Free Above the Thunder by Raymond C. Kerns

served the nation in war, how proud they were of one of Kentucky’s counties—Breathitt, I think—where not oneman had to be drafted for the First World War. In their minds there was nothing more honorable than to die in service under our flag.
    So I had to go forward, so to speak. I resolved to do so gracefully, and I resigned myself to dying that morning. I actually thought of how proud the family would be when they got the word, and with what respect they would mention my name in years to come. So, being thus mentally resigned, I felt no fear that might have inter fered with performing my duty, and I was prepared literally to defend that truck to the death. Of course, I got not a scratch that day, and, strange to say, I never thereafter had any doubt—for longer than a few seconds at a time—that I would survive the war.
    While we were getting the truck ready, the second Japanese attack came in. It didn’t hit us, but a formation of eighteen bombers passed directly overhead, not far above the now scattering clouds, droning toward Pearl Harbor. I looked around for our two fighters but could not spot them. Then, far above the neat enemy formations, I noticed a flash, a small movement far up in the sky above it, and down came two planes, a dark one in the lead, a silver one following. Like hawks dropping toward their prey, the two fighters came almost straight down through the midst of the enemy. They began firing, and the bomber gunners responded in kind, the crisscrossing tracers looking pale in the morning light. After a brief delay the thin, ripping sounds of the guns drifted down to us.
    The two fighters continued their dive together until they had passed through and below the Japanese formation, and then the silver plane pulled up and turned away to disappear behind a cloud. The dark plane shallowed its dive a little but kept coming down, and smoke began stream ing out behind it. I thought then that the dark plane was the P-40 I had seen shortly before, so I kept urging the pilot to pull out, pull out, but it appeared that he did not try to do so. I guess he was already dead or unconscious. The plane exploded in a burst of flame and black smoke in a pineapple field a short distance from us, and for the first time that day, I got that empty, weak-kneed feeling that comes with being just a wee bit shaken up. The enemy bombers continued on their way, apparently unperturbed.
    Since then, I have read several accounts of American fighter losses during that affair, and it seems that none occurred in that particular locale just south of Schofield; thus, I must have witnessed the silver P-36 shooting down a Japanese fighter, meanwhile passing through the bomber formation and being fired on by them.
    Immediately after the plane came down, we got the order to move out. We went along the southeast edge of Schofield, passed the smoking wreck age at Wheeler, and went out the Wheeler gate onto the Kamehameha Highway toward Honolulu. Rolling down the long, gentle slope through fields of pineapple toward the cane fields at lower levels, we looked down on Pearl Harbor as on a game being played in a stadium.
    From the vicinity of Ford Island in the middle of the harbor and from Hickam Field on the far side of it, black smoke boiled upward, adding to the volume of a huge cloud that spread and drifted slowly southwestward. Around that smoke Japanese planes swirled and dived and zoomed like night bugs around a light, and the air was alive with dark puffs of antiaircraft artillery shell bursts. Within the smoke pall, the bursts flashed dull red. As we drew nearer, we could see the battleships burning and many small boats moving about the smoky harbor that, although we didn’t know the numbers then, was the fresh grave of some two thousand officers and sailors, many of whose bodies would never be recovered. I stood in the back of our truck, holding my BAR and marveling at the scene of death and destruction. Any