Weller's War

by George Weller

  Itself written in the field, this account of what happened in Java should be considered an elementary nugget, unfinished and awaiting the treatment of other hands. Three of the four commanders of the Seventeenth Pursuit are missing or dead. Someone must speak for them. This account is offered out of debt to those who fought and are still fighting, as well as those who lie forever in the Graafplaats Kembang Koening at Soerabaya, in the blue recesses of the Java Sea, in Bali's soft jungle, or in some forgotten rice paddy high on Java's curved terraces.

  Too little to honor fully those whom it celebrates, perhaps this word will not arrive too late.

  George Weller

  Somewhere in New Guinea

  1 March, 1943

  “LUCK TO THE FIGHTERS!”

  Twenty-seven big Mitsubishi bombers, fifteen Zeros hovering above them like gnats, arose from Kendari in the eastern Celebes, swung into their great geese-like triple V, and marched methodically over the blue waters of Madura Strait. It was a big raid on Java, and Soerabaya was going to get it.

  Soerabaya, the chief Dutch naval base in the Indies, had no radar listening apparatus to give warning before the bombers came up over the horizon. Nowhere upon its hilly shores did one see the black-armed monster that saved England and could tell the approach of aircraft nearly a hundred miles away.

  The Dutch system of warning was voice radio sets, manned by courageous Javanese youths and Eurasians in shacks on lonely beaches, who relayed word if the Japanese flew over within hearing distance or eyeshot. But the Japs flew high, often above 20,000 feet. If they were seen, it was lucky. If they were not, it was too bad.

  The Japanese were already beginning to exploit the indirect approach. Their base was so close that their Mitsubishis had plenty of time-over-the-target and could hit Soerabaya from any direction except directly south. And on successive raids, comparing the time of the warning on the Dutch radio with the position in the flight leader's log, the Japs could determine which approach gave Soerabaya's thousands the narrowest margin of warning, or no warning at all.

  This time the makeshift warning system, like a network of fire wardens protecting a national forest, happened to work effectively.

  Among those Japanese fighter pilots flying above the bombers was a dead man. He did not know yet that he would soon be dead. With his rubber-sneakered feet on the sensitive needle-like controls of his butterfly plane, he kept his eyes on his squadron leader, his oxygen mask tightly closed. He was flying at nearly 30,000 feet, where no American Kittyhawk could reach him. The Dutch pilots' Brewster Buffaloes, already wallowing at 16,000 feet, could do no more than look up.

  Yet he was a dead man. For at that moment the P-40E that was to accomplish his ending was searing down its runway and taking off, with an American, a plain-and-simple, uncomplicated human being in heavy drill trousers, furred boots and a leather flying jacket.

  The flying garment of the Japanese pilot was not a zippered army leather jacket like the American's. He wore a funeral shroud, suitable for a corpse. He meant it to be such. The shroud was long and black. He must have known that when the Zero is hit it usually burns up or blows up. He did not know that he would die, but if he did, he was dressed for it.

  American and Jap met at 22,000 feet over the Java Sea, met and fought. The American's guns won. The Jap, still alive, began to fall. But this Jap did not burn. His engine was hit, not his fuel tank. This is rare, because in the Zero the tank is directly behind the engine, and when one goes, usually the other puffs into flame too. The Jap's propeller, from being invisible before him, slowed and became an almost visible wall. Then as the plane began to fall the prop whirled faster, the earth grew larger, the prop grew invisible again then with an awful simulacrum of safe flight the wings screamed loud, the rooftops came closer and closer—

  They found him over a garden wall, still in his burial shroud. His wish had been to die for the emperor. Neatly he dressed for death and neatly he got it. The American, nonchalant and slovenly, dressed for life in a leather zipper jacket, remained alive.

  Enemies form each other's natures. This pilot's antagonist was an American. Not any particular American; it's aimless in this war to attribute acts to individuals. He was one of perhaps the bravest, least known group of fighter pilots in the war in the Far East. He fought at a time when we were losing the war, and losing it fast. Australia had to be saved many times, and he gained time to save it.

  This nameless American pilot was the American boy whose two slim hands—he was hardly twenty—were thrust into the Dutch dike at Java and held long enough for the American and British High Commands to get away, held long enough for Soerabaya to be destroyed by the Dutch with fire, axe and explosive and thus denied to the Japanese navy, held long enough for Australia to get sufficient additional American aircraft to stop the Jap on the Java-Solomons line.

  The boys at the Java dike were part of the Seventeenth Pursuit Squadron. We can name it, because it is gone forever, scattered and dispersed. Everyone knows the work of the Flying Tigers in Burma and China, or of PatWing Ten in the Philippines, Java and Australia. Everyone knows how the Fortress bombardment groups fought there. But few have heard of the Seventeenth Pursuit. Their work remained almost unknown even in Java. Like angels, nobody knew where they came from. Only their works were famous. Why?

  First, because they were secretly based at Blimbing—a village between Soerabaya and the Fortress base at Malang Only a handful of correspondents ever went from western Java, where the ABDA [American-British-Dutch-Australian] Command was located first in Batavia and then in Bandoeng, to eastern Java. And no correspondent was allowed to visit their field.

  Some of these pilots died in Java striving to stem the Japanese. The honor they deserve is long overdue. To realize what they accomplished necessitates knowing how the Seventeenth Pursuit came into being, how it fought until every plane it had was destroyed, and how its members, now scattered forever, are fighting still to avenge those who will fight no more.

  The Seventeenth Pursuit Squadron was born not in Java or the Philippines, but Brisbane. The man who brought it into being was stocky, peppery little Major-General Lewis Brereton, who was the spark plug of the fighter forces in Java after Brett moved into position as Deputy Commander of the patchwork Allied force.

  If pilots were as superstitious as sometimes represented, the Seventeenth Pursuit might well have taken its number for a talisman. On the field at Brisbane in early January, there were seventeen P-40Es ready to fight—if they could get to Java. The tiny expedition consisted of seventeen pilots, seventeen crew chiefs, seventeen armorers, one line chief, one first sergeant and three radio men—the barest bones of a skeleton force rushing into an emergency. It was a kind of defensive commando. Only thirteen pilots in the Seventeenth Pursuit had experience flying under Brereton in the Philippines. Four pilots newly arrived from California made up the rest.

  The squadron commander selected by Brereton was Captain Charles “Bud” Sprague, a slim young redheaded Irishman from Bridgeport, Connecticut, who was soon to acquire a status with his men that amounted to worship. Commissioned only after arriving in Java, his majorship, like almost everything about the Seventeenth, was just dealt off the arm.

  Time, time, time was what Australia needed. “You—well, you—er—just go up there and fight,” Brereton said.

  Send us American fighters was the signal being tapped out in different codes from a dozen places, from Tulagi in the Solomons and Rabaul in New Guinea to Rangoon and Colombo.

  New Guinea's Port Moresby, undergoing daily punishment by low-flying Zeros and high-level bombers, wanted fighters. So did Singapore, 2800 miles away across the great half arc of the southwestern Pacific. The only forces opposing the Japanese at this time were half a dozen badly shaken P-40s still remaining on Bataan, the handful of Wirraways still striving to endure Japanese attacks upon Moresby, the slow Dutch Brewsters and curious CW-21s that were rejected by our army because it took a genius to land them—both to be massacr
ed in the first heavy raid on Soerabaya—and the doomed RAF Hurricane fighters debarked in late January on Singapore.

  Across the enormous panorama there were air fields galore, but no planes. Had all one hundred and twenty American pilots been able to take off instantly from Australia in fighters for Java, it would hardly have been enough.

  Scrappy little Brereton—who through his spectacles can give a look which pins you to the wall—peeled the gilt from the golden apple of the Indies before he tossed it into the lap of the Seventeenth. While the flies of Darwin practically kidnapped him, he gave the boys a straight talk, delivered in the challenging let's-see-anybody-say-different Brereton manner. Nobody was there to write down his sulfurous views, but the boys felt they would never forget what he said. They cannot give you the exact words, but as they remember, it went like this:

  He said that we would be heavily outnumbered from the beginning.

  He said that we could expect some support from the Hurricanes if any got out of Singapore, but probably not very much because things were looking tough. He said he would be coming up himself as soon as he got things straightened out …

  And what did they think about it?

  We understood two things. We understood that he was a pilot's air general. And we understood that if Java fell we probably would not be coming back.

  Taking the fourteen planes to Java by air could be planned in only one way. There was no choice of air fields as there had been across Australia; there was just a single causeway of islands, good as long as the Japs left it alone. Due to Portuguese neutrality, the Americans had to fly from Darwin to Koepang Beyond that the only airdromes were on the island of Soemba, or Bali. The next landing had to be Java.

  In the October conferences in Java before war broke out, it was arranged for Dutch fighters to take part in the defense of Singapore and British fighters to take part in Java. No one could foresee that American fighters would be the principal defending force for Java. Nor had the Australians and Dutch come to any agreement nor made any preparations for the transport of planes from Australia to Java.

  The whole idea was that the British fighters, if the Philippines fell, would drop back from northern Malaya, and if Singapore fell, would pull back to Sumatra and Java. A good plan, but Singapore and Manila both lost all their fighters.

  The day came—it was January 23 [1942]—when the pilots strapped on their goggles, walked across the red clay RAAF field at Darwin, and climbed in. Then they were off over the big abandoned meat factory. They saw Melville Island on their right, and soon they were gone.

  A leathery-faced American pilot, who flies an aged bi-motored Beechcraft and has remained anonymous while accomplishing some of the most incredible scouting flights of the Pacific war, led the fighters safely to Koepang, like some Daniel Boone of the Indonesian archipelago. Though separated by twenty-five years and 17,000 hours flying time, they were his gang, the Philippine bunch he'd flown out in this rickety plane, announcing his arrival from Australia with a telegram, One Beechcraft, one nitwit en-route. But for him [Paul “Pappy” Gunn], they would be with the other young pilots on Bataan. He brought them because he wanted them to fight with six machine guns on wings instead of a Garand that most couldn't handle.

  Another pilot, Lieutenant Ben Irvin, caught dengue fever at the Penfoei airdrome and was forced to remain when the final flight took off for Waingapoe. Two days later a whip of Japanese fighters swept in and destroyed his Kittyhawk; his sergeant, Angelo Prioreschi, was working in the hangar when six Zeros strafed methodically for twenty-five minutes. “I ran around that hangar like a chicken, trying to dodge those bullets,” said Prioreschi, a stocky blackhaired crew chief from a Pennsylvania coal-mining town. He went on to Java and became one of the squadron's three decorated enlisted men. Irvin (later to win almost every flying honor America could give) flew back to Darwin to plead himself another P-40.

  No, there was nothing secret to the Japs about the stepping-stones from Darwin to Soerabaya.

  Curiously enough, many of the ground crewmen had never in their lives flown before they took wings for Java. As Perry says: “We left Australia over the Timor Sea on our way to ‘the front.’ We flew until almost six p.m. and finally were over Timor itself. We landed at Koepang, taxied up to the concealed hangar, got out and there wasn't a soul in sight. A few minutes later the Australians manning the 'drome began drifting out of the jungle. They were amazed to see us. We had come in from the wrong way, and thinking it was two Jap bombers, they took to their slit trenches in the jungle. The Japs had been raiding at nine in the morning and five in the afternoon for the last two weeks. They had just left, they said. We went up and had our supper, along with a cold bottle of Dutch beer.

  “We stayed in a grass hut and took turns through the night standing guard with the brilliant moon overhead, silhouetting the swaying palm trees and ferns. The lizards croaking in nearby bushes, and the night birds uttering their hoarse shrieks, made it unforgettable. At last dawn came and we took off as soon as the runway was visible. All this time we'd been looking for our Forties to arrive to accompany us. We were getting worried about them, and also for our own safety, since Japanese planes were in the area and we had no guns at all on the transports. We had not seen the other transport for a long time and we were all alone in the sky.

  “Suddenly a plane dived out of the clouds above us, went below and came up under our belly. Instantly: Jap! From each side we expected flashes from his guns. Twin flashes came blinking at us. It was the other transport! The sigh of relief was audible. ‘Don't ever do that again,’ said one of the men, talking to the other plane.”

  Less than three weeks later, Japanese parachutists were to descend on Koepang, breaking the golden thread to the Indies.

  Koepang to Waingapoe, for the gnatlike P-40Es, was only about 240 miles over the Savu Sea. The next hop would have been only 300 miles if the P-40s could have landed at Den Pasar. But at this time on Bali there was only the air field, no fighter fuel. They had to push through to Soerabaya, a jump of over 450 miles.

  The fighters got only a glimpse of Bali, that unspoiled paradise of the creative craftsman. They did not know, then, that over Bali and little Penida, the island in Lombok Strait, Major Sprague was to fight his last battle as their commander.

  Thirteen planes arrived in Soerabaya on January 24 and 25.

  Two days later the big American transport planes came winging in from Darwin. The boys in tan duck caps who knew about machine guns and carburetors jumped to the ground with: “How did the engines stand up?” on their lips.

  It's a cramping, deafening and fatiguing experience to fly fighter planes over long stretches of water. Fighter pilots are not navigators by nature. Sprague had brought his whole force through intact, but they were tired. The marathon was over; they prepared their maneuvering muscles and sea-weary eyes for the sprints.

  The British troops fell back upon Singapore, and the Japs took Ambon, the northern keyhole to the Banda Sea. Would Singapore hold? The Japs were making preliminary photographs of the Soerabaya navy yard—the last usable Allied naval base above the south coast of Australia—for the raids to come. Small wonder the Jap bombers would be able to place a bomb directly amid the thatched camouflage the Dutch had so painstakingly built over the drydock for our refugee Asiatic Fleet.

  For five days at Soerabaya the pilots learned to distinguish the Dutch and American aircraft already on hand, which in the Dutch case consisted of Dorniers, Ryans and barrel-bodied Brewsters, together with a handful of old Curtiss CW-21Bs plus a small force of PBY Catalinas. The Americans also began practicing with the interceptor control operated by the Dutch air officer at Soerabaya, to whom they were subordinated. “Those Dutchmen certainly were gutty,” said one American armorer who saw them fight. There was something challenging about receiving the duty from men who died as the Dutch did in the first raids.

  The CW-21, their best plane, was a radial engine job like the Zero, with four .303 Browning machine gun
s. But the Zero had about fifty miles an hour margin over the old Curtiss interceptor, and could practically turn cartwheels inside it.

  The first time the Japs hit Soerabaya, thirteen of these anachronisms went up; only seven came back. At night the Dutchmen sang and laughed and drank beer just the same, and the American enlisted men felt a wonder that men could die like that.

  Those five days in Soerabaya, the Allies got to know each other. Dutch pilots and American enlisted men lived only a few doors apart. Before dying, the Dutch knew who was taking over.

  When the seven went up, to meet the next overwhelming raid, only two came back. The hard-boiled Dutchmen, with the strong suicidal streak that came of desperation, merrily told the Americans: “If the Japs come tomorrow, we'll both go home, too. It's time we knocked off work, like those other boys.”

  About the Dutch, the Americans say: “They might be a little quick reaching for the old guilder, but they sure knew how to fight as a people, and you couldn't move them with anything. They certainly tried to show their appreciation for us.”

  On January 27 Sprague took out a flight of ships to protect a Dutch sub crippled in the shallow water attacks off Borneo. After the weather worsened under the prevailing monsoon, and the sub was no longer in danger of air attack, all the P-40s were pulled back to Soerabaya. Lieutenant Frank Neri, landing in bad weather after a mission to Bali, spun in and crashed. His face and head were terribly cut and his ear sliced off cleanly, as by a razor. He went to Bandoeng for more treatment. After Neri had gone, a couple of his friends went out to the scene of the crash and saw something white in the grass. It was the ear. They put it in a small blue box and carried it around awhile, intending to return it formally to its owner. But the ear became impossible to live with and finally, like a lot of things, got lost.