Above the Thunder (11 page)

Knowing that, to save ammunition, there would be no fire for effect, I hesitated a few seconds. Major Ferris asked, “What is your next command?”

“Repeat range, fire for effect,” I replied.

“Cease fire, mission accomplished,” said Major Ferris. “Are there any comments?”

One of the captains stood up and said, “Yes, sir. He changed his method of conducting fire when he said ‘repeat range, fire for effect.' He should have said ‘battery so many rounds, elevation such-and-such.'”

He was right, and I knew it, but before Ferris could reply to the captain, Bledsoe said, “Damn it, Captain, sit down and shut up! That's the best mission that's been fired out here today.”

There was another time, not long after that, when I successfully fired a mission, and this time I knew what I was doing. Those occasions were to pay off later in ways of which I never dreamed.

Soon after my experience with the roving guns, Major Ferris had me transferred to a job in the FDC as a chart operator and battery computer. This gave me further opportunity to learn gunnery—and it also gained me the status of “jawbone” sergeant, an acting sergeant, granted the
authority and privileges of the grade but still drawing the pay of a PFC, specialist 3d class. I moved into an old shack near the FDC, sharing a room with my new boss, Tech. Sgt. John W. Stone. Under his guidance and with the friendly encouragement of Lt. Robert Bernard, our personnel adjutant, I made important advances in my understanding of the sometimes mysterious ways of artillerymen.

I'd been in FDC about two months, I guess, when my new BC, Captain Snow, called and asked whether I thought I could handle the radio section. He said he had busted George Williams for overstaying a pass. I moved back to the section that day and was immediately promoted to sergeant. A month later—about the first of June—I was further promoted to staff sergeant, the grade called for by my position as radio section chief.

Captain Snow had told me that Colonel Bledsoe, a firm advocate of radio instead of wire as the prime communication means for artillery, wanted the radio section put into top shape, and I set out to do the best I could at that task. We had received several draftee replacements and two or three men transferred from other assignments in the battery. I put Corporal Downs, the assistant section chief, in charge of making radio operators out of these new men while I concentrated on coordinating all other activities of the section and helped as I could in improving radio communications in the firing batteries. Driving around the sector in my command car with long whip antenna waving, I received the salute of many a sentry who thought I must be someone important, so I just returned the salutes and went on.

As the new men progressed with their training, there came a day when Pappy Downs advised me that one of them, Leroy Ryder, in order to complete his training, needed to work for a while with an experienced operator on one of our major stations. I put him on our station in the division artillery (Div Arty) command net, and that led to my first little difficulty as section chief.

I considered Burnis Williamson and Ralph Park the best operators we had, and the Div Arty command-net station had been theirs for a long time. To get better contact and to avoid pinpointing the head quarters for enemy radio direction finders, the station was located some distance from the battery area, and the two operators lived there, coming to the
battery only for meals. They had built them selves a comfortable shack out of scrap materials and had run a power line in from the road a hundred yards away. They had even built themselves a transformer so they could use the line power to run their radio, thus avoiding the onerous task of cranking the generator while transmitting. They were proud of their work and quite happy with their situation.

Park answered when I phoned the station.

“Park, I'm going to send Leroy Ryder up there tomorrow to work for a while to get experience in the net. Either you or Willie will have to come down to the battery. I don't care which one, you can decide that between yourselves.”

Ralph was beside himself with outrage. He objected strongly and in very positive terms, and I appealed to his own understanding of the need for training the men to get him to accept the inevitable. But he raised the devil, nonetheless.

“Willie and I work our fingers to the bone to build this place up, and now that we've got a good setup you send these Johns from the States—these damned handcuffed volunteers—up here to get all the gravy!” he yelled.

“I know you've worked hard and you deserve what you've got, Park, but you can see the position we're in. Besides that, I need a top-notch operator down here to take over the 193 from Crupi.”

I thought that would soften Ralph a bit, and it did. The SCR-193 was by far the biggest and most powerful set we had. It was mounted in the back of a command car, and any operator would have been pleased to get it.

“Well, OK,” said Park, grudgingly, “I won't even mention it to Willie. I'll come down myself.”

There was no more trouble about it.

One night, as sergeant of the guard, I was returning from checking the sentries around the area when, passing the little garage building that was our orderly room, I heard a typewriter in operation. I stop ped in to see why Private First Class Rupert, the battery clerk, was working so late and found that he was typing applications for Officer Candidate
School (OCS) that, he said, had to reach Battalion Headquarters early next morning to meet a quota deadline. I sat down to talk with him. As he finished the last application, he asked me why I hadn't applied for OCS.

“Oh, it wouldn't do any good. I'd never make it.”

“Why not? You have as good a chance as any of these guys who are applying. What's your IQ score?”

I didn't even know I had an IQ score, so he looked it up in the files.

“Why, this is the best score I know of in the battery. Look, why don't you let me type up an application for you. The BC will sign it in the morning and it can go up with the others. Maybe you can at least get back to the states.”

That last part sold me. A few days later I went before a board of officers at Schofield. I was called into a large room with windows along one side. Before those windows were a couple of small tables, at which sat two majors and two captains, one of whom, Capt. Claude Shepard, I knew. In the middle of the room, facing them, was a straight chair in which I was instructed to be seated. On a wall some distance to my left was a large map of the island of Oahu. Otherwise, the room was empty.

The officers took turns asking me questions while I sat stiff and straight in the chair, with no place to hide. I could barely see their faces, the backlight from the windows making them little more than silhouettes. The questions covered a wide range of subjects—my personal background, my duty assignment, various aspects of my duties, current events and my opinions regarding them, military organ ization and chain of command, and so on. Seldom was I allowed to complete an answer before another would interrupt with a question on some unrelated topic. Occasionally, after I had given an answer, the officers would sit silently for a short time and look at each other as if appalled at my ignorance. Then the quiz would be resumed.

One of the questions they popped at me was, “How far is it from here to Haleiwa?” I remembered the map off to my left. I glanced at it for a few seconds and counted the grid squares between Schofield and Haleiwa. Noting that the direction cut diagonally across the squares, I made an allowance for that and told them it was approximately so many thousands of yards. That seemed to please them.

Eventually, without a word to me, they all got up and exited through a door to their left. I remained seated. Occasionally, one of them would come back, open the door, gaze silently at me for several seconds, then close the door again. After about ten minutes, they filed back in and sat down. One of them said, “Sergeant Kerns, we note that you have only an eighth grade education, that you have never studied geometry or trigonometry, and that your education in mathematics is generally quite limited. Mathematics is very important in artillery, as you may know. Therefore, it is the opinion of this board that if you go to OCS now you run a very high risk of failing. Having failed once, you may never get another chance. So we, the board, recommend that you return to your battery, study algebra and trigonometry, and apply again after a few months.”

My heart sank, of course, and my dream of seeing home again before the end of the war crumbled to dust. But the major wasn't finished.

“However, we have received letters of recommendation for you from your BC, Captain Snow; your battalion S-3, Major Ferris; and from your former battalion commander, Colonel Bledsoe, now the Div Arty chief of staff. On the strength of these recommendations, we have decided to leave the decision up to you. Either stay and study, as we have recommended, or go now and take your chances, as you may choose. You may go outside now and think it over for a few minutes.”

“Thank you, sir, but I can decide right now. I'd like to go and take my chances.”

“Very well. You're dismissed, Sergeant. Good luck.”

Out of fourteen applicants from the 89th who were examined that day, five of us passed that artillery board. Of those five, I was the only one who then made it past the medical examination. Within two weeks, I was on a ship for the U.S. of A.

Some historians claim that the morale of the U.S. fighting forces was extremely low in the months following the attack on Pearl Harbor. I don't believe it, not for a minute. We firmly believed in our cause, we were angry with the enemy for having attacked without warning or a declaration of war, we wanted to strike back, and we had not the slightest doubt that, ultimately, we would win the war. True, we were rather astonished at the Japanese strength relative to our own, but the typical American fighting man was determined, like First Sergeant
Regan, that “those little yellow bastards” would be sorry for what they had done. We took pride in such things as the words of Marine Corps major James Devereaux just before his tiny garrison at Wake Island was finally overwhelmed by vastly superior numbers of Japanese troops. The brave commander refused to accept the certainty of defeat, and his last message reported: “The issue is still in doubt.”
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There was frustration, of course, among the ground troops who had to sit on guard and wait for an enemy that might never come, while the sea and air people were going out to find and fight him wherever they could. The average man was genuinely eager for an active combat role in the war, and a few of our ground troops found it by getting transfers to the AAF as radio operators and gunners. Others who tried and failed were bitterly disappointed. My friend Ernett Onderdonck was one of those whose request for transfer was refused, and he went to the stockade for striking Major Carroll, the acting battalion commander, with his fist. Some of our men went to Kaneohe in their free time and got rides with dive-bomber pilots on their training flights just to feel a little closer to the war. Men who are eager for closing with the enemy are not in low morale, and the sight of damaged planes and casualties returning to Oahu during the Battle of Midway did nothing to cool their ardor.
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There may have been senior officers and civilian officials who held doubts and fears—people such as my onetime hero, Col. Charles A. Lindbergh, who thought the Germans invincible—but the lower echelons, technically ready or not, did not share them.
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As the Pearl Harbor disaster united the people of the country and brought their support for the war, so it fired up the fighting forces to go after the enemy. When the time was finally right, they went and they conquered.

I'm proud to have been a Pineapple Soldier. I'm proud to have had even a minor role in the events of that tragic day when this nation was plunged into the greatest of wars, and in the preparation of one of that war's finest artillery units for the outstanding combat record it would earn on Guadalcanal, New Georgia, and Luzon. In the process, I learned something of the technicalities of field artillery, but still more important, I believe, I came to understand the basic philosophy of the artilleryman, the redleg soldier who is there to provide the best possible fire support
for the most admirable of all soldiers, the infantry rifleman, who must close with the enemy and fight him face to face.

When I left the islands for OCS in August 1942, I looked back from the ship at the sunset to see Mount Olomana faintly silhouetted against the backlighted Koolaus, and I could envision the scene there at its foot on Maunawili Ranch where the HQ Btry men would be straggling down to the mess tent, joking, laughing, their mess kits jangling, somebody's radio playing “Maria Elena.” I knew it was the end of a phase of my life, that I could never be back there again, and I couldn't keep the tears out of my eyes. I wish that I could roll away the years and be back there with them right now.