Evening star., 1943-05-01
CHAPTER 20.

SI1A1 ! IIIL ~.
Actually, when you added it up,
weather was the worst of it. 1t was
always there, and when by some odd
oversight it wasn't it sure could
come up in hurry.
The weather blinded the men in
the sky. They, of course, had in
struments to "see" with, but flying
on instruments in enemy country
and over islands that never were
mapped before the war and could
be mapped during the war only in
hit-or-miss patches as war missions
carried planes over those areas is
not a joy. Particularly where you
have to 60 low, sometimes skim the
water, to give yourself a chance to
see ships and keep out of those
muscular thunderheads. And when
you go low you find out that black
clouds there have a habit of sitting
right on the water, and mist has a
habit of gathering around the feet
of an island and covering those feet
so that the island seems to be a
black cloud suspended in gray air.
And altogether it's hard to be sure,
sometimes until it's too late, whether
you're up against fluff that can't
hurt you or volcano or mountain
that is going to kill you.
The nights were even tougher
There were nights that were SO
thick a fellow taking off into them
was flying on instruments before he
got to the end of the runway. Find
ing your way home on such a night
was a job to make anybody gray
For, about fifteen seconds or so
plane time, south of Henderson
Field was 5000 feet of mountains
and man cropping around low
looking for the field, say with his
instruments thrown all out of whack
from the Earrings of machine-gun
fire, knew he had only those fifteen
seconds to fool around with. If he
banked too soon, he'd never find
anything and if he banked too late
he'd knock his brains out.
The fellows tried to get their
bearings by picking out the thin
line on the shore where the water
ended and land began. When the
wind was kicking up the water into
a sort of mild, aby-bodied little
surf, this line of demarcation was a
kind of pencil stripe, tiny and frail
and wabbling and sometimes fading
out altogether. But, usually, there
was no fussup in the waters of that
lakelike lagoon and the only way to
tell the difference between land and
water from the air was the water
was different shade of black. The
land was a black black and the wa
ter was kind of midnight blue
something a little off black.
Must Decide Quickly.
Women can get the idea of what
strain this business imposed on
the men if they remember trying to
match up fabrics in very bad light
Only, they must add to their ex-
asperations the fact that their lives
depend on being right and the fact
that they have only seconds to make
their decisions and act on them.
The fellows all had top-grade, 20
20 eyes and could make out the diff
ference when they were low enough
| The trouble with getting low enough
was the trees. The trees were one
height in one place and another
height in another place 1t was i'm
possible to tell beforehand just
which place you were coming in at
Then suddenly the trees showed UP
in front of you, kind of as if some
one had penciled in some lines on a
blot of black ink
Trees can kill a plane just as dead
as shells or bullets or mountains
It's happened time and again that a
fellow with black all around him
going deeper into the black to look
for the difference between midnight
blue and black, finds suddenly these
sinister little grayed-over black pen
Gil stripes dead ahead of him
There's this black blankness fore and
ait, black blankness topside and be-
low, black blankness to port and
starboard, with just the littlest little
bits of differences in the shades of
blankness, such little bits of differ
ences that you can't tell whether
they're really there or were just
caused by using your eyes too much.
This business of getting spots and
streaks and so forth in front of your
eyes-any man who has been around
planes in the Guadalcanal area any
length of time has a real horror of
them. They give him the real creeps
There was a Flying Fortress once,
| coming in for a landing after hit
ting a Jap carrier 1t was rainy
night, the weather just socked in