THE PLANES
It was the rainiest winter in recent memory, of that Daisy was sure. The mudflats outside Shafter had turned into a swampland, several of the WARDs had contracted strep throat and everyone was trapped indoors for days on end. Even Blanche never left the house. The only ones who loved it were the cane toads. Daisy had not seen or heard from Walker since he dropped her off three days ago and was beginning to wonder if the whole thing had been a dream.
To be prudent, Walker had pulled over two blocks before the barracks, on a back street. He seemed to think it was entirely unnecessary, but Daisy insisted. There were eyes everywhere in the neighborhood and the coconut wireless was rampant with this many women living in one place. Words traveled fast on the trade winds. Nor was she ready to deal with Peg and Thelma blaming her for Walker’s decision. Though they would anyway.
To make matters worse, they were now on the graveyard shift, which for some reason happened to be when most air-raid sirens sounded. Usually a result of American pilots not properly identifying themselves. It stunk.
“Someone needs to tell those boys they’re causing needless panic,” Fluff told Lieutenant Dunn one day.
“I’ll take it up with Owens and the other guys,” he said.
An hour into their shift on the night of March 5, Daisy was stirring sugar into her second cup of coffee when a call came in over VHF radio from Koke‘e. Only every fourth word came through and the voice was muffled. Several of the girls crowded around to hear.
“Say again,” the radio operator responded.
“Bogeys—bearing—coast—unknown—” followed by the hiss of static.
“I’ll put money down that it’s another one of our pilots not following protocol,” Fluff said with her hands on her waist.
Daisy wasn’t so sure. “He sounded concerned, more so than usual.”
Major Oscar and Sergeant Jones, the naval liaison, had come down from the balcony. “What is it?”
“A garbled message from Koke‘e. Sounds like they picked up something and I’m guessing whatever it was is coming our way,” Daisy informed them.
“Call Opana and Wai‘anae, tell them to be on high alert, paying special attention to the northwest,” Major Oscar said.
Daisy and Betty sprang into action. Since losing Chuck, Betty worked with a new ferocity. Anything to do to help win this war, she threw her all into. On her days off, she had taken up knitting scarves for the pilots, and fashioning bandages from old socks. She canned guava jelly by the truckload and wrote them letters to boost morale. Though it was her morale that was being boosted. Helping others, she said, was a backdoor way to helping yourself.
The Army Air Corps officer leaned over the balcony and frowned at the mostly empty boards. “I don’t like this,” he said to no one in particular. “We have no operations or trainings in these waters, and neither does the navy.”
A collective feeling of tension filled the room, so thick you could almost taste it. Daisy ordered herself to stay calm. Which was a silly notion, really. Trying to reason with fear was like wrestling a twelve-foot tiger shark for a manini on your line.
No matter how many times unidentified planes had turned out to be false alarms, each subsequent one evoked the same dread. It didn’t help that word had been circulating among the male officers that reconnaissance and bombing raids were imminent. No one mentioned their source, but they seemed quite sure. Major Oscar started barking orders. “Someone call Nixon.” He pointed to Daisy. “You, Rascal, go.”
Daisy shrunk back. “Me?”
“My guys are all tied up.”
Nixon lived next to Palm Circle, the heart of Fort Shafter, and was known for getting to Little Robert in five minutes flat. Still, Daisy hated to be the one to wake him up. The phone rang only once, and he answered, “Nixon.”
“Colonel Nixon, sorry to bother you, but we got a call from Koke‘e and we couldn’t understand the message but it looks like we have two bogeys incoming. Oh, this is Wilder, sir, at Command Center.”
A dial tone buzzed in her ear. Minutes later, Betty started waving her hand madly, nodding and jotting down notes. “Opana’s got their echo. They think there’s two!” she said.
Fluff placed an X in the standard, and in her neat, block print marked it UNIDENTIFIED. Her hand shook as she wrote. Val picked up a call from the other Oscar at Opana. “Rascal, bogey bearing southwest twenty miles east of Koloa.”
The women set markers on the board, and Daisy tried to collect herself as they waited for the next coordinates. Nixon strode into the room moments later. Aside from the pouches under his eyes, he looked perfectly put-together and ready for business. He came directly to the table.
“What are we looking at?” he asked.
Daisy and Betty alternated filling him in.
From the balcony, Major Oscar, who held a phone to each ear, called down, “No one’s claiming them, sir. But we’re still waiting for confirmation from air force.”
Nixon’s jaw hardened. “Any surface craft detected?”
“Not yet,” Daisy said.
The creases in his forehead seemed to have deepened since yesterday. Without another word, he left the table and went to consult with the men on the balcony. Fluff came and stood behind Daisy, hands on her shoulders. She spoke quietly, “Do you think this is the real McCoy?”
It certainly felt like something was coming. Animals were designed to detect danger. Their heightened senses picked up vibrations and subtle changes in the air. Horses became uncontrollable, bees swarmed and deep-sea fish washed ashore. A Japanese attack was not a natural disaster by any means, but the atmosphere felt charged.
“We’ll know soon enough,” she said.
Ten minutes passed, and the planes continued a beeline toward O‘ahu. Daisy watched the air force liaison approach Nixon with an anxious look on his face. Whatever he said caused Nixon to slam his coffee down.
Nixon alerted the room. “Air Force denied any knowledge of the aircraft, which means we need to prepare for an imminent attack. Sound the sirens and dispatch the pursuit planes. I also want a patrol out scouting for carriers, on the double, and shut down the naval yard. These fuckers are not going to get us again.”
All the officers scrambled to their phone sets. The WARDs on duty were told to gather their helmets and gas masks, and have them on hand. Daisy grabbed Betty’s for her, as she was glued to her headset. Whispers and murmurs circulated around the table. There was a feeling of organized chaos, and dare she say it, anticipation. This is what they’d been practicing for so long. Would they be able to hack it?
Generals and colonels and other brass began appearing in droves, all of them dripping wet. Every time the door opened, a cold fury blew in. There were so many bodies that nonessential staff were ordered into the break room. Daisy followed Fluff out, but Nixon called her. “Wilder, I want you to vector the pursuits. Get back in here.”
She stopped cold.
Fluff turned and said, “Go on, you’re the best one out of all of us for the job.”
Daisy returned to the table and awaited instructions. She said a little prayer for everyone she knew on the island, humans and animals alike, and ended it with, may this be another false alarm. Danielson hovered over the board, and Daisy was thankful for his calming presence.
“You ladies are doing good work. I’m impressed,” he told her.
Outside, the air-raid siren wailed its mournful song for a full minute. The sound sobered an already tense crowd, and no doubt had the whole island scrambling into wet, muddy and bug-infested shelters.
Betty commented, “These aircraft don’t seem to be moving very fast. What do you think they are?”
Daisy helped her calculate airspeed. About 190 knots, which was below a B-17 or most American fighters. “Possibly flying boats.”
So far, nothing else had been picked up by radar. Perhaps they were reconnaissance or forerunners of a larger fleet.
In the distance, the roar of fighter engines and the whine of ascent cut across the night.
“There they go. God bless ’em,” Betty said.
Wai‘anae called in the pursuits, which had just shown up on their screen, and Daisy began tracking the lead plane and his two wingmen.
The pilot radioed in, “This is Warhawk two-six-niner. Black as tar up here, not a star or moon in sight. We’re going to need all the support you can give,” he said.
It had taken a little time getting used to the military lingo, using phonetic alphabet and code names and strange phrases. Daisy still felt like an imposter when speaking to the pilots, but she found that using the same matter-of-fact voice she used with the horses came in handy. It almost felt natural. She double-checked the bogey coordinates five times, then said, “Roger that. Fly heading three-zero-five. Incoming aircraft moving at one-niner-zero knots. What’s your altitude?”
The fewer words the better.
“Angels three. Cloud bases are low tonight and the rain is spitting.”
Daisy couldn’t even imagine what it must be like flying around in the dark up there. A good thing they were heading toward Kaua‘i, otherwise they’d run the risk of plowing into the Wai‘anae range with any miscalculations.
Cigarette smoke and body heat mingled together in the poorly ventilated building, steaming up the board. It was thick enough to choke on. Betty fanned herself with a pamphlet cautioning against venereal disease, which had mysteriously begun circulating the previous day. Someone’s poor idea of a joke. Most likely one of the boys.
At any moment, Daisy expected a call to come in saying someone had made a mistake, the planes were ours. But that call still hadn’t come. Now, the bogeys were more than halfway across the channel.
Nixon came down again and stood next to Daisy. “How far now?”
She pointed to the board, where Betty’s and Val’s markers and her marker were moving closer together. “Twenty-two miles.”
“You need to tell him that!” he said.
She flinched. “Come in, Warhawk two-six-niner.”
“Read you, loud and clear.”
“You’re closing in fast, twenty-two miles. Head zero-one-zero north and watch out.”
Watch out? What kind of silly advice was that? How could he watch out when he couldn’t see anything? Daisy wished Nixon had picked someone else. Pressure tended to make her stupid. Pretty soon, the planes were ten miles apart. A quiet came over the room, and the feeling that something big was about to happen. Beads of perspiration dripped down Daisy’s neck, between her breasts, in the creases behind her knees. She wiped her face on her sleeve and reminded herself that she had prepared for this.
Betty sat to her left, nervously tapping her stick on the floor.
“Knock it off, Yates, you’re making me crazy,” Nixon growled.
She immediately stopped. “Sorry, sir.”
The next reading from Wai‘anae had the interceptors and one bogey on a collision course. The other seemed to be veering north. Daisy notified the pilot. “Eyes wide open, Warhawk two-seven-five. Bogey is within striking distance.”
“Roger. In cloud soup out here. I’ve dropped down to angels two and am going in and out, but no lights sighted, though am getting intermittent sightings of Ka‘ena Point Lighthouse.”
Daisy thought that if our pilots couldn’t see a thing, then neither could the Japanese. At least they had that going for them.
“Try to get above the clouds,” Nixon said, leaning in Daisy’s face to speak directly to the pilot. His breath smelled like stale coffee and sleep.
One of the downfalls of radar was that it didn’t tell you altitude. One plane could be at five hundred feet and another at fifteen thousand, and they would both look the same on the oscilloscope. Another was that low-flying aircraft often went under the radar and were not detected.
“Tell him to stay with us,” Nixon said.
“Stay with us, Warhawk.”
The next readings showed the bogeys approaching O‘ahu, one near Barber’s Point and one just outside Hale‘iwa.
“Turn around, heading one-eight-five. You passed them,” Daisy said.
Word came in from the PBY Catalina pilots who were out hunting for Japanese carriers that so far they’d encountered nothing suspicious. Nor had radar across the islands picked up anything. Carriers might be able to operate without running lights, but as the girls had seen with the US ships, they showed up loud and clear on radar.
There was something remarkably unsetting about watching the bogeys approach the island from two directions, and pretty soon, the brass began to quarrel. By now, several more fighters had been sent up to intercept. None could see a thing.
“We need to open fire.”
“Hickam and Schofield are standing by.”
“Not with our boys up there, we don’t!” Nixon yelled, face cherry red.
In the chaos of the Pearl Harbor raid, friendly fire from anti-aircraft artillery not only killed American pilots, but exploding rounds fell in neighborhoods across the South Shore, killing civilians too. When Daisy had heard this, she felt sick to her stomach. What a dilemma. She was thankful it wasn’t her call right now.
“Wait until someone calls Tally Ho,” Nixon said.
Tally Ho, she had recently learned, meant enemy in sight and engaged.
“Anyone not with a headset, put your helmets on,” Danielson said.
Daisy would have gladly traded her headset for a helmet. Though in all honesty, what good was a helmet against a five-hundred-pound bomb? Her gas mask rested in her lap. No sooner had she placed the marker in the middle of O‘ahu, when a loud explosion sent shockwaves through the Penthouse. Glass rattled, wood vibrated and people scurried toward the back wall. A moment later, another explosion, and then two more.
“Warhawk, we’ve been hit. Somewhere not far from Shafter,” Daisy yelled into the radio.
The blasts sounded close, but not too close, possibly in the direction of downtown Honolulu. Bombing the heart of the city was unthinkable, bound to kill more civilians than servicemen.
“Roger that. I’m up at angels one, two, no clouds up here. The moon is shining and I’m getting glimpses of the city.”
Nixon jumped onto the floor and took the radio from her. “Charlie Mike and be ready for more. Stand by for orders.”
“Charlie Mike?” she asked. She knew the phonetics but had no idea what he meant.
“Continue Mission.”
Betty reached over and grabbed Daisy’s hand. If it bothered Nixon, he didn’t let on. Soft and clammy, Daisy clasped as if her life depended on it. That warm hand did more to slow her pulse than any pill. They waited for more bombs to fall.
And waited.
And waited.
Finally, news came in that bombs had come down in a wooded area on Mount Tantalus, just behind Roosevelt High School. The blasts had flattened trees and left a smoldering crater, but there were no reports of injury. Radar tracked the enemy back out to sea until they were no longer visible. Suddenly, Daisy could breathe again, as a wave of relief poured into the room and swept away the tension that had risen to the ceiling. That was the thing with air-raid warnings, you never got used to them. Each one could be the one.
Nixon called everyone together. “Tell you what. Those bastards planned this knowing the moon would be full. But they didn’t count on the weather and they sure as hell don’t know we are watching them. Now we know how well our radar works.”
And that us WARDs can vector and plot and do what needs to be done, Daisy thought. Of course, he would never say it out loud. A few cheers erupted.
“Now get back to business.”
For the rest of that shift, Daisy checked the clock every two minutes. They were in continuous conversation with the Oscars around the island, and with every hour that passed without echoes, everyone let down their guard a few notches. It went down in the record books as one of the longest nights of her life.