Whip (2 page)

The silence was incredible.

It was the signal to resume human activity, and the men drifted forward, looking up at the planes, gesturing or shouting greetings to the men who slid down through the belly hatches, gawking and wondering at this quiet curtain to the unexpected performance.

There was more to stare at than just airplanes. These bombers were marked and not only with the telltale signatures of Japanese bullets and flak. On the nose of the lead B-25, the black machine, beneath the cockpit windows on each side, was a macabre death's head, a skull with a bullwhip handle jabbed mockingly through one eye socket, twisting in upon itself so that it assumed the appearance of crossed bones beneath the skull. There were Japanese flags and the half-silhouettes to mark sunken ships and rows of bombs to indicate missions flown. This was a hardened, combat-tested outfit.

Now, more than the planes, the men stationed at Garbutt Field waited to see who commanded this maverick bunch who flew with angel touch on their controls. Because now the word was spreading through the clustered onlookers. They knew this outfit. The carved notches in the form of painted markings identified the killers.

The Death's Head Brigade. Sometimes they were called the 335th Special. They were famed throughout the Southwest Pacific, and their leader was more than that. Infamous would do. Whip Russel. They knew his name, and they'd heard stories of how he'd made a mockery of both the high command in Australia
and
the Japanese in their own territory. There were stories that General MacArthur would have personally liked to have killed Whip Russel because of his incredible insubordination, but he didn't, and he wouldn't, because the 335th was more of a pain to the Japanese than it was to headquarters, and God knew we had few enough outfits who could hold their own against the enemy, let alone run up the devastating success enjoyed by the 335th Special.

The Japanese, of course, also would have relished Russel's demise, but unlike MacArthur, they were doing their very best at it, and failing.

Understandably, the men crowded forward to see this phenomenon who had defied MacArthur and the Japanese and seemed to have survived both in excellent health.

His crew was already on the ground, standing in the shade beneath one wing as the engines crackled and popped as they gave off their heat, when Whip came down through the forward hatch, the last man to descend from all the bombers. No one could miss that lithe and fluid motion.

A voice rang out from the watching crowd. "Shit, he is a little dude, ain't he." Some laughter followed the remark, but it was friendly, even admiring, because a long time ago these people had learned the physical size of a man didn't count for much in hauling an airplane through the sky, especially not when you enjoyed the reputation of
this
man.

They pressed closer, wanting to see him better, to watch him move, to listen to him say something, anything, when the sounds of an approaching jeep with horn blaring began the dispersal of the still-gathering assembly.

The jeep came to a halt in a cloud of its own swirling dust. Seated by the driver was an enormous man. Not simply big, but fat, almost corpulent, and no one needed to ask to understand this was a civilian rushed into uniform for whatever skills the army wanted so badly it would overlook his physical grossness. He sat quietly, one thick leg on the edge of the jeep, his khakis stained with sweat and coated with various layers of dust and oil and grease from airplanes. His hands were dirty. Beneath his nails was a grime that could not be removed for months, compounded as it was from the lubrication of warplanes and his own hard work. Finally he rose, so that he could rest his massive forearms on the windshield runner of the vehicle, surveying the line-up of bombers, until he halted his gaze on the man who commanded the Death's Head Brigade. For a long moment no one spoke. Then the fat man, whose colonel's eagles were barely visible against the stains of his uniform, spoke slowly. His deep voice carried surprisingly strong through the air.

"Captain," he addressed his words to Whip Russel, "you are a goddamned disgrace."

No one moved.

"Captain, you are out of uniform."

Which Whip Russel certainly was, since he wore only boots and faded shorts and a .45

automatic strapped to his right side. His body was a strangely lined mixture of dark tan and white stripes from bandages worn in the sun while he recovered from wounds he refused to allow to keep him out of his cockpit. Above the heavy combat boots his legs were bandy-muscular, almost ludicrous. The faded shorts could have come from any decade preceding the present. His stomach was braided muscle, he carried a three-day growth of beard and his hair was unkempt.

No question of the reaction to the colonel's words. The men watching the scene showed disbelief and open contempt for the observation. Jesus, here they were in this freaked-out desert of northern Australia, with the Japs just over the horizon kicking the shit out of everybody save
this
one outfit, and all this fat bastard of a colonel can do is complain about how this little guy dresses. Jesus, no one in the whole outfit had a complete uniform!

Whip Russel strolled lazily from beneath the wing of his bomber to the jeep. He stopped, dust scuffling about his boots, and he looked up at Colonel Louis R. Goodman, Commanding Officer of the 112th Maintenance Depot, that took in Townsville and Garbutt Field and a dozen other airstrips scattered across the parched Australian countryside.

"And you, Colonel," drawled Whip, "are one fat son of a bitch."

Men gawked. And shook their heads, and waited for the fireworks.

Colonel Louis R. Goodman grinned hugely. "That I am, Whip," he boomed jovially, and the two old friends who'd not seen one another in nearly two years clasped hands. "Get in, you little bastard. I'll buy you a beer."

3

"You live in a lousy neighborhood, you know that?" Whip gestured lazily from the back seat of the jeep, leaning forward as they drove from the flight line.

"Well, I can't hardly argue with you," Goodman replied, his gaze following Whip's gesture. "It's all pretty obvious."

It was. About them, near and far, were dispersed aircraft and teams of mechanics and air crews in what was virtually raw desert country. Scrub trees showed haphazardly, augmented by low, stunted plants unfamiliar to Whip. "What I don't understand," he said to the colonel, "is why people this far back from the shooting have to live like this."

His reference was to the "permanent" frayed tents and other makeshift dwellings.

"Because we ain't got nothing better," Goodman grunted. "Hell, Whip, look around you.

See those canvas sheets over there? We don't have anything with which to build what might even pass for a hangar. When we tear down an engine we build a tent around it, otherwise the dust would get into everything and the engine would tear itself apart the first time it flew." Goodman sighed. "Man, we're not just short of the right equipment, we don't have any right equipment. This whole complex is the biggest scavenging yard you ever saw. My people are even making their own tools, for Christ's sake. We can't get sheet metal for repairs. The only way we've stayed in business is by stripping old cars and trucks and cannibalizing planes we don't believe should be sent back into the air.

I've been screaming to headquarters just for the tools to do the job. Never mind that half my men are sick to death from lousy food and our medical supplies are a joke and they sleep with scorpions and God knows what else. They'd accept all that and just bear up under it, if they could only do the job we need doing. And that's patching up the worn machines and modifying the others that come in here." He cast a baleful look at his passenger. "I imagine we'll get around to what you want before too long."

"Uh huh. Before too long."

About them, in the individual stands back from the road, were bombers standing without purpose, awaiting long-overdue repairs. Their wings and bodies showed scars and gaping holes, and Whip studied with his practiced eye the black punctures where Japanese bullets and cannon shells had ripped through metal skin and structural members, leaving the aircraft dangerously weakened until the metal could be made whole again.

"You still carrying operational groups from here?" Whip asked.

Goodman nodded. "We do. Its a case of their patching airplanes together until they have enough to go on a mission. We've got the 19th Bomb Group right here at Garbutt — you can see a few of their B-17s over there — but they don't fly too often. The only way they can stay in the air with the Japs, flying the small formations they do, is to get upstairs where the Zeros can't hack the thin air. The problem, Whip" — and again there was that sigh that reflected incessant, nagging problems — "is that the superchargers on those things are a mess, and we're short of oxygen equipment, and every time they try to fly to thirty thousand feet they're lucky to stay up."

Goodman motioned for his driver to turn left. "Over there we've got two squadrons from the 22nd Group. Marauders. They've got the 33rd Squadron out at Antill Plains, about twenty miles south of here. Their 2nd and 408th Squadrons are at Reid River, another twenty miles to the south. Whip, they got an out-of-commission rate of about fifty percent. We just can't keep those things flying without parts. Hell, when they're grounded, the crews live with their airplanes. They got live rounds in their weapons to keep the other crews from stripping their machines."

Lou Goodman shook his head. "Before I got into this side of the war I thought I knew men pretty well. I didn't. I didn't know a goddamned thing about how people could put up with absolute, hell, and do everything they could to stay in the fighting. You'd think these crazy bastards would welcome the chance to stay the hell away from the Japs. But it doesn't work that way. I was talking before about the 19th, the people in the B-17s.

Their morale is so low it wouldn't reach the bottom of a cat's ass. Their planes are wrecks.

I wouldn't want to fly one around the pattern. No supplies. Nothing. They were scheduled to fly a mission up to Rabaul with ten bombers. It was the goddamndest joke you ever saw. They scraped parts and pieces from all the planes so they could get just two airplanes off the ground. And one of those had to turn back when the oxygen system went out." Goodman paused and dug in a shirt pocket for a sweat-stained cigarette. "The other plane went all the way to Rabaul."

Whip raised an eyebrow. "Alone?"

"Alone. They didn't come back either. The crew that had to turn back were almost mad with frustration. Felt that if only they'd gone along they might all have made it."

Whip shook his head. "Don't count on it. Two B-17s is like waving a flag up at Rabaul."

"I know, I
know
. I'm just telling you about the crews. You've flown out of Seven-Mile, right?"

Whip pictured one of the main airfields in Papua, the southern half of New Guinea.

Seven-Mile Drome lay seven miles outside the harbor town of Port Moresby on the south coast of New Guinea. "Yeah, I've been there, Lou."

"Then I don't have to say anything about it, do I." It was more a statement than a question.

"No, Lou." They both knew the score about Seven-Mile and the other fields around Moresby, where everyone was a lot closer to the enemy. Seven-Mile was also the advance combat base through which Australia-based bombers staged for refueling on their way to strike at Japanese targets. Crude and rough were kind words for the field which the Japanese used for target practice several times a week, day and night. What Whip thought about, and he knew his thoughts were shared by Lou Goodman, was that as bad as it was for the men who flew, it was sheer murder for those who patched and fixed and worked to keep the Marauders and Mitchells going.

The world in all directions from Seven-Mile was a bitch. In the summer the grass burned into brittle straw, and the only thing worse than the hordes of insects were one special breed — the Papuan mosquitoes, which were numberless and maddening by day and by night. A man couldn't accustom himself to the weather, because he had to endure the weird combination of choking dust from the airstrip and dank humidity from the surrounding jungle and the sea. Yet this was only the backdrop to the real problems.

Men can endure almost any type of weather or terrain, but they've got to have a fair chance at their game.

Not at Seven-Mile. When the Mitchell bombers, and others, went to Seven-Mile, it was usually to stage out of the airstrip for a series of swift and hazardous strikes against the Japanese. They had to be swift because of enemy attacks against Seven-Mile, which were always extremely hazardous because of the quantity and the quality of the enemy's fighters. The pilots and air crews knew their chances for survival left much to be desired, but few of them would have willingly exchanged places with the men who kept their battered machines in the air.

The ground crews knew an existence limited strictly to bone-weary sleeplessness from work day and night. The groggy state into which they fell while they worked was broken only by the shriek of Japanese bombs or the stutter of cannon fire from Zeros sweeping up and down, strafing at treetop height. It didn't do their morale much good to see Japanese fighters in tight formation performing loops and other aerobatics directly over the field in a nose-thumbing challenge for the American or Australian fighters to come up and do battle. Which, wisely, the pilots who flew the P-39s or P-40s refused to do. There are few ways to commit suicide faster than to try to fight a Zero from below.

Whip Russel recalled one time in particular when they came back from a mission.

Taxiing down one side of the runway he saw two Buddhalike figures in the parched grass on the far side. There, two of his mechanics — Sergeants Charles Fuqua and William Spiker — were sitting perfectly upright. Their legs were crossed beneath their bodies, and they were sound asleep. These two men, and the others who worked with them, if luck proved to be on their side, might average three hours' sleep a night when the raids increased in tempo. They considered five hours at any time a delectable luxury.