Whip (15 page)

The gull-winged spread of the B-25 spanned sixty-seven feet and six inches, and the airplane was just one inch short of fifty-three feet, although the length changed from one plane to the other, depending upon what Whip or his pilots did to it. At times those changes were drastic, and it was impossible to match one airplane exactly against another. On some machines heavy weapons protruded a greater distance from bulkheads than on others. On some B-25s the crews had hacked and cut and rebuilt the tail sections to take either fixed guns or to carve out a position for a tail gunner.

If aircraft length proved to be a sometime thing, the height was essentially the same at fifteen feet and nine inches. Not so the weight of each machine. Poundage was a factor critical to flight and even more critical to flying at the whim of the pilot. And it was ultracritical to fighting in the air. Which meant that knowing the weights and the balance of a bomber at any time, and under any conditions, dictated to an enormous degree what you could do with it and survive. If you knew you could stretch the rules a bit, you got more performance from the thing than the manuals promised. This meant certain end results — better pilots, better airplanes, better combat ability, and, last but not least, more survivors.

The factory had reckoned the empty weight of the B-25D models received by the 335th at just about 21,000 pounds, but everyone in the combat zone knew this was silly.

Especially if you believed it. It was approximately or about or around 21,000 pounds, and approximation was a fact of life because if you had been modified with a new type of self-sealing fuel tank or had new radios installed, your empty weight changed. It changed all the damn time as the airplanes were modified with armor plating, weapons, ammo feed racks, survival gear, shackles, racks and the other assorted hardware people take with them to war.

What really mattered was the combat weight. Now, according to the book you flew the B-25 with a normal combat weight of anywhere from 25,000 to 30,000 pounds, but this was, once again, only a guideline. It all boiled down to the maximum weight with which you could get into the air and fly from the field on which your airplane rolled to heave itself into the air.
Period
.

The 335th rarely flew their missions at less than 32,000 pounds gross weight when starting engines. If they needed extra speed for a strike they flew with less. If the strike was an all-out mission calling for maximum range with maximum bomb load, they could fly with a weight of 40,000 pounds, perhaps even more. At such weight you had to beat your engines half to death, your wing loading soared and the otherwise responsive machine flew like a half-dead truck until you lost some of that weight first by burning off fuel, then ridding the machine of such specifically disposable items as bombs and ammunition. One of the keys to the success of the 335th was that except for crossing mountains, they could stay low. Long-range missions meant heavy loads and lead-in-the-arms feelings at takeoff, but they burned fuel steadily on the way to the target, and their weight when they arrived in the strike area was within the limits of throwing about the airplanes in wicked maneuvers.

If you tried those fancy sidesteps at high speed with an overloaded airplane the Japanese wouldn't even have to try to cut you out of the air. Overloaded airplanes flown with less than sensitive skill have a nasty habit of breaking their wings, and that can mess up your plans for a whole day.

The only real way to take the measure of their airplanes was to judge the effectiveness of delivering destruction to the enemy, as it balanced out to the best chances of returning from a raid. This translated into defensive armament and bomb load. The slide rule held great flexibility.

There was also the matter of the enemy. You had to get in tight to mix it up with those little people who had also come so far to fight a war. Now, by God, there was the means to do some mixing.

A fifty-caliber machine gun is an effective and lethal weapon, drilling out heavy slugs with a high rate of fire. The effectiveness of a gun is measured in its punch at the target.

If one fifty is good, two is better, and four is even better than that, and — well, the trick was, as Whip saw it, to stuff as many heavy machine guns into and onto his airplanes as was feasible.

The first time Whip decided to transform desire into hardware he almost gave his chief of maintenance, Master Sergeant Archie Cernan, and his ordnance officer, First Lieutenant Dick Catledge, a joint heart attack.

Whip rested a hand on Cernan's shoulder. "Arch, you know what I want you to do with this airplane of mine?"

"Sure, Captain. Stick some more guns on it. Especially pointing in the same direction you're flying."

Whip shook his head. "Uh uh. You're going to tear the nose out of that airplane."

"Tear it out?" Cernan echoed. He remembered nothing of captain's silver bars or sergeant's stripes. "What the hell for?" he demanded.

"So we got more room in this tin can, Arch, that's what for. Tear it out. Bombardier's station, lights, oxygen lines, radios, intercom,
everything
."

Cernan glanced at Lieutenant Catledge, then back to Whip Russel. "And then what?" he demanded.

"And then, sweetheart, you will fill that great big space with fifty calibers. You will mount stanchions and crossbars or whatever it takes to handle the recoil and the blowback and the gases and the shell cases and the heat, and you will put in ammo feed boxes that, goddamnit, work when they're supposed to. You will rig the gun tit for the whole shebang on the left yoke of this here airplane. Because when I fire those babies, Arch, I want to blow a hole clean through the side of a Jap destroyer, and without using one stinking bomb, to sink the son of a bitch. Got it?"

The end result of that conversation long ago was now "alive" before Whip Russel and his men at Garbutt Field.

Whip's airplane still had that same black finish, with patches and outbreaks of rash along its metal skin, and it still had two engines and a double tail and tricycle landing gear and — that was about it. Gone was the naked glass nose he had hated so long. Now it was solid, both in bulk and in the weapons it mounted. Protruding from the rounded nose were eight fifty-caliber machine guns, four sets of two powerful weapons each, arranged one above the other. A sledgehammer if ever there had been one.

There was more. On each side of the fuselage, down along the rounded lower flanks, Catledge had installed package guns. Individual weapons in their own fairings, two to each side, clamped and bolted to the airplane. Pointing forward. All the machine guns controlled by one small gun tit that rested beneath the thumb of Whip Russel.

My God… he thought about that. He had more firepower under his thumb, now, than
all
the bombers in his squadron had when they first flew into Garbutt Field. Yet it was more than that. When he fired his weapons all twelve screamed at once and the firepower was a massive buzz saw churning in every direction wherever the river of steel-jacketed and incendiary slugs met. When his weapons howled, the impact where they struck was the same as if someone had set off a devastating explosion
that kept
going
.

There were four more weapons to his airplane. Atop the rear fuselage was the dorsal power turret with two guns that provided defensive fire to the flanks and behind and, in an upper arc, through three hundred and sixty degrees. Two more weapons completed the basic armament. On each side of the fuselage, just forward of the dorsal turret, was another gun, and having weapons in these positions provided additional rearward flanking protection, and to some extent against attacks from below. Whip gave the latter no more than a passing thought. Formation positioning, and fighting at minimum altitude, would keep belly attacks to their minimum.

Not all the bombers were alike. They had been modified according to a basic plan, but there were no similar tools for all the aircraft, there were no drawings or blueprints nor was there even experience for this sort of thing. Certain design details had been left to the crews of individual bombers. Three B-25s had been fitted with fixed guns in the tail.

Where there had been a plexiglas cone for observation the men installed one or two fifty-caliber weapons. They would be fired only when a fighter was making a dead-astern attack, and the value was questionable, but a pilot's freedom to alter his airplane according to whim was a tenet of Whip Russel's. Four bombers had plexiglas sheets with cross-bracing in the belly, and at the center of the bracing a ball socket had been installed to hold a single machine gun, providing some defense against belly attacks.

There was, finally, the matter of the bombs. The bombs these machines would carry in combat were the end of the long line that had begun in a California factory and had now come to its realization in northeastern Australia. The ultimate purpose of a bomber is to function as a weapon, to deliver ordnance to the target.

The specifications for the original B-25 called for a machine to deliver one ton of bombs over a range of twelve hundred miles. To the Death's Head Brigade even the term "a ton of bombs" had no meaning unto itself. What was the mission? What were the targets?

Were they after warships where deep penetration of decking and armor plate was necessary, so that they must use armor-piercing missiles? Were the ships thin-hulled destroyers or merchantmen where you wanted the bomb to go off as soon as the detonator struck
anything
? If the strike called to hit airfields you might want parafrags

— fragmentation bombs lowered by small parachutes to get the drifting cluster effect you wanted, and the maximum blast wave and frag effect above the surface. A hundred other factors, small or vital, determined the ordnance loads.

The drastic alterations to the B-25s called for shuffling about the crew positions. The

"book recommendations" no longer had meaning. No one sat up front any longer, of course, since the entire nose of the airplane was now a killing machine of weaponry.

There were still the two pilots who shared the duties of flying the airplane, operating its systems, operating command radio and coordinating mission strikes. With the modified airplanes the pilot was now the gunner and the bombardier, although most crews found it expedient to have the pilot shout his command for bombs away and the copilot, finger against the release, was able to respond in a split second.

In the space immediately behind the cockpit sat the navigator, tucked away within a tightly confined world. He could watch all hell breaking loose from his compartment by staring ahead between the pilots, or he might try to get into the back of the airplane. Not a pleasant or easy task, for the only way back was through a narrow crawl space atop the bomb bays. Because a man in the navigator's compartment could go crazy — being unable to
do
anything in combat — Whip gave his men the option of installing a single machine gun in a crossbar hatch by the navigator's dome.

This modification was performed on Whip's airplane by his navigator, Second Lieutenant Ronald Gall. Whip's first sight of the gun position was less than enthusiastic.

"What the hell are you going to do with that thing?" Whip asked Gall. "You've hardly got any room as it is now, and your field of fire, well — " He shrugged.

Ronald Gall snorted with something less than cheers for his pilot's observations. "Tell you what, boss. Next time we get into a fracas with the Emperor's favorite people, I'll fly and you come back here and chew on your fingernails. I'm fresh out."

Behind the bomb bay, just aft of the wing trailing edge, was the rear fuselage area where the radio/operator gunner, Staff Sergeant Joe Leski, operated the liaison radio equipment and fired the two waist guns. Corporal Bruce Coombs completed the crew at five; he was flight engineer, worked the dorsal power turret in combat and doubled in brass with Leski to operate various fixed cameras in the fuselage.

Once again, crew designations were reflections of the training bible. In Whip Russel's outfit it was mandatory for the crews to be cross-trained and adept in the tasks assigned

"on paper" to the other men. It gave the bombers greater flexibility and reliability and imparted that intangible but critical level of shared self-confidence on the part of men who join one another in flight where death is only a garish fireball away from them all.

The men completed their inspections, test-fired their guns on the ground, turned dials, studied gauges, pulled levers and operated handles until every element of their airplanes had been moved and activated.

All but flight, and the 335th was ready when Whip Russel notified the crews to be on deck for takeoff the next morning at dawn.

15

If you went by the book the B-25 — as the manuals listed the numbers — showed a maximum speed of 322 miles an hour, reflecting a flying weight of 27,000 pounds. But that weight itself had meaning only when you specified a specific altitude at which engine and aircraft performance was at its optimum. It was a sort of crossbreeding between weight, power settings, altitude, temperature and the angle at which the propeller blades were set to chew into the air. Then, the speed also was a direct reflection of just how clean an airplane might be — that is, without all the garbage that characterized the combat birds. They had the drag of the nose guns, package guns, wing racks, antennae and other equipment, all of which slowed any machine moving through a resisting medium such as the air. Combat airplanes also tend to be smeared and caked with oil and grease and dust, all of this complicated by such things as dents and dings.

Everything considered, hauling between two and three thousand pounds of bombs, with the throttles hammered forward and the props whirling at top speed, the loaded airplanes turned in about 280 miles an hour.

You could always gain speed, a hell of a lot of it, by mixing gravity with your performance. The gravity ride was a favorite of Whip's because his initial strike on a mission could then be made with everything full out, and taking care of his engines, yet plunging toward the enemy at well over three hundred miles an hour.