The Pacific (51 page)

In the ready room, Skipper Campbell began chewing out Hal Buell, who led the second division in Campbell's strike. Campbell told Hal he was not to dive in advance of Campbell's division, but to follow his lead. If the skipper expected Hal to accept this, he had read him wrong. Hal looked him in the eye and told him the leader was not supposed to slow down their attack by circling the target--that just gave the enemy gunners more time to sight in their AA guns. Proper technique dictated a high-speed approach--descending from the cruising altitude to the diving altitude--followed immediately by the dive. "You want to get over the top of the target and out!" Campbell could not accept this challenge to his authority. The two ended up going to the air group commander. Campbell had rank on his side. Hal was a seasoned veteran who knew the doctrine. As a division leader himself, Mike could have been drawn into the confrontation, but refused. He got along well with "Soupy" Campbell. He agreed with Buell. Micheel had been around enough to know the flap would work itself out as such things usually did: Hal would be told to follow orders and Campbell would stop circling the target.

After three days, America's first strike into the Palau Islands ended in complete success. The enemy in the Palau Islands could not threaten MacArthur's advance up the New Guinea coast; 130,000 tons of enemy shipping had been sunk; and dozens of planes had been shot down and more strafed on the ground. The task force had lost about two dozen planes, although the subs had picked up a number of downed crews. It bothered Mike that operational losses had outnumbered the airplanes lost to enemy fighters or AA fire. Steaming back to Majuro, scuttlebutt had it that they would hit New Guinea next.
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First they had a chance to get off the ship and onto the Majuro Atoll while the ships received supplies and gasoline. The men played baseball on the beach or went swimming, but there wasn't much to Majuro. One of the wolves surely defined the word "atoll" for his friends--no women atoll, no whiskey atoll, nothin' atoll.

AS BAD AS THE RAIN ON CAPE GLOUCESTER HAD BEEN, IN MARCH THE MORTARMEN of the 2/1 had to admit "the rainy season seems to have only begun now." It rained hard. It rained daily. The rain created the seas of mud that slowed the pace of infantry warfare. The air raid siren sounded occasionally, although seldom did planes arrive. The only troops of the IJA the marines saw were those strung up in the native villages--each village had captured five or six alive. The natives "beat the mortal shit out of every jap they catch," exacting retribution for the injuries the invaders had once inflicted on them. To keep busy, the 2/1 had classes on weapons, had inspections, and worked on their camp.

Sid, as a member of the kitchen team, had seen his popularity sink. The men hated eating the same food every day. Twice in the past two months, steak and eggs had been served to break the monotony of warmed-up K and C rations. In early April, the cooks tried serving fish as an entree. Deacon took one look at it and told the cooks, "They can jam that salmon up their ass as far as I am concerned." When John Wesley "Deacon" Tatum used foul language, the situation had obviously gotten bad. The regimental HQ tried to improve the situation. It issued cigarettes, toothpaste, and other treats. It offered the men a chance to draw out some of their money. No one wanted any. It began showing movies at night, the one bright spot in the jungle.

The night of April 5 they offered a double feature. The rain abated, and that allowed the men to watch them before bed. At about four a.m. a huge crash woke up Sid. Someone yelled, "Tree on a man." Sid climbed out of his hammock to see a huge tree, with a trunk perhaps ten feet in diameter and fifty feet tall, lying on a tent twenty feet from him. The galley men grabbed their Coleman lanterns and the whole of H Company came to help. The tree had crushed the legs of one man in the tent. Deacon and W.O. were with Sid when the company moved the trunk, freeing the injured man and extracting a body out from underneath. The dead body had been Don Rouse, one of the original members of the #4 gun squad.

Later that morning Lieutenant Benson gave Sid the job of going through Rouse's personal effects as a team of Seabees showed up and began to inspect the forest in and around camp. Two of them carried a giant chain saw like a stretcher team. They cut the tree that had killed Rouse into pieces. In Don's possessions Sid found a piece of propaganda that had been dropped by the Japanese on them back in New Guinea. Don had a copy because he had been moved over to the company's intelligence section. Given the propaganda's pornographic content--the Japanese had mistaken the marines for Aussies and had intended to sow discord among the Allies with it--Sid took it to Benson. Benny told him to keep it; he already had one.

Apparently the rain had weakened the hold of the trees in the earth. All of the top-heavy ones had to come down. A Seabee from Oregon dropped trees with precision, not even asking for the tents to be moved. The company held the funeral at two p.m. for Private First Class Don Rouse of Biloxi, Mississippi. They buried his body in the cemetery. The headstones they erected would not last long in the jungle on Cape Gloucester. Nothing man-made lasted within the green inferno. Next to the tents the Seabees cut the felled trees into logs and the marines rolled them out of their way.

A few nights later How Company learned lists were being drawn up for rotation home. A furlough system had also been established for those who qualified, although applying for a furlough meant delaying one's rotation stateside. Neither would happen until they departed Cape Gloucester, New Britain. The first reliable news about their departure reached the men on Easter Sunday, April 9. A senior NCO called a special meeting to announce the army's 40th Division would relieve them in seven to ten days. The 1st Division would either go to Noumea, Guadalcanal, or some island in the Russells.

EASTER SUNDAY FOUND PRIVATE FIRST CLASS EUGENE SLEDGE STILL STUCK IN the replacement battalion camp in Noumea, New Caledonia. The Red Cross held services. Attending church brought him joy and fond memories of attending the Government Street Presbyterian Church in Mobile with his family. As he told his father in a letter written on that day, "You and mummie have given Edward and I a pure Christian outlook on life that we will never lose no matter where we are."

The replacement battalion made long marches into the mountains outside of town. They hiked eighteen miles fast enough that Sledge felt "sure Stonewall's Foot Cavalry would have thought us pretty good."
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His sharp eyes did not miss the cockatoos and parakeets in the trees. The birds' brilliant plumage as well as their scolding replies to any disturbances on the ground below delighted him. Later, when the marines practiced their amphibious maneuvers, he noticed the tiny shells and took interest in the sea life.

Now that he was overseas, Eugene permitted himself to talk the talk of a marine. To a friend in Mobile who had "just joined the best outfit in the world," he counseled, you "will find the furloughs few and the work pretty hard. But when it's all over he can say he was a Marine. I'm proud to say that right now." To his aunt, who had had the temerity to suggest that Gene "looked like an R.A.F. fighter pilot" in a recent photo, he declared, "If a man told me that I'd grab him by the stacking swivel & blacken his sights. In other words--push his face in. Not that I have anything against the R.A.F. But I'm in an outfit with 169 years of fighting spirit & tradition behind it and I don't care to be told I resemble a 'fly- fly glamour' boy." His pride in the Marine Corps only seemed unbounded, however. He drew the line at tattoos. A lot of the men in camp had had the eagle, globe, and anchor etched into their arms or chests, but he knew his parents would be "horrified."

Private First Class Sledge also quickly adopted the fighting man's disgust at receiving bad news from home. "When I'm down here doing the best I can," he advised his mother, he didn't want to hear about "strikes, racial trouble, or political bickering." He liked the clippings from the newspaper she sent that were about hunting or history, but he asked her to stop sending him news about the war--the recreation room was full of it and he was sick of it. So far as politics went, "When we win the war I hope the politicians have left enough of America for us fellows to live peacefully in."

HORNET
SAILED OUT OF MAJURO ON APRIL 11 ON THE WAY TO HELP GENERAL MacArthur's army move farther up the northern coast of New Guinea. Due to a shake-up in command, Micheel's flattop had become the flagship of Task Group 58.1, which included USS
Bataan
and two other light carriers, under the command of Jocko Clark. The task group sailed with the other task groups of Task Force 58, a force totaling twelve carriers and dozens of escorts. In offensive capability, it had no equal.

Sailing with an armada of cruisers, destroyers, and other carriers made launching sorties more difficult. The carrier had to turn into the wind, whatever its direction, and speed up. The speed of the carriers made life difficult for the slower vessels. On the trip to New Guinea, Admiral Clark informed his task group that his "flipper turn" was now standard operating procedure. As a carrier commander, Clark had invented "the flipper turn," in which his carrier exited the group formation at twenty-five knots while the other ships held steady at eighteen knots.
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It saved fuel. Now that he commanded 58.1, Jocko Clark decreed the entire task group make the flipper turn, whose prosaic name was changed to "Modified Baker" to fit better with naval lingo. Jocko, a former pilot, ordered the change because he put the needs of his carriers first. His plan angered the captains of the battleships, cruisers, and destroyers, who had "to give way" to the carriers.
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Modified Baker represented another marker in the destruction of centuries of navy tradition and doctrine. The line of great battlewagons had once ruled the seas. Breaking that line meant the battleships were no longer preparing to fight the decisive fleet engagement; their guns existed to protect the carriers from enemy aircraft. Admiral Mitscher, in command of all of the task groups, also wore the Golden Wings of a naval aviator. Mitscher observed Jocko's 58.1 execute the flipper turn, decided it worked better than any other, and ordered it adopted by all the task groups of the Fifth Fleet.

In the Bombing Two ready room, Campbell showed his men a map of New Guinea and of MacArthur's target, Hollandia. As usual, they would help the soldiers by destroying several airfields nearby. Reports by army reconnaissance estimated Japanese strength at 350 aircraft. While other squadrons hit Hollandia itself, the wolves were assigned to strike bases about 120 miles farther west along the coast. Part of the preflight briefing concerned the location of a place to land or to bail out over in the case of trouble. Hitting targets on the coast of New Guinea gave them a lot more options than the Palau Islands had, but Mike warned his guys with a grin, "Don't land in the jungle because there's aborigines in the jungle . . . man eaters!" As they approached New Guinea, they again found themselves within the range of enemy planes. The Combat Air Patrol (CAP) began to have bogeys to chase down. The bogeys came in singles, though, not in squadrons.

An unexpected ruckus broke out early in the morning of April 19, the day before the next combat mission. As the ship turned into the wind to launch some routine ASW scouts, general quarters sounded.
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Mike and the other pilots had to remain in the ready room. It turned out that the carrier had turned into the path of another ship of the task group. More of the story came in later, when Hal Buell returned from his routine ASW search. He had seen two ships almost collide with
Hornet
. He had been sitting in his plane, the engine idling, when he had looked over the starboard (right) side of the ship to see the prow of another charging at him through the darkness. It had slid past with perhaps twenty feet to spare. Just as he had gushed relief, another one appeared; its prow "appeared as tall as our flight deck" and "on a direct collision course." Hal had cut the engine, released his harness and jumped from his plane. He watched as the tanker threw itself into reverse, sliding past "our stern with only inches to spare; I could have jumped from our fantail onto her bridge deck. . . ." From the bridge word came that Captain Browning had been at the helm when this happened and had gotten an earful from Admiral Clark, "who had run to the bridge in his bathrobe."
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It ended with Jocko warning Browning, "Don't you ever do that again."
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The ship's captain walked away, shaking his head.

Beginning on April 20, the airplanes of Task Force 58.1 spent four days hitting targets at Sawar, Sarmi, and Wakde Island. The weather was terrible, with a ceiling so low that the Helldivers began their dives from four thousand feet.
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The low altitude helped the enemy gunners on the ground. In a few days, the wolves lost eight planes.
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Mistakes and malfunctions accounted for more losses than enemy AA fire. Two planes collided. Another had engine trouble soon after takeoff and crashed while attempting to get back aboard. The pilot survived; his gunner did not. Another plane failed on takeoff and fell into the ocean. His gunner got out, but the pilot's body had to be pulled from it. Blunt- force trauma to the head had killed him. Every pilot knew why: the handle to pull up the wheels was beyond most pilots' reach. Pilots had begun taking off with their shoulder straps unbuckled, so they could get their wheels up quickly. Getting the gear up quickly helped the Helldiver reach flying speed faster and thus reduced the chances of hitting the water. Without his straps on, Lieutenant Bosworth had sustained a severe blow to the head when his Beast fell off the end of the bow and hit the water 52.3 feet below.

The accident prompted the skipper to make sure the navy understood the problem. Campbell also asked for immediate assistance in extending the handle. The pilots had to be able to bring up the wheels while remaining strapped in. When another SB2C failed on takeoff and hit the water, the pilot had his shoulder strap on. When he was fished out of the water, he described being "trapped in the cockpit and dragged thirty to forty feet below the surface before he could fight clear."
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The crash brought Hal Buell and Mike Micheel together for a talk. Something had to be done. Their air group had suffered ten crashes. After reviewing the circumstances of each, the two veterans decided the pilot had been at fault in one or two; "insufficient wind" over the flight deck had caused the others. While the ship's other planes, the Hellcats and the Avengers, seemingly jumped off the deck in a light breeze, a fully loaded SB2C demanded lots of wind and lots of flight deck. Buell did not think their squadron CO, Campbell, appreciated the danger and recommended going over his head to the air group commander. Mike agreed. Roy Johnson, the CAG, listened carefully to his veterans and decided they were correct. He found a way to convince Captain Miles Browning to either get twenty- five to thirty knots of wind or allow the Helldivers to fly with a fifteen-hundred-pound payload of bombs instead of two thousand pounds. Skipper Campbell of Bombing Two found out about the meeting, of course, and he blamed Buell.