It made me sad to hear that. As bad as he wanted to fly and all, I bet William Foxwell would have been a great pilot.
Mr. Tomzak said every chance Foxy had he would climb up on the planes on the flight deck or down belowdecks in the hangars to check out the instrument panels, the guns, everything. And he asked questions so much of the pilots and the other members of the flight crews that they tried to avoid Foxy any time they saw him coming.
“He got us in trouble a couple of times,” Mr. Tomzak said. “Dragging me over with him to examine something or other on those dive-bombers and torpedo bombers and all when we were supposed to be doing our jobs keeping the flight deck cleaned and all that grunt work they had us do.”
I asked Mr. Tomzak where he was when the Yorktown got bombed in the Battle of the Coral Sea, and was he with William Foxwell.
“No,” he said. “I was in my bunk at the time. I’d come down with something or other. Don’t know where Foxy was, but I do know we lost some of our friends. He took it really hard. We all did, of course, but he seemed to take it the hardest. He wouldn’t talk about what happened, but for a long time after that, most of a week, he wouldn’t hardly talk to me or anybody.”
“Then what?” I asked, working my way up to asking about how Mr. Tomzak thought William Foxwell went missing at the Battle of Midway. Julie and Greg were crowded next to me the whole time I was on the phone with Mr. Tomzak, actually pressed against me as though we were having a group hug.
“You mean what happened to Foxy?” Mr. Tomzak said. “I surely wish I knew, and I’ve wondered about it all these years. Everything was so busy when we got to Hawaii, fixing up the ship during those three days in port, and then taking off right away for Midway. I hardly had time to say hello to Foxy or anybody else for that matter. All I can tell you is that once we got in position at Point Luck — that was what they called the rendezvous site where our ships were hiding out near Midway — it was all business and total chaos. Well, a kind of controlled chaos.”
I tried to imagine it, and kept picturing that scene from the dream I had where Greg and I were in that little boat in the middle of everything, looking for William Foxwell.
Mr. Tomzak continued, “Everybody knew where they were supposed to be and what they were supposed to be doing, but that doesn’t mean that it all happened smoothly. That’s about the best way I can put it. I remember Foxy at one point racing belowdecks to get to the head right before they gave the order for our torpedo bomber squads to take off. They were bringing all the planes up from the hangar belowdecks on these giant elevators. The pilots and their crews came out in their flight suits and headgear. One fellow, a machine gunner, I remember came running out real late. His plane was already taxiing over, lining up for takeoff when he climbed in.
“I don’t remember Foxy coming back on deck, but he must have at some point. It’s just that once things got going and those planes started taking off, I didn’t notice much of anything. And then, once all the planes took off, we had to clear the deck and get into our battle stations in case the Japanese found us and attacked us with their planes.
He paused and took a deep breath. “And I never saw Foxy again.”
Mr. Tomzak coughed into the phone again. I realized he must be pretty old, probably in his nineties, and here we were asking him to remember — and to relive — what happened in the war, and what happened to his friend who disappeared and didn’t survive. I wondered if Mr. Tomzak was even crying a little, which made me feel bad.
I apologized for bringing all this stuff up, but Mr. Tomzak insisted that it was okay. “No need to apologize at all,” he said. “Sometimes it’s good to talk about it. You have to remember. It’s when everybody starts forgetting that you get in trouble.”
“Forgetting what, Mr. Tomzak?” I asked.
He seemed surprised by my question. “Why, how terrible it all was. The terrible things we do to one another in war. How young we all were, us and the Japanese, and what an awful waste of so many young lives.”
Julie, Greg, and I walked home quietly after the phone call with Mr. Tomzak. He couldn’t tell us anything else about William Foxwell, and I think we were all feeling sad, and feeling like the war — Mr. Tomzak’s war and William Foxwell’s war — was starting to seem like it was our war, too.
There was still so much we didn’t know about the Battle of Midway, and what happened to the Yorktown, and, of course, what happened to William Foxwell. But what we did know felt almost like too much. After a few blocks, we all went our separate ways, hardly even saying good-bye.
Mom asked me at dinner if I was feeling okay. I guess I wasn’t saying much there, either. Dad was home for once and after I assured Mom that I was fine, Dad and Mom got distracted talking about some weekend plans they had to go up to the mountains on Skyline Drive and see the leaves changing color. Mom had been feeling a little better lately and thought she was up for it. I told them I had been at band practice — that the All-Ages Open Mic Night was soon and we wanted to be in it.
“What’s the name of your band again?” Dad asked. “The Great Beyond? The Afterlife? Something like that?”
“Close,” I said. “It’s the Ghosts of War.”
I excused myself from the table shortly after and headed for my bedroom. William Foxwell still wasn’t there. It had been a couple of days since I’d seen him, and I was definitely starting to worry now. I forced myself to sit down and crank through my homework, and then I made a list of the things I still needed to find out about the Battle of Midway.
What happened after the Japanese shot down all the torpedo bombers?
How did we still manage to win the Battle of Midway?
And what did Dewey Tomzak mean when he said the Yorktown was “a doomed ship”?
I clearly had a lot more reading to do. But even with that, I was going to have to wait for William Foxwell to show up again and hope it would all be enough to stimulate his memory so we could find out the rest of his story.
“That was me,” William Foxwell said. Or I dreamed that was what he said. My eyes were shut, I was facedown on my pillow, and I was dead asleep.
“Hunh?” I said into my pillow, trying to force myself up but too tired at first to do it.
“The machine gunner,” William Foxwell said. “The one who was late getting to the torpedo plane. The one Dewey saw as he was heading for his battle station. That was me.”
I managed to push myself free of the pillow and lift my head, though not enough yet to see to the end of the bed where William Foxwell customarily sat when he visited. I hadn’t gotten very far back into the Midway book before I fell asleep earlier. It was still lying on the bed next to me.
Meanwhile, what William Foxwell had just said, or what I thought he’d just said, hardly made any sense. I shook my head to try to clear it some more. He wasn’t on any of the flight crews, and he sure wasn’t a machine gunner — that much I knew for sure.
“Where have you been?” I asked.
“Nearby,” he said. “Some of the time, anyway. It sort of felt too hard for a while there to get to you guys. Not that I didn’t try.”
I didn’t understand that, either, but let it go.
“Did I hear you right?” I asked. “Did you say you were on one of the torpedo bombers during the Battle of Midway?” I sat up the rest of the way and leaned against the headboard on my bed. I didn’t think I could hold my head up without some help. “Is that what you said?” I asked again.
“I’m pretty sure so,” William Foxwell said, though his voice was already starting to sound funny, far away one minute, closer the next. “It’s what came back to me when you all were talking to Dewey.”
“Were you there when we were on the phone with him?” I asked. “At Uncle Dex’s? Because none of us saw you or anything.”
“Sort of yes and sort of no,” he answered. “It’s hard to explain. But I did hear some of the conversation.”
“And that helped you remember that you were on one of the
torpedo planes?” I asked. “But how?”
“Thought you’d be interested in that,” William Foxwell said, pressing his hands down on my mattress, not that it did anything. “Believe me, I was very interested in that myself. It was when I went down to the head, like Dewey said.”
“About that,” I interrupted. “I meant to ask Dewey — Mr. Tomzak — but what’s the ‘head’?”
“Toilet,” William Foxwell replied. “I had — well, most of us on ship had, at one time or another — what they used to call the runs.”
“I think I can figure that one out,” I said, making a face.
“Anyway,” he continued, “I was coming back up the metal stairs, hurrying back to where I was supposed to be. Wasn’t anybody else around except a guy I recognized from one of the flight crews. He was carrying his flight suit, rushing to get to the same place I was just coming from and he slipped and fell and hit his head. He was pretty loopy. I guess you could say he didn’t know what day it was or anything like that. Probably had a concussion.
“Meanwhile, they were barking orders on the loudspeakers all over the ship, and the main order was for flight crews to report to the flight deck and prepare for takeoff. But there was no way this guy was making it to his plane. I already knew they were bringing up the torpedo bombers, the Devastators, which was a plane I knew inside and out, and in just that split second I saw that this was my chance to make up for what I did, or what I didn’t do, in the Battle of the Coral Sea.”
“You pretended you were him?” I asked, incredulous.
“There still wasn’t anybody else around in that one part of the ship,” he said, not answering me directly. “I didn’t have time to go for help. So I made sure the guy that hit his head was propped up okay where somebody could find him. Then I grabbed his flight suit and pulled it on over my uniform. They were still yelling all over the ship for the torpedo bomber crews and I ran up to the flight deck, jamming the headgear on right when I got there.”
“How did you know which plane to get on?” I asked.
William Foxwell nodded his serious nod. “I just looked for the one in need of a machine gunner,” he said.
“Didn’t anybody realize you weren’t the right guy?”
“Nope,” he said. “I did see Dewey on the other side of the flight deck, heading below, probably to a fireman’s station. My Devastator was already taxiing into position for takeoff, so I ran over and they boosted me up and nobody asked me a thing. As soon as I buckled in, I realized I hadn’t grabbed the gunner’s parachute, and I just about climbed back down to go find it, but it was too late. We jerked forward in the takeoff line and that was that. I wrapped my fingers around the double-barrel machine guns they had back there, just to get the feel of them. I already knew how to shoot — I’d figured that out those countless times I’d checked out the planes whenever our cleaning crew was on the flight deck. But knowing and doing, those are two very different things, let me tell you.”
I was straining to follow all that William Foxwell was saying. It was two in the morning and I was still feeling fuzzy from being woken up from a deep sleep, and he also kept doing that fading in and out thing with his voice, as if it was a struggle for him to keep the volume up loud enough for me to hear.
He kept talking, and after a while it seemed as if he was talking as much to himself as to me.
“Next thing I knew we were flying, climbing high enough to stay with the squad formation to try to locate the Japanese fleet. We’d heard back on ship that they had already launched the torpedo planes from the Enterprise and the Hornet first, before us. The Yorktown Devastators would be the last ones, coming in to finish off the job. I guess. Only when we found the Japanese ships, it didn’t look like any of them had been hit at all. What we did see were a lot of our planes in the water, burning, blasted to pieces.”
I realized I knew part of the story — maybe a lot of it — that William Foxwell didn’t, even though he’d been there. “I don’t know if you heard us talking about it before,” I said, “but none of the torpedo bombers hit their targets. They almost all got shot down.” I felt awful being the one to tell him, but he had to know.
William nodded sadly. “Well, we tried,” he said. “But one minute we were flying along, just spotting the Imperial Navy and their aircraft carriers, and the next minute we were getting shot at from behind. I rotated in the rear cockpit and saw three Zeroes were already on us. One shot up a wing, but we managed to keep going. Another hit the cockpit and I was pretty sure wounded the pilot, but he kept us flying, taking us down lower toward the water. We had to get down there, just above the waves, to line up and fire that thousand-pound torpedo that was weighing us down.”
“Did you shoot back at them?” I asked, caught up in the story — as awful as it was.
“Yeah,” he said. “I did. Or I tried. They were so fast, though! Like buzzing bees or something. Every time I opened up, they disappeared, and then they reappeared somewhere else, shooting at us from another angle. All that saved us was going so low over the ocean that the Zeroes couldn’t maneuver around us and had to give up.”
“What happened then?” I asked, all my weariness totally gone. I was practically hyperventilating, wanting to know.
“Everything and nothing,” William Foxwell said, sounding glum all of a sudden. “The torpedo released too soon. Didn’t even explode. Just must have sunk.”
“Oh no!” I said loudly.
“I couldn’t believe it,” he said.
“Then what?” I asked, quieter this time, with a bad feeling.
“Then they killed the pilot,” he said. “I saw him slump over. At first, we kept flying straight, low over the water. I emptied the last of the rounds from the machine gun at one of the Japanese carriers, not that I was even in range. And then we went down.”
I let the silence between us just sit there for a minute, before I asked the question.
“So was that where everything, you know, ended?” I asked.
The silence came back — such a deep silence that I could hear myself breathing, almost panting as I waited for William Foxwell to break it.
“No,” he finally said. “I don’t think so. It’s kind of a blur — the plane hitting the water and spinning like crazy. No way the bombardier could have survived the impact. And then the nose of the plane going under. Me climbing out of my shoulder harness to see if I could help the pilot, even though I already knew it was too late for him. It seemed like just seconds, though, before the cockpit submerged with his body still trapped in it. I climbed out on a wing, but then even that went under, and then the rest of the plane, too.
“Gone,” he said. “And me treading water in the middle of the Pacific Ocean while the battle still went on all around me. Surrounded by Japanese ships. Grabbing whatever I could find to stay afloat.”
“Just like George Gay!” I exclaimed.
“Who?” William Foxwell asked.
“He was a torpedo bomber pilot, too, but I think he was on the Hornet. He was the only one in his squad who survived. He hid under a seat cushion after his plane went down so the Japanese wouldn’t find him, all day and all night. A seaplane finally rescued him the next day. He wrote a book about it after the war. He got pretty famous.”
William Foxwell nodded. “That’s good news he got rescued. Didn’t know him or know anything about that. About all I did know at the time was how hard it was getting to keep my head above water, and how scared I was of both sharks and the Japanese. I was pretty sure my leg was broken, down at my ankle, from the crash landing into the ocean. But I couldn’t think about that too much. Everything was happening so fast all around me.”
He hesitated. “I remember thinking everything was lost,” he said. “Not just the planes and everybody flying them on our side, but the whole battle. Maybe even the war.”
He wrinkled his brow, going even deeper into his thoughts or memory or whatever. “And then …,” he started, and stopped.
“And then
what?” I asked, desperate to hear.
“And then everything changed.” His face brightened.
“How?” I asked. “What?” I really, really wished I’d finished reading my book about the Battle of Midway so I’d already know this stuff.
“Dive-bombers,” he said. “It was our dive-bombers on the attack. Coming straight down at the Japanese carriers, right out of the sun. Turned out we weren’t done just quite yet!”
“I remember struggling to keep my head above water in the ocean,” William Foxwell was saying. It was now so deep in the night I didn’t want to look at the clock and see how much sleep I wasn’t going to get, or how soon before I’d have to get up for school.
“I also remember being so close to the Japanese ships that I was afraid if one of them turned my way I’d get run over and drowned,” he said. “All I had to help me was a half-inflated life vest. Not even half inflated, really. Just barely enough air in it so I could hang on.”
“Was that when the dive-bombers attacked?” I asked.
“Not yet,” he said. “First what I saw was all the Japanese planes landing back on their four giant aircraft carriers to refuel. Not just the Zeroes that had shot down all our torpedo bombers, but a lot of their bombers, too.”
“I bet those were the ones that had attacked Midway,” I said.
William Foxwell shrugged. “Maybe so. I didn’t have any way to know, but that could well be. So that’s when I was at my lowest. All our torpedo bombers shot down, no damage to any of the Japanese ships. My plane gone down to the bottom, with the poor pilot and bombardier. And me a sitting duck with that half of a life vest in the middle of the ocean, nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. And I guessed the Japanese planes were refueling to go attack our ships, which they must have found by then with their scout planes.”
“And that’s when our dive-bombers attacked?” I asked again.
William Foxwell smiled, but it was a half-sad smile. “Yeah. That’s when it happened. The Japanese hadn’t counted on those dive-bombers, and they hadn’t seen them, either. Apparently, the divers were flying so high coming in from the Yorktown and the Hornet and the Enterprise that the Japanese didn’t have time to send their Zeroes out to meet them, and shoot them down, too. There was cloud cover, and they were coming out of the sun. The Japanese almost didn’t know what hit them.”
The Secret of Midway Page 9