God Is My Co-Pilot by Robert L Scott

Author:Robert L Scott [Scott, Robert L]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

I think most of the ammunition had been fired at us while we circled at sixteen thousand feet, for we were the whole show now. We'd rake the steel decks from stem to stern and then swing out low to the water and come back with quartering shots from the beam. We were so low that we were actually shooting up at the decks of the boats. I saw many human heads above the water as the Japs tried to swim from the boats, and I fired at them. Those bullets ricocheted from the water into the steel side of the gunboat and went on through. As my range would reach the "sweet spot" of some 287 yards, where the six lines of tracers and armor-piercing Fifties converged, it would appear as though an orange-colored hole the size of a flour barrel was being burned into the side of the Jap vessel at the water-line. looking back at the next man in the column and observing his hits, I could see his tracer bullets coming through the boat and out the other side.

We S-ed along the ten-ship Une and shot at them all from both sides. On the second pass, two of the vessels were listing, and others were smoking. On the fourth attack, seven out of the ten were smoking and burning and some of these were on the bottom with their masts barely out of water. Photographs taken later from an observation plane showed that seven had sunk immediately in the strait, and that the other three had sunk within a thousand yards of the battle area.

I was so happy, so excited and eager, that I tried to be glamorous that morning. After the fourth attack I had called to re-form and head for the rendezvous point to the Southwest. But as the ships left the target, I saw something I had to go back for. It was a Japanese flag, waving defiantly from the mast of one of the sunken gunboats. Forgetting caution, and with the other seven planes speeding away to the rendezvous point, I dove to strafe the flag in a gesture of hate.

When I finished the job and pulled up again, I could barely see the last of my flight several miles away. I gradually climbed after them, forgot to look around, and just sat there, "dumb and happy." Just sat there too long over enemy territory, without looking around every second. Without thinking about it, I had become a straggler.

In a high-powered engine, as soon as we go into combat we take military power from the engine—that is, we take as much boost as the engine will stand without "detonating," put the prop in low pitch, high speed position. As you leave the combat and the area, if you're not too excited the hand automatically pulls the prop controls to maximum cruising position to save fuel and to keep the engine from running hot. I began subconsciously to do this.

Just then, very dreamily, I heard—pop-pop-pop-pop-pop.

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