Above the Thunder (32 page)

“Hell yes, I know what a fathom is. That's my guess. What's your guess?”

His guess was so obviously far beyond reason that I really felt asham ed to go through with the bet.

“Captain Olsen, have you considered the fact that this ship is at anchor here within a few hundred yards of an island?”

“What's your guess, Kerns?”

“Well—I'll say ten fathoms.”

We found one of the ship's officers on deck, and he answered our question: “Oh, about six or seven fathoms.”

I hated to take Captain Olsen's money—fifty guilders was about $28 at the existing exchange rate—but he had asked for the bet, and I think it's the only bet I ever won. It took a while for him to start being friendly with me again, but he finally got over it.

Next morning it was anchors aweigh, and our small convoy bore northwest toward the Philippines. En route, we joined a much larger number of ships carrying the rest of the 33d Division from the Halmahera Islands, where they had helped to tame the enemy on Morotai, and we made quite a respectable and very warlike flotilla on the bounding main.

For the first few days aboard, it was hard to get a drink of water at one of the scuttlebutts. After months of drinking warm, heavily chlorinated water in New Guinea, our people formed perpetual lines for the good, sweet, cool water aboard ship, and many a soldier would move directly from the fountain to the end of the line. In New Guinea, we'd had essentially nothing cold to drink. The only way to cool a can of beer—if you had one—was to sacrifice a “bug bomb” by spraying its pressurized contents on the can, and that wasteful practice still left the beer a long way from Stateside cold. Once during our stay at Maffin Bay, some morale-building team visited us with a machine that dispensed cold Coca-Cola, and even Uncle Bud Carlson stood in line to get his half-a-canteen-cupful. That's all anyone got, but it was a red-letter day.

There were lots of card games and crap games aboard our ship, much conversation on a wide range of topics but with emphasis on favorite restaurants, it seemed to me. In fact, eating establishments were a favorite subject throughout the war, and one on which I could never talk, because I'd never been anywhere or visited any fine restaurants. Well, there was the time Bill Gibson and Paul Arnold and I sat down at a table at Lau Yee Chai's in Waikiki and spent our entire month's pay for dinner, but I couldn't say that was my favorite place. Heiress Barbara Hutton could afford to party there, but we common soldiers certainly couldn't. But most of the fellows from the big cities, especially, considered restaurant quality the criterion by which to measure every place they ever visited, and it seemed to me to be the only thing they remembered about a city. I got tired of hearing about them.

Of course, there was the occasional gum-chewing Dane Clark type with his endless discussion of women he claimed to have known.

There was a lot of socializing among the infantry, artillery, and other branch personnel, and many new acquaintances were made with people who heretofore had been, at most, voices identified by radio call signs. That was good. For some reason, though, the two new acquaintances I recall best from that trip were both unpleasant personalities that would play interesting and contrasting roles in future events of my war experience.

Lt. Edward Schuster was a tall, slender, young infantry platoon leader with short blond hair and a disposition that seemed to dare anyone to try to be friendly with him. He would go out of his way to be nasty in response to just about any approach, and no one understood why. The other fellow—nameless, for the purposes of our story—was a burly, loud-mouthed captain with curly black hair and a red face. He was constantly sounding off about his personal prowess and bravery, and he bragged ceaselessly about what his company was going to do when they turned it loose in the Philippines.

Our ship stopped for a few hours off the shore of Leyte, where Douglas MacArthur had made good his promise, “I shall return,” less than three months before. All we could see from the ship was a long stretch of sandy beach backed by blasted trunks of coco palms and hazy distant mountains. We talked of the great naval battle that had so recently been
fought here in Leyte Gulf, and I thought of my brother-in-law Fay Lane, fighting somewhere on Leyte with the 7th Infantry Division. And then we were underway again, sailing through Surigao Strait and the narrow Mindanao Sea.

Despite the successes of our sea and air forces, we knew that these were still dangerous waters, and many of us spent most of our time on deck, scanning the sea and the sky, trying to identify the land masses that we could occasionally see on one side or the other. Colonel Carlson, who spent most of the day on the bridge, told us later that the ship's captain paced the bridge anxiously, marveling that there were no enemy airplanes to contest our passage. Late in the afternoon, we saw on the starboard side a distant coast that we knew was the island of Negros, and far to port was a bluish headland that someone told us was Tagolo Point on Mindanao. Our ship plowed on to the west into the Sulu Sea and toward the most beautiful sunset I have ever had the pleasure of witnessing.

I don't know what our route was from there on, but eventually our convoy slid into Lingayen Gulf and came to anchor amid scores of other assorted vessels. We climbed down cargo nets hanging over the side and dropped into an LCT (Landing Craft, Tank), I believe, which ran us in to shallow water about a hundred yards from the beach. From there, just like General MacArthur, we waded ashore.

Where the 122d FA went ashore, the beach was crowded and busy with logistical activities in support of the divisions that had made the assault landing a month earlier, and I think it was about the same all around the several miles of Lingayen beaches. Nevertheless, the first man I spoke to when I reached the beach was one I knew well, PFC Gilbert Higgins of Vermont, a member of my old unit, HQ Btry, 89th FA Bn. Big Higgins was there with a detail expediting supplies for the 25th Division.

The contingent from Morotai had brought a replacement for my lost L-4. This one was transferred from the 31st Division. It may not have been the worst plane the Dixie Division had, but it certainly wasn't the best. Just the same, I was happy to have my own ship once more, and as soon as we got our tents up on the old 43d Division strip at San Fabian, the boys got busy assembling and checking it and Vineyard's
Arizona Keed.
The strip was a good one, sandy but firm, lined on one side with coco palms that provided some shade and concealment. The fire-blackened frame of an L-4 lay at one side.

As we worked to get our planes ready, local citizens began informally to visit us. Many of them had something to sell—a homemade candy wrapped in banana leaves, hand-rolled cigars in bundles of fifty tied with twine. Coming from a family of Kentucky tobacco farmers, I was pleasantly surprised to note that this was a tobacco-growing region. The men were clean and intelligent looking, most of them wearing beautiful pure white shirts. Old women squatted, grinning, in the background, smoking roll-your-own cigarettes with the lighted end inside their mouths—not just to show off, but by preference, we learned. Younger women were more shy around the soldiers and therefore less in evidence. Children were everywhere.

Some of the men told infuriating stories of atrocious or degenerate conduct on the part of Japanese soldiers during the occupation, and some claimed—maybe truthfully, maybe not—to have been guerrilla fighters against the Japanese. Some of these people impressed me as sincere and honest, but others, I'm sure, were merely seeking favor for whatever benefit it might bring them.

One young fellow made a deal with Vin: if we could get him some lard, he would bring us a fried chicken. Fried chicken! It was music to our South Pacific ears, and our boys went all out to scrounge some shortening from a mess sergeant. I guess we gave him about three or four pounds of it, and then we waited. But nothing happened. Finally, Vin saw fit to press the matter. The result was a few small pieces of (presumably) chicken, dry, tough, hard, cooked without breading of any kind, and really almost inedible. War is hell!

Lingayen Gulf, with its many fat ships and crowded beaches, was a prime target for Japanese air. Apparently unable to mount a massive and sustained campaign against it, which could have seriously hindered logistic support of the American offensive, they limited their effort to
nightly harassing missions. Flying from fields on Taiwan, four hundred miles to the north, they kept at least one dive-bomber over Lingayen all night long every night for about the first two weeks we were there. The planes would come in high. As soon as one flew over the area, American searchlights would stab their beams into the dark sky and begin swinging to and fro as they tried to find it. When one got on it, the others would converge at that point, and the Japanese plane, twisting and turning in its frantic efforts to escape them, would shine like a star with the reflected light. Every gun on every ship and every gun ashore that could be brought to bear would open fire, and the whole gulf would be alight with tracers, flashes, and shell bursts, all aimed at that one enemy plane. The universe would roar and shake with the sound of guns. Sometimes the Japanese pilot would manage to escape the searchlights, and then the uproar would cease, but he would never back down from his mission, and soon he'd be in there again to face the music.

When he had just enough fuel remaining to make it home, the brave Nip would roll into a dive toward his selected target, and down he'd come, into a regular maelstrom of fire. Sometimes he'd be destroyed in midair, but surprisingly often he would come through apparently untouched, release his bomb, and vanish into the darkness over the sea or up the coast to the north, hugging the surface for security. I admired those enemy pilots.

One night when two or three of these guys were giving us a hard time and lots of ammo was being wasted on them, a bomb struck a pile of some kind of torpedoes on the beach near our San Fabian strip. The explosion was tremendous. We were lying in a shallow ditch, and it seemed to me as if the ground dropped away about a foot, then came up hard and hit me. At the same time, there was the warm impact of overpressure in the air. We heard that eleven men of a black supply unit that had been working on the beach were killed.

We didn't stay long at San Fabian. Under I Corps, the 33d “Golden Cross” Division was to relieve the exhausted 43d, which had been holding the north flank of the American forces while the 37th “Buckeye” Division and the gung-ho 1st Cavalry Division drove hard toward Manila, and the 25th “Tropic Lightning” fought its way straight eastward across Luzon.
Three days after our landing, the 33d's 123d Regimental Combat Team (RCT) was first to go into the line, relieving the 158th RCT on high ground just north of the road between the coastal village of Damortis and the town of Rosario. To support the 123d Infantry, Uncle Bud Carlson put his batteries into positions near the village of Rabon, and a Div Arty airstrip was established not far behind them. Our strip was bounded by the beach on one side and a railroad on the other. Paralleling the railroad was a highway. Beyond the highway was a flat area where the division ammunition company set up its tents, and right behind that was a long, low knoll that contained the 33d's ammo reserve. In the midst of the ammo dump were several light antiaircraft guns.

Our ten L-4s were lined up facing the strip, their tails to the railroad, and most of our tents were on the ocean side, on top of a ten-foot bank that sloped steeply to a narrow sand beach. Along there, behind the tents, we dug foxholes for protection in case the night raiders strayed from their usual targets. There were no trees nearby, and we used no camouflage for tents, planes, or vehicles.

As the other regiments went into line east and southeast of Rosario to the vicinity of Pozzarubio, the other battalion pilots established forward airstrips in their respective zones, occupying them during the day but returning to the Rabon strip at night. With the Div Arty pilots, Vin and I used only the Rabon strip for a while, since it was ideally located in our own zone of operations. Being old hands at the business now, we immediately began getting acquainted with our new battlefield and the local enemy forces.

While the other regiments—the 130th and 136th Infantry—had more immediate hot action, the 123d had the most critical task to perform. Anchoring the west end of the whole Sixth Army line and with the coastal highway providing the enemy an assault axis pointed directly at Colonel Serff's men and into the logistic base at Lingayen, the 123d had to hold at all costs; therefore, its initial actions were cautious, feeling out the enemy, and trying, of course, to determine his probable capabilities and intentions, while remaining at all times prepared to deal with a major attack. In making minor adjustments in its defensive dispositions, the 123d experienced some of its first fights on Luzon.

One of these early fights that I remember very clearly involved Lieutenant Schuster, the unfriendly young man I had first known aboard the ship coming up from New Guinea. Schuster's platoon had the mission of seizing a small, boulder-strewn knoll located maybe half a mile north of the Damortis-Rosario road, and I was overhead to handle general observation and artillery support as called for. As we had begun doing in New Guinea, we habitually carried not only our SCR-610 two-channel artillery radio back on the chart board but also had an SCR-300 radio mounted overhead for communication with the lower echelon infantry units we supported. One limitation, however, was that—for reasons I can't recall—the infantry always insisted that they could not operate their SCR-300 while actually moving, so when they began the attack on the knoll, they shut off their radio.