Above the Thunder (6 page)

Pilotless airplanes running wild seem to have been a particular bane of then lieutenant Erickson, for on another occasion a Cub ran away from him while he was trying to prop (hand-start) it. Since a Cub had nothing so exotic as a self-starter, not having any electrical system to run one, it was normal procedure to hand-start an L-4 by flipping its propeller. If the pilot had no helper to do it for him, he did it himself, after first chocking a wheel (or jamming his boot under one), and then when he had the engine running, he kicked the chock away and climbed into the cockpit. Lieutenant Erickson had accidentally left the throttle of this particular L-4 wide open while he propped it, and to his astonishment the engine came to life with a great roar, knocked him down, and the Cub began to take off without him. With “Eric” (as his friends called him) running frantically in the airplane's wake, like Buster Keaton in one of his silent comedies, the unoccupied airplane left him behind in a cloud of dust and headed for the wild blue. Fortunately, just as it was taking to the air, one wheel dropped into a pothole, causing the propeller to hit the ground and stop the engine, to the immense relief of its pursuer.

Erickson had a great fund of such stories, preferring the funny ones over the tragic, and I urged him to write them down, or at least speak them into a tape recorder and let me do it for him, but he pooh-poohed the idea. “If anyone needs to write down his WWII memories,” he said, “it would be Ray Kerns. You should hear some of the things he did.” This was the first I had heard of Kerns, although my father said the name sounded familiar to him and he believed they had met socially on at least one occasion (most of the World War II L-pilots who stayed in the Army after the war seemed to have met each other at one time or another). Erickson, as it turned out, was as good a friend of Kerns as he was of my father, even though my dad and Kerns barely knew each other. So, with Eric as the middleman, I contacted Ray Kerns, whom I learned had flown Cubs with the 33d Infantry Division against the Japanese in the Pacific, earning both the Silver Star and the Air Medal. To my delight, Kerns told me that he was already writing his World War II memoirs. As the
editor of a postwar publication called
Thunder,
dedicated to maintaining contacts and arranging reunions with former Army friends in the 89th Field Artillery Battalion, he had begun writing some of his memories as articles for that publication, which had given him a good start on his book. He sent me a complete set of the magazines, and a glance at his writing was all I needed to tell me that here was one of the best writers I had ever encountered.

“But,” he said with the modesty I always encountered in my father's generation of gentle warriors, “Eric's stories would put mine to shame, if he'd only write them down.” Whether that was true or not would never be known, for Erickson was deaf to my entreaties. My father, too, insisted he had not seen enough combat to fill a book (though I did succeed in getting him to write his memoirs for our family). This left me aiming a barrage of badgering at Kerns to finish getting his memories down on paper, so that I could enjoy them all the sooner, and not only did he endure my prodding without protest, but he did me the honor of letting me read each chapter as it was completed. I thus played the part of proofreader, a superfluous service since his daughter, Carol, can spot a misplaced comma at a hundred paces, and Kerns's writing is impeccable to begin with, but it did give me an excuse to keep asking for more of his memoirs.

When the book was finished, with Kerns's permission I sought out publishers for it, but in the 1990s we met with no success. Unaccountably to me, no press I contacted seemed interested at that time. Perhaps I approached the wrong ones or gave up too easily, but, to my shame, I became discouraged, set the book aside amid a pile of rejection slips, and allowed a decade to slip by. Then one day I picked up the manuscript again, reread it, and decided it could not be allowed to languish. Some publisher, somewhere, surely had the sense to recognize a great work when he saw it, and I would find that publisher no matter how long it took.

And this time, to my surprise, interest in the book was immediate and widespread. Somehow, in the intervening years, the situation had turned around 180 degrees. World War II had become a hot topic. Bookstores now contained volumes on all aspects of the war, a World War II memorial had finally been built on the Mall in Washington,
videographer/historian Ken Burns had produced a documentary on the war that was viewed by millions on TV, and I had been hearing veterans of World War II being interviewed on radio talk shows and rightfully thanked for their service. It seemed that America was finally waking up to the great debt it owes the veterans of World War II, and it was in this atmosphere, happily, that I was now offering one of the best memoirs ever written about the war. Enticed by a few excerpts, this time several publishers expressed keen interest in the manuscript, and Kerns was actually able to choose among them. He picked Kent State University Press, partly because Ohio is part of his old stomping grounds, near where he grew up, and partly because in its director, Will Underwood, we found a helpful collaborator.

Kerns's book now joins the all-too-few volumes written by and about the heroic Army liaison pilots of World War II. (See the list of additional readings at the end of this book for some of these.) Probably from ignorance of the roles and accomplishments of the L-pilots, many authors of supposedly comprehensive histories of World War II hardly mention the “organic” Army Aviation of that war. The L-4 Cub may indeed have been “the most lethal aircraft of the war,” but that didn't make it the most famous, or even very well known, probably because it was the least glamorous—it was “the little airplane that could”—and for many years its stellar role in the winning of the war has been largely unknown or ignored by a public more interested in the bigger, sexier, and more powerful fighters and bombers.

There were many thousands of liaison aircraft used by the U.S. Army in World War II—nearly six thousand Piper L-4 Cubs alone—and Joseph Furbee Gordon, author of
Flying Low,
has estimated that there must have been around four thousand Army liaison pilots who flew them.
²⁰
Very few seem to have written their experiences down, unfortunately, and thus their stories have remained in only their memories or related only to immediate family. And when the owner of such a memory departs for better worlds, as both my father and Floyd Erickson have done now, the stories they did not tell or write down are gone forever. To those such as Raymond Kerns, who have gone to considerable effort to write their memoirs down for us, we should be very grateful. They have given us a part of our American heritage.

As this book was going to press, Raymond Kerns was struggling with the final stages of a long illness, and after putting the finishing touches on the manuscript, he passed away on 6 February 2008, two months before his eighty-seventh birthday. He thus joined his good friend Floyd Erickson; my father, Donald A. Baker; most of their fellow L-pilots; and the fast-lengthening list of other World War II veterans who can no longer tell us firsthand what they experienced in that great global conflict of the twentieth century. This book was his final accomplishment and his gift to history.

 

 

I think General Sherman was not entirely correct when he said that war is hell and you cannot refine it. War certainly is hell, but there are some respects in which we can refine it—if our hearts are so inclined. Nevertheless, so long as leaders and nations remain ambitious, greedy, callous, uncaring about human beings, the wars, with all their inhuman cruelties, will come. As Sherman further observed, “You might as well appeal against the thunderstorm.”

—Raymond C. Kerns

 

One summer afternoon in 1927, when I was six years old, I was playing under some black locust trees just across the dusty pike from our farm home near Buzzard Roost in Nicholas County, Kentucky. (Well, the legal name of the little crossroads was Sprout, but since early settlement times it had been called Buzzard Roost, and so it is to this day, and it's on my birth certificate.) Anyway, my little brother, Bobby, was taking his nap, and Dad was at work somewhere in the fields. I was playing in the dirt and listening to Mom singing as she did her housework.

And then there came another sound, a thin droning that I knew at once had to be an airplane, although I had never seen or heard one before. It took a lot of searching, but finally I saw them, not one but three airplanes, almost directly overhead. They were flying in a “V” formation. The leading plane was a monoplane that looked white and almost transparent, so that the sky seemed to be a blue liquid flowing right through its wings. The other two planes appeared smaller, were dark in color, and were biplanes.

It was many years before I learned that the white monoplane I saw that afternoon was the most famous airplane in the world, flown by the
whole world's hero, Capt. Charles A. Lindbergh. The others were Army pursuit ships escorting him as he toured the country after returning from France.

Lindbergh's solo flight from New York to Paris in
The Spirit of St. Louis
in May 1927 inspired many a boy to dream of flying, and I was one of them. I filled my schoolbooks and pencil tablets with drawings of biplane fighters, dirigibles, Civil War cannon, and riflemen firing over earthworks and knocking down straight rows of stick figures. As I thinned corn or hoed tobacco or worked a team of horses, I was always dreaming of airplanes. Unfortunately for me, I grew up skinny and awkward, dropped out of school in the ninth grade, and when I tried to enlist in the Army Air Corps in 1940, they turned me down for lack of a diploma. I became a radio operator in the 8th Field Artillery at Schofield Barracks, Oahu, Territory of Hawaii, where I arrived on 10 December 1940 aboard the U.S. Army Transport
Hunter Liggett.

Except for a ten-minute ride in a Kinner-powered Waco biplane with a barnstormer in 1939, I had never flown. But I was conscientious, believed in keeping my nose clean and doing what I reasonably could to make the folks back home proud, so I did well as a soldier. By October 1941, I was financially able to get some flight training at John Rodgers Airport, located where Honolulu International is today. I got thirty minutes in a Fleet biplane, but at $16 dual (tandem controls) it was too much for my $66 a month salary (a buck private drew $30 a month in those days, but I was a private first class with a specialist third-class rating on top of it), so from there on it was $8 dual in an Interstate “Cadet.”

Wednesday afternoon was recreational time for us lucky redleg GIs at Schofield. I had usually spent it at Soldiers Beach at Haleiwa, but for Wednesday, 3 December 1941, I scheduled an hour with my instructor in the fifty-five horsepower Interstate. That would make the required eight hours of pre-solo dual, and my hopes were high. We went up over Keehi Lagoon, between the airport and Honolulu, and McVey had me do spins to the left and spins to the right, one turn, two turns, one-and-a-half turns—all that good pre-solo stuff they used to do and should still do.

After about half an hour of that, he told me to give him a spin to the right and hold it until he told me to pull out. “And when you come out,” he said, “I want the nose right on Diamond Head.”

PFC Raymond Kerns in the carefree prewar summer of 1941, aboard the yacht
Ebb Tide
about forty miles south of Oahu. A group of soldiers had rented the craft for deep-water trolling. It was owned and operated by a Captain Salazar, with his daughter as crew.

The Cadet was a very light airplane, and it would spin a lot of times in the 4,500 feet we had beneath us. We must have spun more than a dozen turns before he gave me the word. I reversed the rudder, let off the stick, and got out of the spin, then started pulling up and putting on power. Diamond Head? I had no idea where it was.

“What in the hell are you doing?” asked McVey.

“Getting the nose up to the horizon, sir. Returning to level flight.”

“Horizon, hell! You're about to stall out on top of a loop.”

After he got the plane back to a suitable attitude he gave it to me and told me to climb back to 4,500. Halfway there, he asked how I felt. I told him I felt just a little woozy, and he said, well, there was no need for us to do more spins if I was feeling bad, so we might as well call it a day. He asked when I was scheduled next.

“Sunday at 9:30, sir.”

“OK, Sunday we'll do a few more stalls and spins, and if you don't get sick I'll let you solo.”

Sweeter words I had never heard. “Thank you, sir!”