“WEST OF MIDWAY ATOLL THE LAST AVENGER 0944”
“Whatever intuition Bert Earnest still possessed had told him it was time to turn east toward the sun. The moment had occurred almost an hour earlier. It had felt just right to change course to the east. Without a compass or any other instruments, all he had to go on was instinct. The consequences of being wrong were obvious. If he overshot the tiny atoll of Midway, the next mass of land ahead of them would be Pearl Harbor, more than twelve hundred miles away. He wasn’t sure he had enough gas to even reach Midway. Having turned east, he and Harry saw nothing but ocean for miles in every direction. On and on they flew, searching vainly for the wake of an American ship or the hint of a landmass on the far horizon. As time passed he began to consider the increasing likelihood that they would have to put the plane down in the sea. Although the water looked calm, there was very little chance that search planes would come looking for them to the west of Midway. In frustration, he decided to climb through the cloud cover to see if something might be visible from a higher altitude. Rolling the trim tab wheel with his fingers, he took the battered plane up to four thousand feet. Breaking through the clouds, he and Harry began scanning the sky ahead of them. Bert felt a shiver of excitement as he looked toward the southeast and saw what appeared to be black smoke. He headed toward it, dropping down through the clouds as they drew closer. Emerging beneath the clouds, he could see that the smoke was coming from a massive oil or gasoline fire. The island could only be Midway. It looked like they were going to make it. With his radio shot out, there was no way for him to contact the airfield on Eastern Island to identify himself. As he approached Midway, Bert carefully went through the designated recognition turns that would identify the Avenger as a friendly aircraft. After coming this far, he didn’t want some trigger-happy Marine gunner to shoot them down.”
Excerpted from “A DAWN LIKE THUNDER”, author Robert J. Mrazek. Publisher: Little, Brown and Company, Hachette Book Group. 237 Park Avenue, New York, NY. 10017.
To be continued, Islander.