“Not bad, Mr. Crosetti,” the instructor said-about as much praise as he ever gave. “Take her back to the base and land her.”
“Aye aye, sir.” Joe had to look around to figure out where he was and in which direction Pensacola Naval Air Station lay. That didn’t matter much here-he had plenty of landmarks to guide him back. With only ocean between his plane and a carrier, it might not be so good.
Some guys seemed to have a compass between their ears. They always knew right where they were and how to get where they were going without fuss, muss, bother, or visible calculation. Joe suspected Orson Sharp was like that. His roomie was a strange bird, but a damn capable one. He wished he could find home as automatically as he reached into his pocket for a half-dollar. But navigation didn’t come easy for him.
That didn’t mean he couldn’t navigate, only that doing it was hard work. He put the Texan down in a landing he was proud of. If he’d been that neat when he soloed in it… But he had more experience now. The more experience he got, the more he realized how much it mattered.
“I know you want to be a fighter jockey,” the instructor said as they climbed out of the Texan.
“Yes, sir,” Joe agreed.
“That’s fine,” the older man told him. “But if you don’t get what you want, you can strike at the enemy in a dive bomber, too. If anything, you can strike harder. Fighters fight other airplanes. Dive bombers fight the ships that carry airplanes.”
“Yes, sir,” Joe said again. It wasn’t that the other officer was wrong-he wasn’t. But Joe had had his heart set on flying a fighter since before he volunteered for the naval aviation program. Oh, sure, a Dauntless could make a Jap battlewagon or carrier very unhappy-but it was such a lumbering pig in the air next to a Wildcat!
“Okay.” The instructor sounded wryly amused. No doubt he knew just what Joe was thinking. Fighter pilots got the glory, and glory could look mighty good to a kid getting close to finishing flight school.
Joe hustled back to his dorm room to work on trig problems he’d have to turn in that afternoon. No, navigation wasn’t easy for him. That just meant he had to sweat it out the hard way.
The door flew open. In burst Orson Sharp. Joe stared at him. Joe, in fact, dropped his pencil. His roommate looked excited, and Sharp was usually cool as a cucumber. “What’s up?” Joe asked.
“You haven’t heard?” Sharp demanded.
“Nope.” Joe shook his head. “If I had, would I be asking you?”
“No, I guess not.” The kid from Utah nodded to himself. “Word is, we’re going to have one of the pilots off the Yorktown talk to us this afternoon.”
“Wow!” Joe forgot all about trigonometry. This was bigger news than any navigation problem. The Yorktown lay at the bottom of the Pacific, somewhere north of Hawaii. The Japs had sunk her in the failed U.S. attack against the islands. “Not many of those guys left.”
Orson Sharp nodded. “I should say not. They had to ditch in the ocean and hope a destroyer would pick them up.” That wasn’t the only reason there weren’t many Yorktown pilots left. Japanese fliers had taken a savage toll on them. Sharp didn’t mention that, and Joe didn’t dwell on it.
Cadets weren’t in the habit of ditching classes anyhow, but the hall where the pilot would speak was packed tighter than a cable car with a tourist convention in town. The navigation instructor, whose class the pilot was taking, was a dour lieutenant commander named Otis Jones. He’d pulled every string he knew how to pull to get sea duty, but he was still here. That no doubt helped make him dour. All the same, Joe was convinced he’d been born with a lemon in his mouth.
Now he said, “Gentlemen, it is my privilege to present to you Lieutenant Jack Hadley, formerly of the USS Yorktown, soon to return to one of the carriers now building. Lieutenant Hadley!”
Hadley came out and saluted Jones. The cadets gave the fighter pilot a standing ovation. He eyed them with an aw-shucks grin. He wasn’t much older than they were; some of them might have been older than he was.
“Thanks, guys,” he said. Like his clean-cut blond good looks, his flat vowels said he came from somewhere in the Midwest. Being around cadets from all over the country had made Joe way better at placing accents than he’d ever needed to be back in San Francisco. Hadley went on, “Why don’t all of you sit down again? And if you don’t mind too much, I’m gonna do the same thing.”
No matter what Lieutenant Commander Jones said, Hadley wasn’t going back to sea right away. He walked with a pronounced limp and carried a cane. A nasty burn scar showed below his left shirt cuff; Joe wondered how far up his arm it went, and what other wounds his summer whites concealed. When Jones brought him a chair, he sank into it rather stiffly, and sat with his left leg, the bad one, out straight in front of him.
“Thank you, sir,” he said to Jones, who nodded brusquely and sat down himself at a front-row desk he’d saved with a homemade RESERVED sign. Jack Hadley looked out at the crowded room again. “You’ve got to remember, gentlemen: I don’t have a whole lot of experience against the Japs myself. But what I’ve got is more than most Americans have, so here’s how it looks to me.
“First thing you need to remember is, the Japs aren’t a joke. Forgetting that is the fastest way I know to get yourselves killed. All the jokes we made up till last year about them being little bucktoothed guys with funny glasses flying planes made out of tinfoil and scrap iron-all that stuff’s a bunch of hooey. They’re lousy back-stabbing so-and-sos, yeah, but they’re awful good at what they do. They flew rings around us out there.”
He paused, a look of intense recollection on his face. Joe wondered exactly what his mind’s eye was seeing. Whatever it was, it didn’t seem pleasant. Hadley’s left arm twitched a little. Maybe that meant something, maybe it didn’t. The injured pilot was the only one who knew for sure.
After a silence that lasted a few seconds too long for comfort, Hadley went on, “The Japs are no joke, and their planes are no joke, either. You’ve probably heard a thing or two about what the Zero can do.” He paused again, this time waiting for nods. When he got them, he resumed: “Well, everything you’ve heard is true. That’s one hell of an airplane. It’s faster than a Wildcat, it climbs better, and it can turn inside you like you wouldn’t believe-and a Wildcat’s pretty maneuverable all by itself. If you try and dogfight a Zero, you are fitting yourself for a coffin. Don’t do it. You won’t do it more than once.”
Again, he seemed to look at something only he could see. This time, he explained what it was: “They told me the same thing I’m telling you. I didn’t want to listen. I figured no Jap in the world had my number. Shows what I know.”
He gathered himself. “Don’t dogfight them,” he repeated. “If you’re taking notes, write that down. If you’re not taking notes, write it down anyway.” He tried the aw-shucks grin again. It came out strained.
“You’ve got two edges, and only two. A Wildcat can outdive a Zero. You can make a firing run from above and behind. Or, if you’re in a lot of trouble, you can dive out of there, and most of the time you’ll get away.”
Joe waited to hear what the other edge was. While he waited, he underlined what he’d written about not dogfighting. But Hadley seemed to have dried up. Lieutenant Commander Jones had to prompt him:
“Lieutenant…?”
“Huh?” Jack Hadley came back to himself from wherever he’d gone. “Oh. Sorry, sir. I was thinking about… battle damage, you might say. Yeah. Battle damage.” Was he talking about what had happened to himself, to his airplane, or to the whole fleet the USA sent against Hawaii?
Did it matter?
Hadley gathered himself again: “There’s one other thing you can do to at least help keep those monkeys off you. A pilot named Jimmy Thach thought it up, and the Thach Weave does some good, anyway.” He briefly described the system, explaining how a threatened plane’s sharp turn away from the enemy would alert the other pair in a four-plane element to turn towards it and give them a good shot. “This isn’t perfect, not even close,” he finished. “It takes really tight teamwork and a lot of practice to work well. But it does give us some kind of chance against a superior airplane, and we hardly had any before.”