Whip (25 page)

"Roger that," Haney called back. "Any way home is the best way."

25

"Sorry, Whip."

Lou Goodman showed him the orders. A strike against a protected beach area in the Admiralty Islands. Right off Los Negros.

Whip Russel looked up with disbelief. "But that's more than sixteen hundred miles when you figure screwing around for formations, the rendezvous; hell, more than that, maybe."

"I know."

"But it's crazy!"

Lou Goodman sighed. He was in complete sympathy with Whip. The reactions he was hearing now were merely a forecast of how the crews would also react. But there was no way out of it.

"Somebody in headquarters has a report, I guess they got a photo recce up there, that the place is lousy with landing barges. They want them hit as soon as possible and FEAF

is laying on a coordinated strike. B-17s from twenty-five thousand feet and — "

"I know,
I know
! It says we're to bomb from eighteen."

Goodman looked miserable. "Yeah."

"What the hell are we going to hit with our guns from more than three miles up!"

"The orders call for a strike with a bombing pattern."

"Do you know how long it's been since anyone in my outfit used a Norden sight?"

Whip's expression was total disbelief. "They're crazier than bedbugs, Lou." His voice trailed away. He wasn't going to fight city hall from this stinking field in New Guinea.

They flew the mission. It was a disaster. Sixteen B-25s from another outfit and eleven of their own. Nine B-17s went in ten minutes before they did. The B-17s beat the absolute living shit out of a beach. That sand would never be the same again. They didn't touch the barges.

The other B-25 outfit did pretty good and laid their pattern where it chewed up barges and hurt people. The 335th with Whip leading turned in a lousy performance. Three of his airplanes had already turned back. Their oxygen systems were riddled with fungus and jungle growth and men were turning blue. The eight planes that went into the target at Los Negros stayed in a tight cluster. If one B-25 was off it seemed obvious the rest of them would be. They killed a lot of fish. Maybe. No one would ever know.

The raid up to Los Negros was the first shock wave in the changing pattern of the air war. Something was breaking at a place called Guadalcanal and the navy and marines were having a hellacious time in the Solomons. The Japs had pulled a lot of their punch from other areas to deal with what they probably felt was insurrection on the part of the Americans. Either way, the targets that had been dangerous but juicy plums for the Death's Head Brigade began to evaporate.

Infuriated is too mild a word to describe how Whip and his pilots reacted to the shift in operations. Until now, because of General Smyth's ramrodding of special missions, the 335th had gone after the targets that had given headquarters its own special brand of fits. The big push of the Japanese to heavily reinforce their army on New Guinea had twice been blunted. But with Guadalcanal commanding center stage, the Japanese went to low profile. They kept up a trickle of reinforcements rather than going to a solid move to get men and materiel onto New Guinea. The ripe targets withered away. Two or three ships, no more, would sail together, following weather as much as possible, to reach their unloading areas.

The big push, the final attempt, was yet to come. But in the meantime the special missions simply faded.

Fighting headquarters was like trying to kick a ghost in the groin. They were still laying on missions but their methods and procedures, and their reasons, were that special kind of insanity that so enrages men on the firing line. Orders would come in to hit Finschhafen. No one was told
what
they were supposed to bomb. No one specified fighters or bombers or fuel depots or ammunition dumps or shipping or what. Just hit the target. Which was stupid to the point of criminal conduct. Whip and his men had learned, and the other outfits were getting their education fast, that tearing up runways never really bothered the Japanese. Most of their fields were dirt or gravel or grass. They didn't have to resurface the material or pour cement. Men with shovels and bare hands could do the job, and they did, and their fighters were always clawing into the air against bombers without specific targets.

That was the worst of it. The Death's Head Brigade was the finest cutting edge the newly formed Fifth Air Force had at its disposal. Here were men experienced in knifing through to the most difficult targets, in fighting the Jap on his own terms, in doing damage that a force ten times their number couldn't manage — and doing so without the appalling losses other outfits were taking. Half the bombing squadrons and groups in the area were losing planes faster than they could be replaced, and new airplanes
were
coming into the southwest Pacific now in more than a trickle.

It had become a war of attrition. The 335th was ordered to join with the pack. Go out with the other bombers.

"Don't they ever
learn
anything in their ivory tower? Jesus Christ, we've just spent the last couple months
proving
what we can do! If they brought the rest of those goddamned planes down to the deck like we fly they'd — " And usually the anger came to its own brick wall of realization. You follow orders. You go after targets even when you know there's no justification for those targets.

You give the enemy some damned fine target practice. You're the target.

They went back to Rabaul and Lae and Madang and Finschhafen and Wewak and Hollandia and Aitape and other targets. They followed their orders to bomb from this towering level or that, and when the bombs had been dropped and the orders had been followed, Whip held up his middle finger, extended rigidly, on which all of headquarters might seat themselves for proper insertion, and he took the Death's Head Brigade back to the deck. Where they knew how to fight, where they could destroy, where they could kill, and do it all with unmatched ferocity and results.

What they did not know, but soon came to understand, was that the ghost of Commander Gaishi Naogaka waited for them. The Lae Wing had been whipped by a baker's dozen of bombers with seventy Zero fighters on the ground. The same Yankee devils had destroyed a convoy of barges and troopships. They had smashed into the heart of Rabaul. The fighter pilots had their signals out. Watch for the special group. The B-25s with the sting in the nose. The airplanes with the sharks' teeth, with fangs. Led by a black B-25 with a death's head — and nearly twenty Japanese flags — painted on each side of the fuselage beneath the cockpit.

The combination began to chew into the fiber of the 335th. Headquarters kept sending them out to strike targets which weren't worth a single bomb. Headquarters insisted some of their missions be flown in concert with other groups so as to amass a large number of aircraft over target. It made great public relations copy, and it added up to a lot of bombs, but it really wasn't doing that much damage to the people on the ground.

If they had gone after those fighter fields with the hammer-and-anvil tactics developed to such a fine pitch by the Death's Head Brigade they could have broken the back of Japanese fighter strength in the New Guinea area.

But they didn't have the chance. Not yet. There was a new general coming into the business. Now that the Fifth Air Force had been formed from the wreckage of a half-dozen old organizations, George Kenney was taking the helm. He was a no-nonsense, cock-of-the-walk pilot who knew how to get in low and fast and mix it up in an old-fashioned brawl. But George Kenney was still on his way. Lou Goodman swore to Whip he'd badger the old man before Kenney's ass could warm his seat. Until then the 335th could only grit its teeth and go to war. Wastefully, sometimes; stupidly, often. But they went.

Whip made two combat strikes out of almost every mission. If they went after a target at high altitude, he broke from the formation on the way home to hit an airfield as they raced back to Kanaga. That meant coming in on the deck, shooting up everything in sight. The massed guns of the B-25s were still terrifyingly effective. It was the hammer-and-anvil, but before many weeks the crews began to realize
they
also were on the anvil. Whip Russel was squeezing blood out of stones.

They bombed Arawe on the bottom coast of New Britain Island from fourteen thousand feet. The big formation flew almost due south over the Solomon Sea to return home, avoiding Japanese fighters on the way back. Eleven bombers slid from formation and began the gravity ride to Finschhafen in Whip's favorite strike — on the deck from across the water. They beat up the Japanese field, and when they came around to regroup the Zeros hit them like a swarm of wasps.

"Close it up! Get together, you people!" Whip shouted in the familiar call to bunch together and bring their heavy firepower into a tight cluster of sky. The pilots skidded and climbed and dove and the formation pulled itself into defensive posture. The Zeros stayed away from head-on attacks. Suicide with all that firepower up front. They didn't come after the bombers in trail or a long file. Six fighters went after one bomber at a time.

The Zeros closed in to pointblank range, concentrating on the one B-25, and it didn't take long to smash the dorsal turret and shoot out the waist guns, and the Zeros ignored other turrets, despite taking damage and losses on their own. They stayed in there, tight, eyeball to eyeball, and they shot the bejesus out of the airplane they were after.

The first gang fight like that killed Paddy Shannon in his cockpit. The airplane was burning and Shannon drove for altitude with his life bubbling in a red stream from his throat. He got high enough for his crew to bail. There was always a chance a PBY could come back in and pick up the men on their small rubber rafts.

The PBY never had the chance. The Zeros killed one man in his chute on the way down, and they circled low and slow over the water while the three remaining survivors climbed into their rafts, and then they pumped streams of bullets and exploding cannon shells until the water was boiling.

Three days later Fifth Air Force sent out a total of sixty-two B-25s and fourteen A-20

bombers, with sixteen B-17 heavies going in first from high altitude, against Madang.

The Zeros rose up in a great loose swarm like wasps climbing for altitude. Twenty-seven fighters in all.

There were P-40s flying escort at fourteen thousand feet and they went downstairs in a hurry to bounce the enemy fighters. The Japanese climbed up through them, exchanging a few shots on the way, and kept boring upstairs until they reached the level of the twin-engines.

All twenty-seven Zeros went after the thirteen bombers from the Death's Head Brigade.

It was a bitter, savage fight. None of the other bombers was touched that day. Only the 335th was forced to take it. They did, but they shot down six Zeros, losing only one of their number. A nice kid named Matt Barber. They hadn't had time yet to remember the names of the other crewmen.

They rolled away from their bomb runs, their number cut to twelve. Arnie Kessler eased from the formation with his airplane showing gaping tears and holes. Smoke streamed from his right engine. Whip hit his radio. "White Fox, White Fox, you read?"

The P-40 leader called back at once. "White Fox. Go."

"Blue Goose. We've got a cripple and he's tailing smoke. Can you have some of your people take him home?"

"Wilco. Fox Seven and Eight, you have that thing in sight?"

"Roger."

"Got 'em."

"Give the boys some company going home."

Two P-40s peeled off and took up escort position with Kessler's battered airplane. They were high enough for him to go straight through a saddleback of the Owen Stanleys without any great turns. High enough to get across the worst of the mountains on only one engine.

The other bombers went for their home fields. Whip took the 335th still flying in a long descending circle. He wasn't through this day. Not yet, not yet.

Muhlfield called in. You could tell his worries from the tone of his voice. "I got two people shot up pretty bad, Lead."

"Go home then, Mule."

Quiet consternation in that bomber. "Ah, stand by one." Muhlfield came back a few moments later. "We've had a little caucus here. The troops say they don't mind bleeding a bit longer." A pause. "Ah, Lead, are you thinking what I think you're thinking? Over."

Whip burst out laughing. He grinned at Alex before thumbing his transmit button. "Ah, that's affirmative, Mule."

"Okay, boss. We go where you go."

Whip timed it with the touch of the master. He stayed at four thousand feet and in the far distance, along the coastline of New Guinea, he saw the tiny reflections of sunlight in the low sky. "That's them. They won't be expecting company now," he told Alex. He went to transmit. "Okay, everybody, down we go."

The old gravity train ride, the B-25s trembling with the fury of air pounding past them, screaming through bullet and shell holes, the coastline expanding steadily in sight, and a slow-turning nest of moths in the sky.

Zero fighters in the landing pattern at Lae, speed low, gear down, flaps down. Partridges plump and ripe, and the 335th came across the water with everything forward, throttles wide open, light in weight, their speed high, and the Japanese pilots had no more than a few seconds' warning when the bombers struck.

One hundred thirty-two machine guns bucked and roared as the bombers hit the stunned fighter pilots in a wide sweep. It was a one-pass deal only but it was savagely effective. Four fighters burned and exploded in the air. Several more were hit heavily and, for all they knew, went down with dead pilots. It would have been perfect except that one Zero pilot, confused, turned and climbed in a graceful sweep, and only three or four seconds after he died from being pulped, his lifeless form fell forward on the stick and rammed the fighter down, and it fell swiftly from the sky to put its heavy engine directly into the cockpit with Muhlfield and Russ Trotman.

That caucus hadn't lasted long. Mule's men did bleed only "a bit longer."