“We’ll go back for another load,” he said, turning the Fortress’s nose homeward. “How’s Cracker Jackson?”
“Coming out of it,” was Curly Levitt’s reply. “His right arm’s broken above the elbow, and his nose is banged up. The ball turret took an awful wallop from that ack-ack shell.”
“Better our ball turret than our bomb bay!” Hap Newton remarked grimly. “We could have gone out in a blaze of glory if that shell had hit a few feet forward.”
Much to Cracker Jackson’s distress, his friends took him to the hospital tent the moment they landed at Mau River.
“Have a heart, Lieutenant!” he begged Barry. “This bum wing feels fine in a sling, and I could shoot my left gun with my left hand. Please let me go along this trip.”
Barry shook his head.
“That’s a compound fracture, man!” he replied. “If you don’t get proper treatment now, it may gangrene. Besides, your nose is swollen so big that you couldn’t see around it to shoot. Lieutenant Levitt will man your turret if necessary.”
They left him, still protesting, in care of the field doctor.
“As a matter of fact,” Curly Levitt said when they were out of hearing, “Jackson’s turret is so banged up that it’s useless. It won’t turn, and only one gun will fire. I didn’t tell him, because he would worry about our going back without belly protection.”
No more than six Jap vessels were still in the fight when Rosy O’Grady returned with a fresh bomb load. One cruiser, four destroyers and a small cargo ship made up the half dozen. They were scattered many miles apart, each trying to make good its own escape. Between them the sea was covered with rafts, landing barges, lifeboats and wreckage of every description, but they made no attempt to take aboard survivors.