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Show Ernie Pyle With the Navy: Pilots Coached Before Attacks on Tokyo Area Japs Jabber at Sight of Yanks; Rescue Airman Off Enemy Shore By Ernie Pyle IN THE WESTERN PACIFIC We were up an hour and a half before daylight, for our planes had to be in the air at the first hint of dawn. The first patrol was always launched by catapult, because be-cause in the wind-swept semi-darkness, it was too dangerous danger-ous for them to make the run down the rolling deck. After seeing the flights launched the first few days, it became old stuff, and 1 would have stayed in " ' r bed and ignored W K-MB$X! it, but that was TfK::iSS:iffMj0k impossible. The ' - J catapult's huge n "KS , ' y launching machin- :Mi:mMSM'M ery was directly ' , above my cabin, f' ! and every time it ' ,' shot a plane off it :;:sf 4l iff'i-tA was just as though iii:i-5siiK!5i'! the Washington Ernie Pyle monument had fallen on the ship. Rip Van Winkle himself couldn't have slept through it. So I just got up. .The fighter pilots were given their last briefing. In the "ready room" the squadron commander and intelligence intel-ligence officer showed them on maps and by drawings on the blackboard, black-board, just where they would strike. The squadron commander asked how many of the pilots had no wrist watches. Six held up their hands. The funny part was that the ship had no extra wrist watches, so I don't know why he asked the question ques-tion in the first place. Then he told what our approximate approxi-mate total of planes over Japan would be, and how many it was , probable the Japs would put up against us. And then he said: "So you see, each one of us will only have to take care of three Jap planes!" The pilots all laughed and looked at each other sheepishly. (Days later, when the final scores were in, we found our force had destroyed Japs at nine-to-one.) And at the end of his briefing, the squadron commander gave strict orders for the pilots not to shoot at Japs coming down in parachutes. "They're supposed to do it to us," he said, "but it isn't the thing for us to do." The bomber pilots and their enlisted en-listed gunners and radiomen were briefed the same way. After the intelligence in-telligence officer had finished, the squadron commander said: "We're going to dive low on the target before releasing our bombs. Since we're risking our necks anyhow, any-how, there's no point in going at all unless we can do some damage, so go down low." All through the various strikes on Japa?, our teok force kept enough planes back to fly a constant blanket it protection in the sky above us. I remember the funny sign chalked in the blackboard of the "ready loom" first day, urging our patrol liilots to extra vigilance for Jap planes that might sneak out from the mainland to attack us. The tign said: "Keep alert remember your poor icared pals on the ship!" Ifoe Surprised By Strike We didn't know whether our first I-lanes over the mainland would surprise sur-prise the Japs or not. It didn't seem possible, yet there were no indications indica-tions that they knew. For two days on our approach we had been knocking off Jap reconnaissance recon-naissance planes and picket boats. We hoped we had got these scattered scat-tered planes and boats before they had time to radio back home the news of our presence. One of our destroyers de-stroyers had even sat all day on top of a Jap submarine to keep him from coming to the top and sending a warning. But still we didn't know for sure, so there was tenseness that first morning. We knew almost exactly exact-ly what time our first planes would be over the Tokyo area. We went to the radio room to listen. lis-ten. The usual Japanese programs were on the air. We watched the clock. Suddenly at just the right time the Jap stations all went ofT the air. There was silence for a few minutes. min-utes. And then the most Donald Duck-like screaming and jabbering jabber-ing you ever heard. The announcer was so excited you had to laugh. We knew our boys were there. After that, for us on the ship, it was just a matter of waiting, and . hoping. And as the blackboard sign said, of being poor seared pals. Finally all but six of our planes were back from their strike on Tokyo and safely landed. The six formed a separate flight, and we couldn't believe that aE of them had been lost, and for that reason our officers didn't feel too concerned. And then came a radio message from the flight leader. It said that one of the six was down in the ocean, and that the other five were hanging around to try to direct some surface vessel to his rescue. That's all we knew for hours. When we finally got the story, this was it: Ens. Robert Buchanan of Clemen-ton, Clemen-ton, N. J., was hit by flak as they were diving on their target some 20 miles west . of Tokyo. Buchanan himself was not hurt. He kept his plane up till he got over water, but it was still very much Japanese water. In fact, it was in Tokyo's outer bay the bigger big-ger one of the two bays you see on the map leading in to Tokyo. Ensign Buchanan is an ace, with five Jap planes to his credit. He ditched his plane successfully, and got out in his rubber boat. He was only eight miles from shore, and five rmles from the big island that stands at the bay entrance. Then the flight leader took charge. He is Lieut. John Fecke of Dux-berry, Dux-berry, Mass. He is also an ace, and an old hand at the game. He has downed seven Jap planes. Fecke took the remaining four of the flight, and started out looking for an American rescue ship. They found one about 30 miles off the bay entrance. They talked to him on the radio, told him the circumstances, and he sent back word he was willing to try. But he asked them to stick with him and give air support. So Lieutenant Fecke ordered the o'ther four to stay and circle above the ship, while he went back to pick up Buchanan's location and guard him. But when he got there, he couldn't find Buchanan. He flew for 25 minutes min-utes around Tokyo bay and was about to despair, when he began getting sun flashes in his eyes. He flew over about three miles and there was Buchanan. He had used his signal mirror, just like i says in the book. Snatched From Lion's Mouth In the meantime, the ship's progress prog-ress was slow. It took almost two hours to get there. And one by one the aerial escort began getting get-ting trouble, and one by one Fecke ordered them home to our ship, which was getting farther away all the time. Lt. Irl Sonner of Petaluma, Calif., lost the use of his radio, and had to leave. Lt. Max Barnes of Olympia, Wash., got dangerously low on gas, and Fecke sent him home. Gas shortage also sent back Lt. Bob Murray Mur-ray of Muncie, Ind. That left only Lieutenant Fecke circling above the man in the boat, and Lt. Arnold Berner of Spring-dale, Spring-dale, Ark., flying lone aerial escoit for the rescue ship. Finally the ship was past he bay, entrance. The skipper began to have his doubts. He had to go within three miles of the gun-dotted island. He was within five minutes flying distance of land, and Jap planes could butcher him. Furthermore he looked at his chart, and saw that he was in "restricted "re-stricted waters," meaning they were probably mined. It was certainly no place for a ship to be. The skipper radioed Fecke and said he couldn't go any farther. Fecke radioed back and said, "It's only two miles more. Please try." The skipper answered and said, "Okay, w'e'll try." And they pulled it off. They went right into the lion's mouth, pulled out our pilot, and got safely away. Then, and then only, did Fecke and Berner start home. They came back to us three hours after all the rest had returned. They had flown six hours on a three-hour mission. But they helped save an American life by doing so. |