One plane appeared, then another and another. One by one, they landed, all critically low on fuel, one with a dead engine. Super Man wasn’t in sight.
Out in the fog, Phil must have looked at his fuel gauge and known that he was in real trouble. With his bomb bay open and wind howling through the fuselage, he had dragged away most of his fuel and was running on empty. He didn’t know if he’d be able to find Midway, and he didn’t have enough fuel to make a second pass. At last, at around eight A.M., he saw Midway dimly through the mist. A moment later, one of Super Man‘s engines sputtered and died.
Phil knew that the other engines would quit almost immediately. He nursed the plane along, spotting the runway and aiming for it. The engines kept turning. Phil dropped Super Man and touched down. Just after the plane turned off the runway, a second engine died. As it reached its bunker, the other two engines quit. Had the route been only slightly longer, Super Man would have hit the ocean.
General Ramey ran to each bomber, calling out congratulations. The tired Super Man crewmen dropped out of the plane and into a mob of marines, who’d spent a year waiting to deliver retribution to the Japanese for what they’d done to their brothers at Wake. The marines passed out shots of liquor and feted the airmen.
The mission had been a smashing success. Every plane had returned safely. Only one bomb had missed its target, plopping into the water twenty feet offshore. The Japanese base had been gravely damaged—by one estimate, half of its personnel had been killed—and America had demonstrated the reach and power of its B-24s. And though the men didn’t know it, the American captives had all survived.
Phil’s crew spent the day sitting in the rain, watching several albatrosses make comically inept attempts at landing on the flooded runway. Early the next morning, Super Man carried them back to Kahuku. Louie spent New Year’s Eve at a party with Moznette and his bombardier, James Carringer, Jr., and didn’t drag himself back to the pornographic palace until four-thirty. He pulled himself together a few hours later, when Admiral Chester Nimitz presented the Wake pilots with Distinguished Flying Crosses and their crewmen with Air Medals.
News of the raid broke, and the men were lauded as heroes. The press played up their Christmas gift to the Allies. STEEL FILLS JAP SOX, read one headline. In Tokyo, radio broadcasters had a different take. They reported that the Americans, upon encountering Japanese defenses, had “fled in terror.” In the Honolulu Advertiser, Louie found a cartoon depicting his role in bombing Wake. He clipped it out and tucked it in his wallet.
With the dawn of 1943 and the success at Wake, the men felt cocky. It had all been so easy. One admiral predicted that Japan might be finished within the year, and Phil overheard men talking about going home.
“Methinks,” he wrote to his mother, “it’s a little premature.”
Eight “Only the Laundry Knew How Scared I Was”
IT WAS EARLY MORNING ON JANUARY 8, 1943. THE SUN HADN’T yet risen. George Moznette and James Carringer, who had spent New Year’s Eve with Louie, joined their crew at the beachside airstrip at Barking Sands on Kauai, preparing to lead a three-plane training run over Pearl Harbor. The pilot was Major Jonathan Coxwell, one of Phil’s closest friends.
As he taxied out for his flight, Coxwell tried to reach the control tower, but the tower’s radio was down. He powered his plane down the runway, lifted off, and flew over the beach and into the darkness. The two other planes took off after Coxwell. Later that morning, they returned. Coxwell’s plane did not. No one had seen it since takeoff.
During a briefing at eight, Louie was told that Coxwell’s plane was missing. Phil’s crew was slated for practice bombing off Barking Sands that morning, so they went early and walked the beach, looking for some sign of their friends. Someone found a $400 paycheck that had washed ashore. It was made out to Moznette.
The Super Man crew was fifteen thousand feet up when the lost B-24 was found, lying on the ocean floor not far offshore. All ten crewmen were dead.
Coxwell had barely made it past takeoff. He had cleared the runway, turned, and slammed into the water. Several crewmen had survived the crash and tried to swim to land, but sharks had found them. The men were, Louie wrote in his diary, “literally ripped to pieces.” Five, including Moznette, had lived in the pornographic palace with Louie and Phil. Carringer had just been promoted to first lieutenant, but had died before anyone could tell him. They were buried in the cemetery in Honolulu, joining the men killed at Pearl Harbor.
The B-24 Stevenovich II just after being struck by flak. The plane spun several times, then exploded. The radar operator, First Lieutenant Edward Walsh, Jr., was thrown from the plane and managed to open his parachute. He survived. The other crewmen were presumed dead.
Louie was shaken. He’d been in Hawaii for only two months, yet already several dozen men from his bomb group, including more than a quarter of the men in his barracks, had been killed.
The first loss had come on the flight from San Francisco, when a B-24 had simply vanished. This fate was sadly common; between 1943 and 1945, four hundred AAF crews were lost en route to their theaters. Next, a plane had caught fire and crashed at Kahuku, killing four men. Another plane had hit a mountain. A bomber had been forced down after losing all four engines, killing two. In one bomber, a green engineer transferring fuel across the wings had caused gasoline to pool on the floor of the bomb bay. When the bomb bay doors had scraped open, igniting a spark, the plane had exploded. Three men had survived, including a passenger whose hand had happened to be resting on a parachute when the blast flung him from the plane. After the Wake raid, a plane sent to photograph the damage had been hit by antiaircraft fire. The crew had sent out a last message—“Can’t make it”—and was never heard from again. Then had come Coxwell’s crash.
These losses, only one due to enemy action, were hardly anomalous. In World War II, 35,933 AAF planes were lost in combat and accidents. The surprise of the attrition rate is that only a fraction of the ill-fated planes were lost in combat. In 1943 in the Pacific Ocean Areas theater in which Phil’s crew served, for every plane lost in combat, some six planes were lost in accidents. Over time, combat took a greater toll, but combat losses never overtook noncombat losses.
As planes went, so went men. In the air corps, 35,946 personnel died in nonbattle situations, the vast majority of them in accidental crashes.* Even in combat, airmen appear to have been more likely to die from accidents than combat itself. A report issued by the AAF surgeon general suggests that in the Fifteenth Air Force, between November 1, 1943, and May 25, 1945, 70 percent of men listed as killed in action died in operational aircraft accidents, not as a result of enemy action.
In many cases, the problem was the planes. In part because they were new technology, and in part because they were used so heavily, planes were prone to breakdowns. In January 1943 alone, Louie recorded in his diary ten serious mechanical problems in Super Man and other planes in which he flew, including two in-flight engine failures, a gas leak, oil-pressure problems, and landing gear that locked—fortunately, in the down position. Once, Super Man’s brakes failed on landing. By the time Phil got the plane stopped, the bomber was three feet short of the runway’s end. Just beyond it lay the ocean.
Flak.
The weather also took a toll. Storms reduced visibility to zero, a major problem for pilots searching for tiny islands or threading through the mountains that flanked