Above the Thunder by Raymond C. Kerns Page B

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.”
    â€œSergeant,” I said, “if it’s just a mock air raid, where is all that smoke coming from?”
    â€œSmoke bombs,” he explained. “They always use them.”
    â€œSergeant, 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.
    â€œYou 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.
    â€œHot 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 uptwo 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