Chapter 2

That was just the first of a good many nights over the next couple months that we sat around someplace swapping stories. Well, to be honest, I just sat and listened to those stories that Frank and Spud and Carnie were telling, because being a Nebraska farm boy I didn't have anything I could match some of those tales with. Carnie liberated a can of coffee somewhere once, and there was some nights we'd build a little fire out of sticks and trash, and Carnie would boil coffee in a tin can, carnival style. We'd sit around shooting the bull, drinking coffee out of canteen cups with a metal rim that would burn your lips given half a chance. Sometimes some others would sit in for a while but the four of us were the regulars.

After a while both Frank and Spud began to run low on the racing stories, at least the good ones, and conversation ranged a little wider, to what we were going to do after the war. Both Frank and Spud were itching to get their fingers on the wheel of a race car again. Frank hadn't run any races since the spring of 1940, so it had been five years since he'd even had one of his cars fired up. Spud had hung on a little longer, into early 1942, just before the government stopped racing for the duration as part of the war effort – rubber and gas were being rationed. Spud had last raced the day before he reported for induction, about a month before the racing ended, and his midget was sitting in his uncle's garage in some little place in New Jersey. Both of them pretty well figured that racing would pick up about where it left off in 1942, with everybody having pretty much the same cars and stuff, just three or four years older.

These bull sessions extended into the motor pool, especially on slow days now that the battle was pretty much over with. Carnie had liberated some tarps and poles, and we'd managed to rig a big sunshade that we could use to work on vehicles, which was really welcome on a hot Okinawa summer day. One day along in the first part of July when we didn't have much else to do we were talking about Jeeps and how they were pretty decent vehicles for what they were. Someone said they were all right but would be a lot more all right with a little more power under the hood, like maybe a full-size Ford V-8, maybe even the truck version that went to 371 cubic inches and had a whole potload of power for those days. Frank and Spud weren't quite as enthusiastic about the idea. Frank said it would make the thing way too heavy in the nose to turn well, and Spud thought that the transmission and the rear end wouldn't stand up to that kind of pressure.

Things got talked around the way things will, and somehow the discussion turned to how much you could soup up a regular Jeep engine. At that time there wasn't much of anything in special parts floating around, especially for Jeeps and even more especially on Okinawa, but Spud and Frank between them cooked up the idea that there was still a lot that could be done. Since we didn't have anything better to do, we decided to soup up a Jeep just for the hell of it.

It wasn't easy. In addition to not having any special parts, about the only things we had to work with were wrecks, either from war action or natural accidents. Over the weeks since the invasion we'd accumulated a little junk yard of busted vehicles that we used as parts sometimes, and we decided to start with one of these wrecks – actually, two of them, one with the front end hit by a shell, and the other with the rear end wrecked by an argument with a deuce and a half. We did have plenty of welding equipment, so we cut the wrecks in half and welded the good sections back together. For just doing it by eye with primitive tools we did pretty well.

The engine really got the attention. The World War II Jeep had a really simple and easy-to-work-on little four-banger, based on the original Willys design. Frank and Spud hemmed and hawed around it a bit, and then Spud set to work with a welding torch and some scrap metal. They built a log manifold that would allow three carbs on it, which freed up the breathing a bit. Carnie had his own idea – he got the head off another wreck, borrowed a Jeep one day and took off to do some horse trading. I don't know what he traded for it, but there was a navy repair ship tied up down the island a ways. It turned out there was a milling machine on that ship, and he got that head milled down a pretty good piece. Frank took on the most complicated job of all – grinding the cam so the valves would open a little farther and stay open a little longer. Cam grinding is pretty specialized, and you have to get all the lobes pretty close to the same. All Frank had to work with was a bench grinder but he built some jigs and stuff, and ground on half a dozen cams from wrecks before he had one that he liked.

In spite of not having much to work with the job went pretty quick, and it only took us three or four days to have a Jeep with a pretty souped up engine that wasn't on anyone's books. It ran real rough on regular gas, but it was no trick for Carnie to come up with some 115/135 aviation gas from a fighter plane. Carnie was of the opinion that there was no point in buying gas when you could steal it, and he was good at it. Even running on aviation gas it idled awful rough but when you stuck your foot in it you never heard a Jeep engine scream like that one! Spud said it reminded him of what an Offenhauser big car engine sounded like.

Now there's no point in having a hot car if you can't impress people with how hot it is – that's the American way, I've come to believe. There was no Jeep, or anything else on Okinawa, that would be able to touch it. By then the MPs were throwing their weight around like they usually did when there wasn't a battle going on, and they were of the opinion that their Jeeps were pretty hot stuff, even if they were the same as anyone else's. Our hot rod Jeep was chased many times but never caught – and it helps a little when every other vehicle is a Jeep of the same color. The MPs couldn't tell which olive drab Jeep was the hot rod until it blasted off like a rocket. Most of us in the motor pool were given a chance or two to go out and tangle with the MPs. No one was ever caught, which was probably good because whoever was caught driving that Jeep was probably heading for the stockade. After a while we had to cool it because the MPs finally got a pretty good idea of where the hot rod Jeep was coming from.

All that kept us amused for a while, which was about all we asked of it. We were all pretty sure that we were going to be facing another battle, this one maybe the biggest and the bloodiest of the war, and frankly no one was looking forward to it much.

Then the Air Corps bombed Hiroshima.

We didn't actually hear about it until the next day and really had no idea of how big a deal it was – just that whatever happened, we were one more flattened Jap city closer to the end of the war. A few optimists thought maybe that one might cause the Japs to cave in, but anyone who had been involved in digging the Japs out of their holes on Okinawa didn't seem to think much about that idea.

I happened to be over at the airport a couple days later trying to scrounge some parts off the Air Corps when the sirens blew, and the word came down that there was a B-29 approaching under emergency conditions. It was – a fan was out and another quit as it was rolling down the runway. They had to go out with a tug to tow it in since it didn't have enough gas to make it to the apron. I didn't find out until much later that I'd seen the Bock's Car landing after bombing Nagasaki – the crew had hung around waiting for a hole to open in the clouds before finally dropping the bomb and heading to Okinawa on the last of their gas.

After Nagasaki people started thinking that maybe we wouldn't have to invade Japan after all – if the Air Corps could drop one of those things every three days, sooner or later they might run out of Japs to kill. And then the word got out that the Japs were at least negotiating, and we began to smell the end of the war.

A day or two later we had the division commander drop by the motor pool. This wasn't the first time; he dropped in without warning every now and then, to see what was going on, and often to give us a pep talk – when we were doing as little as we had been doing, it was worth it to know you were waiting for something worthwhile. He had Frank pull the NCOs together, and he told us, "I don't know a lot officially, but it seems to me like this war might be over in the next week or two. We probably won't be going home right away but we need to do something to celebrate and blow off steam. Anybody here got any ideas that don't involve beer or beating up MPs?"

Well, Frank glanced at Spud, who was a sergeant by now, and gave a big old grin. "Sir," he said. "Sergeant McElroy and I used to be professional race car drivers before the war. How about we get some of the junkier Jeeps together and have us a little stock car race?"

"Now, there's an idea I haven't heard before," the division commander grinned. "Where would you hold it?"

"Right out there, sir," Frank said, pointing out toward the back of the motor pool. "Looks to me like there'd be plenty of room for us to lay out a quarter-mile track, and there's plenty of space for spectators up on the hillside."

"You can organize this?" the division commander smiled.

"I've never actually promoted a race before, but it's not that difficult," Frank promised. "I'm sure we can handle it."

"Go ahead and set it up," the general told him. "Figure on doing it the day the surrender is announced, or the day after, but wait until I announce it to actually hold the race."