Devil at My Heels - Louis Zamperini [30]
Even though B-24s had the necessary speed and could handle the range, to some the ship will never be as popular as the earlier B-17, a good plane and, with its streamlined side profile, a glamorous bird. However, a plane doesn’t fly sideways, and the B-24 was the real workhorse that won the war. Consolidated Aircraft and other companies manufactured 19,600 of them, a record. Until the B-29 came along, no bomber beat the B-24 for speed, range, or bomb capacity.
Each crew named its own plane and confirmed it with nose art. We christened our B-24 Superman and painted the Man of Steel on the fuselage.
Our pilot, Second Lieutenant Russell Phillips, was a short, easygoing Hoosier, a man who didn’t waste words. We called him Phil. He flew us from Midway to Wake at ten thousand feet with lights on until we were within 150 miles of the target. The lead planes were scheduled to drop their payloads just after midnight.
At 00:05 hours I saw bombs from Colonel Matheny’s plane hit the island. I opened our bomb-bay doors. Intermittent clouds covered Wake, so we dove from eight thousand feet to four thousand feet and pulled up. Because we used dive-bomb tactics, I only had a handheld sight and a few seconds to synchronize and calibrate my instruments as antiaircraft fire and 7.7-millimeter incendiary shells flew like firebirds over our right wing. No one expects a heavy four-engine bomber to do a dive-bombing act, but we had a Davis wing that allowed the plane to cruise with pursuit-plane performance. B-24s were almost fighter-bombers. In fact, General Hap Arnold had set up my group as an experimental unit. At Kahuku we practiced skid bombing with torpedoes: dropping our explosives right above the water. Unfortunately, we encountered complications with them bouncing on the water and popping back up to strike the plane. Thank goodness accidents only happened on simulated runs with practice torpedoes. Eventually, General Arnold decided that skid bombing wasn’t that good an idea for such a heavy ship.
We leveled out to drop our payload. I saw a red light on the tail of a Zero taking off at the south end of the island. I synchronized on the light through a thin layer of clouds and dropped one bomb on the north-south runway just as that craft left the ground. I missed but left a large crater. After waiting two seconds I dropped my five remaining bombs on the bunkers and planes parked near the east-west runway. Then we hung a sharp left turn in a barrage of bullets and watched the fireworks while Mitchell, the navigator, shouted out our heading and we made for home. Despite all the stuff the Japanese threw at us, not a plane was hit. I looked back to see bombs bursting everywhere—the rockets’ red glare, indeed—and the island on fire.
We had smashed Wake and left the Japanese confused. Our dive-bombing made them think the attack was carrier-based. We made only one mistake: using the gasoline in our wing tanks first. When we pulled out of the initial dive the bomb-bay tanks were still full, and the centrifugal force caused them to slip an inch or two, wedging the doors slightly open. That created drag and used up more precious fuel, not to mention caused a draft.
The weather turned stormy and visibility failed, but all twenty-six planes returned safely to Midway. We landed around 8 A.M. This time the marines greeted each crew with a quart of whisky. At 14:00 hours we gathered and heard a radiogram from Admiral Nimitz: “Congratulations on a job well done.” He knew what he was talking about; the navy had hidden two submarines off Wake to get a visual account of the attack. That night they threw a big party, and the next morning we took off for Hawaii. When we arrived at Kahuku, no one was there to cheer us because our raid had not yet been announced publicly. It didn’t matter. I was interested only in a freshwater shower and the Christmas party at the North Shore officers club that