regret opening his mouth and putting both himself and others in peril.
He asked for and got permission to fly again with Ensign Tuller who openly called it a suicide mission and berated him for coming up with the idea. “Look, Commander, it’s one thing for us to attack a sub or a relatively unarmed freighter, but we’re no good at hitting ground targets and we’ll be nothing more than low, slow targets for Jap gunners.”
“Which is why the plan calls for us to fly low and slow and come in over from land, rather than water. Hopefully, they won’t expect us to come from that direction.”
“With respect, Commander, ‘hopefully,’ my ass. Low I’ll give you and slow is the only way we can fly, and coming in over land might just give us the element of surprise, but that won’t last long. Maybe ten seconds if we’re lucky. Besides, I’ll give you a dollar for every real target we hit.”
Dane could not argue with Tuller’s assessments. What was now referred to as “Dane’s idea” had taken hold and would be implemented regardless. As Spruance had explained to him as he was departing, “It’s vitally important for us to hit back at the Japs, or at least be perceived as hitting back. The American public is demanding that we do something, anything, to strike back at our enemies. Even though Alaska isn’t a state, it’s damn close to us and we just can’t let them get away with invading us and not do anything.”
When Dane had been on the verge of saying something, the admiral had put his hand on Dane’s shoulder. “Doolittle’s raid was a mission with little chance of success and it managed to rile the Japanese government into doing something foolish. With just a little bit of luck, the Japs would have suffered the disaster at Midway and not us.”
“Even if we do nothing other than dig holes in the ground with bombs and lose a lot of planes?” Dane asked.
“No. It won’t be like flying over Japan and then having to bail out over China like Doolittle’s boys did,” Spruance said. “You’ll have a much greater chance of survival.”
Dane shuddered. While many of Doolittle’s pilots had escaped, some had been shot down and captured. Rumors had it that they either would be executed or had already been killed.
Spruance continued. “The Catalinas will come in, hit, and fly back out just as fast as they can. There is no indication that the Japs have any planes on the ground or much in the way of antiaircraft guns, and we’re certain there are no carriers out there.”
Dane wondered how the admiral could be so certain, but again kept his mouth shut. He was getting good at that. He did wonder if the navy had some superior source of intelligence regarding the Japanese he wasn’t being told about.
The next day, they flew the PBYs from Puget Sound to Juneau, which was still an incredible eight hundred miles from Anchorage. “Jesus,” said an incredulous Tuller. “Don’t they make anything close to anything else up here?”
They and the rest of the PBY’s crew were in a bar in Juneau having a meal. To a man they resisted the urge to call it their last supper. Since they would be flying over land, the actual flying distance would be much longer than crow-fly miles, more than a thousand miles altogether. Days were getting shorter, so they would have to leave before dawn to arrive over the target before nightfall. Their cruising speed was a lowly one hundred and twenty-five miles per hour, which meant at least an eight-hour trip each way.
Tuller accepted the inevitable. “Commander, don’t forget to bring a change of socks and underwear, and some nice warm pajamas would also be a good idea.”
“Tuller, go screw yourself,” Dane said and then ordered another round of beers for “his” crew.
The next morning they took off before dawn as planned and formed to four groups of three each. They did not keep radio silence; instead, only mimicked casual conversations between bush pilots to maintain order and help keep in visual contact.
Alaskans on the ground had set up radio beacons, and the Ugly Duckling Flight, as they now called themselves, duly turned west after several hours and headed to Anchorage. As they got closer, a female voice identified only as Ruby Red chatted inanely about food and fuel shortages, and the flight followed her signal. At a certain point they dropped down to less than five hundred feet.
“There we are,” yelled Tuller. “Finally.”
The small town of Anchorage was coming up fast. Rows of tents were visible in a field alongside the road leading to Fort Richardson. Tuller laughed. “God, we can’t miss a field full of tents, can we?”
The Japanese were not asleep. Spotters on high ground had seen the planes, but only at the last minute. As PBYs dropped their loads, machine-gun and rifle fire blazed up at them.
“We’re hit,” yelled one of the machine gunners who was busy returning fire. To Dane’s horror, holes had appeared in the plane’s hull.
“One down,” yelled Tuller. One of the PBYs had been mortally wounded and had just crashed in flames. Another was burning but still staying aloft.
“We’re done,” Tuller yelled and turned his plane due south.
More Japanese machine guns opened up and more planes were struck. Dane saw that one of the Catalinas was attempting to land in the water off Anchorage. Not a good idea, Dane thought. What the Japanese would do to the survivors wasn’t pleasant to contemplate. They should have tried for land farther south, but maybe they didn’t have a choice. Tuller was screaming into his radio, but Dane couldn’t hear it. One of the bow gunners nudged him and Dane looked back to where the bombs had dropped. Yes, they had managed to hit the field. A total of forty- eight five-hundred-pound bombs had been dropped on the tent city, but, he wondered, had anybody been in the tents?
He also wondered how many Americans had perished in this exercise, and the thought that it had been his idea made him slightly ill. How the hell do people like Spruance or Nimitz get away with sending people to their deaths and not cracking up over it? If that was one of the privileges of rank, he thought, the brass could keep it.
The little town of Grover, California, was about halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. It consisted of a couple hundred frame houses, some stores, and a few churches. It also had thirty-five-year-old and unemployed Fred Hanson, who was waking up on the beach after a long evening of drinking with some friends at the hotel where he once worked. Sleeping on the beach had been a little chilly but much better than going home and confronting his wife.
Maria was half Mexican and had a temper that was half volcano. When Fred had a little too much to drink, she was not rational, in Fred’s highly biased opinion. Thus, he’d made the decision to sack out on the sand. If he had been a truthful man, Fred would have admitted that he wouldn’t have been able to walk to his house in the first place. Being unemployed, he had a lot of time on his hands. Even he had to admit that he was jobless by choice. Sometimes he thought about going to nearby San Diego or even Los Angeles and getting a job in one of the burgeoning war industries, but that never quite appealed to his minimal sense of ambition. So far, too, he’d been declared too old to be drafted, but he knew that could change at any time. What the hell, he thought, he’d face that problem when it came along, which was pretty much the way he ran his life.
The Town of Grover was its official full and pretentious name. It had advertised itself as an affordable tourist location before the war, but there were damn few tourists nowadays.
Fred rubbed his eyes and splashed water on his face. He was careful not to swallow. The salt water would have upset his stomach even more than it was, and the last thing he wanted right now was a case of the heaves. Damn, Maria was going to be pissed. He couldn’t put it off, though. It was Sunday morning and maybe the good, devout Catholic woman would be at church when he sneaked home.
Speaking of piss, he stood, smiled, and relieved himself hugely into the ocean, sending a multibeer stream arching well into the sea, hoping as always that he hadn’t killed any of the little fish that swam around in the shallows. He blinked and noticed a pair of warships a mile or so offshore. They looked different. He wasn’t an expert, but they looked, well, foreign. He’d seen a number of American ships cruising by, but there was something not right about these two. What the hell, he thought as he carefully zipped up his fly. Maybe the navy got some new style ships and why not? The old ones hadn’t done them all that much good so far. Every time they went out, it seemed that they got themselves sunk.
Lights flickered on the ships, and, seconds later, something shrieked through the sky and impacted in the town, sending debris and dirt high into the air. The explosions were shocking and ear-shattering and threw him to
