Pacifica Military History Free Sample Chapters.pmd

420 Pacifica Military History
transformed into a human torch. I cringed when I saw him fall out of the
truck cab and roll on the ground, waving and slapping at himself as he
tried to put out the flames. Even had he extinguished the flames, there
was no way he could have survived the burns.
We flew on. A short time later we were given coordinates for a target
described as a Vichy command post. It was housed in a big, white,
cement-block building set up on a hill. As we dove in to attack, guns
that were dug in around the building put up torrents of antiaircraft fire.
It was intense, but not nearly so thick as what the destroyers had put up
earlier that day.
From our end, the attack was somewhat frustrating. We could see
flashes from our .50-caliber rounds hitting the building, but they had
little effect on the masonry structure. We certainly couldn’t make it burn.
It wasn’t long before I came to the conclusion that our return on this
investment wasn’t worth it. I saw rounds coming up at me during one of
my strafing runs, then heard a loud crack, and felt a gush of air pour into
the cockpit.
A small-caliber antiaircraft round had hit the left front quarter-panel
of my windscreen, come through the cockpit, missed my face by only
inches, and gone right through the rear of the canopy. I could see bits of
Plexiglas on the outside of my goggles, trapped there by the hurricaneforce
wind that was rushing through the cockpit. I really wasn’t much
interested in strafing that building anymore.
Finally, like a pack of blooded and panting dogs that have lost interest
in a treed animal, we rejoined and circled the command post from a
distance. It didn’t look much different than it had before we made our
attack. We were low on ammunition; it was time to head home. We
climbed to altitude and started back, a bit disappointed that our efforts
hadn’t yielded more spectacular results,
There was trouble waiting for us when we reached the Ranger at
1425, more than two and a half hours after we had launched. Our lack of
carrier landing practice during the last few weeks finally caught up with
us. The nature of combat being what it is, the launch and recovery cycles
had gone askew. Our landing skills had atrophied, and recovering pilots
were being given more wave-offs than normal. Consequently, the