East Wind Returns

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East Wind Returns Page 6

by Grasso, William Peter


  It is closer to sunset than Kelly planned as his flight enters their carrier’s landing pattern. Landing a Corsair on the boat is hard enough in daylight; darkness makes it a harrowing experience. During its developmental period, the Navy had initially rejected the Corsair for carrier use. Aerodynamic modifications to the prototype had moved the cockpit aft, so the forward fuselage and big round engine in front blocked the pilot’s forward view of the floating “postage stamp” that was the carrier deck during landing. Only after a curved approach was perfected, with the aircraft constantly turning from the downwind leg to the threshold, with the deck and the landing signal officer always visible out the side of the cockpit canopy, was the plane approved for carrier deployment.

  Kelly is last in line to come on board the carrier. As he waits in the holding pattern in the fading sunlight, he cannot stop his mind from wandering. He flashes back to his days at Yale, which he had left in early 1942--his junior year--to volunteer for Naval flight duty. A Bostonian from a wealthy family, he joined up for no other reason than patriotism and had flown combat missions in the Pacific since early 1944. His industrialist father had arranged to pull some strings and keep his idealistic son out of the military, but Kelly refused his father’s help. Their relationship, never close, was strained and, perhaps, irreparable.

  He tries to clear his head as he begins his approach but fatigue is taking over; his focus is not perfect. The landing signal officer, somewhat fatigued himself, is on the verge of waving him off but does not; this last plane has a stable sink rate after all, and he isn’t enthusiastic about another approach in even less light. Kelly lands long, his tailhook barely snagging the last of the four arresting wires. Like an exhausted bird, the Corsair slams to the deck and lurches to a halt, its whirling propeller just feet from the flock of parked aircraft crowding the deck ahead.

  Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing…but I definitely stunk the place up with this one.

  At the post-flight debrief, none of the pilots in Kelly’s flight remembers anything significant about the train they had strafed. The gun camera film is equally vague. The conclusion is quickly reached that the obscure, cylindrical figure briefly visible behind the locomotive and tender is a tank car, probably carrying fuel or oil. Kelly and his flight get credit for a “probable” neutralized target, despite the lack of firm evidence. No intelligence significance is attached to the mission debrief report, other than the presence of ineffective Japanese fighter coverage. It is further noted that effective immediately a directive is in force to cease attacking trains until further notice. The intelligence staff suspects they are being used to transport American POWs to forced labor in the invasion area. The pilots think the directive strange, but hell…war is strange.

  Colonel Ozawa is relieved to find no damage to the nuclear device and no new injuries to his battered unit. He clearly remembers the sharp “clank” sound--loud and rapid--as bullets bounced off the iron device, leaving it unharmed and shielding his men and the locomotive. A disquieting thought crosses his mind: What if an American bomb scored a direct hit?

  Would that cause the nuclear reaction to occur? Ozawa does not know. He only knows how to hook up the wires, depress the firing handle, and sacrifice his life for the Emperor.

  When the nuclear device is finally parked in the warehouse, hidden from sight, the Colonel gives a sigh of relief and lets his battered troops get some rest.

  His mind ponders the irony that, save for a decision made by his father almost 20 years ago, he might now be fighting for the other side.

  Ozawa had been born in Hawaii, the son of Japanese parents. His father had moved the family back to Japan in the mid-1920’s, after the death of his younger brother. Ozawa was grateful his father had made that decision. He despised Americans; it had been an American Army officer, a major, who had killed his brother. An accident, the police report said. That fateful evening, the two boys were walking home on the darkened road when the younger boy was struck by the Army man’s car. The American officer claimed he had not seen the boy.

  He might have been able to see, Ozawa believed, had he not been dead drunk. Returning from a social function, the inebriated major lost control of his vehicle in a turn. As it veered crazily toward the Ozawa boys, they tried frantically to jump out of the way. His brother wasn’t quick enough.

  Ozawa could never forget the words the American major had uttered--without emotion--as he stood over his dead brother: “Too bad…I killed the little chink.” His equally inebriated female companion urged the major to just drive away, but the police had been summoned and were already approaching. Once on the scene, the policemen did not detain the American officer. He was never prosecuted or disciplined in any way.

  Ozawa vowed he would forever hold all white people in the same disregard they exhibited to Asians. Americans and their allies could not be bothered to tell the different Asian peoples apart: chinks, nips, slants, dinks, wogs…they were all the same. During the early war years in Malaya and Burma, he encountered many British POWs. He had found them comical: haughty fools who didn’t realize their day had passed; a dishonorable rabble, not unlike the natives of the lands they had shamefully failed to protect for their king. If Japan was “The Empire of The Rising Sun,” Britain was surely “The Empire of The Setting Sun.”

  But he would forever reserve his deepest hatred for the Americans. It was on them that he would take his apocalyptic revenge.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Marge sits in the f-stop’s cockpit, overwhelmed by the array of gauges, switches, and levers that John, sitting on the wing outside, is trying to explain to her. Everything seems so much smaller than she had imagined. The only dimension that doesn’t conform to this impression is the height of the wings while the plane sits on its tall landing gear. It took her several awkward leaps, with a lot of help from John, to climb the boarding ladder onto the trailing edge of the left wing root. Once on the wing root, the cockpit is at your feet. You practically fall into its cramped confines.

  What a strange creation this aircraft is… so different from the other aircraft she has seen. There is no fuselage to speak of, just a pod jutting forward from the junction of the wings, with the cockpit at the rear of this pod, in line with the wings’ leading edges. Extending from the lower forward section of the pod is the nose landing gear, which is as tall as she is and retracts rearward in flight so the tire nestles inside the pod just below John’s feet. On either side is the big number “47,” painted in red, and the name “f-stop,” in black, on the shiny aluminum skin.

  Its two engines protrude forward from the wings, one on either side of the fuselage pod, each turning a three-bladed propeller. The plane’s height off the ground, provided by its spindly landing gear, is necessary for these blades to clear the ground. Rather than an aft fuselage, two slender booms extend aft from the engine nacelles to the tailplane.

  John has been describing the aircraft and its equipment to Marge nonstop, like a military instructor teaching a class of basic trainees. “In the fighter version,” he says, “the nose of the pod has four .50 caliber machine guns and one 20 millimeter cannon. Recon planes like this old girl have five cameras instead, looking through small windows that are oriented vertically down and obliquely to either side. We’ll get a better look at them from the ramp in a minute. Now, by synchronizing the airspeed, altitude, and shutter speed, I can get miles of continuous, high resolution strip photos of the earth below. Several strips shot on parallel courses give us a mosaic map.”

  “OK. I think I follow you there,” she says, forcing a smile. “And I thought you said you didn’t want to be an instructor. You sure sound like one right now.”

  “No, Lieutenant, you’re just getting the special five dollar tour. Relax and enjoy.”

  “Yes, sir!” she replies, with all the sarcastic tone she can muster.

  Marge’s head begins to swim again as John continues. “The props are constant speed, electrically controlled and cou
nter-rotating. That cancels out the torque, making her much easier to handle during take off and rapid applications of power.”

  Yeah, sure, Farm Boy, whatever the hell that all means.

  “Each of those big Allison engines has 12 cylinders and develops nearly 1500 horsepower, enough to give f-stop a top speed of over 400 miles per hour. Nothing the Japs have can overtake her in level flight.”

  Marge likes the sound of that. Yet it brings no comfort.

  He turns her attention to those two booms extending to the tail. While explaining the engine coolant radiators that protrude from their sides, she becomes fixated with the wheel-like mechanisms atop each boom, flush with the skin and in line with the wings’ trailing edges. Turning slowly in the stiff breeze, they remind her of the spinning ventilators on Chicago rooftops. She points to them, interrupting his presentation.

  “What are those?” she asks.

  “I was just getting to them,” he says. “They’re superchargers…turbochargers, actually. The hot exhaust gases from each engine spin a turbine which turns a compressor that squeezes the thin intake air at altitude so the engines will make full power up there.”

  “A supercharger… Isn’t that what blew out on you the day we met?”

  “Hey…good memory! It was that one over there,” he says, pointing to the one in the right boom.

  Marge had hoped that learning about his airplane would help lessen her growing dread that something might happen to him. It did not seem to be working that way, though.

  “But what does all that stuff mean when you’re up there risking your life, John?”

  He tries his very best to sound reassuring. “It means I can outrun and outclimb anybody else.”

  It does not matter what he says. All she keeps thinking is: This is a coffin with wings! He’s going to die in this thing!

  But she would not let him see how frightened she is. She summons all her resolve and tries to impress him with some pilot lingo.

  “Where’s George?” Marge says.

  “George? You mean the autopilot? She doesn’t have one. You’ve been hanging around too many bomber pilots!” John replies, somewhat crestfallen.

  “Never you mind!” She was enjoying this first hint of jealousy.

  Marge points to a lever on the cockpit sidewall labeled DIVE BRAKES. “OK… Does that mean you can dive faster than anybody, too?”

  “Not exactly. The dive brakes are little fences that pop out of the wing and increase drag. Without them, it’s possible to go so fast in a dive that you cannot pull out… it’s a phenomenon known as compressibility. If you get caught in it, it’s crash and burn.”

  There it was; that reminder of imminent death again. She struggled to overcome her tumbling spirits one more time.

  Dammit! He seems to love giving this little tour so much… Don’t ruin it for him!

  “John, your first airplane…What happened to it?”

  “She got worn out...‘war-weary’ or ‘uneconomical to repair,’ as they say in official jargon. She was an F-4, an earlier P-38 recon model. I turned her in to the scrap yard at Nadzab, New Guinea. Then we were assigned a brand new bunch of F-5’s, but before we ever flew them, they were taken back for conversion to fighters. Recon got the short end of the stick again. Finally, I was assigned this airplane from another batch of new ones.”

  “And you’ve never been shot down?”

  “No.”

  “How long before f-stop wears out?

  “A long time… she’s still going strong.”

  “You know, that name--f-stop--it’s kind of cute for a photo plane…like a lens setting, right?

  He nods. She probes a little deeper. “Are you sure you don’t you have a girl back home to name it after?”

  “Nope. Don’t have one.”

  “Hmm…I’ll bet,” she says, highly skeptical. “So what made you pick f-stop, anyway?”

  “Well, all the good names were taken, like Shutterbug, Celluloid Clipper, Photo Express, Eye in the Sky. It just sort of came to me.”

  “Well, I really like the name,” Marge says.

  “Yeah, me, too. You know, Marge, I really do love this plane.”

  “I know, honey, I can tell. Forgive me, but I find it a little hard to love.”

  “I guess I can understand that.” Then he adds: “And by the way…the number “47” on the sides…that, coincidentally, was my football number in high school and college.”

  “How convenient! There’s something I’ve got to ask you, John. It’s silly, but...”

  “Go ahead, ask.”

  “You’re up there so long some times. What do you do when you have to go to the bathroom?”

  “You think about something else.”

  “Does that really work, John?”

  “Well, there is a relief tube…I hate to use it…but if you’re asking me if I’ve ever peed myself in the cockpit, the answer is yes, but not for the reason you’re thinking.”

  Marge just stares at him with those bright green eyes, as if to say: OK, so tell me!

  “Back when I was a rookie in New Guinea, I was lost and got caught in a valley by two Japs flying Zekes…you probably call them Zeroes. Those guys were obviously not rookies. I was too low, too slow, and had nowhere to go. I was sure I was about to buy it, but I was real lucky. Even though the plane got riddled, it was all light machine gun stuff…they must have been out of cannon ammo when they ran into me. Every time I looked in the rearview mirror, all I could see was a big round engine right on my tail. I guess they shot at me until they ran out of all their ammo, then they vanished. I never got a scratch, though, but I did get a big case of the damp drawers. And speaking of being pissed, Jaworski gave me holy hell for all the holes they had to repair!”

  As he tells his tale, Marge’s resolve collapses. Her face slowly transforms into a portrait of apprehension. She winces when she realizes that John’s story is not finished.

  “And ever since then,” he says, “as a kind of reward for not actually getting my stupid self killed, I’ve been the squadron maintenance test pilot.”

  “What, exactly, is that, John?” She is almost too afraid to ask.

  “All the planes that get really badly damaged… after they’re repaired, I give them a test flight to make sure they still fly OK.”

  “OH, NO!” Marge cries, grabbing her shaking head with both hands.

  John leans down into the cockpit, takes her head in his hands and kisses her forehead. She looks up at him, her green eyes suddenly expressing all the terrible pain and loneliness of the past year in a world at war, and pleads in a whisper:

  “Take me away from here. Right now. Please!”

  Chapter Fifteen

  One week has passed since the War Council’s last discussion of the nuclear device.

  Foreign Minister Togo assembles the Council once again, still with the vain hope the military leaders would, at last, accept the concept of negotiated surrender. Prime Minister Suzuki silently shares that hope. They both believe that Japan is already defeated militarily. The US Navy’s highly effective blockade is literally starving their nation. The war must end.

  If not for the Allies’ insistence on “unconditional surrender,” that would be the Emperor’s wish as well; but it certainly isn’t the military’s wish. Both Suzuki and Togo fear assassination by fanatically extreme junior officers if they dare to differ too strongly with the generals and admirals. They would not be the first statesmen to meet death at the hands of wild-eyed, immature young men in uniform.

  The Prime Minister rises first to speak. “Gentlemen, I understand you are ready to propose a plan for deployment of the nuclear weapon. General Umezu, the Army commissioned Professor Inaba’s research. I call on you to enlighten us.”

  “It would be an honor, sir,” the General says, placing his prepared statement on the table before him. “As you all know, the defensive plan for the Home Islands is named Ketsu-Go. The section of this plan covering the defense of Kyushu is Ke
tsu-Go 6. We in the military understand some members of the government consider us deluded fools, but let us assure you we understand our situation clearly. We know we face a powerful foe who rules the sea and the sky. But this foe cannot be allowed to rule our people, control our way of life, or dictate terms to the Emperor. This foe fears setting foot on the soil of the Japanese homeland, as well he should. Our heroic defense of Okinawa was just a prelude to the battle he knows he will face if he invades. He does not understand our values, loyalty, and honor. He possesses no honor and is our inferior. The Kamikaze is a terrifying mystery to him. Unfortunately, the Kamikaze is all that is left of our once mighty Navy and Army Air Forces, but our ground troops are still almost five million strong… although half, of course, are on the Asian continent and, in light of the latest Russian betrayal, probably trapped there, unavailable for homeland defense. We believe our army on Kyushu, numbering over 500,000, can repel the American invaders, who will undoubtedly land on the southern beaches at the conclusion of this typhoon season, less than two months away. Our plan calls for fixing the attackers on the beaches and destroying them in place, before they can establish a foothold and employ the numerous airfields in the area. Close-in fighting on the beaches will negate the advantage the attackers will have in air and naval firepower. Reduced to this level of combat, the attackers will surely succumb to the determination of the soldier defending his own soil.”

  Foreign Minister Togo rises to speak. “General, we all have the deepest respect for your efforts in these matters, but we are all familiar with Ketsu-Go. How will the nuclear weapon help us?”

 

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