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On Glorious Wings

Page 22

by Stephen Coonts


  As I started, empty and numbed, up to my seat, I beckoned to Clint to follow me above to the flight deck, where he could be out of the worst of the wind and could be plugged into the permanent oxygen system. He climbed up after me and went back to the radio room.

  Marrow was flying very badly. He was like a beginner, over-correcting, and jolting the controls.

  I sat down and hooked myself up and looked at my watch. It was four thirty-nine. We must be past Eupen. We were supposed to get P-47s at Eupen.

  The Body was now definitely a straggler. The last of the formation was three quarters of a mile ahead of us and six or seven hundred feet above us, in a sea-blue sky, and there were German fighters plunging into the squadrons of Forts, but for the moment they were leaving us alone. We were having some of what Marrow would have branded in the early days as his luck. They could have sent up a Fiesler Storch, a tiny single-engined scout plane like a Piper Cub, and armed it with a twelve-gauge shotgun, or maybe a slingshot, and they could have potted us with it.

  I saw no P-47s, but I thought we might as well put up a straggler’s signal just in case they were somewhere around but out of my sight, and besides, this would be something for Junior or Clint to do, and since there was a spare jackbox in the radio compartment, I called on interphone, “Haverstraw? You on there?”

  The answer came back clear as a bell. Lamb must have shot the trouble, whatever it had been. Clint was on and asked what I wanted.

  I told him there was a flare canister at the forward end of the ball-turret compartment; he should get out a green-green flare and fire it. There should be a pistol in a clip-rack next to the canister. He could fire it out of Butcher’s slot.

  “Roger,” he said, and there was that old ironical lilt in his voice; doubtless he was delighted to have something to do.

  “Wait a sec,” I said. “Do you remember what time we were supposed to get fighter support?”

  “Sixteen sixteen hours,” Clint said, “same time as course change at fifty degrees thirty-eight minutes north dash oh six degrees oh three minutes east.” That number-dogged mind of his was clicking; he could have told me the number of Jenny in Minneapolis or of Peggylou in Biloxi, if I had asked, I’m sure.

  Then Prien came on and said, “What’s green-green, Lieutenant?”

  I said, “It means, ‘My ass is dragging, friendly fighters take note.’ ”

  Next it was Bragnani; brave, bully-boy Bragnani. “We going to make it, sir?”

  There is a mimic that lives in all of us, whose job is to hide our true selves from the world by pushing masks out onto our faces and sneaking others’ gestures into our hands, and I was on the point of saying, “Listen, son, you fire your gun,” but I paused a second, over the thought that the boys in the back didn’t know what was going on, not a thing, and I said, instead. “The nose is opened up. Two and three are feathered. We’re losing altitude, about seventy-five a minute now, but we’re holding one-thirty i.a.s. . . . They got Lieutenant Brindt.” I thought I might as well tell them that.

  Then, clear and strong, almost like a vivid memory, we all heard Marrow’s voice, “Lamb? You awake? Give me a fix, kid.”

  “Yes, sir,” Butcher said.

  There was a silence, a long one, and then Marrow, “Come on, come on, come on.”

  Lamb must have been trying to get cross bearings on the radio compass.

  A floodgate of abuse broke open. That monotonous, whining voice which made you cringe. In the middle of it, on CALL, there was an unintelligible phrase in Farr’s voice. More of Marrow’s cursing. Then Farr, “Aw, f—this, I’m through with this crap.” Farr clicked out and Marrow was still going. Lamb tried to cut in with the fix, but Buzz didn’t want it any more. Marrow was flying now with really dangerous want of co-ordination—washing all over the sky, careening, flirting with death and shouting at it. That is surely what some deep part of him was doing. Not only with his own but with ours.

  Farr pushed his button and rasped, “For Christ’s sake, do something, even if it’s wrong. . . . Ah, s—! I can fly till I’m sixty. I’ll do five hundred missions. They can’t hit me no more than . . . I’m telling you, you son of a bitch, I’m no rookie. I’ll outlast every mother f—er of you. You can’t knock me off. They tried! The bastards plugged the s—out of me, but they . . . This is so dumb. I could’ve told those God-damn toidy-seat generals. . . . How dumb can you get? . . . Don’t you put a finger on me, you bastards. . . .”

  I saw Marrow, across the way, unbuckle his seat belt.

  I said, as sharply as I could, on CALL myself, “Farr!”

  He paused, and I said, “Bragnani, get that brandy away from him.”

  Marrow reached under his seat, pulled his parachute out (I remembered with a start that I had left mine below), and half stood up. As he did so the plane slowly climbed till it was on the edge of a stall. I pushed the column forward, and The Body fell off to one side and after a long, swooping plunge picked up buoyancy again.

  Marrow settled back in his seat. He seemed puzzled, undecided, old.

  I said, “I’ll fly her awhile, Buzz.”

  Marrow grabbed the wheel and tensely held it.

  “Give her to me,” I said. “Let me fly some.”

  No answer. Marrow was leaning forward toward the column.

  Prien said, “Four fighters coming in, six o’clock level.”

  I stood up in the aisle, just in back of the trapdoor, and I tapped Marrow on the shoulder, and when he turned his head I jerked my right thumb toward my seat. For what seemed to me a long time nothing happened, then slowly Marrow unplugged his suit-heater cord and his headset jack, and he put his hands on the sides of his seat, pushed himself up, slid out from under his wheel, straightened up in the aisle, and then in the over-cautious way of a senile man sat down in my place. I moved into the pilot’s seat, and that was all there was to it.

  THE MILK RUN

  FROM TALES OF

  THE SOUTH

  PACIFIC

  by JAMES A. MICHENER

  Tales of the South Pacific is a cultural icon of the generation that fought World War II. First published in 1946, it was Michener’s first novel and launched a literary career that made him one of the most widely read, popular writers on earth for the next four decades.

  The book is a huge, sprawling collection of loosely-related short stories set in the South Pacific during the first two years of World War II. There is no conventional plot and zero suspense. Some of the stories are related in the first person, some in third; sometimes the storyteller is omniscient, sometimes not. All that said, the book is extraordinary, a triumphant tour de force by a literary genius.

  One of the short stories contained in the book, the romance of nurse Nellie Forbush from Arkansas and French planter Emile De Becque, was the basis for the fabulously successful Rogers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific, which in turn became a hit movie.

  Over the years, millions of people who were enchanted by the musical and movie never read the novel, which was their loss. Easily Michener’s best work, Tales of the South Pacific is also one of the best American novels ever written, a literary masterpiece on par with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Old Man and the Sea.

  The excerpt that follows is a flying story entitled “The Milk Run” and it is vintage Michener, which is as good as literature gets.

  It must make somebody feel good. I guess that’s why they do it.—The speaker was Lieut. Bus Adams, SBD pilot. He was nursing a bottle of whiskey in the Hotel De Gink on Guadal. He was sitting on an improvised chair and had his feet cocked up on a coconut stump the pilots used for a foot rest. He was handsome, blond, cocky. He came from nowhere in particular and wasn’t sure where he would settle when the war was over. He was just another hot pilot shooting off between missions.

  But why they do it—Bus went on—I don’t rightfully know. I once figured it out this way: Say tomorrow we start to work over a new island, well, like Kuralei. Some da
y we will. On the first mission long-range bombers go over. Sixty-seven Japs come up to meet you. You lose four, maybe the bombers. Everybody is damn gloomy, I can tell you. But you also knock down some Nips.

  Four days later you send over your next bombers. Again you take a pasting. “The suicide run!” the pilots call it. It’s sure death! But you keep on knocking down Nips. Down they go, burning like the Fourth of July. And all this time you’re pocking up their strips, plenty.

  Finally the day comes when you send over twenty-seven bombers and they all come back. Four Zekes rise to get at you, but they are shot to hell. You bomb the strip and the installations until you are dizzy from flying in circles over the place. The next eight missions are without incident. You just plow in, drop your stuff, and sail on home.

  Right then somebody names that mission, “The Milk Run!” And everybody feels pretty good about it. They even tell you about your assignments in an offhand manner: “Eighteen or twenty of you go over tomorrow and pepper Kuralei.” They don’t even brief you on it, and before long there’s a gang around take-off time wanting to know if they can sort of hitchhike a ride. They’d like to see Kuralei get it. So first thing you know, it’s a real milk run, and you’re in the tourist business!

  Of course, I don’t know who ever thought up that name for such missions. The Milk Run? Well, maybe it is like a milk run. For example, you fill up a milk truck with TNT and some special detonating caps that go off if anybody sneezes real loud. You tank up the truck with 120 octane gasoline that burns Pouf! Then instead of a steering wheel, you have three wheels, one for going sideways and one for up and down. You carry eight tons of your special milk when you know you should carry only five. At intersections other milk trucks like yours barge out at you, and you’ve got to watch them every minute. When you try to deliver this precious milk, little kids are all around you with .22’s, popping at you. If one of the slugs gets you, bang! There you go, milk and all! And if you add to that the fact that you aren’t really driving over land at all, but over the ocean, where if the slightest thing goes wrong, you take a drink . . . Well, maybe that’s a milk run, but if it is, cows are sure raising hell these days!

  Now get this right, I’m not bitching. Not at all. I’m damned glad to be the guy that draws the milk runs. Because in comparison with a real mission, jaunts like that really are milk runs. But if you get bumped off on one of them, why you’re just as dead as if you were over Tokyo in a kite. It wasn’t no milk run for you. Not that day.

  You take my trip up to Munda two days ago. Now there was a real milk run. Our boys had worked that strip over until it looked like a guy with chicken pox, beriberi and the galloping jumps. Sixteen SBD’s went up to hammer it again. Guess we must be about to land somewhere near there. Four of us stopped off to work over the Jap guns at Segi Point. We strafed them plenty. Then we went on to Munda.

  Brother, it was a far cry from the old days. This wasn’t The Slot any more. Remember when you used to bomb Kieta or Kahili or Vella or Munda? Opposition all the way. Japs coming at you from every angle. Three hundred miles of hell, with ugly islands on every side and Japs on every island. When I first went up there it was the toughest water fighting in the world, bar none. You were lucky to limp home.

  Two days ago it was like a pleasure trip. I never saw the water so beautiful. Santa Ysabel looked like a summer resort somewhere off Maine. In the distance you could see Choiseul and right ahead was New Georgia. Everything was blue and green, and there weren’t too many white ack-ack puffs. I tell you, I could make that trip every day with pleasure.

  Segi Point was something to see. The Nips had a few antiaircraft there, but we came in low, zoomed up over the hills, peppered the devil out of them. Do you know Segi Passage? It’s something to remember. A narrow passage with maybe four hundred small pinpoint islands in it. It’s the only place out here I know that looks like the South Pacific. Watch! When we take Segi, I’m putting in for duty there. It’s going to be cool there, and it looks like they got fruit around, too.

  Well, after we dusted Segi off we flew low across New Georgia. Natives, and I guess some Jap spotters, watched us roar by. We were about fifty feet off the trees, and we rose and fell with the contours of the land. We broke radio silence, because the Japs knew we were coming. The other twelve were already over target. One buddy called out to me and showed me the waterfall on the north side of the island. It looked cool in the early morning sunlight. Soon we were over Munda. The milk run was half over.

  I guess you heard what happened next. I was the unlucky guy. One lousy Jap hit all day, on that whole strike, and it had to be me that got it. It ripped through the rear gunner’s seat and killed Louie on the spot. Never knew what hit him. I had only eighty feet elevation at the time, but kept her nose straight on. Glided into the water between Wanawana and Munda. The plane sank, of course, in about fifteen seconds. All shot to hell. Never even got a life raft out.

  So there I was, at seven-thirty in the morning, with no raft, no nothing but a life belt, down in the middle of a Japanese channel with shore installations all around me. A couple of guys later on figured that eight thousand Japs must have been within ten miles of me, and I guess that not less than three thousand of them could see me. I was sure a dead duck.

  My buddies saw me go in, and they set up a traffic circle around me. One Jap barge tried to come out for me, but you know Eddie Callstrom? My God! He shot that barge up until it splintered so high that even I could see it bust into pieces. My gang was over me for an hour and a half. By this time a radio message had gone back and about twenty New Zealanders in P-40’s took over. I could see them coming a long way off. At first I thought they might be Jap planes. I never was too good at recognition.

  Well, these New Zealanders are wild men. Holy hell! What they did! They would weave back and forth over me for a little while, then somebody would see something on Rendova or Kolombangara. Zoom! Off he would go like a madman, and pretty soon you’d see smoke going up. And if they didn’t see anything that looked like a good target, they would leave the circle every few minutes anyway and raise hell among the coconut trees near Munda, just on chance there might be some Japs there. One group of Japs managed to swing a shore battery around to where they could pepper me. They sent out about seven fragmentation shells, and scared me half to death. I had to stay there in the water and take it.

  That was the Japs’ mistake. They undoubtedly planed to get my range and put me down, but on the first shot the New Zealanders went crazy. You would have thought I was a ninety million dollar battleship they were out to protect. They peeled off and dove that installation until even the trees around it fell down. They must have made the coral hot. Salt water had almost blinded me, but I saw one P-40 burst into flame and plunge deeply into the water off Rendova. No more Jap shore batteries opened up on me that morning.

  Even so, I was having a pretty tough time. Currents kept shoving me on toward Munda. Japs were hidden there with rifles, and kept popping at me. I did my damnedest, but slowly I kept getting closer. I don’t know, but I guess I swam twenty miles that day, all in the same place. Sometimes I would be so tired I’d just have to stop, but whenever I did, bingo! There I was, heading for the shore and the Japs. I must say, though, that Jap rifles are a damned fine spur to a man’s ambitions.

  When the New Zealanders saw my plight, they dove for that shore line like the hounds of hell. They chopped it up plenty. Jap shots kept coming after they left, but lots fewer than before.

  I understand that it was about this time that the New Zealanders’ radio message reached Admiral Kester. He is supposed to have studied the map a minute and then said, “Get that pilot out there. Use anything you need. We’ll send a destroyer in, if necessary. But get him out. Our pilots are not expendable.”

  Of course, I didn’t know about it then, but that was mighty fine doctrine. So far as I was concerned. And you know? When I watched those Marine F4U’s coming in to take over the circle, I kind of thought maybe something
like that was in the wind at headquarters. The New Zealanders pulled out. Before they went, each one in turn buzzed me. Scared me half to death! Then they zoomed Munda once more, shot it up some, and shoved off home.

  The first thing the F4U’s did was drop me a life raft. The first attempt was too far to leeward, and it drafted toward the shore. An energetic Jap tried to retrieve it, but one of our planes cut him to pieces. The next raft landed above me, and drifted toward me. Gosh, they’re remarkable things. I pulled it out of the bag, pumped the handle of the CO2 container, and the lovely yellow devil puffed right out.

  But my troubles were only starting. The wind and currents shoved that raft toward the shore, but fast. I did everything I could to hold it back, and paddled until I could hardly raise my right arm. Then some F4U pilot with an IQ of about 420—boy, how I would like to meet that guy—dropped me his parachute. It was his only parachute and from then on he was upstairs on his own. But it made me a swell sea anchor. Drifting far behind in the water, it slowed me down. That Marine was a plenty smart cookie.

  It was now about noon, and even though I was plenty scared, I was hungry. I broke out some emergency rations from the raft and had a pretty fine meal. The Jap snipers were falling short, but a long-range mortar started to get close. It fired about twenty shots. I didn’t care. I had a full belly and a bunch of F4U’s upstairs. Oh, those lovely planes! They went after that mortar like a bunch of bumblebees after a tramp. There was a couple of loud garummmphs, and we had no more trouble with that mortar. It must have been infuriating to the Japs to see me out there.

 

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