Joe Crosetti understood that. Like every cadet at the Pensacola Naval Air Station, he wished he’d been along with Jimmy Doolittle and his intrepid flyboys. He was sick-jealous of the fliers, as a matter of fact. How horribly unfair that they’d got to go and he hadn’t! Just because they’d been flying for years while he was only now beginning to get up in the air…
That they’d lost more than one plane in three and about one man in two (for several crewmen had been shot even on B-25s that kept flying to the ditching point) fazed him not at all. It hadn’t fazed them either. They were all volunteers. The papers made that very plain. He couldn’t imagine anybody in the country who wouldn’t have stepped up to the plate there.
He burbled about the attack standing on the runway next to the Boeing Stearman he’d soon be taking up. Like all Navy trainers, the tough little biplane was painted bright yellow so nobody could mistake it for anything but what it was. People not training in Stearmans called them Yellow Perils, not altogether in jest. They were dangerous to their pilots and dangerous to those around them.
“If you will bring yourself back from the Hawaiian Islands to the business at hand, Mr. Crosetti…” said the instructor, a lieutenant from Pittsburgh named Ralph Goodwin.
“Uh, yes, sir. Sorry, sir.” Joe wasn’t the least bit sorry. “Can you imagine the look on the Japs’ faces when we buzzed ’em?”
Goodwin had cool blue eyes and a manner that spoke of money. “Can you imagine the look on your face when I give you a downcheck for wasting your time-and mine?”
“No, sir,” Joe said quickly.
“All right, then. Why don’t you hop on in? We’ll run through the checks.”
“Aye aye, sir.” Joe scrambled up into the Stearman’s rear seat. It went up and down like a barber chair, to adjust to trainees of different heights. The man who’d taken the plane out last must have been big, because Joe had to raise it three or four inches. He clipped the parachute pack to the flying harness.
Lieutenant Goodwin, meanwhile, had taken his place in the front seat. “You squared away there?” he asked.
“Uh, just about, sir.” Crosetti reached up and adjusted the mirror attached to the upper wing. He might have been fooling with the rear-view mirror on a car somebody else had been driving. When he got it fixed the way he wanted it, he said, “All ready now.”
“Okay. Let’s run through the checklist, then,” Goodwin said.
“Right.” Joe hoped he hid his lack of enthusiasm.
By the way the instructor snorted, he didn’t hide it well enough. “You do this every time you plop your fanny down in an airplane, Mister-every single time. The one time you forget, the one thing you forget, will always be the one you wish you hadn’t. A Stearman’s a very forgiving plane-you can do a lot of things that’d send you home in a box if you tried ’em in a hotter machine. But no airplane ever made will forgive out-and-out stupidity. And even if you don’t feel like running through the checks, I do-’cause it’s my neck, too.”
Ears burning, Joe mumbled, “Yes, sir.”
“Okay.” Goodwin sounded amused, not angry. “Seems about two cadets out of three are like that. They get the hang of it, though. Let’s go through the list.”
Through it they went, everything from the attachment of Joe’s safety belt to pedals and stick to throttle and magneto with the motor running. Everything checked out the way it was supposed to. “All green, sir,” Joe said above the roar of the seven-cylinder radial.
“Looks that way to me, too,” Goodwin agreed. “Take her over to Runway Three-West and let the tower know you’ll be going into the air.”
“Three-West. Aye aye, sir.” Slowly and carefully, Joe taxied to the end of the required runway. A plane was meant to fly, not to waddle along on the ground; taxiing was nothing like driving a car, the way he’d thought it would be. He exchanged formalities with the control tower. He also looked down the runway to make sure nobody else was landing on it or taxiing across it. That was like automobile traffic: charging out from a stop sign without looking was liable to get you creamed. “Seems all clear, sir,” he said to Goodwin. He wasn’t far enough along to take off without the instructor’s permission.
“So it does. Get us airborne, Mr. Crosetti.”
Joe advanced the throttle. The engine’s roar got louder and deeper. The Stearman shot down the runway. Actually, the little biplane was one of the most sedate airplanes ever manufactured, but it didn’t seem that way to him. Even though he was still on the ground, he kept one eye glued to the airspeed indicator. When it showed he was going fast enough, he pulled back on the stick. The Yellow Peril lurched into the air.
“Smoothly, Mr. Crosetti, smoothly,” Goodwin said. “You’re not bulldogging a steer.”
“Yes, sir.” Joe thought he’d made a great takeoff. He was flying, wasn’t he?
“It’s like learning to drive a car,” Goodwin told him. “After you get enough hours, you won’t need to tell your hands and feet what to do. They’ll know by themselves, and they’ll do everything together. It’ll seem like second nature-if you don’t kill yourself before then, of course.”
That comparison made sense to Joe. It also told him he wasn’t as far along as he’d thought. He remembered how ragged he’d been the first few times he got behind the wheel. A few less than perfect turns here-and the instructor’s sardonic comments accompanying each one-went a long way toward cutting him down to size.
But he was flying! Even if he wasn’t such hot stuff yet, he was up in the air and learning what he needed to learn so he could go out and shoot down Japs one of these days. There was the Naval Air Station, and the woods and swamps behind it, and the blue bay in front, and the even bluer Gulf of Mexico out beyond the bay. Birds got a view like this all the time. The Stearman could outperform any bird ever hatched. (Even had it carried machine guns, it would have been helpless against anything this side of a Sopwith Camel, but Joe didn’t dwell on that.)
Much sooner than he wanted to, he was coming in for a landing. “Gently,” Goodwin urged. “Smoothly. You’re juggling eggs. Cadets make ninety percent of their mistakes in the last twenty feet. If you only knew where the hell the ground is, you’d be Charles Lindbergh.”
“I don’t want to be Charles Lindbergh,” Joe snapped. Lindbergh had done everything he could to keep the USA out of the war till the Japs jumped Hawaii. He’d been the Nazis’ teacher’s pet. And he’d been mighty quiet since December 7.
“Okay, you’d be Jimmy Doolittle,” Lieutenant Goodwin said equably.
“That’s more like it.”
Jimmy Doolittle Joe wasn’t, or not yet, anyhow. The Stearman bounced hard when he put it down. His teeth clicked together. The instructor said something Joe hoped didn’t go out to the control tower. He brought the recalcitrant beast to a stop and killed the engine.
“Well, sir?” he asked unhappily into the sudden silence that seemed so loud.
But Goodwin had recovered his sangfroid in a hurry. “Well, Mr. Crosetti, you’re learning, that’s all,” he said. “I’ve seen men at your stage of training do better, but I’ve seen plenty do worse. You’ve got plenty of work ahead of you, but you can get where you want to go.”
Joe knew where he wanted to go: where Jimmy Doolittle had gone before him. Doolittle had raided. Joe wanted to take Hawaii back all by his lonesome. He wouldn’t. He couldn’t. He knew that. But it was what he wanted.
COLONEL MITSUO FUJIKAWA had been promoted for bravery after the conquest of Hawaii. But, even though Corporal Takeo Shimizu’s regimental commander now wore three stars on his collar tabs instead of two, he looked anything but happy. Like the rest of the men in the regiment, Shimizu stood at stiff attention on the grass of a park doing duty for a parade ground. His face held no expression. He stared straight ahead. He might have been carved from wood.