Vanished (6 page)

Jimmie’s hands were calloused and strong but he still had the lanky physique of a teen. His blond hair was perpetually tossed over a boyish face of freckles. One day at gunnery school in Laredo, he was struggling with a heavy pack, the blisters bleeding on his feet, when his wiry frame gave out. He felt a surge under his arms as another private hoisted him up, carrying him down the field until his strength returned. After that, Jimmie and Johnny Moore were rarely apart. They bunked together, ate together, and stayed up late talking. Jimmie told Johnny about life on the plains, the shade of the elm trees he longed for, and the little boy, Tommy, he’d left behind with Myrle, the only woman he’d ever loved. Johnny told Jimmie about the sultry woods of Arkansas, a place that Jimmie no longer remembered, but where his mom and siblings still lived.

Johnny was five years younger than Jimmie, but he was a head taller and laced with muscle. His dark brown hair scooped into a swirl, and he beamed the easy sideways smile of a lifelong country boy. Growing up on the Des Arc Bayou, he was the youngest of nine kids and the second son, but he was named for his father. Most folks in Des Arc called him John Junior. His dad and sister called him Bud. In the service, he was Johnny.

Life in Des Arc hadn’t changed much in a century or two. Johnny’s dad woke early each morning for a bowl of corn mush and a mug of hot water, then headed out to fish the hidden corners of the White River, bagging catfish and buffalo fish as big as fifty pounds. In the evening, he dragged them home to put on ice and ship to Saint Louis. When Johnny was little, he stayed home with his mom, Addie, a husky, whistling figure who tended the chickens and milked the cow and raised fields of cotton and corn beside the jumble of beans and peas and potatoes in the
household garden. The older kids sometimes helped Addie do laundry in the outdoor washtub, or hang the clothes to dry on a line between trees. When things got busy, Johnny hung by his sister Melba, who was six years older. “
He was my pet
,” Melba said. “He was my baby. He was my doll.”

In place of toys, Johnny had cousins and nephews to race and chase through woodland acres. Two of his sisters were so much older that one had a son, Doyle, who was just ten months younger than Johnny, and another had a boy named Charles born just two years after that—the year the White River climbed so high in Des Arc that it
breached the pages of the
New York Times
. By the time the three boys were old enough to walk, they were running. They’d skinny-dip in the river behind the cemetery and climb up high in the persimmon trees to ride the branches to the ground. When school began, they made the two-mile walk along railroad tracks by the river, tossing rocks into the water to see who could make the biggest splash. The year Johnny turned thirteen, the river surged over the banks again, sweeping through the first floor of the house. Johnny was surging that year, too: In high school, he was six feet tall, with size 11½ shoes. His hands were strong enough to crack a walnut.

On weekends, Johnny and his dad would slip away together, crawling up the malarial gulches of the river to hook fish. Johnny would clean them with a cleaver he’d cut from a railroad plate. Back home, he rounded up his cousins and nephews to smack a baseball or hurl a football until they were all falling down. Then they’d clamber into someone’s kitchen to belt down beans and broth. Once a year, on the Fourth of July, the town filled with farmers, everyone converging to park their wagons by the river and bustle into Caskey’s Hardware, or chop a hunk of cheese from the block on the counter at Robinson’s Mercantile. At dusk, they drifted back to the waterfront, eating together at long picnic tables and sleeping below their wagons under lilting cricketsong.

When Johnny got a football scholarship to junior college, he trundled off to spend four days each week on campus. Then he’d hurry home for long weekends, demanding a pile of fresh biscuits from whichever sister
he found first—Melba, Mary, Flossie, it didn’t matter; they all had Addie’s recipe.

One day at Melba’s, Johnny spotted a new girl across the road. She had downturned eyes and a broad, open face, and she’d just moved with her family from the little town of Hazen. Her dad had a job in the rice fields. Dirty work, but it paid. By summer, Johnny and Katherine Price were dating. By fall, they were hinting at marriage.

Whatever passion some men had for war, Johnny had none. The thought of combat was alien to him, and the thought of leaving Katherine worse. When the draft notice came, he handed it to his mother and she ran away. His dad’s face turned red and he swore he’d never vote for a Democrat again. Johnny’s sisters reassured him. “It’s only a while,” Melba said. “You’ll be back before you miss us.” But Melba knew it wasn’t true, and Johnny knew it, too. On the last day before he shipped out, he stood with Melba on the front porch. They looked across the road to Katherine’s house and the woods beyond.

“Melba,” Johnny said quietly in a voice she’d never forget, “I don’t think I’m ever going to see you again.”

“Oh,” she snapped, “don’t say that, Johnny.”

“Well, I just don’t think I will,” he said.

Johnny met Jimmie at gunnery school, and then they were off to Fresno. He married Katherine on a visit home, then he was in Tonopah.

Most of the men on Johnny’s crew were about his age, but they came from places he couldn’t imagine. Earl Yoh was a gunner from the snowy plains of northwest Ohio, one of thirteen kids crammed into a house with no electricity or plumbing. At night, Earl and his family would gather by the downstairs fireplace to play records on a windup Victrola, or else they’d tune in to the battery-powered radio for episodes of
The Shadow
. Then the kids would trudge upstairs to the cavernous second floor, with no insulation or dividing walls. The girls took one end of the room, the boys the other—except in the deepest part of winter, when they might burrow together under a mountain of blankets to stay warm.

Earl played baseball and basketball well enough to be named the “Best Boy Athlete” in his yearbook, but with soft brown hair and wide blue eyes, high cheekbones and a chiseled chin, he spent nearly as much time under the stage lights of the auditorium—starring in theater, the chorus, and the glee club, and singing his way into the hearts of local girls. In the annual “Will” section of the yearbook, his classmates wrote, “
Earl Yoh leaves his way with women
to Wayne Zielke”—a junior who, judging by photos, must have been grateful for the help.

Leland Price happened to grow up just a few miles from Earl on the banks of the Auglaize River, where his grandparents, aunts, and uncles shared a large house on a forty-acre farm, while Leland and his parents lived in a smaller home nearby. At five feet six and 130 pounds, he was small but not slight; his powerful shoulders and arms made him a natural fit for the cramped turrets of a B-24.

In Tonopah, they all bunked together, ate together, and raced together into the sky. Each time they lifted off, Johnny felt the pressure building in his nose, throbbing as they gained altitude until the blood came trickling down from an old football injury. He’d try to pin his nostrils shut, but never had much luck, laughing to the other boys that, damnit, he’d been hit. Then he’d belly up to the waist gun, raining hell on the desert floor.

“
I’ve been on two gunnery missions
this week and fired 500 rounds,” he wrote to his sister Mary in March. “I almost shot a hole in the tail of the plane. Scared the heck out of me!”

After dark, the boys would retreat to their barracks—enlisted guys playing cards and drinking beer together, while the officers disappeared into separate quarters. Only one of the officers routinely visited the enlisted men. He was the navigator, Frank Arhar, a massive kid from a coal-mining family near Johnstown, Pennsylvania, who loomed even over Johnny at six feet five, with a jutting jaw and short hair parted down the middle. At navigation school on Selman Field, he’d been issued a small booklet that he carried with him. It gave instructions to officers on how to relate to enlisted men. “
If you do not have a sense of humor
, cultivate
one,” it said. “Lack of it is worse than a disease. A disease affects only the person who has it, whereas a lack of a sense of humor is a wet blanket over all with whom you come in contact. Do not be afraid to laugh with your men. It will only go to show that you are human, and will add a little cement to the bonds that hold them to you.”

More than any other officer the men had known, Frank Arhar lived those instructions. He would join them for a hand of cards and a drink and a laugh, and in time they gave him the nickname “Big Stoop,” after the good-natured giant in a popular 1940 serial film. When they reached the war zone and got their own plane, they said, they would name it
Big Stoop
, and they would be the Big Stoop crew.

That day was coming. Each morning it seemed another crew departed Tonopah, and soon it would be their turn. They would fly to Hamilton Field, California, pick up a gleaming silver B-24J, and head west, to war.

—

T
HE WAR WAS PICKING UP.
As the Big Stoop boys finished their training in Tonopah, Mussolini was hiding in the strongholds of northern Italy, Allied raids were leveling German positions in Belgium and France, and final preparations were under way for the landing at Normandy. But if the war in Europe was reaching an apex, the Pacific was at a crossroads of its own.

Since the beginning of the drive in 1942, US forces in the Pacific had formed along two primary lines of attack. The northern line, led by Admiral Chester Nimitz of the Navy, was pushing through the Central Pacific toward Taiwan. The southern line, led by the Army’s General Douglas MacArthur, looped through Fiji and the Solomon Islands, and across New Guinea toward the Philippines.

If the two-column advance had some tactical benefits, they weren’t entirely deliberate. Mostly, the twin approach reflected two different strategies for the war. The northern column embodied the Navy’s conviction that the best way to reach Japan was in a relatively straight shot. But
in the Army, MacArthur was just as adamant that only the southern track would work. Driving through the Philippines, he insisted, was a strategic and a moral necessity. Strategic because the islands offered a choke point to stop the flow of oil from Japanese refineries, including those of Balikpapan, Borneo, known as “the Ploesti of the East.” But the southern route was also a moral necessity, MacArthur believed, because two years earlier he’d been driven from the islands himself and promised, “I shall return.” Any strategy that failed to keep that promise was a betrayal of America’s good name—not to mention his own.

Faced with two competing strategies, President Franklin Roosevelt chose both. His friend and military chief of staff, Admiral Bill Leahy, advised him to let each column proceed and see which fared better. Along the way, the two could protect each other at the flank, and they would give Roosevelt the greatest number of options as he drew closer to Japan. It was the sort of kitchen-sink strategy that could only make sense to an emerging superpower. As the military historian Max Hastings put it, “The twin-track strategy, sustaining both MacArthur’s invasion of the Philippines and the navy’s drive across the Central Pacific . . . represented
a broadcasting of resources
acceptable only to a nation of America’s fantastic wealth.”

The biggest downside of the two-column approach, other than expense, was that it split the Pacific command in half. Nowhere was the potential for bureaucratic confusion more obvious than in the Thirteenth Air Force. Much smaller than the Eighth and Ninth Air Forces pounding Europe, the Thirteenth had been cobbled together as an afterthought in 1942, when commanders realized that the ragtag ensemble of fighters and bombers they had sent to the South Pacific would need an organizational home. Yet as the Thirteenth Air Force stood up in January 1943, its position remained unclear; unlike other Air Forces in the Pacific, such as the Seventh in Hawaii and the Fifth in Australia, it had no standing base. Instead, its “headquarters” jumped from island to island, following MacArthur’s front line, while for administrative reasons, it fell under the
command of Nimitz. On any given morning, the airmen of the Thirteenth might fly in support of either column: north to cover Nimitz in the Central Pacific, or west to back MacArthur’s advancing line. In time, the small, mobile Thirteenth became known as “the Jungle Air Force.”

The first unit of the Jungle Air Force to embrace the B-24 was the 307th Bombardment Group. In fact, the 307th converted to Liberators even before the Thirteenth officially stood up. During the first major Allied offensive of the war, as the legendary First Marines pushed back Japanese defenses on Guadalcanal, the airmen of the 307th had flown the longest mass bombing mission in American history, pouring munitions on the Japanese airfield at Wake Island from their Liberators. It was a flight so risky, bloody, and effective that, two weeks later, Nimitz himself awarded the commanding officer of the mission the Distinguished Flying Cross. By the time the Thirteenth Air Force came into being a few days later, the 307th was its most decorated unit, with the nickname “the Long Rangers.”

Over the next two years, while the Jungle Air Force hopped across the South Pacific, the Long Rangers remained invisible to the public. Just as the Marines who rushed onto Pacific beaches would always fall in the shadow of their counterparts at Normandy, the airmen of the South Pacific would never know the fame that fliers in Europe enjoyed.

But the Long Rangers knew. One of their earliest members was the Olympic runner Louis Zamperini, immortalized in the biography
Unbroken
; one of their last was the film director Robert Altman, who completed his fiftieth mission in the summer of 1945 and returned to California
without a single bag of luggage
. In between, the Long Rangers would cover a region of four million square miles, rarely stopping anywhere for more than a few weeks.

By the spring of 1944, they had made their way to a small island in the Admiralty chain, known as Los Negros. Two hundred miles south, the sprawling battlefield of New Guinea swarmed with Japanese troops; a thousand miles north, the Navy was preparing a strike on the
Mariana Islands. And to the west, Japanese troops were fortifying their defenses.