Above the Thunder (19 page)

Hastily, we climbed into his ship and took off. He was a bit irritated with me because every time he asked for something the copilot was supposed to do, he'd have to show me where it was or do it himself, with rare exceptions. I did manage to get the gear up by myself, and as he banked toward the site of the accident he looked at me and asked what I'd been flying. With a straight face, I replied, “L-4.” After a few seconds delay, he said, “Oh.”

We saw some wreckage floating and a patch of yellow water from a dye marker, but I don't think either of the P-40 pilots was ever seen again. If they were, I never heard of it.

South of Nawiliwili Harbor there are some steep cliffs along the shore, and on these cliffs—in 1943, at least—there were wild goats. Vin got the idea of trying to shoot one with a carbine from the plane while I flew the plane. After several tries, he brought one down—and then we both wished he hadn't. It would be almost impossible to recover the
carcass, and what would we do with it if we had it? So we left the goats to themselves after that.

In the early days on Kauai, before we got our planes, I was detailed to Btry A of the 122d, and the BC, Captain Hurlbut, sent me out to his OP—just to get me out of the way, I suppose. The post itself was an artificial rock built in among some real ones on a bluff about midway between Nawiliwili and Koloa. It had just a narrow slit through which our BC-scope looked out southeastward over the sea. A hundred yards behind us, hidden from the ocean side, we had a cook shack.

We had a dog there, and one night he growled and then ran off in the direction of the cook shack, as if he were going to tear something to bits. But then he came backing up, running to and fro across the path but always losing ground, and barking frantically. At least three possibilities ran through my mind. One was guerrillas, but I doubted that there really were any in the islands then, if ever. Another was wild hogs or goats. The third was a sneak thief over at our cook shack. I decided we'd better investigate.

Leaving three men at the OP and taking the sergeant with me, I set out to cut around to the left of the path and down a little gully until we were near the shack. Then I sent the sergeant farther down to where he could watch the path below the shack for anyone leaving that way. When he was in position, he whistled to me and I moved in on the shack, pistol ready. If someone had hollered “Boo!” I'd have disappeared for several days. But my luck held. If anyone had been there, he was either gone or well concealed somewhere by the time I arrived. We never did find out what the dog was barking at. Possibly it was menehunis, the Hawaiian version of leprechauns. But it gave me a chance to show how brave I was, and how great a tactician.

Flying down Waimea Canyon one day, Dwight Mossman suddenly became aware that he was about to fly into three power cables strung across the canyon some four hundred feet above its floor. He pushed the nose down to go under them, and his landing gear caught an unseen fourth
cable that was swinging lower than the rest. The cable didn't break. It flipped the airplane over itself and left it plunging steeply toward the ground at low speed. As Mossman regained partial control, he tried to pull up, but the plane passed between two trees, tearing off both wings, and then the fuselage slid into a heavy clump of light undergrowth and came to a halt. He and his passenger suffered only minor injuries.

Shortly after our arrival in Hawaii, Maj. Gen. Percy W. Clarkson took command of the division. Flying General Clarkson into the 210th Bn's strip one day, Fred Hoffman failed to see some field wire the communications people had thoughtfully strung across the approach. The resultant difficulty didn't hurt Fred or the plane very much, but it did wrench the general's back rather severely.

Div Arty's airstrip at Kalaheo was a small baseball field on top of a hill barely large enough to hold it. Trees and a high hedge blocked two adjacent sides. Another side had the chicken-wire backstop as an obstacle. It wasn't too bad if you had a pretty good wind from a handy direction; otherwise, it was slightly difficult.

Early one morning I flew into Kalaheo. There was not a breath of wind, and the grass was still wet with morning dew. I set the plane down at the very edge of the longest axis of the field and began trying to stop, but the big slick tires just slid on the wet grass as if it were ice, and my brakes were useless. With the hedge rapidly coming up ahead, I had to ground-loop to get stopped and avoid it. The only damage was that the little solid-rubber tire was knocked off of the tail wheel. The Div Arty mechanics put it back on within five minutes and it was as good as new.

But Fred Hoffman deemed it necessary to chew me out and lecture me in a very unpleasant way—from the vantage point of his silver bar over my gold one—as if I had committed an unpardonable offense. I resented that, so if I tell a funny story about Fred later on, you'll understand that I'm just getting even. Actually, he wasn't a bad sort; it was just a bad morning for him.

We didn't get to do a lot of shooting while on Kauai, but when we did shoot, the pilots had the task of clearing cattle out of the range area. That was fun—low altitude, close quarters, up and down the draws and around the thickets, driving the dogies just like old cowhands.

I helped Mel Harker, our battalion assistant S-2, experiment with a method of extending survey to points in the target area that could not be seen by the surveyor on the ground. He set up his aiming circle and marked it with a white panel, then he tracked my plane with the aiming circle while I flew a course that placed his position directly in line between me and a point he wanted to locate. When I had them in line, I called on the radio, “Mark,” and he stopped tracking and recorded the azimuth reading on his aiming circle. We took three readings on each of several points, and then he moved to a new location along his selected survey baseline and we repeated the procedure with the same points. Averaging the readings at each point and plotting the reciprocals of the azimuths, he was able to locate the points accurately enough for artillery-fire control. However, I don't think we ever had occasion to use such a procedure in combat.

Among the nonflight details I was given while on Kauai was to make the annual inventory of all PX (post exchange) facilities on the island, which had stock worth something like $250,000. I was given a sizable force of civilian clerical personnel and more authority than I had ever enjoyed before. I guess I did a satisfactory job, since I heard no word to the contrary.

Flying in those days, there on Kauai with our simple little airplanes, usually with no radio, no flight plans, and no direct supervision by anyone, was a great pleasure and relaxation. I made a practice of going up for thirty minutes or so every morning as soon as I got to the airstrip, whether there was a need to or not. It woke me up, cleared my head, and made me feel good for the rest of the day.

One morning I came down from such a flight, during which I had flown loops and spins and other maneuvers, and discovered that my safety belt had been unfastened during the entire flight. A serious uncoordinated movement—such as stalling on top of one of my loops—might have had catastrophic results, since we never carried chutes on routine flights. On one occasion (not this same one) I accidentally performed a whip stall, in which the plane is flown straight up until it stops dead in the air, then slides backward for a short distance and quickly swaps ends (because of the engine's weight) and falls nose first toward the ground
until it regains control speed. Every bit of dust and dirt and trash that had accumulated inside the plane was thrown into the air and floated around me. I felt very much as if I were up there without an airplane, and it was a most unpleasant sensation. If I had not had a safety belt then, I might have come down alone.

Returning from one of my wakeup flights one morning, I was met by T/4 Wendell Young, who looked very worried. As I started to get out of the plane, Wendy came up to the door and said, “Sir, let me show you something.” He pointed to the two bolts that hold the main spars of the wings to the frame of the airplane. Both were in place but there were no nuts on them, not to mention the normal cotter-pin safety. If one of those bolts had worked out, a wing would have immediately separated from the airplane, no question about that. It was another case in which I had just jumped into my plane and taken off without checking the aircraft status symbol in the Form 1. In this case, it was a red X, meaning non-flyable. Sergeant Allen had removed the bolts for inspection and had replaced them but had left for breakfast before replacing the nuts.

Despite little oversights like that, I managed to survive to fly about five thousand hours as an alleged pilot. I sometimes wonder how.

Pvt. Joe Dzyb had more than an unusual name, he also had a talent for painting in oil. He also had a desire for an airplane ride, and he offered to paint a picture on my plane if I'd take him up. We made the deal quickly, and Dzyb carried out his part of the bargain, then he came down to Isenberg for his ride.

“Now, sir, I've never been up before and I'm not sure I'm going to like it, so please don't do anything fancy.”

I promised I wouldn't, and we took off. I had little more than cleared the edge of the short field and had not so much as started a gentle turn when he tapped me on the shoulder and asked me to take him down. As gently as I could, I circled the field and landed. Dzyb got out and lay on the ground, his face on his arms. Thinking he was just feeling a little nauseous, I went inside the tent and left him there. But it must have
been thirty minutes later that one of the men told me that Dzyb was still lying there. He would not respond to anything we said, and even shaking him would not rouse him, although he appeared to be conscious. The medics came and took him away, and it was about a week before he was released from the hospital.

On Sundays the beach at Nawiliwili was always crowded. One such day, when many people were well out into the bay, I spotted from the air two very large manta rays, great devilfish, headed in toward the beach, getting very near the swimmers. Having no radio, I hurriedly landed at our strip and called our CP by phone. They, in turn, called the Lihue police. A few minutes later, I was back in the air and watching when the word about the rays reached the beach. The water appeared to boil with people heading for shore, and very shortly the rays had the bay all to themselves. Considering that the largest devilfish are about twenty feet wide and weigh up to 3,000 pounds, I wouldn't have cared to tangle with one, either. The ones I saw at Nawililwili must have been among the largest.

Mount Waialeale is 5,080 feet high, just 90 feet lower than Kauai's highest peak, Mt. Kawaikini. Waialeale has one of the world's greatest recorded annual rainfalls, averaging 456 inches. That's mighty wet, and it's not easy to find a time when the mountain is not clouded, but on a day when ceiling and visibility permitted, I flew low across the broad, flat top of it. You may have trouble envisioning a swamp on a mountaintop, but that's what it looked like to me. The vegetation was quite dense but low, and I don't recall seeing any large trees up there.