War Pilot True Tales of Combat and Adventure Paperback - 2003

Excerpt

CHAPTER ONE

To Shoot Down a Zero

It was a long time ago in a faraway place, yet the vision remains so clear that it seems only yesterday when I glanced through the canopy of my P-38 fighter and saw my first Zero. He was coming in fast, slightly above me and heading in the opposite direction, so I actually only saw him for a few seconds. But even a half century later, I vividly remember the hypnotizing sensation that gripped me and the strange feeling that it was all happening in slow motion.

I'd had enough aircraft-recognition classes to identify it as a Japanese Zero by its sleek aerodynamic lines, rounded engine cowling, bird-cage canopy, and tapered fuselage, all clearly registering as though my brain were taking slow-motion pictures. Then a flash of intense color drew my eyes to the aft fuselage and that huge red ball--the insignia of the rising sun.

It was a brilliant red, painted on the side of the earthy green fuselage and wings, creating a startling color contrast. American pilots called the insignia the meatball, derisively, of course. But I suspect that most pilots saw the rising sun on the Japanese fighter as I did: no joking matter. And I saw that red ball many times during the 103 combat missions I flew in the Southwest Pacific during World War II.

There were several different types of low-winged, single-engine Japanese fighters, generally referred to as Zeros. Probably the best known was the Mitsubishi A6M. To simplify things, I'll refer to all of them as Zeros. Even before I completed Army Air Corps flight training, I'd heard stories and read reports about this famous fighter's performance against our fighters in aerial combat, and they ran the gamut from invincible to a piece of cake. I wasn't sure just what to believe. When I was finally sent overseas and assigned to the 9th Fighter Squadron of the 49th Fighter Group, I found out what to believe--very quickly.

The squadron was encamped on the northeast coast of New Guinea in the steaming jungle, at Dobodura. On my first day in the "Flying Knights" squadron, I was assigned a cot in one corner of a GI pyramidal tent with three "ol' heads," pilots who had been in combat for a while and knew the ropes. Wearing shiny new silver wings and an equally shiny gold bar, I felt somewhat intimidated by first lieutenants who were experienced combat pilots. But they were about my age and seemed like just ordinary guys. That night at dinner, I listened intently to their conversations, hoping to hear some good war stories. But strangely, they didn't talk much about that. They wanted me to talk about what was going on back home in the States.

I wasn't scheduled to fly the next day, but I rode down to the airstrip in a jeep with my new tent mates and watched them roar off the steel-thatched jungle runway in their P-38s, headed for a place called Rabaul--which, I subsequently found out, was one of the hottest targets in the Southwest Pacific.

When they returned later that afternoon, I hurried down the jungle path to our tent to hear about the mission. When I rushed in I saw one of my tent mates sitting on his mosquito-netted cot, smoking a cigarette and cleaning his .45 pistol.

"Hi Ralph!" I greeted eagerly. "How did the mission go?"

He glanced up at me for a moment. "Okay. We got in a fight with a bunch of Zeros," he said in a kind of distracted tone of voice, the cigarette dancing between his lips as he spoke.

"Well . . . uh, how did you make out?"

"I think I got one."

"You shot down a Zero?"

He nodded and turned back to cleaning his gun.

"You really got one, huh?" I probed.

"Yeah. But I won't get confirmation unless the gun-camera film shows it, and that's about a fifty-fifty shot. Those damn things don't work about half the time."

"They don't?"

"No."

"Well, can't one of the other pilots confirm it for you?"

"No."

I hesitated. "Uh . . . why not?"

He glanced up again as he reached into his sweat-soaked khaki shirt pocket and pulled out a fresh cigarette. "You can't confirm what you don't see."

"Oh . . . no one saw it?"

"Only me, and that don't count."

"Gosh, you'd think your wingman or someone else would've seen it, wouldn't you?"

He stuck a fresh cigarette between his lips and lit it with the butt of the old one. "We try to retain our two-ship element in combat, but, as you will learn, Kirk, once you get into a dogfight with a Zero it often ends up being you and him. And he is one tough son of Nippon."

"The Zero is a tough opponent, huh?"

A nod.

"I've heard stories . . . uh . . . how did Frank and Jim make out?" I looked across the tent at the empty cots of my other two tent mates.

"They got shot down."

For a moment I just stood there in the musty GI tent in the musty New Guinean jungle, not sure what I'd heard. "They got shot down?" I finally croaked.

A nod.

"Jesus."

Another nod.

"By Zeros?"

He glanced up at me and frowned. "What the hell else?"

In the jungle outside the tent, one of those long-beaked birds let out a loud screech. Ralph picked up the clip to his freshly cleaned .45 and slammed it into the chamber. He got up from his cot, walked across to the tent door, stuck the gun out, and fired twice.

"That'll shut his ass up for a while," he muttered.

Returning to the cot, he chain-lit another cigarette and started the gun-cleaning process all over again. I stood rooted to the moldy wooden tent floor, with my thoughts racing as I desperately attempted to put some kind of a rational spin on this earthshaking development. If two of my tent mates, who were experienced combat pilots with several victories to their credit, had both been shot down by Zeros on a single mission, then how was I going to . . . "Uh . . . Ralph?"

"Yeah?"

"Could I have one of your cigarettes?"

He looked at me curiously. "You out?"

"I never smoked before," I admitted.

He nodded and tossed me the pack. "Sure. Two things we ain't short of around here is cigarettes and Zeros."

Now you can sort of understand my reaction when I saw my first Zero, live and in full color. Actually, during that first encounter, I saw several rising suns coming from every which way. But I was so busy trying to stay on my element leader's wing that I never even fired my guns. His instructions had been simple: "Stay on my wing. If you don't, a Zero will flame your ass."

During the next couple of weeks I flew several milk runs, as we called a combat mission when no enemy resistance was encountered. But I was still in "Zero shock" and stuck to my element leader's wing like glue. Needless to say I also became an overnight chain-smoker, like everyone else in the squadron. We even had one kid from Texas who could roll his own cigarette from a sack of Bull Durham with one hand while flying formation with the other. If you've never rolled your own Bull Durham or flown tight formation in a fighter, you may not appreciate what a feat that was.

Then came the day when I finally tangled with a Zero. My squadron was flying a target of opportunity mission: a fighter sweep up to the big Japanese base at Wewak on the northwest coast of New Guinea. I was in the number-four slot of green flight, which made me tail-end Charlie of a sixteen-ship flight. Intelligence had said we'd probably encounter enemy fighters on this mission, so we were all primed and ready for action.

As we got near the target area, our squadron leader gave the signal to clear guns. That meant fire a short burst to make sure they worked, tighten up the formation, and sharpen the watch for enemy aircraft. I had just completed the procedure when radio silence was broken with: "Bogeys! Bogeys at three o'clock high!" And an instant later: "Drop tanks, now!" On the longer missions we always carried external fuel tanks, which we dropped off if we got into a fight.

I saw my element leader's external tanks drop off, spewing fuel as they tumbled away. I quickly flipped the arming switches on mine and punched the salvo button. About a half second later, a stream of tracers arched across our flight path from a V of three Zeros that came screaming down through our formation. I followed my element leader into a steep left bank, just as both my engines quit. I knew instantly what had happened: in my excitement, I'd forgotten to switch the fuel selector from drop position to internal tanks.

Although both Allison engines roared back to life quickly after I'd switched the fuel valve, one did it a little sooner than the other, which caused an unequal surge of power--and now, among other things, I found myself flying upside down. When I got the fighter right side up again, I glanced around and saw airplanes--both Zeros and P-38s--going every which way, all around me. I was looking wildly about, trying to find my element leader, when I suddenly realized there was a Zero directly in front and slightly below me. There he was, with those huge red balls plainly visible on the top surface of his wings.

I was agonizingly aware that my clumsy mistake had caused me to break formation. But there was nothing I could do about that now, and there was the enemy, a Zero. Shoot him down!

I rammed the throttles to full power and dove after him. He went into a right diving bank, but I stayed with him and closed the distance rapidly. Within seconds his silhouette filled my gunsight, and I jammed down hard on both the 20-mm cannon and the

.50-caliber machine-gun firing buttons. The guns roared and my nostrils stung from the acrid smoke that always sifted into the P-38 cockpit, since the gun compartment was just forward in the pilot's gondola.

I saw my tracers falling behind the Zero, so I pulled back on the yoke to gain some lead. But about that time I guess he saw me, because suddenly he reversed his direction into an incredibly tight left bank. I couldn't believe any aircraft could turn that quickly. Instinctively I slammed into a left bank and reefed back on the yoke with all my might to try to stay with him, but all I succeeded in doing was pulling a solid black curtain down over my eyes.

I shouted and shook my head violently, trying to fight off the blackout, as we had been taught to do in training. Then, through the blackness, I remembered my element leader's caution: "Don't try to turn with a Zero, whatever you do." I slammed the yoke forward, which, in turn, slammed my head against the top of the canopy. Now I saw stars in my blackout.

The Lockheed P-38 was one the of great fighters of World War II: it was fast and had deadly firepower. But the cockpit was small and would not accommodate a pilot much taller than five feet nine, and I was six feet tall. But this wasn't the usual Army snafu. I had wanted to fly the P-38 so badly that during my cadet physical exam, I had managed to shrink down when they measured my height. I paid for that little deception--in spades.

Anyway, with the G forces relieved, my sight began to return. As soon as I could see I glanced around, but the Zero was gone and so were all the other airplanes that had been there a few seconds earlier. Despite all the chatter on my radio, I seemed to be all alone in the skies over Wewak, New Guinea. Or at least I thought I was, until I realized that those red things flying past my canopy were 20-mm cannonballs made in Japan.

I looked back and sure enough, there he was: the black engine cowling shining in the sun, and those big black wing guns blinking fire. "If you get one on your tail, dive away quickly: you can outdive a Zero." My element leader's words rang in my head at about the same time as I saw pieces of my airplane spewing off into space.

I'm not sure how, but I managed to put my rapidly deteriorating aircraft into a power dive at full throttle. And I discovered that it was true, fortunately: the P-38 could outdive the Zero. But there was a complication, which I remembered when I saw the needle on my airspeed indicator spin past the number six, and the aircraft began to shake. "The pilot should monitor airspeed closely in a power dive to prevent compressibility." The folks at Lockheed had written that in the flight manual.

I jerked the throttles off and tried to pull back on the yoke. I might as well have been pulling on the Empire State Building: it wouldn't budge. Then I remembered another little scrap of timely information: "In compressibility, use the trim tab." The P-38 hadn't been designed to break the sound barrier, so when it approached that speed, it went berserk. We called it compressibility.

I guess that pulled me out of the dive, because the next thing I knew I was wandering around the skies over Wewak trying to find somebody to fly with. Then, loud and clear over the radio, came, "Kirkland! Where the hell are you?"

It was great to hear from someone, even if it wasn't a very friendly voice. "I'm here, sir," I replied.

"Where's here?"

"Uh . . . well, I--"

"Is that you trailing smoke from your left engine?"

I glanced out at my left engine. Yes, it was trailing smoke, all right, a lot of smoke.

"Yes sir, that's me."

"Well, you better shut it down and get your ass back in formation."

A lot of World War II pilots thought the twin-engine fighter was no match in combat for a single-engine fighter, because of less maneuverability. And to some degree, that was true. But then no American fighter could outturn the Zero anyway, so the P-38 lost nothing, and it was superior in other ways. For example: that day I shut down my smoking engine, feathered the prop (stopped it from turning), and got back in formation. I'd like to see a single-engine fighter do that.

My baptism under fire had been somewhat of a disaster. I'd made several bad mistakes and nearly got myself killed. The airplane was shot full of holes and one engine was ruined. I caught hell for breaking formation, and I would have caught even worse hell if I'd told my element leader all that I'd done wrong.