Ch 30 - In the Air To Where?

CHAPTER 30

IN THE AIR TO WHERE?

After we were in the air about thirty or forty minutes, the pilot or someone else in the cockpit clicked on the mike and informed us that our destination was Okinawa!

“Why in the hell are we going to Okinawa?” Someone behind me said.

At the time, there were no crewmen in the cabin, which left no one to ask. A few minutes later there was a crewman in the cabin and he was beset with questions, and a few threats sprinkled in! He announced that we knew as much as he did, that we were going to Okinawa, that we would arrive there in a few hours, he thought, and the aircraft would return to Yokohama!

“Why would they take us to Okinawa?” an older man sitting across the aisle asked.

“Damfino!” the serviceman shrugged, “this is the first time we’ve went there!”

There was nothing to do but settle back and relax, after all, the seat was kind of comfy compared to what I was used to. Why not take things as they come? Looking down, I guessed our altitude was about ten to twelve thousand feet. The ocean was below us, and to the west I could see land stretching off into the distance. I looked for ships, but only smaller boats spotted the seascape. I wondered how the Japanese were taking the American occupation? One of the men asked the crewman just how the war ended, and did Japan surrender everything at once? Did the Americans land on Japan proper?

The crewman laughed.

“Oh, the bomb did it! That’s what really finished them!”

“The bomb?” the man next to me asked. The crewman nodded.

“Yeah, the Atomic Bomb did them in! When Hiroshima got wiped out, the Japanese had it! Then, we bombed Nagasaki with another one and they threw in the towel!”

“Atomic bomb?” somebody said. The man nodded.

“Well, we invented this atomic bomb, and it was such a secret that no one knew anything about it, not even most of the Air Corps people! Well, when that B-29 dropped that bomb on Hiroshima, there was nothing left! It just destroyed the whole city! All of it!”

It seemed almost too difficult to believe! Apparently the older man across the aisle was an officer. He continued to ask the crewman questions and finally the man told him that he must go to his station, but perhaps he could come back again. He mentioned he had only known of the bomb for a few days, the details of the attack were unknown to him, but if he learned more he would pass it on.

I must have fell asleep for a long time, because the man next to me shook my arm and I awakened to see that we were getting ready to land. So this was Okinawa! It looked more like a desert than anything else. There appeared to be a large landing strip that started right near the water, and without a doubt this airplane was going to sit down on the airstrip! The pilot landed the big plane smoothly and moved the big silver bird along a taxi-way for almost a quarter of a mile. There were no hangers, only several small buildings near the end of the main runway.

We were told to sit still until the trucks arrived to pick us up. Many of the men were getting itchy, and some were up pacing back and forth along the aisle to relieve tension. Finally the trucks arrived, and we slowly descended the tall, metal steps that had been rolled up to the door. Once a truck was loaded, off it went along a narrow road that wound around the many sand hills that spotted the terrain. I found myself climbing into the second truck, which soon was bumping along the ‘road’ behind the first truck.

The journey lasted only about ten minutes. As we rounded a low plateau, several rows of large squad tents appeared. Tents? That’s what they were. Lots of tents, neatly lined up in rows, with wooden sidewalks between the rows. Wow! We were going to live in class! The man sitting next to me on the plane and I found ourselves in the same tent. The other men I did not know. Some of the faces were familiar, but I didn’t know the men personally. Since there was nothing to see outside, I stretched out on my cot to await further events. Shortly, a man in uniform entered the tent and announced the large tent situated about fifty yards farther down the walk was the eatery, and we were welcome to go there day or night and eat whatever we wished!

“Real food, not canned stuff?” one man asked. The soldier nodded. “Everything and anything! If you guys want ice cream, steak, pork chops..... anything you want!”

“Pork chops?” the same guy questioned, “you mean they got real pork chops in there?” The soldier nodded again.

“Just go and live it up you guys, nobody deserves it any more than this bunch!” with that he turned and left. Several men got to their feet and nonchalantly drifted toward the door of the tent.

I was unprepared for what I found when I entered the big tent! At the far end of the tent, a canvas partition was strung up, apparently to isolate the cooking ranges from the mess hall itself. The entire open area was filled with tables, each sized for about six men. Folding benches serviced each side of each table. Sensing this place was surely prepared for a large number of repatriated POW’s, it appeared this facility expected many hungry mouths to pass through its portals. When I moved closer to the canvas partition, I saw just this side of the canvas, a long row of steam tables paralleled the canvas partition. Men with white hats stood waiting behind the serving tables. Each of them had a big smile on his face. At each end of this row of serving tables, were tables piled high with trays, silverware and napkins. All we had to do was grab a tray, the tools, and pick a serving table to start on! I quickly found I could eat very little this time. I felt full, even before I had finished a bowl of soup! That, I declared to myself, is it! I feared that I would make myself sick, but could not resist a slug of the ice cold milk that I had drawn from a large container. I had dreamed of cold milk for a very long time!

As I arose and walked away from all of that food, I was positive I could hear my stomach slushing about! What a wonderful feeling I thought as I weaved my way back to my tent! When I reached my cot, I made myself comfortable with a happy smile. I found it still difficult to believe there were no more Japanese guards to scream their threats, no more need to suffer the pick handle beatings, the bayonets were gone, and the constant threat of death and dismemberment overshadowing each of us every day. As I lay there, I thought of Spence, of Guy Wardlaw, John Sirota, and my friend Bill McCann, all of those left at Pasay School House when I marched out with the others in July 1944. Rudy Soichtig, who attempted to teach me German, and the little navy man that taught me so much Japanese. I could never forget Awalt, Room Leader of Room #1, who never stopped smiling, And whatever happened to Capt. Starr and Sgt. Fooshee, Sergeants Jackson and Naylor, Krueger and Larson, all from Battery “H” 60th?

Somehow, I felt sad and embarrassed that I was here safe, but I didn’t know where my friends were. Were they still in the Philippines, or perhaps somewhere in Japan? Then I brightened as I thought maybe we would all be together again in Frisco! We would have the grandad of all parties when we hit the dock in Frisco, that was for sure!

Several days rolled by. This was not a pleasant place. The pressure to get home was growing in all of us. We wanted to go home and we were receiving zero information regarding plans to get us home. I returned to my tent from lunch on this particular day and noticed that my bed was rumpled. I suspected that someone had been here and I jerked the blanket down from my pillow. My old campaign hat was gone! I had been laying it next to my pillow where it would not be visible, and pulling the blanket up over it and the pillow. I thought of my diary, hidden under the mattress. It was gone! I sat down on the bed and felt sick at my stomach. These were very prized possessions to me and some low creep had taken them! I went immediately to the administration building and talked to a master sergeant sitting at a heavy desk just inside the door. I related the events to him and informed him if I caught the thief, I was going to break his skull! The sergeant was trying to calm me down while he listened to to my raving.

I explained the diary was a detailed account of my entire prison camp experiences, that it would be impossible for me to recall all of this information!

“I can’t possibly remember the names and the dates!” I told the sergeant, and I wondered if he really understood the magnitude of the loss.

He arose from his chair and crossed the room to a door, knocked and waited. The door opened and an officer walked through to face the sergeant. They talked in low tones, then both came over to me.

“Just how long were you gone from your tent?” the officer, a captain, asked me. I told him approximately a half hour to forty five minutes.

I quickly convinced the officer it a was disastrous loss, both to me, and to the military. That it contained a running account of my experiences, from May 1942 until the present. The events, together with dates and names were all documented. It was a terrible loss! The captain told me to return to my tent and he would get an investigation under way immediately.

Two days later I was summoned by the captain and was shown into his office by the same sergeant. The captain told me he had been unsuccessful in his search for any information concerning my belongings. His concern was genuine. He informed me he could not determine whether the culprit was another ex-POW, or perhaps one of the many other service men wandering about the place. He said it was not a closed area, and almost anyone could have stolen my things.

I could not imagine who would want my old campaign hat and my diary! I was so upset by my loss that I lost my appetite for eating, and fraternizing with the other men for a couple of days. I spent much of the time walking around the area.

During one of these walks I encountered two black service men that were curious about prison camps and of the way we were treated. They turned out to be truck drivers from a nearby motor pool. One of the men asked if I would care to ride along with them while they took some “tractor drivers” out to a site a few miles from the motor pool to service some heavy equipment located there. I was all for doing anything to get away from the tents, and I said I would be happy to go along.

After bumping along rough, dirt roads for ‘several’ miles the truck wended its way into some low hills. Coming around a sharp curve in the road, we came upon two big diesel cats with large shovels attached to the fronts of the big machines. One of them had pushed a huge pile of dirt and rock up against the steep side of one of the hills.

“That there is one of those Jap tombs where their soldiers hid in!” one of the black army men explained.

“They would hide in there and wait for our guys to go on past, then come out behind them and start shooting! Well our men caught on to that, and they tried to get the enemy out of the tombs. They found out it was hard to get them out, so somebody got the idea of just bringing in bulldozers from the beach and pushing dirt up against those tombs and trapping them in there! There’s a bunch of those around here!”

The men on the back of the truck had jumped off with their tools, and now began crawling over the bulldozers. Shortly, one of the machines roared in life and one of the men slowly backed it away from the hill while others stood by with carbines to guard against any Japanese emerging from the cavity inside the hill. It would have been impossible for them to burrow out with the big shovel jammed against the face of the tomb, but from some of their remarks, I guessed they no longer took any chances when dealing with buried Japs! I heard one say that experiences at Saipan had taught our military some hard lessons! While I was watching this, I heard the other big cat began to sputter and then it too roared into action. This one was not jammed against one of the tombs like the first one. Apparently it had just been left sitting there when the first machine had put the nest of Jap snipers out of action.

One of the ‘mechanics’ had a large radio strapped onto his back. He told the truck driver they would be alright, and the driver could return to the motor pool, and if the mechanics had any problems, they would radio the base for help. We climbed back into the truck and after turning around, we headed back down the bumpy road the way we came. I asked the men where the airbase was where I had landed on the flight from Yokohama and one of them pointed off to the left.

“It’s just over beyond those hills” he said, “if you want to see it, it ain’t hardly any out of the way!”

I nodded and received a big, toothy grin. A few minutes later we pulled through an opening in the low hills and stretching out before me was the airfield, reaching almost down to the beach! Looking out toward the ocean I could see a large number of navy ships of all types, some anchored in clusters, others sitting well apart, spread out across the broad vista of the Pacific Ocean.

As the driver brought the truck closer to some of the parked planes, I saw few that I recognized. Most of the aircraft were transport type planes, but some, parked a short distance from our position, bristled with guns. The truck driver told me that the strange looking, all black planes were night fighters called “Black Widows”. I had seen nothing like them before and I was curious to get closer. I let myself down from the truck and walked the hundred yards separating me from the black planes and studied the strange configuration of the aircraft. A crewman, sitting in the pilot’s position in the plane to my right, was watching me.

“Whatta you think?” he grinned down at me.

I told him I had never seen a plane of this type before and was just curious to look closer. I turned and saw the truck driver, and helper, were still in the truck.

The man in the plane told me the plane was used as a night interceptor, very heavily armed for combat with any type of enemy aircraft. I stood and talked with him for almost fifteen minutes before I thanked him and returned to the truck. I also thanked the men in the truck for giving me the informative ride today. When we reached the tent city, I thanked them again and returned to my tent. One of the ex-POW’s also in my tent told me one of our groups had been pulled out and was apparently moving on to the next place, or next step on the way home. When I decided to go eat, the mess tent was alive with rumors!

Two days later, our tent number was called and cautioned to be ready to move out! Just after breakfast, those of us next on the list to depart were loaded once again in trucks and rode the bumpy roads to the airfield for our flight to.....where? The truck entered the parking and taxi strip and pulled up to a bulky looking aircraft. The plane was painted a blotchy green and it was unlike any airplane I had ever looked upon. The fuselage was bulbous looking, with a sharply defined crease running the length of the plane. The crease seemed to divide the fuselage into an upper and a lower half. The huge, deep fuselage was flanked by two immense radial engines. This was one ugly airplane! We clambered from the truck and the men began climbing the ladder up, and into the dark interior of the plane.

“This airplane is missing two of its engines! It’s too big for just these two.” I remarked to a crewman standing by the door. He laughed.

“Naw, it’ll take us where we want to go! Been over the hump many times and got us home. Never a hiccup! Don’t worry, we’ll get there!” I asked him where? He remarked that wherever we were going, it would get us there.

I reluctantly climbed the ladder and took a seat on the right side and toward the rear. One plus was this airplane had seats! The four-engined C-54 that carried me from Yokohama to Okinawa was furnished with aluminum bench seats that ran from bulkhead to bulkhead, the full length of the fuselage. Perhaps the comfort level was increased when one was sitting on a chute pack, but we were not issued chutes, consequently, the comfort level was nonexistent. The seats in this funny looking airplane were not uncomfortable, and I settled back for the trip.

The pilot started up the right engine, and shortly the left, and the crew busied themselves preparing for takeoff. A few minutes later the plane was bumping along the taxi strip. Once in the air, I busied myself looking out of the window at the rapidly expanding view below. A wide beach stretched off into the distance to the south, and low sand hills were apparent inland from the beach dominating the landscape. The airplane climbed until it reached an altitude of twelve to fifteen thousand feet, then leveled off. I did not recognize the man sitting next to me, already fast asleep. I guessed most of the men were far behind in their sleep, and many seem to fall asleep when they found themselves inactive. I was not of that category, plus I feared that I would miss something in this marvelous new world where I found myself. I looked around and found most of the men were sleeping, and I eased out of my seat and wandered up the aisle.

A half bulkhead jutted out on the right side, and I discovered that the radio man sat just on the forward side. I nodded to him and this triggered a conversation, mostly questions from him concerning my experiences in the prison camps, and questions about my home and family. Our chat was interrupted by an incoming radio message which proved to be a lengthy one and I wandered back to my seat.

I dozed off a bit later, put to sleep by the drone of the engines. I was awakened by heavy turbulence bouncing the aircraft about. When I opened my eyes, we were surrounded by a heavy cloud cover. The water below was obscured by clouds in all directions and everyone one the aircraft was awake and talking about the rough ride. After another hour of heavy bouncing, the plane settled down considerably, and the ride smoothed out to where I could get out of my seat and stagger up to the radioman’s position. I asked him how far along we were and he said that we were near the northern tip of Luzon.

“Luzon!” I croaked, “what the hell are we doing near Luzon?”

He proceeded to tell me that our destination was Luzon, and that in another hour or two we should be in Manila! I was stunned! All of us thought we were going home, and now I find that we are farther away than when we took off on this flight. All I could say was, "Why are they taking us to the Philippines?” He shrugged.

“When we took off on Okinawa, I did not have the flight plan as yet.”

I asked him if it was ok for me to mention this tidbit to the others and again he shrugged and told me he saw no reason why I shouldn’t. I nodded and again made my way back to my seat.

One of the men sitting behind me asked what was going on and I told him that we were somewhere near northern Luzon, and we were headed for Manila. This of course, caught the attention of all within earshot! I thought at first that we were going to witness a mutiny! None could believe it. All anyone could say was, “why are they taking us to Manila?” I settled back into my seat and allowed my mind to sort through this new information. Why would they be taking us so far south instead of toward the east, and Hawaii? Somehow it did not make sense! On we flew!

I could not restrain the urge to keep looking downward, in search of the island of Luzon. A hole in the cloud layer suddenly materialized, and there below us was a white beach! And on the beach was boats of some kind. Later, I was to learn that these boats were landing craft! At least ten of the boats were visible before the plane was past the hole in the clouds. I passed the info on to the fellows across the aisle and excited chatter spread quickly through the cabin! As I sat mulling over the sighting, I was surprised to see the same hole again, only this time our altitude had decreased, and details of the boats were much more visible! We were losing altitude, and I wasn’t sure whether that was good or bad! I decided to wander up and talk to the radioman again! When I approached, he appeared rather nervous. I asked about passing the hole in the clouds twice, which led me to believe that we were circling. He shushed me, and told me to keep it down. His story was, the aircraft had been fighting a headwind for a considerable time and we were very low on fuel.

“Very low” he repeated. “Matter of fact, about eight or ten minutes low,” he said in a low voice.

“We going down?” I asked him. He nodded.

“One way or another!” he mumbled, “But the Captain has a plan. He wants to set her down just outside the breaker line, which will give us a good chance to reach the beach!”

Needless to say, this was a real shocker! Here we had made it through the past three and a half years, and now we were going to go down in this flying walrus, down into the drink! I wobbled my way back to my seat.

I sat down just as the right engine coughed and quit! The big prop was feathered! Now we had only one engine of the two, and I felt we should have had four in the first place! I got up again and headed for the radioman.

Before I could open my mouth, he said, “ We may be in luck, the co-pilot sighted a strip down there and we’re flying on fumes, so the Captain’s going to try sitting down on the strip if he can! Go strap in and tell the others to do the same!”

I passed the word as I went back to my seat, strapped myself in, and waited! The pilot brought the aircraft around and now I could see the runway! I thought to myself it was very small runway, but certainly better than no runway! We neared the strip, and just as I thought we were sitting down, the pilot gunned the engine and the big airplane staggered around and circled for another attempt!

He did set the heavy aircraft down! It continued to roll until the bulbous tires rested against piles of sand located at the end of the runway. We were told the pilot was spared the task of shutting the one engine down, because it had already quit as the plane approached the end of the strip! Needless to say that the pilot fell to his knees when he stepped down from the aircraft, and solemnly performed the “Allah” ritual at least three times!

CHAPTER 31

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