Above the Thunder: Reminiscences of a Field Artillery Pilot in World War II

Introduction: The Heroic Liaison Pilots of World War II and the Amazing Piper Cub L-4

1 Lt. Col. Raymond R. Kerns has written here what I believe to be one of the finest memoirs to come out of World War II. He witnessed and participated in some extraordinary events, including the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and he has the writing skills to bring them to life for us. One of the historians who reviewed the manuscript for the publisher said it would make a good movie, and I said it before he did. Raymond Kerns was a young enlisted man in the Army before the start of the war, stationed in Hawaii, and when the Japanese attacked Pear Harbor on 7 December 1941, he was at Schofield Barracks and fired back at the attacking aircraft with an automatic rifle that he hastily grabbed from his barracks arms room, and thus began his eventful participation in the conflict. Later in the war, as an artillery liaison pilot, he was involved in many more exploits that he vividly recounts for us in this book, as U.S. forces battled the Japanese Imperial Army back across the Pacific, dislodging it from New Guinea and the Philippines as they hammered their way ever closer to its homeland. Kerns has given his fellow Americans a rare gift in this book, one that will be increasingly valued as future generations study that greatest of all armed conflicts in the history of mankind, which is over sixty years —Introduction— the heroIc lIAIson pIlots of world wAr II And the AmAzIng pIper cub l-4 TOM BAKER 2 above the thunder gone already and fast receding into history. There is a little something here for everybody: students of human nature, warfare, aviation, World War II buffs, and even (in its descriptions of native Pacific islanders) anthropologists. Like all good books, it will mean something different to everyone who reads it. For me, it brings to life all those young men whom the war took away from the farms, offices, schools, and factories of America and sent to fight in distant parts of the world, places with strange names most of them had never even heard of, some to die there, and some whose bones, like those of big John Durant and his comrades (see chapter 4), lie there still. Most of those young men returned home after the war and raised families (my generation, the baby boomers), eventually became grandparents and great-grandparents, and now have grown old or passed on. The book is special to me, not only because I am privileged to be a friend of the author but also because my father was one of those young men, and in many ways this is his story too. Like Kerns, my father flew the small Army observation planes that wreaked such devastation on the enemy through the artillery fire they called in upon the battlefields. This book provides the reader with some idea of what those men thought and felt as they found themselves far from home and family, locked in life-and-death struggles with wily, brutal foes. It is those insights that give this book its greatest importance. On a secondary but still important level, Kerns’s memoir illuminates the history and beginnings of U.S. Army aviation, for much of what he U.S. Army liaison pilot wings (Photograph by Tom Baker). To view this image, please refer to the print edition of this book introduction 3 writes about occurred while he was piloting the small, unarmed, lowflying observation aircraft of the artillery assigned to the support of the infantry. Beginning in 1942, these so-called liaison airplanes were assigned directly to the Army ground forces, not the Air Forces (that is, the Army Air Forces or Army Air Corps, which became the independent U.S. Air Force after the war), and unlike the Air Forces pilots who flew the fighters and bombers that the public usually associates with World War II aviation, the Army pilots of the ground forces interacted closely and continually with the foot soldiers who slugged it out with the enemy face to face. These liaison pilots, or L-pilots, thus had experiences much different from the pilots of fighter or bomber planes, and, indeed, L-pilots lived in a different world from Air Corps pilots. Air Forces pilots were normally based with their fighters or bombers at airfields away from the fighting front, or (in the case of Navy and...