Barry Blake of the Flying Fortress Page 15

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  SLAUGHTER FROM THE AIR

  Chick Enders’ prediction was only partly right. Colonel Bullock didorder _Sweet Rosy O’Grady_ and her fighting crew grounded for temporaryrepairs. But it was only for the rest of that day and night. To smashthe Jap task force utterly, every bomber that could fly would be needed.

  “Get those wounds dressed at once,” he ordered the eight bloodstainedragamuffins who faced him near _Rosy’s_ shell-torn fuselage. “Thenreport to the mess shack. Fill your stomachs and hit the hay. Ifyou’re all fit for duty tomorrow morning I’ll let you fly.And—er—congratulations on spotting that Jap task force, Blake!You’ve probably saved us a lot of ships and fighting men.”

  Barry took the officer’s proffered hand, with an embarrassed smile.

  “I was just playing a hunch, sir,” he murmured. “Chick—I mean,Lieutenant Enders—did the real job. He sank a big destroyer and blewthe stern off a cargo vessel before we had to clear out. And the otherboys knocked that _Aichi_ T98 out of the sky—simply chewed her tojunk!”

  “My congratulations were meant for all of you, Lieutenant,” the colonelreplied with a twinkle in his eye. “And so are the orders I just gave._Dismissed!_”

  As Barry and his friends moved wearily toward the hospital tent, asquadron of Mitchell bombers passed over, heading out to sea. Theceiling had lifted to three thousand feet. If it stayed there, Barrythought, the planes would have little trouble in spotting the Japconvoy.

  The field, he noted, was almost empty of planes. Evidently they hadtaken off right after his radioed report. The Japs would catch plentyof grief before darkness shut down, but the real pay-off would betomorrow. By that time Allied airfields from all over eastern NewGuinea as well as Australia and the Solomons would be sending planes tothe attack. The Japs would meet them with swarms of their ownland-based fighters. A gigantic air-and-sea battle would be on, withthe outcome impossible to guess.

  Much the same thing was passing through the minds of all the crew, butthey were suddenly too tired to talk about it. The tension of battlehad broken. Now they were conscious chiefly of stiffening wounds andthe deep, physical craving for food and sleep.

  The night passed in dreamless oblivion. It seemed to Barry that he hadjust closed his eyes when the bugle routed him out of bed. He glancedunbelievingly at his watch. Yes, the hands stood at five-fifteen—halfan hour before dawn!

  “Roll out of it, Chick, Hap, Curly!” he called. “This is our big day.If we’re not out there in time, I bet you _Rosy O’Grady_ will take offwithout us!”

  Groans and yelps answered him, as the tent mates moved their sorebodies and found them more painful than the night before.

  “Come on!” urged their young pilot. “Snap out of it or I’ll report thewhole crew on the sick list. We’ll miss our crack at the Japs, but—”

  He saw a boot come sailing from Hap’s side of the tent, and ducked justin time.

  “All right, all right!” he laughed. “I’ll see you lazy birds on therunway, if you’re too late for mess call. So long!”

  Hap Newton’s other boot caught him as he hurried out of the tent. Hepicked it up, but paused in the act of throwing it back.

  “Setting up drill at this time of the morning, Lieutenant?” saidColonel Bullock’s voice behind him.

  “No, sir—_getting_-up drill is more like it,” Barry replied. “My crewslept too hard last night, and they’re still in a fog.”

  “Harrumph! I envy them!” grunted the colonel. “Couldn’t sleep at allmyself, last night.... But I have good news for you, Blake. Your shiphas passed every quick test for serious damage, and except for theholes that there wasn’t time to patch, she’s fit to fly. That damagedmachine gun in the nose has been replaced. She’s been bombed up andserviced. I’m counting on her—and you men—to give the Japs a veryspecial pasting today.”

  “We’ll do that, sir, and—er—thank you for giving us so much of yourtime and thought,” Barry responded. “Are we taking off with thesquadron this time?”

  “Yes. Extreme right wing position,” Colonel Bullock told him. “Thetake-off is in thirty minutes.”

  Barry saluted and watched the officer’s tall, still youthful figurestride away in the twilight. Behind him the crew were piling out of thetent.

  “Just time to eat and run, fellows,” he said, turning toward the messshack. “The squadron takes off at six.”

  * * * * *

  Clear sunlight gleamed through the bottle-green crests of the bigcombers that tossed and battered the Jap task force. Gone was theprotecting blanket of clouds. Gone, too, was any hope in the mind ofthe Jap admiral that he could sneak up on the Allied bases without acostly attack from the air. Yet his words were confident as he issuedhis orders to the flotilla.

  A second convoy of fourteen vessels had joined his ten during thenight. With their added strength he felt certain of success.

  “Inform the honorable captains that they will close the intervalsbetween their ships to five hundred yards,” he told his chief executiveofficer. “Our massed antiaircraft, plus the umbrella of our land-basedfighter planes, will beat off any air attack our enemies may make. Infact, we shall utterly destroy them.”

  The executive bowed and hissed politely.

  “We shall destroy them utterly,” he repeated. “Banzai!”

  Green water crashed on the forecastle as the flagship buried her bowunder a giant comber. The cruiser shuddered, heaved, and shook herselffree. The bow rose higher, higher, until the steel warship seemed tothose on deck as if she were going to stand upright on her propellers.

  Again her foredeck dipped, rolled, plunged into the trough of a mightysea. The antiaircraft crews balanced themselves calmly on sea-trainedlegs. Their eyes never left the reeling sky above them. They breatheddeeply, fingering the cold steel of their weapons, waiting for thetargets they knew would soon appear.

  It was a different story below the wave-washed decks of the trooptransport ships. There, packed in the stifling holds like sardines,eighteen thousand Jap infantrymen gagged and groaned. The throes ofseasickness gripped officers and men alike. It was not deadly, they hadbeen told, but it made them long for death. Only their inbred habit ofobedience had kept them from shooting themselves or committing _harakiri_ through the past week of inglorious suffering.

  Suddenly the flotilla’s antiaircraft opened fire with a concerted roar.The transports’ long range guns joined it. Their barking reports madethe thin steel hulls quiver. Then came the bombs.

  One struck an 8,000-ton troopship aft of the bridge. A thousand Japsoldiers died in the flaming inferno it made. Live steam from thewrecked engine room cooked fifty other men alive.

  A second bomb blasted the stricken vessel. Its superstructure leapedinto the air and fell overside in twisted pieces. The ship itselfrolled, broke apart, and sank.

  That second bomb was a credit to Chick Enders’ marksmanship. From athree-mile height he had hit the wave-tossed Jap ship with the accuracyof a sharpshooter. He had done it, flying through air that was bumpywith antiaircraft bursts, ignoring the darting Zero fighters thatstabbed at his ship from above.

  Soapy Babbitt in the top turret and Tony Romani in the tail were notignoring the hornet-like Jap Zeros. While Barry, Hap and Chick wereconcentrating on their first bombing run, they knocked down a planeapiece.

  The Flying Fortress squadron had dispersed, and its members were makingindividual runs over the flotilla. Now, however, the Jap flak wasforcing them to fly higher. One bomber already was down in the sea.Several others had been nicked by shrapnel. _Rosy O’Grady’s_ stabilizershowed ragged holes, and Cracker Jackson had been stunned by a directhit on the ball turret.

  “We’re going upstairs, too,” Barry Blake decided. “We won’t make somany hits, but we’ll make the Japs disperse, so their flak won’t be soconcentrated.”

  “That suits us gunners, Lieutenant,” Fred Marmon spoke up. “We’ll pickoff a few more Zeros up there
where our Lockheed Lightnings aredogfighting.”

  The Jap “cover” of fighting planes certainly looked as if a tornado hadstruck it. The deadly but unarmored little fighters were torching downall over the sky. Others were fleeing back toward their New Guineabases, glad of an excuse to return for gas. The reason was simple:plane for plane and pilot for pilot, our forces were better. When theFortresses got “upstairs” there was not much opposition to deal with.

  _Rosy O’Grady_ made three more runs before the first wave of Australian_Havoc_ bombers arrived beneath her. Skimming the sea at mast-height,the twin-engined attack bombers strafed the Jap decks with a terriblehail of bullets. They passed over, from stern to stem, and droppedtheir bombs at point-blank range—sometimes down the enemy’ssmokestacks.

  On their heels came the North American B-26 Mitchells, repeating thesame tactics, with even greater effect. Back and forth like a greatbroom of destruction they swept across the Jap flotilla. Enemy gunnerswithered and died under blast after blast of hot lead. Those whosurvived tried desperately to swing their heavier guns into action, butthat was like trying to shoot mosquitoes with a pistol.

  Now, all over a forty-mile area, Jap ships were blazing. Barry sawthree of them sink before Chick emptied the bomb racks with near misseson a dodging destroyer.

  “We’ll go back for another load,” he said, turning the Fortress’s nosehomeward. “How’s Cracker Jackson?”

  “Coming out of it,” was Curly Levitt’s reply. “His right arm’s brokenabove the elbow, and his nose is banged up. The ball turret took anawful wallop from that ack-ack shell.”

  “Better our ball turret than our bomb bay!” Hap Newton remarked grimly.“We could have gone out in a blaze of glory if that shell had hit a fewfeet forward.”

  Much to Cracker Jackson’s distress, his friends took him to thehospital tent the moment they landed at Mau River.

  “Have a heart, Lieutenant!” he begged Barry. “This bum wing feels finein a sling, and I could shoot my left gun with my left hand. Please letme go along this trip.”

  Barry shook his head.

  “That’s a compound fracture, man!” he replied. “If you don’t get propertreatment now, it may gangrene. Besides, your nose is swollen so bigthat you couldn’t see around it to shoot. Lieutenant Levitt will manyour turret if necessary.”

  They left him, still protesting, in care of the field doctor.

  “As a matter of fact,” Curly Levitt said when they were out of hearing,“Jackson’s turret is so banged up that it’s useless. It won’t turn, andonly one gun will fire. I didn’t tell him, because he would worry aboutour going back without belly protection.”

  No more than six Jap vessels were still in the fight when _RosyO’Grady_ returned with a fresh bomb load. One cruiser, four destroyersand a small cargo ship made up the half dozen. They were scattered manymiles apart, each trying to make good its own escape. Between them thesea was covered with rafts, landing barges, lifeboats and wreckage ofevery description, but they made no attempt to take aboard survivors.

  For the moment, the sky was fairly clear of planes. Two other FlyingFortresses, a PBM flying boat, a few Grumman Wildcats and LockheedLightnings on the hunt for Zero fighters—these were all that BarryBlake could see. The enemy had been definitely shot out of the air.

  “We’ll go after that cruiser,” the young pilot told his bombardier.“Before she gets our range, I’ll dive to three thousand, level offthere for a quick run, and then climb for a cloud. Ready, Chick?”

  “Roger!” answered the little man in _Rosy’s_ nose. “It’s risky but itwill give me a swell target. You never learned this stunt out of a rulebook, Barry!”

  In the co-pilot’s seat, Hap Newton sat nursing the throttles, changingthe bomber’s air speed from moment to moment. Barry worked the wheel tokeep her constantly shifting altitude—foiling the ack-ack gunners onthe Jap warship. Abruptly he shoved the wheel far forward.

  The Fortress headed down as if out of control. Then, at three thousandfeet she pulled out of it. For a matter of seconds her run at the Japcruiser held true and level.

  “Bombs away!” cried Chick Enders. “Let’s get out of here in a hurry!”

  Barry put his Fortress into a steep, climbing turn that strained her tothe limit. Zigzagging, banking, spiralling, he made the big bomberclimb like a cat in a fit.

  Far beneath, a sheet of flame was rising from the enemy cruiser. ChickEnders’ bomb had opened her oil tanks. Some of her antiaircraft werestill firing, but _Rosy’s_ unorthodox actions fooled them completely.

  “Great stuff, Barry!” yelled the little bombardier. “We’ll pull thesame stunt on that destroyer to the east of us. Let’s go!”

  “We will not!” Barry Blake retorted. “I felt _Rosy_ groan too manytimes in that last crazy climb. If I did it again she might really comeapart. From now on we’ll confine our bombing attacks to a reasonablealtitude. It’s better to waste a bomb than a bomber, even if you don’tbelieve it.”

  As they headed for their new target at ten thousand feet, more bombbursts tossed up white fountains of sea water around the fartherwarships. Seven or eight Fortresses were now on the scene. Theflotilla’s fleeing remnants were doomed.

  It had been a ghastly slaughter, Barry reflected. Nearly twentythousand enemy troops, not to mention the crews of the Jap vessels,were either dead or floating among the wreckage. An army and a taskforce blotted out in two days!

  Mechanically he guided _Rosy O’Grady_ on her run. He was sick ofkilling. Even Chick’s jubilant, “Bombs away!” failed to thrill him asit had before.

  Another hit! The thousand-pound bomb burst the thin-hulled destroyerapart like a paper bag. Swiftly she settled, stood up on her nose, andslipped out of sight. There was no time to launch a boat.

  Five miles beyond, a number of tiny waterbugs were leaving zigzag wakesin the water. They were probably Jap landing barges, Barry thought,crammed with armed soldiers from one of the troop transports that hadgone down. Now he saw the cause of their erratic dodging—a flight ofMitchell B-25’s diving at them, with tracer bullets streaking fromtheir guns.

  “Those Nips haven’t a chance, even if they’re lucky enough to shootdown a plane or two,” Hap Newton observed. “Their barges must look likesieves already. More meat for the sharks!”

  “More butchery!” muttered Barry Blake. “It’s necessary, of course. Ifthose armed Japs ever made land, they’d soon be killing our own men.That’s what they were sent here for. But I’ve seen enough slaughtertoday to make me feel rather sick.”

  Chick Enders didn’t say so, but he may have felt the same way, afterthinking it over. At any rate, he seemed to have lost his uncannymarksmanship for the rest of that day. His remaining bombs scorednothing better than near misses on a desperately zig-zagging destroyer.Another Fortress sank that vessel as Barry turned his plane homeward.

  “Looks like some sort of a weather front, over toward the coast,” HapNewton remarked. “I hope our base isn’t shut in by it. We’d have tofind another field or bail out....”

  “Tony can’t bail out, Lieutenant,” Fred Marmon’s voice interrupted.“He’s bleeding to death fast, from a leg wound. I’ve just found himunconscious in the tail turret, and put on a tourniquet.”

  A moment of shocked silence followed Fred’s statement. Each man of thecrew felt as if he himself had received a deadly hurt. The fortresscrew was like a single body, its members knit inseparably together byweeks of common danger, duty, thought and feeling.

  “Tie that tourniquet tight, Fred,” Barry Blake said huskily. “Keep Tonyalive, and I’ll manage to set _Rosy O’Grady_ down somewhere, ceiling orno ceiling.... Soapy! Contact Mau River, will you, and ask what theweather is there.”

  Leaving his position in the top turret, Sergeant Babbitt sat down athis radio. In a few minutes he had the field’s weather report.

  “Closed in,” it said briefly, “and so are all near-by airfields. Bettertry Buna—or Port Moresby if you have enough gas.”

 
“That’s the tough part of it,” said Hap bitterly. “We used up our gashunting down the Jap Navy. Buna and Port Moresby are out! Our only hopeis to hit the silk.”

  Groans sounded over the interphone. Not their own danger but that ofTony Romani, brought unanimous protest from the others.

  “There’s _got_ to be some place for us to set her down, Skipper,” FredMarmon declared. “You’ve always been able to figure a way out. We can’tlet Tony down.”

  “Curly!” exclaimed Barry Blake. “Get out your charts and see if therearen’t some atolls or small islands somewhere this side of that weatherfront. If one of them had a beach long enough and smooth enough—”

  “I see what you mean,” Curly spoke excitedly. “I’ll tell you in twoshakes, Barry. There’s a sprinkling of little islands between us andthe western tip of New Britain.... Here they are! Two or three of themought to be clear of fog right now. I’ll give you the compasscourse....”

  A new spirit pervaded the bomber’s crew. Despite battle weariness,their still painful hurts and their worry over Tony, they crowdedaround Curly’s map like a bunch of eager kids.

  “Don’t get your hopes too high,” their levelheaded navigator warnedthem. “None of these islands may have a beach big enough to land afighter plane. If that’s so, we’ll lose _Sweet Rosy O’Grady_ anyway.”

  “And if we can land,” Barry added, “the place may be swarming withJaps. Personally I’m for taking the risk, but if there’s one man whodoesn’t like the idea, we’ll turn back and bail out over Mau River.Tony would have a bare chance to live if we pulled his ripcord andchucked him out.”

  Silence answered him. It was broken finally by Curly Levitt’s voicegiving Barry the compass course for an unnamed islet that they mighthope to reach ahead of the fog.

  “Okay, Crusoes, you asked for it!” _Rosy’s_ Old Man said cheerfully.“We’ll be in sight of Island number one in about twenty minutes.”

  In twenty minutes to the dot they sighted the first white-and-greenbump on the ocean’s surface. The islet rose to a central peak aboutthree hundred feet high, covered completely with jungle. As theFortress swept over it at two thousand feet, her crew voiced theirdisappointment. Such beaches as the place possessed were narrow androcky. A helicopter might have found a landing place, but not a bomberwith a 90-mile-per-hour landing speed.

  Almost before the little peak had passed beneath, Curly was laying thecourse for Island number two. It lay a little farther to the north, andaway from the weather front. Its length, however, suggested betterlanding possibilities, and it was barely fifty miles away.

  Ten minutes later Chick Enders pointed it out. As its low-lying shapebecame more distinct, the crew’s hopes rose. The south beach, they saw,was wide and free from stones, and the tide at this hour was out. Theonly fault of this natural runway was its slight curve, and the tinybrook that broke its length.

  “I’ll chance it,” the young skipper decided. “As a matter of fact, it’sgoing to be a lot easier to set down on that beach than to takeoff—even supposing we can get more gas.”

  Climbing to a safe height, he turned and came in for his landing. Inorder to make the most of the beach’s length, he brought _Rosy’s_wheels down just at the farther edge of the brook. The Fortress buckeda trifle in the wave-packed sand, and rolled to a smooth stop. Withinher, six men cheered like maniacs.

  “Hold it down, men,” Barry advised. “We don’t know what we’re upagainst yet. Our first job is to dress Tony’s wound. Then we’ll explorethe island, if there’s time to do that before dark.... Curly, pass methe first-aid kit and a bottle of water, will you, please?”

  Tony was still unconscious when they carried him to the plane’scockpit. His wound had evidently been made by a piece of flak that hadripped through his thigh like a dull knife. The arteries were bleedingslowly despite the tourniquet.

  With small silver clips from the first-aid kit, Barry managed to closethe severed blood vessels. He dusted a handful of sulfanilamide powderinto the wound, removed the tourniquet, and used most of the kit’sgauze in a snug bandage.

  Straightening up, he pointed to the windows in the nose and overhead.

  “Open up and give him some fresh air,” he directed. “The minute Tonycomes to, we’ll make him swallow some salt tablets and sulfadiazine,with all the water he can drink. That’s all we can do.... Chick, youand Soapy will stay with him now, while the rest of us look over theisland. We’ll be back before dark if we don’t run into any Japs.”

  “Okay, Skipper—we’ll hold the fort,” Chick answered. “If you shouldmeet trouble near by we can cover your retreat with _Rosy’s_ machineguns. Maybe you’d better demount one of them and take it along for anemergency.”

  “Our pistols and the tommy-gun will be enough,” Barry said, as he leftthe cockpit. “Those fifty-caliber babies are too heavy to carry far, orto use without a tripod. See you soon, fellows.”

  A five hour search of the island revealed no human inhabitant. On thefarther side from their plane the Fortress men found the burnedremnants of a native village and a few unburied corpses. The Japbutchers had evidently come and gone a few weeks before.

  Barry and Hap downed a half-wild pig with their pistols. On theirreturn to the Fortress, they frightened a number of scrawny islandchickens that flew squawking into the jungle. It was plain that theyneed not starve, Fred Marmon remarked, even if escape from the islandshould be delayed for a month.

  “I’ve no idea of waiting that long, Fred,” Barry laughed. “As soon asit’s dark, we’ll radio the base to send a supply ship here. With arunway of steel mats on the beach we should have no trouble in takingoff. That is, if the Nips don’t spot us!”

  Reaching the plane they found Tony Romani conscious again. He had beenswallowing salt and water in quantity to make up for his loss of blood.Despite the pain of his wound he greeted his friends with a plucky grin.

  “All I want is a juicy beefsteak,” he told them. “And mashed spuds andapple pie and—”

  “You’ll have to be satisfied with pork chops,” Barry interrupted. “Beefwon’t be on the menu until we’re back at Mau River. The same goes forpotatoes. Dinner tonight will be roast wild pig, palm cabbage, andcocoanut milk—with a vitamin pill for dessert.”

  Ravenous appetites made the jungle dinner a success, even though Tonydropped off to sleep in the middle of it. The others literally cleanedthe bones of their little roast porker. There was no campfire to enjoy,however: the light would have betrayed them to any scouting Jap planewithin twenty miles. The moment the sun set, they kicked sand over thecoals and finished their meal in the dark.

  Contact with Mau River was made quickly by radio. A brief message, notlikely to mean much to listening Japs, gave their location. Barry addeda request for supplies, and arranged radio and ground signals to guidethe approaching planes to a moonlight landing.

  “The next thing,” Barry announced, “is to camouflage _Rosy_ so thatshe’ll be invisible from the air. As soon as the moon rises, we’llbegin cutting vines and leafy bushes. With only four pocket knives, itmay take us most of the night, but that just can’t be helped.”

  _Ravenous Appetites Made the Dinner a Success_]

  “There’s the moon coming up now!” Hap Newton exclaimed, pointing to aglow on the eastern horizon. “Out with those toadstabbers, gentlemen!We’ll cut out a new green dress for _Sweet Rosy O’Grady_—or fallasleep trying!”

  The camouflage was only half completed when the first supply planearrived. It was a big _Coronado_ flying boat, altered for extra cargospace. It brought enough gasoline in cans to feed _Rosy’s_ big engineson the trip home, and it took Tony Romani back to the field hospital.The next two planes brought bundles of steel mats for the beginning ofa long, straight runway.

  Three days later _Rosy O’Grady’s_ sunburned crew had lost ten orfifteen pounds apiece, but the roadway of perforated steel wascompleted. One end of it was under water, owing to the curve of thebeach. An incoming wave might cause the huge bomber to ground-loo
p atthe moment of her take-off, but that was a chance that had to be taken.

  As the men piled into their ship they tried not to worry about thisdanger spot; yet there was no denying the risk. Belted into hisco-pilot’s seat, Hap Newton warmed up the four big engines. Slowly heincreased the r.p.m. until _Rosy O’Grady_ was straining to be off. Themighty slipstream ripped jungle foliage and tossed the fragments of hercamouflage screen.

  “Let’s go, Hap!” Barry Blake said quietly.

  With brakes released the bomber leaped ahead. She rushed down thenarrow steel runway, her airspeed gauge climbing fast. If one of herbig wheels should run off into the sand, disaster would almostcertainly result.

  Almost on the “step” she reached the wet end of the strip. Spray flewfrom her right hand wheel. The water tugged at the tire like amany-tentacled octopus. Despite both the pilots’ weight on thecontrols, it pulled her down. The right wing dipped into a wave.

  Every man on board held his breath, bracing himself for the shock andrending crash of a ground loop.... Then, abruptly, the ship rightedherself. When Barry eased back on the controls she lifted hertwenty-five tons as lightly as a windblown leaf.

  “Home, James!” croaked Chick Enders, and a gale of laughter sweptthrough the Flying Fortress, releasing her crew’s badly stretchednerves.

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