Above the Thunder (47 page)

1
. Above ten thousand feet, the air is so thin that pilots flying without supplemental oxygen soon begin to experience hypoxia, with symptoms of euphoria similar to being drunk.

2
. Ancestors of the Robinson family bought the island (twenty-three miles long and three to six miles wide) in 1864 from the Hawaiian King Kamehameha V for $10,000 in gold. Today it is managed by Keith and Bruce Robinson, who try to protect it from modern influences and preserve the traditional Hawaiian way of life.

3
. A Japanese pilot from the Pearl Harbor raid took over Niihau, one of the Hawaiian islands, with the collaboration of Japanese Americans living there. The incident is not well remembered today but is seen by some as a contributing factor to why Japanese Americans were distrusted by the government and interned during the war.

Two Japanese fighter planes (Zeros) became too damaged in the Pearl Harbor attack to make it the two hundred miles back to their carrier, and instead, according to a prearranged plan, headed for the remote westernmost Hawaiian island of Niihau, eighty miles northwest of Oahu. Japanese intelligence had thought the island to be uninhabited, and a submarine was to pick up any such stragglers there. One of the planes didn't make it and dove into the sea, but the other, piloted by Shigenori Nishikaichi, crash-landed in a field on the island. However, far from being uninhabited, Niihau was (and still is) home to a small group of the last purely ethnic Hawaiians—at that time around two hundred Hawaiians plus three people of Japanese descent. Unaware of the Pearl Harbor attack, but suspicious of an obviously foreign warplane, one of the Hawaiians disarmed the pilot before he could get out of his aircraft, taking his pistol and papers, which included maps of Pearl Harbor, radio codes, and attack plans.

Once he had regained his senses from the crash-landing, the Japanese pilot took back his pistol and demanded the papers back also, but by this time they had been hidden. Two of the three Japanese Americans on the island were a man and his wife, Yoshio and Irene Harada, who had been born in Hawaii and were thus U.S. citizens, Yoshio having also lived in California for seven years. Speaking in Japanese, which none of the Hawaiians could understand, Nishikaichi won the Japanese Americans over to his side, and, with the pistol plus a shotgun taken from a ranch house, the three instigated a brief reign of terror on the island. They threatened the rest of the islanders with death if they did not hand over the papers taken from the airplane, burned down the home of the man who had taken the papers, and then Nishikaichi and the Haradas entered the home of Hawaiian Ben Kanahele and threatened to kill Kanahele's wife if he did not produce the papers. Instead Kanahele lunged for the shotgun. Nishikaichi shot him three times with the pistol, but despite his injuries Kanahele picked the pilot up and threw him against a stone wall, killing him. Yoshio Harada then killed himself with the shotgun (Irene Harada was later arrested and imprisoned in Honolulu). Ben Kanahele recovered from his wounds and was proclaimed a hero by the government and press, and a song, titled “They Couldn't Take Niihau Nohow,” was written about him and became popular during the war. This was the man whom Kerns and Vineyard hoped to meet when they flew their L-4s to the island.

The Niihau incident was investigated by the Army and a report forwarded to Washington. In the atmosphere of near hysteria in the United States following
the Pearl Harbor attack, with the large numbers of ethnic Japanese on the U.S. west coast, the fact that the traitor Yoshio Harada had lived in California as well, and fears that a Japanese invasion of California might be imminent, President Roosevelt and others in govern ment viewed it as reason to believe that Japanese Americans might ally themselves with the invaders just as they had so readily done on the island. As a result, Japanese Americans in the United States were interned in camps and kept under supervision for the duration of the war. The Niihau episode is detailed in a book by Michelle Malkin titled
In Defense of Internment: The Case for Racial Profiling in World War II and the War on Terror
(New York: Regnery, 2004).

4
. After its recapture from the Japanese, Finschhafen became a big World War II resupply and staging area for the retaking of New Guinea and then the Philippines as the Allies island-hopped toward Japan. Aircraft shipped to the airfield at Finschhafen were assembled and flown to other airfields in the area. At the end of the war, there was so much war materiel left at Finschhafen that much of it was simply bulldozed into big holes in the ground and abandoned, and generations of salvagers have made a living from recovering it. Aircraft left parked on the field were initially cut up and melted down for scrap, but some partial or nearly complete aircraft have recently been dug up and exported to museums or restorers, their rarity today making them more valuable as historical artifacts than as scrap metal.

5
. Lieutenant Kerns had undoubtedly stumbled upon the former home of one of the many German Lutheran missionaries in New Guinea. In the late 1800s Germany made attempts to colonize New Guinea and convert the natives to Christianity, and the port town of Finschhafen had been first occupied and settled by Lutheran missionaries. Before the outbreak of war there were some eighty of them at Finschhafen running several missions, schools, the port, and a large radio station in the town. They even bought some airplanes and constructed their own airfield. Their missionary work was made difficult by the malaria and tropical diseases prevalent on the island. All these Germans abandoned New Guinea at the outbreak of the war, and when the Japanese invaded the island in March 1942, they used the Lutheran missionary buildings at Finschhafen as their headquarters. After the war the Lutherans returned to the area, and there are Lutheran missionaries on New Guinea again today.

6
. Colonel Truxton never made it home with his seashells. He was later killed by a sniper on Luzon Island in the Philippines.

1
. The 33d Division history states that the next day Captain Marchant re turned to the scene of the fight with a group of volunteers, hoping to bring the third Japanese tank back to their camp as a war trophy, since it was only lightly damaged. However, he found that the bazooka rounds he had fired at it the previous day had destroyed its ignition system, and it wouldn't start. With no way to move it, they decided instead to destroy it with incendiary grenades. (Winston,
The Golden Cross,
60.)

1
. On the strategic use of bulldozers by the American forces, see the introduction, note 2.

2
. There were other incidents of Cubs losing fabric from their wings in flight. The humid jungle climate apparently weakened or rotted the cotton cloth covering, and/or the thread used to stitch it to the wing structure, and the suction of lift while flying then pulled it off. Don Moore wrote in his book
Low and Slow:
“The fabric situation got so bad that, one day when I was flying my commanding officer, Col. Knowlton, from the battalion strip to the main strip in Bacolod, fabric ripped off of the upper surface of the right wing. Two sections, each about three feet in width, came off and blew away. The Colonel, Stewart Knowlton, understandably, was a little nervous, as he saw the fabric fluttering down to earth. The Cub, or L-4, has so much excess wing surface for its weight that I was able to fly tolerably well with that much surface gone. A lot of cross controlling got us into the base without difficulty. Our excellent ground crew had an adequate patch on it before the day was out” (143).

3
. Artillery-spotting aircraft were indeed occasionally hit by their own artillery shells. L-4 pilot Ernest Kowalik described how an L-4 had its tail shot off by a 105 mm shell in Italy (pilot and observer were both wearing parachutes and survived), and war correspondent Ernie Pyle once wrote from Italy about another incident that did not end so happily: “One of the worst strokes of fate I ever heard about happened to a Cub there on the Fifth Army beachhead. A ‘Long Tom'—or 155 rifle—was the unwitting instrument. This certain gun fired only one shell that entire day—but that one shell, with all the sky to travel in, made a direct hit on one of our Cubs in the air and blew it to bits.” Over Stolberg, Germany, Capt. Francis P. Farrel was killed when his L-4 was hit by an American shell, and Lt. Thomas Turner had a 105 mm shell pass through the tail of his Cub without detonating. See Ernest Kowalik, with John R. Baylor,
Alone and Unarmed: An Army Pilot Sharing the Skies with Artillery Fire in WWII Italy
(1968; rpt., Seminole, Fla.: Glenn Curtiss Press, 2005), 249; Ernie Pyle,
Brave Men
(New York: Holt & Co., 1944), 240; and Stratton,
Box Seat over Hell,
2:79.

1
. Winston,
The Golden Cross,
214–19.

2
. Just as Lieutenant Kerns saved the civilians from being fired on by making adjustments to the artillery fire unknown to his commander, so did a firing battery apparently deliberately aim wide to avoid shooting at a Japanese hospital on Luzon. In the latter incident, much to the confusion of the aerial observer, Lt. Don Moore (who resented the order to shoot at a hospital as much as the cannoneers did), the widely scattered shells burst everywhere except on the target. Thinking about it later, however, he realized that the artillerymen must have been aware of the nature of the target, since the fire direction center always had to be informed of what they were shooting at in order to select the correct fuses for the job, and
not wanting to fire on a hospital—even one of the enemy's—they had deliberately shot wide. See Moore,
Low and Slow,
162–66.

3
. Undoubtedly the thin air at Baguio's nearly mile-high elevation was to blame for these crashes by significantly reducing both the lift of the wings and the horse power of the engines (because there is less oxygen for combustion). Each of these pilots knew exactly what his aircraft could do under normal circumstances but probably had little previous experience with takeoffs and landings at such a high altitude. Loss of aircraft performance at high altitudes, especially on hot, humid days, can be dramatic for low-horsepower aircraft like the L-4.

1
. A Cub in Italy crashed for the same reason Lieutenant Kerns's nearly did: something jamming the second control stick in the rear seat (and it has also happened occasionally to civilian Cubs). During the Italian campaign, pilot Ernest Kowalik watched an L-4 Cub sideslip all the way down to the ground and crash. He wrote, “I looked up to see a sideslipping Piper Cub a scant fifty feet overhead. Fascinated, I watched it continue its downward plunge until it crashed, right wing first, into a terrace about two hundred feet away.” When Kowalik reached the scene, he found the pilot, a Sergeant Maschmann, standing beside the wreck of his airplane, only slightly injured, and asked him the reason he had crashed. “A package fell off the back seat and jammed the stick-stub to full right aileron. All I could do was cut the throttle and give full left rudder,” Maschmann told him. Sergeant Maschmann did not have the backseat's control stick installed like Kerns did, yet the socket for mounting the stick was still enough to cause the jam. Smart Piper Cub pilots today always strap anything set on the backseat securely in place with the seat belt before flying (Kowalik,
Alone and Unarmed,
117–18).

Beers, Clyde.
A Balcony Seat at the E.T.O.
N.p.: C(NMI)B, 1991.

Cannon, Hardy D.
Box Seat over Hell.
Volume 1:
The True Story of America's Liaison Pilots and Their Light Planes in World War II.
San Antonio, Tex.: International Liaison Pilots and Aircraft Association, 1985.

Cummings, Julian William, with Gwendolyn Kay Cummings.
Grasshopper Pilot: A Memoir.
Kent, Ohio: Kent State Univ. Press, 2005.

Francis, Devon.
Mr. Piper and His Cubs.
1973. Second edition, Lock Haven, Penn.: Sentimental Journeys, 1987.

Gordon, Joseph Furbee.
Flying Low, and Shot Down Twice during World War II in a Spotter Plane.
Middletown, Conn.: Southfarm Press, 2001.

Kowalik, Ernest E., with John R. Baylor.
Alone and Unarmed: An Army Pilot Sharing the Skies with Artillery Fire in WWII Italy.
1968; reprint, Seminole, Fla. Glenn Curtiss Press, 2005.

Moore, Don.
Low and Slow: The Liberation of the Philippines as Viewed from Eight Hundred Feet above the Ground.
Upland, Calif.: San Antonio Heights, 1999.

Schultz, Alfred W., with Kirk Neff.
Janey: A Little Plane in a Big War.
Middletown, Conn.: Southfarm Press, 1998.

Stratton, Bill.
Box Seat over Hell.
Volume 2. San Antonio, Tex.: International Liaison Pilots and Aircraft Association, 1985

Wakefield, Ken.
Lightplanes at War: U.S. Liaison Aircraft in Europe, 1942–1947.
Charleston, S.C.: Tempus, 1999.

Wakefield, Ken, with Wesley Kyle.
The Fighting Grasshoppers: U.S. Liaison Aircraft Operations in Europe, 1942–1945.
Stillwater, Minn.: Specialty Press, 1999.

Winston, Sanford.
The Golden Cross: A History of the 33rd Infantry Division in World War II.
Nashville, Tenn.: Battery Press, 2000.

Aftawadona, Mount (Luzon),
144–45
,
171–73

Agoo (Luzon),
207
,
212

air mobility,
279

air observation, for artillery,
79
,
177–79
,
229
,
238–39
; demonstrations of effect iveness of,
100–101
,
112
; in development of Army Aviation branch,
278–79
; effectiveness of,
206
,
220
,
231–32
,
236
,
242
,
250–51
; for first use of,
146–47
; organic,
79
,
100–101
,
146–47
; usefulness of passenger for,
249–51