Above the Thunder (46 page)

TOM BAKER

1
. Sanford Winston,
The Golden Cross, A History of the 33rd Infantry Division in World War II
(Nashville, Tenn.: Battery Press), 353–44.

2
. Bulldozers were tremendous assets to the American forces, hence Gen. A. D. Bruce's famous comment: “The secret weapons of the South Pacific War were the Piper Cub L-4 and the bulldozer,” and thus there was good reason for Japanese suicide squads to target them. The Japanese had no earthmoving equipment equivalent to the American bulldozer, instead employing large gangs of human laborers—often prisoners or slaves—for the same purposes. With bulldozers, the Americans could quickly create roads, level obstacles to tanks and other vehicles, seal off enemy-occupied caves and pillboxes, build and repair airstrips, and generally accomplish earthmoving tasks much more quickly than the Japanese could. Bulldozers could do things in a few days that took Japanese laborers months to accomplish.

3
. Devon Francis,
Mr. Piper and His Cubs
(Ames: Iowa State Univ. Press, 1987), 104.

4
. Ibid., 99.

5
. Ibid., 115.

6
. Ibid., 82.

7
. Ibid., 92.

8
. Joseph Furbee Gordon,
Flying Low, and Shot Down Twice during World War II in a Spotter Plane
(Middletown, Conn.: Southfarm Press, 2001), 159–60.

9
. Ken Wakefield with Wesley Kyle,
The Fighting Grasshoppers: U.S. Liaison Aircraft Operations in Europe, 1942–1945
(Stillwater, Minn.: Specialty Press, 1999), 19.

10
. Francis,
Mr. Piper and His Cubs,
115.

11
. Julian William Cummings with Gwendolyn Kay Cummings,
Grasshopper Pilot: A Memoir
(Kent, Ohio: Kent State Univ. Press, 2005), 35–44.

12
. A good friend of my father's, Lt. Gerald Middleton, tried flying an L-4 in the dark once at Fort Sill but got lost and had to light matches to see the compass on his instrument panel. Afterward, he told my father that he could not recommend this type of flying.

13
. Cummings,
Grasshopper Pilot,
65.

14
. Ibid., 49.

15
. Bill Stratton,
Box Seat over Hell,
vol. 2, (San Antonio, Tex.: International Liaison Pilots and Aircraft Association, 1985), 107–10.

16
. Francis,
Mr. Piper and His Cubs,
ix, 101–2.

17
. Heckmann Wolf,
Rommel's War in Africa
(New York: Doubleday, 1981), 40, 60, 227.

18
. Cornelius Ryan,
The Last Battle
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966), 310–12.

19
. Francis,
Mr. Piper and His Cubs,
108; Cummings,
Grasshopper Pilot,
56.

20
. Gordon,
Flying Low,
211.

1
. One witness thought that the white uniforms of the cooks made them highly visible targets to pilots of Japanese planes. (Ray Glazer, quoted in
Thunder
16 [Jan. 1988]: 5).

2
. A number of women and children ran out of the family quarters at Schofield Barracks onto the parade ground near the artillery barracks, where they were in grave danger in the open. Carl B. Mett was one of a number of soldiers detailed to round them up and get them back under cover again. In the process, one woman went into labor, and Mett helped place her on a pool table in one of the dayrooms where a medic delivered her baby. In 1991 Pearl Harbor veteran Ray Glaser also mentioned the incident but could only remember that it was an officer's wife. Carl Mett wondered who that baby was—and is, today (
Thunder
3 [1991]: 6–7 and 16 [1998]: 5).

3
. This miniature submarine, known as the HA-19, is now on display in the Admiral Nimitz National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg, Texas. It had been unsuccessful in its attempts to penetrate Pearl Harbor to participate in the attack and had then drifted around to the east coast of Oahu and become stuck on a reef, where it was captured the next day and salvaged. One of its two crewmen drowned on the reef, and the other, Ensign Kazuo Sakamaki, was captured and became the United States' first prisoner of the war. The submarine subsequently toured the United States on a trailer in a war bond drive.

Phil Grimes, a fellow artilleryman in the author's 89th FA, remembered the miniature submarine in 1997: “About 10 am on the 8th, a call came to send a howitzer to Waimanalo Bay to shoot a miniature sub caught in the reef. We sent the first section and could see the periscope swaying back and forth, so we
bore-sighted on it and wanted to shoot but they held up for a long time and finally said it was permanently caught and they were going to try to salvage it. We returned, fully realizing that we could have won the war right then and there if they had let us fire. The next day or so they did salvage it and bring it up on shore to be moved away. Later, it was taken to the US and was moved all over the country on a flatcar in the efforts to sell war bonds. There were two officers on it. One got killed on the reef, but the other survived and was captured by the Air Force and abused a bit, if I'm not mistaken. There was no love for the Japs at that time.” “Me and the Army,”
Thunder
14 (Jan. 1997): 16.

The Japanese Navy sent five battery-powered midget submarines into the Pearl Harbor attack. Each was seventy-eight feet long, six feet in diameter, weighed forty-six tons, and carried two men and two torpedoes. Transported piggyback on large I-type submarines, the midgets were launched near the entrance to Pearl Harbor five or six hours before the aerial attack began. Four of the five have now been accounted for, and three recovered. Studies of photography taken during the Pearl Harbor attack have led some observers to argue that the fifth of the midgets was in place off Battleship Row as the Japanese torpedo planes came in and may have fired its torpedoes at the USS
Oklahoma
or
West Virginia.
If true, it may yet lie undiscovered on the seabed inside Pearl Harbor.

4
. Phil Grimes described Colonel Bledsoe's mobile guns in 1997 (“Me and the Army,” 17):

After being in position for about a month, Col. Bledsoe came and asked if I thought we could put a 75 mm howitzer in the back of a 2½ ton truck with enough protection to absorb the recoil and not destroy the truck. He said he thought we could and wanted my opinion. After a brief discussion, we decided to try it, and he asked me to do it and let him know when ready. I discussed this with the Motor Sergeant and the Chief of Section One, and then we loaded the howitzer pointing to the rear. We put a big timber to absorb the recoil with sandbags and soil behind the board. We put a cable around the axle to hold the howitzer, and some
3/8
inch armor plate in front of the sights and other parts to protect the gunner and crew. It looked good, and we called Col. Bledsoe, who came and said, “Let's try it out.” We did, and it worked fine.

About that time a Major from Island Ordnance came and confronted Col. Bledsoe with the remark that the trucks were the property of Ordnance and that using them for mounting a howitzer was not authorized and it would have to be dismounted. Upon hearing this, and with his neck getting redder all the time, Col. Bledsoe said, “Major, we are at war. This is not peacetime. We are expecting and preparing for an attack by the Japs. We do not have a mobile gun, and we need one badly to move up and down the beach to help defend our sector. We have it mounted and it has been tested and it works. We don't think it will destroy the truck. We are going to leave it as it is and prepare to use it in our defense. Will you please go and report this
to your commander.” We used it for gunnery practice several times, using Rabbit Island as our target. We trained a driver how to handle the driving and getting into position quickly and accurately. Nothing further was ever heard from Island Ordnance.

5
. Major Devereaux was taken prisoner and survived the war in a Japanese POW camp. After the war he became a brigadier general and then a member of Congress. He died in 1988. As the author mentioned, the valiant and stubborn defense of the island by the Americans until they were overwhelmed by a vastly superior enemy force was a source of pride to the nation at a time when it sorely needed a boost to morale in the face of so many Japanese victories. Wake Island became known as the Alamo of the Pacific.

Wake Island itself is a small coral atoll 2,300 miles west of Hawaii, and was attacked by the Japanese on 8 December 1941, the day after the Pearl Harbor raid. It was captured after a fifteen-day siege by Japanese bombers and warships, culminating in an amphibious landing by 1,500 Japanese troops. Their first landing attempt was repulsed by the Americans—the only failed Japanese landing of the war. The island was defended by the First Marine Defense Battalion, totaling 449 officers and men, commanded by Cdr. Winfield Scott Cunningham. Others on the island were 68 U.S. Naval personnel and about 1,221 civilian workers. U.S. Marine pilots flying from Wake's airfield in four Grumman Wildcat fighter planes attacked incoming Japanese aircraft as well as surface ships and a submarine until their aircraft were destroyed.

It was famously reported that the embattled Marines on Wake, when asked by radio if there was anything they wanted, replied defiantly: “Yes, send more Japs.” Forty-nine of the 449 U.S. Marines were killed in the battle, along with 3 U.S. Navy personnel and at least 70 civilians. The Japanese retained 98 of the remaining civilians on the island for forced labor, then executed them all in 1943 when the Japanese commander feared they were plotting rebellion (he was hanged for the atrocity after the war). Japanese losses while capturing Wake were recorded at between seven and nine hundred killed, with at least a thousand more wounded, in addition to two destroyers sunk in the first invasion attempt, as well as at least twenty land-based and carrier aircraft shot down. Wake Island was surrendered to the United States by the Japanese garrison at the end of the war in 1945.

6
. The Battle of Midway, fought over and near the tiny U.S. mid-Pacific base at Midway atoll 4–7 June 1942, was the turning point in the Pacific war. Prior to this action, Japan possessed general naval superiority over the United States and could usually choose where and when to attack. After Midway, the Japanese Pacific offensive was derailed, the two opposing fleets were approximately equal, and the United States soon took the offensive and kept it from then on. The Japanese lost four irreplaceable aircraft carriers at Midway and were demoralized.

7
. Lindbergh, an Army Air Corps reserve pilot and mail flier, at age twenty-five became the most famous man in the world and probably of the twentieth century in May 1927 when he made the first nonstop crossing of the Atlantic by air in a monoplane called
The Spirit of St. Louis
(named for his St. Louis
financial backers), to win the Raymond Orteig prize of $25,000 for being the first pilot to do so. It was a solo flight of 3,612 miles from New York to Paris, which took thirty-three and a half hours. He followed the transatlantic flight with a triumphant flying tour of the United States and Mexico, and it was on this national tour that six-year-old Raymond Kerns in Kentucky saw his airplane and its two-plane Army escort pass overhead.

1
. Fort Sill military reservation covers 148 square miles in southwest Oklahoma and is home to the U.S. Army Artillery and Missile Center. The site of Fort Sill was chosen on 8 January 1869 by Maj. Gen. Philip H. Sheridan during a winter campaign into Indian Territory to stop hostile tribes from raiding border settlements in Texas and Kansas. The six regiments of cavalry were accompanied by such famous frontier scouts as “Buffalo Bill” Cody, “Wild Bill” Hickok, Ben Clark, and Jack Stilwell. Sheridan named the post in honor of Brig. Gen. Joshua W. Sill, a West Point classmate and friend of his who was killed in the Civil War. Some of the fort's original stone buildings are still present around the post quadrangle, and the post maintains museums open to the public (there are forty-eight designated historic sites in the area).

The U.S. Army Field Artillery School was founded at Fort Sill in 1911 and continues to operate today, having graduated generations of artillerymen as well as Army artillery officers in its Officer Candidate School (OCS). Today, Fort Sill remains the only active Army installation of all the forts on the South Plains built during the Indian Wars. It serves as a national historic landmark and home of the Field Artillery for the free world.

2
. Signal Mountain at Fort Sill has been a landmark to generations of artillery students, so named because a heliograph, or sun-signaling device, was once emplaced there during the early days of the fort to signal the approach of Indians or other news. The concrete base of a heliograph is still visible on the summit.

3
. Henry Post Army Airfield at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, was the first home of Army Aviation and is still in use today. It was named after Lt. Henry Burnet Post, an early Army aviator who became famous for setting an altitude record of 12,120 feet. He died in an airplane crash in 1914. This airfield was the original home of all Army Aviation training, and since it began before there was a separate Air Force, it is the first home of Air Force aviation also. The first aircraft in the Army Air Corps were assigned to Post Field, and before that, balloons were flown from it; in fact, there is still a balloon hangar beside the field, now listed as a historic landmark and slated to become an aviation museum. The first rotating beacon was used at Post Field.