Above The Thunder

Reminiscences of a Field Artillery Pilot in World War II

Raymond C. Kerns

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781612775784
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Seconde Guerre mondiale

An extraordinary memoir of an aviator's service in the Pacific Theater

"If you're looking for macho, fighting-man talk, you've picked up the wrong book.... This is just an honest narration of some of my experiences... during my service in the U.S. Army between 1940 and 1945."
—Raymond C. Kerns

The son of a Kentucky tobacco farmer, Raymond Kerns dropped out of high school after the eighth grade to help on the farm. He enlisted in the Army in 1940 and, after training as a radio operator in the artillery, was assigned to Schofield Barracks (Oahu) where he witnessed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and participated in the ensuing battle.

In the months before Pearl Harbor, Kerns had passed the Army's flight training admission exam with flying colors. But because he lacked a high school diploma, the Army refused to give him flying lessons. Undaunted, Private Kerns took lessons with a civilian flying school and was actually scheduled for his first solo flight on the afternoon of December 7, 1941.

Notwithstanding his lack of diploma, Kerns graduated from Officer Candidate School and then completed flight training in the L-4 Piper Cub in late 1942. He was assigned to the 33rd Infantry Division in New Guinea and saw extensive combat service there and in the Philippines. In a simple but riveting style, Kerns recalls flying multiple patrols over enemy-held territory in his light unarmored plane, calling and coordinating artillery strikes. While his most effective defense was the remarkable maneuverability and nimbleness of the L-4, he was often required to defend himself with pistols and rifles, hand grenades, and even a machine gun that he welded to his landing gear and once used to blow up an ammunition dump.

Proud of his service and convinced of the effectiveness and cost efficiency of the L-4 pilots in the Pacific and Europe, Kerns earned the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Silver Star.

Above the Thunder, arguably one of the best memoirs of combat action during World War II, will appeal to military historians as well as general readers.

– One –

THE PINEAPPLE SOLDIER

According to accounts I’ve read, he was Lt. Akira Sakamoto. I can envision him pulling his flying goggles down over his eyes, hastily rechecking the “ready” switches for guns and bombs, and rolling his Aichi-99 into a howling plunge toward Wheeler Field. Behind him twenty-five more dive-bombers from the Imperial Japanese Navy’s aircraft carrier Zuikaku began peeling off to follow him down in line astern. Higher up, the Zeros of their fighter escort, encountering no American opposition, prepared to join in the attack.

It was Sunday morning, 7 December 1941. My watch told me it was 0740 hours, but most people think it was nearly 0800 by the military clock. At that moment, few Americans, if any, knew that several hundred Japanese warplanes were streaming over the Island of Oahu, intent on destroying the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet where it lay at anchor in Pearl Harbor. Surprise was essential for success, and the attackers had achieved total surprise, seeming to drop out of nowhere—but actually coming in from a large carrier force some two hundred miles north of Oahu. Another essential was early destruction of the planes and facilities of the United States Army Air Force on Oahu, which had as its primary mission defense of the naval base at Pearl Harbor. Wheeler was the Army’s principal fighter base in Hawaii, and Sakimoto’s task was to nip reaction in the bud.

As his bomber slanted downward, Sakimoto could see rows of Curtiss P-40s and P-36 fighter planes tied down, wingtip to wingtip, on Wheeler. There was no hostile activity in evidence. He could see some strollers, an automobile here and there, a few people on the golf course, and soldiers moving between barracks and mess halls. It was evident that neither Wheeler nor adjoining Schofield Barracks had been alerted. Sakamoto’s heart must have raced in exultation and excitement as he concentrated on aligning his sights on what had sud denly become, by orders from Tokyo, enemy aircraft there below.

As the howl of Lieutenant Sakamoto’s diving plane rose in pitch and volume, it finally intruded on my consciousness and that of a few other men in the latrine of our barracks. With my razor poised in midair, I gazed silently at First Sergeant Regan of Service Battery. We stood there staring at each other, wondering if the pilot would be able to pull out. The howl suddenly ended in a thunderous, building-shaking crash.

Pvt. Burnis Williamson yelled, “He’s crashed in the quadrangle!”

It sounded as if he had, but when we rushed out to the third-floor porch and looked into the grassy square surrounded by concrete barracks like our own, we saw nothing unusual. And now we became aware of continuing howling and crashing and shuddering, so we ran to the east windows of our room.

We could see smoke already boiling up from Wheeler, nearly a mile away. Planes were trailing each other in from over the mountains of the Waianae Range, dropping their bombs on the airfield, then pulling up and banking around toward our left to sweep across Schofield with their machine guns chattering.

Since we had no mandatory formations on Sunday, most of our men were still in bed; my personal schedule had gotten me up early. I was expecting to make my first solo flight that day at John Rodgers Airport, which was where Honolulu International is now. I wanted to get breakfast before the mess hall closed at 0800, and then I’d ride the bus to the airport. But many of our men, tired from a long Saturday night after payday, lay like logs in their bunks. Only “Pappy” Downs rose up on an elbow and growled, “What the hell is going on, anyway?”

This 1950s aerial view of a part of Schofield Barracks is much as it must have appeared to the attacking Japanese pilots. The quadrangle is the enclosed area between the buildings and is similar to the one referred to in the text (Photograph courtesy of Tom Baker).

Pappy was one of my colleagues in the Radio Section. His real name was Maurice, but he was in his late twenties, which made him seem old to most of us boys, so we called him Pappy. I replied to him, “Somebody’s bombing the hell out of Wheeler Field!”

Beside me at the window, Sergeant Regan smiled. “No,” he said, “they’re not really bombing. It’s just a mock air raid. Funny they didn’t let us know about it, though. They usually do.”

“Sergeant,” I said, “if it’s just a mock air raid, where is all that smoke coming from?”

“Smoke bombs,” he explained. “They always use them.”

“Sergeant, I don’t believe smoke bombs would shake this building from that far away.”

He snorted derisively (as they always say in books). “What’s the matter, Kerns? You scared?”

I wasn’t exactly scared, just very concerned and becoming excited, but I said to him, “You’re damned right I am, Sergeant!”

I pointed to one of the planes as it pulled up and banked sharply, silhouetted against a gray cloud.

“You see the elliptical shape of those wings? I don’t know whose planes those are, but I know we don’t have any planes in the islands that look like that.”

Regan still was not convinced, but the matter was quickly settled when bullets began breaking windows of the NCO (noncommissioned officer) rooms on one side of the barracks—one of them being Regan’s own room—and one of the planes broke into view directly overhead, no more than seventy-five feet away, its guns now spewing bullets into the buildings beyond ours. On its gray and dull yellow wings and fuselage we could clearly see its markings: the big red Rising Sun.

“Hot damn! Japanese! It’s the damned Japs! Oh, those little yellow bastards will be sorry for this!” Sergeant Regan may have been the originator of that term we so fondly and universally used in reference to our Pacific enemy during that war. Seeing how things are all these years later, I hope they don’t hold it against us.

The men now rolled out with alacrity, crowding to the windows and porch to see for themselves what was happening. From the porch, I watched a man caught in the middle of the quadrangle moving from side to side along a small, low structure there as strafing planes came from different directions. He finally got a break and ran for better cover. A man in cook’s whites took a look around the corner of a kitchen across the quadrangle just in time to catch a bullet. He dropped and lay still.¹ A machine gun stitched a stream of lead in front of Pvt. William Cancro, and, as the man from “Joisy” later reported, he “toined” and ran another way. However, seeing a man fall with several bullets in his body, Cancro “toined” again to help Privates First Class Clarence Compton and Charles Dahl carry the man into our dayroom and place him on a pool table. PFC Warren Harriman, narrowly missed by a flurry of bullets, ran through a screen door to the first floor of the barracks and pounded up two flights of stairs, arriving breathless and bleeding from a small cut on his cheek to announce to us: “They’re shooting real bullets! They’re killing people downstairs!”

He was so right. Men caught in the open sought cover from the machine guns while an exodus of the curious from mess halls sometimes prevented others from getting back in. Pvt. Walter R. French was killed; PFC Claude E. Phipps took two bullets in the body but made it to cover in a barracks corridor before he collapsed; Pvt. Leo R. Eppes was outside his mess hall when a bullet from a Zero nailed him in the leg; Cpl. John E. Robinson was hit in the hand, and Pvt. Stephen A. Kitt went down wounded. First Lieutenent Charles G. Cassell, a former Army Air Corps bomber pilot who had recently joined our battery and was still quartered at Hickam Field, ran outside to bring a neighbor’s little girl to cover when the attack started there. He was shot through the face.²

In the midst of the furor, PFC Van Swaney, of Calf Creek in McCulloch County, Texas, bugler of the guard for the 25th Division Artillery that day, marched to the bugler’s post near the guardhouse and played “Alert Call”—twice, in the prescribed military manner. He never hurried or missed a note. I think that if a monument is ever erected to the Pineapple Soldiers of Pearl Harbor Day it should be a statue of Van Swaney in campaign hat, wool olive-drab (OD) shirt with khaki tie tucked in, khaki trousers and canvas leggings, his bugle to his lips, calling the nation to war. Like the others, Van did just what he was supposed to do: his assigned duty. If there was failure that day, it was not in the lower echelons.

Officers and NCOs not living in barracks were alerted in various ways, usually by hearing the bombs, and made their way as quickly as possible to their units. Capt. John Ferris was probably typical of our battery commanders. He arrived at his orderly room no more than ten minutes after the attack began. Breathless from running, he used the squawk box to announce that the attacking planes were Japanese: “This is no drill. This is no drill. This is a real air raid. I want everyone on the ground floor. Stay inside, stay in the corridors. All men to the ground floor. This is no drill.”

We had been so fascinated with watching the planes that few of us had started to dress, and now the men began heading downstairs, grabbing a garment or two, many of them wearing only the shorts and undershirt that are a soldier’s pajamas as well as his underwear. I yelled to the general assembly that we should at least take helmets and gas masks, but few paid any attention to me. I was just a PFC. So I soon found myself alone in the room where about forty men had been before. An occasional bullet zinged off the concrete floor as I hastily donned my field gear. I had recently read of the German airborne assault on Crete, and I had no desire to be caught out in some guava thicket in my underwear fighting enemy paratroopers. Finally, I laced up my leggings and headed for the stairs. And I fell flat on my face. I got up, took one more step, and fell again. Then I sat on the top step, took off my leggings, and put them on the proper legs so the strings of one would not catch on the hooks of the other and hobble me.

Pvt. Leo Eppes, seen here clowning for the camera in front of Schofield Barracks, took a bullet in the leg from a strafing Japanese plane during the attack on Pearl Harbor. Beside Eppes is Pvt. Allison Murphy (Photograph courtesy of Henry Hazelwood).

On the first floor at last, I ran down the porch and turned toward our supply room, gun in mind. I stepped over Claude Phipps as he lay bleeding on the floor and continued on my way. I helped PFC Leo Magnan and another man break in the supply room door, and there we got tools and further broke through the iron bars of the arms room, wondering where Sgt. Kenneth McCart was with the keys. (We later learned he was at the motor pool with Cpl. Adolph Otto Mann, shooting out-of-focus 8 mm movies of the Japanese planes.)

Although assigned a 1903 Springfield rifle, I grabbed a Browning automatic, commonly called a BAR, and hastily loaded three twenty-round magazines of ammo. Then I ran out to the quadrangle and waited for a target. Very soon one of the strafing dive-bombers came low across our building, firing into the building across the quadrangle. I brought up my BAR and let go a burst at him, but within about three seconds he had disappeared beyond that building, his rear gunner throwing lead back at our barracks as he went. I waited a few minutes for another, but none came near. And then I remembered that Captain Ferris had ordered us to stay inside, so I went into the dayroom, from which men were being dispatched in small groups to proceed to the motor pool, gun park, and section rooms to start loading out for the field.

So far as I know, I was the only man in my battalion to fire at the Japanese planes that day, with one exception. Our battalion commander, six-foot four-inch Lt. Col. (later brigadier general) William P. Bledsoe, a veteran of World War I, reportedly was seen out in the open, stomping and cursing as he fired his pistol at the planes.

The dayroom was still crowded with men, and the wounded man on the pool table lay moaning softly, his white undershirt soaked with blood. Amid the babble, I recognized the high-pitched voice of Pvt. Carl Bunn asking, “How in the hell do you get this thing to fire automatic?” Immediately afterward he accidentally fired a burst from his BAR into the dayroom ceiling, bringing down plaster over everything, including the wounded man. Bunn was a droll young radio operator with innumerable friends, a special fondness for oranges and beer, and a passionate devotion to Columbus Grove, Ohio. But he was never to see his beloved hometown again. In little more than three years, he would die beside his radio in a fight at Binalonan on Luzon. Burnis Williamson’s Springfield left a bullet hole above the screen door that was still visible when he visited forty years later.

As Japanese airplanes sprayed Schofield Barracks with bullets, Capt. John Ferris (right) announced over the squawk box, “This is no drill, this is no drill!” Fer ris is seen here two years later, in 1943, when he was Colonel Ferris, battalion commander of the 89th Field Artillery, on the Solomon Islands. At left is Capt. W. D. “Doug” Baker, who was later killed in action on Luzon, and Col. William W. Dick, G-3 of the 25th Infantry Division (U.S. Army photo).

Some of the boys were already on the move. A bullet slammed into the backseat of Pvt. Elmer Darling’s command car, just missing his shoulder. Maj. James Carroll, the battalion exec, en route to the ammo supply point, kept yelling, “Faster! Faster!” His driver, PFC Robert D. Schumaker, floored the accelerator but was frustrated by the engine governor that limited the vehicle to 35 mph. When Capt. Gavin L. Muirhead saw PFC Carl Koon frantically typing vehicle dispatches, he yelled, “We don’t need dispatches now! This is war!”

In less than an hour our battery—Headquarters Battery (HQ Btry)—was dispersed over a large field in Area M, between Schofield and Kolekole Pass, waiting for its turn on the roads to move to our island defense position. Some of us had grabbed little paper cartons of milk before leaving the barracks area, but few of us had eaten that morning. Now our mess sergeant, S.Sgt. Lorenzo Silvestre, formerly of the Philippine Scouts, assisted by cooks Charles Dlusky, George Kimball, and Michael Drapczak, came around handing out apples and sandwiches made from roast beef that had been prepared for Sunday dinner.

Radio operator William A. “Billy” Mulherin, who had spent the night at the YMCA in Honolulu, made his way to Schofield as quickly as possible, and now joined us in the dispersal area. He had passed along the edge of Pearl Harbor, and in his Georgia drawl, he gave us our first word of the disaster that had struck the Navy there.

Also arriving, smiling happily and not at all angry with the Jap anese, were two young soldiers named Robert Trayer and James O’Donnell who, a few months earlier, had stowed away on the Matson Liner Lurline and got almost to San Diego before they were caught. Like all but the most serious offenders, they had just been released from Schofield Stockade—the one made notorious by James Jones’s novel From Here to Eternity.

Meanwhile, fire continued to billow from Wheeler Field’s planes and hangars, casting a gloom of dark smoke that mixed with the broken clouds. Under those clouds, circling bravely in a loneliness that was both dramatic and pathetic, was a P-40 in camouflage paint with an unpainted silvery P-36 flying on its wing. They were the only American planes I saw aloft that morning, but there were a few others, piloted by devoted young lieutenants who used their private cars to reach their planes and take to the air, ill armed, against odds of twenty to one or worse, while their own air base was under attack, their own quarters blazing. They destroyed a number of Japanese planes. For example, only weeks out of flight school, Lieutenants Kenneth Taylor and George Welch took down two and four, respectively. There were a few others. As I have said, if there was a failure that day, it was not in the lower echelons of the command.

Two good men: Privates Carl Bunn and Bill Wil liamson. Bunn survived the attack on Pearl Harbor only to die three years later beside his radio on the Philippine island of Luzon.

There was, howe...