by Bryan Bender
George had to make a decision fast. He could open up with the Kiowa’s .50-caliber cannons and disable the car, possibly killing the two men inside. But he didn’t know exactly who they were. All that was known was that they had been standing next to the car with the hood open in the traffic circle when automatic weapons were fired at the American patrol. When U.S. soldiers approached, the two men fled. George darted his eyes around the area. Several blind alleys branched off from the main roadway, which was lined with low-slung homes and shops. If he used heavy firepower, civilians might be injured or killed. Besides, if the men were in fact insurgents, they were worth more alive than dead. The Strykers were closing in, and if the men could be captured they might provide valuable intelligence about other insurgents in the area.
George instructed his co-pilot to take control of the chopper and swoop low over the car. As the Kiowa was flying about fifty feet off the ground, George turned his body ninety degrees into the swirling dust curling up into the open side of the cockpit. He planted his right foot on the floor, bent his left knee, and braced the heel against the seat. He carefully raised his M4 carbine with his left arm and took aim at the speeding car below.
Bang, bang, bang. George pulled the trigger. The three quick bursts struck the sedan, shattering the rear window. The car careened left and right, but the driver kept control—and his foot on the gas.
George instructed Joey to try to fly beyond it, circle back around, and come in over the top. Carefully, and after some difficulty, they maneuvered the Kiowa into position. George steadied his weapon and fired three more shots directly into the hood of the car. The car came to a sudden stop at an intersection next to a row of run-down market stalls.
As the Kiowa hovered, George craned his neck to see what the passengers would do next, steadying his weapon so it was pointed at the roof of the car. The seconds ticked slowly by as George, sweat dripping down his cheeks and his heart beating loudly, watched for any movement. The driver, wearing a traditional long white frock with his head partially covered, finally opened his door and gingerly started to get out. As he stood up, he turned his body toward the car but kept his arms hidden under the roof—a sign for George that he was shielding a weapon and intended to take aim at the helicopter. Training one eye on the passenger-side door, which was still shut, George decided not to take any chances. He fired off a few more rounds at the hood, hoping to draw out the driver and force him to make a move. At that very moment the driver, wielding an AK-47, and the passenger scrambled from the car and into the adjacent stalls.
The Strykers arrived on the scene, and what happened next, George thought later, was eerily reminiscent of the episode burned in his brain of his grandfather’s last moments in Vietnam.
Lieutenant Colonel Kurilla, who had given George orders to fire on the car, was a towering figure who took special care of his troops and always led from the front. In his body armor and wraparound shades, the tall and well-built thirty-nine-year-old Army Ranger from Minnesota commanded a unique physical authority. But he was also known for a softer side. He praised his men for showing restraint when civilians were nearby and kept a list of phone numbers so he could personally call the families when one of his troopers was killed or wounded so they wouldn’t hear it from someone who wasn’t there.
Kurilla sprinted out of the lead Stryker and headed after the insurgents into the stalls. Following behind him were a fresh-faced lieutenant and an Army specialist, both with little combat experience, along with a former Green Beret turned war correspondent named Michael Yon, who had been covering the war up close for more than a year.
While Kurilla was still in mid-stride, a burst of machine gun fire erupted from one of the corner stalls. He somersaulted to the ground and fired back with his M4. A few seconds later, while he was still firing, he slumped over on the ground a few yards from one of the outer walls.
“I’m hit three times!” Kurilla called. “I’m shot three times!”
The spray of gunfire had shattered both legs and burrowed into an arm. Bullets were still striking off the ground all around him.
Circling overhead, George heard the rat-a-tat-tat of the gunshots over the radio. But with the noise of the rotors and the dust clouds, he couldn’t quite make out the commotion in the courtyard in front of the market. Crouched nearby the wounded Kurilla were the pair of soldiers riding in his vehicle and the unarmed Yon. Kurilla couldn’t move, but he shouted orders at the soldiers to go in after the shooters. They hesitated. He ordered them into the market again, but they didn’t move. Then Yon started yelling for them to throw a grenade. Finally, a few moments later, Kurilla’s top NCO, Command Sergeant Major Robert Prosser, rushed up and ran straight into the shop just as one of the shooters lunged forward firing a pistol at Kurilla. Prosser shot the man at least three times at point-blank range even as he was hit in the leg. Seconds later, American reinforcements entered the market, and the second gunman surrendered.
George, still circling above the scene, heard over the net that Kurilla was shot and another soldier wounded; both needed to be evacuated as soon as possible. He got back on the radio to headquarters to make sure the evacuation mission was already under way.
As they returned to base and the adrenaline began to dissipate, George’s mind raced. Was he to blame for this? Should he have handled the situation differently and just blown up the car? Maybe he was too careful this time. Might the commanding officer die because of his actions?
He was relieved to learn later that both men would survive. But when he was given a citation for his role that day, he felt he didn’t deserve it. This was not what he had trained for. He was trained to scout enemy positions and support ground troops in battle with an opposing Army. Instead, he was being awarded a medal for chasing pickups and sedans down crowded city streets.
George desperately needed to rationalize what he was doing and why. After the Mosul chase, he got in the habit of circling the half a dozen neighborhoods in the southeast section of the city that he knew were minority Christian communities. The sight of statues of Jesus Christ atop some of the churches, visible through his cockpit glass, was comforting to him. At least he felt some connection to the people down there, who would often come out and wave at his helicopter.
“At least I’m protecting them,” he thought.
He confided to Scott he felt there was little worth fighting for.
“There are three reasons to breathe here,” George told him. “One is to wake up. I prefer to do that when I can. The second is lunch. And the third is of course dinner.”
For the rest of the summer and into the fall, as he flew more long missions over Mosul, a recurring thought nagged at George.
“Why are we here? Why am I here? If I get killed, I’m gonna be really pissed.”
PART THREE
For we are like olives: only when we are crushed do we yield what is best in us.
The Talmud
CHAPTER SIX
MOVING UP THE LINE
Just after New Year’s 1942, as the bodies of American sailors were still being pulled from the twisted metal that remained of the U.S. Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor, Japanese warplanes were headed for another port, this one virtually unknown to the outside world. On January 4, 1942, while Ryan was still in flight training in Jacksonville, Japanese air forces began pummeling Rabaul, on the northernmost tip of New Britain Island.
The garrison of Australian troops on the lightly populated Gazelle Peninsula, about nine hundred strong, were the only thing standing between the Japanese and the large island of New Guinea, situated just to Australia’s north. Under the cover of darkness, on the night of January 23, five thousand Japanese soldiers went ashore at Blanche Bay. The Australian defenders were quickly overrun. Within hours, most of them had been captured, tortured, and beheaded. As for the rest, the Australian commander ordered a full withdrawal, “every man for himself.” Few survived to tell the harrowing tale.
In the ensuing weeks, tens of thousands of Japanese troops,
dozens of warships, and, eventually, a large air force descended on Rabaul, with its deep port—known as the “Pearl of the Pacific”—surrounded by volcanoes and a natural defense of high rocky cliffs that straddled the strategic Solomon and Bismarck seas. It would soon host one of the largest concentrations of Imperial forces outside Japan.
The New Guinea campaign had begun. It would last more than three years, nearly the entire duration of the war, in one of the most treacherous places on earth, where thousands of American and Australian fighting men would be swallowed up by a forbidding jungle that literally reached the clouds.
On February 3, 1942, as Ryan was flying in formation on a three-hour training flight off the Florida coast six thousand miles away, Japanese bombs fell for the first time on Port Moresby, Australia’s dusty colonial capital and the largest city on the main island of New Guinea. The Japanese were now within range of Australian soil. Later that month, in a demonstration of what might be next, the Japanese bombed Darwin, on Australia’s northern coast, killing 250 people and destroying nearly a dozen warships and two dozen aircraft.
Panic spread like wildfire Down Under, where Australians had watched with foreboding as Japan’s mockingly named “Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Zone” stretched from Hong Kong to Malaya, Burma, Singapore, Guam, Java, the Dutch East Indies, and now Rabaul—nearly one-sixth of the earth’s surface—leaving devastation in its wake. By May, the Japanese had seized all the major coastal towns on New Guinea and the nearby northern and eastern islands.
Australia was nearly defenseless. Twelve thousand militia members, the under-trained home guard, made up its only sizable security force. In 1940 it had sent most of its air, land, and sea forces to fight alongside England against Germany and the Axis powers in North Africa, Greece, and the Middle East. The Australians’ fortunes now depended on the Americans. “Our resources here are very limited. It is in your power to meet the situation,” Prime Minister John Curtin wrote to President Roosevelt.
American resources, however, would prove scarce as well, as the war in Europe was given higher priority. On February 17, the U.S. Army chief of staff, George Marshall, ordered to Australia the Forty-First Infantry Division, a unit of National Guardsmen from Idaho, Montana, Oregon, North Dakota, and Washington. Their job was to hold the line pending reinforcements, if and when they became available. Soon afterward, the Thirty-Second Infantry Division, mostly members of National Guard units from Michigan and Wisconsin, was also ordered to Australia.
But before the Americans could complete a crash training course in Australia, the Imperial Japanese Army was on a high ridge of the Owen Stanley Range, overlooking Port Moresby, just across the Tasman Sea from Australian territory. The newly arrived Allied commander in the Southwest Pacific, General Douglas MacArthur, paced back and forth on the long porch of his Port Moresby headquarters. He appealed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington for more ground, air, and naval forces to beat back the Japanese advance—to no avail. He had little choice but to order the ill-prepared American units into combat.
Their mission was to traverse the Kokoda Track through the Owen Stanley Range and beat the Japanese back to New Guinea’s northern coast. The trail is sixty miles long, but only passable on foot, and winds near the 7,185-foot peak of Mount Bellamy. It is among the most “geographically disturbed” places on the planet, where there is virtually no flat land and no roads—just goat trails. There was no direct route to get anywhere. If you trekked a thousand feet up into the rain forest, the topography would often descend six hundred feet before climbing another one thousand. With no roads or railways through the nearly impassable terrain, supply lines were simply native tracks cut through the jungle, little more than narrow footpaths that quickly turned into knee-deep mud in downpours that turned streams into rivers. In short, the terrain made a mockery of conventional military deployments. Covering two miles in a day was considered a rousing success.
At first, the Allies didn’t only fear the Japanese, who were quickly earning a reputation for ruthless brutality matched only by the Nazis. The barefoot natives, decorated with exotic tattoos, shell necklaces, and colorful skirts, grinned at them through teeth stained a deep red from chewing betel nut, the local narcotic, as they leaned on their twelve-foot spears. Some GIs, hearing stories of cannibalism, remembered thinking the natives were eyeing them for dinner.
New Guinea’s intricate web of tribal societies, the GIs learned, was governed by a combination of myth, magic, and sorcery. The natives had a deep fear of the mountains, where they believed evil spirits roamed the darkness. By and large, though, they were eager to help the Americans and Australians as carriers and scouts, for they had already experienced firsthand the depravity of the Japanese invaders. “They were totally on our side because of the Japanese cruelty whenever they had contact with them,” recalled Sergeant Major Arthur May of the Third Air Task Force, whose job was to build makeshift airfields for the U.S. Army Air Forces.
At best, the American-led ground campaign on New Guinea in 1942 and early 1943 could be called a stalemate. The Forty-First and Thirty-Second Divisions suffered heavy casualties before reinforcements could arrive. Nearly 25 percent of the Forty-First was killed, wounded, or succumbed to tropical disease. The Thirty-Second, woefully short of medical supplies, had it far worse. Of the 9,825 men who went into combat, a full 66 percent fell ill. Added to those killed and wounded in action, the total casualty count for the division was 9,956. Accounting for replacements, that was actually more than the division’s entire official battle strength.
In command of the Japanese fortress at Rabaul was Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, considered one of the most brilliant Japanese naval officers. Yamamoto, standing on the bridge of his flagship, also knew his enemy all too well. After graduating from the Japanese naval academy, he was seriously injured in the Japanese war with Russia in 1905. He came to America in 1919 to study at Harvard University, where he learned English and recommended Carl Sandburg’s three-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln to his friends. He drank scotch, smoked cigars, and became an accomplished poker player.
He also traveled to the heartland—including Chicago and Detroit—where he saw firsthand America’s industrial might. “It is a mistake to regard the Americans as luxury loving and weak,” he wrote upon his return, after he changed his military specialty from gunnery to aviation. “I can tell you that they are full of spirit, adventure, fight, and justice.” On the eve of World War II, Yamamoto was the only member of the Japanese high command to recommend against the attack on Pearl Harbor. In 1940 he told the Japanese prime minister: “If we are ordered to go to war with America, then I can guarantee to put up a tough fight for the first six months, but I have absolutely no confidence about what would happen if it went on for two or three years.”
By the end of 1942 the Japanese forces on New Guinea were no longer an imminent threat to Australia, but their heavily entrenched positions at the military fortress at Rabaul presented a main obstacle to MacArthur’s grand strategy to move across the Central Pacific, retake the Philippines, and ultimately defeat Japan. Rabaul was Tokyo’s lifeline in the Southwest Pacific, but the Allied command concluded it could not be taken outright. Every Allied warplane—Army, Navy, and Marine Corps—that MacArthur and his commanders could muster would be needed to isolate the Japanese forces there.
“Tanks and artillery can be reserved for the battlefields of Europe and Africa,” remarked General George Kenney, commander of the U.S. Fifth Air Force from 1942 to 1945. “The artillery in this theater flies.”
“Got two letters from you Friday and did enjoy them. And by the way, who is the one to keep up the morale of this family? I’m the Mother, and here it is, you are keeping us all going.”
Grace’s letter to Ryan was mailed from Charleston on Monday morning, November 8, 1943, via the Fleet Post Office in San Francisco. It was filled with the news of home he was so desperate for. His sister Uranie had “covered herself with glory” when she presented at a
local medical conference the previous Thursday, Grace told him. She was even more of a hit at the banquet afterward at the Francis Marion Hotel.
“She did look very pretty in a white dress with large red flowers and a bright red coat with her white earrings,” Grace gushed. “All of her professors remarked that she looked so pretty and wanted to know why she didn’t come to class with something on like that—maybe then they could keep awake!”
Ryan’s military checks were arriving all right, Grace reported, and relayed that she had shipped him a month’s supply of Vimms, the vitamins advertised in storefronts and magazines as “a great thing for you—and a great thing for wartime America.” Santa would also soon be bringing Ryan the mirror he requested. “Maybe he will appear in a hula skirt,” his mother teased. “Will try for the socks,” she added, “but don’t know where I’m going to get all wool ones.”
As Grace’s letter made its way to Ryan, the Hell’s Angels were waiting on Samoa for the USS Pocomoke, a seaplane tender, to take them to the advance base at Efate. Their next stop was in the New Hebrides, a chain of forty primeval islands to the southwest of Samoa and three hundred miles south of the ferocious battle taking place between the Allies and Japan for control of the approaches to New Guinea. Ryan’s flying would soon be getting more intense, and he expected to be in the cockpit for longer stretches of time as the squadron moved closer to the battle zone. Even in the tropics it could get cold up there at twenty thousand feet—thus the urgent request to Grace for warm socks.
When the squadron crossed the 180th meridian in the Pocomoke, all hands were inducted into the Domain of the Golden Dragon, a Navy tradition for “crossing the line” into the “silent mysteries of the Far East.” On November 20, the Hell’s Angels arrived on the fiddle-shaped island of Efate and took up quarters next to Quoin Hill Airfield, the 6,080-foot runway built by the Seabees on high ground on the northeast corner of the island. It, too, was made of coral, which engineers had discovered was extremely useful for runways and roads when laid down in layers, wet down with salt water or freshwater, and then rolled until the coral hardened almost to the thickness of concrete.