W.E.B. Griffin: The Corps IV - Battleground

He did remember that the Val had a nonretractable landing gear... the wheels had pants. These made Vals look something like the Gee-Bee Racer Jimmy Doolittle used to fly in air races. Jimmy Doolittle was one of Bill Dunn's childhood heroes.

Bill hadn't thought of Jimmy Doolittle in years, until word had come six weeks ago that Doolittle had flown B25s off an aircraft carrier, bombed Tokyo, and wound up a Brigadier General with the Medal of Honor. He didn't understand how the hell Doolittle had managed to get B25s off an aircraft carrier, it was hard enough getting a Wildcat off.

The news of the Tokyo raid brought back to him his adolescent hero worship of Doolittle racing his Gee-Bee around pylons. The Gee-Bee was much like the Wildcat, a little airplane with a big engine, and thus very fast. And correspondingly hard-dangerous-to fly.

By the time Bill Dunn was fifteen, he knew he would never emulate his father and his two brothers who'd been football heroes at the University of Alabama: He weighed 105 pounds and was dubbed "The Runt." Things were in fact looking bad for him in the manhood department in general until the U.S. Navy-specifically, the Naval Air Station, Pensacola-came to his rescue. The Navy showed him a way to do manly things, even if he wasn't going to be well over six feet and two hundred pounds when he reached full growth.

The Navy hoped to build auxiliary and emergency landing strips on land the Dunns owned just across the border from Florida in Alabama. Though the Navy had no funds to lease, much less buy, the necessary land, the Admiral at Pensacola thought there was a good chance that he could appeal to the Dunn family's patriotism.

The Admiral had read his history and suspected- correctly-that Lieutenant Cassius Alfred Dunn, gunnery officer of the Confederate Ship Alabama, probably had a familial connection with the Dunns of Mobile and Point Clear, shipping agents and land owners. The Alabama, under Admiral Raphael Semmes, was the greatest Naval Raider of all time.

"You must come see us at Pensacola," the Admiral said to C. Alfred Dunn IV, Bill's father. "And bring your boy. I think he'd like it."

When the Dunns came to Pensacola, the Admiral laid on them a little demonstration of the capabilities of the Grumman F3F-1, the last Navy biplane fighter to be produced. Bill Dunn's awe of the F3F-1 was exceeded only by his shocked realization that the pilot who climbed out of the cockpit and walked over to be introduced to the Dunn family was no taller and not much heavier than he was.

I bet they called him "Runt" too, when he was fifteen.

That summer, and the next, Bill spent long hours with his feet dangling off the family pier, watching the sun set over the smooth waters of Mobile Bay. A lot of the time he was there he was thinking about flying. He would have cheerfully swapped all his worldly possessions, present and future, for a chance to climb in the cockpit of a fast and powerful little airplane and shove the throttle as far forward as it would go.

The dream endured... though he changed part of it. By the time he entered the University, he'd decided that if there was anything in the world better than being a Naval Aviator, it was becoming a Marine Naval Aviator.

Now that he was a Marine Naval Aviator and rated in the Grumman F4F, which was a little larger than the Gee-Bee, but just about as fast, he understood that flying hot aircraft as fast as they would go, as close to the ground as you could get them, was a pretty dumb thing to do. He realized now why there had been such a hell of a hue and cry to stop the National Air Races because those guys had kept flying into each other, the pylons, or the ground.

The Val, like the Kate, had two forward firing 7.7mm machine guns in the wings and a single 7.7mm in the aft cockpit. It could carry about nine hundred pounds, total, of bombs, a big one under the fuselage and two smaller ones under the wings.

Neither the Val nor the Kate was any match for the Wildcat, which was faster, and far more heavily armed (six.50 caliber Browning machine guns) and armored. One on one, that is.

Was one Wildcat equal to two Vals? Or three?

That was an uncomfortable question.

And that wasn't the whole problem.

"We may certainly expect the Vals and Kates to be accompanied by a roughly equal number of Zeroes," the Navy Zoo Guide had said matter-of-factly.

The Zero (technically the Mitsubishi A6M2 Model 21) was an interesting airplane... interesting, that is, if you could sit back and compare it dispassionately with the Wildcat. It was a low wing monoplane fighter, with a fourteen-cylinder radial engine that gave it a top speed of about 315 mph at 16,000 feet. The Wildcat had a top speed a couple of miles an hour faster at 18,000.

But if you could not consider it dispassionately-for example, if you were about to go fight twenty-five to thirty-five of" them-the Zero seemed immensely formidable. From everything Bill Dunn had heard, the Zero was a better airplane than the Wildcat. That the Navy pretended otherwise did not change the facts. The Navy also pretended that the Brewster F2A Buffalo was only "marginally inferior" to the Wildcat, and that was bullshit, pure and simple.

It was common knowledge, anyhow, that the Zero was far more maneuverable than the Wildcat, except at sea level, where the more powerful Wildcat engine gave it an edge. And in addition to the two 7.7mm machine guns it had in the wings, it had two 20mm machine cannon. The projectile from a 20mm machine cannon had greater range than a.50 caliber bullet. Thus a Zero pilot could shoot at a Wildcat before the Wildcat pilot could shoot at him; and because it was larger, a 20mm did more damage.

If it was true that no matter how bad a situation is, it could always be worse, Bill thought, then whenever we sally forth into harms way, I could be flying a goddamned Buffalo. There are three times as many (twenty-one) Buffaloes on Midway as there are Wildcats.

The Navy didn't want the Buffaloes, of course, knowing that they are no fucking good. So naturally, they are good enough for the Marines. But at least I will be flying a Wildcat.

Which raises the interesting question, how come?

Did Major Parks put me into a Wildcat because he felt I can fly one better than the other guys? Or because he thought, being the nice guy he is, that I stand a slightly better chance of living through this morning flying a Wildcat than I would flying a Buffalo?

And that raises the question of relative pilot skill, which is a real chiller. Christ only knows how much time Major Parks and Captain Armislead and the other old timers have-several thousand hours anyway-but Mrs. Dunn's Little Boy Billy has 312.5 hours, which ain't very much, especially considering how little of that is in the Wildcat, and that somehow Navy Intelligence has learned enough about the Japs to estimate their average carrier pilot has 800 hours, including some in combat. I have zero hours in combat.

After he rolled out of bed, Dunn dressed quickly by pulling on what the Marine Corps called a "Suit, Flight, Tropical," and which he somewhat irreverently thought of as his rompers. Next came ankle high boots, which he thought of as his clodhoppers, because the rough side of the leather was on the outside. Some of the guys flew with low-quarter shoes, but he preferred the clodhoppers. He slipped a leather flight jacket over the flight suit, and then put on a shoulder holster with a Colt Model 1911A1 pistol in it.

Some of the guys carried.38 Special caliber revolvers, which were somewhat smaller weapons, arguing that they didn't get in the way as much as the Colt. Bill carried the Colt because that's what they had issued him, and because he thought the chances of his ever having to take it from the holster to shoot anybody with it ranked right up there with his chances of being named Pope.