Bless ’em all! Bless ’em all!
Bless the needle, the airspeed, the ball;
Bless all those instructors who taught me to fly—
Sent me up solo and left me to die.
If ever your plane starts to stall,
You’re in for one hell of a fall.
No lilies or violets for dead strafer pilots,
So cheer up, my lads, bless ’em all!
The young American voices were bellowing these words off—key when Frank Buchanan emerged from Major General George C. Kenney’s tent into the humid twilight of the New Guinea jungle a few miles from Port Moresby. “Thanks for dragging your ass out here to the end of the earth on such short notice, Frank. I wish I could give you something more concrete, like money. Or at least a medal,” Kenney said.
“There’s one thing you could do, George,” Frank Buchanan said. They were old friends from World War I days. “Let me fly with the kids tomorrow. I always like to see how my planes perform under stress.”
“You know as well as I do those bombers can’t handle passengers. They’ve got enough weight problems.”
“My nephew’s copilot is down with malaria. They’re going to give him some green kid who flew in yesterday.”
“My ass will be in a sling with Richard K. Sutherland stamped on it if you get shot down.”
Sutherland was General Douglas MacArthur’s overbearing chief of staff. When he tried to browbeat Kenney the way he had intimidated other generals, Kenney had taken a blank piece of paper and drawn a tiny black dot in the corner. “The blank area represents what I know about airplanes. The dot represents what you know,” Kenney said. Sutherland had not bothered him since that exchange.
Tomorrow the whole world would find out if Kenney knew as much as he claimed. He had taken over the Fifth Air Force with its reputation at zero and its morale at zero minus. Bombing from twenty thousand feet, their planes had hit almost nothing. Occasionally they attacked American ships by mistake. Kenney had fired five generals and a dozen colonels and totally revamped their strategy.
He had summoned Frank Buchanan to the Pacific to redesign the Samson light bomber, another plane Frank had created from the SkyRanger II configuration. It had more armor and more powerful motors than the Nelson version they had shipped to the British. Buchanan Aircraft was building hundreds of them at a new plant they had opened in the Mojave Desert.
Working with the crudest tools, but with dedicated mechanics, Frank had put eight fifty-caliber machine guns in the nose and bolted four more on the outside of the fuselage. All were fired from a button on the pilot’s control wheel. Nose-heavy and loaded to the limit of their weight ratio, the Samsons required maximum skill from their pilots to keep them in the air.
Kenney added another requirement for his pilots: fearlessness. He announced the days of high-level bombing were over. They were going to come in at 150 feet or lower. For three months they had been practicing on a sunken ship in shallow water off Port Moresby.
Last night coast watchers and reconnaissance planes had reported a Japanese fleet carrying a full division of reinforcements heading for New Guinea, the key to the South Pacific. There was not a single U.S. Navy ship close enough to stop them. Kenney’s strafers were the only available weapons.
“Come on, George,” Frank said. “I want to see if Billy Mitchell was right when he said planes could sink a fleet.”
Kenney could not resist this appeal to the hero of every U.S. Army airman. “Okay. Just don’t tell anyone about it when you get back to the States.”
Frank limped off to the tents of the 345th Bomb Group’s 499th Squadron, better known as Bats Outa Hell. His right leg had still not entirely recovered from the crash of the Nelson bomber three years ago. He had wanted to die that day. The pain had been unbearable. Now he was volunteering to fly in what was basically the same plane at a near-suicidal altitude. But the pain had led to the miracle of regaining Amanda’s love. Perhaps this flight, even if it
ended in another crash, would reestablish a link with another person he loved.
He and Amanda seldom met in his house in Topanga Canyon now. He was away so often on overseas assignments such as this one. When he was in California, the pressure of work was all-consuming. Buchanan Aircraft had expanded a hundred, a thousand times. Proposals for patrol planes, heavy bombers, transports, poured in from Washington D.C.
But there was always the future, that almost mythical world of tomorrow, when the war was over and a victorious America was at peace again. What would he and Amanda do? Even before the war exploded, Frank had started to hate the furtive element in their love. He found it harder and harder to confer with Adrian Van Ness, to eat lunch and dinner with him—and on that very day, perhaps, make love to his wife.
Amanda belonged to him, not Adrian. Frank was absolutely certain of that on the spiritual plane. But in the everyday world of legality and custom she belonged to Adrian. Frank could not adjust his mind to a future of endless liaisons, perpetual deception. But he recognized Amanda’s dilemma. Although she had talked bravely about risking Victoria’s affection, she flinched from demanding a divorce from Adrian. Frank also had a dilemma—a deep reluctance to leave the company he had founded, to abandon the designers and engineers who had him helped create his planes—and would, he hoped, help him build even better ones after the war.
In front of the Bats Outa Hell tents, Frank listened to a short, slim hatchet-faced Texan describe his week’s R&R in Sydney, Australia. “You go back and forth between satchel fever and sweet ass.”
“What the hell are you talkin’ about, Patch?” asked his younger more naive copilot.
“Satchel fever’s like you and me gettin’ us a couple of gals in Sydney and goin’ to Mansion’s Bar or some other pub and drinkin’ and just sayin’ anythin’ in front of ’em. Then hustlin’ the women back to our apartment for some more drinkin’ and fuckin’ and maybe in the middle of the night we switch women.
“But sweet ass. That’s somethin’ else entirely. That’s when you think you’ve found the virgin, the one and only woman who hasn’t been touched by any other male member of the human race. Then you take her to Bondi Beach the next day for a swim, and she sees McCall stretched out on the sand with two or three dames just as virginal breathin’ perfume on him and you find out from the expression on your sweet ass’s face that this California son of a bitch was there first!”
Captain Billy McCall had propped himself against a palm tree. His canteen—and all the other canteens—were full of Scotch from a case Frank Buchanan had brought with him. Billy smiled at Patch’s complaint and Frank thought his heart would stop. He was remembering the four—year—old, the eleven-year-old, he had visited at Buzz McCall’s mother’s house in Laguna Beach.
Now Billy was wearing a hat with a fifty-mission crush and Frank could easily imagine the swath he cut through the women of Sydney. He had been cutting quite a swath through the girls of Santa Monica until he joined the air
force. Women fell into his arms the way men had gone crazy over his mother.
“What’s the word from the big brass, Pops?” Billy said.
“I’m flying with you. But it’s a military secret.”
“How come I don’t get a copilot with five thousand hours’ experience?” Patch groused.
A siren awoke them at 4:30 A.M. Frank sat in the operations tent looking at the sleepy young faces, remembering the haphazard briefings of World War I. This briefing was far more complex. They were going to fly almost five hundred miles down the coast to hit the Japanese fleet as it turned into a strait between New Guinea and New Britain.
Billy’s bomber, named Surfing Sue after one of his Santa Monica girlfriends, awaited them inside the dirt revetment. She was black from nose to tail, with an evil-looking bat’s head on the fin. Frank joined Billy in the walk-around to make sure nothing obvious was wrong with the plane. “Oh-oh,” Frank said and pulled a screwdriver from the nacelle of the left engine.
“Jesus,” Billy said. “Braun!”
His scrawny crew chief came running. “You forgot this,” Billy said, handing him the tool. “Tomorrow Braun, I want you to get drunk and stay that way for twenty-four hours.”
They climbed into the plane. “Braun got a Dear John letter yesterday. He hasn’t slept for two nights,” Billy said. “Imagine letting a chick bug you that much?”
“Sure. I felt that way about your mother.”
He had given Billy a sanitized version of his love for Sammy.
“There’s one thing I can’t figure out in that story, Pops. Why she preferred my old man. It doesn’t say much for her judgment.”
The navigator, a chunky Tennessean named Forrest, informed Billy that he and the three gunners were ready to take off. The 1,700—horsepower motors split their eardrums as they burst into life. Many people swore they were the loudest engines in the world. “Any instructions for the copilot?” Frank shouted.
“Remember to flip the toggle switch that turns on the camera as we go over the target,” Billy bellowed.
As squadron leader Billy led the other five planes to the runway. Ahead of them another squadron was taking off at thirty-second intervals. Billy’s planes paused, roaring, belching, backfiring, as each pilot tested his engines one last time. “Kit Bag Leader to squadron,” Billy said. “I’ll circle a half turn to the left at two thousand feet. Follow me.”
Thirty seconds after the other squadron’s last plane took off, the green light in the ramshackle control tower flashed and Billy pushed the throttles to the wall. They hurtled down the runway toward a green mass of jungle five thousand feet away, bouncing wildly through chuckholes and dips in the dirt strip. Frank, who had his hands on the copilot’s controls, could feel the elevators and rudder coming to life. At the halfway mark they reached the point of no return and it was up to Billy to get this seventeen tons of plane and bombs off the ground.
As the airspeed hit 120, he pulled smoothly back on the yoke and they cleared the trees by twenty feet. But they were by no means safe. The prop wash of the planes ahead of them had stirred the air like a giant eggbeater. Frank could feel the plane trying to fall off on her left wing, a common reaction to such turbulence. A novice pilot would try to right the plane with his aileron—an instinctive reaction, but one that would be fatal in this situation. The prop wash was momentary and when it vanished, the down aileron would throw the plane onto its side at virtually zero altitude. Good pilots like Billy repressed instinct and kicked the laggard wing up with the opposite rudder.
Frank was tempted to say nice going. Billy grinned at him, making it clear that he knew exactly what he had done right. They were both pros now. This was no boy sitting beside him.
They climbed laboriously to 2,000 feet to await the rest of the squadron. Forming up in a tight V formation they headed down the coast. Other squadrons of Samsons, Australian Beaufighters, and A-20s, designed by Douglas Aircraft’s resident genius, Ed Heinemann, joined them. In an hour there were over a hundred planes around them, with the Bats Outa Hell in the lead. In another hour the navigator told Billy they were within fifty miles of the strait where they hoped to find the Japanese fleet.
“Let’s ride some waves,” Billy said. He switched on the intership radio. “This is Kit Bag Leader. We’re going down to attack altitude.”
Down, down Billy slanted Surfing Sue’s black nose until she was only 150 feet above the water. The other planes joined them, forming a wide arc, each squadron flying in a tight V behind its leader.
“There they are!” Billy shouted.
Ahead Frank saw at least two dozen ships, a mix of troop transports and destroyers, spread across several miles of sea. “This is Kit Bag Leader,” Billy said over the radio. “We’ll take the ones at the end of the line. Good hunting.”
Billy increased the propeller pitch to 2,100 rpms and moved the fuel mixture control from cruising lean to rich to give them maximum power. “Kosloski, watch for bandits out of the sun,” Billy told the top turret gunner, as they headed for the transport that was bringing up the rear of the convoy.
They achieved almost total surprise. The guardian destroyers fired only a few rounds at them as they came in. Far above them, the Japanese air cover waited for the usual high-level attack. Surfin’ Sue roared toward a black-hulled transport. Its decks were crowded with men. “Hang on!” Billy howled and pressed the button on the twelve fifty-caliber machine guns.
A stream of fire spewed from Surfin’ Sue’s nose. Each of the twelve guns was firing 750 rounds a minute. That added up to the firepower of a battalion of infantry. The plane shook so violently, Frank would not have been surprised to see one of the engines fall off.
The blast of bullets from Billy’s guns and the guns of the other planes in the squadron literally melted the superstructure of the transport before Frank’s eyes. Most of the men on the deck never knew what hit them.
“Good shooting,” Billy said. Ten seconds later he hit the bomb release and two of their one-hundred-pound bombs and twenty of their fragmentation bombs tore chunks out of the deck. Flame and smoke spewed from the transport and it went dead in the water
“Patch, Wilson, this is Kit Bag Leader. Follow me onto that destroyer,” Billy said. “The rest of you finish the transport.”
Billy banked to port, his wingtip all but touching the waves, and roared toward the long low-slung warship. Flames winkled from the muzzles of a dozen guns along the deck. This ship could fight back. A five-inch gun belched and Patch’s plane exploded into a thousand fragments.
“You son of a bitch!” Billy roared. He was pure warrior now. The expression on his face was one Frank had never seen before, jaw rigid, eyes bulging, mouth a slit. Billy pressed the button and the machine guns spewed fire again. Terrified Japanese flung themselves behind their gun shields. Parts of the destroyer’s superstructure sagged and all but disintegrated under the firestorm of steel.
“Now,” Billy said and pressed the bomb release. Two one-hundred-pound-bombs added to the chaos on the destroyer’s deck.
Wheeling, Billy and his surviving wingmate came back for another run. This time, the gunners on the other side of the ship blew the wingmate out of the sky. Billy called on the rest of the squadron to join him. In five minutes there was no one alive on the destroyer’s deck. She was drifting aimlessly, gushing flames and smoke. Billy planted the last of his hundred-pound bombs on her bridge.
“Skip bombers, this is Kit Bag Leader. Finish this guy off.”
A trio of Samsons wheeled along the horizon and roared toward the destroyer. While their nose machine guns poured in the same blast of death, from their bays leaped five-hundred-pound bombs that bounded off the water into the hull. Three tremendous explosions blew half the ruined superstructure into the sea.
Carnage. Along the ten-mile length of the convoy, other destroyers and transports were sinking and burning. Japanese sailors and soldiers leaped from them into the sea, where they clung to rafts and drifted in open boats. “Take the swimmers. Even the score for Bataan,” Billy said.
“No!” Frank cried.
“Orders, Pops,” Billy said. “These guys don’t surrender. If they get ashore we’ll have to kill ’em all over again.”
They dropped to less than fifty feet and the machine guns churned the water white around the hapless survivors. “This isn’t war!” Frank cried.
“Yes it is, Pops,” Billy said. “These guys shoot pilots when they bail out. They behead pilots who bomb their sacred homeland. What the hell’s wrong with you?”
“Bandits at six o’clock!” yelled the turret gunner.
The Japanese air cover was roaring down from their high-altitude patrol to protect the convoy. They were much too late. Not a single troop transport was
still afloat. Four destroyers had survived by fleeing over the horizon, leaving the soldiers to their fate. Billy Mitchell was right. A fleet could be destroyed by air power alone.
The Japanese wanted to prove that enemy air power could at least exact revenge. Samsons and Beaufighters plunged burning into the sea as the marvelously maneuverable Japanese Zero fighters zoomed around them. “Long-range fighters,” Billy shouted, weaving across the water at no more than twenty feet. “Build us some long-range fighters, Pops.”
“Zeke at eleven o’clock. He’s trying to ram us!” the top turret gunner shouted.
Billy swung the plane violently to the right and the Zero crashed into the sea.
“I’m out of ammo,” the turret gunner reported. He had used most of his bullets on the ships and swimmers.
“I only got enough for two or three bursts,” the tail gunner said.
“Here come three more Zeros,” the navigator said. He was in charge of guns in the waist but like most navigators had little gunnery training and was a lousy shot.
Billy raced for the shore of New Guinea and zoomed along the beach, still at twenty feet. The Zeros could not dive on him and pull out without plowing into the jungle. Ahead, Billy saw the mouth of a river. He banked into it and roared along its snaking surface, the Zeros still buzzing angrily overhead. The river made several turns around various mountains and the Japanese, low on fuel, gave up the chase.
Billy swung south toward their home base. They too were low on gas and he did not want to waste an ounce of it. Suddenly they were flying down a box canyon at minimum altitude. About a mile ahead was the ugly stone face of a mountain at least 2,500 feet high. “We better get the hell out of here,” Billy said.
He pushed the props to 2,300 rpm, shoved the throttles to full power and started climbing. Surfin’ Sue failed to respond. Instead of going faster, the plane slowed to near stalling speed as it struggled to ascend.
“What the hell’s happening, Pops?” Billy said.
“A downdraft,” Frank said. “In the worst possible place.”
“This thing stalls at one-thirty. I bet we’re below that now. What’s holding us up?” Billy said.
“I don’t know. Maybe the spirit of Billy Mitchell,” Frank said.
They were climbing but the mountain still blotted out the horizon. Frank began preparing to die in the jungle beside Billy. He could think of worse ways to go. At least he was with someone he loved. Maybe Sammy would be there to greet them on the other side. It would solve the dilemma of his future with Amanda.
“Jesus Christ!” Billy said. He was still pushing the engines to their limits. Instruments showed cylinder head temperatures creeping over the red line. Billy
had the yoke jammed against his chest, trying to haul the plane over the top of the mountain by sheer physical effort. Frank could see the flat peak of the mountain now. They were going to hit about fifty feet below it.
“Full flaps!” Billy roared. “Give me full flaps. Fast.”
Frank slammed down the lever and the flaps fell. Surfin’ Sue ballooned straight up like a helicopter and they cleared the top of the mountain by ten feet. Billy had realized that by changing the shape of the surface of the wing, he could gain fifty feet of lift.
On the back side of the mountain, Billy quickly regained airspeed and roared back to the base at treetop level. “Do you think I’ll always be able to get out of a tight spot that way, Pops?” Billy said.
“I hope so,” Frank said. “But remember the saying, ‘there are old pilots and bold pilots but no old bold pilots.’”
“Who wants to get old?” Billy said.
Over the base, Billy decided to celebrate their victory. He roared up to two thousand feet and rolled into a steep turn, which put the wings vertical to the ground. He cut the throttles, dropped the wheels and let down thirty degrees of flaps as Surfin’ Sue started falling toward the jungle. Billy yanked the plane out of the turn, leveled the wings and was on the runway before Frank could get his breath.
General Kenney was waiting for them, his hands on his hips, as they taxied into their revetment. “If you weren’t Frank Buchanan’s nephew I’d have you court-martialed, Captain!” he roared. “You were never trained to do that in a bomber. I don’t know many fighter pilots who’d land that way.”
“It’s a great way to build morale, General,” Billy said. “I’ll be glad to teach it to the whole bomb group.”
“There’s not a hell of a lot left of the group,” Kenney said.
Three of the six planes Billy had led into the air that morning were at the bottom of the sea. Losses in other squadrons were equally heavy. Low-level bombing was murderously effective—Kenney had proved that. But it was also murderously dangerous.
“I hate to ask these kids to keep doing it,” Kenney said that night in his tent. “But Bupp Halsey’s got it right. He said you can’t win a war without losing ships and you can’t do it without losing planes either.”
Frank said nothing. He knew Kenney was talking more to himself than to him, agonizing over a decision he could not retract.
“You lost a lot of your planes to Zeros, George,” Frank said. “What you need is a good long-range fighter. I’ve got some ideas for one. They could use it in Europe to protect the B—Seventeens too.”
He began sketching a plane with a pointed snout and thin square-tipped wings. “Those wings will make her hot to handle on takeoffs and landings,” he said. “But they’ll let a pilot do wild things in the sky.” Next came a long lean fuselage that would have room for twice as much fuel as the average fighter. The cruciform tail rode high above the body. “We’ve learned a lot in our wind
tunnel,” he said. “Putting the tail up there solves the flutter problem with this size fuselage.”
“If I knew you had that plane in your head I would have court-martialed myself for letting you go up in that bomber!” Kenney said. “Go home and get to work on it.”
Later that night Frank sat on the beach with Billy, getting drunk beneath the starry Pacific sky, with the Southern Cross blazing in the center of the constellations. “Tell me the truth man to man, Pops,” Billy said. “What happened to my mother? How did she die? I asked Buzz a hundred times and all he’d say was ‘Don’t worry about it.’”
Frank told him, leaving out his own anguish, though it was probably audible in his voice. “Buzz loved her, Billy. That’s why he can’t talk about it. He blames himself for it.”
Billy was not interested in Frank’s defense of Buzz. “It doesn’t make any sense, does it? No more sense than poor old Patch gettin’ creamed by that five-inch shell this afternoon while I make it back in one piece. What’d he do to deserve that, Pops? Why’d I make it back?”
“I don’t know, Billy. War makes you realize how mysterious life is. How each of us is working out a destiny—how little we control it.”
“I don’t like it. Whoever’s running the show is doing a lousy job.”
Billy sprang to his feet and raised his fist at the dark glowing sky. “Do you hear me up there? Are you listening, you fucking assholes? Tell the head asshole he’s doing a lousy job!”
Frank staggered to his feet, appalled by Billy’s blasphemy. This was Sammy’s son, the boy she had insisted on baptizing as a symbol of her repentance, her yearning to escape from her dark driven wildness to a life of caring love. With his dual nature, Frank understood it was not simply God Billy was cursing, it was all his failed fathers.
Frank saw he had to give Billy something more than the comradeship of terror and danger they had shared in the cockpit. That was Craig’s love, older brother’s love, a substitute at best for fathering love. In his desperation Frank offered his deepest and purest gift, his talent.
“Billy,” he said. “You’re a great pilot. After the war you’ll fly planes that will go ten times faster and higher and farther than these crates. They’re flying in my head now. I’ll build them for you. I promise you.”
With that pledge Frank knew he was abandoning Amanda, Eden, love in Topanga’s green silence. He was accepting the warriors’ dark code, their love of danger, their fascination with war and death. He was offering them his talent in Billy’s name, for Sammy’s sake.
“I won’t forget that, Pops,” Billy said.
They clung to each other there in the New Guinea darkness, fabricating fatherhood and sonship, their only shield against the misshapen world men and their gods had created.