Whip Read Free Page A

Goodman sighed. "Man, we're not just short of the right equipment, we don't have any right equipment. This whole complex is the biggest scavenging yard you ever saw. My people are even making their own tools, for Christ's sake. We can't get sheet metal for repairs. The only way we've stayed in business is by stripping old cars and trucks and cannibalizing planes we don't believe should be sent back into the air.
    I've been screaming to headquarters just for the tools to do the job. Never mind that half my men are sick to death from lousy food and our medical supplies are a joke and they sleep with scorpions and God knows what else. They'd accept all that and just bear up under it, if they could only do the job we need doing. And that's patching up the worn machines and modifying the others that come in here." He cast a baleful look at his passenger. "I imagine we'll get around to what you want before too long."
    "Uh huh. Before too long."
    About them, in the individual stands back from the road, were bombers standing without purpose, awaiting long-overdue repairs. Their wings and bodies showed scars and gaping holes, and Whip studied with his practiced eye the black punctures where Japanese bullets and cannon shells had ripped through metal skin and structural members, leaving the aircraft dangerously weakened until the metal could be made whole again.
    "You still carrying operational groups from here?" Whip asked.
    Goodman nodded. "We do. Its a case of their patching airplanes together until they have enough to go on a mission. We've got the 19th Bomb Group right here at Garbutt — you can see a few of their B-17s over there — but they don't fly too often. The only way they can stay in the air with the Japs, flying the small formations they do, is to get upstairs where the Zeros can't hack the thin air. The problem, Whip" — and again there was that sigh that reflected incessant, nagging problems — "is that the superchargers on those things are a mess, and we're short of oxygen equipment, and every time they try to fly to thirty thousand feet they're lucky to stay up."
    Goodman motioned for his driver to turn left. "Over there we've got two squadrons from the 22nd Group. Marauders. They've got the 33rd Squadron out at Antill Plains, about twenty miles south of here. Their 2nd and 408th Squadrons are at Reid River, another twenty miles to the south. Whip, they got an out-of-commission rate of about fifty percent. We just can't keep those things flying without parts. Hell, when they're grounded, the crews live with their airplanes. They got live rounds in their weapons to keep the other crews from stripping their machines."
    Lou Goodman shook his head. "Before I got into this side of the war I thought I knew men pretty well. I didn't. I didn't know a goddamned thing about how people could put up with absolute, hell, and do everything they could to stay in the fighting. You'd think these crazy bastards would welcome the chance to stay the hell away from the Japs. But it doesn't work that way. I was talking before about the 19th, the people in the B-17s.
    Their morale is so low it wouldn't reach the bottom of a cat's ass. Their planes are wrecks.
    I wouldn't want to fly one around the pattern. No supplies. Nothing. They were scheduled to fly a mission up to Rabaul with ten bombers. It was the goddamndest joke you ever saw. They scraped parts and pieces from all the planes so they could get just two airplanes off the ground. And one of those had to turn back when the oxygen system went out." Goodman paused and dug in a shirt pocket for a sweat-stained cigarette. "The other plane went all the way to Rabaul."
    Whip raised an eyebrow. "Alone?"
    "Alone. They didn't come back either. The crew that had to turn back were almost mad with frustration. Felt that if only they'd gone along they might all have made it."
    Whip shook his head. "Don't count on it. Two B-17s is like waving a flag up at Rabaul."
    "I know, I know . I'm just