Once They Were Eagles Read Free Page B

“duty beyond the seas.”
    He served one tour as executive officer of VMF 122 at Guadalcanal in April 1943 but saw no combat action. At a rear base after his tour, he’d broken his leg in a barroom incident and been shipped to New Zealand to recuperate. Now he was back at Espiritu Santo, looking for an assignment.
    Major Boyington was the right rank for a squadron commander; he was an experienced combat pilot; he was available; and the need was great. These assets overcame such reservations as the general may have had about his personal problems.
    General Moore made the decision.
    â€œWe need an aggressive combat leader. We’ll go with Boyington,” he said.
    The squadron had its commander.

 
4 | The Intelligence Officer
    I became a member of the Black Sheep by a circuitous route. As sergeant in charge of War Traffic Control Planning for the Los Angeles Police Department, I was draft exempt. But by mid-1942, as I read of the Japanese advances in the South Pacific, it was obvious that the war was already the biggest show on earth and destined to get bigger. I believed that the place for every able-bodied man was in the service. My wife, Carol—not one of those weeping “don’t leave me” types—was fully in agreement.
    Volunteering for service, I was appointed a first lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps and ordered to proceed to Camp Lejeune, New River, North Carolina, for duty.
    Camp Lejeune had been hacked out of the wilderness and swamps of the coast of North Carolina. It was said that an Army detail sent down there to look it over had reported that the place was not fit for human beings to live in, so it was turned over to the Marines.
    I was one of 50 in an officer indoctrination course, all trying to sort out “Field Sanitation,” “Arms and Ammunition,” “Thompson Submachine Gun,” “First Aid,” “Map Reading,” “Scouting and Patroling,” “Identification of Ships,” “Navy Firepower,” “Military Gases,” “Defense against Air Attack,” and a hundred other topics—interspersed with calisthenics, close-order drill, long-range hikes, field maneuvers, overnight bivouacs, command practice, marksmanship (rifle, machine gun, and pistol), and regular turns as Officer of the Day.
    All this and more was crowded into us in 35 days.
    I had a pleasant home leave, then reported to Camp Elliott near San Diego and was assigned to the 22nd Replacement Battalion. On 1 July 1943 came orders for “permanent duty beyond the seas.” I was a little concerned about the word “permanent.” I knew that a lot of Marines had found permanent resting places in the South Pacific.
    My wife came down to San Diego to see me off. We had a stiff-upper-lip farewell, and then I boarded the former Dutch ship Bloemfontaine along with some 2,300 men, 250 officers, and a crew of 200. Carol returned to Los Angeles, applied for work at Lockheed, and spent the war as a rigger on combat aircraft.
    Except for a submarine scare, which kept us at full alert for 24 hours, our trip was uneventful. We docked in Noumea, New Caledonia, on 24 July 1943.
    On Monday, 16 August (my wedding anniversary was the next day), I was transferred to the First Marine Air Wing. I drove up to Tontouta (35 miles north of Noumea) and, with four other officers and about 500 bags of mail, loaded into a DC-3 cargo plane for the four-hour flight to Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides.
    I was assigned to the Wing Intelligence Office and immediately commenced an on-the-job training program in aircraft identification, reading Japanese documents, escape and evasion reports, survival information, and other documents that would be of assistance to the pilots when I was assigned to a squadron.
    I had been undergoing the cram course in Air Intelligence duties only about two weeks when Captain Dave Decker, Wing Intelligence Officer, called me in one