Devil at My Heels - Louis Zamperini [29]
My assignment also included working out of Kahuku Air Base on Oahu’s north shore. There I continued my training, learned to speak a little Hawaiian, and ran practice bombing missions at eight thousand feet until my margin of error was about fifty feet. In other words, a virtual bull’s-eye. My reward was a master bombardier classification and the knowledge that, in the words of Major General Eugene Eubanks, “The greatest bombing planes in the world take him [the bombardier] into battle through every opposition, and in thirty seconds over the target he must vindicate the greatest responsibility ever placed on an individual soldier in the line of duty.”
I FLEW IN a B-24 Liberator. Here are its stats:
Type:
Heavy bomber
Crew:
8 to 10
Armament:
Ten .50-caliber machine guns and up to 12,800 pounds of bombs
Length:
66 feet 4 inches (20.22 meters)
Height:
17 feet 11 inches (5.46 meters)
Wingspan:
110 feet (33.53 meters)
Gross weight:
56,000 pounds
Number of engines:
4
Power plant:
Pratt & Whitney R-1830
Horsepower:
1,200 each
Range:
3,200 miles (5152 kph)
Cruise Speed:
175 mph (281 kph)
Max Speed:
303 mph (487 kph)
Ceiling:
28,000 feet (8,534 meters)
My baptismal raid took place just past midnight on Christmas Eve, 1942. Two days earlier we’d fitted our B-24 with bomb-bay fuel tanks, which meant a long hop, but no one knew to where. They just told us to take enough clothes for three days. I got a simple one-dollar bombsight for low altitude work, instead of the expensive model made by Norden. At 10 A.M., twenty-six ships took off from Kahuku. Five minutes later we opened our secret orders. Our mission was first to fly to Midway Island, 1,300 miles northwest of Honolulu. It took eight hours to get there. Each ship received a case of cold Budweiser when we landed. The marines there seemed to know exactly where we were headed next. One guy said he’d expected us for a few weeks. All I expected was a shower, quickly, even if all they had was hot and cold running salt water. I got one.
Afterward there wasn’t much time to see the sights, which was no big disappointment, since Midway’s only natural attraction was the albatross, also known as a gooney bird. Thick-billed with white chest feathers fading into chestnut, they take off into the wind, gathering speed like a plane. If they come in for a landing too high or low, they crack up in the bushes. Sometimes they fly into poles and wires, not seeing them in time to change course. Again, just like a plane. In fact, that’s what they nicknamed the C-47 Skytrain, the military version of the DC-3 cargo ship: Gooney Birds.
At a briefing we learned about the rest of our mission: be the first to bomb Wake Island since the Japanese had occupied it a year earlier.
I was pleased even though I realized the mission would be like running a marathon. All Pacific runs were. In Europe, in most cases, pilots flew only several hundred miles to drop their bombs; some planes could make two or three sorties in one day, loading up in between. Our journey to Wake was five thousand miles, one way. Fully loaded, we could fly almost three thousand miles without refueling; to make it to Wake required modifications, hence the bomb-bay fuel tanks and only six 500-pound bombs—half a load. That day workmen also coated the underside of our wings with lamp black—early stealth technology—so we couldn’t be seen at night.
After a briefing the next day at 14:00, we studied our maps and targets thoroughly. Two hours later we took off, the ships stripped of all excess weight, heading for Wake, another eight hours away. Traveling these unheard-of distances was worth the risk to gain the element of surprise.