from my South Pacific Diary

May 19 Buttons to Cactus #213 2:15 pilot & 2:15 co-pilot Rockwell - May 21

We got to Cactus about 3:00 pm and found a tent empty.  We moved in & found that the other occupants had been driven out by rats.  The mosquitos were the worst I have ever seen.

At 9:00 pm the Japs started coming over so we had to get in our fox holes mosq. and all.  The search lights got one and we could hear the roar of the night fighter's engines. (P38)  We were watching the Jap plane in the lights when all of a sudden there was a stream of tracer bullets out of the darkness and they passed right through the plane and it caught on fire.  It looked like one engine was on fire.  It started to fall and then began to recover & it looked like it was getting the fire under control.

And now a stream of tracers shot out but the plane kept going a couple seconds more and another hose of bright red tracers lashed out and the plane started to fall.  It was now falling and burning fiercely.  It fell about three thousand feet and exploded in a tremendous burst of flames.  Pieces continued to fall burning to the ground.
A roar of voices went up from the men watching it.  Those were the last bombs those Japs would drop.  

We were standing beside our fox hole about 11:30 pm when all of a sudden we heard the whistling of falling bombs.  I made a jump for my fox hole and got in before the bombs hit the ground.  My helmet came off & I chipped two of my teeth & cut my lips on the damn thing.

The night fighters shot down two more but the planes did not catch on fire.  All we could see was the red tracers hitting the plane & noise of them exploding.  There were 26 planes over in all.

We spent from 9:00 pm till 5:00 am in our fox holes.  Slept till about 11:00 am, woke up with blankets all wet from sweat & heat.  Last night we had one alarm about 9:00 pm but they didn't come over for some reason so we got to sleep all night long.

Not much doing during the day.  We were supposed to strike and got up at 10:30 pm and messed around until 12:00 am and then were told the strike was called off because of weather.  We went back to bed but couldn't sleep.  A rat came into my bed about 2:30 & woke me up even more than I was.  Finally about 4:00 am got to sleep & got up at 7:00 am for breakfast on my first wedding anniversary.