CHAPTER THREE

DEAD RECKONING

         Maybe war only ever comes down to one man. Maybe it is the death of just one man that brings war into our hearts at all and makes it real. Maybe that is all war ever is: the death of one man.
         In our case, it was Tom. I see so clearly now, as I never have before, that for us, for my family and now at last for me, Tom represented the war. He was what was lost and never regained. He was the sacrifice that I believe took his parents to an early grave, drowned my father’s spirit in guilt and kept my mother suspended in grief until quite literally her dying day. He died so that I could live. This was a concept so old and so trite, the kind of old-saw patriotism that I’d come to expect in political speeches and manipulative religious pulpits, the kind of statement that had been used and abused until it had no meaning at all. As a result, I had never truly understood what it meant, until I’d come this far in looking for Tom.
         In the early days of aviation, before radar and all the other miraculous ways that pilots now find their way through weather foul and fair, there were several ways to navigate. If it was a clear night, the course could be steered by using the stars and planets as road signs. But if it was foggy, a pilot would find his way by what was known as dead reckoning. Unable to see for himself, the pilot charted his course based on information such as the direction in which the aircraft moves over the earth’s surface and the speed made good over ground, aeronautic terms that allow for such variables as wind and drift. Dead reckoning is, basically, guesswork, although guesswork of the finest kind, based on as accurate information as can be learned without actually experiencing it. I’ve used “dead reckoning” to put together the last hours of Tom’s life. Based on the log of that final day, and on all the documents that I have gathered as well as on the conversations I have had with men who flew the same skies, at the same time, this is what I believe happened to Tom.

         On the scorching first day of November in 1942, Tom stepped out from his tent, where he had spent the morning reading, trying to stay out of the frying sun. He’d also had the chance to talk with his buddy McCoun about the way he felt. He had never felt so down as he had on this day. No letters from home, no sign of life from outside this hell. And all that crazy stuff from Dee. Yes, she loved him, he felt sure of it. But she wouldn’t give up her heart. She couldn’t make up her mind. All those years of loving her and no return. The back and forth.  “You are free to go and find someone else.” What could she have meant by that? How could she let him go out here without a promise of her love? How could she expect him to live like this without providing him some hope of pleasure on his return? Flying was one thing but flying in this mountainous terrain, watching your back every minute, this was completely different. He had not even begun to imagine what it was to fight like this. Before he got here, he had not even begun to realize what a warring earth looked like, shot up and burned to a crisp by bombs and firepower. He had never lost a friend and here he was, just a couple of months into this and he had watched his friends’ planes plunge from the sky and crumple against the hard surface of the earth. Or find water and disappear into it like a diving fish. He had stood by with his hat on his heart while they buried his mates in the hard orange earth, day after day.
         Crosswhite and Hawkins, the other two pilots joined him as he walked toward the trio of B-25s, the big drab twin engine bombers that sat in the grass beside the dirt runway. Each plane bore their sign, the red pair of dice inside a blue circle, roughly hand painted onto the side, just under the pilot’s seat. The stony earth crunched beneath their feet as they walked toward the planes. The guns and bomb-bays were loaded. Their assignment was to reconnoiter across New Guinea to the smaller island of New Britain. All week long, the Japs had been coming in closer and closer. They seemed to be everywhere.
         Tom had been in New Guinea only a little more than a month. He felt as if he had been dropped into the Stone Age. Primitive villages ringed the air field, green jungles thick as carpet spread beyond up into the jagged purple-hued Owen Stanley Range, a tough set of mountains to fly over, nothing like the flat terrain of South Carolina. Nothing like it at all. The closest he had ever come to seeing anything like this country had been photographs in National Geographic. Bare breasted women and naked children. Grass roofed huts. Tribal chiefs with bones through their noses. Cannibalism was still active in these jungles and in their training, Tom and his mates had been warned of the head hunters, who  still lived in the mountains beyond. Should their plane go down, the head hunters gave them more to fear than the Japanese. If not headhunters, there were crocodiles in the swirling muddy rivers. He hated the heat and the bloody Neanderthal world that he was suddenly living in.
         When he headed out of San Francisco in August, he didn’t know he was flying straight into some of the worst and deadliest action on the planet at that time. At that point, the war in the southwest Pacific had not figured highly in American pre-war strategy. But the Japanese advances down through this chain of islands, toward New Guinea, threatened the Australian mainland. Their daily progress sent devastating messages to the Allies: more troops, more troops now. The jungles of New Guinea were dense and difficult to penetrate. The mists that came up out of them were even worse. Flying could only be done in the morning. By afternoon, it was nothing but soup out there. It was as if God was giving the Japanese a curtain behind which to operate in secret. American planes were needed desperately to help the Australian troops as they moved north up through New Guinea. The planes were meant to observe what they could from the air, hopefully to spot Japanese encampments and alert the Australian infantrymen of their position. Cutting across the diagonal of the island were the Owen Stanleys, a sharp knife’s blade as daunting as the Japanese themselves.
         Before he was sent into New Guinea, Tom had gone first to Australia, which seemed fairly civilized. There he had enjoyed playing a little tennis and found the steak to be pretty good. But, overall, he was in a strange place, among strangers. Just before he left for Hawaii, he had been transferred out of the group he had trained with for so many months and into this new group. He was there, along with the four squadrons of the Third Attack Group, known overall as The Grim Reapers, a wicked name with a smiling skeleton wielding a bloody scythe for an icon. What they were reaping, of course, were Japs. But as more and more of his buddies went down, their chosen symbol became confusing. It was grim. That was certain. But who was doing the reaping? Everything there breathed death, even the fiery sun. He had no idea that by the end of ten months, of the 200 in his group right now, 200 would be dead.
         The Japanese were deep into New Guinea which put the coast of Australia in direct peril. There were Japanese outposts set up on the east coast of New Guinea, just a hop from the Australian mainland. Tom had landed in Port Moresby, a desolate wasteland of a city, not that he had time to explore it. Japanese dive bombers continually bombarded the airdromes there, constantly harassing the growing Allied forces that were congregating. Their planes, sitting ducks on the grass beside the rough gravel runways, were hit, diminishing their numbers and, out of the skies, his friends were brought down. When he walked, mostly, he looked up.
         Since he had been there he had been sent out to bomb and strafe the buildings in Buna, where the bloodiest battles in all the war were taking place. In the months since Pearl Harbor, the Japanese had penetrated deeply into these islands and Australian and American troops were doing their best to beat them back. Buna, as it was so strategically and directly across the Papua peninsula from Port Moresby, was virtually two steps away from Japan’s attempt on the northern coast of Australia. Throughout September and October, Australian ground troops were heaving their way up and over the Stanleys. Tom and the rest from his bomber group ran raids up into this forbidding terrain, bombing and strafing, flying low and searching the dense foliage for signs of the Japs, as they pushed toward Port Moresby.
         In the little isolated villages of Myola and Kokoda, and Templeton’s Crossing, they found footholds. Today was another of these missions, flying over the enemy held territory, following the trails that twisted through the jungle, searching for the Jap encampments, hoping to drive them eastward, into the sea.
         Tom’s co-pilot, Lt. Head, Sgt. Mefford, the rear gunner, Sgt. Coffey, the upper gunner and Sgt. Frankenforter, the bombardier, joined him at the base of the plane where the hatch was down. Tom slithered up through the narrow opening into the belly of this big machine that he admired so greatly. His crew followed him up into the plane, the thin metal sides banging as they clattered into their positions. Tom went forward and slipped his chute into the slender metal pilot’s seat, hot as an iron from the noonday sun that fell through the glass pilot’s dome. Tom settled into the dished seat, hitching his straps. On the stick was a helmet and earphones and he slipped those on. He could feel the dampness of the last pilot’s sweat.
         From the rear, Frankenforter gave him the high sign and Tom snapped on the switch and pressed the starter. With a slow whine that rose to a scream, the left engine came to life in a great cloud of blue-gray smoke. The big bomber shuddered beneath him. He watched the broad propellers vanish into a blur of speed. Then the right engine, which also gave forth a whirling shudder and an exhaust that gradually rose into the still, humid air. He buckled his helmet under his chin, and fixed the goggles over his eyes. Next to him, Crosswhite and Hawkins were also firing up their planes and the combined mind-rattling noise canceled out all other senses. He snapped the lead from the earphones into the radio and the roar of the engines was tempered by the crackle of static.
         Tom touched the left pocket of his tan shirt, where he kept the tiny photo of Dee. It was his ritual to do that, before every take-off. And he thought of her special radiance, in that lovely peaceful place called home, innocent of all that surrounded him now. He eased off the brakes and the plane began to roll.
         One after another, he and Hawkins and Crosswhite  taxied the stretch of gravel they called a runway and in a blast of smoke and noise, ascended toward the Port Moresby sun. Heading west, they ground along in formation, wing to wing, engines throbbing, the walls and the seats of the ship vibrating as if the rivets could be shaken loose. Below them, the jungled hills steamed. Afternoon thunderheads had begun to take shape, boiling into massive white towers. The rivers that cut through the rumpled valleys were white with the mud and the debris of all that had come before them, the bleeding drains of war.
         As they neared Buna, Crosswhite’s left engine began to sputter. It hammered and skipped. He signaled to them that he was turning back and, he turned on a wing and wheeled back for Port Moresby. Hawkins then took the lead and the two planes continued on their course which was to take them to Lae and then to Gasmata and Arawe, both on the island of New Britain. Heading up to Lae, Tom looked down to the Owen Stanleys that cut the air so close beneath them. Their tops were sawtooth, rough, newborn, like the rest of this primordial place. The area out around Buna was devastated, a burned out wasteland from the  fighting that had already taken place. He saw parts of the jungle where the trees had been singed down as if from the tongue of a huge blow torch. With the foliage trimmed back like that, he could see gaping bomb holes in the dense earth.
         Lt. Head nudged Tom and pointed into the sky. Tom took his thumb and blocked out the sun. A flank of Zeroes fell out of the brilliance, where the Japs liked to hide. Tom saw the scarlet circles on the dainty wings. He had only ever seen a Japanese plane in the distance and his stomach lurched. This was his first encounter. There always has to be a first. Here goes. Turrets lowered!  Battle positions ready! The Zeroes, so small and light and agile, swept down and came at them head-on. Tom counted ten of them, moving and soaring around them. They swooped like small birds around the big bombers, nearly five times their size, their wings firing, firing, firing. The noise was ungodly, the grinding engines, the stuttering of the gun turrets, then, Mefford yelling: his turret was jammed. Hawkins’ rear gunner was out too. Coffey, in the upper turret, fired for all he was worth, fired and fired and held them off, keeping them away from Hawkins, too.
         Two Zeros came straight at Tom, head-on. and Tom dropped the plane down, which slipped him out of the tight formation he had held with Hawkins. And then he was out there, split away from Hawkins, hanging out there in the naked sky. There were Zeros above him and there were Zeros below him, the bullets shattering the glass bubble that surrounded him. The bullets came from above, falling down on them like hail. Tom felt a sting in his stomach and then his leg. From the back Frankenforter and Coffey and Mefford were cut down too. Tom touched his stomach and saw that there was blood, seeping through his tan shirt. His pant leg was torn and he saw his own flesh, open, raw and surprisingly vulnerable. He held his bleeding self and said to his copilot, “Take over, I’m down.”
         And Lt. Head took the controls and dove back toward Moresby, the cries of the injured crew members louder now than the plane’s shuddering engines, the gunfire, louder than all the unholy sounds that God had ever created.
         He parried and the Zeros released him. In the Stanleys now, coming onto Moresby Lt. Head called in his position. The men inside the shot-up plane groaned and cried for help. Lt. Head tried the lever, to drop the bomb load but there was no response. As Three Mile Field came up in his sight, he tried to put the wheels down for landing. No response. Probably the hydraulics had been shot out. Well, here we come, wheels up, bombs aboard and in on our belly.
         From the airfield, the officers who watched his landing thought it looked OK but the runway was still under construction and off to the side was a pile of rocks that they had been clearing. Coming down to earth, the big metal ship slithered around, hit the rock pile and flew apart, spewing engines and wing parts and that smart twin tail assembly that Tom was so proud of all across the field. Pieces cartwheeled onto the grass and the rest of the plane burst into a ball of orange flames, an earthbound sun belching black smoke into the hot air all around.

         Only Lt. Head survived, to write what happened into the log. Though I searched, my efforts to find Lt. Head turned up nothing. I did not even have his first name. Even his survival, I find remarkable, almost unbelievable. The log is succinct, terse but it appears that at least some of the crew members lived long enough to be taken to the hospital, for several of them lived until the next day. Perhaps one of them was Tom and perhaps that is why the date of his death is inconsistent in some of the records. It’s a small detail and yet one that I’ve thought about a lot. If he was not killed instantly in the plane crash, could he have survived the wounds to the leg and to the stomach? It seems possible. Would it have mattered if he could have been buoyed by the news of my mother’s change of mind?
        My mother, of course, never knew any of the details of Tom’s death and I suppose that that is also just as well. She knew only three words about Tom’s fate: killed in action. In letters, my mother and Grandma Platt wondered together what had really happened. In a letter dated November 27, 1942, Grandma Platt tells my mother: "Today we have had our first word from Australia and it tells us so little. I will copy it for you. It is all so hard to understand and accept. We feel so crushed.”
        There was so much they did not know. The letter that Grandma Platt refers to was the one describing the burial. It surely did not escape their notice that Tom’s burial took place on the morning of Tom’s twenty-fifth birthday, under that November sun of Port Moresby, a place more than five thousand miles distant from my mother’s grieving bedroom. I’m sure it was virtually impossible for her to envision that rude grave which was not, as it turned out, Tom’s final resting place. But she never knew that, either.


CHAPTER FOUR

FIVE THOUSAND MORE MILES


         On January 10, 1949, exactly one month after I was born, three years after the end of World War II and a little more than six years after his death, Tom’s shot-up and badly burned remains, contained inside a wooden casket, were loaded on board a war ship that had been reconfigured to carry thousands of such caskets. This was the third and last time that his body was to be disturbed.
         Unbeknownst to my mother, or, so far as I can discover, to anyone in his family, the ship left its berth in Brisbane, Australia, and turned toward Hawaii, where, after several years of negotiation, the U.S. government had purchased 116 acres of land in the long dormant crater of the Puowaina volcano. Puowaina roughly translates to “hill of sacrifice” as it was the site of many royal burials as well as a place where Hawaiian criminals were sacrificed. On that dramatic swoop of land overlooking Honolulu, the U.S. government proposed to create a national cemetery for those American soldiers who had been killed in the Pacific during World War II. On January 1, 1949, just nine days prior to Tom’s move, the area known locally as “the Punchbowl” was officially designated the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, in what was then still the Territory of Hawaii. The first of the transferred war dead were buried on January 4, 1949. For the U.S. Government, this was the middle of a very long process. For Tom, it was the end of a very long journey. He had traveled thousands of miles to join the effort to save his country and his body had traveled thousands more in search of a safe grave.
         In the military, all of what I have just described can be summed up with a single word: repatriation. By the end of World War II, the bodies of more than 400,000 American soldiers lay in simple graves in more than 500 temporary cemeteries around the world. Following the war, it was the task of our military to bring these men home. As surely as the war had ended, this was one mammoth final task. The problem was simple: the land where these men were buried did not belong to the United States. In a few cases, such as in Normandy, where the sheer numbers made it almost impossible to consider removing the dead, our government purchased the land and created a permanent cemetery. However, in most cases, the dead were removed and sent home. Those who died in Europe were sent to the Arlington National Cemetery and those who died in the Pacific were sent to the new cemetery in Honolulu. According to the Army’s department of Mortuary Affairs, this effort took six years, tens of thousands of soldiers, and more than 180 million 1940’s dollars to complete. Inside a series of buildings, in Maryland, there now rest some 10,500 boxes of “deceased files.”  Douglas Howard, who is the deputy director of the Mortuary Affairs Center, maintains that, “You cannot possibly understand what a massive undertaking this was until you step inside of those buildings.”
         Tom’s, of course, is just one slender file in those boxes, in those buildings. Even so, his was a strangely contorted path, one that I’ve attempted to reconstruct from further documents sent to me by the War Department.
         Just plotting the course of Tom’s belongings gave me an idea of how long everything took after the war was over. From what I have, it seems that the process of returning Tom’s personal effects to his family was not begun until April 7 of 1943, already six months after his death. A letter from the Quartermaster in Kansas City was sent asking that Grandpa Platt authorize the return of these items to him. Letters and notarized responses were exchanged and finally, a single carton--weighing 76 pounds and containing everything Tom had left behind in his tent, including “1 pkg. letters,”  which I can only assume are the letters that I have now, sent by my mother to Tom, in New Guinea--arrived by train. Grandpa Platt signed a receipt for these effects in New York City on September 4, 1943, by then nearly a year after they had been notified of his death. I have read of other families receiving these boxes, opening them and discovering horrid, musty lumps of clothing. I have no way of knowing what condition Tom’s belongings were in when Grandma or Grandpa Platt opened this ominous and horrendously heavy carton but, since they had been packed up in the heat of the jungles of New Guinea and had then sat in some warehouse in Kansas City for more than ten months, I can only assume the worst in regard to the condition of all that Tom carried with him into war.
         This is the famous paperwork, the bureaucracy of our war, which surely only served to further crush the broken hearts of the families who had bravely accepted the news of their loved one’s demise. All this for a box full of moldy trousers, pajamas, and rusted razor blades.
         If it seemed to take forever to obtain their belongings, the process of setting the men to rest was far more arduous.
         At two o’clock in the afternoon of November 3, just two days after his plane crashed and burned, Tom was buried in the Bomana War Cemetery, a Port Moresby burial ground maintained by the Australians. His cause of death was listed as a “crushed head.” Beside him on his right his upper turret gunner, Sgt. Harris Coffey, was buried on the same day. Adorning Tom’s grave was a white cross marker, stamped only with Tom’s serial number. As the war progressed and Port Moresby became more and more demolished and more and more Americans were killed in that turning point of the war in the Pacific, a new American cemetery was established in Teak, New Guinea. In March of 1943, just four months after he was laid to rest in Port Moresby, Tom was dug up and his body was moved and reinterred in this new cemetery. He remained there until the end of the war.
         Some time after the war ended, Tom was dug up once again, along with all his mates, and their skeletal remains were taken to Brisbane, Australia where they were buried once at the Ipswich USAF Cemetery. It was likely a safe place to wait out the long repatriation process, which, at that point, was still three years from completion.
          Grandpa Platt was informed of this move, though I don’t believe he knew that it was the third time Tom’s remains had been disturbed. In April of 1947, the War Department sent Grandpa and Grandma Platt a photograph of the Brisbane cemetery with a letter that included this sentiment, “it is my sincere hope that you may gain some solace from this view of the surroundings in which your loved one rests. As you can see, it is a place of simple dignity, neat and well cared for. Here, assured of continuous care, now rest the remains of a few of those heroic dead who fell together in the service of our country.” Maybe it was because of this photograph that Grandpa Platt made it his wish that Tom not be disturbed again, that he remain there, in Brisbane. However, in 1947 our government wrote to inform him that the Ipswich cemetery would not be maintained by the United States and that a new cemetery, to be located in the Territory of Hawaii, would be where Tom would be moved. The cemetery was still two years from reality. Grandpa Platt was given the choice of bringing Tom all the way home, for burial in Arlington or in their home town on Long Island, or allowing him to be buried in Hawaii. On the document that was sent to me by the war department, Grandpa Platt authorized Tom to be buried in Hawaii, with the rest of the dead from the Pacific war, but he stated his confusion over the fact that Tom had been buried in Ipswich and that he preferred that he remain there. However, he jotted at the top of the official request for disposition of remains, “if Ipswich not permanent, I understand.”
         And so Tom was authorized to be shipped to Hawaii, a chapter with a lot of mysterious holes in it. On December 4, 1947, more than five years after his death, Tom was once again dug up, at least according to the “Disinterment Directive” I was sent. At that time, it was noted on the form that his serial number was incorrect. But nothing further was made of this error.
         A mysterious five months passed before it was recorded that Tom’s remains were prepared and placed into a casket. On April 30, 1948, the casket was “boxed and marked”. I can only assume then that this casket sat somewhere, along with thousands of others, awaiting the ship that would bear it to Hawaii.  (Lt. Howard, at the Mortuary Affairs Office, informed me that after the war, hundreds of troop carriers were reconfigured so that they could carry these caskets.)
         It is doubtful that Grandpa Platt ever mentioned any of this to my mother. After all, by that time my mother was married to my father and pregnant with my sister. Aggravating old wounds was something Grandpa Platt sought to avoid.
        A lot of time passed between that letter and the actual day that Tom was buried in Hawaii. There is nothing in the file that indicates any further correspondence between Grandpa Platt and the War Department.
        And I have nothing that explains the big gap in time. All that I can verify is that on January 10, 1949, Tom’s body was buried in the newly established National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific. Eventually, he was joined by some 11,597 identified dead and 2,079 soldiers who had not been and probably never will be identified. On April 26, 1949, Grandpa Platt received a letter notifying him of Tom’s burial. Sometime later, the Army sent Grandpa a photograph of Tom’s grave marker.
         No one Tom ever knew was present the day he was buried. In fact, it is likely that no one who ever knew him or ever cared about him was aware that January 10, 1949 was the day that Theron Griggs Platt finally came to rest, six years and three months after his fiery crash. Then as now, Tom was still five thousand miles from home.