A Douglas SBD-3 Dauntless was just about to touch down. Another Dauntless-the last of a dozen-was just turning
Galloway turned to his right, saw Jim Ward looking at him, and gestured to him to go on down. Ward nodded and peeled off. The other three Wildcats in the first five-plane V followed Ward.
As the first planes of VMF-229 landed, Galloway flew two wide three-sixties, mostly over the water (there was no reported anti-aircraft fire, but why take a chance?). And then Bill Dunn, leading the second five-plane V, pulled up alongside him. Galloway signaled for him to land. Dunn nodded, and gave the signal to his wing man. He peeled off and made his approach, followed by the others. Dunn remained on Galloway's wing tip.
Soon it was the two of them alone above the field.
Two mother hens, Galloway thought, making sure the little chickies get home safe.
Except this isn't home and it isn't safe.
Charley reached his left hand down beside his seat, found the charging handle for the outboard.50 Caliber Browning in the left wing, and turned it ninety degrees, putting the weapon on SAFE. Then he found the inboard handle, and rotated that. He put his left hand on the stick, put his right hand down beside his seat, and repeated the action, putting the guns in the right wing on SAFE.
Then he looked over at Dunn, held up his index finger, and then pointed it at himself.
Me First.
He could see Dunn smiling.
Charley peeled off and put the Wildcat into a dive.
There are two ways to lower the landing gear of a Grumman F4F. The means specified in AN 01-190FB-1 Pilot's Handbook of Flight Operating Instructions for Navy Model FM-2 Airplanes (As Amended) specifies that the pilot will turn the landing gear handcrank located on the right side of the cockpit approximately twenty-eight times until the crank handle hits a stop indicating the landing gear has been fully extended.
The second way was not listed in any pilot's manual. The technique was not only not recommended, it was forbidden. It was the technique Charley Galloway used-and, he was sure, most of the pilots of VMF-229. Charley had explained it to them back at Ewa, so they would know what they were forbidden to do...
He released the landing gear handcrank brake just before he came out of the dive. Following Newton's Law that a body in motion tends to remain in motion, when he pulled out of the dive to make his final approach, the forces of gravity pulled the landing gear out of the retracted position.
You had to be very careful that the rapidly spinning handle didn't get your arm, which would probably break it, but on the other hand, you didn't have to turn the damned crank twenty-eight times with your right hand while flying the airplane with your left.
Charley touched down; and twenty seconds later, Bill Dunn touched down behind him. Before he finished the landing roll, the humid heat began to get to him. He felt his back break out in sweat.
He was not very impressed with the airfield. It looked to him like a half inch of rain would turn it into a sea of mud. And he understood that a half inch of rain a day was not at all uncommon on Guadalcanal.
The entire runway was lined with spectators. Not solidly, but every couple of yards there seemed to be a Marine. They were smiling, and a few of them even waved.
Charley waved back, and even forced a smile.
The Marines looked like hell. They looked exhausted and underfed and filthy. And they regarded the arrival of the first combat aircraft as something more important than it really was.
It was actually a desperate attempt to stop a major Japanese effort to throw the Marines off Guadalcanal and reclaim the airbase.
That effort was about to get underway. Charley Galloway had private personal doubts that nineteen F4Fs and a dozen SBD-3s were going to be able to do much to stop it. Not to mention anything else they scraped off the bottom of the barrel.
Just before they'd left the Long Island, he heard that the Army Air Corps was sending a squadron of Bell P-400s to Guadalcanal. The reaction of the group was that the goddamned Army Air Corps was butting in on the Marine Corps' business.
Galloway's reaction was that the Marines, and maybe especially MAG-21 in particular, could use all the help they could get; but they weren't going to get very much from a squadron of P-400s. He knew the story of the P-400.
Technical Sergeant Charley Galloway first heard about the aircraft in 1939. Curious about it, he managed to have a little engine trouble over Buffalo, New York, which gave him a chance to sit down at the Bell plant and have a look at the plane that began life as the Bell P-39 Aircobra.
He had not been impressed. It was a weird bird, sitting on what looked to Charley like a very fragile tricycle landing gear. It had a liquid cooled Allison engine, mounted amidships, behind the pilot. The prop was driven by a shaft. The shaft was hollow, and carried a 37mm cannon barrel. There was no turbocharger, giving it, consequently, low to lousy performance at high altitudes.
All of which, in the final analysis, meant that nobody wanted the damned things.
The English wouldn't have anything to do with them. So the Aircobras that were supposed to go to them were sent to the Russians. Though Charley couldn't say for sure, it was entirely possible that the Russians, as desperate as they were for anything that would fly, didn't want them either. And so somebody had turned them over to the Army Air Corps.
Their reputation was so bad they'd even changed the name from P-39 to P-400. The only thing that surprised Charley was that the Marines hadn't wound up with them. The Marines normally got what the Army and the Navy didn't want.
It was not the sort of thing you talked to your men about, to bolster their morale, so Charley kept his mouth shut.
A familiar bald head and naked barrel chest appeared on the side of the runway, directing Charley to taxi to a sandbag revetment.
Tech Sergeant Big Steve Oblensky climbed up on the wing root before Charley stopped the engine. ' "Well, I see you all got here," he said.
"There was some doubt in your mind?"
"Only about you," Big Steve said.
"What shape are we in?"
"Great. We have to pump fuel-the fuel there is-by hand through chamois. That runway's going to be a fucking muddy..."
" 'The fuel there is'?" Charley quoted, interrupting him.
Big Steve waited until Charley hauled himself out of the cockpit before replying.
"Those converted tin cans that brung us here," he said, "carried 400 barrels of Avgas. That's not much. Some of it they already used to refuel the Catalinas that have been coming in."
"You're telling me we have less than 22,000 gallons of gas?"
"Maybe a little more. They're bringing in a little all the time, but when we start using it..." Oblensky gestured at the aircraft that had just flown in. "And I just heard that the Army is sending in a half dozen P-400s tomorrow."
"Jesus Christ," Charley said.
There was the sound of aircraft engines, a different pitch than a Dauntless or Wildcat made. Charley looked up at the sky and saw a Catalina making its approach.
We make fun of them, he thought. Aerial bus drivers. But it has to take more balls to fly that slow and ungainly sonofabitch in and out of here than it does to fly a Wildcat.
"And there's no fucking chow," Oblensky said, almost triumphantly. "We're eating captured Japanese shit."
"Well then, I guess we better hurry up and win the war," Charley said. "I wouldn't want you writing Flo that we officers are starving your fat ass."
(Two)
U.S. NAVY HOSPITAL
SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA