Devotion Page 21
“Today, the strike package is paying a visit to the twins,” the skipper said.
Click.
A grainy aerial photo of two bridges appeared on the screen. They spanned the Yalu, side by side. The bridge to the south held a highway that ran across its twelve humps and the other one held railroad tracks. Both bridges had been damaged enough to halt traffic but neither had fallen.
The skipper explained that the enemy was repairing the bridges under darkness and soon both would be back in operation. Tom wanted to groan. Supposedly the Chinese had five hundred thousand troops on their side of the river just waiting for a lift across and the North Koreans had six thousand trucks on their side, eager to serve. Only the damaged bridges were preventing them from uniting.
No targets held greater importance in all the war. Ten days earlier, General MacArthur had ordered air force B-29 air strikes against the bridges but the heavy bombers had missed the narrow targets, so they handed the job to the navy, which hadn’t done much better. The problem lay in the rules of engagement—American pilots were forbidden from crossing the river and violating Chinese airspace, so they had to fly up or down the river and attack the bridges at their thinnest.
“Today, we’re going after the highway bridge,” the skipper continued. “But this time we’re going in ahead to suppress the flak—we’ll leave the bridge-busting to the Skyraiders.”
The pilots nodded with approval. Skyraiders were heavy attack planes, like flying tanks, that were better suited for the job. Despite having just one engine, a lone Skyraider could carry nearly the same bomb load as a B-17 bomber.
The skipper explained that ’32 would lead the strike package, with ’33 following and the Skyraiders trailing them. He nodded to the projectionist.
Click.
A photo appeared of Sinuiju, a city on the Korean side of the bridges. Sinuiju now served as the acting North Korean capital for the regime in retreat.
The skipper explained that there were plenty of anti-aircraft guns in Sinuiju—the most in all of Korea—so ’32 was going in first, to silence as many guns as possible, before the Skyraiders made their dives.
Tom glanced nervously at his buddies. Koenig ran his hands over his crew cut. Jesse didn’t blink from the image on the screen. Veteran pilots who’d been to Sinuiju swore that the flak was as bad as anything in WWII.
Credit 29.1
An AD Skyraider
Click.
The next photo showed three red circles over the city grid, near the bridge. Each circle was numbered and represented a battery of three Soviet-built 85mm cannons.
The skipper said that each pair of pilots was assigned a battery to strike. The skipper and his wingman would take battery number one, in the city. Tom and Cevoli were assigned battery two, between the city and the bridge. Jesse and Koenig got battery three, nearest the bridge. “Considering the current level of ruin, Intel believes the area is civilian-free,” the skipper added.
He narrated several more slides, then ordered the sailor to turn off the projector. The lights flicked on. The squadron’s duty officer stepped forward and ran through a clipboard list of radio codes, call signs, and rescue procedures. He took his seat and Tom closed his notepad. The skipper resumed his place.
“Today’s gonna be rough,” he said. “They know we’re coming, they know from which direction. The sky will be black and we’re just gonna have to plow through it.”
Tom and the others nodded.
The skipper’s eyes filled with determination. “Let’s give the Skyraiders some clear skies, and let’s tumble a damned bridge already!”
—
Koenig stood, his face tight with tension.
Jesse noticed. “You should sit this one out, Bill,” he whispered, “You’re not 100 percent.”
“I’ll tough it out,” Koenig said. “Just have to hit the head.”
Jesse and Tom watched Koenig walk, hunched over, toward the lavatory. Cevoli asked what was wrong and Jesse explained that Koenig had been in and out of the lavatory all night, with flu-like symptoms. “I’m a little worried about him flying,” Jesse said. Everyone knew the rules: A pilot was not allowed to fly if he’d had fewer than eight hours of sleep within the previous twenty-four hours.
Cevoli frowned. He summoned the duty officer and told him to find Koenig in the lavatory. “Tell him to get back to his rack,” Cevoli said, “and let’s get a replacement.”
Jesse strode to the bulletin board where the duty officer had slapped up photos of the targets. He opened his notebook and began sketching his own map of the streets and buildings around his target. During his four missions since Sasebo, a new cautiousness had come to define Jesse’s flying. He seemed obsessed with doing his job perfectly and getting home safely, as if he had never been more eager to live—or afraid to die.
—
With their helmets on and their hands full with their maps and oxygen masks, Tom and the others traversed the dining room. The breakfast crowd had thinned.
Layers of flight gear covered the pilots. A knife and an emergency light hung from their yellow life vests and revolvers bounced in their shoulder holsters. Beneath his leather jacket, Tom wore a tan flight suit and Jesse wore green. White silk scarves were wrapped around each man’s neck to prevent chafing.
Wilkie stepped into the dining room, dressed to fly. “Heya, fellas,” he said. “Am I on standby or what?” On important missions, a spare pilot would usually man a plane in case someone encountered mechanical trouble.
Cevoli grinned. “Actually, you’re coming with us, Wilkie. Just a quick hop to the Yalu.”
Wilkie’s chin dropped. Jesse said that Koenig was sick.
“But what are we hitting?” Wilkie said. “I don’t know the bomb line or approach sector or—”
Jesse interrupted by resting a hand on Wilkie’s shoulder. “You’re with me,” Jesse said. “Just drop when I drop and you’ll get through just fine.”
Wilkie relaxed a little. “Okay, but what’s the target?”
“Flak suppression, Sinuiju city,” Jesse said.
Wilkie’s face sank again.
The pilots resumed their march and Wilkie followed silently. Earlier, he’d written to his parents: “It’s all been fun so far, as we’ve just hit buildings, vehicles, etc. Hope I don’t have to kill men, as I’m not looking forward to that part at all, but someone has to do it, I guess. Just hope I’m not the one, as I can’t see this killing crap at all. Just ain’t built that way, I guess.”
Now Wilkie’s blue eyes were lost in thought. There was no way to bomb a flak gun without killing the men operating it.
—
Mere minutes after taking off, Tom leaned forward in his seat in the Corsair’s cockpit. Something was wrong. His eyes narrowed—in the sky ahead and to the right of the carrier, Cevoli flew with his landing gear still lowered and his flaps dangling. Tom caught up and nestled beside his leader’s right wingtip. Cevoli looked over to Tom and shook his helmeted head.
“Lead, this is 214,” Cevoli radioed.
The skipper and his wingman were orbiting above at four thousand feet, waiting for the others.
“Go ahead, 214,” the skipper replied.
“I’ve got a hydraulics malfunction,” Cevoli said. “My gear won’t retract.”
“Roger, take departure,” the skipper replied tersely. “Hudner, form up on me.”
Oh brother, Tom thought. No one wanted to fly under the skipper’s scrutiny.
“Tom can handle our target,” Cevoli said, glancing at Tom.
Tom forced a smile.
He’d been counting on following Cevoli’s lead and simply dropping his bomb when Cevoli dropped. But now the veteran pilot had decided for him. On the most important mission of the war, Tom would lead his own flight: a flight of one. The consequences of hitting the target—or missing—would all be his.
Cevoli waved at Tom and peeled away.
Two hours later, at twenty thousand feet over North Korea
Tall in his seat, the skipper looked from his cockpit to his wingman, then to Tom. He pointed his finger like a gun and motioned forward: Target sighted!
Between breaths from his oxygen mask, Tom peered ahead. The midday sunlight magnified every scratch in the windscreen. In the distance, warm brown mountains folded down to the muddy blue Yalu. Cities lined both banks, and between the cities were the bridges.
Cloaked in radio silence, the Corsairs swept over the outskirts of Sinuiju, the city on the Korean side. The tightly blocked Asian neighborhoods looked clean and hospitable in the midday glare. But as the formation neared the bridges, the city turned scorched and shadowy, like a vision of Stalingrad during WWII. Ten days earlier, a B-29 raid had burned 60 percent of the city below.
Tom’s eyes lifted. Across the river, an industrial city was wide awake on the Chinese side. Smoke rose from factories and paper mills. Over there lay the warehouses of food and ammo that kept the Chinese armies functioning in North Korea. Over there marched five hundred thousand fresh Chinese troops ready for war.
Tom scanned the fields on the Chinese side and gritted his teeth. Reportedly, anti-aircraft guns dotted the fields. For weeks, the North Koreans had been moving their guns over to sanctuary in China. From there, they could fire on American planes, but the Americans couldn’t legally fire back. Tom couldn’t fathom how the Chinese could look the nations of the world in the eyes and deny that they were involved in the Korean War.*1
A black puff of smoke burst far ahead and below Tom’s plane. Another puff leapt from thin air, then another. The puffs began soiling the sky. Each was an exploding flak shell. The hairs on Tom’s neck stood up. The enemy gunners weren’t aiming for the Corsairs—the puffs were collecting into a black cloud six thousand feet beneath them. The gunners were laying their flak in the Skyraiders’ flight path. Tom glanced in his rearview mirror. The formation of Skyraiders looked like dots on the horizon, lower than the Corsairs. They were just minutes behind.
The skipper pumped his fist—Prepare to attack! Tom lowered his goggles and reached to the left of the gunsight. He flicked a switch and his gunsight’s concentric rings glowed yellow. He armed the guns and bomb next. Beneath the Corsair’s belly hung an olive-painted bomb with a message in chalk, scribbled by a deckhand, something like: “With love, from the USS Leyte.”
The bomb was special, a proximity bomb. A silver cylinder protruded from its nose, and within the cylinder was a radio fuse that would emit a sound wave and trigger the weapon just above the ground. The radio fuse was sensitive and fickle, though. Once the bomb was released it would arm, and a passing cloud could trigger an accidental detonation.
The skipper broke radio silence. “Prepare to deploy dive brakes.” Tom reached left and seized the landing gear lever. The lever could be lowered into either a slot on the right marked “landing gear” or one on the left marked “dive brake.” A Corsair didn’t have traditional air brakes to stabilize the plane as it dived, but the wheels would suffice.
“Deploy dive brakes now!” the skipper said. Tom lowered the lever leftward. Across the formation, the front wheels descended from each Corsair, and the planes bucked and slowed.
The flak cloud slipped beneath the Corsairs and Tom’s breathing became heavy. To reach their targets, the pilots would have to dive through that abyss. Tom peered through the cloud and saw the highway bridge’s twelve humps rising from the river like a sea serpent. His eyes narrowed on the city blocks just inland from the river. This was his target area. A moonscape of bomb craters pocked the streets there.
The skipper reached his target first. When his Corsair pulled parallel with the first flak battery, he announced: “Commencing flak suppression!” A split second later, his plane peeled leftward into a dive, followed by his wingman’s.
Tom held his course toward the bridge with Jesse and Wilkie close behind. Several seconds of flight would place him parallel with his target, the second gun battery. Sweat coursed down the padding of Tom’s helmet. His eyes blinked nervously. Before the navy’s first bridge strike, Admiral Joy had issued a statement to his fleet. “Our naval pilots have been given a most difficult task,” he wrote. “May God be with them as they accomplish it.”
Tom banked the control stick leftward and peeled away. The river slid across his gunsight and shadows crossed the instrument panel. Tom kept banking and allowed the Corsair’s nose to fall into an eye-watering dive. Wind knifed through gaps in the canopy seal and Tom felt the plane running with him, its weight on his back. The speed mounted—320 miles per hour became 330, then 340.
Below and to the left, Tom saw the skipper and his wingman diving side by side toward the black cloud. With gear down, the planes resembled Stuka dive bombers. The cloud seemed alive, a roiling kill zone. The skipper and his wingman plunged into the abyss. Shells flashed like lightning. A puff of flak erupted behind the skipper’s left wing and jarred his plane. Metal pieces of Corsair skin fluttered through the air. The wound was light, so the skipper kept diving.
Darkness wrapped Tom’s cockpit as his plane punched into the abyss next. Shells flashed left and right. Ka-boom! Ka-boom! Nineteen pounds of jagged steel leapt from each explosion. Tom shrank in his seat and held his breath. Black puffs dissolved against the windscreen and the stink of burnt gun powder filled the cockpit. Shock waves split the air and rocked the Corsair’s wings, tossing Tom against his shoulder straps. Come on, old girl! Tom urged.
The black cloud suddenly slipped behind and the Corsair popped into the clear. Tom sucked oxygen from his mask. The city now filled his windscreen. His eyes snapped back to his target area. The altimeter needle spun backward as the Corsair dived through 12,000 feet, 11,000, 10,000.
Streams of orange tracers rose from the city and arced toward Tom. His eyes went wide. He reeled back against his headrest and winced. Zip, zip, zip! The glowing orange bolts zoomed past his windscreen. Across the rooftops and in the city’s shadowy rubble, enemy gunners were sitting at Soviet-made 37mm cannons, cranking wheels, blasting through vertical magazines of foot-long shells.
New tracers cut past Tom’s windscreen from the right. Zip, zip, zip! Tom tracked the fiery bolts as they whipped over the canopy and under his wingtip. He glanced right and tracked the fire to its source. “Holy hell!” he muttered. The fields on the Chinese side of the river were ablaze with flashes of North Korean gunfire. He had nearly forgotten. Tom’s brow furrowed and he held his dive as the tracers crisscrossed around him.
Below, Tom glimpsed the skipper and his wingman at 2,500 feet, now pulling from their dives. Condensation slipped from their wingtips as they peeled right to escape the city. Behind them, their bombs exploded and secondary explosions crackled. Tom depressed the radio button on the throttle and stammered, “You hit something, Lead!” No reply came—the skipper was flying for his life.
Tom turned back to his gunsight. His index finger curled around the stick’s crescent-shaped trigger. Not yet! Tom thought. Too high! The city still blended together.
The Corsair rocketed down through 9,000 feet, 8,000, 7,000. Tom couldn’t see the flak cannons, but he saw them flashing. The gunners weren’t running.
In the city below, three cannons sat in an intersection, their fifteen-foot-long barrels aiming skyward at the same angle. Behind the guns, North Korean soldiers passed an 85mm artillery shell from hand to hand to reload. They wore Soviet-style helmets and tan uniforms. Sirens blared and rubble lay around them.
When all three cannons had been reloaded, an officer raised a red-and-white flag and his men covered their ears. He lowered the flag.
Ka-boom!
In unison, the cannons fired. Shock waves blasted from their muzzles and dust rippled across the street. Spinning shells as wide as baseballs rocketed up toward Tom Hudner.
Crack! Crack! Crack!
As the shells exploded behind him, Tom didn’t flinch. A gleam of certainty filled his eyes—he had seen the enemy muzzle flashes and held his crosshairs on that spot. His finger t
ightened on the trigger. The altimeter needle spun backward as the Corsair dived through 6,000 feet, 5,000, 4,000. The intersection took shape.
Now! Tom squeezed the trigger. With an ear-shattering roar, all six machine guns bucked like jackhammers in his wings. Fiery streams of orange tracers belched from the wings and empty shell casings tumbled forth.
Tom squinted against the blinding light. Three hundred yards ahead, the molten orange streams converged and the .50-caliber bullets rained into the intersection. With metallic rage, the bullets pierced and thudded and ricocheted into anyone and anything.
Tom lifted his finger from the trigger as the city stretched in his windscreen. The altimeter needle whipped backward through three thousand feet.
Drop! With his thumb, Tom mashed the red button atop the stick. Beneath the Corsair’s belly, the proximity bomb clicked loose. Tom hauled back on the stick, and the plane lifted from the dive as the bomb whistled down.
G-forces gripped Tom’s lungs and blackness squeezed his vision. He sipped air from his mask and muscled the stick back farther toward him. The wings groaned and creaked, threatening to rip away, and the landing gear whistled through the air. Just above the charred rooftops, the Corsair leveled out.
Behind Tom, a flash burst—Ka-boom! Twenty-five yards above the intersection, Tom’s bomb had exploded and sprayed a cone of hot metal down onto the gun battery. Shock waves rippled from secondary explosions. High above, Jesse’s voice crackled: “Looks like a hit, Tom!”
Tom shook the vision back into his eyes, raised his gear, and steered for the river to follow the Yalu south to safety. Green tracers chased his tail but the Corsair was flying too fast and too low. Tom tore his oxygen mask from his helmet and sucked in fresh air. Relief filled his face.
Behind him, another gun battery was silent.
—
Meanwhile, seven thousand feet above, fifty feet separated Wilkie’s and Jesse’s Corsairs as they dived with gear extended through the web of fire. Wilkie squinted through his gunsight. “Crap!” he muttered in his mask. He could see the bridge to the right but couldn’t spot their target, where the highway rolled into the city. The cannons had stopped flashing—their crews had likely fled.