A HANDFUL OF HELL book preview

PREVIEW

“The blazing phosphorus whirled around the inside of the B-29 like a meteor gone berserk. Ricocheting off the curved roof of the plane, it bombarded Erwin with its searing heat...the putrid smell of scorched flesh filled the cabin... He fell backward, waving his arms, thrown off balance and dazed....”

Aviator, diplomat, and historian, the prolific Robert F. Dorr was uniquely qualified to write for men’s adventure magazines, bringing sweat-and-blood, nuts-and-bolts authenticity to his many stories of combat, adventure, and sacrifice. This white-hot collection showcases the very best of Dorr’s tense, vintage tales of aerial conflict and boots-on-the-ground heroism.

paperback, ebook, and limited edition hardcover with alternate cover art and exclusive content

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BY robert f. dorr selected bibliography CRIME SCENE: FAIRFAX COUNTY (novel) AIR POWER ABANDONED Hitler’s Time Machine (novel) Fighting Hitler’s Jets Mission to Tokyo Mission to Berlin Hell Hawks! (with Tom Jones) Marine Air

by ROBERT DEIS BARBARIANS ON BIKES (Editor, with Wyatt Doyle) CRYPTOZOOLOGY ANTHOLOGY (Editor, with David Coleman and Wyatt Doyle) HE-MEN, BAG MEN & NYMPHOS (Editor, with Wyatt Doyle) WEASELS RIPPED MY FLESH! (Editor, with Josh Alan Friedman & Wyatt Doyle)

BY WYATT DOYLE I NEED REAL TUXEDO AND A TOP HAT! BARBARIANS ON BIKES (Editor, with Robert Deis) dollar halloween CRYPTOZOOLOGY ANTHOLOGY (Editor, with Robert Deis and David Coleman) HE-MEN, BAG MEN & NYMPHOS (Editor, with Robert Deis) WEASELS RIPPED MY FLESH! (Editor, with Robert Deis and Josh Alan Friedman) STOP REQUESTED Illustrated by Stanley Zappa

f o l u f A Hand

L L HE r ies by

ure stor t n e v d a d n a Classic war

r o D .

F t Rober

t doyle t a y w d n a is ert de edited by rob

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A New Texture book

Copyright Š 2016 Subtropic Productions LLC All Rights Reserved.

Stories copyright Š 1962, 1963, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1969, 1970, 1972 Robert F. Dorr. All stories reprinted by arrangement with, and permission of, the Author. All rights reserved.

Editorial Consultant: Sandee Curry/SandeeCurry.com Book design and layout by Wyatt Doyle MensAdventureLibrary.com MensPulpMags.com

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Booksellers: A Handful of Hell and other New Texture books are available through Ingram Book Co. ISBN 978-1-943444-08-3 First New Texture trade edition: January 2016 Also available in ebook and limited edition hardcover editions Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Robert Deis Preface

7

Robert F. Dorr “My Plan Was To Be a Writer and an Adventurer. . . .”

10

“Handful of Hell” [Climax, October 1962]

39

“The Bloodiest Single Mission in Air Force History” [Bluebook, November 1962]

51

“Rammed Over Berlin” [Stag, August 1963]

67

“Yank Ace Who Battled the Japs Over Pearl Harbor” [Stag, December 1965]

89

“The ‘Impossible’ Raid” [Stag, January 1966]

103

“The POW General Who Tried to Kill Himself ” [Man’s, November 1965]

117

“I’m Going to Ram That Nazi Plane!”

[Man’s, November 1966]

137

“Fish Him Out—Or Else!”

[Man’s, December 1966]

155

“5 Downed GIs Who Gutted Ambush Alley” [Men, June 1967]

177

“Yank Ace Who Saved the Anzio Invasion” [Man’s, December 1967]

193

“The Day the Boondocks Ran With Yankee Blood” [Bluebook, August 1969]

209

“Borneo Longshot” [Male, March 1970]

223

“I Fought Castro’s Cutthroat Guerrilla Squad” [For Men Only, April 1970]

237

“The Incredible Glory Saga of the Boondock Padre” [Man’s Illustrated, October 1970]

253

“I Fought Burma’s ‘Red Flag’ Terrorist Killers” [Bluebook, March 1972]

269

Preface

In November 2009, I received a short email from author Robert F. Dorr regarding my then recently-launched blog about vintage men’s adventure magazines, MensPulpMags.com: “I stumbled upon your blog more or less by accident,” he wrote. “I wrote hundreds of articles for the men’s pulp adventure magazines. I still have a small collection of those mags in the basement. I didn’t know anyone else was interested in them!”

I was thrilled. I had read some of Bob’s men’s adventure magazine stories. I was aware, though not nearly as aware as I would become, that he was among the best and most prolific of the many great writers who once worked for the genre during its lifespan from the early 1950s to the mid-1970s: writers such as Mario Puzo, Bruce Jay Friedman, Lawrence Block, Walter Wager, Robert Silverberg, Martin Cruz Smith and Walter Kaylin.

That brief email led to an ongoing correspondence with Bob Dorr; to a series of phone interviews and posts I wrote about him on my blog; to the creation, at Bob’s suggestion, of the Men’s Adventure Magazines group on Facebook, which now has many members from all over the world; to the inclusion of two of his classic men’s adventure magazine stories in our first anthology of men’s pulp mag stories; and now to this collection, comprised solely of his stories from those magazines.

It also led to a long-distance friendship that spans the 1,200 miles between his home in Oakton, Virginia and mine near Key West, Florida.

Almost exactly six years later, in November 2015, I received

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A Handful of Hell

Robert F. Dorr with a copy of his recent Mission to Tokyo: The American Airmen Who Took the War to the Heart of Japan (Zenith Press, 2012) another short email from Bob with shocking news. He had been diagnosed with a brain tumor, specifically a glioblastoma, the most common type of brain tumor—and the most aggressive.

When I called Bob to get more information, what he said to me that day was heartrending but also inspiring. He started by saying he was happy to be able to enjoy a beautiful fall day in Virginia with his beloved wife Young Soon and their Labrador retriever, Autumn. He was looking forward to going out to lunch with them and having a big, juicy hamburger.

He went on to tell me about other things he was grateful he’d been able to do in the 76 years he’d lived so far. He frequently made me laugh with his characteristically wry sense of humor.

A few days later he sent out an email to followers of his own blog. It publicly broke the news about his brain tumor and reiterated things he’d told me on the phone, with the same sense of grace and humor. It read, in part: I’m still able to talk, including talking on the phone, but the tumor is near the speech center and my ability to speak, to type, and to add and subtract is deteriorating rapidly . . .

I’m in good spirits amidst these gorgeous autumn days with wonderful support from family, friends, and readers.

Well, okay, not every reader. One reader mailed me a package of Preparation H. That’s genuinely thoughtful but maybe not the work of an adoring fan.

My first paid publication was in the November 1955 issue of Air Force magazine when I was in high school. I got to be

Preface

9

in the Air Force in Korea and to spend 60 years writing about those who fly and fight. A current example is the cover story on the B-24 Liberator in the January 2016 Aviation History magazine.

Hey, I got to invade Panama, fly with the Air Force in Somalia and in Sarajevo, cover Desert Shield, make friends with senior leaders and everyday airmen, fly in a F-15E Strike Eagle (several times) and write. I went with the Air Force to far above the Arctic Circle and to the tropics. I also wrote for the men’s adventure magazines, the women’s confession magazines, the supermarket tabloids and the History Channel. It just doesn’t get better. . . .

Thanks to my family, friends, and readers for a great time.

—Bob Dorr In late November 2015, Bob had successful surgery to remove his brain tumor. He has explained to me that there is no cure for the type of cancer he has. But the surgery bought him more time, and he’s happy about that.

Bob’s mind is as sharp as ever. So is his sense of humor. And, although the tumor did affect his fine motor skills, making typing a slow process, he’s back to writing again. He posts regularly on his blog, in the Facebook groups he created for his books, and in the Men’s Adventure Magazines group.

In late December, he completed and self-published a new novel, Crime Scene: Fairfax County, a murder mystery set in 1947 that features characters from his alternate history novel, Hitler’s Time Machine.

Earlier that month, I sent Bob a proof copy of the anthology you now hold in your hands. In several phone calls we’ve had since then, he’s told me he loves it. I am immensely pleased by that. I have come to love Bob and his stories and books. I’m very grateful that he has allowed us to reprint some of his classic men’s adventure stories.

Above all, I’m deeply grateful to have had the opportunity to get to know Robert Francis Dorr. He’s an inspiration and a role model to me as a writer and publisher, as a keeper and teller of part of America’s cultural history—and as a human being.

Robert Deis Somewhere Near Key West January 2016

Bob Dorr at age 4, circa 1943. (Photo courtesy of the author)

“My Plan Was to be a Writer and an Adventurer. . . .”

Robert F. Dorr

From childhood, I’ve had two main interests: the Air Force and writing.

I was born on September 11, 1939. I grew up in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC and went to Suitland High School. I frequently would skip school to go to Andrews Air Force Base and look at airplanes.

The genre of aviation pulp fiction magazines with flying aces stories were gone by the time I was 12 years old. I did read magazines about airplanes and aviation. In addition, I read the men’s adventure magazines, because they described an adventurous life and included a lot of great stories about pilots and war heroes by writers I admired, like Glenn Infield.

I was about 12 when I used the money from my newspaper delivery route to pay for an Underwood portable typewriter. I used it to write a letter to Air Trails magazine telling them they identified an airplane incorrectly. They published my letter, and I thought, “Gee, my name is in print. That’s really exciting.” I’m still excited by that today.

I had my first paid magazine piece published in the November 1955 issue of Air Force Magazine, the journal of the Air Force Association, when I was 16.

Another thing happened at about that point in my life: We discovered that I had been born with a hearing impairment. So my other dream, which was to go to the new Air Force Academy they were building in Colorado and fly the F-86 Sabre jet and be a great fighter pilot, was not available to me, because I couldn’t pass the

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hearing requirement to become a fighter pilot. But I did end up joining the Air Force and flying in hundreds of different planes. I also became a writer.

Even though I couldn’t become a pilot, I was sufficiently interested in the Air Force that I enlisted the day after I graduated from high school, in June 1957. I had the idea that I was going to be a jet engine mechanic and was going to work on the latest jets. If I couldn’t fly them, at least I could be on the flight line. Then the Air Force gave me aptitude tests and discovered that I had an aptitude for learning languages.

Based on that, they sent me to study the Korean language at the Army Language School in Monterey, California (since that time, it’s been renamed the Defense Language Institute). I took the longest Korean language class the Air Force ever gave, which ran about 20 months. Then I was sent to Korea and given a job listening to the bad guys, the North Koreans, on the radio. It was ironic, since I’m the guy who couldn’t pass the hearing test to become a pilot.

The Korean War was over, but it was still a very tense situation.

It was like the Korean War without the shooting. The nation of South Korea I was stationed in from 1958 to 1960 was a very crude, primitive country that bears no resemblance to what it looks like today. Today, it is in many respects ahead of us in education and technology. But not then. The village outside of the main gate of the air base was like the Wild West, with the dusty streets, and the saloon, and the drinking, and the prostitutes in their white satin garb.

All of that is gone today. It’s a different world there now, but that’s what it was like then.

Part of what my squadron did was to fly reconnaissance missions in C-47s. In everyday jargon, that would be a spy plane, although technically speaking, a spy is a civilian. We were part of a massive communications intelligence operation that was going on around the world during the Cold War and continues today.

Anyway, that’s how I, as a very young man, still a teenager, had the experience of seeing how knowledge of a foreign language and living in a foreign country could make life look very different.

I was still in love with the old Terry and the Pirates comic strip exotic vision of the Far East, including the women. And so, a combination of an aptitude for language, and an interest in

“My Plan Was To Be a Writer and an Adventurer...”

13

Bob Dorr, 1961. (Photo courtesy of the author) the Orient, plus the exotic, plus women, all led eventually to my subsequent career in the Foreign Service.

I got out of the Air Force in August of 1960, just before my 21st birthday. I then spent several years doing various things, mostly in California. I also went to Hong Kong.

My plan was to be a writer and an adventurer.

I wanted to become the next great American writer. I studied Ernest Hemingway and pretended to care about André Gide. I wanted to write the Great American Novel.

The problem with that idea was that I didn’t really have the Great American Novel in me. I didn’t have this great American story that I felt compelled to tell. I just liked writing words. And, I liked other people seeing I had written words and that they were in print.

The first example of my work in men’s pulp adventure magazines was published in Real magazine, a story called “The Night Intruders” in Real, April 1962 (included as a bonus story in the hardcover edition of this collection). The editors paid me $100 for the story, about a B-26 crew in the Korean War. The Korean War was a popular subject then.

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A Handful of Hell

That was the first of what became several hundred stories and articles in those magazines. I’m using the word articles somewhat loosely because almost all of them contained a great deal of fiction, though I tried to make them all seem as realistic as I could.

I did the same thing with the first story in Real that I did with almost all of the later men’s adventure magazine stories and articles: I typed them up on 8½ by 11 typewriter paper on a manual typewriter, using white-out, booze, and cigarettes.

I also tried to write literary short stories. During that era, Esquire magazine was the pinnacle for men’s magazines. It was publishing some of the great writers. I wrote a fiction story that came back from Esquire with a scribbled little note from the editor that said: “Almost made it.”

I never did succeed in publishing literary short stories. I wrote some, but didn’t get them published. But I began writing regularly for the men’s pulp magazines, in their heyday.

Between the Air Force and the time I entered the Foreign Service, there was a period of several years when I was going to college part time. I also worked some part-time jobs. But most of the time

“My Plan Was To Be a Writer and an Adventurer...”

15

I was supporting myself with income from the men’s adventure magazines. I wrote a lot for Magazine Management Company, which published Stag, Male, For Men Only, Men and others, and for Pyramid Publishing, which published Man’s Magazine and some other men’s adventure magazines. They usually paid me $350 per article, and $350 was pretty good. Not only was it pretty good then, it hasn’t gotten much better. There are plenty of fine, high-quality magazines that pay less than that today.

For most of that period, I was moving around a lot, so I had a post office box in San Francisco. I had a couple of buddies there that I hung around with, guys I had been in the Air Force with. I remember when we’d get together they would say, “Let’s go down to the post office today and see if you got a check from Man’s Magazine.”

And every once in a while, there would be that wonderful moment when there would be a check for $350 in the post office box, and we’d be rich.

Magazine Management had sort of two tiers of men’s adventure magazines. Magazines like Stag and Male were the better ones, if that’s the right word, but they had many others, and I was published in almost all of them.

Another company I wrote for published Man to Man magazine and Escape to Adventure, which was another pulp adventure mag. They also produced Sir! magazine, which was more like a girlie magazine.

I can’t remember the editors anymore, but I was published in all of those. The umbrella company for them was Volitant.

I had virtually no real communication with the editors. I knew their names, but I didn’t talk to them. My fifteen years of communication with Noah Sarlat, who edited Stag and other magazines for Magazine Management, consisted of little notes that contained three or four words. (I did eventually have some telephone communications and one personal meeting with Pyramid’s Phil Hirsch, the editor of Man’s Magazine.) Basically, I typed up a story, sent it to one of the editors, and either they used it or they didn’t.

If they used it, they sent me a check. If they didn’t, they sent me a rejection note—then I’d often send it to another editor.

Since I had almost no communications with the editors, I had no idea if they knew that many of my stories that they were publishing were fake. They didn’t ask if they were true or not.

With one exception involving one article out of hundreds, no editor ever suggested a topic to me. I simply looked at what the

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A Handful of Hell

magazines were publishing and tried to write similar stories.

The exception was when I got a phone call out of the blue from Mel Shestack, Art Director for Magazine Management.

Mel had this elaborate idea for a completely phony story involving a hero, a woman, bad guys, and the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. He had the painting already and wanted me to write the words that would go with it. That was the first time I realized that the editors knew we were making most of this stuff up. (Mel also told me in detail how he asked artists to design illustrations that had phallic images, meaning that in some, the positioning of a club or gun is no accident.)

For the men’s adventure magazines, particularly those published by the Magazine Management company, I wrote stories that were typically presented to the reader as factual articles about things that really happened.

In some cases, they actually were non-fiction. In many cases they included a great deal of imagination. That was typical of the genre.

But to write for the men’s adventure magazines, it was necessary to have some knowledge of history. If you were going to write about World War II, you needed to know something about World War II. You could use your imagination for the story, but you had to have some of the key details right to please the editors and the readers.

Another author who wrote a lot for the men’s adventure magazines, Mario Puzo, once said something to the effect that you could create a whole vast battle involving tens of thousands of troops and just completely make it up out of whole cloth, and readers would accept it as fact. But if you got the muzzle velocity of an M-1 Garand wrong, the readers would be all over you.

In terms of the readers of the men’s adventure magazines I wrote for in the first half of the ’60s or so, when I did most of my writing for them, almost all of them were veterans. The situation was different than it is today, when a veteran is perceived as sort of a separate category of human being that’s apart from everybody else.

“One of my favorite titles for one of my completely made-up works that appeared in Escape to Adventure magazine, September 1964: ‘Captain Bob Winthrop’s Jap-Fighting Jungle Girl Decoy.’ The cover shows women in minimal clothing with their breasts almost hanging out, tied to poles and being tortured by fiendish Nazis.” Cover by Syd Shores.

“My Plan Was To Be a Writer and an Adventurer...”

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These magazines were read by regular guys. The fact that they happened to be veterans had something to do with shaping the content. But the fact that they were veterans is sort of an added fact to whatever else is true about them, since so many men were veterans back then.

These stories were being read by men who’d had similar experiences themselves. They had been there, done that, and when I wrote about warfare for them, I had to have the personalities and the details right and avoid puffery. They wouldn’t tolerate having men like themselves overly glorified or to have war made glamorous, so I didn’t do those things.

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A Handful of Hell

But the fact that men’s pulp magazines had titles like Escape to Adventure is not without meaning. The reader wanted to snuggle up in a corner and escape to adventure. One of the closest comparisons to the men’s pulp magazines I can think of is the women’s confession magazines, which I also wrote for during those years.

For them, I wrote articles like “I was Broken-Hearted When He Left Me for My Sister’s Husband” and things like that—in the first person, as if it really happened, from a female viewpoint, even though I really know nothing about women. I’ve spent over 70 years trying to figure them out and still know nothing. But I wrote the articles anyway.

I used different byline names for each, because the name was the name of the woman in the article. They paid less well than the men’s adventure magazines, so I only did a handful of those.

I learned a lot about writing later in other ways. But the men’s adventure magazines were a good training ground, and you could see some practical results from your efforts.

Writing for the men’s adventure magazines was a learning process in many ways. I think the guys that put out those magazines deserve a lot of credit for helping teach a whole generation of writers how to write.

Re-reading the stories included in this book brings back many memories. I remember I loved a fiction account of a B-26 Invader bombing mission I read in a small literary magazine in San Francisco in 1960. I also met Robert C. Mikesh, who’d flown B-26s in the Korean War, and was later a museum curator and author.

Maybe that’s why the first story I wrote for men’s adventure magazines was about B-26 bombers.

THE ADVENTURE l of u f d n IN a H A CONTINUES

HErtLF. DL orr d adventure

an Classic war

Robe

stories by

yatt doyle

rt deis and w

edited by robe

“Handful of Hell at 20,000 feet!”

CLIMAX, October 1962 Cover art by Joseph Cellini

art by JOSEPH CELLINI

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A Handful of Hell

Bedridden in the Guam military hospital in May 1945, Red Erwin was a grim picture of just how much a human being can take.

The 23-year-old sergeant from Bessemer, Alabama, was lying in a horizontal frame covered from head to toe by heavy gray bandages.

Beneath the gauze, his body was a mass of watery blisters and welts, and exposed skin burned to the color of fried beef. His eyes were buried beneath little round holes in a hillside of bandage. His voice was still too strained to be coherent, but he was able to mutter, “I don’t really feel like a hero. Not at all.”

The ceremony was brief, but profound. Major General Willis Hale stood beside Erwin’s bed. On either side were the crew members of the sergeant’s B-29 bomber. The general opened a leather-covered box, removed the Congressional Medal of Honor, and made a short speech about how Erwin had risked death to save the lives of his comrades. The general, who had flown in from Pearl Harbor to make the presentation, spoke for only a few moments before pinning the medal on Erwin’s bandages. Then he stood back, gazing silently at the bundled figure of a man still in intense pain from third-degree burns suffered five weeks earlier.

No one in that hospital room really knew why Erwin was still alive. The pilot of his B-29, Captain G.A. (Tony) Simeral, still wore an expression of relieved amazement. The others were unnaturally quiet and somber. They knew that Erwin’s ordeal aboard a combatbound B-29 had lasted less than 15 seconds, yet in that instant of time the sergeant had been roasted like a steak in a fire. According to all medical odds he should have died after hours of agony. The fact that he was alive, that he had survived more punishment than the human

“Handful of Hell at 20,000 Feet!”

43

body is built to endure, offers at least a partly happy ending to the epic of the only B-29 flier in World War II to win the nation’s highest award. Here is “Red” Erwin’s story.

The date was April 12, 1945. The target was Koriyama.

Captain Tony Simeral taxied the Boeing B-29 bomber named City of Los Angeles out of its revetment toward the takeoff point.

The plane, looking like an aluminum cigar with wings and bristling with remote-control guns, handled easily and rolled smoothly. Simeral slipped it into line with other B-29s and checked through his preflight list.

The B-29s of XXI Command were taking their first crack at a chemical products plant located in rough mountains northeast of Tokyo. Koriyama, which was supplying chemicals and badly needed petrol to the Imperial forces, was the farthest target yet to be attacked by bombers stationed in the Marianas. It was actually a complex series of small factories, and the attack upon its center would involve more risky formation flying than usual. Although the enemy was not expected to muster any fighter planes in its defense, the B-29 airmen knew that some twin-engine “Nick” interceptors were based in the area. They also knew that mechanical problems, navigational difficulties and heavy flak would make this an abnormally dangerous mission.

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A Handful of Hell

The City of Los Angeles roared down the runway and climbed above the cold Pacific. Other B-29s followed, until a whole formation was loosely pinwheeling toward a course for Tokyo.

Simeral handled his plane with knowledgeable gentleness.

Leaning over his shoulder, Colonel Eugene Strouse, commander of the 52nd Bombardment Squadron, was staring at the deep blue water and admiring the smoothness of the takeoff. Strouse had come along as a passenger to observe the Koriyama raid.

Hunched in the right rear part of the cabin just forward of the bomb bay, Staff Sergeant Henry E. “Red” Erwin made himself as comfortable as possible for the long trip to target. Surrounded by HF equipment and wearing earphones, Erwin was radio operator for the City of Los Angeles. He had ten combat missions under his belt and, on one of them, had ridden through a hellish eight-minute gantlet of anti-aircraft fire. He had never been able to relax after a takeoff, but he braced his knees against the SRC transmitter and did his best.

Erwin was a handsome, sharp-featured Southerner with a characteristic Alabama drawl and a faintly stilted way of walking. His eyes had the bright glimmer of youth, yet his squared jaw and jutting nose made him seem mature. He had enlisted in the Air Corps shortly after the outbreak of war and had been one of the first crewmen to fly the four-engine bombers designed for the final air assault against Japan. At first there had been many technical problems with the pressurized B-29s, and some crewmen had come to hate the planes— but not Erwin. He loved radios, disliked wearing oxygen gear, and seemed vaguely indifferent to the grimness and brutality of war in the air. Earlier in the same week, he had witnessed a tragic crash in which another B-29, returning from a strike on two engines, had overshot its runway and was blown to bits among the coral and cocoa palms. Nine men had been killed instantly, but none of Erwin’s crew members had been able to get a single comment about the incident from the young sergeant.

“This one is going to be rough,” he said to himself.

As the City of Los Angeles droned across the water, Erwin made his final radio checks. The airwaves were filled with the usual pre-mission chatter, weather information, and formation instructions. He made his last call, put down the earphones, and stood up to prepare for another of his duties.

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45

The “City” was acting as lead airplane for the entire 52nd Bombardment Squadron that day. This meant that it would give the signal at the initial point—the beginning of the bomb run—for the other B-29s to join in a tight formation. Erwin had been given the task of dropping a phosphorus signal bomb that would indicate where the planes should assemble for their runs.

The signal bomb mechanism on the B-29 was still considered by many to be a cantankerous device, and some of the fliers did not trust it. It was located too close to the bomb bay for anyone’s comfort. The City of Los Angeles was carrying more than three tons of incendiary bombs in its main bay on that day, and more than one crewman had pointed out what would happen if the phosphorus device should somehow explode too close to those incendiaries: The resulting blast would be so enormous that a four-plane echelon of B-29s might he obliterated.

Erwin’s duty was to release colored parachute flares over the assembly point, then to drop the phosphorus. The phosphorus smoke bomb weighed about 20 pounds and was encased in a thick steel canister. Equipped with a six-second, delayed-action fuse, it was intended to be dropped through a circular release pipe. It would fall for perhaps 300 feet before exploding, marking a clear rallying point in the center of the sky. From this assembly point the other B-29s would begin their runs on Koriyama. The job was short and simple.

The sergeant was getting ready when he saw a blur through his side port. “Fighters,” he said.

A yellow-colored “Nick” was coming down off to their right, and starting to fire at the B-29s in the next echelon. It was an ugly airplane that seemed far too large to be a fighter. Meatball red circles were painted on its wings, and streaks of tracer bullets were flying from its nose.

“I see ’em,” the top gunner said. “There’s also four Zekes circling somewhere off to the left.”

“How close are we to the assembly point?”

“Four of them!” A voice rose above the others. “Four Zekes closing on our left! Man, look at that crazy yellow color!”

For tense moments the City of Los Angeles continued to fly straight and level through sporadic attacks by fighters. The Japanese pilots were crafty and determined, attacking from directions where they faced a minimum of return fire from the B-29s. The four “Zekes”

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turned out to be Mitsubishi J2M raiders, the newest and fastest of the Japanese fighters. They were fat, radial-engine aircraft with enormous snouts and armed with 20-mm cannons, and they weaved in and out of the B-29 echelons at more than 440 mph, shooting with frightening accuracy.

Even with the raiders and Nicks plummeting through the sky, Captain Simeral refused to budge his control column. The pilot had long since learned that evasive action only made things easier for the enemy pilots by giving them more time to press their attacks. Besides, it was strictly against orders. So Simeral stayed level while his top and rear gunners squeezed off bursts with their remote-control weapons.

Erwin was working his way toward the phosphorus signal device when they crossed the Japanese coast. Fighters were continuing to harry them from all sides, and now flak bursts were exploding beneath them. The B-29 lurched for a split second and Erwin fell to the floor, uttering a silent curse. He had not decided whether the Japanese fighter pilots, the flak gunners or the puzzling intricacies of the B-29 itself was the most dangerous enemy.

As they approached the point where the squadron would assemble into a tighter formation, Erwin grabbed his flares and the phosphorus bomb. He stood up beside the release pipe waiting for a gesture from Simeral, Strouse, or co-pilot Lieutenant Roy Stables.

Far away to the right, another B-29 staggered uncertainly in midair. The big, silvery plane had been struck beneath one wing by a flak shell. It seemed almost to stop in its course, suspended majestically, billowing clouds of black smoke. As the crew of the City of Los Angeles watched, the B-29 faltered, then began to lose altitude and to bank on the damaged wing. It turned with orange fuel-fire spewing back inside its smoke trail, throwing its bombs away like bundles of discarded linen. A moment later it straightened out on course for the emergency landing field at Iwo Jima, 600 miles to the southeast.

Erwin bit his lip. That B-29 did not have a chance.

The rolling green hills surrounding Tokyo were now beneath them. Captain Simeral raised his arm and looked back. Calmly, Erwin dropped his parachute flares through the release pipe.

The flares made a clunking sound as they fell through the tube and exploded far below the plane. The eyes of the pilots of other bombers were now fixed on the lead plane, awaiting the phosphorus blast that would mark the assembly signal.

“Handful of Hell at 20,000 Feet!”

47

No longer encumbered by his earphones, Erwin picked up the signal bomb. His fingers moved calmly over the steel device until he found the delayed action fuse and set it. He held the bomb over the release pipe and allowed it to slip from his hand.

What happened next was an unpredictable fluke, the kind of thing that can go wrong when a thousand mechanical parts have to be relied upon to keep a plane in flight. It was not the fault of the B-29’s manufacturers, nor of the company that built the signal bomb, nor of the crew chief back in the Marianas. It simply happened.

The signal bomb clattered inside the release pipe and refused to fall through the gate at the bottom of the tube. After a split second bounce, it exploded, throwing white-hot flames back into Erwin’s face. Then it came back up, flying out of the release tube and into the airplane, hurtling at an incredible speed and burning at a temperature of 1300 degrees Fahrenheit.

The sergeant’s 15-second ordeal had begun.

The blazing phosphorus whirled around the inside of the B-29 like a meteor gone berserk. Ricocheting off the curved roof of the plane, it bombarded Erwin with its searing heat. His nose was burned off and the putrid smell of scorched flesh filled the cabin. Then the whole upper portion of the sergeant’s body was charred. He fell backward, waving his arms, thrown off balance and dazed.

The bomb finally came to a stop on the floor of the plane.

It fizzled and burned, only feet away from the 6,000 pounds of

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DORR DOSSIER

“I Stole the Emerald Eye of the Cyclops Buddha” For Men Only, May 1972 Art by Bruce Minney

“Wade Jenkins’ Amazing Escape With Our Top Secret U-2 Camera” Male, July 1971 Art by Samson Pollen

“The DAY THE BOONDOCKS RAN WITH YANKEE BLOOD” BLUEBOOK, AUGUST 1969 Cover art by Stan Borack

inset art by STAN BORACK

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A Handful of Hell

Sergeant Thomas A. Baker kept squeezing off rifle shots as Japanese troops swarmed up the Saipan hillside, launching their final banzai attack on Company A, 105th Infantry, 27th Infantry Division, just after sunrise, July 7, 1944.

Aware he was witnessing a fanatical, suicidal attempt to turn the tide of battle, Baker fought like a wild man, shooting rapid-fire in a pitched frenzy—but with uncanny accuracy.

“Got to stop ’em!” Tom Baker yelled above the roar of gunfire.

His right leg had been mangled by a grenade blast, his kneecap shattered to a bloody pulp, but he seemed almost not to notice. A short man who looked over-burdened by his field pack, helmet, and M-1, Baker’s face was twisted taut like the skin on a drum as he emptied one .30-caliber clip, reloaded, and continued hammering out a withering volley of fire.

Japanese stormed uphill by the hundreds, plunging swiftly through smoke from their own mortar shells and grenades, firing on the run as they attacked.

In his foxhole looking down from the slope called Butterfly Ridge, Sergeant Tom Baker didn’t even blink as bullets kicked up dirt inches from his face.

The Japs were everywhere! Some of them would get through, and Baker knew that part of the company would have to pull back, whether anyone liked it or not. He knew the Japs wanted more than just this hilltop. They were out to drive the American defenders of Saipan into the sea.

To Tom Baker, halting the banzai was a matter of pride.

“The Day the Boondocks Ran With Yankee Blood”

213

Company A, and its battalion, had been Baker’s home for so long that the outfit was a part of himself, and he was determined not to see his unit defeated. Already called a “one-man army” for combat feats on Saipan, Sergeant Baker felt certain he was now facing the final, brutal showdown battle that had been building ever since amphibious landings on the island 21 days earlier.

The Japs were now less than 100 yards downhill. Baker killed one with a single shot that blew the man’s head apart. Reloading again, he fired a burst that knocked down three Jap infantrymen as they tried to lob grenades.

He felt a jolt of pain from his grenade-shattered right leg. The amomorphine that he’d injected moments earlier wasn’t much help.

“They’re trying to breach our end of the line!” Sergeant Baker shouted to a GI beside him. “Rake ’em! Go after the ones with the grenades!”

“Dammit, why don’t we have any?” the other man shouted.

Company A had used its last grenades just before dawn.

“If we can slow ’em down here, the right flank will be okay. But we may have to pull back a little.” Bullets thudded around him and Tom Baker tried to meet the other GI’s gaze. He was too late. Private First Class John W. Muccio of Boulder, Colorado, had taken one of those slugs in the heart.

Tom Baker glanced around. Company A seemed to be holding its line on Butterfly Ridge’s right flank, but dead and wounded were strewn everywhere, some lying in craters gouged out by a Jap mortar barrage.

Hand-to-hand combat seemed only seconds away. The battalion CO, Lieutenant Colonel William J. O’Brien, had been killed in a vicious fire fight just before dawn and the company CO, Captain Louis Ackerman, had been carried off the ridge with four bullets in his chest, protesting that he wanted to stay until the battle was resolved.

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A Handful of Hell

Company A was fighting by instinct, each GI defending himself and the few feet of ground around him.

Baker could see that there were too many Japs, too few GIs. It gave him a helpless feeling of rage and frustration, but he knew he had to be realistic. The left end of the defense line, where he lay slumped over his M-1, was going to be cut to pieces and overrun— whether Company A held the ridge or not.

Nothing would stop the screaming horde of fanatic Japanese who kept pouring uphill into GI fire. The right flank of Butterfly Ridge, where the highest ground jutted above the slope, still looked secure.

But Baker knew that his part of the line was going to break.

This is the end, he thought bitterly, almost relieved that Colonel O’Brien wasn’t here to see it. We’re finished . . . and after all we’ve done. . . .

To Baker’s right, Private First Class Frank P. Zielinski snatched a Jap grenade in mid-air and tossed it back. Explosions and gunfire were now a constant, ear-shattering crescendo on the hilltop. Baker saw Zielinski grab for a second grenade in mid-flight, miss it, and disappear in a geyser of smoke and flames. Then Zielinski stood again, his fatigues ripped to shreds and drenched with blood, still triggering his M-1 in wild spasms. “We can’t hold!” Zielinski shouted.

“They’re all over us!”

The sheer weight of the assault brought Japanese soldiers to the lip of Tom Baker’s foxhole. More Japs overwhelmed and killed a GI running to aid the wounded Zielinski. Sergeant Baker emptied his rifle clip into the stomach of a man rushing at him from less than ten feet away, just as two others leaped at him from the side, bayonets flashing.

In the next foxhole, Zielinski killed four Japs with four bullets, took a bayonet thrust in his left thigh, and dropped back from the human tide, swearing and swinging his rifle like a bat held by an expert ball player.

Baker clubbed at his attackers with his empty M-1, drawing blood and a pain-garbled scream. He had long ago forgotten the wound in his own leg and was now battling in a blind fury, punching with the rifle, feeling its steel barrel crash into flesh and bone.

“Back off !” he yelled to Frank Zielinski, who was already pulling back. He smashed the rifle butt into a Japanese face with such brutal force that the man’s jawbone cracked.

“The Day the Boondocks Ran With Yankee Blood”

215

He and Zielinski somehow got together as the next wave of Japs rushed toward them. Baker momentarily lost sight of all the other GIs. The rifle in his hand was so badly twisted out of shape that he didn’t even attempt to insert a new clip. A burst of fire passed within inches of his face. As Zielinski shot down another Jap within arm’s length, Tom Baker glanced around, searching for another weapon.

He and Zielinski, each wounded and helping to support the other’s weight, backed away while the Japs wheeled to the right to attack Company A’s strong flank. Machine gun fire from the right chopped down several Japs who’d been about to rush them.

Momentarily, Tom Baker and Frank Zielinski were in the eye of the storm, backtracking along a row of broken telephone poles that had once carried Japanese communication wire across Butterfly Ridge. Behind them, medics were struggling to evacuate wounded and shooting at the Japs at the same time.

Baker knew the enemy troops would have kept coming, straight down into the rear area at his back, and he was glad they’d decided to assault the right hill peak instead. The GIs on the right were still holding. . . .

Capt. Bernard A. Toft, a forward observer from a mortar outfit behind Butterfly Ridge, went racing past the two men, triggering a carbine at the Japanese on the skyline.

Toft glanced back and could hardly believe his eyes: Zielinski was covered with savage, gaping wounds, and Tom Baker looked almost as bad.

The two had joined Company A as reservists in Troy, New York in 1934.

The charter members of Company A, the hometown boys who’d played basketball with Tom Baker and who’d drilled with him on weekends, had fallen like flies on Saipan beach and on the bloody march from the shore to Aslito Airfield, to Nafutan Point, to the Tamang Plain—and finally to the bullet-raked piece of real estate called Butterfly Ridge. From Saturday afternoon drill sessions in the Troy High School gymnasium to the banzai attack on Butterfly, Tom Baker and Frank Zielinski had thought of Company A as the core of their lives—and now the end was in sight. . . .

More Japs came spilling over the skyline. This time they didn’t swerve to the right. They plunged toward Baker, Zielinski, and a handful of other Americans on the reverse slope. Baker saw muzzle

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flashes. Slugs rained through the air around him.

“We’re not going anywhere,” Baker said, releasing the pistol’s safety. “We ain’t got any place to go.”

“That’s right.” Half standing, half leaning on Baker, Zielinski fired exactly one rifle shot. Then a spray of automatic fire kicked up dirt around his heels and came upward. Bullets slapped into his groin, stomach, and chest. He pitched forward.

Sick with pain and rage, Tom Baker gripped the .45 with both hands and fired. He hit the charging Japanese officer. The Jap spun on his heels and dropped. But the recoil of the pistol, plus the loss of

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“I FOUGHT CASTRO’S CUTTHROAT GUERRILLA SQUAD” FOR MEN ONLY, APRIL 1970

art by EARL NOREM

240

A Handful of Hell

The dusty road ahead seemed almost to be ripping itself apart.

Mortar shells, I thought, and braked the Land Rover to a lurching halt—jolting me and the dark-featured girl sitting beside me with brutal force.

It was the afternoon of July 11 last year, and we had just driven into the Guatemalan village of Nueva Cadiz from high in the Escontrios Hills. I had suspected the presence of Red guerrillas in this area of Guatemala but had ignored my fears.

I shouted to the girl, Marita Esquivel: “Get out and make for that ditch—stay low and move fast!”

I yanked my pistol out of the glove compartment, slid it into my jacket pocket and dived out of the Land Rover just as a spray of bullets shattered the windshield. I cut behind the vehicle, leaped after the running figure of the girl and dragged her down into a roadside irrigation ditch.

“Jack, what is it?” The girl was gasping for breath. Strands of sleek black hair had fallen in disarray across her dark, sensual face, and her eyes were wide with fright. “Are we in the war everybody in the city talks about?”

A volley of counter-fire resounded from a cluster of low stucco buildings just ahead—the post office, the police box, and a barracks that must have housed the modest government garrison that small towns of this sort had.

“It’s the war everybody talks about, all right,” I muttered. The original barrage of mortar and automatic weapons had come from a grove of trees across from the now-burning stucco structures.

“I Fought Castro’s Cutthroat Guerrilla Squad”

241

We had a perfect view as government troops then spilled out of the barracks, triggering M-1s as they ran. Bursts of fire kicked up geysers of dirt at their heels, and the men spun and fell in dusty clouds, their screams slicing across the continuing bark of machine guns.

“Where those trees are,” I told Marita, “there are probably Communist rebels—the FLC—pulling off another of their raids.”

She nodded. “Fuerza de Liberacion Communista. But the FLC are not rebels, Jack. They are bandits, criminals, murderers.”

“Sure,” I said. “So get ready to do some running. If we can reach the hills beyond the town, we’ll be able to find some place to hide.”

“If they see us. . . .” the girl broke off, her eyes riveted on that tree grove. Suddenly, the guerrilla troops broke into the open and began raking the mortared buildings from close range. They zigzagged around the dead government soldiers sprawled in the dust, ignored the inevitable chickens that wandered aimlessly on the chaotic roadway, and poured their fire into the wrecked barracks where a black column of smoke rose like a pall above Nueva Cadiz. It looked as if the guerrillas intended to leave nothing alive.

“Let’s try to follow this ditch. Maybe they won’t bother to chase us.”

“They will if they see you. And you know their feelings about Americans. They are very strong.”

“Yeah.”

I’d done some research about Guatemala before coming here to set up a food processing plant in the impoverished hinterlands. I knew the Communists’ terror campaign had included the murder of two US military attachés in Guatemala City on January 23, 1968, and that the Reds had wantonly assassinated our ambassador, John Gordon Mein, only a few months later. The various groups of Castro-oriented Reds in Guatemala were engaged in a sweeping campaign of terror and bloodshed that offered no mercy to anybody standing in its way.

I checked my Smith & Wesson .38 tightly as we groped along the ditch. If we managed to keep going, we’d reach the edge of the green-brown jungle less than a hundred yards away.

A new brace of mortar shells slammed into the road behind us.

Blasts of raw heat swept over us as we dropped flat.

The Land Rover exploded. The stench of smoke gagged me.

When a shadow fell across us from behind, I spun around and

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A Handful of Hell

raised the .38. But a boot came flicking out of nowhere and knocked the pistol from my hands.

“Do not move another step,” a voice commanded in Spanish.

“You have been in my line of fire ever since your vehicle entered the village. In fact, we saw you coming and timed our attack for your arrival. I could have killed you at any moment.”

The speaker was a short, mustachioed figure flanked by half a dozen other guerrillas. Obviously their leader, he wore denims and a dirt-stained sombrero and was leveling a Czech-made AK-50 automatic rifle at my heart.

“I am not involved in your war,” I said, a little stupidly. “You have no argument with me.” Marita was trembling.

The mustachioed man was grinning. I could sense his arrogance now, and I remembered seeing his face on a government poster.

Pablo de Villegas-Corena. Known everywhere in Guatemala as El Diablo—The Devil.

In his thirties, powerfully built in the squat shape of a beer barrel, El Diablo was high in the ranks of the FLC, the most violent of a dozen Communist splinter groups in Guatemala. He’d done his apprenticeship under Castro and Che Guevara. A vicious killer, a government reward of 50,000 pesos on his head, he was also rumored to have an eye for a shapely knee.

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