Luzon Pilot

A crew chief fired his pistol three times, pointing upward toward the northwest, over the green Zambales Mountains. “Good God almighty!” he yelled. “Japs!” Jim stared and saw diamonds arrayed on blue velvet! Perfect, pure arrow shapes: three Vs—each comprising nine brilliant gems—that combined to form one vast sparkling V moving inexorably across the blue tropical sky. Incredibly, a similar V of Vs followed: a second formation of twenty-seven bombers, a mirror of inhuman precision guided by human hands. Sergeant Kaelin had started Jim’s engine, and as Jim vaulted into the seat, he heard the satisfying roar of the other P-40Bs around him in the dispersal area. The red flag ran up the Operations flagpole, the signal for takeoff. Jim waited for Moore to begin his takeoff roll, with Randy Keator and Ed Gilmore following close on his tail. Then Jim fell in line, with Dan Blass and Max Louk behind him. The P 40B’s in-line Allison engine, in its high-angled “shark-nose” seven-foot-long cowling, blocked each pilot’s vision so that he had to zigzag in “S-turns” to see ahead; each one’s passage thickened the dust. Jim was almost blinded. Cutting through the cacophony of the engines, he heard the hoarse grunting of the klaxon, the fire alarm/air raid warning. Too late, too late, too goddam late! What the hell happened to our magical early warning from Iba? It was impossible to see through the cloud of Gilmore’s prop wash to be sure he had taken off, but Jim did not dare wait to see him airborne. Blam! The ground beneath his wheels jerked as if an earthquake had jolted the field. The bastards are trying to blow my ass off! He flashed a prayer—Don’t let me run into Ed, please, God—and gunned his engine for a scorching takeoff roll. Climbing, he retracted his wheels as he made a wide left swing, according to routine squadron procedure, and in the clear air he could see Joe Moore, Keator, and Gilmore ahead and above, just as always. But this time, they were all “hanging by their noses,” straining to gain altitude to reach the Japanese bombers that were now probably flying at about eighteen thousand feet. That’s why they looked so small at first—they’re so damned high! Stunned by the sudden attack, Jim had acted reflexively, and now he followed Joe and the other two as mindlessly as a migrating bird follows its leader. To take any action on his own initiative seemed beyond his ability, as if he were frozen in a dream. He kept the throttle pushed to the firewall, climbing at full power, feeling even more dazed above ten thousand feet, like he was clawing the thinning air. All pilots tried to hoard their limited supply of oxygen, but he thought, What the hell, this might be my last chance to breathe, as he snapped on his oxygen mask. It worked, but would it give him the wits to know what to do against this monstrous armada? He could see bombs falling on either side of him, black and viciously efficient. Below him Clark Field was exploding in red fireballs. He kept searching the sky for the thirteen P 40s that should be following him, but the only visible aircraft were the ominous twin-engine bombers—twenty-seven of them—and those three very small P 40s that he was trying to follow in their climb. Moore was above the bombers now, leveling off at about twenty-two thousand feet, and ahead of them, still flying west toward the South China Sea. The invaders were keeping their precise formation as they turned left over Mount Arayat, their work done. Tantalizingly high above Jim, maddeningly unperturbed, the invading bombers were identifiable now. They were the same kind of Mitsubishi bombers that had been pounding China since 1937—code-named Nell in the inadequate American aircraft identification sketches. The bombing pattern was as precise as the formation, its swath of destruction clearly visible from the air. The first wave of bombs, Jim now saw, had begun their bursts on the line of officers’ quarters at the northwest corner of the field, and next—oh, God—marched across the revetments of the 20th Pursuit just vacated by Jim and the other pilots. The bombs then destroyed the headquarters building and concluded by sieving the black-and-yellow checkerboard roofs of the hangars. All over Clark Field, small red-orange buds were opening up like hell-flowers, while over his head, that implacable, unreachable metal curtain moved across the sun: a blue-and-silver screen, neatly dotted with red roundels representing rising suns. Good God—there are more of them coming! Jim’s intense feelings of weakness, just-dive-into-the-ground-and-end-this-nightmare helplessness, threatened to overcome him as he watched an identical formation of bombers following the same course as the first, with equal precision, doubling the destruction. There were another twenty-seven planes in their perfect V of Vs, still flying at about eighteen thousand feet. These were also twin-engine planes, but slightly different. Jim identified them as Mitsubishi G4M1 Betty bombers, new this year. Like the Nells, each one would carry twelve 132-pound bombs—and they were dropping every one of them on Clark Field. By the time they completed their unhurried clinical cauterization, a fat pillar of black-and-red greasy smoke was climbing thousands of feet into the sky, obscuring their departure before any of the U.S. planes could fire a shot in defense of their territory.