Free The Twilight Warriors by Robert Gandt Page A

G4M Betty bomber. They only managed to get a quick burst into the Nick before both aircraft escaped in the clouds.
    Landreth’s orbit was bringing him back to an easterly heading. As he watched, the rim of the sun broke through the horizon. In a matter of minutes, the sea was bathed in an ethereal orange glow. One by one, the gray ships below became visible.
    Landreth was astounded. “From horizon to horizon,” he recalled, “the ocean was covered with the might of the United States Navy. Five task groups—twenty-one carriers and all their escorts.” Until that moment, the ultimate victory of the United States over Japan had been only a vague assumption. Gazing down at the armada of warships, Landreth was struck with a sudden realization: the outcome of the war was a certainty. It was almost over. The day was close when the fighting would be over.
    What Landreth didn’t know was that for him that day was today.
    E rickson was hearing noises. He was in his assigned slot—Tail End Charlie—in CAG Hyland’s four-plane division. They were droning over the open ocean, en route to Japan. And Erickson kept hearing these worrisome sounds from his Corsair.
    With them were more flights from the fighter squadron, VF-10, making a total of nineteen fighters. All were armed with eight of the new 5-inch HVARs, which someone had aptly nicknamed “Holy Moses,” describing their reaction the first time they fired the rockets.
    Erickson was still hearing the worrisome noises. He knew what they were, of course, but they didn’t go away. Such noises were a joke—and a common phenomenon—among fighter pilots. On your first long mission over water, you heard things. You heard a roughness in the engine, a buzz in the controls, a rattle that didn’t belong. After you stopped worrying about the noises, you worried about other things: losing fuel, magnetos shorting out, oil leaking.
    Erickson knew all this, but he worried anyway. For a while he worried that his guns might not work. After running out of things to worry about, he started wondering about his parachute. Would he be able to open it? He practiced reaching for the D-ring of the chute. Just in case.
    After an hour over the water, they spotted the shoreline of Kyushu. The primary target, Oita airfield, lay on the northeast coast, looking across the Bungo Strait at the island of Shikoku. Oita wasn’t visible. It was obscured beneath a heavy cloud cover, and Hyland made his first decision as a strike leader. They would go for the secondary target, the Saeki naval base and airfield. Saeki was thirty miles south of Oita and visible through the broken cloud deck.
    Erickson armed his guns and set his rockets to fire in salvo. One after the other the Corsairs pushed over in their dives. As the airfield, buildings, and revetments swelled in his windshield, Erickson could see the parked Japanese airplanes lined up, red meatballs on their wings.
    He squeezed the trigger. The six .50-caliber guns rattled in a staccato beat. He saw his tracers arcing down toward the parked airplanes. As in a dream, he watched one of them explode in a roiling fireball. Then another.
    The Corsairs swept over the airfield. In the harbor beyond, Erickson spotted a tanker. He salvoed his rockets at the ship, then opened up again with his guns. Peering over his shoulder as he pulled up, he saw that the tanker was ablaze. Crewmen were diving over the sides into the water.
    But the enemy was firing back. One of the Tail End Charlies, Ens. Loren Isley, was diving on his target, guns firing—and didn’t pull up. Isley’s Corsair dove straight into the harbor and exploded.
    Stunned, the other pilots stared at the blackened slick on the water where the Corsair had hit. No one knew—nor would they ever know—whether Isley had taken an antiaircraft round or just pressed his attack too close.
    They came back to strafe the field, expending most of their .50-caliber ammunition, until Hyland gave the signal to pull off