Operation Fishwrapper (Jock Miles WW2 Adventure Series Book 5) Read online

  Operation

  Fishwrapper

  A Jock Miles WW2 Adventure

  By

  William Peter Grasso

  Novels by William Peter Grasso:

  Moon Above, Moon Below

  A Moon Brothers WW2 Adventure

  Operation Fishwrapper

  Book 5 in the Jock Miles WW2 adventure series

  Operation Blind Spot

  Book 4 in the Jock Miles WW2 adventure series

  Operation Easy Street

  Book 3 in the Jock Miles WW2 adventure series

  Operation Long Jump:

  Book 2 in the Jock Miles WW2 adventure series

  Long Walk To The Sun:

  Book 1 in the Jock Miles WW2 adventure series

  Also available in audiobook format

  Unpunished

  East Wind Returns

  Kindle Edition

  Copyright 2015 William Peter Grasso

  All rights reserved

  **

  Cover design by Alyson Aversa

  Kindle Edition License Notes

  Operation Fishwrapper is a work of historical fiction. Events that are common historical knowledge may not occur at their actual point in time or may not occur at all. Apart from the well-known actual people, events, and locales that figure in the narrative, all names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to current events or locales or to living persons is purely coincidental.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Novels by William Peter Grasso

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  Dedication

  Map—Dutch New Guinea

  Map—Biak

  Part I—Broken Wings

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Part II—Until It Ends

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  About the Author

  More Novels by William Peter Grasso

  Author’s Note

  This is a work of alternative historical fiction. In actual events, MacArthur’s forces invaded the island of Biak at the end of May 1944 as part of their continuing quest to neutralize the Japanese in Dutch New Guinea and secure airfields to support the invasion of the Philippines. The fighting on Biak raged until early September of that year, when the last Japanese retreating westward across the island in a brutal war of attrition were finally subdued. While the story in this novel adheres loosely to the timeline of actual events, the events depicted, the units and weaponry involved, and the intelligence ploys used to achieve an American victory are fictitious.

  In no way are these fictional accounts meant to denigrate the hardships, suffering, and courage of those who served.

  Contact the Author Online:

  Email: [email protected]

  Connect with the Author on Facebook:

  https://www.facebook.com/AuthorWilliamPeterGrasso

  Dedication

  To Peg, still the only reason all this is possible

  Chapter One

  June 10, 1944

  2300 hours

  The US Navy crew of the PBY Catalina was used to night missions. They’d been flying them for months, using their radar to find and attack enemy ships seeking refuge with the only friend the Imperial Japanese Navy had left: darkness. Two symbols stenciled below the pilot’s window—each an outline of a sinking ship—meant this aircraft had been credited with sending two enemy vessels to the bottom. But this US Navy Cat had rarely worked as a solo ship before—and never with an Army officer onboard, calling the shots.

  That officer—Jock Miles, Major, US Army—peered over the shoulder of the PBY’s navigator, a lieutenant j.g. named Becker. Together, they watched as the dial on the radio direction finder crept slowly toward the aircraft’s port beam. “About fifteen seconds,” Becker called to the pilot. “Then turn left to heading one-three-zero…on my count.”

  Becker turned to Jock and said, “Well, Major Miles, let’s hope and pray the signal from Darwin isn’t bending a whole lot tonight.” Then, stopwatch in hand, he began the countdown:

  “Five…four…three…two…one…MARK.”

  The lumbering flying boat dipped her left wing and began a southerly turn. When she leveled off at her new heading, the radar operator stared intently at his scope and said, “Well, that looks pretty good, Major Miles. We’ve got a coastline about five miles off our port wing and nothing but sea return ahead. Wanna look?”

  Jock leaned closer to the radar scope. “Like you said, Baum, it’s a coastline. With a little luck, it’s Biak’s coastline.”

  “Don’t sweat it, sir,” Petty Officer Sid Baum replied. “Mister Becker hasn’t gotten us lost too badly yet.”

  The PBY droned on for twenty minutes more, slowly losing altitude until they were 3,000 feet above the sea’s surface. In the pale glow of the cockpit lighting, Jock could read the tension on the face of the pilot, Lieutenant Arthur Simpson.

  “You sure it’s safe to be down this low, Major?” he asked Jock. “Mountains jutting out of the sea in the dark are a great way to get us all dead.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure, Mister Simpson. Been over this place three times in the past week.”

  “But that was in broad daylight, Major…and you were probably a hell of a lot higher, too.”

  Simpson was right about that: those missions on Photo Finish—an Army Air Force B-24 bomber converted for the photo mapping role—had been flown at 8,000 feet, with the comfort of escort fighters to ward off Japanese interceptors. None had risen to the challenge, though—and the photos hadn’t shown anything to suggest a significant Japanese build-up on the island of Biak. The pilots had called those missions milk runs.

  “And I’m still a little fuzzy what the Army expects to see at night it couldn’t see in broad daylight, sir,” Simpson said, and then laughed as he added, “oh, wait…the Army doesn’t do much night flying. They get lost real easy once the sun goes down. Maybe you should’ve gotten the Aussies to fly this mission, Major. MacArthur usually gives them all the shit jobs, doesn’t he?”

  Without taking his eyes off the navigator’s plot, Jock replied, “Mister Simpson, I’m married to an Aussie, so I don’t need to be hearing that crap from you, too. Now come left five degrees. Let’s get a little closer to the coast.”

  As he put the big flying boat into a shallow bank, Simpson mumbled a skeptical, “Aye aye, sir.”

  They were barely out of the turn when Simpson said, “Ma
jor Miles, you’d better have a look at this.”

  There was a bright glow in the distance, just visible over the Cat’s nose, like the lights of a small city. They were flying straight for it. Simpson asked, “What the hell do you make of that, sir? Fires or something?”

  “Nope,” Jock replied, “those are floodlights. Just what I was afraid of.”

  “Afraid? Why?”

  “Because, Mister Simpson, the natives don’t generate electricity. Those are Jap floodlights.”

  “But sir, why would the Japs be stupid enough to light up the place like it was Christmas?”

  “They’re in too much of a hurry to care right now, Mister Simpson. We figured they’d be building airfields around the clock down there on Biak. But I still can’t figure out why we never saw any of that on the daytime recon flights.”

  “Well, now we know they’re building something,” Simpson said. “And now that we’ve seen it, we can get the hell out of here.” He was already pushing the throttles forward and beginning a turn that would take them away from the coastline.

  “ Negative, Mister Simpson,” Jock said. “Hold your course and altitude.”

  “But that’s going to take us right over the Japs!”

  “That’s exactly what I want. Now throttle back, for cryin’ out loud—let’s not make this big black airplane easy to spot by blowing flames out her exhausts. I’m going back to the blisters for a better look…and to get some pictures.”

  Jock had barely stepped from the cockpit when Sid Baum, the radar operator, yelled, “Holy shit! I’m getting returns like crazy, five miles dead ahead, maybe a little less.”

  “Dammit,” Simpson said. “A mountain! I knew it! We don’t know where the hell we are!”

  Lieutenant Becker replied, “Begging your pardon, Skipper, but I’ve got a pretty damn good idea where the hell we are…and there aren’t any mountains ahead of us.”

  “Mister Becker’s right, sir,” Baum added. “This sure as hell isn’t any mountain I’m looking at. It’s got to be ships. Lots of them.”

  We figured that, too, dammit, Jock told himself. Ships bringing troops under cover of darkness. Lots of ships bringing lots of troops.

  “Hold this damn course, Lieutenant,” Jock yelled to Simpson. Then he continued aft to the gun blisters, passing below the flight engineer at his panel in the stubby cabane strut that joined the fuselage to the wing. The engineer, a crusty CPO named Atticus “Buzz” Parmly, called down, “What the hell’s going on, Major? The lieutenant can’t seem to decide whether he wants to climb or stay put. He’s playing hell with my fuel calculations.”

  “We’re staying put, Chief. We may have hit the jackpot.”

  “Jackpot, eh? We gonna win the war tonight, Major?”

  “Right now, I’d settle for not losing it, Chief.”

  When Jock reached the aft compartment, he found Minsky and Benedetto, the two gunners, staring intently out the left blister. Benedetto asked, “What the hell’s going on down there, sir? It’s lit up like a fucking carnival.”

  “Looks like the Japs are building airfields,” Jock replied. “That lit-up area’s got to be between Mokmer and Sorido. It’s the only place on Biak where there’s a plain flat enough for airfields but close to the sea for easy resupply.”

  Minsky asked, “All the rest is mountains and jungle, right?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “And the Army’s hot to invade it, ain’t you, sir?”

  “Afraid so,” Jock replied. “Pretty soon, too…maybe too damn soon. But that’s not for publication, understand?”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  As the Cat flew closer to the shoreline, the floodlights, though trained on the ground, reflected an unwelcome glow across the plane’s lower surface and into her cabin. The scene below looked as if it was being played out in the bright sunlight of high noon. Trucks, steam rollers, and gangs of men—hundreds, maybe a thousand—were toiling to clear and level long, narrow strips of land in three distinct areas.

  “Three separate airfields, spread out over about five miles,” Jock said as he snapped photos and jotted notes on a map. “They’ll be able to launch hundreds of planes, enough to do some serious damage to our amphibious assault before it even gets near the beach. No wonder we couldn’t see any of this during the day—they’re working under camouflage netting. Looks like miles of it.”

  Flying directly over the shoreline now, they could see ocean-going troop barges nestled against makeshift floating jetties and the sparse patches of beachfront the mangroves had failed to claim. Each barge was huge, meant to carry fifty to one hundred troops or tons of equipment. Jock counted at least three dozen offloading men and materiel. The rectangular shapes of countless other barges lurked in the offshore darkness, barely visible yet betrayed by the glow of their wakes as they circled, waiting their turn to be guided through the reefs.

  Jock didn’t need to see any more. He hurried back to the cockpit. Grabbing the message pad on the radio operator’s desk, he began to draft the message to 6th Army HQ: a warning that Biak was not the easy pickings MacArthur had pronounced it to be.

  Then the first jolt rocked the Cat.

  Even though they’d expected it, to a man they wanted to pretend it hadn’t happened. But they couldn’t pretend for long, not as the harsh, industrial racket of flak punching through their ship continued. They dared to look and saw the orange glints in the dark sky —looking deceptively like the harmless blink of a photographer’s flash—as anti-aircraft shells exploded all around them. They could hear the explosions, too, their dull poomfs too close for the drone of her engines to mask—quickly followed by a sound like angry waves of hail against a tin roof as still more iron fragments ripped through her thin aluminum skin.

  With a sickening lurch, the Cat yawed left. The steady, comforting drone of her engines turned into the cyclic moan of mismatched rpms as the port engine began to falter. Chief Parmly struggled with the dying engine, gently playing her controls, trying to restore at least some of her power, while he offered a silent prayer for the continued health of the good starboard engine.

  “I CAN’T CLIMB ON ONE ENGINE, DAMMIT,” Lieutenant Simpson yelled. “WE’VE GOT TO GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE.”

  He jerked the control wheel hard to the right, hoping to turn his lumbering ship back over the sea, out of harm’s way.

  Nothing happened. The Cat didn’t turn right. She just kept drifting left, over the Japanese on Biak.

  What the hell? he thought, and gave the wheel an experimental spin fully to the left. The Cat didn’t respond in that direction, either.

  Staring in bewilderment at the useless controls, he said, “Son of a bitch…we’ve got no ailerons. Flak must have cut the cables. Right rudder’s already to the floor fighting this crapped-out engine…and we’re still slipping to port.”

  His co-pilot, a cocksure rookie named Steve Richards, tapped his finger against the altimeter and muttered, “Shit…shit…shit.” The instrument was slowly winding down, dragging Richards’ confidence down with it.

  Lieutenant Simpson gave a tentative backward tug on the control column. The ship’s nose began to rise. “At least the elevators still work,” he said, watching as the airspeed—already dangerously low—began to bleed off. “But if we don’t keep the nose down, she’s going to stall.”

  He turned to his radio operator and said, “Morales, send out the mayday. Tell them we’re going to end up in the drink somewhere south of Biak.”

  “No,” Jock said, still writing on the message pad. “If we’re going down, we’ve got to get this intel report out first. Too many lives are at—”

  “Bullshit on that,” Simpson interrupted. “I’m not taking a dunk in the Pacific without them knowing where the hell I am.”

  Becker, the navigator, asked, “And where exactly are you going to be, Skipper? We don’t have a clue where we’re going to splash. Not yet, anyway.”

  “Ballpark, Mister Becker. Just get us in the damn bal
lpark.”

  “One hell of a ballpark,” Becker mumbled as he drew a big goose egg on his chart south of Biak Island.

  “We’re wasting time,” Jock said, thrusting the message pad toward the radio operator. “How about it, Morales?”

  Hector Morales looked at Jock, and then his pilot. Grabbing the message pad, he said, “Begging your pardon, Mister Simpson, but the major here is right. And if you gentlemen would stop measuring your peckers for a minute and leave me alone, I could get off both these messages no sweat.” He hunched over his telegraph key and began to send the intel report.

  “Dammit, I gave you a direct order, Morales,” Simpson said.

  “Yeah, I know you did, sir, but he outranks you.”

  He kept right on sending Jock’s report.

  “Dammit, I’m in command of this aircraft,” the pilot said. “You’ll do as I—”

  Jock cut him off. “No he won’t, Mister Simpson, because I’m in command of this mission. Every man in your crew seems to realize that except you. Just fly the fucking airplane.”

  The moaning of the out-of-sync engines stopped, giving way to a shrill squeal like metal against a grinding wheel. The cockpit lit up with an orange glow as the damaged port engine trailed a comet’s tail of sparks. In seconds, it burst into vivid flames, which swept aft across the wing.

  Before Simpson could scream Feather it…shut her down, the engine seized, her propeller blades coming to an abrupt halt in a startling display of centrifugal force that tore the engine halfway off its mount. It dangled crazily, a useless, drag-inducing appendage on a barely controllable ship that needed every bit of that lost streamlining just to stay airborne a few minutes more.

  At least the fire had gone out.

  Ensign Richards was still watching the altimeter wind down. “We’re going to be on the deck in a little over a minute,” he said. “We’ve got to hit level, or we’re going to bury a wingtip and cartwheel…and I can’t keep her straight with the rudder anymore.”