around there! I haven’t seen so many planes since I was at Corpus
Christi—but these are not trainers. Fighters, torpedo planes,
bombers—coming in like flocks of wild geese. Why, I was just as worried
trying not to bump into some of our own craft as by any opposition the
Japs put up. The Old Man must be mighty happy. Has he got full reports?”
“He’s gettin’ ’em first-hand right this minute!” the executive officer
of the carrier replied. “He’s up there himself in a scout, looking over
the whole business. And you can bet your bottom dollar he’s the
happiest man on earth!”
“What was prettiest,” another joined in, “was seeing the planes from
the other carriers coming in. From every direction! We were in the
first wave, and just as we pulled up and away, there they came—wave
number two from the northeast, and a little farther away wave number
three from the southeast. You had to hurry and do your job so you could
get out of the way of the next batch coming along.”
“Where’s Turk Bottomley?” Scoot asked. “Did any of you see him?”
“I saw him circling around for another go at one of the airfields,” a
torpedo-plane pilot said. “At least I think it was Turk’s Hellcat I
saw. He was joining up with the second wave and going in again.”
“He ought to be back by now,” someone said. “All the other fighters are
in—except Tommy Mixler. I saw him go down in the harbor. Ack-ack.”
There was a moment’s silence at this unwanted mention of a casualty, of
a friend they’d see no more, and then—as if they were forcibly clearing
their minds of any such thoughts—the pilots went on chattering again.
Their planes were almost ready for them to take off again when they all
saw a lone fighter circling the ship. Zooming his engine and doing a
beautiful wing-over turn, the pilot brought his plane around into the
wind for a landing on the heaving deck of the carrier.
“That’s Turk, all right,” Scoot said. “Home from the wars.”
And it was Turk, almost out of gas and completely out of ammunition. He
had stayed around as long as he could, and now he wanted to be off
again within five minutes. As soon as his plane was shoved out of the
way where it could be checked and get its new supplies of gas and
ammunition, the fighters who had come in earlier began to take off
again. They were off on schedule, going in for their second attack on
Japan’s Pearl Harbor of the Pacific!
All day long it went on, with Scoot and the others staying aloft, on
the alert for the Jap planes that would surely come through to attack
them. No matter how great the surprise, some planes would get off the
airfields at Truk and others would race in from other Jap strongholds.
They would go for the carriers first, of course, for the flat-tops were
the big prizes. With the base ship gone, the planes would be lost
without a “home” to return to.
[Illustration: _Some Fighters Stayed With the Carrier_]
But Scoot searched in vain through the skies as the afternoon turned to
evening. The _Bunker Hill’s_ own planes came back for the last time but
still no Japs appeared. Scoot was raging—all day long without a crack
at a Jap! And they were right in the heart of what the Nips considered
their private ocean!
“Is there anything left of Truk for us to get?” he asked that night.
“Didn’t everything get blasted off the map?”
“There’ll be plenty left for everybody,” the squadron commander
replied. “We’ve got half the ships in the harbor and we’ll get most of
the rest tomorrow. Some of them scattered and ran but the boys from the
carriers to the north are catching them. There are emergency airfields
around that will be in use tomorrow, and you can be sure that there’ll
be planes from other Jap garrisons in this area. You boys will have a
fight on your hands tomorrow all right.”
“We’d better have!” Scoot exclaimed. “Imagine! Not a lousy Jap showed
up today!”
It was with grim anger that Scoot took off the next morning, reveling
in the almost unlimited power of his Hellcat as it roared up into the
blue skies and circled, heading for Truk. Scoot was in the squadron
leader’s group, and their objective was the big airfield south of the
city. The Japs would have been working on it all night, despite
constant attacks by the bombers, and they’d have at least one landing
strip in shape for their planes to get off. The fighters were to strafe
the field, then go up as protective cover for the dive bombers. These
would be coming into the harbor right after them, to get the rest of
the ships that still lay there.
Roaring low over the choppy waters of the Pacific, the speedy planes
raced toward the tiny group of islands that the Japs had made into a
great naval fortress, a fortress that was being knocked to pieces by
American planes.
As they approached the island, Scoot saw ahead several American
ships—two cruisers and half a dozen destroyers.
“They’re doing it, boys,” his squadron leader’s voice came over the
radio. “The surface ships are moving in close to shell the island!”
Scoot almost laughed in happiness. It was daring enough for American
carriers to penetrate supposedly Japanese waters and give a pasting to
their impregnable fort. Carriers could stay a couple of hundred miles
out while their planes flew in to the attack. And they were fast ships
which could get away in a hurry if they needed to. But here were the
big-gun ships moving to within fifteen or twenty miles to shell the
island. And the Jap Navy was either hiding or running away—in its own
back yard!
The fighter planes gunned their engines in greeting as they passed the
American ships, and Scoot could see the crews waving and laughing
happily on the decks of the ships.
“They’ll start their shelling just about the time the dive bombers
finish the first part of their job,” Scoot guessed. “And when they’ve
pounded away a couple of hours the bombers will come back in again for
another attack.”
Up ahead lay the island. At better than three hundred miles an hour the
huge flight of fighters went over the shore, heading straight for the
airfield. They paid no attention to the twenty or thirty Jap fighters
high above them, did not even notice the bursts, of ack-ack shells that
puffed around and ahead of them. They were too low and traveling too
fast for ack-ack to be very effective or accurate—and as for those
Zeros, the American planes would take care of them in just a few
minutes.
Scoot saw the airfield up ahead, saw Jap planes on the runways ready to
take off. And the next minute he was roaring over the field, not thirty
feet above the runway, watching the Jap ground crews running for cover,
seeing a few firing rifles futilely into the air at the speeding
planes. He pressed the machine-gun button and felt the slight backward
push to the plane as the battery of fifty caliber machine guns poured
out its converging fire of destruction. Jap after Jap, fleeing toward
the hangars, was cut down in his tracks. Scoot concentrated a terrific
burst of fire on the plane directly ahead of him, saw a flash as it
caught fire, then pulled up and away with a shout that could have been
heard half a mile away had not the air been filled with the roar of
powerful engines.
He circled and came back over the field the other way, this time
dipping to pour a hail of lead into the open doors of a hangar.
“How did the other boys happen to leave that one standing?” Scoot
wondered. “The others are all down in ruins.” It was not easy to
demolish a big hangar with a fighting plane, so Scoot left that for the
bombers, knowing that he had taken care of a few Japs huddling inside
the building and had put forty or fifty holes in the plane standing
near the front.
After one more sweep over the field, he pointed his Hellcat’s nose at
the sun and climbed. But there was something up there on the sun, he
thought, looking intently. Sunspots? What a funny thing to think of at
a moment like this. He’d hardly be noticing sunspots—but he _would_
almost instinctively notice Jap Zeros when they were diving at him out
of the sun.
“That’s what they are!” Scoot exclaimed. “But they made one big
mistake. They thought we were going to strafe the field a couple more
times and they’d come down on us out of the sun while we were busy
doing it. I’ll bet they’re confused now, seeing us coming right up at
them head-on.”
The first groups of the fighter squadrons were all aiming for the
clouds after their attack on the field, while the next groups were
carrying on the strafing job. And Scoot knew, too, that two groups were
high in the air, serving as cover for just such a Jap attack.
“Those Nips may not know it,” he muttered to himself, “but I’ll bet
there’s a flock of Hellcats coming out of the sun right behind ’em.”
The Zeros were larger now, growing larger every minute as they dived
down at the formations of American planes trying to climb away from the
field. It looked as if all the planes were determined to crash head-on
into each other at the greatest possible speed.
Scoot heard a short command come over the radio from his squadron
leader. He grinned.
“Just what I thought he’d do,” he told himself, and then shoved the
stick hard to the right, as he pulled back on the throttle. The
American group split, half going to the right, half to the left, in a
maneuver so sudden and sharp that the Japs in their Zeros could hardly
believe their eyes at seeing planes which had been almost in their
gunsights disappear so quickly. They still thought that their lightly
armored Zeros were the most highly maneuverable planes in the world.
They’d not had much experience yet with the new Hellcats.
Scoot’s wing tipped sharply, and the craft seemed to stall. Then,
giving her the gun again, he flipped completely over. He knew that the
Japs, in that part of a second, would have roared past the spot he had
just been in and now the American planes could chase _them_ on down
toward the field, coming in from the side and rear.
“There they are!” Scoot cried. “Just about set up in position!”
The first Jap planes were pulling up desperately from their dive,
attempting to get back in position to meet the attack of the Americans.
Scoot picked the leading Jap plane, got it in his sights and roared up
on it from a little below. He held his fire, held it a fraction of a
second longer, then pushed the fire-control button with a vicious jab
that almost drove it out of its socket.
Black smoke crept back from the Zero, then flame which fast grew into a
huge sheet of fire enveloping the entire craft. It slowed, seemed to
stagger a moment in the air. Losing power at once because of its
climbing position, it twisted and turned.
As Scoot pulled up and away, he kept his eye on the blazing Zero as it
fell—at first lazily, then faster and faster—toward the ground.
“Is it going to—Yes, by golly!” Scoot cried as the flaming plane
crashed into the huge hangar still standing at the edge of the Jap
field below. There was a roar of fire, a great cloud of black smoke and
Scoot threw back his head and laughed loud and long.
“Who said a fighter couldn’t take care of a hangar?” he demanded. “Why
did I think I had to leave it for the bombers? Boy, oh boy, is that
good?”
“That’s puttin’ ’em in the right pocket, Scoot!” It was the voice of
his squadron leader over the radio. “But watch out behind you! A little
sneak attack coming!”
Yes, there were two Japs coming in on him. Now where did they come
from, Scoot wondered. But he didn’t spend much time on that question
for he had other things to do. If these Japs weren’t familiar enough
with what the new Hellcats could do he’d show ’em. So, instead of
diving to get away, as he knew they expected, he put his fighter into a
steep climb that pulled him up toward the clouds as if a giant hand had
reached down and grabbed him.
That took the first Jap by surprise, as Scoot hoped, but the second had
just enough time to meet the maneuver. As Scoot closed in on the first,
he knew that the second was coming in behind him. He concentrated on
one thing at a time. Maybe, he thought, he could take care of the first
one fast and get away quickly enough. With a roar of speed, he brought
the first Jap into range, opened fire, saw smoke, and waited no longer.
He plunged into a diving turn, looked back over his shoulder and saw
the second Jap ship already plunging earthward in a cloud of smoke.
“Who did that?” Scoot demanded, almost to himself.
“I did, my friend!” It was Turk Bottomley’s voice.
“What are you doing here?” Scoot demanded.
“No Jap planes showed up at the carrier,” Scoot said, “so the Old Man
let a few of us come over to have some fun. I just got here.”
“And just in time, lad,” Scoot said. “Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it,” Turk laughed. “The pleasure was all mine.”
So that is how Scoot managed to paint two little Jap flags on the side
of his plane the next day, as the _Bunker Hill_ steamed westward, away
from a smoking and flaming Truk.
“That’s something like it!” Scoot exclaimed to himself. “I’ll bet poor
old March isn’t having any fun like this, cooped up in that stuffy
submarine.”
It was at that moment that March was listening with pleasure to the
explosion of the _Kamongo’s_ torpedoes against the sides of a Jap
tanker at Wake Island.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CRASH LANDING
_Kamongo_ was ranged with fourteen other submarines alongside the
tender _David_ at the little island base in the southwest Pacific. The
crossing after the sinking at Wake Island had been uneventful, since
they had run submerged most of the time during daylight hours. Always
on the lookout for enemy ships, officers and crew alike had been
disappointed to run into nothing but an American task force, consisting
of a carrier, a cruiser, and three destroyers racing north at full
speed.
March had tried to make out the name of the carrier, and he would have
been delighted to know it was the _Bunker Hill_ carrying Scoot and his
companions from their Truk attack to a small action against another
Jap-held island farther north. But even American subs submerged and ran
deep and quiet when American ships were near by. The destroyers would
have started to toss depth charges like snowflakes if they had sighted
a periscope of any kind.
At the sub base, all pigboat Skippers and their seconds were at a
meeting aboard the tender. Captain Milbank, the Intelligence Officer,
was speaking to them.
“You’ve all heard about the blasting of Truk,” he said. “Now, it’s
certain that the Japs will try to reinforce that important post as
quickly and as fully as possible. In fact, word has reached us through
the Chinese that a large convoy has already left Japan for Truk, with
troops, oil and gasoline, ammunition, more antiaircraft guns, food and
supplies, and with almost every deck covered with Zeros. They’ve got to
replace what we knocked out there and, even further, increase their
defending force. They know we’ll hit it again.”
He looked around the room at the quiet, serious faces of the men who
listened intently.
“You may also know,” he went on, “that we have found Chinese
Intelligence to be very reliable. It’s amazing how they get word
through the Jap lines so quickly and efficiently. Well—the Chinese
report that there’s something special about this convoy for Truk. They
weren’t able to learn exactly what it is, but they believe it is in the
route to be followed. The Nips know our submarines are roaming the seas
out here and will be on the lookout especially for this convoy. Having
knocked Truk half out, we want to keep it in that condition. It’s you
men—with some help, I must confess, from the air service—who will do
that job.”
There were smiles in the room as the Captain, joking, grudgingly
recognized the usefulness of the flying sailors. Then he continued:
“Our patrol planes are ranging over the ocean on the lookout for the
convoy, of course, but their distances are limited and it’s a mighty
big ocean to cover. So, for a while, our submarines must also act as
scouts. Later we can get together and sink the ships, but first we have
to act as a team to find them.
“We’re all going to leave here at the same time, and fan out to cover
the main routes from Japan to Truk. And we want to catch them as far
from Truk as possible. The earlier we can find them, the more subs and
planes we’ll have time to get to the attack so we can wipe the whole
thing out.”
The Captain turned to a chart behind him on the wall.
“Later I shall go over with you the routes to be followed by each
submarine,” he said. “If and when any one of you sights the convoy he
is _not_ to radio that information. The Japs would certainly pick up
that broadcast. They’d know we had discovered them and they’d be ready
for us. We want the attack to come by surprise. So we have arranged
certain spots for each of you to arrive at on certain days and at
specific hours. A patrol plane will visit each of those spots, clearly
marked so that you will not mistake it for an enemy plane. He will land
on the water and pick up any information you may have. This same
procedure is to be followed twenty-four hours later at another spot
further away.
“If by that time not one of you has found the convoy, you are to go
your own ways, looking for whatever you can find on this patrol. And by
that time, if you find anything like the big convoy, the only thing to
do will be to surface and radio us so we can all close in for the kill.
We’ll lose the element of surprise but we’ll get them, anyway.”
Next, the Intelligence Officer went over the details of routes and
rendezvous spots for each submarine. March saw at once that _Kamongo_
was taking a westerly course from their base, then heading northwest.
It seemed to him that this should be one of the most likely routes for
a convoy to take from Japan to Truk, and he was pleased.
Then Larry Gray asked a question of the Intelligence Officer.
“Those rendezvous spots,” he said. “They appear to be in open sea, but
I know there are little atolls all over the place. Are they near such
islands?”
“No, they are not,” the Captain said. “Purposely. The Japs have little
garrisons on a great many of those tiny islands that look no more than
bumps on the sea. Some of them have radios. If they saw the contact of
an American sub and an American patrol plane so far from our bases,
they’d report it. That wouldn’t tell the Japs much, but the less they
know the better we like it, no matter how unimportant it may seem. No,
the meeting places are in open water. The navigators have a little work
to do on this patrol.”
Larry glanced at March and smiled. March knew it wasn’t the easiest
thing in the world to find one exact spot in the middle of a big ocean
by dead reckoning.
After going over all details of the complicated plan thoroughly, the
skipper and their execs returned to their own submarines to see that
everything was ready for getting under way. Fuel and supplies and
torpedoes had been loaded into all the pigboats and there remained only
a final check before they could depart.
In the night they slipped away from their tender one by one and,
traveling on the surface under the protection of night, they headed out
to sea silently, on the alert, eagerly looking forward to the task
ahead. The crew of each pigboat felt that _they_ would be the ones to
find the convoy, the first to go in for the attack.
But on the second day not a sign of the convoy had been seen by any of
the submarines.
“Must be coming more slowly than we thought,” Larry suggested. “We’ll
catch up with it before the next patrol stop.”
At the time Larry spoke they were on the surface in the late afternoon,
watching the big American flying boat slide down out of the clouds and
circle above them. March had felt a thrill of satisfaction when he saw
it, knowing that it meant he had found his particular spot in the wide
Pacific, but Larry just seemed to take it for granted that his
navigator would have brought them where they were supposed to be, no
matter how difficult the job.
They gave their negative report to the patrol, learned that no other
pigboat contacted had had better luck, then submerged as the flying
boat took off from the choppy waters.
They ran submerged at periscope depth for two hours until darkness
began to fall, with one of the officers having his eye glued to the
little rubber piece on the ’scope every minute. Then they surfaced and
went steadily forward on their prescribed course. Two officers and
three lookouts stayed constantly on the bridge, and the sound detector
man below concentrated on his listening as never before. It might well
be that he could pick up the sound of a convoy’s propellers long before
the lookouts would sight anything, especially on a moonless night.
But dawn came and found them with nothing to report.
“You’d think there wasn’t even a war going on out here!” McFee
complained. “Don’t the Nips have _any_ ships in these waters?”
“Not in the waters we’ve been sailing on, anyway,” Stan Bigelow
replied. “I feel cross-eyed from looking so hard for the last four
hours.”
The bright sun sent them under the water again, but only to periscope
depth so that a constant lookout could be maintained. Still—late
afternoon found them filled with discouragement, waiting for the patrol
plane. The patrol had found nothing.
“Maybe one of the others—” March suggested, but Larry shook his head.
“I can’t believe it,” he said. “I think we’re in the best spot. We’re
furthest west of the whole bunch. That’s certainly the most likely
route for the convoy, keeping as close to the Philippines, to land
protection, as possible. If they were attacked they’d have support from
land-based planes there for quite a while. If anything, I think they
may even be further west than our route.”
March and Larry talked as they stood on the bridge waiting for their
patrol plane to come out of the west. Suddenly the lookout shouted,
“Plane coming out of the sun!”
“Can’t be ours!” Larry shouted. “Rig for dive, March.”
As March barked out the orders to take the ship down, the lookout
reported that the plane was a two-motored flying boat.
“Must be a Jap all right,” Larry said. They all knew that their own
plane was four-motored, one of the longest-ranged flying boats in the
world.
[Illustration: _A Two-Motored Flying Boat Came at Them_]
In two minutes March had slid down the hatch, to be followed by Larry,
who dogged the hatch cover tight.
“Take her down to a hundred and fifty,” he said.
_Kamongo_ turned her nose down and slid forward. As they leveled off at
a hundred and fifty they heard the roar and felt the jar of a depth
charge explosion. But it was not close and it went off far above them.
Then came another, a little closer but still threatening no danger to
the sub.
“Not full-size charges,” Larry said. “We’re all right at a hundred and
fifty. We’ll just wait him out. He can’t be carrying very many depth
charges in that job of his. But hold on—he’ll probably get a little
closer.”
They all held on, but nothing happened. Not another charge went off.
March looked questioningly at Larry.
“Don’t know,” Larry said. “Maybe he’s gone on. More likely he’s playing
possum, hoping we’ll think he’s gone and will come up for a look.
That’s when he’d get us.”
“Better stay down for a while,” March said.
“Yes, he can’t fly around up there in a circle forever,” Larry said.
“We’ll go up in an hour.”
“What about meeting our patrol plane?” March asked.
“I’m afraid we’ll miss him,” Larry said. “Can’t take a chance on going
up now. He might hang around for a while, of course, if the Jap has
gone.”
“He could take care of that Jap in a minute,” McFee said.
“Say, maybe that’s what happened,” March suggested.
“Perhaps,” said Larry. “Maybe our plane came and drove off the Jap. But
we can’t be sure. I’m not going to risk a sub and sixty men just to
find out.”
Then the sound man turned excitedly.
“I hear something, sir,” he said. “Something in Morse—sounds like a
hammer tapping against metal. I’ll have it in a minute.”
They waited impatiently as the sound man took down the message. Then he
handed it to Larry.
“_Kamongo_,” it said. “Jap went home. Come on up.”
Larry grinned. “It’s okay,” he said. “The Jap wouldn’t have known we
were _Kamongo_. It’s our plane. Take her up.”
When the ship surfaced and Larry scrambled through the hatch on to the
bridge he saw the big American flying boat resting on the water not a
quarter of a mile away. It taxied over beside the submarine as March
and Mac joined Larry on the bridge.
“I thought you’d get that hammer-on-the-hull message,” the plane’s
pilot called with a smile. “Nippo just took one look at me coming and
decided he had a date west of here in a big hurry.”