Whip by Martin Caidin Read Free Book Online Page B

several moments. The muscles in his left cheek twitched visibly. But there was no quaver or change in his voice.
    "Anyway. It was obvious the Japanese were going to give us what you Yanks so quaintly call the old one-two punch, first with the defending fire of those warships, and then with the Zero fighters. One sight I will never forget. For a moment I thought I'd gone mad.
    The whole fleet seemed to have exploded into flames. Then I realized that every gun of those warships had opened fire, and the brilliant flames I was seeing came from the flashing of the guns. One rippling blast of flame after the other.
    "We'd hoped, of course, to hold a tight formation so we might better defend ourselves against the fighters. Not much of a chance there, however. The Japanese were firing everything up to and including their sixteen-inch rifles, and their first salvos fell short of us. Impossible to miss, because the ocean erupted in towering geysers where their big shells struck the water. It's a frightening thing, really, to see those spouts of water. Must have been hundreds of feet high. You run into one of those and it's like hitting a tree. It's all over right then and there.
    "That wiped out our neat formation, to say the least. We began to dodge. Whip at once skidded off to the left of the lead aircraft. The way we were bunched in there, one salvo and its waterspouts could have creamed all of us. So we spread out and began to jink about. We were really dodging the great spouts of water, flying between and around them and trying to stay one jump ahead of the Japanese. Yet, the man who was leading the show, I think his name was Carter, was quick. He estimated the Japanese had shot their load with those heavy salvos, and that now they would leave it up to the fighters to attend to us. So he called out for everyone to close it in tight again, and we did just that, back into the diamond formation."
    "We got down to the thin skin of it all when the Zeros made their move. They came at us in line-abreast position, and the fun began with the first sweep of six of the bastards. You all know the sight when they're firing with their cannon and guns, but you rarely have a delayed view of all those Zeros with their noses and wings sparkling like that. They opened fire with their nose guns. Then we saw the wings come aflame. The color was darker and had black smoke, and that meant, of course, they had opened up with their cannon.
    "It was quite eventful, really. There were still some odd waterspouts about and before us, so in effect here we were rushing in like some bloody fools to take on the whole Japanese fleet, and we were actually trapped. Remarkable, when you think of it. We didn't dare climb because that would slow us down and open us up to lighter flak, and everybody would have a piece of us. We still had some altitude because our dive was rather shallow.
    Carter, who was leading us, had a rather terrible decision to make. Did we give the nod to the guns or the Zeros as the greater evil? The man deserves enormous credit for split-second thinking. The instant he saw the black smoke from the wings of the Zero fighters, he made his decision. I was still sitting there with visions of cannon shells coming at us when all four Marauders went down steeply. Very steeply, because I had a marvelous view of the ocean rushing up at us. The air was more than rather bumpy, of course. All those exploding shells were throwing out their shock waves. Most interesting effect, really.
    "Well, what Carter had done was to think that one vital moment ahead of the Japanese.
    Our sudden dive, and still in formation, took us right down to the water. It threw off the aim of the Zero pilots in their head-on pass at us, and also gave our turret gunners a chance to have a shot at the fighters as they passed overhead. It was a marvelous payoff for us, for we rushed ahead of that wave of fighters, and the short dive gave us some extra speed.
    "I haven't had much to say