Read an Excerpt
Overrun
The Battle for Firebase 14
By Jeffrey H. Ahlin AuthorHouse
Copyright © 2016 Jeffrey H. Ahlin
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5246-1767-7
CHAPTER 1
Disquieting and Foreboding, June 1969
Every muscle in my body was screaming, Get off this plane! After only a few hours of flight, the long metal bench that spanned each side of the huge aircraft had already taken its toll on my weary bones. There was row after row of seating for soldiers in the middle of the airplane, yet there wasn't one empty seat. It wasn't so much the hard, cold surface or the continuous vibration of the giant C-10 military aircraft as it gnawed its way through the atmosphere at thirty thousand feet. Nor was it the unrelenting whine of the four enormous jet engines that prevented all but rudimentary conversation. The seat that held me tightly and firmly felt like a trap. Looking over my shoulder and out the window, I could see nothing but blue. The sky appeared to touch the Pacific Ocean; it seemed to be one continuous, unending entity.
We had to be about halfway between Hawaii and the Philippines; it had been several hours since the departure from Hickam Field in Hawaii. The interior of the plane was cold, dark, and cavernous. The other three hundred or so men packed on this flight must have been fighting similar circumstances; my whole body felt numb. The engine noise and vibrations made hearing and participating in normal conversation all but impossible. Our immediate destination was Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines. My best guess was that most of these men were headed into a war zone in South Vietnam. Their facial expressions made it evident that many of them were not having an easy time on this flight; fear, numbing pain, despair, air sickness, and homesickness were all close to the surface for these men.
As one of the oldest men on the flight, twenty-six that month, I had orders to report to the commanding officer, dental department, the USS Kitty Hawk, CVA-63, no later than June 24, 1969. The orders contained not even the slightest hint of the nightmare and terror that would slowly evolve.
The orders were not very specific for the location of the ship, perhaps because of the need for secrecy. All I knew was that the orders meant western Pacific because of the Westpac designation.
While I was watching the face of an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old man on the opposite side of the aircraft, it occurred to me that it was not only physical discomfort he was feeling, but bone-numbing acquiescence. The face that stared back through the din had dark skin stretched tightly over a firm, handsome skeletal frame. The dark shining eyes said it all. They were cold, penetrating, and full of resentment. There was no hint of fear, pain, or even despair. It was abject resignation.
The casualty rates in Vietnam had been increasing monthly; how many of these men worried about getting home in one piece? The cold, boxed, somewhat stale bologna sandwich that served as lunch did nothing for our disposition. If anything, it furthered everyone's belief that upcoming circumstances were going to be completely beyond our control. Sheer exhaustion finally took over, and I succumbed to sleep. My thoughts drifted back to time with family and friends during my childhood. As I dozed off, dreams of early family life seemed pleasant. I remembered that my father was also about my age when he was in the US Army Air Force flying sorties over Germany, first in the Eighth Air Force based in England, then in the Fifteenth Air Force based in the Mediterranean. Dad's missions frequently took him over the mountains of northern Italy. I fell into a deep slumber, remembering my childhood.
* * *
My earliest memories were quite humbling. The product of a woman with one semester of secretarial training and a father who was a high school dropout, I had very modest beginnings. My parents and I had always lived with relatives until around age six. You might say our family was dirt poor, even though it never felt that way growing up. After my brother Jonathan was born in 1946, my grandfather thought the family should move out from living with relatives and someday have our own home.
My granddad was quiet and reserved; he owned a small business selling specialty food items. The House of Herbs in Connecticut was one of his typical accounts. He worked hard growing his small enterprise and lived alone in a small one-bedroom apartment on the third floor of a walk-up in Medford, Massachusetts. His wife had passed away from cancer the previous year. Our family's one source of joy and pride was a farm my grandfather had inherited along with a small antique family home in the town of Sudbury, Massachusetts. This sixty-acre farm in Sudbury was taken by eminent domain in the early 1950s so the town could build a new high school. Granddad got so little money for the farm that most of the family complained. But he was philosophical and claimed, "Our ancestors probably took this land from the Indians for nothing."
After World War II, in 1949, Granddad said to his daughter, "It's time you folks had your own home." He then loaned my parents the $500 down payment on a very modest $4,900 house in Reading, Massachusetts. In addition, on several occasions, he had to make the $39 monthly mortgage payment.
My father, Phil, although not a high school graduate, had good practical skills. He had left school in 1932 at age sixteen in order to work and financially help support his family during the Depression. He worked at an entry-level position for Liberty Mutual Insurance Company in Boston and volunteered for duty in the US Army Air Force when America was thrust into World War II on December 7, 1941.
By 1942 rationing was in high gear in the United States. At first it was all rubber and petroleum products; then the ration list included coffee and sugar. At the time of my birth in June 1943, rationing had been extended to include canned soups and juices, meat, fish, and dairy products. Approximately twenty million "victory gardens" sprung up from nowhere; these gardens supplied almost one-third of all the vegetables consumed in America. My grandfather's farm in Sudbury helped supply some of those vegetables.
So many American men had gone off to aid in the war effort that millions of women and teenagers ages twelve to seventeen had volunteered to fill their ranks in the workforce. Unemployment was eliminated; the Depression was over, and "Rosie the Riveter" (illustrated by Norman Rockwell) made the cover of the Saturday Evening Post in May 1943.
The Imperial Japanese Army had conquered most of Asia and were conducting bombing raids on Australia. The first and largest raid on the city of Darwin commenced on January 19, 1942, and included 242 Japanese aircraft in a surprise attack. The Japanese bombed ships in the harbor, shore-based military installations, and the city's two airfields. The objective was to prevent the Allies from staging raids on the Japanese-held islands of Timor and Java. The city was only lightly defended, and the Japanese inflicted heavy losses with little damage to their own aircraft. It was a dark period of time for Australia and America and a difficult time to bring a child into the world.
My father and I met for the first time when he was released from active duty, after World War II, near my third birthday. Before age three, my mom, Phyllis, her twin sister Barbara, and Barbara's daughter Sandy were all the family I knew. Sandy was two years older, but she always felt more like a sister than a cousin. During the war years, we were very happy living in my uncle's small home in Plaistow, New Hampshire.
After the war, my dad told me a story about an aerial battle over Schweinfurt, Germany, that occurred shortly after I was born. On August 14, 1943, my dad was flying as a waist gunner in a bomber aircraft in a huge fleet of aircraft that was targeting armament and ball-bearing factories over the Ruhr industrial complex in the Fatherland (Nazi Germany).
He said this one battle was the most terrifying of his life. They were met by mountains of steel from hundreds of flak and antiaircraft guns. "The sky was black with flak," he said. In addition they were intercepted by swarms of 109 German fighter aircraft. "Some of those damn Krauts flew right into our bombers. They came so close on several occasions that it was difficult not to miss. I kept spraying .50-caliber machine-gun fire directly into their cockpits, and they still came at us!
"My gun got so hot that my hands were burning through my leather gloves, even though my hands had been cold. Holes were opening up in the fuselage where bullets and flack would tear through the cabin. The waist gunner on the other side of the aircraft was hit in the backside by flack that came right through my side of the aircraft. There wasn't much left of our tail gunner when we landed. His compartment looked like Swiss cheese. Parts of our tail gunner were scattered all around the compartment. What a bloody mess.
"None of us had seen or experienced anything close to that terrifying mission. Our pilot, Jock, said his upper body was so stiff and tense from trying to hold the plane on course that he couldn't really move them for several hours after the flight."
The American losses totaled sixty heavy B-17 bombers and six hundred highly trained airmen from the Eighth Air Force. It was the largest loss of aircraft and men in any single mission of the war. It was the first time that the US Air Force admitted to such horrendous losses.
My dad said he was just fortunate that his aircraft could limp back to the air base. Although his plane had been riddled with holes from German fighter pilot bullets and flak, somehow it still flew. The mission, as devastating as it was for the Eighth Air Force, did destroy several industrial armament and ball-bearing plants and highlighted the need for fighter aircraft escorts for the bombers. It was my third month of life.
My dad had trained and studied for a navigation and waist machine-gunner position in B-17 and B-24 bombers at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, before his tour of duty with the Eighth Air Force overseas. The new B-24 heavy bombers were called "Liberators" and could fly nonstop for up to three thousand miles. They were powered by four twelve-hundred-horsepower air-cooled engines and could carry ten men, four tons of bombs, and five thousand rounds of .50-caliber machinegun ammunition. They were made at the Ford Motor Company's Willow Run Assembly Plant, near Detroit, Michigan.
Each plane contained 1,225,000 parts, and at the height of production, one plane was assembled every fifty-five minutes! The plant in Willow Grove produced a total of 8,685 B-24s for the war effort. The manufacturing facility Willow Run, located between Ypsilanti and Belleville, Michigan, had been constructed specifically to build the B-24s. After the war, ownership of the plant transferred to Kaiser Motors and then to Ford's rival, General Motors. On June 1, 2009, General Motors announced that it was closing the plant as part of its bankruptcy proceedings.
Although the B-24 was the latest bomber developed to that point in the war, it was not without problems. The aircraft loaded with fuel and ordnance needed four thousand feet of runway for takeoff. The Model D weighed 71,200 pounds when fully loaded. It was hard to fly — thus the nickname "the flying boxcar." It was also notorious for gas leaks. If an airman lighted up a cigarette, his plane could explode. During World War II a total of 52,173 army air force men were killed or missing in combat, many of these from accidental deaths. During the Pacific campaign these planes earned the nickname "the Flying Coffin."
Although the Eighth Air Force (then the US Army Air Force, or USAAF) was the largest of all sixteen numbered air forces in the USAAF, it suffered a staggering number of casualties during World War II. Over half of the casualties of the entire USAAF came from the Eighth.
* * *
My dad had quick reflexes, and his math skills were pretty good. He often flew as navigator or waist gunner wherever he was needed. Most of the time, his aircraft was flying sorties over the Ruhr industrial complex, the heart of Nazi Germany. He had a couple of close calls: once his shot-up plane had to crash-land back at his air base, and once he had to jump out over northern Italy after his plane was hit with antiaircraft fire and flak. The flak burst into razor-sharp metal shards that sliced through the wings and the fuselage of his lumbering bomber. He always said those planes were "tough, well-built and stubborn, but you sure don't want to try to land them in the mountains of northern Italy."
When my dad first came back home after the war, it was a terrifying experience for me, a happy three-year-old. Up until that time, my world and family had been limited to my mom, her twin sister Barbara, and my cousin Sandy. When my uncle and father came home and we met for the first time, we were complete strangers. After I acted up a bit, it took some explaining on my mother's part for me to get used to the intrusion of two very unfamiliar men in my life.
Several years later, around my tenth birthday, my curiosity got the better of me. "Dad," I asked, "how was it being shot down over enemy territory in the mountains of northwest Italy? How did you survive after jumping out of an airplane filled with smoke and fire?"
My dad needed to tell his story. His experiences later shaped my hope and prayers for my pilot friend on the Kitty Hawk, Lt. Daniel Kirk.
* * *
My slumber was temporarily interrupted by a sailor handing me a small cardboard box containing a bologna sandwich and an apple. I made both disappear quickly and went back to my dream. The droning of the aircraft engines made sleep almost instantaneous. Sleep helped numb the pain in my backside.
* * *
To my way of thinking, World War II, in the European theater, was Britain, France, Russia, and the United States against the enemy — the Germans and the Italians. Dad got pretty upset with this way of thinking and told me that it was Italians who had saved his life. After his plane was hit by flak and antiaircraft fire, it could not maintain altitude, and the cabin filled with smoke. Dad was the navigator. After quickly conferring with the pilots, the crew decided that bailing out was their best and only option.
"The aircraft was no longer capable of flight. There were too many holes in the underside of the plane, and the landing gear was a dangling mess. We were not even sure we could get out of the aircraft because of the erratic and violent lurches of the plane as it continued losing altitude. A couple of the crew were injured from the flak that penetrated the aircraft; others were injured by the violent vibration and lurching of the aircraft from the winds coming off the mountain range."
They were over the Apennine Mountains in northern Italy and had no idea precisely how high above some of the mountains they were actually flying. They had flown over Lake Trasimeno and were near a small town outside of Arezzo called Gello. Although he grabbed a sidearm before he jumped, Dad was reluctant to use it against a well-armed enemy, and on the way down in his parachute, he was pretty sure his fingers were too cold to even fire the weapon.
He mentioned that he wished his plane had been protected by the Tuskegee Air group of fighter pilots. This was an all-African American group of fighter pilots who served with distinction during World War II: they never lost a bomber they were protecting. The Tuskegee airmen painted the tails of their aircraft with a distinctive red paint. This African American pilot group eventually became known as the "Red Tails" and later in the war, because of their success in guarding the bombers, as the "Red Tailed Angels."
All of the crew bailed out. Dad said he saw one other crew member's chute on the way down, then nothing. The wind howled and blew icy-cold. He was scared and freezing on the way down, and it seemed to take forever to hit the ground. Much of the time, the wind blew him sideways. The cold, penetrating wind felt like it would freeze him solid before he landed. His chute got caught in some tree branches, and he had to fight and pry his way free in order to climb out of the tree.
On the way down in his parachute, he had two primary thoughts: surviving and getting back to his wife and new son. He came down in a very sparsely populated wooded area. There were no lights or roads visible. On the way down, he saw what he thought might be a building or church steeple in the distance. He was very cold, scared, and lost. He thought about praying, but he was too afraid God might not be on his side right at that moment. His primary concern was getting warm.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Overrun by Jeffrey H. Ahlin. Copyright © 2016 Jeffrey H. Ahlin. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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