Pacifica Military History Free Sample Chapters.pmd

Free Sample Chapters 223
Ens Chip Reding. All save Leppla were novices. Leppla flew directly
into the oncoming Zeros. The four Wildcats instantly received hammer
blows from hundreds of 20mm and 7.7mm rounds.
Chip Reding, Leppla’s second-section leader, saw only the rear
Zero shotai as it closed on the Avengers. He immediately charged his
guns and dropped his wing fuel tank. The transition from the drop tank
to the main tank did not go well, however, and Reding temporarily lost
air speed. In a second or two, the fuel-starved engine sputtered and died,
and the Wildcat spiraled toward the ocean as Reding desperately tried
to restart the engine.
Dusty Rhodes, Reding’s wingman and the division’s tail-end-
Charlie, also had a problem with his wing tank. It stuck in place when
he tried to jettison it, and a Japanese incendiary or tracer round set it
aflame. Rhodes nevertheless stayed on station above Reding while the
latter fluttered toward the sea and until he got his engine restarted. During
those few bleak moments, oncoming Zeros riddled Rhodes’s canopy,
shot out most of his instruments, and clipped his pushed-up goggles
from his forehead—all without injuring him. Meanwhile, the wing tank
continued to spew dangerous flames.
As his engine restarted, Chip Reding distinctly saw two Avengers
struck by Zeros diving from above and both sides, from directly out of
the sun. He led Rhodes straight at the attackers, but other Japanese
fighters intervened and pressed home their own attacks at such steep
angles and in such quick succession that neither Reding nor Rhodes
was able to get any of the Zeros in his reflector gunsight. At some point
in the swirling fight, however, the fire in Rhodes’s wing tank went out,
by then a small consolation.
John Leppla was gone. The last person to see him was Dusty
Rhodes, who had looked back just once to see Leppla making a head-on
run at one Zero with a second Zero clinging to his tail. A few moments
later, Rhodes saw a partially deployed parachute streaming toward the
water and thought it might be Leppla, but there was no way to be sure
because by then several Avengers had been culled from the formation.
Long before Rhodes’s last sighting, and only an instant after the
action got under way, Leppla’s wingman, Al Mead, had evacuated his
disabled Wildcat. He safely parachuted into the water.