Whip

Whip

MARTIN CAIDIN

for

AL CASAROTTO

This one is on me . . .

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Although the characters in this novel are fictional, the combat is real — even the final great battle. There
was
a B-25 bomber group very much like the one in this book and it fought with deadly effectiveness at treetop and wavetop level. Even Whip Russel has his real-life counterpart in Bill Bagwell, a pilot for all seasons and a flying friend of many years.

Martin Caidin

1

The heat rose about them in shimmering waves so that the horizon was buried within a shimmering heat carpet. It was savagely bright. Glare does that. The air glowed with the naked sun, intensely painful to the unwary, and past headaches brought experienced men to seek the rare vision-comforting shadows of the northeastern Australia scrubland.

More than sun this day, really. Dust fine-grained and pervasive thickened the air. It was stinking weather in a, stinking land, where men sought any distraction to veer their minds from oppressive tedium and inescapable discomfort. Yet at this moment, wherever they were, whatever they were doing, they slowed in their efforts or stirred from their glazed-eye trances, for there had appeared an intrusion unexpected in their miserable lives. In this nothingness of the parched land splashed forever around Townsville in northeastern Australia, scattered about lackluster airfields with their tents and shelter halves and weathered shacks, and the aircraft, some whole but more broken in many different ways, events dragged haltingly to a stop. It took no small thing to do that, to lift a man's head from his dejection with diarrhea and cramps, with skin rot and malaise.

The intrusion was a sound. The sound of engines, and that in itself was a surprise, because they'd by God heard enough engines throbbing from the sky and from the ground to last their lives, and they heard them all the time, day and night, as if the country just beyond sight were occupied by huge swarms of mosquitoes that never shut up. After all, aircraft and engines were the only reasons for this forsaken hellhole and the only justification for the men suffering as they did. It was here that old and battered machines staggered in to be repaired or modified or cannibalized and engines ran whenever men brought them to readiness, and the engines ran low and slow, popping and snorting, and when they were run to full power and propellers slid into flat pitch, they howled and screamed. So they were accustomed to it, it was part of their lives.

But there was a subtle difference to this engine sound. It took an experienced ear to detect it, but Garbutt Field ran thick with men capable of such distinction, and so they shook themselves free of the moment, and looked up and squinted into that goddamned glaring sun and sky.

Synchronized thunder. A beat of sound that came from so many engines that it should have been garbled, an accepted cry of rumbling discord, but it wasn't, and then they saw what they knew must enter that glaring sky, the black, winged shapes far off in the distance, and with only that first glance, that momentary pinging on the eye of the shapes, they knew this outfit differed from any other they'd known before. Garbutt Field was home to sick and broken machines, and when the bombers staggered onto the dusty runways they were flown by men often as weary and bone-bent as the aircraft in which they sailed the skies. No, these strangers were different, already recognizable as twin-engined, and from the high-shoulder-wing configuration and slab sides no question they were B-25s.

What snatched at the attention of the men across the parched ground in this early fall of 1942, in a world where the Japanese were triumphant and near-masters, was the way those people up there were flying those machines.

There is a
touch
to certain pilots and it is created, it is never simply born, of discipline and pride and confident skill, in themselves and their fellow pilots, and whatever it was, those men up there had it. No one aircraft chased another. They flew formation, tight, riding easily the thermals and the spinning slipstream of great propellers and the vortices pummeling back from wingtips. But other men also did that well, so this was not the siren call that beckoned attention from the ground. There was some invisible mark that etched this formation growing in size as it approached Garbutt Field, and for the watching men, for whom defeat and misery were no strangers, a surge of pride stirred somewhere deep within them.

It was precision to such an extent it was beautiful, and as the machines continued their approach they could see more clearly just how beautiful was that formation. They flew as if one man touched the controls of all eleven aircraft, and the men watching from the ground, knowing that distance has a habit of glossing over imperfections, held their breath and wondered if this also would mar what had grasped at them. But as the thunder swelled and the machines enlarged with decreasing distance they saw there were no imperfections, and Jesus, but they're holding it in
tight
, all bunched together as if they were in a goddamned aerial parade with the air soft and untroubled, and the widened eyes were joined with grins and startled exclamations. Everyone who could hear and see was looking into the sky, screw the sun and the glare, and they watched the eleven bombers as they came on down low, very goddamned low, right onto the bloody deck, thank you, until their thunder was a massive pounding and the watching men knew that the eleven pilots at the controls also knew just how good they were, were trying to impart that pride and confidence, and there wasn't any better way of doing it than what they were doing, rushing now with furious speed and hammering sound waves over the dusty earth, and oh,
Jesus, but they're beautiful
.

They were even more surprised when the Mitchells came close enough for details to be seen, for most witnesses from the ground had assumed these aircraft to be new replacements from the States, pilots with fresh uniforms and factory-new machines, smelling that mysterious new-airplane smell, untouched by Japanese steel, in their last moment before the acid test of the agile Zero fighters. But, no; they were wrong. These airplanes were worn, battered, beaten, holed and scattered across their metal surfaces with their smallpox scars of tin covering bullet holes and patched over gaping tears made by exploding cannon shells. Just what in the hell were these men
doing
?

By now the commanding officer of Garbutt Field had emerged from his makeshift office, trailed by his staff,
and
the cooks and administrative and hospital personnel, and everyone on the field who could walk, because the thunder of twenty-two engines close up was overwhelming, pounding the earth, sending dust flurrying upward in a fine mist, and the strange B-25s flattened it out on the deck, smack down the runway, all eleven of them holding what everyone knew by now had to be their combat strike formation, and as they swept by, they came hauling up in a sudden, steep wild climb, the first nine bombers in a vee of three vee's, then the last two, and they were really hauling coal now, flashing before the blazing sun, as they rolled smoothly, beautifully, out of their climbing turns, their thunder more ragged with the thunder of those great props. They seemed to ease into an impossible floating movement as the pilots let up on the power and from every bomber, virtually at the same moment, flaps were sliding back and down from wings, the three legs of the landing gear of each bomber jutted stiffly into the wind, as the watchers below strained to make out more details, because the first three B-25s had curved gracefully, like fighters, through the pattern of the airfield, and rolled around, sliding into final approach,
still
in tight formation, and staying tight, and "Holy cow! Look at 'em!" and they looked and another man shouted, "Them crazy bastards are gonna'
land
like that! Jesus, in formation, yet!"

You just didn't do that at Garbutt Field. The runway was all screwed up with undulations and dust and rocks, and it wasn't that wide, it just wasn't the place to pull off this kind of superprecision crap, but no one had told those pilots up there, and they
were
doing it, and every man on the ground who knew what the inside of a cockpit looked like knew also that the manifold pressure gauges and the revolutions per minute and fuel pressure and oil temperature and the rate of descent and the air-speed needles and the gyro compasses in each plane were dead-on, every set of instruments in each plane like those of its companion aircraft. If the instruments worked, that is.

They came sliding down their invisible rail in the sky, glued together and all of them shimmering in the heat rolling off the runway, and as the earth came to meet them, the pilots had their trim set just right and they flared, control yokes easing back with practiced skill, without deliberate thought, for this was rote and instinctive motion, and the nose of each bomber came higher as they bled off air speed and ghosted their descent to earth, looking for all the world like three great stiff-feathered creatures about to alight in their desert nest, and then the main gear wheels spurted back dust and they were rolling, no longer flying, rolling on the main gear and as speed fell away the noses came down and the single wheels before each bomber touched and then from three airplanes there were nine trailing dust plumes, all three aircraft holding position, still tied with their invisible knots. Thunder rumbled easily along the ground as the pilots fed in a touch of power and taxied in formation to the end of the runway, to a cleared area for parking where a startled lineman had run and began motioning with his hand signals. They wheeled about in line formation, the black airplane in front turning smartly with deft bursts of power and the B-25 came to a stop, rocking gently on its nose shock.

The other two bombers aligned with the first ship, the black killer, and the men in the cockpits were busy with their checklists, shutting down systems, attending to power and flow and pressure, but not yet cutting the final umbilical of power. Behind them, down the far end of the runway, the next vee of bombers was lightly treading dust, and the men on the field watched and marveled, feeling the pride that had been so long missing.

2

Captain Whip Russel released his seat belt and freed his shoulder harness, sweat springing from where the webbing had pressed against his body. He pulled open side windows and watched his copilot do the same, so some breeze would be caught from the flailing propellers and thrown through the sweltering cockpit. Russel half stood behind the control yoke of the pilot's side of the cockpit in the black B-25. He paid no attention to First Lieutenant Alex Bartimo to his right or to the other three men in the aircraft.

They would go through their shutdown checklist without comment from Russel.

The little man in the pilot's seat, all 138 pounds of him raw nerve and rubbed tendon and fierce intensity, had no eyes for what transpired within his own aircraft. Whip Russel had brought his eleven bombers into Garbutt Field for major modification work, and first impressions were important on a field where priorities came from scheming and where regulations were archaic memories. They could mean the lot between getting what he wanted or running into the stone wall of a fast administrative shuffle. This was the first time Garbutt Field had seen the 335th Bombardment Squadron, Medium, and Whip Russel was determined they were damned well going to see some professionals at work.

He glanced through the plexiglas of his cockpit, studying the other bombers rolling down the runway, the third trio about to set down, as the two Ass End Charlies cut it in close.

"Keep it in tight, you bastards," Whip growled into his microphone. No one bothered to answer. No need. These cats had it all together and Whip's radio call was more conversational than required. They feathered down from the glaring sky, raced ahead of their dust plumes to the roll-off point and one by one lined up and stopped, exactly so, engines on all the iron birds still running, but now with a sound that made a mockery of the sweet precision thunder of flight. A Wright Cyclone on the ground is music to no one save a pilot or a mechanic.

The watching men were still motionless, caught up in the powerful display of flight and touchdown, and now they waited to see what these strange pilots would do with their battered aircraft. Whip Russel was satisfied now. He knew that in each cockpit the shutdown procedures had been started and the pilots and copilots were waiting on his word, and he grinned as he thumbed his mike. "All right, troops. Everybody cut 'em." In eleven cockpits hands moved mixture controls and throttles and adjusted switches and twenty-two engines expired, by no means in unison, because there aren't any men born who can bring that many Wright Cyclones to perform their last exhalation on command, but still there was a mass rumbling to a halt, metal bodies and wings shaking as the engines gave up their power, the great propellers twitching in their final revs.