Above the Thunder (2 page)

U.S. Army liaison pilot wings (Photograph by Tom Baker).

Most of those young men returned home after the war and rais ed families (my generation, the baby boomers), eventually became grandparents and great-grandparents, and now have grown old or passed on. The book is special to me, not only because I am privileged to be a friend of the author but also because my father was one of those young men, and in many ways this is his story too. Like Kerns, my father flew the small Army observation planes that wreaked such devastation on the enemy through the artillery fire they called in upon the battlefields. This book provides the reader with some idea of what those men thought and felt as they found themselves far from home and family, locked in life-and-death struggles with wily, brutal foes. It is those insights that give this book its greatest importance.

On a secondary but still important level, Kerns's memoir illuminates the history and beginnings of U.S. Army aviation, for much of what he
writes about occurred while he was piloting the small, unarmed, low-flying observation aircraft of the artillery assigned to the support of the infantry. Beginning in 1942, these so-called liaison airplanes were assigned directly to the Army ground forces, not the Air Forces (that is, the Army Air Forces or Army Air Corps, which became the independent U.S. Air Force after the war), and unlike the Air Forces pilots who flew the fighters and bombers that the public usually associates with World War II aviation, the Army pilots of the ground forces interacted closely and continually with the foot soldiers who slugged it out with the enemy face to face. These liaison pilots, or L-pilots, thus had experiences much different from the pilots of fighter or bomber planes, and, indeed, L-pilots lived in a different world from Air Corps pilots.

Air Forces pilots were normally based with their fighters or bombers at airfields away from the fighting front, or (in the case of Navy and Marine pilots) on aircraft carriers at sea, and only saw combat infantrymen, if they saw them at all, when they attacked assigned targets in some proximity to them. They rarely had any personal interaction with foot soldiers. At the end of each flying mission, Air Corps pilots returned to their relatively civilized quarters (the envy of all infantrymen in their muddy foxholes on the battlefield) in barracks or tents adjacent to their airfields.

By contrast, the Army liaison pilots of World War II were essentially flying soldiers, who lived, ate, slept, and otherwise spent their daily lives alongside the infantrymen they supported. Each infantry division had its attached division artillery (Div Arty), and each battalion of artillery was allotted two small airplanes with their pilots, observers, and ground crews. Rather than having each artillery battalion's two aircraft acting independently, Div Arty centralized control in an air section, usually commanded by a major who coordinated the activities of all the battalion pilots for the division. Thus, when an infantry division moved, its attached Div Arty with its air section and aircraft moved with it. This infantry/artillery/aviation team, with its activities tightly coordinated, remained together throughout the campaigns. A division's bulldozers scraped out airfields for its planes at every change of location, as the Army maneuvered about the landscape.

The primary duties of an artillery pilot and his observer (if he took one along) were, first, to direct daily artillery fire on the enemy from their aerial observation posts (air OPs) and, second, to assist the ground forces in any way possible—and they found many ways. The armies of World War II maneuvered under the protection of massed artillery barrages, and to be effective, this cannon fire had to be delivered with the greatest possible precision. Although the infantry always had artillery forward observers on the ground with it for this purpose, the air observation posts proved to be so much more effective, because of their wide aerial view of things, that the aircraft ended up doing most of the artillery fire direction work. (In the Pacific theater, the pilots usually flew alone and did the fire-direction duties themselves, while in Europe they more often took up trained observers who directed the fire missions.)

But it bears repeating that these Army pilots were always and ever an integral element of the ground forces; their airplanes were listed as artillery equipment (officially they were even listed as vehicles, like jeeps), and the infantry divisions they were attached to took care of them, greatly appreciated them (in most cases cherished them), and considered them their own. According to
The Golden Cross,
the official history of the 33d Infantry Division, to which Lieutenant Kerns was attached:

Few people had more friends in the 33d than the artillery liaison pilots. Eleven in number, they accomplished the work of fifty men. They dropped supplies to small patrols operating well in front of the Division line. Whole battalions on the move were oriented by pilots providing “protective” cover. Platoons in the attack received immediate information on strength and disposition of enemy forces occupying their objectives.

Commanded by Major Richard F. Bortz, the Air Section exemplifies cooperation between infantry and artillery. Battalion and company commanders planning an advance were always given a chance to first survey the terrain from the air. Patrol leaders received the same consideration. Engineering parties, dispatched on reconnaissance for prospective road or bridge sites, had their leaders ferried over the hills via L-4.

More beneficial than anything else, however, was the Air Section's effect on infantry morale. To riflemen up front, the sight of a Cub plane cruising overhead was cause for rejoicing. It meant immediate relief from Japanese artillery fires. Enemy gunners, realizing that operations in the face of this observation could only bring counter battery fire, promptly ceased activity. Mountain guns were hastily wheeled back into caves and outside camouflage buttoned into place. Nip barrages thereafter were generally reserved for dawn and dusk—before the L-4s came out or after they had retired for the night.

Every pilot in the section received the Silver Star and Air Medal; awards in which the infantry heartily concurred.
¹

Infantrymen never forgot the help provided by the artillery pilots and observers during desperate encounters with determined enemies. In March 2008, Kerns received a letter from former 33d Division infantryman James McNicols, a man he had never met or heard of, thanking him for directing artillery fire on Japanese troops on Luzon on 5 and 6 March 1945, while the 33d Division was pushing up the Tubao-Agoo Road toward Baguio against heavy resistance. McNicols had researched Army records to find out who was in the L-4 above him during those two days, directing the gunfire that lessened the enemy pressure on him and his comrades. Sixty-three years after the event, he sent his thanks to the pilot. The division history goes on to describe the many photo missions flown by the pilots, which were often conducted so far beyond the range of the artillery that the enemy had no fear of shooting at the Cubs, and the planes often came home with their cloth skins ventilated by bullet holes.

The airplane referred to, the Army L-4 (L for “liaison”), was the type usually flown by these pilots throughout the war in both the Pacific and European theaters. The L-4 was actually just a slightly modified civilian J-3 Piper Cub, a small (thirty-five-foot wingspan) airplane designed in 1930 for low-cost pleasure flying and basic flight training (see
appendix
for diagrams, full specifications, and a detailed history of its civilian development). A Cub carried two people, shoehorned into the cramped cockpit one behind the other (in tandem), and seemed an unlikely candidate for a warplane, which is no doubt why the Army brass dismissed
out-of-hand the idea of using it in warfare when it was first proposed. And yet, in one of those strange twists of fate, the little Piper Cub ended up becoming the most effective warplane of the Second World War.

By 1942, the Piper J-3 Cub had been in production for nearly a dozen years, thousands had been sold to the public, and it had become so familiar to the average American that “piper cub” had become a generic term for any small airplane. Painted yellow with a black stripe down the side, a Cub was mechanically the simplest of airplanes, of light yet rugged construction. It weighed only 680 pounds empty and consisted of a deceptively flimsy-looking skeleton of welded steel tubing and aluminum formers to give it its shape, with wooden spars of Sitka spruce passing through aluminum ribs to form its wings. This whole framework (except for the aluminum sheet-metal cowling around the engine) was covered with a cotton cloth skin that was stiffened and made airtight by several coats of a special kind of paint, called “dope” (from the effects of its fumes on the painters). Within that cloth skin, the plane was mostly air, accounting for why Liuetenant Kerns could fly one home from a mission with forty-seven bullet holes in it—most of them being merely holes in the fabric, and the bullets had hit nothing but air in passing through.

Except for its engine, a Cub had few moving parts, so there was not a great deal to go wrong with it as long as its engine kept running, and the engine itself was a simple, reliable, air-cooled four-cylinder power plant (an O-170-3/A-65-8) manufactured by the Continental Engine Corporation. With only sixty-five horsepower turning the propeller, though, the airplane barely made seventy-five miles per hour at cruise, and at slower speeds, against a stiff headwind, it might hover—or even travel backward—over the ground (some pilots did this just for fun on windy days). But this slow speed also made the airplane ideal for aerial observation and allowed it to land practically anywhere—a road, a stretch of beach, a meadow, anywhere a little reasonably flat open space could be found. It could also be fitted with skis to fly off snow, pontoons to fly from water, or (with a hook fixed above its wing) could snag a cable and land without even touching the ground. And the plane's simple construction rendered it easy to maintain and repair in the field. Cloth patches could be applied in minutes to any
rips or tears in its fabric skin (my father once flew one temporarily repaired with adhesive tape and Kerns writes of one patched with hankerchiefs). The tubular steel framework of a Cub's fuselage, landing gear, or tail, if bent or broken, could be hammered back into shape or welded with motor-pool equipment, while a damaged wooden propeller, in a pinch, could be whittled back to a functional shape with a pocketknife. The low-compression engine was not fussy about fuel and could burn automobile or truck gas when necessary.

Thus, rugged in all the ways that counted, stable and easy to fly from its civilian sport-plane heritage, the Piper Cub in war became an aerial jeep of tremendous utility to the Army. As Kerns notes in this book, the Cub proved itself to be the most cost-effective weapon in the Allied arsenal (a Piper L-4 cost the government only $2,800). As the eyes in the sky of the artillery, commanding the massed firepower of battalions of field guns, the Cub frequently became the most important asset on the battlefield. Gen. A. D. Bruce, commander of the 77th Infantry Division, was quoted after the war as saying, “The secret weapons of the South Pacific War were the Piper Cub L-4 and the bulldozer.”
²

When called to war, the J-3 Cub shed its yellow paint for military OD (olive drab) camouflage green, was provided with some extra cockpit glass to aid aerial observation, plus a platform behind its rear seat on which to mount the bulky radios of the day, and was thereby transformed into an airplane that some rightly came to call “the most lethal warplane in the world”—the Army L-4. Though it sounds like a joke, the description was entirely accurate, for the pilot of an L-4, in radio contact with battalions of artillery, could quickly call down so many tons of high explosive onto a target that even flights of heavy bombers could not equal its destructive power. Someone once calculated that a single artillery battalion could fire fifty tons of shells in an hour, and the pilot or observer of an L-4 could direct the fire of
several
battalions at once onto a target if need be.
³
Furthermore, he could deliver this tremendous firepower on call, with greater precision than bombers, and keep it up for as long as necessary to destroy the target, even following moving targets if necessary. After a few demonstrations of this awesome ability,
both Japanese and German guns quickly learned to fall silent when a Cub appeared in the sky, so as not to reveal their locations and invite such deadly retribution. As mentioned in the 33d Division history, this, of course, endeared the Cubs and their pilots to ground troops everywhere. Army inductees might initially have been surprised to see the little Piper Cubs of their hometown airports going to war with them, but when they entered combat, the troops, as well as their commanders, soon came to rely on the Cubs in a myriad of ways. (One of my father's friends, then captain Brenton A. Devol Jr., suffered the indignity of being shot at by the U.S. Navy during the North Africa landings by ships' gunners who mistook his Cub for an enemy aircraft. Another Cub flying with him was shot down. The Navy gunners later explained, ruefully, “If you were at sea and saw a Cub putt-putting by, would you believe it?”
⁴
)