Chick Enders’ prediction was only partly right. Colonel Bullock did order Sweet Rosy O’Grady and her fighting crew grounded for temporary repairs. But it was only for the rest of that day and night. To smash the Jap task force utterly, every bomber that could fly would be needed.

“Get those wounds dressed at once,” he ordered the eight bloodstained ragamuffins who faced him near Rosy’s shell-torn fuselage. “Then report to the mess shack. Fill your stomachs and hit the hay. If you’re all fit for duty tomorrow morning I’ll let you fly. And—er—congratulations on spotting that Jap task force, Blake! You’ve probably saved us a lot of ships and fighting men.”

Barry took the officer’s proffered hand, with an embarrassed smile.

“I was just playing a hunch, sir,” he murmured. “Chick—I mean, Lieutenant Enders—did the real job. He sank a big destroyer and blew the stern off a cargo vessel before we had to clear out. And the other boys knocked that Aichi T98 out of the sky—simply chewed her to junk!”

“My congratulations were meant for all of you, Lieutenant,” the colonel replied with a twinkle in his eye. “And so are the orders I just gave. Dismissed!”

As Barry and his friends moved wearily toward the hospital tent, a squadron of Mitchell bombers passed over, heading out to sea. The ceiling had lifted to three thousand feet. If it stayed there, Barry thought, the planes would have little trouble in spotting the Jap convoy.

The field, he noted, was almost empty of planes. Evidently they had taken off right after his radioed report. The Japs would catch plenty of grief before darkness shut down, but the real pay-off would be tomorrow. By that time Allied airfields from all over eastern New Guinea as well as Australia and the Solomons would be sending planes to the attack. The Japs would meet them with swarms of their own land-based fighters. A gigantic air-and-sea battle would be on, with the outcome impossible to guess.

Much the same thing was passing through the minds of all the crew, but they were suddenly too tired to talk about it. The tension of battle had broken. Now they were conscious chiefly of stiffening wounds and the deep, physical craving for food and sleep.

The night passed in dreamless oblivion. It seemed to Barry that he had just closed his eyes when the bugle routed him out of bed. He glanced unbelievingly at his watch. Yes, the hands stood at five-fifteen—half an hour before dawn!

“Roll out of it, Chick, Hap, Curly!” he called. “This is our big day. If we’re not out there in time, I bet you Rosy O’Grady will take off without us!”

Groans and yelps answered him, as the tent mates moved their sore bodies and found them more painful than the night before.

“Come on!” urged their young pilot. “Snap out of it or I’ll report the whole crew on the sick list. We’ll miss our crack at the Japs, but—”

He saw a boot come sailing from Hap’s side of the tent, and ducked just in time.

“All right, all right!” he laughed. “I’ll see you lazy birds on the runway, if you’re too late for mess call. So long!”

Hap Newton’s other boot caught him as he hurried out of the tent. He picked it up, but paused in the act of throwing it back.

“Setting up drill at this time of the morning, Lieutenant?” said Colonel Bullock’s voice behind him.

“No, sir—getting-up drill is more like it,” Barry replied. “My crew slept too hard last night, and they’re still in a fog.”

“Harrumph! I envy them!” grunted the colonel. “Couldn’t sleep at all myself, last night.... But I have good news for you, Blake. Your ship has passed every quick test for serious damage, and except for the holes that there wasn’t time to patch, she’s fit to fly. That damaged machine gun in the nose has been replaced. She’s been bombed up and serviced. I’m counting on her—and you men—to give the Japs a very special pasting today.”

“We’ll do that, sir, and—er—thank you for giving us so much of your time and thought,” Barry responded. “Are we taking off with the squadron this time?”

“Yes. Extreme right wing position,” Colonel Bullock told him. “The take-off is in thirty minutes.”

Barry saluted and watched the officer’s tall, still youthful figure stride away in the twilight. Behind him the crew were piling out of the tent.

“Just time to eat and run, fellows,” he said, turning toward the mess shack. “The squadron takes off at six.”

Clear sunlight gleamed through the bottle-green crests of the big combers that tossed and battered the Jap task force. Gone was the protecting blanket of clouds. Gone, too, was any hope in the mind of the Jap admiral that he could sneak up on the Allied bases without a costly attack from the air. Yet his words were confident as he issued his orders to the flotilla.

A second convoy of fourteen vessels had joined his ten during the night. With their added strength he felt certain of success.

“Inform the honorable captains that they will close the intervals between their ships to five hundred yards,” he told his chief executive officer. “Our massed antiaircraft, plus the umbrella of our land-based fighter planes, will beat off any air attack our enemies may make. In fact, we shall utterly destroy them.”

The executive bowed and hissed politely.

“We shall destroy them utterly,” he repeated. “Banzai!”

Green water crashed on the forecastle as the flagship buried her bow under a giant comber. The cruiser shuddered, heaved, and shook herself free. The bow rose higher, higher, until the steel warship seemed to those on deck as if she were going to stand upright on her propellers.

Again her foredeck dipped, rolled, plunged into the trough of a mighty sea. The antiaircraft crews balanced themselves calmly on sea-trained legs. Their eyes never left the reeling sky above them. They breathed deeply, fingering the cold steel of their weapons, waiting for the targets they knew would soon appear.

It was a different story below the wave-washed decks of the troop transport ships. There, packed in the stifling holds like sardines, eighteen thousand Jap infantrymen gagged and groaned. The throes of seasickness gripped officers and men alike. It was not deadly, they had been told, but it made them long for death. Only their inbred habit of obedience had kept them from shooting themselves or committing hara kiri through the past week of inglorious suffering.

Suddenly the flotilla’s antiaircraft opened fire with a concerted roar. The transports’ long range guns joined it. Their barking reports made the thin steel hulls quiver. Then came the bombs.

One struck an 8,000-ton troopship aft of the bridge. A thousand Jap soldiers died in the flaming inferno it made. Live steam from the wrecked engine room cooked fifty other men alive.

A second bomb blasted the stricken vessel. Its superstructure leaped into the air and fell overside in twisted pieces. The ship itself rolled, broke apart, and sank.

That second bomb was a credit to Chick Enders’ marksmanship. From a three-mile height he had hit the wave-tossed Jap ship with the accuracy of a sharpshooter. He had done it, flying through air that was bumpy with antiaircraft bursts, ignoring the darting Zero fighters that stabbed at his ship from above.

Soapy Babbitt in the top turret and Tony Romani in the tail were not ignoring the hornet-like Jap Zeros. While Barry, Hap and Chick were concentrating on their first bombing run, they knocked down a plane apiece.

The Flying Fortress squadron had dispersed, and its members were making individual runs over the flotilla. Now, however, the Jap flak was forcing them to fly higher. One bomber already was down in the sea. Several others had been nicked by shrapnel. Rosy O’Grady’s stabilizer showed ragged holes, and Cracker Jackson had been stunned by a direct hit on the ball turret.

“We’re going upstairs, too,” Barry Blake decided. “We won’t make so many hits, but we’ll make the Japs disperse, so their flak won’t be so concentrated.”

“That suits us gunners, Lieutenant,” Fred Marmon spoke up. “We’ll pick off a few more Zeros up there where our Lockheed Lightnings are dogfighting.”

The Jap “cover” of fighting planes certainly looked as if a tornado had struck it. The deadly but unarmored little fighters were torching down all over the sky. Others were fleeing back toward their New Guinea bases, glad of an excuse to return for gas. The reason was simple: plane for plane and pilot for pilot, our forces were better. When the Fortresses got “upstairs” there was not much opposition to deal with.

Rosy O’Grady made three more runs before the first wave of Australian Havoc bombers arrived beneath her. Skimming the sea at mast-height, the twin-engined attack bombers strafed the Jap decks with a terrible hail of bullets. They passed over, from stern to stem, and dropped their bombs at point-blank range—sometimes down the enemy’s smokestacks.

On their heels came the North American B-26 Mitchells, repeating the same tactics, with even greater effect. Back and forth like a great broom of destruction they swept across the Jap flotilla. Enemy gunners withered and died under blast after blast of hot lead. Those who survived tried desperately to swing their heavier guns into action, but that was like trying to shoot mosquitoes with a pistol.

Now, all over a forty-mile area, Jap ships were blazing. Barry saw three of them sink before Chick emptied the bomb racks with near misses on a dodging destroyer.

“We’ll go back for another load,” he said, turning the Fortress’s nose homeward. “How’s Cracker Jackson?”

“Coming out of it,” was Curly Levitt’s reply. “His right arm’s broken above the elbow, and his nose is banged up. The ball turret took an awful wallop from that ack-ack shell.”

“Better our ball turret than our bomb bay!” Hap Newton remarked grimly. “We could have gone out in a blaze of glory if that shell had hit a few feet forward.”

Much to Cracker Jackson’s distress, his friends took him to the hospital tent the moment they landed at Mau River.

“Have a heart, Lieutenant!” he begged Barry. “This bum wing feels fine in a sling, and I could shoot my left gun with my left hand. Please let me go along this trip.”

Barry shook his head.

“That’s a compound fracture, man!” he replied. “If you don’t get proper treatment now, it may gangrene. Besides, your nose is swollen so big that you couldn’t see around it to shoot. Lieutenant Levitt will man your turret if necessary.”

They left him, still protesting, in care of the field doctor.

“As a matter of fact,” Curly Levitt said when they were out of hearing, “Jackson’s turret is so banged up that it’s useless. It won’t turn, and only one gun will fire. I didn’t tell him, because he would worry about our going back without belly protection.”

No more than six Jap vessels were still in the fight when Rosy O’Grady returned with a fresh bomb load. One cruiser, four destroyers and a small cargo ship made up the half dozen. They were scattered many miles apart, each trying to make good its own escape. Between them the sea was covered with rafts, landing barges, lifeboats and wreckage of every description, but they made no attempt to take aboard survivors.

For the moment, the sky was fairly clear of planes. Two other Flying Fortresses, a PBM flying boat, a few Grumman Wildcats and Lockheed Lightnings on the hunt for Zero fighters—these were all that Barry Blake could see. The enemy had been definitely shot out of the air.

“We’ll go after that cruiser,” the young pilot told his bombardier. “Before she gets our range, I’ll dive to three thousand, level off there for a quick run, and then climb for a cloud. Ready, Chick?”

“Roger!” answered the little man in Rosy’s nose. “It’s risky but it will give me a swell target. You never learned this stunt out of a rule book, Barry!”

In the co-pilot’s seat, Hap Newton sat nursing the throttles, changing the bomber’s air speed from moment to moment. Barry worked the wheel to keep her constantly shifting altitude—foiling the ack-ack gunners on the Jap warship. Abruptly he shoved the wheel far forward.

The Fortress headed down as if out of control. Then, at three thousand feet she pulled out of it. For a matter of seconds her run at the Jap cruiser held true and level.

“Bombs away!” cried Chick Enders. “Let’s get out of here in a hurry!”

Barry put his Fortress into a steep, climbing turn that strained her to the limit. Zigzagging, banking, spiralling, he made the big bomber climb like a cat in a fit.

Far beneath, a sheet of flame was rising from the enemy cruiser. Chick Enders’ bomb had opened her oil tanks. Some of her antiaircraft were still firing, but Rosy’s unorthodox actions fooled them completely.

“Great stuff, Barry!” yelled the little bombardier. “We’ll pull the same stunt on that destroyer to the east of us. Let’s go!”

“We will not!” Barry Blake retorted. “I felt Rosy groan too many times in that last crazy climb. If I did it again she might really come apart. From now on we’ll confine our bombing attacks to a reasonable altitude. It’s better to waste a bomb than a bomber, even if you don’t believe it.”

As they headed for their new target at ten thousand feet, more bomb bursts tossed up white fountains of sea water around the farther warships. Seven or eight Fortresses were now on the scene. The flotilla’s fleeing remnants were doomed.

It had been a ghastly slaughter, Barry reflected. Nearly twenty thousand enemy troops, not to mention the crews of the Jap vessels, were either dead or floating among the wreckage. An army and a task force blotted out in two days!

Mechanically he guided Rosy O’Grady on her run. He was sick of killing. Even Chick’s jubilant, “Bombs away!” failed to thrill him as it had before.

Another hit! The thousand-pound bomb burst the thin-hulled destroyer apart like a paper bag. Swiftly she settled, stood up on her nose, and slipped out of sight. There was no time to launch a boat.

Five miles beyond, a number of tiny waterbugs were leaving zigzag wakes in the water. They were probably Jap landing barges, Barry thought, crammed with armed soldiers from one of the troop transports that had gone down. Now he saw the cause of their erratic dodging—a flight of Mitchell B-25’s diving at them, with tracer bullets streaking from their guns.

“Those Nips haven’t a chance, even if they’re lucky enough to shoot down a plane or two,” Hap Newton observed. “Their barges must look like sieves already. More meat for the sharks!”

“More butchery!” muttered Barry Blake. “It’s necessary, of course. If those armed Japs ever made land, they’d soon be killing our own men. That’s what they were sent here for. But I’ve seen enough slaughter today to make me feel rather sick.”

Chick Enders didn’t say so, but he may have felt the same way, after thinking it over. At any rate, he seemed to have lost his uncanny marksmanship for the rest of that day. His remaining bombs scored nothing better than near misses on a desperately zig-zagging destroyer. Another Fortress sank that vessel as Barry turned his plane homeward.

“Looks like some sort of a weather front, over toward the coast,” Hap Newton remarked. “I hope our base isn’t shut in by it. We’d have to find another field or bail out....”

“Tony can’t bail out, Lieutenant,” Fred Marmon’s voice interrupted. “He’s bleeding to death fast, from a leg wound. I’ve just found him unconscious in the tail turret, and put on a tourniquet.”

A moment of shocked silence followed Fred’s statement. Each man of the crew felt as if he himself had received a deadly hurt. The fortress crew was like a single body, its members knit inseparably together by weeks of common danger, duty, thought and feeling.

“Tie that tourniquet tight, Fred,” Barry Blake said huskily. “Keep Tony alive, and I’ll manage to set Rosy O’Grady down somewhere, ceiling or no ceiling.... Soapy! Contact Mau River, will you, and ask what the weather is there.”

Leaving his position in the top turret, Sergeant Babbitt sat down at his radio. In a few minutes he had the field’s weather report.

“Closed in,” it said briefly, “and so are all near-by airfields. Better try Buna—or Port Moresby if you have enough gas.”

“That’s the tough part of it,” said Hap bitterly. “We used up our gas hunting down the Jap Navy. Buna and Port Moresby are out! Our only hope is to hit the silk.”

Groans sounded over the interphone. Not their own danger but that of Tony Romani, brought unanimous protest from the others.

“There’s got to be some place for us to set her down, Skipper,” Fred Marmon declared. “You’ve always been able to figure a way out. We can’t let Tony down.”

“Curly!” exclaimed Barry Blake. “Get out your charts and see if there aren’t some atolls or small islands somewhere this side of that weather front. If one of them had a beach long enough and smooth enough—”

“I see what you mean,” Curly spoke excitedly. “I’ll tell you in two shakes, Barry. There’s a sprinkling of little islands between us and the western tip of New Britain.... Here they are! Two or three of them ought to be clear of fog right now. I’ll give you the compass course....”

A new spirit pervaded the bomber’s crew. Despite battle weariness, their still painful hurts and their worry over Tony, they crowded around Curly’s map like a bunch of eager kids.

“Don’t get your hopes too high,” their levelheaded navigator warned them. “None of these islands may have a beach big enough to land a fighter plane. If that’s so, we’ll lose Sweet Rosy O’Grady anyway.”

“And if we can land,” Barry added, “the place may be swarming with Japs. Personally I’m for taking the risk, but if there’s one man who doesn’t like the idea, we’ll turn back and bail out over Mau River. Tony would have a bare chance to live if we pulled his ripcord and chucked him out.”

Silence answered him. It was broken finally by Curly Levitt’s voice giving Barry the compass course for an unnamed islet that they might hope to reach ahead of the fog.

“Okay, Crusoes, you asked for it!” Rosy’s Old Man said cheerfully. “We’ll be in sight of Island number one in about twenty minutes.”

In twenty minutes to the dot they sighted the first white-and-green bump on the ocean’s surface. The islet rose to a central peak about three hundred feet high, covered completely with jungle. As the Fortress swept over it at two thousand feet, her crew voiced their disappointment. Such beaches as the place possessed were narrow and rocky. A helicopter might have found a landing place, but not a bomber with a 90-mile-per-hour landing speed.

Almost before the little peak had passed beneath, Curly was laying the course for Island number two. It lay a little farther to the north, and away from the weather front. Its length, however, suggested better landing possibilities, and it was barely fifty miles away.

Ten minutes later Chick Enders pointed it out. As its low-lying shape became more distinct, the crew’s hopes rose. The south beach, they saw, was wide and free from stones, and the tide at this hour was out. The only fault of this natural runway was its slight curve, and the tiny brook that broke its length.

“I’ll chance it,” the young skipper decided. “As a matter of fact, it’s going to be a lot easier to set down on that beach than to take off—even supposing we can get more gas.”

Climbing to a safe height, he turned and came in for his landing. In order to make the most of the beach’s length, he brought Rosy’s wheels down just at the farther edge of the brook. The Fortress bucked a trifle in the wave-packed sand, and rolled to a smooth stop. Within her, six men cheered like maniacs.

“Hold it down, men,” Barry advised. “We don’t know what we’re up against yet. Our first job is to dress Tony’s wound. Then we’ll explore the island, if there’s time to do that before dark.... Curly, pass me the first-aid kit and a bottle of water, will you, please?”

Tony was still unconscious when they carried him to the plane’s cockpit. His wound had evidently been made by a piece of flak that had ripped through his thigh like a dull knife. The arteries were bleeding slowly despite the tourniquet.

With small silver clips from the first-aid kit, Barry managed to close the severed blood vessels. He dusted a handful of sulfanilamide powder into the wound, removed the tourniquet, and used most of the kit’s gauze in a snug bandage.

Straightening up, he pointed to the windows in the nose and overhead.

“Open up and give him some fresh air,” he directed. “The minute Tony comes to, we’ll make him swallow some salt tablets and sulfadiazine, with all the water he can drink. That’s all we can do.... Chick, you and Soapy will stay with him now, while the rest of us look over the island. We’ll be back before dark if we don’t run into any Japs.”

“Okay, Skipper—we’ll hold the fort,” Chick answered. “If you should meet trouble near by we can cover your retreat with Rosy’s machine guns. Maybe you’d better demount one of them and take it along for an emergency.”

“Our pistols and the tommy-gun will be enough,” Barry said, as he left the cockpit. “Those fifty-caliber babies are too heavy to carry far, or to use without a tripod. See you soon, fellows.”

A five hour search of the island revealed no human inhabitant. On the farther side from their plane the Fortress men found the burned remnants of a native village and a few unburied corpses. The Jap butchers had evidently come and gone a few weeks before.

Barry and Hap downed a half-wild pig with their pistols. On their return to the Fortress, they frightened a number of scrawny island chickens that flew squawking into the jungle. It was plain that they need not starve, Fred Marmon remarked, even if escape from the island should be delayed for a month.

“I’ve no idea of waiting that long, Fred,” Barry laughed. “As soon as it’s dark, we’ll radio the base to send a supply ship here. With a runway of steel mats on the beach we should have no trouble in taking off. That is, if the Nips don’t spot us!”

Reaching the plane they found Tony Romani conscious again. He had been swallowing salt and water in quantity to make up for his loss of blood. Despite the pain of his wound he greeted his friends with a plucky grin.

“All I want is a juicy beefsteak,” he told them. “And mashed spuds and apple pie and—”

“You’ll have to be satisfied with pork chops,” Barry interrupted. “Beef won’t be on the menu until we’re back at Mau River. The same goes for potatoes. Dinner tonight will be roast wild pig, palm cabbage, and cocoanut milk—with a vitamin pill for dessert.”

Ravenous appetites made the jungle dinner a success, even though Tony dropped off to sleep in the middle of it. The others literally cleaned the bones of their little roast porker. There was no campfire to enjoy, however: the light would have betrayed them to any scouting Jap plane within twenty miles. The moment the sun set, they kicked sand over the coals and finished their meal in the dark.

Contact with Mau River was made quickly by radio. A brief message, not likely to mean much to listening Japs, gave their location. Barry added a request for supplies, and arranged radio and ground signals to guide the approaching planes to a moonlight landing.

“The next thing,” Barry announced, “is to camouflage Rosy so that she’ll be invisible from the air. As soon as the moon rises, we’ll begin cutting vines and leafy bushes. With only four pocket knives, it may take us most of the night, but that just can’t be helped.”

Ravenous Appetites Made the Dinner a Success