Vanished (17 page)

As he traveled through bases in California and Hawaii, then Fiji and Guadalcanal, he began to join Marine and Navy fliers on combat missions. In May 1944, he flew to an active battlefield on the island of Bougainville, crawling on his hands and knees past Japanese bodies to join American troops at the front line. In early June, he joined Marine pilots from VMF-118 and VMF-222 on bombing missions to Kavieng and Rabaul. Then he continued west to visit the Army’s 475th Fighter Group in
New Guinea, where he began flying missions on the P-38 Lightning, crossing the very satellite islands that would soon be home to the Long Rangers.

The P-38 was a twin-engine fighter, the first of its kind in the American fleet. Because it was still relatively new, its limits were untested. As Lindbergh racked up missions with the 475th, other pilots in the unit began to notice something unusual. No matter which plane Lindbergh flew, or where he went, he always came back with more fuel than anyone else. Like an experienced scuba diver, he had learned to preserve his tank, mostly by lowering RPM and thinning out the fuel mixture. This became especially clear on a mission from Wakde Island to Waigeo on July 3, when the rest of the formation ran so low on fuel that several of the pilots had to turn back—yet Lindbergh completed the mission and returned to base with 260 gallons to spare.

Two days later, Lindbergh was summoned to MacArthur’s headquarters in Brisbane, Australia. The men already shared a history. Fifteen years earlier, at the height of Lindbergh’s early fame,
his mother, Evangeline, had been on a cruise ship
returning from Turkey when a rumor spread in the American press that she was romantically involved with the captain. Evangeline denied the story, but it was titillating enough to cause a minor uproar in the US news, which then reverberated back to the boat. She spent the second half of the voyage hiding in the room of another passenger, Jean Faircloth, and when the ship finally docked in New York, it was Faircloth who strode through a throng of reporters on the dock to bring Lindbergh on board to fetch his mother. Six years later, Faircloth herself fell in love on a big ship. She and Douglas MacArthur had been together ever since.

Lindbergh found MacArthur at his office on the eighth floor of a massive stone building on the city’s busiest intersection. MacArthur’s staff had chosen the building because it was “
the largest and most modern office
” in Brisbane, but by coincidence the edifice happened to be inscribed with a fitting slogan for the US-Australian relationship: “Amicus
certus in re incerta,” or, “A faithful friend in uncertain times.” In anticipation of MacArthur’s arrival, the second and third floors of the building had been fitted with air raid blast walls. Sitting in MacArthur’s office, the two men laughed about their connection, but MacArthur’s real purpose was grave.

Some of his commanders were concerned that Lindbergh was flying combat missions. It was illegal for a civilian to do so, and they wanted MacArthur to ground the pilot before he got hurt. MacArthur was not especially troubled that Lindbergh was flying, but he was intrigued by the report that Lindbergh could make the planes so efficient. Was it true, he asked Lindbergh, that he returned to base with hundreds of gallons to spare? And if so, how far did he think a P-38 could fly?

Lindbergh made a few mental calculations. Officially, the P-38 had a combat radius of 570 miles, but with the right approach, he guessed it could travel about 20 percent longer. He told MacArthur that
his best guess was about 700 miles
, or roughly the distance from Wakde Island to Palau.

As Lindbergh spoke, MacArthur’s face lit up. He pulled the pilot to a map and began pointing excitedly at landmarks, explaining his plan to drive northwest from New Guinea, past Palau, to the Philippines. If Lindbergh could hit Palau directly from the New Guinea islands, it would simplify everything. “
MacArthur said it would be a gift from heaven
,” Lindbergh wrote in his journal that night. “He asked me if I were in a position to go back up to New Guinea to instruct the squadrons in the methods of fuel economy which would make such a radius possible. I told him there was nothing I would rather do, and that I could go back at once. He said I would have any plane, and do any kind of flying I wanted to, and that an increased fighter radius would be of very great importance to his plans.”

As Lindbergh returned to the satellite islands, he began to train other pilots in his method, and on August 1, he and three other P-38 pilots decided to test the plane’s range. At 9:27 a.m., they set off for Palau.

Blazing across the water, Lindbergh watched his fuel gauge inch down. He checked with the other pilots by radio and confirmed that their tanks were holding up as well. Just north of the equator, they entered a storm front, barreling through the streaky gray lines and shooting up through a gap to daylight. A few minutes after noon, the islands came in sight—Angaur, then Peleliu, then Koror, and finally Babeldaob spread out before them.

As the P-38s looped across Babeldaob and began the journey south, Lindbergh spotted a Japanese seaplane racing up from the water. One of the P-38 pilots shot after it as Lindbergh watched. “
It banks frantically left
—straightens out—the P-38 is in position,” he recorded in his journal. “A streak of tracers—a sheet of flame trails out behind the enemy—his plane becomes a comet of fire—rolls over—crashes into the sea—the surface of the ocean flames where it has disappeared. It has been only a matter of seconds.”

Glancing in his mirror, Lindbergh saw another Japanese plane racing up behind him. This one was a fighter. Lindbergh swerved to the right and pushed his throttle to the firewall, but the fighter was closing in. “I am not high enough to dive,” Lindbergh wrote. “I must depend on speed and armor plate and the other members of my flight. I nose down a little and keep on turning to avoid giving him a no-deflection shot. He must have his guns on me now—in perfect position on my tail. I hunch down in front of the armor plate and wait for the bullets to hit.

“
I think of Anne—of the children
. My body is braced and tense. There is an eternity of time. The world was never clearer. But there is no sputtering of an engine, no fragments flying off a wing, no shattering of glass on the instrument board in front of me. The Zero is climbing away.”

Lindbergh watched in confusion as the fighter fled, then he spotted the other P-38s swooping after it, smothering the Japanese pilot in a stream of bullets. In seconds, the fighter was trailing down in flames.

That night, Lindbergh returned to the base shaken. He had made good on his promise to MacArthur and flown a new course for Palau, yet
he’d nearly died in the attempt, and as word spread of his close call, the pressure on MacArthur grew. Within days, the general sent word:
Lindbergh was to stop
flying and return home.

Lindbergh decided to spend a final night on Wakde Island. Touching down on the airfield, he gazed out the window. The island had been captured from the Japanese three months earlier and the devastation was still overwhelming. “
Wrecked planes lined
the sides of the runway,” he wrote in his journal, marveling at the contrast between what a pilot saw in the clouds and what he found below. “In the lonely beauty of the sky,” he wrote, “one seems cleansed of the stench and bedlam of war, free of the suffering, the degradation, and the filth of surface armies.”

Even as Lindbergh wrote those words, the advance echelon of the Long Rangers was just a few hundred yards away, scraping out a new campsite on the island’s southern peninsula. In the days to come, the rest of the unit would arrive on Wakde to begin their daily flights to Palau along the route that Lindbergh pioneered.

—

F
OR THE
B
IG
S
TOOP BOYS,
Wakde was a shock. If their camp on Los Negros had been one of the most comfortable in unit history, Wakde was among the worst. Most of the trees on the island had been incinerated in the US assault, leaving only cindered trunks that protruded from the sand like burnt matchsticks. Without trees, there was nowhere to take shade, but as the thirst and dehydration set in, there was also no reliable source of clean water. Like Lindbergh, they would be forced to confront on Wakde the true face of war, and the devastation their own planes usually wrought from above.

“
Wakde resembles no island
I’ve lived on or visited, and only some I’ve bombed,” one man from the 372nd Squadron wrote on the first night. “The few palm trees still standing wear tattered crowns and shattered trunks; the disused Jap foxholes and slit-trenches gape menacingly on all sides; piles of smashed guns, vehicles, and other equipment—the
detritus of war—have still to be bulldozed into the sea . . . meals are eaten from mess kits; drinking water, tepid and tasting of iodine, comes from hanging canvas Lister bags; showers are available only to those who wait in line for the one designated hour a day the precious sun-warmed fresh water is dispensed from a P-38 belly tank on a raised platform.”

Even Tent City was a hastily constructed mess. The ground had been cleared in such a hurry that the grading was uneven, and after a storm, pools of water would linger for days, filling with mosquitoes and chiggers. Malaria and scrub typhus spread through the camp, and the flies were so abundant that they formed an instant crust on any scrap of food. In a squadron report at the end of the month, commander Jack Vanderpoel wrote, “
Wakde had recently been taken
, and the results of the battle were still evident when we moved in. . . . Bomb craters and fox holes pocked the area, ruined Jap equipment, planes, stores, and ammunition were strewn all over the island. The smell of rotting Jap dead pervaded the air.”

The Long Rangers’ camp also perched on the most dangerous part of the island. While their quarters on Los Negros pointed north toward six hundred miles of open ocean, on Wakde they stared across a narrow strip of water to the bloody hills of New Guinea, where nightly battles echoed with gunfire and the shouts of dying men. It took a few days for the danger of the new camp to sink in. During the first week on Wakde, one adventurous crew decided to slip across the channel for a peek at the front line. As veteran Sam Britt recalled in
The Long Rangers
, the men “donned their steel helmets and strapped on their .45s and
hopped a landing barge for the mainland
.” When they spotted a US military vehicle careening down a dirt road, they flagged it down and asked for directions to a hillside where there had recently been fighting.

“They went to the hill as directed,” Britt continued, “and found a considerable number of Japanese bodies scattered around where they had fallen the night before. There were pistols, helmets, map cases, binoculars—a really great untouched store of souvenirs. As they stood
there, trying to decide what to pick up first, a whistle was heard coming from down on the road. There was a jeep pulled up just at the edge of the clearing at the foot of the hill. Behind the jeep was a GI, down on his hands and knees, frantically blowing his whistle and yelling for the men to get down the hill immediately, and that was an order. The hunters came down the hill in great spirits, while the GI jumped into the jeep and backed it into the canopy of trees covering the road. The group followed, and clustered around a very tough-looking and equally angry infantry first sergeant, who had in all probability, saved the lives of some, if not all, in the group. The sergeant let them know, in very salty language, that the Japanese had spent the night booby trapping the bodies up on the hill. They were there, and had not shot any of the hunters because they were waiting for them to pick up something and blow up.”

While that crew hurried back to Wakde, Jimmie and Johnny were at the Big Stoop tent setting up their gear. The wooden floors they had enjoyed on Los Negros were too big to transport by plane, so most of their belongings sat directly on the ground. They dug a small moat around the tent to divert rainwater, but even so, the floor was always damp. As Jimmie kneeled to write a letter home, he tried to describe the scene for Myrle: “
Johnny is making fun
of the position I’m in, but it’s the only place I can get where I can see. I’m on my knees on the ground, and have a tool box for a desk, with a candle on the end of my bunk. John started to write, but gave it up until tomorrow. But I had to write you a few lines just to say hello and to tell you I love you. And it helps me feel closer to you.”

The living conditions on Wakde were crude, but the working conditions were worse. The runway was in such poor shape that it would have been funny if it weren’t so terrifying. First constructed by the Japanese, it was intended for much smaller planes. An empty B-24 needed five thousand feet to take off. Fully loaded, it might need seven thousand. The Wakde airstrip was just that long, but it wasn’t flat. Like an amusement park ride, it rose and fell as it crossed the island. A plane waiting for takeoff began at the bottom of a hill, climbed a steep incline for about one
thousand feet, then descended into a low area known to fliers as “the hollow,” before ascending the final thousand feet in a desperate race to pick up speed before running out of room.

For a crew waiting its turn for takeoff, the view could be disconcerting. Through the cockpit window, a pilot and co-pilot watched the plane in front of them lurch up the hill, disappear into the hollow, and reappear on the other side, barreling toward the ocean. When it worked, the plane would lift off just in time for its wheels to skim the breakers. When it didn’t work, things got wet. Veterans of the unit recall at least one plane that
went in the drink
.

Most of the aircrews on Wakde developed a method for the runway. Al Jose, a top-turret gunner in the same squadron as the Big Stoop crew, recalled his pilot’s approach. “You had to stick the tail of the plane in the water at one end,” he said, “and pour in all the power you could, and Christ it was an uphill climb. Then you’d go down into the hollow and come up the other side, and our pilot would put the yoke down, collapse the hydraulics and the landing gear, and then pull it up and collapse it again, hard—just bouncing the plane off the ground!
It was an ass-pucker
every time.”