The Secret Warriors

Although there were four passengers aboard the U.S. Navy PBY-5 from Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, most of the plane’s cargo weight was mailbags—regular mail from the fleet, official mail from various Army and Navy headquarters all over the Pacific, some from even as far away as Australia.

The Consolidated PBY-5 Catalina flying boat had been designed not as a transport but as a long-range reconnaissance aircraft. It had two 1,200-hp Twin Wasp radial engines mounted on its high wing. Two struts on each side reinforced the wing, the interior of which contained huge fuel tanks. What every Catalina pilot dreaded was landing shortly after takeoff, when the fuel tanks were full—and thus heavy. If the plane could not be greased in, all that weight was likely to tear the wings off.

There was little danger of that now. The fuel tanks were indicating close to empty. A head wind had been with them all the way across the Pacific from Hawaii. The pilot had even worried for a few rough minutes that he would not have enough fuel to make it to Alameda. A few hundred miles from the coast, the navigator had wordlessly laid his calculation on the pilot’s lap. His projection was that they would run out of fuel an hour and fifteen minutes short of Alameda.

At that point the pilot had had two options: He could throw excess cargo out, or he could try fiddling with the engines to decrease fuel consumption, and thus increase range. Since neither the official mailbags nor, obviously, the passengers could be thrown over the side, the only “excess” cargo that could be jettisoned was the fleet mailbags. The pilot was reluctant to throw away several thousand servicemen’s letters home, so he elected to try the unusual.

He retarded the throttles, thinned the mixture more than he knew he was supposed to, and dropped from 8,000 feet to less than a thousand. The miles he gained by this maneuver would put them that many miles closer to the California coast, and thus increase their chances of rescue if he had to set down in the drink and wait for someone to come looking for them.

Since it was daylight and he was forced to fly dead reckoning, he had no reliable means of knowing whether or not what he was trying was working. He was flying on a course of 89 degrees magnetic at an indicated airspeed of 140 knots. Simple arithmetic told him where he should be. But if he was, say, flying into a 30-knot head wind—which, very likely, he was—then he was making only 110 miles an hour over the water. And if the head wind was not coming directly at him, but from the side, he was liable to be far off his intended course.

He was genuinely thrilled, as well as enormously relieved, when the radio operator came forward and, without asking permission, switched the frequency, and over his headset he could hear a marvelously unctuous, pure candy-ass voice announce that San Francisco could expect to experience evening temperatures of 68 degrees Fahrenheit with a slim possibility of early-evening fog.

“I make it about eighty-six degrees from here, Skipper,” the radio operator said. Mounted on the wing, between the engines, was a loop radio antenna that, rotated until a signal-strength meter reached a high point, indicated the direction to the radio transmitter.

“How far?” the pilot asked as he made the necessary small course correction to 86 degrees.

“Don’t know,” the radio operator said. “I tried to raise Alameda, and couldn’t. I’ll try it again in a couple of minutes.”

The radio operator went back to his desk. His voice came over the intercom in a moment.

“I’d suggest another degree north,” he said. “To eighty-five degrees.”

“Okay. You try Alameda?”

“No reply,” the radio operator said.

Which meant, of course, that they were still at least 150 miles at sea. The commercial broadcast station had a greater range than the shortwave transmitter at Alameda Naval Air Station.

But then, minutes later, Sparks’s voice came over his cans again.

“Got ’em,” he announced. “They can’t read us, but we have them.”

“Thank you, Sparks,” the pilot said. “Keep us advised.”

The pilot looked at the copilot to make sure he was awake, then pushed himself out of his seat. He was now going to make the required airline pilot-type speech to the passengers.

Thank you for flying Transpacific Airways; we hope you have found our food and beverage service to your liking, and that you will give us the favor of your air travel business in the future.

The four passengers were all captains. Three were Navy four-stripers from BUSHIPS¹ in Washington, sent to Pearl to see what could be done to speed up the repairs to U.S. Pacific Fleet battleships damaged and sunk during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor four months before. Their party had originally been made up of three BUSHIPS captains and one BUSHIPS commander; but, over howls of outrage from the BUSHIPS captains, the BUSHIPS commander had been bumped from the flight by the fourth captain now aboard the PBY-5.

The PBY pilot found this one very interesting. The fourth captain was an Army captain, which meant that he was two grades junior to the BUSHIPS commander he had bumped. But he was also an aviator, and seeing a fellow airman bump the Engineering Corps commander had not displeased the pilot.

And, although the Army captain was wearing wings on his ill-fitting, dirty, and mussed tropical worsted uniform, he was also wearing the crossed sabers of cavalry. The pilot had wondered about that. The crossed cavalry sabers had the numerals 26 affixed to them, identifying an officer of the 26th Cavalry. The 26th had not long before been caught in the Philippines and apparently wiped out on the Bataan Peninsula. But this captain clearly hadn’t come out of the Philippines, because no one had come out of the Philippines. The poor bastards had been deserted there.

No one, of course, except General Douglas MacArthur, his wife and child, the child’s nurse, and some brass hats, who had escaped from Corregidor on Navy PT boats. The pilot decided it was possible, though unlikely, that the Army captain was somehow connected with MacArthur. That seemed even more possible to the pilot when he considered the captain’s travel priority. The end of the shouting session in Pearl Harbor over whether or not he was to go on the Catalina came after the admiral summoned to resolve the dispute read his orders and announced to the BUSHIPS senior brass hat, “Captain, it’s not a question whether this officer is going with you or not, but whom you wish to send in the available space on the plane with him.”

The pilot had planned to have a chat with the Army officer once they were airborne. But the first time he’d gone back into the fuselage, the captain was sound asleep.

He had made himself a bed of mailbags in the tail of the aircraft, wrapped himself in three blankets, and was sleeping the sleep of the exhausted—and more, the sleep of the ill. His eyes were shrunken, and he was as skinny as a rail. He clearly needed rest, and the pilot didn’t have the heart to wake him.

Though there was evidence he had eaten the box lunches provided, every time the pilot had gone back the Army officer had been asleep. There was also proof that the captain was traveling armed. An enormous old-fashioned World War I Colt revolver lay on one of the mailbags beside him. No holster, which meant that the captain had been carrying the pistol under his blouse, stuck in his waistband.

Steadying himself by holding his hand flat against the fuselage skin above him, the pilot now made his way down the fuselage to the senior of the BUSHIPS captains and made his airline pilot’s speech.

The other two Navy captains leaned forward in their seats to hear what he had to say. The Army captain did not wake up.

“Sir,” he said, “we have just picked up Alameda. I thought you’d like to know.”

“We’re running late, aren’t we?” the captain said.

“We’ve had a head wind all the way across,” the pilot said.

“Is that so?” the captain said. “Thank you, Lieutenant.”

Inasmuch as the captain’s tone of voice clearly implied that the head wind was obviously the pilot’s fault, a dereliction of duty that was inconveniencing him and seriously interfering with the war effort, the pilot did not, as he had intended to do, inform him that they would land in about an hour and fifteen minutes.

Instead, he walked aft and leaned over the Army pilot, frowning sympathetically at his sick pallor and sunken eyes. He touched and then shook his shoulder. The man did not stir.

Then he caught the Army pilot’s breath. He chuckled, and felt around the mailbags until he found what he was looking for. It was a quart bottle of Scotch. And it was empty.

The pilot reburied the bottle and then, smiling, made his way forward to the cockpit.

“Charley,” he said, “we may have a small problem at Alameda, unloading our passengers.”

“How’s that?”

“The Army guy? He’s dead drunk. I found an empty quart of Scotch.”

“No shit?”

“We didn’t really have a fuel problem,” the pilot said. “We could have got him to breathe into the tanks. We could make it to Kansas City on alcohol fumes.”

“The brass know?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“Let’s keep it that way,” the copilot said.

“Yeah,” the pilot said. “I was thinking the same thing.”

“I’m glad we were a little light on fuel,” the copilot said.

“Fuck you, Charley,” the pilot said.

Two boats met the seaplane, a glossy motor launch for the passengers, the other a less ornate workboat to take the mail and tow the aircraft to its mooring.

The BUSHIPS brass, as they obviously thought was befitting their station in life, were sent ashore alone in the motor launch. The pilot told them that since the Army officer was ill, he would take care of him.

When the brass had motored away, he went back to the Army pilot.

He was awake, sitting up on the mailbags with blankets wrapped around his shoulders and wearing an aviator’s leather jacket over his tunic. He was shivering.

Malaria, the pilot decided.

“Where are we?” the Army captain asked.

“Alameda Naval Air Station,” the pilot said. “San Francisco.”

“Well, I guess we have cheated death again,” the Army captain said.

“As soon as we get these mailbags loaded in the boat, we’ll take you ashore.”

“Where’s the brass?”

“They’re gone,” the pilot said.

“Good,” the Army captain said. “I somehow got the feeling they didn’t approve of me.”

“Is there anything I can get you?” the pilot asked.

“You wouldn’t happen to have a bottle around here anywhere, would you?”

“No, but I know where we can get you one once you’re ashore,” the pilot said. “Where are you headed in the States?”

“Washington,” the Army captain said.

“I’ll take you to base ops and arrange for another flight,” the pilot said. “I gather you’ve got a priority?”

“Do I ever,” the captain said.

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Why not?”

“How come the pilot’s wings and the cavalry insignia?”

The captain looked coldly at him for a moment.

“Nosy bastard, aren’t you?”

“Curious,” the pilot said with a smile. The Army officer was drunk. People got belligerent when they were drunk.

“The way they’re running this war,” the captain said, “is that when you run out of airplanes, they put you on a horse. And then, when you have to eat the horse, they find something else for you to do.”

“You were in the Philippines?”

The captain nodded.

“Bad?”

“Very bad, Lieutenant, very bad indeed,” the Army captain said.

The pilot gave him his hand and pulled the captain to his feet.

“I’d like to keep the blankets for a while,” he said. “Okay?”

“Sure,” the pilot said.

They loaded the Army captain into the workboat. Then he sat huddled under the blankets while the mailbags were loaded aboard and the plane was towed to its mooring.

After that the workboat delivered them to the amphibious ramp, where a pickup waited.

When they walked into base ops, the Army captain made an effort to straighten up, but he did not remove the blankets from his shoulders. Then he spotted a pay telephone.

“Can I mooch a nickel?” he asked.

“I think they would prefer you report in,” the pilot said.

“Fuck ’em,” the captain said matter-of-factly. “They can wait. I have a call to make.”

“Then why don’t you give me your orders?” the pilot asked as he handed the captain a nickel. “I’ll get the bureaucracy working.”

The captain went into his hip pocket for his orders. As he did so, the pilot saw that he had the old revolver in his waistband.

“Thanks,” the captain said. “The call is important.”

The pilot was handed only one sheet, instead of the stack of mimeograph copies he expected. He gave in to his curiosity as he approached the Continuing Passengers counter, unfolded it, and read:

“What have we got? Who’s the guy wrapped in the blankets?” the officer on duty behind the counter asked the pilot of the Catalina.

The pilot handed him the well-worn set of orders.

“Jesus Christ!” he said when he had read them.