Dunn glanced at Ted Knowles and nodded, signaling that he was about to take off. Then he looked at Tony Florentino again and made an OK sign with his left hand. After that he took the brakes off and pushed the throttle forward. .
For Christ’s sake, Tony, please don’t do that Catholic crossing-your-self-in-the-presence-of-death crap until Fm out of sight.
Lieutenant Dunn, glancing back, saw that Lieutenant Knowles was beginning his takeoff roll. Then he saw Corporal Florentino crossing himself.
He dropped his eyes to the manifold pressure gauge. He was pulling about thirty inches. The airspeed indicator jumped to life, showing an indicated sixty knots. He was pulling just over forty inches of manifold pressure when he felt the Wildcat lift into the air.
He took his right hand from the stick and grabbed the stick with the left. Then he put his free hand on the landing-gear crank to his right and started to wind it up. It took twenty-eight turns. The last dozen or so, as the wheels moved into their final stowed position, were hard turns. When he was finished, he was sweating.
Dunn put his right hand back on the stick and headed out over the water. In the corner of his eye, he saw Knowles slightly behind him.
When he was clear of the beach, he reached down and grabbed, in turn, each of the four charging handles for the.50 caliber Browning machine guns (these were mounted two to a wing). He reached up and flipped the protective cover from the GUNS master switch, then pulled on the stick-mounted trigger switch.
All guns fired. He was not surprised. VMF-229 had the best mechanics at Henderson. And these were under the supervision of Technical Sergeant Big Steve Oblensky, who’d been a Flying Sergeant when Bill Dunn was in kindergarten. Another Old Breed Marine, Gunnery Sergeant Ernie Zimmerman, took care of the weapons. Dunn was convinced that Zimmerman knew more about Browning machine guns than Mr. Browning did.
But he would not have been surprised either if there had been a hang-up… or two hang-ups, or four. This was the Cactus Air Force (from the code name in the Operations Order) of Guadalcanal, located on a tropical island where the humidity was suffocating, the mud pools were vast, and the population of insects of all sizes was awesome. Their airplanes were in large part made up of parts from other (crashed, bombed, or shot down) airplanes, and were subjected to daily stresses beyond the imaginations of their designers and builders. Flying them was more an art than a science. That anything worked at all was a minor miracle.
Reasonably sure that by now the rest of the flight was airborne, Dunn picked up his microphone and pressed the switch.
“Check your guns,” he ordered. “Then check in.”
It was not the correct radio procedure. Marine flight instructors back in the States would not have been pleased. Neither, for that matter, would commanding officers back at Ewa in Hawaii, or probably even at Espiritu Santo. But there was no one here to complain. Those addressed knew who was speaking, and what was required of them.
In the next few minutes, one by one, they checked in.
“Two, Skipper, I’m OK.”
That was Knowles, on his wing. “Seven, Sir, weaponry operable.”
One of the new kids, thought twenty-one-year-old Bill Dunn, yet to be corrupted by our shamefully informal behavior.
“Three, Skipper.”
“Six, OK.”
“Five, Skipper.”
There was a minute of silence. Dunn reached for his microphone.
“Four?”
“I’ve got three of them working.”
“You want to abort? And try to catch up?”
“I’ll go with three.”
“Form on me, keep your eyes open,” Dunn ordered. “And for Christ’s sake watch your fuel!”
There was no response.
VMF-229 formed loosely on its commanding officer and proceeded in a northwest direction, climbing steadily. At 12,000 feet, Dunn got on the mike again.
“Oxygen time,” he ordered.
[TWO]
1125 Hours 11 October 1942
Lieutenant Colonel Clyde W. Dawkins, USMC, Commanding Officer, Marine Air Group 21, set out to confer with the (acting) commanding officer of VMF-229. Dawkins was a career Marine out of Annapolis-a tanned, wiry man of thirty-five who somehow managed to look halfway crisp and military even in his sweat-soaked Suit, Flying, Tropical Climates.