"Yes, Sir."
"Not feasible! Whose decision was that?" MacArthur asked.
But he did not expect a reply; he was already picking up the telephone:
"Get me General McKinney," he ordered. A moment later, imperiously, he said, "Then send the senior officer present in here right away."
An Army Air Corps colonel appeared a minute or so later, marched to MacArthur's desk, and saluted.
"Colonel," MacArthur said, "this officer is Lieutenant Hon.
He will brief you on the details of a clandestine operation which is about to take place. In my judgment, a diversionary attack on Japanese fighter bases in the Rabaul/Buka area is essential to the success of this operation. If there is some reason General McKinney feels this is not feasible, please ask him to be good enough to explain this to me personally."
"Yes, Sir," the Air Corps Colonel said.
"That will be all," MacArthur said. "Lieutenant Hon will be with you in a minute."
"Yes, Sir," the Air Force Colonel said, saluted again, did an about-face, and marched out of the room.
"Would you be free, Pluto, for a little bridge tonight? Say, half past seven?"
"Yes, Sir. Of course, Sir."
"Sometime between now and then, get this off, will you?" He handed Hon a folded sheet of paper.
"Yes, Sir," Hon said, saluted, and marched out of the office.
The Air Corps Colonel was waiting for him.
"If you're free, Lieutenant, I think it would be best to discuss this in my office." Pluto looked at the sheet of paper MacArthur had handed him.
"Colonel, if you'll give me the room number, I'll be there in fifteen minutes. I have to go to the dungeon and get off a Personal for the Supreme Commander."
"Of course. I'm in 515."
"Thank you, Sir," Hon said.
Chapter Sixteen
[One]
HMAS PELICAN
OFF BUKA, SOLOMON ISLANDS
0405 HOURS 6 OCTOBER 1942
From the very moment Sergeant George Hart stepped off the train in the middle of the night at Port Royal, S.C., and boarded the truck for transportation to The U.S. Marine Corps Recruit Depot at Parris Island; from the moment, in other words, that he realized he was really in The Marine Corps and would almost certainly go into battle, he had given a good deal of thought to his first time in harm's way.
In the image of himself he conjured up most often, he was pictured in utilities, with USMC and the Marine emblem stenciled on his chest. Neatly buckled under his chin, he wore a steel helmet covered with netting that bore a camouflage of twigs and leaves. He was laden down with field gear and armed with a rifle-possibly even the new one, the semiautomatic Garand-and bandoliers of ammunition and hand grenades.
He heard the roar of artillery and the rattle of machine guns.
And he was led by a captain who looked like Tyrone Power and by a sergeant who looked like Ward Bond (both men had made a lot of money playing Marines in the movies). One or the other of them shouted, "Let's go, Marines! Let's go kill the dirty Japs! Semper Fidelis! " And then he blew a whistle as he jumped up and charged toward the enemy, firing a Thompson submachine gun from the hip.
In the event, that wasn't exactly what Sergeant George Hart got.
What he got was a very young-looking lieutenant who didn't look anything like Tyrone Power or Ward Bond. He was wearing swimming trunks, had black grease smeared all over him, and his call to battle was, "With just a little bit of luck, we can make it onto shore without the Japanese seeing us. I will personally castrate anybody who loads, much less shoots, his weapon unless we're fired on." Sergeant Hart took some reassurance from his conviction that Lieutenant K. R. McCoy knew what he was doing. After all, he'd been on the Marine Raider raid on Makin island.
They hadn't been ashore on Makin more than two minutes, he'd told everybody on this expedition more than once, when some asshole accidentally fired his rifle, telling the Japanese they had visitors.
As far as Hart was concerned, Lieutenant McCoy's castration threat was not total hyperbole, either. McCoy was skilled with knives. He'd earned the "Killer McCoy" nickname, for instance, by killing people with one-several people. And at this moment Lieutenant McCoy had a non-issue, nasty-looking dagger affair adhesive-taped to his upper leg. There was no way of knowing it for sure, but Hart had a strong suspicion that it was the knife he'd used on the Chinese and Italians he'd killed when he was a corporal in China.
Sergeant Hart himself had a non-issue knifelike device adhesive-taped to his upper right leg. This had started life as a dull-edged bayonet for the U.S. Carbine, Caliber.30 Ml, and had been converted to a kind of dagger by putting a sharp edge on both sides of the blade and then blueing the blade so it wouldn't reflect light.
Sergeant Hart was not only armed with a modified bayonet from a U.S. Carbine, but he carried the Carbine itself, as well.
Compared to the.30-06 cartridge used by the Springfield and Garand rifles and the light Browning machine gun, the.30 caliber Carbine cartridge looked puny-more like a long pistol cartridge than a real rifle cartridge.
During a briefing to the members of the landing team on board the submarine, McCoy did not challenge this notion: "Think of the carbine as a pistol with a stock, not a rifle," Lieutenant McCoy had advised them. "If you make sure of your target before you fire, it will put him down.
During the briefing, all the members of the landing team showed an intense interest in the Carbine. For everybody was to be armed with one-with the exception of Chief Signalman Wallace and Lieutenant McCoy, who were armed with Australian Sten 9mm submachine guns.
"There are two reasons we're not taking anything heavier," McCoy had explained. "For one thing, a Garand would be harder to handle in the rubber boats. For another, we are not invading Buka, we're sneaking ashore. And with a little bit of luck, we won't even see a Japanese soldier." There had been some grumbling about this at Townsville and on the Pelican, particularly from Staff Sergeant Tom Kelly, who was an expert with the Thompson submachine gun, and from Sergeant Al Doud, who wanted to bring a light Browning machine gun. But the grumbling had quickly dissipated. Not only was McCoy a veteran of the Makin Island raid, but he was just not the sort of officer you fucked with.
They were taking very little field equipment with them, just packs stuffed with field rations, clothing, and some first-aid equipment. And they would paddle in, McCoy had informed them, because outboard motors were unreliable and made too much noise.
In the boats, they would wear swimming trunks; paddling the rafts was easier that way; and it was hard to swim in water-soaked utilities.
The plan was now a little different from the one McCoy and Banning had first put together. Now Lieutenant McCoy, Staff Sergeant Kelly, and Corporal Harry Godfrey would go in on one raft, while Chief Signalman Wallace and Sergeants Al Doud and George Hart would be in the other.
"Yes, the boats will be unbalanced," McCoy said, in answer to a question from Staff Sergeant Kelly, "but they will also be 150 or 180 pounds lighter than if we had four people in each one. We need that weight for the radios."
When his briefing was over, McCoy required each member of the team to recite not only his own role in the landing operation, but that of each of the others. If anyone didn't know exactly what he was supposed to do, Hart thought, he really had to be stupid:
On landing, McCoy would immediately radio the Pelican that they had made it through the surf. After that, he and Wallace would remove the weapons from their waterproof packs, and then select from their equipment those items to be carried inland. Meanwhile, Sergeant Doud and Corporal Godfrey would deflate the rafts, and Sergeant Hart would begin to test the sand. Staff Sergeant Kelly would accompany him to provide what assistance was required.
Without changing out of their bathing suits, Sergeant Hart and Staff Sergeant Kelly would run a test every ten yards or so along the beach. While they were doing this, the others would dress; then the boats would be deflated, the weapons distributed, and the rafts, the radios, and the supplies they weren't taking to Ferdinand Six would be moved to some spot off the beach where they could be concealed.
After departure of the party going to Ferdinand Six, the party that was staying behind-that is to say, Sergeant Hart and Corporal Godfrey-would complete the concealment of the radios and supplies, put on their uniforms, and wait for the others to return. Presuming they didn't encounter Japanese en route and that Chief Signalman Wallace could really find Ferdinand Six (it was some ten or twenty or thirty miles away in the mountainous jungle), the journey would take from thirty-six to seventy-two hours.
Assuming it did not encounter a 30-knot Japanese destroyer and/or a Japanese patrol aircraft, HMAS Pelican would surface each morning at the same time to see how things were going on the beach. If the people from Ferdinand Six had not returned within seventy hours, it would be presumed they were not coming and Sergeant Hart and Corporal Godfrey would be free to make an attempt to paddle back through the surf to the Pelican for evacuation.
Even if the tests suggested the sand on the beach could take the weight, Sergeant Hart privately concluded, there would be no point in sending in the airplane if the people from Ferdinand Six weren't there to meet it. And they certainly wouldn't take the risk just to pick up a sergeant and a corporal. The Marine Corps had more important uses for an airplane like that. Semper Fi!
Sergeant Hart heard electrical pumps. Then he thought he sensed movement, but he wasn't sure. A moment later he decided he was wrong. There was no movement, he was just nervous-read scared shitless.