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43 Chapter 3 First Mission The morning of April 17 had a different feel, electric. The squadron’s officers were still in a closed-door briefing while rumors buzzed about a bombing mission, the squadron’s first. All that remained for pilots to tell their crews was when and where. When Joe Deasy met with his crew and gave them the particulars, it was the first time they had heard of Funafuti. “Funa-who?” Yankus snorted. Twenty-three B-24 Liberators would fly to Canton Island, a porkchop-shaped atoll 1,907 miles southwest of Oahu, refuel, and continue the 737 miles to Funafuti in the Ellice Islands group, 2600 miles from Hawaii. “That’s halfway to Australia,” Hess muttered. Six months before, on October 2, 1942, eleven ships of the United States Navy had entered Funafuti’s lagoon and landed a Construction Battalion. The Seabees immediately began construction of an airfield and support facilities while Marines prepared defenses and set up antiaircraft guns. To build the runway, Seabees bulldozed thousands of coconut trees and covered arable land with hard-packed coral. The airfield was completed before the end of the year.1 Funafuti was a forward base for the American bombers, a staging facility, not equipped for the squadron’s aircraft to stay. The airmen 44 Finish Forty and Home weren’t told where they were going from there; they would be briefed again on Funafuti. There was a lot of speculation, but most of the men agreed they would probably bomb Tarawa. On the long flight to Canton, the men ate plain baloney sandwiches delivered to the flight line from Kahuku’s mess hall. They used their flak jackets for pillows and stole naps in the back of the airplane. A relief tube, or “piss pipe” as crewmen called it, was built in to the side of the plane just aft of the left waist window; another one was installed behind the flight deck. There was a portable toilet, but the men avoided it unless they were desperate. It was better to wait than use the “honey bucket” and have to wash it out after landing, because if you used it, it was yours to clean. Even the piss pipe could be a nasty problem at higher altitudes where the pipe’s flow could freeze and cause a messy back-up. The Navy garrison on Canton treated their overnight guests well. The Air Corps men got a hot meal in the Navy mess hall and slept in clean barracks with fresh white bed linens. Early the next morning, Dogpatch Express and twenty-two more refueled B-24 Liberators took flight for the final leg of the trip to Funafuti, and on the afternoon of April 18, the wisps of land of the Ellice Islands came in to view. The planes approached Funafuti’s coral airstrip from the southeast. The island, shaped like a long, narrow boomerang, curved from the southwest to its thickest part in the middle, then arched back toward the northwest. Long and graceful, Funafuti was about fifty yards wide at each end, about 700 yards wide in the middle, and seven and a half miles long. Waves broke along the eastern side, the dark blue water of the Pacific just beyond and to the right as the aircraft approached. To the left of the island, in the middle of the boomerang, was a lagoon, its calm water a beautiful shade of light blue fading to green close to shore. Coconut trees covered the island from its lower tip, nearest the approaching planes, and ended at the airfield. The white coral runway First Mission 45 cut straight across the leading edge of the boomerang, beginning just a few feet from the ocean, and it seemed to end in the ocean on the other side.2 A detachment of U.S. Marines and Navy men were stationed on the island. If it was possible to have less than the sailors on Johnston Island, these men had it. At least the Johnston Island garrison could look forward to regular visits by planes from Hawaii. Funafuti did have the advantage of a friendly, cooperative native population, and the Marines and sailors at Funafuti were amused by the pretty, dark skinned and topless girls among the island’s several hundred natives. But American service men were supposed to keep their distance from native women and the novelty wore off soon enough. There were no taxiways and very few revetments or...

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