The air was beginning to get cooler, but he kept the canopy open. He was already soaked in sweat as he knew he would be the entire flight out regardless of how cold it got further aloft.
Hickam Army Air Force Base
15:25 hrs local time
“JAMES?”
“Huh? Yeah, sweetheart …”
“No, sir, it’s Dianne.”
More than a bit surprised, he sat up, a few of the sailors sitting on the floor of the hangar nearby chuckling.
Not thinking, he put both arms back to brace himself as he got up, and nearly fell over on his left side. Dianne grabbed him by the shoulders.
“God damn,” he gasped, stump hitting the hard concrete floor, pain radiating up his arm.
She steadied him.
“They got another radio up, and, sir, Collingwood and the rest of the crew are here.”
James saw his boss sitting by a table where a monster of a radio was set up, dials glowing. Joe was standing behind the unit, checking the antenna lead. Collingwood saw him sitting up, and motioned for him to come over.
Dianne helped him to his feet and without asking raised his left arm, checking the bandage, sniffing it again, this time wrinkling her nose.
“You’re going to the hospital,” she announced sharply, “and I’m taking you there.”
“I’m OK.”
“Sir,” and he noticed she had dropped the James routine, “it’s getting infected.”
“Later.”
She gave him a defiant look but then finally relented and stepped back.
He went over to the long table that someone had dragged in, and sat down on a folding chair next to Collingwood, who lit a cigarette and then handed it to James, pushing over a cup of coffee as well.
“You look like crap, James.”
“Well, sir, you don’t look much better,” James quipped back.
He had often wondered if Collingwood only had one uniform shirt in his entire wardrobe, for there always seemed to be ash and coffee stains in the same place.
“This lad here has got us on the right frequencies,” and Collingwood nodded to Joe.
“He’s a good man,” James said forcefully, loud enough so others would hear. “If it wasn’t for him and his friends, our asses would really be in the sling right now.”
Joe reddened slightly, and nodded thanks.
James wondered for a moment if somehow they could wrangle a security clearance for him. Their entire operation in the basement of CinCPac was gone; they were going to have to rebuild a couple of hundred thousand dollars’ worth of radio receivers from scratch. All their files were gone, the new IBM calculating machines that the team was just starting to get the hang of using, the darn things able to help sort coded word groups and pop out a card the size of an old dollar bill upon which was recorded the last use of that letter grouped for cross-referencing to earlier transmissions. All their translation books, all of it was gone. It’d take months before they could even have a remote chance of rebuilding and starting over.
Once things settled down he would have to suggest to Collingwood that a large detail be sent over to sweep the grounds clean, but then again they weren’t the only ones in that building with closely guarded secrets not shared with others. Someone had most likely already thought of it. He looked at Joe again and sadly realized that for now he could help, but a week from now, chances were he wouldn’t be allowed within a mile of any base. There was no way in hell they could wrangle a security clearance for him. He even found himself wondering if, given his own family, he might lose his security clearance as well and find himself sitting out the rest of the war stuck in some damn supply depot back in the States.
“Let’s look at that arm,” Collingwood said, and reluctantly James lifted it up, not letting the pain of movement register on his face.
“I need you here for a little while, and then you’re going over to the hospital to get it properly cleaned and bandaged. Got that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now, listen to this.”
He threw a switch and the small loudspeaker next to the radio crackled to life.
It was Japanese. Damn, they were back in business!
It took a moment to get the feel of it; the signal was weak, distorted. Joe, back around behind them, leaned over and touched a dial ever so slightly. It came in clearer.
James looked at the lit-up dial.
“One of their naval air-to-ship frequencies.”
“Exactly.”
“Repeat. Ten American planes, course bearing two six five degrees. They are …”
The signal wavered for a second, hard to discern.
“You get that?” James asked, and Collingwood shook his head.
“He said Army and Navy dive bombers,” Joe interjected softly, barely a whisper.
They looked back at him and nodded their thanks.
Joe walked away to join a group working to set up another radio.
“Our guys have already been spotted,” James said softly. “Must be a scout plane watching our coast.”
“Should we send them a warning?” Collingwood asked.
This was outside their game. They were cryptanalysts, not tactical air officers.
He shook his head.
“What good will it do them? The Japanese might monitor it and know we’re on to them,” he sighed, “and besides, those kids are doomed anyhow.”
Collingwood nodded and lit another cigarette from the stub of his last one.
“Wish we had a directional antenna up, try and get a fix on them that way.”
Another plane was reporting in on the same frequency, obviously far distant, barely audible, reporting no sighting, and it was turning 90 degrees to the south to start the next leg of its search. A couple of more reported in, doing the same.
From the difference in signal strength he suspected the other planes were part of the Japanese search pattern to the west of their fleet. There was nothing else, and from that he could deduct that Lexington had yet to be spotted. Her location was as much a mystery to him, and for that matter everyone else on their side, as it was to the Japanese.
“Stay with this,” Collingwood said. “I want to see if our miracle worker over there can get us a couple of more radios set up to monitor their other frequencies.”
James turned off the loudspeaker switch and worked on a set of headphones. Ever so gently touching the dial, shifting the frequency but a few kilohertz to either side and back again, picking up snippets of conversation, broadcasting in the clear, scout planes, a lot of them reporting in. And then the first one, giving another bearing on the small attack group, announced he was trailing them astern.
It was so damn frustrating. They were finally getting some information in here, but still it was only fragmentary. No one was sure, with Kimmel dead, exactly who was in charge of naval operations at this moment. As for the Army, General Short, who he suspected would not be in command much longer, was last reported down inspecting beach defenses.
All he could do for the moment was sit and listen and feel impotent while others did the fighting.
Akagi
16:15 hrs local time
THEY HAD BEEN running back into the wind for fifteen minutes. The last of the returning scout planes had been recovered, and a new wave was going out for a final sweep before dark. If the navigator aboard the scout plane trailing the Americans was accurate in his reports, the small attack force was now seventy miles out and tracking to their south. With luck they might miss the fleet entirely.
Each of the four carriers with his task force was launching Zeroes to intercept, with a total of twenty-five committed to defending against the incoming raid. Soryu and Hiryu, not yet up to rendezvous and still trailing fifty miles to the south-southeast, were putting up all their remaining fighters, thirteen of them.
The last of the Zeroes and scout planes lifted off, and as one the entire fleet came about, returning to their westerly heading. The twenty minutes of lau
nch time had shifted them ten miles farther to the north, shifting Hiryu and Soryu as well in the same direction.
The wind was beginning to be an increasingly frustrating factor for the admiral. Every launch and recovery required coming around nearly a hundred and forty degrees from his intended course, eating up thousands upon thousands of liters of precious oil in the process. His calculations of yesterday about the reserve available to take them to the Marshalls were becoming less and less valid. He had hoped to at least do a partial fuel transfer to the always hungry destroyers before dark. That would be impossible now, with another American strike wave coming in.
It was also impossible, of course, for him to know that the navigator aboard the scout plane trailing the Americans was indeed off by a good fifteen miles on his estimate, and that the twenty-minute run to the northeast for recovery and launch had tracked the main fleet out of visual for the Americans, but had edged Soryu and Hiryu almost within sight.
Fifteen miles northeast of Hiryu and Soryu,
twenty-eight miles southeast of Akagi
16:30 hrs local time
“DAMN IT, THEY aren’t here!” It was Struble.
“And that son of a bitch is still trailing us,” one of the P-40 pilots interjected. “Let me go for the bastard.”
“Negative on that,” Struble snapped. “He’ll just lead you into the clouds. They know we’re coming. I want you with us.”
“Just great,” the P-40 pilot replied.
Dave, tense, palms sweating inside his leather gloves, kept scanning straight ahead. The damn sun was lower, straight into his eyes, giving him a headache. But that was where the Zeroes would come from.
Cloud cover was changing, the morning and midday cumulus combining into towering cumulonimbus that rose to over twenty-five thousand feet, some of them dark with flickers of lightning.
The sky ahead darkened, one of the taller clouds blocking it out. Good, it’d give them some contrast, background to search out any Zeroes, and would block out the sun. But the view below was restricted through the cloud openings, and ten minutes back Struble and Welldon had finally broken radio silence to debate whether they should drop down to three thousand feet or not, giving them better visibility of the ocean below, skimming in just below the taller of the clouds.
Struble had opted to stay at twelve, and Dave wondered if they might very well have flown right over the Jap fleet and not even seen it. But then again, the Japanese fighter pilots were aggressive as all hell; if they were near or over the fleet, they’d be bounced by now.
The towering cloud ahead looked dangerous, and Welldon’s B-17 began a gentle turn to the right, northward. He could have gone either way, Dave thought; maybe he’s on to something, or with luck maybe not; they’d circle past the Japs, drop their loads, and get the hell out. As it was, it was going to be close to a nighttime landing, something he never really liked. He wasn’t even qualified for it yet on a carrier—and he had already heard how anything in the sky over Pearl at night was most definitely being shot at.
They were now onto a northerly heading, and Welldon, regardless of what Struble said, was going into a shallow dive, punching lower to try and get a better view. Several long minutes passed. The storm cell was a good ten miles across. It could in fact have an entire Jap fleet hidden under it. He knew that was what Halsey would do, what any carrier commander would do if he knew a strike was inbound, and together with Gloria Ann they were definitely being followed and reported on.
Several things now happened almost at the same instant.
Welldon aboard the B-17 Gloria Ann interrupted the momentary silence. “Got a ship in sight to our north at ten o’clock!”
At nearly the same instant, from the corner of his eye Dave saw one of the P-36s just fold up, a wing shearing off, the spark of tracers and the flash of white, with a red meatball on its fuselage, silhouetted against the darker mass of clouds forward and above.
“X-ray, stay with me!” was all he could gasp as he slammed into full throttle, hitting it so fast that the engine sputtered for an instant, cylinders flooding with fuel before clearing and accelerating. Some instinct told him to pull up and bank hard. As he did so, more tracers snapped past his canopy, slashing the air where he would have been if he had continued on the same trajectory but one second longer.
He banked so hard that he rolled inverted, nose high, and as he did so he caught another glimpse of a Zero, this one cutting between two of the B-17s, knocking out an engine on Pat’s Girl as it dove through. He pulled stick back hard into his gut, lined up and squeezed off a burst, another deflection shot, and the Zero walked straight into it. With the Zero flying at just over three hundred miles an hour and his four .30 caliber machine guns each firing ten rounds a second, the Zero passed through his fire, flying more than the length of a football field every second, so that only one round from each gun would impact before the enemy plane was through the cone of fire. But he was pulling back hard enough on his stick that nine rounds actually hit, walking across the top of the Zero’s fuselage, blowing out a cylinder head on the Zero’s Nakajima fourteen-cylinder engine, fragments cutting a fuel line, another round blowing through the top of the pilot’s canopy, killing him instantly.
Dave barely saw what was happening. The Zero screamed past him, apparently still under control. He rolled out into a shallow dive between Pat’s Girl and Gloria Ann, caught a glimpse of flame licking back from the inboard port engine of Pat’s Girl, a glimpse of the Veronica Lake lookalike painted on her side. He pulled back up, barely hearing the radio chatter, someone, an Army pilot, screaming he was on fire and couldn’t pop his canopy, Gloria Ann calling for the strike group to follow his lead, Struble cursing, then ordering his group into a shallow dive behind the B-17s.
Get above it, Dave thought, and he pulled back hard on his stick, still flying at full throttle, almost redlining the engine. He went into a climb, looked forward, to either side, up, which was now relative to his plane, back to the horizon to the northeast. Another glimpse of two Zeroes coming around hard, two trails of smoke and flame, one without doubt the P-40 with the doomed pilot screaming, mike switched on.
“Jesus… I’m burning! God I can’t get the canopy back. Oh God!”
He felt guilt, wishing the man would switch the mike off or just die. It was horrifying to listen to.
“I see them. God damn flattops! Two, make that three… no, four of them!”
It sounded like Gloria Ann.
Dave continued through his climb, turning it into a loop, arcing up, over, coming back down, now back behind the heavy bombers and dive bombers. There was not enough time for Struble’s group to do what they preferred, climb for a diving strike from high altitude. It was going to have to be a glide bomb run, which left them vulnerable all the way in.
A burst of antiaircraft fire ignited forward of the 17s, then a barrage. He was out of the loop, building speed. More tracers from above; the Japs were concentrating on the 17s. More hits on Pat’s Girl, sparks walking up the fuselage, a Zero dropping down onto its tail, actually dropping wheels and flaps to kill off his speed.
The burst of 7.7-and 20-millimeter fire from the Zero tore into the tail and elevator assembly of Pat’s Girl. Fragments flew off.
He was at long range, a good six hundred yards back, but opened up, arcing his fire in, afraid for a second his own shots were impacting into Pat’s. The Zero, seeing the tracers, broke right, going into a dive as he turned, pulling up wheels and flaps. For a second he thought he had him, but then he overshot, and the Zero disappeared astern.
Christ, he’ll be on my tail!
He began to jink violently, jamming in left rudder, then right, looking over his shoulder. His wingmen were nowhere to be seen.
The Zero rolled in behind him. Still at full throttle, he started into a dive, looked back over his shoulder for another second, then turned to look straight ahead. A moment of pure terror: He barely cleared the tail wheel of Pat’s Girl, diving underneath the bom
ber and its trail of fire and debris. The Zero diverted from him and focused back on Pat, pouring in more fire as Dave went inverted, diving.
The screaming of the dying P-40 pilot abruptly ended. Gloria was back on, announcing he was starting his bomb run, the other 17s to drop when he did.
Dave pulled out of his dive at three thousand feet and four miles out from the Japanese carrier Akagi, a shellburst nearby marking the fact that they were firing at him.
He spared a quick glance at the enemy ship. It didn’t look like the one they had hit earlier in the day. He didn’t have time for a second look. More tracers snapped by his canopy. A sound of impact, and something struck the back of his armored seat so hard he felt it like a hammer blow, the 20-millimeter shell detonating, blowing out the rear of his canopy.
He pulled back hard, heading for the clouds… and heard Struble announce he was going in.
Akagi
EVERY GUN ON both the port and starboard side of Akagi’s flight deck was pointed aloft, firing.
Yamamoto stood motionless, watching, and Fuchida, heart racing, watched as the first of the dive bombers began to go up, inverting, rolling into his dive… and his heart was actually with them.
Were the Americans insane? Five dive bombers attacking the main fleet? It was a futile gesture—and a brave one that filled his heart with admiration, even though it was his ship they had picked out to attack.
Did they know this was the flagship? he wondered.
Over Akagi
LIEUTENANT COMMANDER DAN Struble lined up forward of the carrier as he went into a shallow twenty-degree dive, flak bursting around him.
To his port side he saw Gloria Ann. It was heading toward the other carrier, two miles farther on. He wanted to call for him to divert, but knew he was already on his bomb run.
Should I divert?
I can’t now, he realized. If we got any chance of scoring a hit, it is now. I can’t afford the extra thirty seconds to turn onto the other target. None of us will make it with so many Zeroes closing in.
Days of Infamy Page 23