
if they were in a goddamned aerial parade with the air soft and untroubled, and the
widened eyes were joined with grins and startled exclamations. Everyone who could hear
and see was looking into the sky, screw the sun and the glare, and they watched the
eleven bombers as they came on down low, very goddamned low, right onto the bloody
deck, thank you, until their thunder was a massive pounding and the watching men
knew that the eleven pilots at the controls also knew just how good they were, were
trying to impart that pride and confidence, and there wasn't any better way of doing it
than what they were doing, rushing now with furious speed and hammering sound
waves over the dusty earth, and oh, Jesus, but they're beautiful.
They were even more surprised when the Mitchells came close enough for details to be
seen, for most witnesses from the ground had assumed these aircraft to be new
replacements from the States, pilots with fresh uniforms and factory-new machines,
smelling that mysterious new-airplane smell, untouched by Japanese steel, in their last
moment before the acid test of the agile Zero fighters. But, no; they were wrong. These
airplanes were worn, battered, beaten, holed and scattered across their metal surfaces
with their smallpox scars of tin covering bullet holes and patched over gaping tears made
by exploding cannon shells. Just what in the hell were these men doing?
By now the commanding officer of Garbutt Field had emerged from his makeshift office,
trailed by his staff, and the cooks and administrative and hospital personnel, and
everyone on the field who could walk, because the thunder of twenty-two engines close
up was overwhelming, pounding the earth, sending dust flurrying upward in a fine mist,
and the strange B-25s flattened it out on the deck, smack down the runway, all eleven of
them holding what everyone knew by now had to be their combat strike formation, and
as they swept by, they came hauling up in a sudden, steep wild climb, the first nine
bombers in a vee of three vee's, then the last two, and they were really hauling coal now,
flashing before the blazing sun, as they rolled smoothly, beautifully, out of their
climbing turns, their thunder more ragged with the thunder of those great props. They
seemed to ease into an impossible floating movement as the pilots let up on the power
and from every bomber, virtually at the same moment, flaps were sliding back and
down from wings, the three legs of the landing gear of each bomber jutted stiffly into the
wind, as the watchers below strained to make out more details, because the first three
B-25s had curved gracefully, like fighters, through the pattern of the airfield, and rolled
around, sliding into final approach, still in tight formation, and staying tight, and "Holy
cow! Look at 'em!" and they looked and another man shouted, "Them crazy bastards are
gonna' land like that! Jesus, in formation, yet!"
You just didn't do that at Garbutt Field. The runway was all screwed up with
undulations and dust and rocks, and it wasn't that wide, it just wasn't the place to pull off
this kind of superprecision crap, but no one had told those pilots up there, and they were
doing it, and every man on the ground who knew what the inside of a cockpit looked
like knew also that the manifold pressure gauges and the revolutions per minute and fuel
pressure and oil temperature and the rate of descent and the air-speed needles and the