Battleground Read online

  The Navy hoped to build auxiliary and emergency landing strips on land the Dunns owned just across the border from Florida in Alabama. Though the Navy had no funds to lease, much less buy, the necessary land, the Admiral at Pensacola thought there was a good chance that he could appeal to the Dunn family’s patriotism.

  The Admiral had read his history and suspected—correctly—that Lieutenant Cassius Alfred Dunn, gunnery officer of the Confederate Ship Alabama, probably had a familial connection with the Dunns of Mobile and Point Clear, shipping agents and land owners. The Alabama, under Admiral Raphael Semmes, was the greatest Naval Raider of all time.

  “You must come see us at Pensacola,” the Admiral said to C. Alfred Dunn IV, Bill’s father. “And bring your boy. I think he’d like it.”

  When the Dunns came to Pensacola, the Admiral laid on them a little demonstration of the capabilities of the Grumman F3F-1, the last Navy biplane fighter to be produced. Bill Dunn’s awe of the F3F-1 was exceeded only by his shocked realization that the pilot who climbed out of the cockpit and walked over to be introduced to the Dunn family was no taller and not much heavier than he was.

  I bet they called him “Runt” too, when he was fifteen.

  That summer, and the next, Bill spent long hours with his feet dangling off the family pier, watching the sun set over the smooth waters of Mobile Bay. A lot of the time he was there he was thinking about flying. He would have cheerfully swapped all his worldly possessions, present and future, for a chance to climb in the cockpit of a fast and powerful little airplane and shove the throttle as far forward as it would go.

  The dream endured ... though he changed part of it. By the time he entered the University, he’d decided that if there was anything in the world better than being a Naval Aviator, it was becoming a Marine Naval Aviator.

  Now that he was a Marine Naval Aviator and rated in the Grumman F4F, which was a little larger than the Gee-Bee, but just about as fast, he understood that flying hot aircraft as fast as they would go, as close to the ground as you could get them, was a pretty dumb thing to do. He realized now why there had been such a hell of a hue and cry to stop the National Air Races because those guys had kept flying into each other, the pylons, or the ground.

  The Val, like the Kate, had two forward firing 7.7mm machine guns in the wings and a single 7.7mm in the aft cockpit. It could carry about nine hundred pounds, total, of bombs, a big one under the fuselage and two smaller ones under the wings.

  Neither the Val nor the Kate was any match for the Wildcat, which was faster, and far more heavily armed (six .50 caliber Browning machine guns) and armored. One on one, that is.

  Was one Wildcat equal to two Vals? Or three?

  That was an uncomfortable question.

  And that wasn’t the whole problem.

  “We may certainly expect the Vals and Kates to be accompanied by a roughly equal number of Zeroes,” the Navy Zoo Guide had said matter-of-factly.

  The Zero (technically the Mitsubishi A6M2 Model 21) was an interesting airplane ... interesting, that is, if you could sit back and compare it dispassionately with the Wildcat. It was a low wing monoplane fighter, with a fourteen-cylinder radial engine that gave it a top speed of about 315 mph at 16,000 feet. The Wildcat had a top speed a couple of miles an hour faster at 18,000.

  But if you could not consider it dispassionately—for example, if you were about to go fight twenty-five to thirty-five of them—the Zero seemed immensely formidable. From everything Bill Dunn had heard, the Zero was a better airplane than the Wildcat. That the Navy pretended otherwise did not change the facts. The Navy also pretended that the Brewster F2A Buffalo was only “marginally inferior” to the Wildcat, and that was bullshit, pure and simple.

  It was common knowledge, anyhow, that the Zero was far more maneuverable than the Wildcat, except at sea level, where the more powerful Wildcat engine gave it an edge. And in addition to the two 7.7mm machine guns it had in the wings, it had two 20mm machine cannon. The projectile from a 20mm machine cannon had greater range than a .50 caliber bullet. Thus a Zero pilot could shoot at a Wildcat before the Wildcat pilot could shoot at him; and because it was larger, a 20mm did more damage.

  If it was true that no matter how bad a situation is, it could always be worse, Bill thought, then whenever we sally forth into harm’s way, I could be flying a goddamned Buffalo. There are three times as many (twenty-one) Buffaloes on Midway as there are Wildcats.

  The Navy didn’t want the Buffaloes, of course, knowing that they are no fucking good. So naturally, they are good enough for the Marines. But at least I will be flying a Wildcat.

  Which raises the interesting question, how come?

  Did Major Parks put me into a Wildcat because he felt I can fly one better than the other guys? Or because he thought, being the nice guy he is, that I stand a slightly better chance of living through this morning flying a Wildcat than I would flying a Buffalo?

  And that raises the question of relative pilot skill, which is a real chiller. Christ only knows how much time Major Parks and Captain Armistead and the other old timers have—several thousand hours anyway—but Mrs. Dunn’s Little Boy Billy has 312.5 hours, which ain’t very much, especially considering how little of that is in the Wildcat, and that somehow Navy Intelligence has learned enough about the Japs to estimate their average carrier pilot has 800 hours, including some in combat. I have zero hours in combat.

  After he rolled out of bed, Dunn dressed quickly by pulling on what the Marine Corps called a “Suit, Flight, Tropical,” and which he somewhat irreverently thought of as his rompers. Next came ankle high boots, which he thought of as his clodhoppers, because the rough side of the leather was on the outside. Some of the guys flew with low-quarter shoes, but he preferred the clodhoppers. He slipped a leather flight jacket over the flight suit, and then put on a shoulder holster with a Colt Model 1911A1 pistol in it.

  Some of the guys carried .38 Special caliber revolvers, which were somewhat smaller weapons, arguing that they didn’t get in the way as much as the Colt. Bill carried the Colt because that’s what they had issued him, and because he thought the chances of his ever having to take it from the holster to shoot anybody with it ranked right up there with his chances of being named Pope.

  Last came a canvas helmet with flaps folded up so his ears were free. It always reminded him of the helmet he’d worn to grammar school, goggles in place, imagining that he was Jimmy Doolittle flying the Gee-Bee to racing glory around the pylons.

  He looked at the photograph of his parents standing outside St. Luke’s on some long ago Sunday morning. It shared a folding leather frame with a photograph of Miss Sue-Anne Pendergast, who had been the 1941 Queen of the Mobile Mardi Gras. Sue-Anne was a nice looking girl ... for that matter, a nice girl, period. But she was not, as Bill suggested to his peers, his beloved, almost his fiancée.

  He had known Sue-Anne all of his life. They’d climbed trees and gone swimming and thrown mudballs at each other since about the time the two of them could talk. Now she was doing her bit for the Boys In Service by writing him faithfully once a week. While she signed her letters, “Love,” it wasn’t the sort of love Bill had so far in his life been denied.

  Another of the reasons it was a dirty rotten fucking shame he was probably going to get killed today was that he was, with one exception, a virgin. Just before he’d dropped out of college to join the Marines, he and half a dozen fraternity brothers had gone down from Tuscaloosa to the Tutweiler Hotel in Birmingham, where they had pooled their money and hired a whore from the bellhop. He was so drunk he didn’t remember much about it, except that it was not what he expected it to be, and not very pleasant either.

  It seemed to Bill common justice that a man should be able to get decently laid before he got himself killed. But that hadn’t happened.

  The Officer’s Mess was an open-sided tent with benches and tables, the food was served cafeteria style. Breakfast was the standard fare: Spam and powdered eggs served any w
ay you wanted them, which meant that you could either have little squares of fried Spam with powdered eggs on the side, or you could have the Spam cut up and mixed into powdered eggs. Plus toast, with your choice of apple or cherry flavored jelly. And coffee, with your choice of canned cow or no canned cow.

  He had taken a mug of black coffee and a piece of cold toast and walked out to the flight line. He was afraid that he would throw up and didn’t want to vomit in the cockpit.

  The plane chief was there, looking over the armorer’s shoulders as he checked the Brownings and the links and placement of the belted .50s. They exchanged salutes. The plane chief, a stocky Italian from Florida whose name was Anthony Florentino, was about as old as Bill was, and took his work and the Marine Corps seriously. He was a corporal.

  “Good morning, Sir,” he said.

  “Good morning. Everything shipshape?”

  “Yes, Sir. Just checking the guns, Sir.”

  Funny, it looked to me like you were playing chess.

  “You got the word, Sir, that we’re to start engines at 0540?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  Jesus, I have to take another dump!

  “The Skipper wants the engines warmed up for when the word comes, Sir.”

  He looked at his watch. It was 0533. In seven minutes he would have to climb in that cockpit and hope that he didn’t have nausea or diarrhea.

  He walked around the plane and did the preflight, trying to act as nonchalant as possible. When he finished he had four minutes to wait. He leaned against the Wildcat, just behind the cowl flaps.

  “I didn’t see you in the mess, I wondered where you were,” Major Parks said, startling him. He hadn’t seen The Skipper coming up.

  “Good morning, Sir.”

  “Everything all right? You feeling OK?”

  “Yes, Sir, fine.”

  “You got the word about warming the engines?”

  “Yes, Sir. I was about to get in.”

  “A PBY radioed at five-twenty-five that it had spotted the Japanese fleet,” Parks said. “I expect word anytime now that the Navy radar has picked up aircraft. I want to get off the ground as soon as we get a heading. Hit them as far away from here as possible.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “You’re a good pilot, Bill. That’s why I put you in a Wildcat. You don’t get excited. That’s a good thing for a fighter pilot. Excited pilots forget what they’ve been taught.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  Translated, that means you have had second thoughts about putting me in a Wildcat, because I am very likely to get excited and forget what I’ve been taught, and would probably change your mind if there was time and put me in one of the goddamned Buffaloes. That being the case, you have decided to inspire the troops with confident words.

  Shit!

  Major Parks touched his arm.

  “Good luck,” he said. “Good hunting.”

  “Thank you, Sir.”

  Major Parks was both a professional warrior and a realist. He knew that until the shooting actually started there was no way to predict how Lieutenant Dunn, or any of his pilots, would behave in combat. Even so, he had a belief that he could devise guidelines that would give him some indication—a hint if not a prediction—about which pilots could handle best the stress and terrors of combat. With that goal in mind, he had collected as much data as he could about the behavior of British fighter pilots during the Battle of Britain, the battle Churchill had described both accurately and eloquently: “Never in the history of human conflict have so many owed so much to so few.”

  Parks wondered what the few were really like.

  Not without difficulty, he had learned that by and large they were no older than his young officers, and they’d been trained no better. They had also gone up against pilots with more experience than they had, yet they’d done very well.

  He’d found two notable differences between the British pilots and his own, perhaps the most important being that the English were defending their homes, literally fighting above their mothers and their girlfriends, where his kids would be fighting halfway around the world from theirs. They would be protecting their mothers and their girlfriends, too, but abstractly, over a wide and empty ocean.

  Secondly, the Brits had flown Spitfires against Messerschmidts. Both were splendid aircraft; it was a matter of opinion which was the better. One could charitably call the Wildcat the equal of the Zero, and perhaps when they had enough experience against the Zero to make a bona fide analysis, it would turn out to be so. But that could not be said about the Buffalo, which was hopelessly outclassed by the Zero, and probably by even the Kate.

  With no data worth a damn to really go on, Parks realized he would have to go with his gut feeling. He thought that commanders had probably been forced to go on their gut feeling from the beginning of time, but that offered little reassurance. His gut feeling (which he desperately hoped was not wishful thinking) was that his kids—and perhaps Bill Dunn in particular—would acquit themselves well.

  He had given Bill Dunn one of his precious few Wildcats because of that gut feeling. And perhaps, he thought, because sometimes when he saw Dunn on the flight line, a spunky little crew-cutted, clean-cut kid who looked more like a cheerleader than a Marine Officer, he reminded him of those young English kids standing beside their Spitfires in an East Anglian field.

  (Two)

  Lieutenant Bill Dunn watched The Skipper walk down the flight line to the next aircraft, which happened to be a Buffalo, and pause for a word with its pilot.

  I can’t remember that guy’s name! I’m about to go get killed with him, and I can’t even remember his name. I wonder if he knows mine?

  He climbed up on the wing root.

  Corporal Florentino had already opened the canopy. As Bill lowered himself into the seat, Florentino climbed onto the wing root and watched, prepared to help, as Bill fastened his shoulder and lap belts, and then as Bill set the clock, the altimeter, and the rate of climb indicator to zero. He waited until Bill had checked the stick and rudder pedals for full movement, and then jumped off the wing root.

  Bill checked the emergency canopy release and the fuel gauge, then glanced out the canopy.

  “Ignition switch off, throttle open, mixture at idle cut off,” he called. “Pull it through.”

  Florentino grasped a propellor blade and pulled on it, then the next blade, and the next, until the engine had been turned through five revolutions. Otherwise, oil that had accumulated by gravity in the lower cylinders would still be there when the engine fired. Since oil does not compress, lower link rods would have been bent or broken.

  Bill put the Fuel Selector Valve handle to MAIN TANK and turned the crank opening the engine cowl flaps. He checked the propellor circuit breaker switch and then set it on AUTOMATIC. Outside, Corporal Florentino had charged the starter mechanism with a Type C cartridge, a kind of super-sized blank shotgun shell. When it fired, its energy would turn the engine over until it started.

  Bill set the supercharger on LOW, pushed the Carburetor Air handle in so that air would be delivered directly to the engine, and set the throttle for 1000 rpm.

  He looked to make sure that no one was near the propellor and that a ground crewman had a fire extinguisher ready to go.

  “Clear!” he called.

  Florentino made a wind-it-up motion.

  Bill turned the battery switch to ON, turned on the Emergency Fuel Pump, and watched as the fuel pressure gauge rose to fifteen pounds. Then he held the primer switch on for three seconds, turned the ignition switch to BOTH, and fired the starter cartridge.

  The propellor began to turn, and then there was the sound, rough, of the engine catching. The Wildcat shuddered, and the engine gave off a small cloud of blue smoke. He moved the mixture control to AUTO RICH and flicked the primer switch a couple of times until the engine smoothed out.

  He idled the engine at 1000 rpm, and then teased the throttle further open until it indicated 1200 rpm. There wa
s nothing to do now but wait for the oil pressure and inlet temperature needles to “move into the green.” This made reference to little green arcs painted on gauges and dials to show where the indicator needle should point, if things were as they were supposed to be. There were also little red arcs that indicated a dangerous temperature, or pressure, or the like.

  The oil pressure gauge almost immediately indicated 70 psi (Pounds Per Square Inch) and then the oil inlet temperature gauge needle came to life. It slowly began to move across the dial to the green arc, stopping at an indication of 86° Fahrenheit.

  Then he checked the magnetos, which provided the ignition spark to the engine, by switching from their normal BOTH position first to LEFT and then to RIGHT. The tachometer showed a drop of less than 100 rpm, which meant he had no problem there.

  The goddamn airplane is not going to suffer some fatal internal malady and keep me on the ground. That would have been nice. Not exactly heroic, but nice.

  He let it run another minute and then shut it down. It was warmed up and ready to go. He sat in the cockpit for another minute, listening to the creak of metal as it cooled, and then a Jeep came down the flight line with Captain John Carey at the wheel. He signaled down the flight line. Dunn had expected this. The word had come, and there would be last minute instructions and probably a pep talk.

  “We’ve been over this before,” Major Parks conceded. “You all know where you’re supposed to be when we get in the air. What we have now is where the enemy is: bearing 310, about 90 miles. Radar reports too many of them to count.”

  Now he’s going to say, “Go out there and give them hell, men! Win one for the Gipper! Semper Fi! To the Halls of Montezuma!”

  Major Parks said, “I’ll see you all later at the debriefing.”