position while Hammond’s mechanics fastened it to the wing root. The plane also needed a new tail, control wires, bomb release wiring, and a host of other components.

  When, on the afternoon of October 21, Hammond announced that he was finished, he warned Swede that he didn’t think the plane was safe to fly. Most of the instruments didn’t work. The new wing was definitely out of kilter. It hung perceptibly lower than the other one, and he didn’t have the tools to correct the problem.

  Swede looked at the homely creation as if it were a golden chariot. “Don’t worry,” he told them. “I’ll make the thing fly.” When it was fueled and ready for a test flight late that afternoon, the engine ran fine.

  After revving it to full throttle, Swede took off down the bomber strip. He climbed into the air long enough to set it down on the fighter strip at the other end of the field. Peterkin and Hammond followed him over in the Japanese truck.

  The out-of-kilter wing definitely affected its performance in the air, Swede said, but he could adjust for it. Otherwise, the plane seemed fine. He told Peterkin and Hammond to prepare it for a bombing mission the next day.

  Fred Mears had spent the day watching the aerial dogfights over the field between the Wildcats and the Zeroes. One of the encounters had been fought so low that he had to jump into a foxhole to avoid the machine gun fire.