7

Under an Arctic Rainbow

0300 Hours, September 14, 1942

Adak Island, Aleutians

Gerald Johnson lay in his snivel gear bathed in sweat despite the howling arctic wind lashing his tent. His head throbbed. He felt weak from nausea.

He wasn’t sick. He was about to go into battle.

He was captive to his mind that night, unable to stop imagining death scenarios. Around him, his tentmates Maj. Sandy McCorkle and Maj. Wilbur Miller slept soundly. He alternated between hating that and envying their cool.

Our planes are worn out. They’ve not been properly maintained.

Between the Japanese and Fireplace—the code name for Adak Island—was the unforgiving Bering Sea. Huge swells, forty-degree water, and minimal cold-weather survival gear meant almost certain death if his engine failed.

The water and weather are more an enemy than the Japanese.

He wiped sweat off his brow and listened to the gale outside. At first, he thought McCorkle and Miller had put him in their tent to keep him on a short leash. Then he found out that McCorkle discovered he’d been an Eagle Scout and figured his camping skills would serve them well on this barren hillside above the airfield. Without trees, running water, latrines, or even wood floors in their tents, this was about equal to the most primitive living Johnson did when winter camping in Oregon’s Cascade Mountains. The tent’s entrance was a couple of flaps held together with bow-tied straps. The wind whistled through the seams and chilled the interior so thoroughly that a few days before, Johnson gathered up a bunch of scrap wood foraged from around the base and planned to replace the flaps with a doorframe.

He rolled on his side and checked his watch. Briefing in an hour. No point in sleeping now. For days, he set his thoughts down in his diary as they waited for the weather to clear so they could strike Kiska Island. How would he react under fire? Would he measure up? Who would be lost? He pinballed from tin bravado (“By golly, it’ll be worth a few of us to drive those Japanese from Kiska after what they did to our men and women on Bataan and the East Indies”!) to a bleak assessment of their equipment and the threat of death from exposure while bobbing around in the Bering Sea. At times, he trended toward resignation.

If I die, I’ve lived a good life.

He thought of his father, H. V. Johnson, the self-made man who’d studied law by candlelight after twelve-hour shifts in a tire factory. If he started to fall asleep, his wife threw cold water on his face. There had been no room for softness in his dad’s life. He was rawhide tough, a man who once stopped a rampaging bull chasing his daughter by punching it in the face. He worked twenty-hour days to establish his law practice in Eugene, and in only a few years was considered one of the finest legal minds in the state.

Gerald admired his father tremendously and always sought to make him proud. Part of him, a part he never quite could face, lived in his father’s shadow. Subconsciously, he wanted to prove he was even better than his old man.

Well, combat would sort out whether he had any real guts or not. So far, given how badly he wanted to throw up, Gerald was not optimistic. His fever spiked. He hunkered down in his snivel gear, feeling miserable and unsure.

At length, McCorkle and Miller stirred. They crawled out of their cots and hurriedly put on their flight gear and boots. Miller’s trademark was a corncob pipe. It sat on a homemade wooden table that functioned as the tent’s writing desk. He grabbed it, then said to Gerald, “Hey, Johnson, time to get moving.”

Twenty minutes and a freezing-cold jeep ride later, the three men linked up with the rest of the pilots scheduled to fly that day. The briefing began.

The Japanese had landed on Kiska only three months before, but they quickly turned the place into a fortress. Heavy naval guns pulled from decommissioned battleships now guarded the island’s main harbor, where transports and a flotilla of submarines had been spotted by air recon flights. Antiaircraft batteries ringed the harbor and the main camp area. On a hill on the island’s west side, the Japanese erected one of their first production radar systems. They would be able to detect any inbound raid—unless it came at them from right on the whitecaps.

Four-engine B-24 Liberator heavy bombers composed the heart of the day’s strike force. A squadron of P-38 Lightnings would provide escort, as the Japanese were known to have Zero fighters mounted on floats stationed in the harbor. Even with pontoons for water landings, these Zeroes—called Rufes—would be more maneuverable than any American fighter. Plus they carried two cannon in their wings and two machine guns in the nose—heavy firepower that could knock down an Airacobra or even a B-24 with ease.

The P-39s would be the tip of this spear. McCorkle would lead eight of the squadron on the wave tops a few minutes ahead of the main formation. He explained their role: get over Kiska and shoot up the AA batteries, knock down any Rufes trying to get off the water in the harbor, and generally cause as much surprised chaos as possible. As they strafed their way over the island, the B-24s would release their bombs on targets around the harbor while four other P-39s and a squadron of P-38s protected the heavies from those float Zeroes.

The weather was decent. The mission was a go.

The men headed out to their P-39s. When the engineers drained the lagoon and turned it into an airfield, they dropped interlocking metal planks called Marston matting down atop the sandy bottom. The matting made for a Lego-set-like prefab runway that almost anyone with vehicles and a couple of crowbars could assemble. The strip of metal they linked together was bumpy but serviceable. Except after a rainstorm. The lagoon filled with water again after every squall. At the moment a good ten inches of water surged around atop the matting.

A truck carrying the pilots stopped beside each P-39. The assigned flier dropped out the back, waded over to his waiting mount, and climbed onto the wing, boots soaked. When Gerald’s turn came, he slung his parachute and splashed into the floodwaters, bound for his plane, Scrap Iron.

He climbed onto the wing and strapped his parachute on, looking out over the field. Adak was the most lifeless place he’d ever seen: hills devoid of trees, yellowed grass blown almost flat from the gusts of wind that howled in from the nearby shore. Overhead, a few clouds passed by, but blue skies dominated. That could change in mere minutes. It became a running joke on the island. Don’t like the weather? Count to ten.

That’s what made it so dangerous. One moment, conditions would be fine. The next, a storm would suddenly rage in from the west, and unsuspecting aircrew would be caught in a nightmare of turbulence, hail, and horizontal rain whipped by hurricane-force winds. Many an aircraft took off under an Arctic sun, only to vanish in those sudden dark squalls.

Johnson opened the car door, a mechanic on the wing with him to help him get set. Just before he slipped inside the cockpit, he noticed a rainbow stretching across the end of the runway. Its brilliant colors seemed utterly out of place in this desolate and grim environment.

He settled into the seat and his mechanic strapped him in and closed the car door. He heard it latch with a lonely and distinct click.

He stayed focused and out of his head, running through the preflight checklist with meticulous precision.

Good to go.

He fired up the bird. The three propeller blades began to turn as the engine sputtered to life. Along the flight line, the other ’39s joined him. Soon, a dozen Allisons filled the lagoon with the buttery sound of their power.

Beside him in the next ’Cobra over, McCorkle signaled Gerald. Time to go. Brakes released, he followed his group commander out to the runway. A moment later, they pushed their throttles forward and sped across the flooded strip, each ’39 fanning twin rooster tails of water up over their wings until onlookers could only see the noses of each craft. They lumbered through it, their canopies drenched, visibility reduced to almost nothing as they gained speed and hurtled toward the end of the lagoon. Seemingly at the last minute, their noses lifted and they soared skyward, under that Aleutian rainbow.1

It took under an hour to get to Kiska. McCorkle kept the squadron right on the waves to sneak in under the Japanese radar coverage. Here is where Johnson shined. He loved this kind of flying, and McCorkle had seen enough of it out of the Oregonian to recognize the kid possessed remarkable skills. That was one of the reasons he wanted Johnson on his wing. The other was to keep an eye on him and make sure he didn’t do something crazy again.

Johnson stayed tacked on his leader’s wing, singularly focused. Gone were the headache and nausea. The fear drained, crushed by adrenaline and the sheer excitement of finally going into the fight. All the training he’d done since joining the Army Air Force in March 1941 prepared him for this moment.

In the distance, a rocky chunk of land swelled on the horizon. Little Kiska. A flash of light winked from a hillside just off the surf line. A split second later, a flaming red streak arrowed into the water ahead of them, kicking up a plume of water. Gerald regarded this for a moment, not registering what he’d just seen. Then another wink, another red dash, and another splash in the water ahead. With a shock, Gerald realized this was incoming fire from an antiaircraft gun.

They were firing short. A sudden flurry of red streaks tore up the water in front of them, making a pattern on the surface. The Airacobras charged in, all guns blazing. The Americans hit the coast, throttles wide as their bullets swept across the antiaircraft gun and tore the crew to pieces.

McCorkle bounced up to a hundred feet to clear the first low-lying hills. Johnson followed, dropping his nose and hugging the backside slope as they searched for targets. Ahead stood a line of tents arranged on another hill. McCorkle and Gerald opened fire, their bullets shredding the tents. Then they were over and past, leaving their tattered remains to flap in the Arctic wind.

A moment later, the eight Airacobras broke out over the west side of Little Kiska and dove for the main harbor.

Dead ahead, two submarines rode at anchor. Gerald saw McCorkle bank toward the larger of the two and line up for a pass. McCorkle triggered his 37mm cannon. A second later, Johnson joined in as well. They flayed the subs with cannon and machine gun fire, then made for North Head, the spit of land that created Kiska Harbor. Gerald shot up some shacks and buildings along the water’s edge, then zoomed over another row of hills just in time to see the B-24s approaching thousands of feet overhead. Farther north, a bunch of dots swarmed around under a layer of clouds. Gerald angled toward them.

A pair of P-38s streaked down after a Japanese float Zero. The enemy pilot juked to avoid their attack. A split second later, the two American fighters collided in a fiery explosion. Pieces rained down as the wings and booms twisted crazily toward the water off North Head.

A pair of P-39s finished off the Rufe, and got a second one too. Gerald was still too far out to join the fight when it suddenly ended, score tied.

Johnson reversed course to get back over the harbor. He reached North Head again, climbed up into the hills just in time to see a P-39 dive out of a cloud, shooting at something in the harbor on the other side of the next ridgeline.

He passed another set of hills, ducking down low into the draw between them, the Airacobra bare feet over the tundra grass.

A tent lay dead ahead on a flat stretch of ground at the bottom of the draw. Suddenly, a group of Japanese poured out of it. They ran out into the open without any cover in sight. Johnson didn’t hesitate. His finger touched the triggers on his control stick. The cannon whoomped as his machine guns chattered. His bullets ripped into the grass. A 37mm shell exploded. He fed some rudder into the P-39, and the storm of lead and shells walked right through the group of running men.

One took a hit that blew him off his feet. Another ran desperately away from a stream of .50-caliber bullets that kicked up dirt behind him, then finally caught him and ripped his body apart. This was not like the movies where the bad guys died sanitarily. The destructive power of the M2 Browning machine gun was on full display. He later wrote in his diary that his weapons tore the man in half.

In the moment, he didn’t dwell. He kept shooting, watching as more men died under the power of his guns. An instant later, his fighter thundered over the shattered men. Overhead, the B-24s released their bombs. Splashes erupted around several transports in the anchorage, while incendiaries exploded inside the Japanese camp at the west edge of the harbor. Boiling clouds of fire mushroomed up over the hills as Johnson banked left over North Head and sped out to sea. He was alone now, McCorkle nowhere in sight.

The squadron met up at the rendezvous point and returned to Adak. The landing proved to be the scariest moment of the mission, as the standing water on the runway threw so much spray over them that they couldn’t see out their windscreens. The ’Cobra pilots worked the brakes and prayed they were running straight and true until they slowed down enough that the fans of water spraying over their birds diminished.

Everyone made it. The P-38 squadron would have a sobering night with two empty chairs at dinner. The 42nd Fighter Squadron would be celebrating.

They were veterans now.