The Last Heroes (Men at War 1)

He handed them a name and a telephone number scrawled on a sheet of notepaper.

They called the aide, and he told them to meet him at hangar six, across the field from primary training. When they got there, he was standing outside the hangar office. He walked them away from the hangar, onto the line of aircraft parked off the taxiway, until he stopped in the shadow of a transient aircraft, a Douglas TBD-1. It carried the numbers VT-8, the only shore-based squadron of the six TBD-1-equipped torpedo bomber squadrons in the Navy.

‘‘Either one of you got any time in one of these?’’ he asked, seemingly idly.

Both shook their heads. The aide shrugged and handed Canidy a thin sheaf of mimeographed orders. Bitter read over Canidy’s shoulder: Lieutenants (j.g.) Bitter and Canidy were ordered by NAS Pensacola to make training flights in TBD-1 aircraft between points within the continental limits of the United States during the fourteen-day period commencing 8 June 1941.

‘‘I don’t know how to fly one of these,’’ Canidy said.

‘‘I’ll walk you through it,’’ the aide said, ‘‘and take you around the pattern once or twice.’’ He had planned to tell them nothing more, but when he saw their confusion, he felt sorry for them.

‘‘You didn’t get this from me, understand?’’ he said, and when they nodded their agreement, he went on. ‘‘General Chennault is trying to get fifty, or maybe the entire hundred of them in the Navy, for his Chinese. For your volunteer group. The admiral doesn’t think the Navy will turn them loose. But it might, and if it happens, there should be somebody over where you two are going who knows how to fly them. Understand? Once an IP, always an IP.’’

‘‘What are we supposed to do, shoot touch-and-goes?’’ Canidy asked. ‘‘So people can see us, and ask what are two primary IPs doing shooting touch-and-goes with a torpedo bomber?’’

‘‘Do whatever you want with it,’’ the aide said. ‘‘As long as you don’t do it here. With the orders I just gave you, you can get fuel and whatever else you need at any military air base in the country. What you’re supposed to do is get time in the airplane. How you do that—as long as you do it away from here, and are back for the graduation parade—is up to you.’’

The TBD-1, called the Devastator, was an old-timer, first flown in 1935. It had a nine-hundred-horsepower Twin Wasp radial engine and was primarily designed to launch torpedoes at enemy shipping. It carried a crew of three: a pilot; a torpedo officer/bomb aimer, usually an aviator; and an enlisted man, a tail gunner, who was known as an airdale. The torpedo officer/bomb aimer performed his function on his stomach under the pilot’s seat, looking out through two windows in the bottom of the fuselage. The aircraft could carry one torpedo in a rack under the fuselage, or twelve one-hundred-pound bombs, six under each wing.

Normally, when pilots transitioned into a new aircraft, there was at least a week’s ground-school training. This was then followed by an orientation flight, during which an IP gradually and carefully permitted the student to take over the airplane.

Two hours after Canidy and Bitter met the admiral’s aide at hangar six, he certified them as qualified to fly the Devastator.

‘‘Sir,’’ Canidy asked, ‘‘please correct me if I’m wrong, but the way I read our orders, we are permitted to go anyplace we want to. We could head for San Diego if we wanted to, is that right?’’

‘‘That’s right,’’ the admiral’s aide said. ‘‘I thought I made that clear.’’

‘‘Yes, sir,’’ Canidy said. ‘‘Thank you, sir.’’

Cedar Rapids, Iowa June 10, 1941

Canidy drove his Ford convertible straight through from Florida, stopping only to catnap by the side of the road. Ed Bitter was somewhat reluctantly flying the Devastator to Cedar Rapids himself. He wanted to see his father and had to get rid of his car, Canidy had argued, so driving his car home and selling it there seemed like a good idea. So far as their getting time in the Devastator was concerned, he would fly it back from Iowa.

‘‘And what am I supposed to do with my car?’’ Bitter had protested.

‘‘You really want a suggestion, Eddie?’’

‘‘Why don’t I drive my car to Chicago, and you pick me up there?’’

‘‘We can make another trip if you like,’’ Canidy said. ‘‘But it would make more sense to leave your car here and then turn it over to The Plantation.’’

‘‘Why do I feel I am somehow being screwed?’’

‘‘After you really screw somebody one day, you’ll be able to tell the difference,’’ Canidy said. ‘‘In the meantime, don’t rock the boat.’’

Canidy arrived in Cedar Rapids just after five in the morning and was afraid that he would disturb his father. But when he got to the campus, there was a light on in the apartment’s tiny kitchen. His father was awake, shaved, and dressed, except for the tweed jacket he wore over his clerical dickey.

They shook hands. His father’s hand felt soft and gentle in his. Gentle and old.

The Reverend George Crater Canidy, D.D., Ph.D., headmaster of St. Paul’s School, long widowed, lived in a small apartment in the dormitory between the chapel and the Language Building, where he had his office. It was inconceivable that he would li

ve off campus. For in a very real sense, the Rev. Dr. Canidy and St. Paul’s School were one and indivisible.

Canidy told his father that he was being released from the Navy to go to China and work in the fledgling Chinese aircraft industry. With his engineering degree, that was credible. He did not want to tell his father that he had been given a job where bonuses were paid for the number of people killed.

The Reverend Dr. Canidy was pleased. He quickly concluded that his son was going to China as a practical missionary, to bring to its downtrodden masses the God-given miracles of Western technology. It wasn’t quite the same thing as his son going to spread the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, but it was far better than his being a sailor in the Navy.

It would do no harm to let his father believe that, Canidy decided.