Meanwhile…
4,512 kilometres north-northeast of the Iron Raven
183 kilometres west-southwest of Midway Atoll
Dale Cole fiddled with his goggles, trying to settle them across the bridge of his nose. He needed to focus now, and something about the feel of the goggles was irritating him, making it impossible to concentrate. Dangling just above his left shoulder was his oxygen mask, currently unnecessary at the altitude he was maintaining. His left hand rested on the control yoke between his legs, ensuring that he remained level.
After finally wrestling the goggles into as comfortable a position as he thought they were ever likely to get, he placed his right hand onto his left, resting both of them on the control yoke as he continued on.
Looking to either side of him, he could see dozens of identical planes arranged in a carefully spaced formation, the sunlight sparking off their metal fuselages. Each twin-seater Douglas SBD Dauntless was painted predominantly in a marine blue-grey, with a light grey belly; a pure white five-pointed star within a deep blue circle was positioned towards the tail and at the end of each wing. The planes were constantly shifting through the sky as they made small adjustments relative to each other in order to maintain formation.
Dale could also see the rear gunners on each plane seated facing backwards, their heavy machine guns swaying languidly from the turbulence. The rear gunners sat in the open air, with their canopies pushed back to allow them the space to aim and shoot freely when the time came.
Together, the Dauntlesses made up part of the first wave of aircraft now heading towards the approaching Japanese carrier fleet, somewhere in the distance. Dale himself was positioned somewhere towards the middle of the V formation’s left echelon.
This was it – showtime. After the agony of Pearl Harbour and the subsequent months of regrouping, manufacturing, training, and planning, things had finally come to a head, or so it seemed. The Japanese had contrived to strike out at the US base at Midway in a surprise attack, but the analysts at Station HYPO had decoded the Japanese Navy’s code sufficiently enough that the location and date of the attack had been determined beforehand. Instead of an unsuspecting target, the Japanese fleet would now be met with coordinated and large-scale resistance.
The American planes thundered onwards through the sky, a horde of vengeful steel eagles. The sea below them was a shallow and vibrant blue, filled with barely submerged white sandbars and swirls of bright coral reefs.
Dale lifted the oxygen mask to his mouth. “You doing alright back there?” he said into the radio.
The voice of Garcia, his rear gunner, came rasping into his ears through a surge of electronic noise. “Yeah, everything’s A-OK back here. Beautiful day.”
Garcia wasn’t wrong. The sun was a bright sphere in the sky above them, throwing eye-watering glare through the plane’s canopy and casting a thick iridescent reflection across the ocean perpendicular to the horizon.
“Yes, it is,” Dale replied. “Just make sure that gun is ready to go when we need it.”
Garcia laughed. “Oh, it’ll be ready! Can’t wait to finally shoot some Japs.”
“Good man.”
Dale squinted through the windscreen ahead, struggling to find any sign of the enemy through the refracting dust and smudges on the glass.
He felt the need to maintain a professional confidence, but he was restless, his stomach turning itself over like a washing machine. With nothing much to do yet but keep flying straight, he found his mind racing. Had the mechanics been thorough in their pre-flight checks? Had he been thorough in his pre-flight checks? Hell, what if the guns hadn’t been loaded? At least he had seen the set of bombs secured under the plane’s wings before he got in, so he knew he had something to fight with…
He quickly shook his head. What the hell was he thinking? Of course the guns had been loaded. It was just nerves, he told himself, just the dawning realisation that the real test had now arrived after so much training and anticipation. Still, it was becoming more and more difficult to keep flying straight, as simple as it was in practice. He knew that he was flying towards the enemy, towards a real battle, towards his possible-
“There they are.” The harsh voice in his ears, filled with static, cut through his thoughts. Dale recognised the voice as that of the flight leader, Harris, positioned at the very tip of the formation.
Dale scanned the distance, and soon spotted the distant specks on the edge of the horizon. Visually, they were almost nonentities, just tiny dark blips, but the knowledge of what they represented filled him with dread. Even so, there was nothing to do but keep flying. A lot of people were counting on him.
Time seemed to stretch out unbearably as the American planes bridged the distance to the enemy fleet. Even at their cruising speed of almost three hundred kilometres an hour, it took the flock of bombers the better part of an hour to close the gap.
They were within about a dozen miles of the Japanese carriers when Dale noticed a swarm of black dots ascending into the sky.
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The Japanese fleet had spotted them.
The enemy aircraft quickly grew larger as they rushed to intercept the US planes, and then still larger. They were almost certainly Mitsubishi Zeroes, extremely nimble fighters that were suicidal to engage in a conventional dogfight. Dale reached for the handle of the bomber’s forward machine gun, his thumb shaking over the trigger.
He was about to fire when the Japanese fighters abruptly broke off in streaking contrails to engage the US fighter escort that had dropped down from the shelter of the sun’s glare above, creating a sudden frenzy of crisscrossing streams of yellow and red tracer fire that swirled around the American bombers.
Thankful for the reprieve, Dale focused ahead, attempting to take stock of the enemy forces. He counted five aircraft carriers, four battleships, and at least twenty cruisers and destroyers. Dale had never seen so many ships in one place before, let alone enemy ships that were armed and ready to fire at him and everyone else around him.
It was surreal, impossible. How could there be this much military power, this much latent destructive potential, in the whole world? But there it was in front of him, arrayed across the clear tropical water in floating structures of steel, and men, and a future of death.
With the Zeroes focused on dispatching the US fighters above, Dale and the rest of the bombers had a fairly easy run of the last few miles to the Japanese fleet. At least it was easy, until they drew within about a mile. Then, the closest enemy ships surged into hostile life, and began to spit bursts of fire upwards at the approaching bombers in curving showers of red-hot bullets. To his left, Dale saw the wing of his neighbouring plane snap off like a piece of plywood, sending the bomber careening down towards the sea in what quickly became a fireball that belched a trail of black smoke. He squinted, following the destroyed aircraft for as long as he could, hoping to see a parachute, but saw nothing. He felt powerless in his urge to help, but there was nothing he could do. He shifted his focus back to the task at hand, and angled his plane into an attack vector directed towards the nearest aircraft carrier.
On the water below him, the carriers and destroyers were now truly unleashing their defensive armaments. Bullets surged upwards in hundreds of disjointed streams, filling the sky with a lattice of angry metal shards and relentless explosions. Dale’s eyes widened, struggling to process the scale of visual information he was getting from all directions.
With a quick breath to brace himself, he pushed the control yoke downwards and the bomber entered into a rapid dive. Dale finessed the controls as best he could to try and arc around the storm of machine gun fire that was flaring upwards from below in jets of glowing red tracer, but moments later the carrier’s complement of Type 96 AA guns also burst into life. He knew it was impossible to avoid these antiaircraft shells, invisible until they exploded into lethal balls of fire and metal splinters – he would just have to continue his descent, and hope he didn’t end up in the wrong place at the wrong time.
He was approaching from almost straight above the carrier, holding a near-vertical dive as bullets streaked past the cockpit on all sides, his plane shaking from the extreme forces as it screamed towards the ship below. Once the carrier had grown as large in his windscreen as he was comfortable with, and he was sure that his payload would strike true, he pressed the release for his bombs and felt the plane jolt beneath him as it suddenly grew a ton lighter.
He barely had time to see the heavy metal cylinders punch through the deck before he yanked the yoke back to pull out of the dive as fast as he dared, the intensifying g-force compressing his lungs and slamming him into his seat. Around him, the plane’s fuselage shuddered as it struggled to perform what he was demanding of it. As his aircraft drew level, he shot past the carrier’s control tower, and then swung back up into the sky as tracer zipped past the cockpit from behind him. Over the roar of the plane’s howling engine and the surrounding battle, he heard Garcia cutting loose with the rear machine gun in thunderous bursts. Dale flicked the yoke across to the left, sending the plane into a rapid spin, before jerking it back towards the centre and then down to the right slightly, which positioned the plane on an upward trajectory that would hopefully take it out of the antiaircraft guns’ effective range.
“Did we hit it?” Dale shouted into his radio once they had reached some semblance of safety and drawn level again.
“Yeah, we got ‘em!” Garcia yelled back. “The deck went up like a Thanksgiving bonfire!”
Dale whooped in delight, before turning his attention towards determining what exactly was happening in the battle around them.
As it turned out, it was almost impossible to determine anything.
There were carriers on fire all around, and other ships in various stages of sinking. Flames roared within enormous clouds of black smoke that billowed into the sky from jagged rends in their massive steel hulls. What seemed like thousands of tiny dark specks were spreading throughout the sea, sailors who had decided to chance sharks and drowning instead of swift immolation. In the skies above, planes were darting around and firing at each other in all directions, with many others trailing black fumes or falling out of the sky entirely in chaotic, uncontrolled trajectories. Tracer rounds and antiaircraft bursts still filled the sky, maintaining a transient, fatal labyrinth.
With a slow exhalation, Dale realised he had managed to find a relatively quiet pocket of airspace towards the periphery of the ongoing madness.
“We’ve done enough h-” the last word was cut off by a burst of static. “Fall back.”
Dale tilted his head. The voice wasn’t that of the flight leader, or even his wingman, but of the pilot ranked below them.
Harris and Lee must have bought it, then. Along with God knew who else.
On the other hand, it seemed like he might actually make it back. Dale’s breathing began to slow as he banked his plane into a homeward trajectory, joining a steady stream of other returning survivors from the bomber squadron.
Dale allowed himself a smile. His first mission, and he had probably managed to destroy an aircraft carrier – not a bad start to things, if he said so himself. He couldn’t wait to tell everyone back home. Especially Denise, who-
“Oh shit!” Garcia’s voice blasted into his ears. “We got a fuckin’ Zero on our tail!” Dale had no time to respond before the machine gun at the rear of the Dauntless thundered back to life.
An instant later, the air around his face erupted into small clouds of splintered material that filled the cockpit.
He lurched in his seat involuntarily, his brain processing what had happened far too late for him to have done anything about it. A flurry of bullets had riddled the plane’s fuselage from somewhere – if he had been hit, he wouldn’t even have known it.
He checked himself over with shaking hands as best he could. Everything seemed intact. His mind quickly turned to his plane, which was obviously damaged, but to what degree he couldn’t yet be sure. They were still flying though, which was a good sign.
He looked up and saw that the windscreen was showered with specks of dark red liquid, the larger ones slowly tracing their way downwards.
It couldn’t be his blood. He raised his mask to his mouth.
“Garcia?”
There was nothing but static coming through his earcups.
His mouth was suddenly dry, his head feeling increasingly heavier, or maybe lighter, or both.
“Garcia!?”
The droning, static hiss in his ear continued.
Dale could only grip the control yoke harder as his thoughts and stomach churned.
Then another concern entered his mind.
Where the hell did the Zero go?