dangerous maneuver, for a cruiser scarcely a mile away had opened fire.
Flak was coming near enough to make the air bumpy, and there was no
chance to dodge while making a bombing run. Barry hugged tight to the
ceiling at a scant thousand feet.
“I’ll go over at eight hundred, Chick,” he said quickly. “They’re
shooting too close.”
Before he had finished speaking, Chick’s fingers were busy at the
bombsight’s knobs, compensating for the intended drop. The Fortress
dipped abruptly. The freighter’s deck flashed beneath. Two hundred feet
above, the cruiser’s shells burst—where _Rosy_ would have been, had
not Barry changed his altitude at the right instant.
The shock of them was almost simultaneous with the wallop of the bomb
blast. Chick had laid his half-ton “egg” on the freighter’s stern,
blowing it clean off. As the vessel settled in the water a column of
smoke and flame poured upward from the torn deck.
“Good boy, Chick!” said Barry quietly. “And now we’ll take that
somewhat despised but highly appropriate action known as _scramming_.
The whole task force will be gunning for us now—not to mention
whatever planes the Jap cruiser may try to launch.”
Hap Newton turned and waved mockingly astern.
“Don’t worry, Tojo—we’ll be back, with plenty of company,” he said.
“You’re going to be honorable shark-meat about twenty-four hours from
now!”
_Sweet Rosy O’Grady_ plunged into the clouds and leveled off for Mau
River, three hundred miles away. The wet mist whipped through her
gaping wounds. The torn edges of her metal skin hummed and shrieked in
the wind, but her four mighty engines thundered in unbroken harmony.
She was still fit to fight.
“Speaking of shark-meat,” Fred Marmon’s voice came over the interphone,
“would somebody be kind enough to slap a bandage on my back? It feels
like a cubed steak.”
“I’ll do it, Fred, if you’ll tie up my right shoulder,” Curly Levitt
responded. “I’ve got the first-aid kit here.... Anybody else need
patching up?”
“My ear feels like something the cat brought in,” came Tony Romani’s
voice from the tail turret. “I think there’s some shrapnel sticking in
my ribs, too, but that can wait. You fellows fix yourselves up first.”
All of the crew had some wounds, but none of them were dangerous.
_Rosy’s_ pilots had escaped with scratches. Chick Enders had a bruised
hand and a cut on his leg. Their hurts were just enough to get them
“warmed up for a real fight,” as Hap Newton put it.
“When we land, we’ll stick with _Rosy_ until she’s bombed and serviced
for another run,” Chick suggested. “Only the pilots need to report to
Colonel Bullock, and he won’t ground them for a couple of scratched
faces. That way, we can take off with the other planes for the all-out
attack.”
The plan was unanimously approved, but it was doomed to failure. _Rosy
O’Grady_ made a three-point landing, like the perfect lady she was, but
as she rolled to a stop, Chick Enders groaned.
“There’s Colonel Bullock coming out to us in the jeep!” he exclaimed.
“He’ll never let us take off without a real inspection. And that means
we’ll miss the big fight!”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
SLAUGHTER FROM THE AIR
Chick Enders’ prediction was only partly right. Colonel Bullock did
order _Sweet Rosy O’Grady_ and her fighting crew grounded for temporary
repairs. But it was only for the rest of that day and night. To smash
the Jap task force utterly, every bomber that could fly would be needed.
“Get those wounds dressed at once,” he ordered the eight bloodstained
ragamuffins who faced him near _Rosy’s_ shell-torn fuselage. “Then
report to the mess shack. Fill your stomachs and hit the hay. If
you’re all fit for duty tomorrow morning I’ll let you fly.
And—er—congratulations on spotting that Jap task force, Blake!
You’ve probably saved us a lot of ships and fighting men.”
Barry took the officer’s proffered hand, with an embarrassed smile.
“I was just playing a hunch, sir,” he murmured. “Chick—I mean,
Lieutenant Enders—did the real job. He sank a big destroyer and blew
the stern off a cargo vessel before we had to clear out. And the other
boys knocked that _Aichi_ T98 out of the sky—simply chewed her to
junk!”
“My congratulations were meant for all of you, Lieutenant,” the colonel
replied with a twinkle in his eye. “And so are the orders I just gave.
_Dismissed!_”
As Barry and his friends moved wearily toward the hospital tent, a
squadron of Mitchell bombers passed over, heading out to sea. The
ceiling had lifted to three thousand feet. If it stayed there, Barry
thought, the planes would have little trouble in spotting the Jap
convoy.
The field, he noted, was almost empty of planes. Evidently they had
taken off right after his radioed report. The Japs would catch plenty
of grief before darkness shut down, but the real pay-off would be
tomorrow. By that time Allied airfields from all over eastern New
Guinea as well as Australia and the Solomons would be sending planes to
the attack. The Japs would meet them with swarms of their own
land-based fighters. A gigantic air-and-sea battle would be on, with
the outcome impossible to guess.
Much the same thing was passing through the minds of all the crew, but
they were suddenly too tired to talk about it. The tension of battle
had broken. Now they were conscious chiefly of stiffening wounds and
the deep, physical craving for food and sleep.
The night passed in dreamless oblivion. It seemed to Barry that he had
just closed his eyes when the bugle routed him out of bed. He glanced
unbelievingly at his watch. Yes, the hands stood at five-fifteen—half
an hour before dawn!
“Roll out of it, Chick, Hap, Curly!” he called. “This is our big day.
If we’re not out there in time, I bet you _Rosy O’Grady_ will take off
without us!”
Groans and yelps answered him, as the tent mates moved their sore
bodies and found them more painful than the night before.
“Come on!” urged their young pilot. “Snap out of it or I’ll report the
whole crew on the sick list. We’ll miss our crack at the Japs, but—”
He saw a boot come sailing from Hap’s side of the tent, and ducked just
in time.
“All right, all right!” he laughed. “I’ll see you lazy birds on the
runway, if you’re too late for mess call. So long!”
Hap Newton’s other boot caught him as he hurried out of the tent. He
picked it up, but paused in the act of throwing it back.
“Setting up drill at this time of the morning, Lieutenant?” said
Colonel Bullock’s voice behind him.
“No, sir—_getting_-up drill is more like it,” Barry replied. “My crew
slept too hard last night, and they’re still in a fog.”
“Harrumph! I envy them!” grunted the colonel. “Couldn’t sleep at all
myself, last night.... But I have good news for you, Blake. Your ship
has passed every quick test for serious damage, and except for the
holes that there wasn’t time to patch, she’s fit to fly. That damaged
machine gun in the nose has been replaced. She’s been bombed up and
serviced. I’m counting on her—and you men—to give the Japs a very
special pasting today.”
“We’ll do that, sir, and—er—thank you for giving us so much of your
time and thought,” Barry responded. “Are we taking off with the
squadron this time?”
“Yes. Extreme right wing position,” Colonel Bullock told him. “The
take-off is in thirty minutes.”
Barry saluted and watched the officer’s tall, still youthful figure
stride away in the twilight. Behind him the crew were piling out of the
tent.
“Just time to eat and run, fellows,” he said, turning toward the mess
shack. “The squadron takes off at six.”
* * * * *
Clear sunlight gleamed through the bottle-green crests of the big
combers that tossed and battered the Jap task force. Gone was the
protecting blanket of clouds. Gone, too, was any hope in the mind of
the Jap admiral that he could sneak up on the Allied bases without a
costly attack from the air. Yet his words were confident as he issued
his orders to the flotilla.
A second convoy of fourteen vessels had joined his ten during the
night. With their added strength he felt certain of success.
“Inform the honorable captains that they will close the intervals
between their ships to five hundred yards,” he told his chief executive
officer. “Our massed antiaircraft, plus the umbrella of our land-based
fighter planes, will beat off any air attack our enemies may make. In
fact, we shall utterly destroy them.”
The executive bowed and hissed politely.
“We shall destroy them utterly,” he repeated. “Banzai!”
Green water crashed on the forecastle as the flagship buried her bow
under a giant comber. The cruiser shuddered, heaved, and shook herself
free. The bow rose higher, higher, until the steel warship seemed to
those on deck as if she were going to stand upright on her propellers.
Again her foredeck dipped, rolled, plunged into the trough of a mighty
sea. The antiaircraft crews balanced themselves calmly on sea-trained
legs. Their eyes never left the reeling sky above them. They breathed
deeply, fingering the cold steel of their weapons, waiting for the
targets they knew would soon appear.
It was a different story below the wave-washed decks of the troop
transport ships. There, packed in the stifling holds like sardines,
eighteen thousand Jap infantrymen gagged and groaned. The throes of
seasickness gripped officers and men alike. It was not deadly, they had
been told, but it made them long for death. Only their inbred habit of
obedience had kept them from shooting themselves or committing _hara
kiri_ through the past week of inglorious suffering.
Suddenly the flotilla’s antiaircraft opened fire with a concerted roar.
The transports’ long range guns joined it. Their barking reports made
the thin steel hulls quiver. Then came the bombs.
One struck an 8,000-ton troopship aft of the bridge. A thousand Jap
soldiers died in the flaming inferno it made. Live steam from the
wrecked engine room cooked fifty other men alive.
A second bomb blasted the stricken vessel. Its superstructure leaped
into the air and fell overside in twisted pieces. The ship itself
rolled, broke apart, and sank.
That second bomb was a credit to Chick Enders’ marksmanship. From a
three-mile height he had hit the wave-tossed Jap ship with the accuracy
of a sharpshooter. He had done it, flying through air that was bumpy
with antiaircraft bursts, ignoring the darting Zero fighters that
stabbed at his ship from above.
Soapy Babbitt in the top turret and Tony Romani in the tail were not
ignoring the hornet-like Jap Zeros. While Barry, Hap and Chick were
concentrating on their first bombing run, they knocked down a plane
apiece.
The Flying Fortress squadron had dispersed, and its members were making
individual runs over the flotilla. Now, however, the Jap flak was
forcing them to fly higher. One bomber already was down in the sea.
Several others had been nicked by shrapnel. _Rosy O’Grady’s_ stabilizer
showed ragged holes, and Cracker Jackson had been stunned by a direct
hit on the ball turret.
“We’re going upstairs, too,” Barry Blake decided. “We won’t make so
many hits, but we’ll make the Japs disperse, so their flak won’t be so
concentrated.”
“That suits us gunners, Lieutenant,” Fred Marmon spoke up. “We’ll pick
off a few more Zeros up there where our Lockheed Lightnings are
dogfighting.”
The Jap “cover” of fighting planes certainly looked as if a tornado had
struck it. The deadly but unarmored little fighters were torching down
all over the sky. Others were fleeing back toward their New Guinea
bases, glad of an excuse to return for gas. The reason was simple:
plane for plane and pilot for pilot, our forces were better. When the
Fortresses got “upstairs” there was not much opposition to deal with.
_Rosy O’Grady_ made three more runs before the first wave of Australian
_Havoc_ bombers arrived beneath her. Skimming the sea at mast-height,
the twin-engined attack bombers strafed the Jap decks with a terrible
hail of bullets. They passed over, from stern to stem, and dropped
their bombs at point-blank range—sometimes down the enemy’s
smokestacks.
On their heels came the North American B-26 Mitchells, repeating the
same tactics, with even greater effect. Back and forth like a great
broom of destruction they swept across the Jap flotilla. Enemy gunners
withered and died under blast after blast of hot lead. Those who
survived tried desperately to swing their heavier guns into action, but
that was like trying to shoot mosquitoes with a pistol.
Now, all over a forty-mile area, Jap ships were blazing. Barry saw
three of them sink before Chick emptied the bomb racks with near misses
on a dodging destroyer.
“We’ll go back for another load,” he said, turning the Fortress’s nose
homeward. “How’s Cracker Jackson?”
“Coming out of it,” was Curly Levitt’s reply. “His right arm’s broken
above the elbow, and his nose is banged up. The ball turret took an
awful wallop from that ack-ack shell.”
“Better our ball turret than our bomb bay!” Hap Newton remarked grimly.
“We could have gone out in a blaze of glory if that shell had hit a few
feet forward.”
Much to Cracker Jackson’s distress, his friends took him to the
hospital tent the moment they landed at Mau River.
“Have a heart, Lieutenant!” he begged Barry. “This bum wing feels fine
in a sling, and I could shoot my left gun with my left hand. Please let
me go along this trip.”
Barry shook his head.
“That’s a compound fracture, man!” he replied. “If you don’t get proper
treatment now, it may gangrene. Besides, your nose is swollen so big
that you couldn’t see around it to shoot. Lieutenant Levitt will man
your turret if necessary.”
They left him, still protesting, in care of the field doctor.
“As a matter of fact,” Curly Levitt said when they were out of hearing,
“Jackson’s turret is so banged up that it’s useless. It won’t turn, and
only one gun will fire. I didn’t tell him, because he would worry about
our going back without belly protection.”
No more than six Jap vessels were still in the fight when _Rosy
O’Grady_ returned with a fresh bomb load. One cruiser, four destroyers
and a small cargo ship made up the half dozen. They were scattered many
miles apart, each trying to make good its own escape. Between them the
sea was covered with rafts, landing barges, lifeboats and wreckage of
every description, but they made no attempt to take aboard survivors.
For the moment, the sky was fairly clear of planes. Two other Flying
Fortresses, a PBM flying boat, a few Grumman Wildcats and Lockheed
Lightnings on the hunt for Zero fighters—these were all that Barry
Blake could see. The enemy had been definitely shot out of the air.
“We’ll go after that cruiser,” the young pilot told his bombardier.
“Before she gets our range, I’ll dive to three thousand, level off
there for a quick run, and then climb for a cloud. Ready, Chick?”
“Roger!” answered the little man in _Rosy’s_ nose. “It’s risky but it
will give me a swell target. You never learned this stunt out of a rule
book, Barry!”
In the co-pilot’s seat, Hap Newton sat nursing the throttles, changing
the bomber’s air speed from moment to moment. Barry worked the wheel to
keep her constantly shifting altitude—foiling the ack-ack gunners on
the Jap warship. Abruptly he shoved the wheel far forward.
The Fortress headed down as if out of control. Then, at three thousand
feet she pulled out of it. For a matter of seconds her run at the Jap
cruiser held true and level.
“Bombs away!” cried Chick Enders. “Let’s get out of here in a hurry!”
Barry put his Fortress into a steep, climbing turn that strained her to
the limit. Zigzagging, banking, spiralling, he made the big bomber
climb like a cat in a fit.
Far beneath, a sheet of flame was rising from the enemy cruiser. Chick
Enders’ bomb had opened her oil tanks. Some of her antiaircraft were
still firing, but _Rosy’s_ unorthodox actions fooled them completely.
“Great stuff, Barry!” yelled the little bombardier. “We’ll pull the
same stunt on that destroyer to the east of us. Let’s go!”
“We will not!” Barry Blake retorted. “I felt _Rosy_ groan too many
times in that last crazy climb. If I did it again she might really come
apart. From now on we’ll confine our bombing attacks to a reasonable
altitude. It’s better to waste a bomb than a bomber, even if you don’t
believe it.”
As they headed for their new target at ten thousand feet, more bomb
bursts tossed up white fountains of sea water around the farther
warships. Seven or eight Fortresses were now on the scene. The
flotilla’s fleeing remnants were doomed.
It had been a ghastly slaughter, Barry reflected. Nearly twenty
thousand enemy troops, not to mention the crews of the Jap vessels,
were either dead or floating among the wreckage. An army and a task
force blotted out in two days!
Mechanically he guided _Rosy O’Grady_ on her run. He was sick of
killing. Even Chick’s jubilant, “Bombs away!” failed to thrill him as
it had before.
Another hit! The thousand-pound bomb burst the thin-hulled destroyer
apart like a paper bag. Swiftly she settled, stood up on her nose, and
slipped out of sight. There was no time to launch a boat.
Five miles beyond, a number of tiny waterbugs were leaving zigzag wakes
in the water. They were probably Jap landing barges, Barry thought,
crammed with armed soldiers from one of the troop transports that had
gone down. Now he saw the cause of their erratic dodging—a flight of
Mitchell B-25’s diving at them, with tracer bullets streaking from
their guns.
“Those Nips haven’t a chance, even if they’re lucky enough to shoot
down a plane or two,” Hap Newton observed. “Their barges must look like
sieves already. More meat for the sharks!”
“More butchery!” muttered Barry Blake. “It’s necessary, of course. If
those armed Japs ever made land, they’d soon be killing our own men.
That’s what they were sent here for. But I’ve seen enough slaughter
today to make me feel rather sick.”
Chick Enders didn’t say so, but he may have felt the same way, after
thinking it over. At any rate, he seemed to have lost his uncanny
marksmanship for the rest of that day. His remaining bombs scored
nothing better than near misses on a desperately zig-zagging destroyer.
Another Fortress sank that vessel as Barry turned his plane homeward.
“Looks like some sort of a weather front, over toward the coast,” Hap
Newton remarked. “I hope our base isn’t shut in by it. We’d have to
find another field or bail out....”
“Tony can’t bail out, Lieutenant,” Fred Marmon’s voice interrupted.
“He’s bleeding to death fast, from a leg wound. I’ve just found him
unconscious in the tail turret, and put on a tourniquet.”
A moment of shocked silence followed Fred’s statement. Each man of the
crew felt as if he himself had received a deadly hurt. The fortress
crew was like a single body, its members knit inseparably together by
weeks of common danger, duty, thought and feeling.
“Tie that tourniquet tight, Fred,” Barry Blake said huskily. “Keep Tony
alive, and I’ll manage to set _Rosy O’Grady_ down somewhere, ceiling or
no ceiling.... Soapy! Contact Mau River, will you, and ask what the
weather is there.”
Leaving his position in the top turret, Sergeant Babbitt sat down at
his radio. In a few minutes he had the field’s weather report.
“Closed in,” it said briefly, “and so are all near-by airfields. Better
try Buna—or Port Moresby if you have enough gas.”
“That’s the tough part of it,” said Hap bitterly. “We used up our gas
hunting down the Jap Navy. Buna and Port Moresby are out! Our only hope
is to hit the silk.”
Groans sounded over the interphone. Not their own danger but that of
Tony Romani, brought unanimous protest from the others.
“There’s _got_ to be some place for us to set her down, Skipper,” Fred
Marmon declared. “You’ve always been able to figure a way out. We can’t
let Tony down.”
“Curly!” exclaimed Barry Blake. “Get out your charts and see if there
aren’t some atolls or small islands somewhere this side of that weather
front. If one of them had a beach long enough and smooth enough—”
“I see what you mean,” Curly spoke excitedly. “I’ll tell you in two
shakes, Barry. There’s a sprinkling of little islands between us and
the western tip of New Britain.... Here they are! Two or three of them
ought to be clear of fog right now. I’ll give you the compass
course....”
A new spirit pervaded the bomber’s crew. Despite battle weariness,
their still painful hurts and their worry over Tony, they crowded
around Curly’s map like a bunch of eager kids.
“Don’t get your hopes too high,” their levelheaded navigator warned
them. “None of these islands may have a beach big enough to land a
fighter plane. If that’s so, we’ll lose _Sweet Rosy O’Grady_ anyway.”
“And if we can land,” Barry added, “the place may be swarming with
Japs. Personally I’m for taking the risk, but if there’s one man who
doesn’t like the idea, we’ll turn back and bail out over Mau River.
Tony would have a bare chance to live if we pulled his ripcord and
chucked him out.”
Silence answered him. It was broken finally by Curly Levitt’s voice
giving Barry the compass course for an unnamed islet that they might
hope to reach ahead of the fog.
“Okay, Crusoes, you asked for it!” _Rosy’s_ Old Man said cheerfully.
“We’ll be in sight of Island number one in about twenty minutes.”
In twenty minutes to the dot they sighted the first white-and-green
bump on the ocean’s surface. The islet rose to a central peak about
three hundred feet high, covered completely with jungle. As the
Fortress swept over it at two thousand feet, her crew voiced their
disappointment. Such beaches as the place possessed were narrow and
rocky. A helicopter might have found a landing place, but not a bomber
with a 90-mile-per-hour landing speed.
Almost before the little peak had passed beneath, Curly was laying the
course for Island number two. It lay a little farther to the north, and
away from the weather front. Its length, however, suggested better
landing possibilities, and it was barely fifty miles away.
Ten minutes later Chick Enders pointed it out. As its low-lying shape
became more distinct, the crew’s hopes rose. The south beach, they saw,
was wide and free from stones, and the tide at this hour was out. The
only fault of this natural runway was its slight curve, and the tiny
brook that broke its length.
“I’ll chance it,” the young skipper decided. “As a matter of fact, it’s
going to be a lot easier to set down on that beach than to take
off—even supposing we can get more gas.”
Climbing to a safe height, he turned and came in for his landing. In
order to make the most of the beach’s length, he brought _Rosy’s_
wheels down just at the farther edge of the brook. The Fortress bucked
a trifle in the wave-packed sand, and rolled to a smooth stop. Within
her, six men cheered like maniacs.
“Hold it down, men,” Barry advised. “We don’t know what we’re up
against yet. Our first job is to dress Tony’s wound. Then we’ll explore
the island, if there’s time to do that before dark.... Curly, pass me
the first-aid kit and a bottle of water, will you, please?”
Tony was still unconscious when they carried him to the plane’s
cockpit. His wound had evidently been made by a piece of flak that had
ripped through his thigh like a dull knife. The arteries were bleeding
slowly despite the tourniquet.
With small silver clips from the first-aid kit, Barry managed to close
the severed blood vessels. He dusted a handful of sulfanilamide powder
into the wound, removed the tourniquet, and used most of the kit’s
gauze in a snug bandage.
Straightening up, he pointed to the windows in the nose and overhead.
“Open up and give him some fresh air,” he directed. “The minute Tony
comes to, we’ll make him swallow some salt tablets and sulfadiazine,
with all the water he can drink. That’s all we can do.... Chick, you
and Soapy will stay with him now, while the rest of us look over the
island. We’ll be back before dark if we don’t run into any Japs.”
“Okay, Skipper—we’ll hold the fort,” Chick answered. “If you should
meet trouble near by we can cover your retreat with _Rosy’s_ machine
guns. Maybe you’d better demount one of them and take it along for an
emergency.”