The Dutch, realizing that heavy bombings were imminent, hastened to get the Americans moved back to Blimbing, behind Soerabaya. There was one thing the Dutch were rich in, and that was air fields.
Blimbing (not to be confused with the Blimbing near Malang, the American Fortress base) was a little kampong on an inconspicuous road six miles south from Djombang, a station on the railroad through central Java. From a fighter's view aloft, Blimbing looked like a button set deep in an upholstered divan. It was ranked on every side by climbing sawis, the terraced ricefields by which Java's 40,000,000, a population denser than almost any in Europe, were able to feed themselves.
The field was typical of Dutch ingenuity. They had taken several ricefields, drained them, and planted grass. From the air it still looked more like a ricefield than anything else. It was six miles by the squadron's two “peeps” [small jeeps] to Blimbing the village, where the men lived in the deserted homes of executives of a sugar mill. Then it was another six miles out to the main road, and about twelve to Djombang, where one could take a crowded local train to Soerabaya, full of women in sarongs and babies in tiny sarongs, sweets, chickens and lively Javanese chatter.
For twenty-seven days the Japanese could not find the Blimbing air field. Our pilots often had difficulty finding it themselves. (The Dutch called it “Ngoro” after a nearby town.) The ex-ricefield that was the bulwark against Japanese invasion of eastern Java was shaped like a cross on the ground, with the long arm pointing east and the three short arms running north, west and south. The Seventeenth arranged its planes so at least sixteen—if they were in repair—could get off the cramped runways in three minutes, spiral up and gain enough height for a diving attack at oncoming Zeros and Mitsubishis. Considering that the best pilots had to take off on the short-armed north-south runway, over choppy dangerous air drafts exhaled up from flooded ricefields, the speed of take-off could hardly have been beaten by a crack outfit from those all-outdoors fields where fighters trained back in the States.
The idea was that the American fighters could protect either Soerabaya from a head-on attack over Madura Strait, or Malang against an attack coming from Bali. Meantime bombers from the Seventh Group as well as the more famous Nineteenth were to strike Japanese ships wherever they were, to destroy their air fields from Jolo to Kendari, from Balikpapan to Kuala Lumpur in faraway Malaya, from Singapore to Palembang. These were the days when the B-17 was only a high-level bomber, when moonlight skip-bombing was unheard of, and anything below 5000 feet by daylight was considered wild and wasteful for the bombsight-obsessed monsters.
The Seventeenth moved to its new field after Lieutenant Geurtz, their hard-working Dutch liaison officer, and Captain Willard Reed of the Marine Corps had perfected arrangements and finished preparations. Because the field at Blimbing was well-hidden, accommodations were plain. You couldn't have everything. One customarily cheerful pilot wrote: “The food was terrible, prepared by native cooks, and had no similarity to anything appetizing. So all we would eat was peanuts, bananas and beer. We would only plan from hour to hour, not knowing if we would be alive the next hour. Everybody was in good spirits despite our predicament.”
The day of the ground crew was long and hard. The early shift had a breakfast of bread with powdered chocolate, took the peeps out to the field and had tools in their hands by 2:45 a.m. The regular shift could loaf in bedded ease, provided only they were on the field by 4 a.m.
There was no engineering department and no supply department. They simply borrowed things back and forth. “Could I trouble you, McBride, for a cupful of presto?” “If you can give us the use of two hundred rounds of clean .50s for the day, Goltry” They swapped like housewives.
At 9 the grease gang had another light breakfast consisting of cottile roots plucked fresh from the nearby field and prepared by the Dutchman, his wife and two daughters who fed them. The cottile is a white rooted plant that looks in leafage like a fig and has a straight root. Stripped and boiled, they were good.
Sometimes in this late breakfast they had fresh coconut. There were a hundred fifty coolies working at the strip, rolling gasoline drums and building shelter revetments out of bamboo, matting and tar. It was enough to point to a tree and one of the little Javanese would hitch back his sarong, plant his knife more firmly in his belt, and go up the best-inclined coconut palm.
Blimbing had no anti-aircraft; the Dutch idea was apparently that when this field was discovered by the Zeros, there were plenty in Java to take its place. The Americans started some protection against strafing. They dug four or five round holes about five feet deep, and took .50-caliber guns from damaged or foundling P-40s to arm them. In the plane the guns had been electrically fired, but there was no electrical system on the ground. They rigged up selenoid magnets from the planes as triggers. How all this would have worked out in a raid nobody knew. After a couple of weeks the Dutch sent out some native gunners, who lived in the shacks between the eastern and southern arms of the runway and manned the guns by day.
Sprague tried to keep everyone alive to the fact that they might be attacked any time, by land as well as by air. As early as February 2, four full weeks before the day of invasion, he told the men: “The Japs are due any moment.”
The Japanese hunted patiently for the field. They found and struck not only Batavia and Soerabaya, but Malang, Madioen and Jokjakarta, the three Fortress bases, and the headquarters of Wavell at Bandoeng. But until the very day their landing barges grounded on the sands of Java, they could not find Blimbing.
One morning they almost found it. Four Zeros came over the little field and hung over the rice paddies like the ever-circling hawks of Java. As Perry said: “If they had been able to spot the field, the Seventeenth Pursuit Squadron would have had its career ended. They would have bombed it out completely. As it was we were able to operate a while longer and the Jap radio still reported ‘swarms of fighters rising from hidden fields all around Soerabaya, armed with six cannon.’ … In reality it was our twenty-or thirty-odd P-40Es armed with six .50-caliber guns, rising from one hidden field. But the Japs couldn't do anything, and Tojo kept losing planes.”
In the broiling Javanese noon—sometimes broken by petulant thunderstorms—the squadron's truck would circle the field with lunch: usually fried rice with some fruit like mango or pineapple. The truck stopped at the east end revetments, the north end revetments, and “Operations,” a twenty-foot-square grass hut pushed in the corner between the southern and eastern arms of the runway. The grass huts for armament and engineering were a little farther down the eastern arm.
Before the thunderstorm that often follows sunset in Java, the tired men crammed aboard the two peeps and the truck to go back to Blimbing. Supper, the best meal of the day, was waiting: a big tureen of soup, water buffalo meat with cabbage and rice, and finally manggas, the Malay for “mangos,” which they learned to call by the native name.
Busy though the men were getting the P-40s ready to fight, there was still enough zest in them to want their planes to look terrifying, so they painted on the leering shark mouths that go so well with the underslung jaw of the P-40. Some thought a dragon was the thing, and soon there were a few dragons. Usually officers did this fancy brushwork themselves, spurred by suggestions from mechanics lying on the ground beneath the awkwardly placed underwing feed system of the P-40.
It is customary, when officers and enlisted men have faced death together, to find in retrospect that they were so close the barrier of rank actually vanishes. Blimbing was this kind of situation. The best testimony of such comradeship is that enlisted men are its chief witnesses. “We knew we were all in it together. The officers behaved this way to us, and we behaved the same toward them.”
Discipline was strict, but it came from below rather than above. Sprague was no prude. When they asked him about leave in Soerabaya, he said: “After you get the planes ready and can give them no more work, your time is your own. You can go anywhere and do anything. There will be no
leave passes; you issue your own. But you have to be in the revetment long enough before dawn so that when your pilot comes out, his ship is ready to fly and fight.” To the officers, speaking apart, he said: “There will be no saluting and stuff around here for awhile. We can't waste time in non-essentials. Our job is to hold the Japs out of Java as long as we can.”
Then, just to make sure the grease gang understood obligations were mutual, he called them in again. He said: “We're operating under bad conditions. We have one armorer, one crew chief and one pilot for each plane. If anything big goes wrong, we can't fix it. It's up to you to see that your ship is ready to fight. Besides the guns in his plane, every pilot has a .45 in his shoulder holster. If something mechanical goes wrong with his ship or his guns in the air, and the pilot gets back, he has the privilege of landing, pulling his .45, and shooting you on the spot.” No groundlings were shot.
“Jess” Willard Reed was one of that group of American naval and Marine Corps pilots who had been hired by the Dutch Government to give instruction in piloting Catalinas. Small, round-faced, dark and vivacious, one of the most beloved Americans who ever visited Java, Reed was to be a kind of unofficial foster father to the Seventeenth Pursuit. He was not only ready to guide them, as he had the Dutch, he was ready to fight with them.
Two days after the Squadron settled in at Blimbing, Sprague flew to ABDA headquarters in Bandoeng to explain the lack of repair equipment in Soerabaya. The Dutch had no radar; the Americans had no spare parts, tires or anything else.
Almost upon the hour of the redheaded commander's departure the Japanese sent their first great wave of bombers against Soerabaya.
The lookout system gave the Americans between twenty and twenty-five minutes' warning—when it worked. The Japanese bombers usually came in at 21,000 feet and were able to get over Soerabaya and open their bomb hatches before the Americans could reach them.
On February 3 the Americans were 4000 feet below when they saw the first formation. There were seventeen enemy, in two lines. The Americans chased the bombers, twin-motored Mitsubishi Type 1 Bettys, far out to sea. But the Japs had to pay for their blow at Soerabaya. Bill Hennon of Mound, Minnesota, gained the squadron its first bomber by sneaking in alone from the rear and picking one off.
Hennon, who earned his Silver Star in one of these raids, had been arguing with a Dutch pilot on a Soerabaya airdrome when the Japs came over. “A Brewster can't turn inside a Zero,” he said. The Dutchman said it could. He went up to prove his ideas, and in ten minutes he was back sitting in the same slit trench. “You vere right, Bill,” he said. “Brewster cannot turn inside Zero.”
On this same day the Seventh and Nineteenth heavy bombardment groups of Fortresses received their heaviest blow at Singosari field, a few miles from Malang. Five Fortresses were destroyed on the ground—four that day, the fifth puffing into flame the next. This last Fortress fathered a saying not found in books of Javanese lore. Its number was 27; the saying, whenever an unexplained bolo knife or binoculars was found in the hands of a new owner, was that “I got it out of 27.” The limits of 27 became as extendable as passenger accommodations on the Mayflower.
The next day Sprague flew in from Bandoeng. The ABDA command had not been able to offer much in supplies or equipment. There were no other Kittyhawks in Java; only a few Brewsters and some Hurricanes from Singapore that already had their hands full trying to protect the east coast of Sumatra, where every escaping ship was being terribly punished as it passed southward through Bangka Strait.
The Seventeenth began to sense how remote it was in the extemporaneous, under-equipped scheme of Java's Allied defense. Batavia, at the other end of Java, was a commercial port, of little importance except as a refuge for ships fleeing from Singapore. But on the defense of Soerabaya—a naval base in some respects better equipped than Singapore and far more active—the Allies had bet their hope of stopping the Japs north of the barrier islands. If Soerabaya was to remain a mother port for warships, particularly for American subs meant to halt the Jap convoys, the eleven Kittyhawks of the Soerabaya fighter force would have to be kept in the air.
The lack of radar equipment to defend Soerabaya, giving the Seventeenth time to meet the invaders at sea, was keenly felt in the grass huts at Blimbing. There were also difficulties coordinating the telephone-radio warning system, with long-range Jap fighters approaching Java from the south and east as well as the north.
An adequate warning system might have saved Java. As it was, the boys listened for the warning gongs of the villages, which traveled faster than the tattoo of African drums.
In this first raid on Soerabaya, of February 3, the Japs sent over seventy bombers in all, killing 33 people and injuring 141. The red-circled bombers claimed to have got eighty-five Dutch planes besides five Brewsters shot down.
The next day Blimbing saw its first tragedy: the lovable and popular “Jess” Reed, the Marine captain who had been a kind of guardian angel to the Seventeenth. He had no right to be bringing in an army P-40; his job was on the PBY Catalina training side. But he wanted to help. He was a flying commander, and knew he could not give Bud Sprague full cooperation with the Dutch unless he understood the take-off problems at Blimbing's compact sawi-surrounded field.
Jess took off smoothly, but coming in, perhaps due to the twinkling illusion of the flooded ricefields, he made a mistake, and his motor cut out. What Reed probably did was to reach for the throttle and pull back on the mixture control, which is next to the throttle in a P-40, not bent away from it as in a PBY.
Almost everyone in the squadron was standing on the field watching him. His plane disappeared behind a hilly ricefield. Then they heard the sloppy noise of the crash. He must have got the engine going again, because they heard it catch once before striking. Then Bill Hennon and Cy Blanton reached him. Only his arm was broken; it seemed to everyone as though he had been drowned in the sawi rather than killed. He had tried to stretch his glide, possibly after shutting off his mixture control and being unable to get it going again. Besides having turned over, the plane had come completely around and was facing away from the field.
The Dutch mourned Reed, eldest of their American instructors, and wanted to bury him, but the Seventeenth decided to take care of this marine who was their own. One staff sergeant had operated a funeral parlor, and Reed was borne away by the hands of the men who admired him. They buried him not far from the sawi, and there he rests awaiting the day when his own marines go back to Java.
New reinforcements were on the way from Darwin. After the raids on Koepang and Bali, every flier knew there was no safety in the Darwin-Soerabaya island stepping-stones.
A lag is necessary in describing to the public the deterioration of any military situation. At this time, when encouraging statements were coming out about the prospect of Singapore holding, the Japanese were busy sawing off the arterial system of supplying fighters upon which the whole Dutch East Indies depended.
Down in Australia the U.S. Army was working to do the impossible and keep the planes flowing. Not only P-40 Kittyhawks but also navy-built A-24 Dauntless dive bombers were urgently needed to stop the invasion convoys the Japanese were assembling for Java. Neither the British nor the Dutch possessed any dive bombers.
Meantime American mechanics in Brisbane were diligently trying to put together a navy dive bomber with army weapons. A dealer in old iron was patching up new gun mountings for the rear cockpit, to fit army machine guns on the navy supports. Hammering things out by hand blacksmith-fashion, he was also attempting to make over navy bomb catches to hold army bombs. The army was paying, in those feverish makeshift hours in Australia, for its reluctance to accept the ten-year-old navy experience in dive-bombing, just as the navy was to be tardy in discovering the value of the great land-based reconnaissance bombers used by the army.
When the dive bombers, which were to be operated out of Java under top cover furnished by the Seventeenth, finally started flying there, they faced the same diffi
culties of having no intermediate bases—like champions of the springboard forced to swim the English Channel as a warm-up for their diving.
One A-24 en route across northern Australia lost its way and came down in the desert with a belly landing, scraping off its lower pan and bending its propeller. The pilot began sending telegrams back to the miniature American headquarters. He imagined he was still in the middle of the American system of supply and behaved accordingly. His first telegram went about like this:
FORCE LANDED PLEASE SEND GROUND CREW.
This message being unanswered, he sent another:
WASHED OUT BELLY PAN AND PROP PLEASE SEND SPARES.
There were none to send, so there was no reply. The flier in the bush waited another couple of days, then had the Australian homesteader who was boarding him send another:
STILL GROUNDED HERE WHAT SHALL EYE DO?
This time the reply was:
WHY DONT YOU MARRY AND SETTLE DOWN.
The lieutenant thereupon took part of the corrugated iron roof from the farmer's shed and made himself a new bellypan. He removed the propeller, drove to town and stood by while the local blacksmith hammered it roughly into shape. Then he flew the plane back. He was learning how wars are fought.
No substantial group of fighting planes has ever traveled to battle so far under their power as did the Seventeenth to save Java. If they had never brought down in flames a single Jap, or failed entirely to delay the enemy's onslaught, a forefinger following on a map the crooked, death-strewn line of their travel would necessarily pause in awe at their achievement.
In another part of Australia a big transport plane was about to leave for Java with two dozen “odds and sods” of servicemen. The colonel in charge accidentally learned that the fighters en route there in P-40s—newcomers to the Seventeenth—were going to leave without parachutes, because none had yet arrived.
Weller's War Page 31