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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."
Needless to say, there were some big old grins around the motor pool as soon as the general left. We’d all been listening to Frank and Spud bullshit about how great drivers they were, and now we’d get the chance to see them put up or shut up.
It was a good little idea. However, like a lot of good little ideas, it snowballed into a big idea almost too quick to grab hold of it. The race track wasn’t such a big deal. Carnie went over to a nearby engineer company and worked his magic, and the next thing you know we had a couple road graders, a bulldozer and other engineer equipment out carving out a track literally minutes after Spud explained what had to be done. We never did get a real measurement on the track, but it was long for a quarter mile, 5/16 or maybe even 3/8 mile. It was pretty smooth considering that the engineers put in less than a day on it, and it even had a little banking.
Of course there was a considerable debate around the motor pool about who was going to get to drive the hot rod Jeep, which we decided we’d better put the regular intake manifold and carb back on to make it look a little more stock. Both Frank and Spud claimed the rights to it, and Frank would probably have won considering his six stripes to Spud’s three. But before it came to a showdown it started getting clear that neither of them were going to run it.
The original idea was that we were just going to hold a little event with us in the motor pool, and maybe the headquarters company, but the next damn thing you know the division commander had put out the word that anyone on the island was invited. That was going to get out of hand in a hurry, so Frank went hurrying over to the division headquarters and got the commander to agree to a cap of thirty-two entries. However, when the private was typing up the revised memo for the mimeograph machine, he managed to make it a cap of forty-two, which was a hell of a big field. If it had been just half a dozen of us, we could probably have gotten away with Frank running the race and running in the race. But with a mob that size it was clear that someone who knew what they were doing was going to have to be in charge of it – in fact, more than one someone, and the two someones that knew anything about racing were pretty clearly going to be run ragged just keeping things under control.
So, when Frank and Spud’s plans for a friendly little match race went bad, there really got to be a lot of arguing around the motor pool about who was going to get to drive the hot rod. Since I was technically second in rank to Frank and had about a month time in grade over Spud, I figured that made me a pretty good candidate, but there were others that wanted in, too. Finally, Spud suggested that we settle it on the track by time trials, and I was outvoted so we had to do it.
However, Frank stacked the deck in my favor. We decided that we’d better go out and make sure the track was smooth enough to run, so he, Spud and I went out with three regular Jeeps and made a few hot laps – just driving in line, no real racing. I got some quick lessons in how to run the track as part of the process, especially the dirt track power slide. Then Frank rode with me for a while, giving me a little more instruction.
We held the time trials that evening, and I wasn’t too surprised that I won. Nobody else had any practice with the power slide – I hadn’t had much but it was enough. After that, Frank and Spud both ran a few more laps with me to work on my technique. I honestly figure that since the idea had come out of the motor pool, Frank wanted to make sure that we at least put on a good showing, hot rod or no hot rod.
There were plenty of other details to work out. The commo platoon got assigned the job of putting together a PA system, the medics had to have stuff on hand, the general, bless his heart, managed to come up with hot dogs and enough beer for everybody to have at least one, and so on. It was a heck of a lot bigger deal than any one of us had expected it to be.
The whole thing got thrown together in a heck of a hurry and I’m still a little surprised we did as well as we did. The division commander bit on the idea on either the tenth or the eleventh, I’m not sure, and by the fourteenth we had things pretty well ready to roll. Of course there were going to be details to deal with all the way through to the end, but the main points were there; now all that had to happen was the Japs had to surrender.
We were just in time. The Navy was ordered to cease offensive operations against Japan on the fifteenth, and the surrender was announced on the sixteenth. It was a hectic, wonderful day, and we ended up being off to the races.
Considering the time we’d had to set it up – not a lot – I was amazed to see that most of the division was out on that hillside, along with a bunch of others that came to see what was going on, or just for the hell of it. I never, ever saw a bigger crowd at a quarter-mile dirt track, or even close to one that big. If we could even have charged ten cents admission apiece we could have had a hell of a purse, but all we were racing for was bragging rights. Well, more than that: the general got up at the driver’s meeting and said that there was a one-rank promotion for the winner if he came from our division.
Frank was promoter and steward and a few other things. Once the general had said his piece, he got up and explained how this was going to work. Since nobody had any real experience racing, we’d start out with six ten-lap "C" heats of seven Jeeps each. The top two finishers in each heat would automatically go into the "B" main. The third- and fourth-place finishers would go into a consolation round, two heats of six cars each, the top two also going to the "B" main, where there would be two ten-lap heats of eight cars each. The top five in each "B" heat would go to the "A" feature, which was going to be twenty laps.
To keep things simple, Frank said we weren’t going to mess around with qualifying. Everyone had been assigned a car number in the order that they registered: the first "C" heat would start cars 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 in that order, and so on. We fudged things around so that the hot rod wouldn’t be quite so conspicuous by giving it the number "3." The "B" heats and consolations would again be done by car number, but the feature starting order would be by the order of finishing in the "B" heats, the first heat on the inside, the second on the outside. It sounds complicated but really was about the simplest way we could have done it.
He also explained the flags – green flag for go, yellow for caution, red for stopping the race, white for one to go, and black for disqualification, and checker, of course, for finish. I have to digress here a bit and say that I was the one assigned to getting the flags, and it was a bit of an adventure. Green was no problem; it was actually an olive drab flag. White, black, and checkered flags started as T-shirts, with the black made with India ink. Yellow proved to be tough; I finally was able to scrounge up some yellow paint at the air base and sacrificed another T-shirt. The rules were pretty much normal for the era, but simplified in spots, like racing back to the finish under a yellow and then falling in behind the leader. We’d use a standing start just because it was easier for Spud, the flagman, to line people up. Jeeps had to have their headlights and windshields removed, and all drivers had to wear helmets – in this case, the standard Army steel pot with helmet liner.
I wasn’t too worried about starting third in the first C heat, mostly because I had the hot rod Jeep – and the two guys ahead of me were others from the motor pool that hadn’t done as well as me in the time trials. The race got off pretty wild, mostly because the guy in the Number 2 – Hussey I think his name was – was kind of asleep at the switch when the flag dropped, so me and the 5 car shot around him like he was standing still. The 1 car was kind of pussyfooting his way through the first corner so I got high and powerslid around him, the 5 car right on my tail. The two of us just walked away from the other cars but he was all over my ass. He got a nose under me a half dozen times, and we were just about together when we came out of the last turn side by side, but I was carrying a little more speed from being on the high line and beat him by about a foot.
I learned two very important things from that C heat.
The first, and probably the most important, was that dirt tracks can be a great equalizer. I had more engine and a few other things over the guy in the 5 car, but I found out between the heats that he had been a Carolina moonshine hauler before he got drafted, and he knew how to handle a car on dirt. As it turned out, I heard of him a few times after that. If you’re a NASCAR buff, you’ve probably heard of Goober Buford, too, like when he finished the Daytona race in second twice, back when it was run on the beach. This was his first race, too – at least if you don’t count pounding through the night with a load of ’shine and the revenooers on his tail.
The second thing I learned that day was that stock cars and cheating go together about like popcorn and butter. I suppose that you could have one without the other but it doesn’t taste anywhere near as good. Hell, I was driving a cheater and I wasn’t the only one, either, although I wasn’t really aware of it at the time. It was only afterwards that I found out that the Navy repair ship had milled a good dozen heads in the last couple days before the race and you can be damn sure that every one of those milled heads were somewhere in that race.