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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . c h a p t e r t w e n t y - fiv e ........................................................... how to win while losing, iii Being a major and commander of a B-17 squadron was pretty tall cotton for a knuckle-headed kid who was just barely smart enough to find his way from his tent down to his airplane and back. I kind of enjoyed it except for those unpleasant periods when very unfriendly people were either trying to shoot you out of the sky or blow you up on the ground. Eventually, the field on Espiritu Santo was completed. It was much more habitable than Efate and a much shorter run up to where most of our targets were. When the Marines had pretty well secured the airfield on Guadalcanal, it was renamed Henderson Field, and we began staging B17s into Henderson, where we were even closer to our work. Early in 1943, I was in command of the advanced B-17 party at Henderson . Those were busy days. We’d go out and bomb them in the daytime, and every night, they’d send in a lone bomber that we called ‘‘Washing Machine Charlie’’ because of how his engines sounded to drop bombs on us all night long. Every so often, a Japanese battleship would come whistling down The Slot (New Georgia Sound) in the middle of the night and lob 16-inch shells in at us. We didn’t really get an awful lot of sleep, which wasn’t too bad, but it kept us out from under our mosquito nets for most of the nights—and the mosquitoes on Guadalcanal were as big as hummingbirds . Also, they carried malaria, and the Atabrine* they were giving us wouldn’t protect us from malaria—it just kept the symptoms under control so we could fly. Most of us were far from the hearty beach boys that had come down from Honolulu. I weighed about 120, and I was one of the fat guys. * A synthetic drug in the form of an extremely bitter pill. Because the correct dosage had not been determined, its effect on combating malaria was minimal. Side effects included nausea, headaches, vomiting, and a yellow hue to the skin. Around the middle of February, another squadron commander flew up to Henderson to relieve me, and it was my turn to head south to Espiritu Santo for a while, where you could get a bit more sleep and the food was almost civilized. Captain Jack Thornhill and his crew were scheduled to ferry a B-17 back to Espiritu Santo that had been pretty well shot up and needed fixing. I decided to go along as commander. It had a number 4 engine that was in bad shape, but we could use it at about half throttle for take-off. After we were airborne, with the gear and flaps up, we could feather it and continue on our way with the other three. The only things I had with me, other than the uniform I was wearing and my .45 (which I wore even when I went to bed) were my shaving kit and a ton of dirty clothes. I loaded my laundry and kit into a B-4 bag and dumped it into the back of the airplane. We launched as scheduled, feathered* number 4, and everything was looking fine until along the coast of an island named San Cristobal in the southern Solomons, the number 2 engine began to cough and sputter and was feathered. This left us with two engines, and we weren’t about to get very far in that condition, so we did a quick 180-degree turn and headed back toward Henderson. Just a couple of minutes later, number 3 coughed and quit, and we had no place to go but down. With only one engine pulling power, we made a beautiful splash landing in calm, protected water a few hundred yards off the northern shore of San Cristobal. Other than getting wet, the only harm done to the airplane was to tear the tail cone off as we dragged in for a touchdown. We immediately climbed out the hatches onto the top of the fuselage, extracted and inflated the rubber life rafts, climbed aboard, and watched our airplane settle into the water. As it was getting ready for the last plunge toward the shallow bottom, the old B-17 burped and bubbled quite a bit—and just before it...

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