“I don't order or even suggest you give up your chutes,” he said to his fellow passengers. “I merely put the situation before you, and ask you to do as you see fit.”
Every man entered the transport, took his chute, carried it out and threw it on the fighter sector truck nearby. The fighters took off for the long seat-pounding race for Java, and there was a reassuring chute under every pilot.
Though Soerabaya was only a tree-top jump from Blimbing, the newcomers had to be guided in personally, because Blimbing was almost unfindable in the cushioned Javanese hills. Somebody always had to go over to Soerabaya to bring in the new boys.
The former newcomers were now the old-timers. They gave hints about what to do and what not to do. The food in the hotel at Djombang was terrible, but you weren't supposed to complain. Every third day or so you could go into Soerabaya and fill up on the delicious twenty-course rijstaffel. The unit of Dutch money was a guilder but it was always called a “glider.” And it glided away, just like that.
Nine new pilots brought the fighting strength of the squadron to twenty-two. Besides Egenes, Reynolds, McWherter and Jackson, they were blond and blue-eyed Wallace Hoskyn of Seattle; Lester Johnsen of South Bend, Washington (a sprite of Norwegian descent who had been a champion relay runner at Stanford); stocky Bernard Oliver of Prescott, Arizona; short, thin-haired James Ryan of Oklahoma; and talkative little Roger Williams of Sterling City, Texas, of whom hangar fliers said: “That guy jumps around like spit on a hot stove.”
The fighters were up and active by six on the morning of February 9. Just before eleven o'clock the expected warning came. Even when the air defense control was not working well, the Dutch were heartening to work with.
“Do you see them, fighters?” The call, in a strong Dutch accent, would come over the little phones in the cockpits. “Look a little north and east of where you are. Do you see them now?”
And whoever was leading the flights—Sprague, Coss, Dale, Lane, McCallum or Kiser—would answer: “Sure, we see them! Here we go.”
Then the never-failing Dutch answer would come back, clear for everyone to hear: “Luck to the fighters!” (The Dutch said later, “We liked to hear them answer. They often said: ‘Okey-doke! We see them.’ And then we would say again: ‘Luck to the Yanks! Luck to the fighters!’”)
All four flights set off to meet the Japs. This time it was eighteen Mitsubishis. Williams was the first to sight them, but his “enemy bombers ahead” was not clearly heard by all the pilots, partly because the P-40s were scattered out to cover the square of danger as broadly as possible.
Five fighters got into the bombers, which split upon being attacked into two flights of nine each. The attack was made at 24,000 feet and Coss, Williams, Jackson and Hague all got in at least one pass, while McWherter, using tactics invented by himself, got in four. The left engine of one Mitsubishi began to smoke under McWherter's bullets, but cleared up again. Then the Dutch lookouts reported that they saw a bomber go down into the sea northwest of the naval yard. It was given to McWherter in view of his having made more passes than anyone else.
By this time the Seventeenth had its own bulletin board and Sprague had scribbled the total:
One Seversky
One Messerschmitt 110
Two Mitsubishi 96 heavy bombers
Three Zeros
On February 10 the fighters began to clear decks for action. Wasted hours of operation against non-existent bombers had to be eliminated; of twenty-three P-40Es, only sixteen were in operation. More were added when Hennon and Egenes went over to Djember and brought back two ships that had been forced down. But they were not ready for combat. Fighter planes are delicate creatures, even when as heavily armed and underhung as the P-40s. The redheaded major and Cy Blanton spent a half hour each of early daylight trying to screw up the loose places.
Even more P-40s were on their way, this time including several veterans of the Philippines (led by the slim handsome Grant Mahony of Vallejo, California) who had fought against shoals of Zeros and bombers.
The squadron was feeling its strength and eager for battle. There were now 47 officers, including two transport pilots and two Dutch liaison officers. There were three Dutch radiomen but only 81 American ground crewmen—less than two to a plane. Two pilots were still marooned in Bali and two were in Soerabaya hospital.
It was sixty miles to Soerabaya, and the enlisted men went to town whenever they could borrow a jeep, or a truck. Once in Soerabaya, as Perry said: “When you wanted to go somewhere, you gave a native boy a Dutch five-cent piece to hail a taxi, then you hung onto your hat and prayed, while the driver drove through streets crowded with hundreds of bicycles, oxcarts, and pedestrians at a pace twice as fast as the traffic would permit. A driver that honked his horn first had the right of way. The horn was continually blaring and beeping and many times two taxis could not come to an agreement on who hit the horn first.
“We had learned by this time to pay the driver, then turn and walk off. We used to ask them: ‘How much?’ and paid them according to the number of fingers they held up. It was usually four times too much, and the Dutch people told us the average rate was a guilder an hour. So after that we would pay them what we thought it was worth and walk off. They never got underpaid.
“We learned other things about associating with natives. Another thing was: Never give a native beggar money. Many times syphilitic beggars would approach us for money, and finally a young Dutch soldier told us to tell them in no uncertain terms to be on their way. ‘The government takes care of them,’ he said. He told us to say pikki! when they came around. Pronounced peegy, it meant ‘Get the hell outta here.’ They knew very well what it meant; they were used to it.
“One night a couple of us went to a native stage show. Against a background of fantastically weird, unforgettable music, on a stage elaborately decorated with beautiful curtains and brilliant colors, native actors, dressed in the most luxurious of costumes, acted with grotesque and exaggerated motions, telling the old story of the eternal triangle. Man's wife has another man; man kills other man in a terrific sword fight. It was the most amazing thing I had ever seen, and I knew I would never forget it. A Dutch friend translated the words as best he could, so we were able to follow the story. It was fascinating and that alone paid for all the discomforts we had had. I will never be able to forget the beauty and luxury of the spectacle.”
Lincoln's Birthday was a big day for the Seventeenth Pursuit; important visitors were coming. Billed in advance only as more P-40Es, they turned out to be A-24s. They dove fast, all right, but you had to start pulling them out of the dive so far from the ground that your bombing was liable to be inaccurate. (Eight days later, the A-24s were destined to take part in the first dive-bombing raid in the history of the United States Army. The writer was on the field at Malang to watch this flight.)
The wet fields, due to the monsoon rains—which lasted intermittently all afternoon and much of the evening—were causing as much trouble as the lack of facilities for repairing the temperamental Kittys. The squadron had only twenty-four flyable planes for its 47 pilots, and seven more under repair. The ground men puttered and adjusted and soon there were two more Kittys ready.
The Japs, however, having tested Soerabaya's fighting strength, decided to postpone their bombing activities in the eastern part of Java to concentrate upon the situation at the west created by the fall of Singapore. At this time the Japs were already nearly a week on Singapore Island, and the overcrowded garrison, with its backs to the sea and the wharves, knew that it also was doomed.
Timing two blows at once, the Japs prepared their parachutists on Borneo for the airborne attack against Palembang, Sumatran home of the Dutch and American oil refineries. Already the Japanese invasion fleet, ignoring burning Singapore, was feeling its way south to Palembang. The mixed force of American, Dutch, and British destroyers and cruisers was hunting this fleet in the waters between Sumatra and Borneo, but had to steal its way by day agai
nst Japanese bombers.
Of all this the men of the Seventeenth Pursuit knew nothing. The afternoon of February 14, the canopies of enemy parachutes first mushroomed in the blue sky over Palembang. That night Bud Sprague was summoned to Bandoeng. When he took off from Blimbing on Sunday morning, two ugly things were happening.
An officer with a white flag from the camp of Lieutenant General A. E. Percival had asked for terms for the surrender of Singapore from General Tomoyuki Yamashita, and
The Japanese invasion fleet had reached the mouth of Sumatra's Moesi River, and started up toward Palembang.
The airdromes at Palembang, called P1 and P2, were already deserted. Although the Dutch had wiped out every one of the Jap parachutists, the godowns of Palembang's Chinatown were burning in a great fire of which the refineries of Standard and Shell were the tinder. On the Sunday before, the Japanese had caught on the ground most of three squadrons of Hurricanes, and destroyed them, too.
If fighter planes were to defend the skies over Java, it would have to be the Seventeenth. Of the handful that had reached Batavia for the RAF, about six had been assembled. The RAF had lost most of its records and nearly all its procedure books for the Hurricane in Singapore and Palembang. In the backyards of cottages around the Batavia airdrome, raided sometimes at high noon by the Jap low-level strafers, they were assembling Hurricanes at a rate of one every twenty-four hours.
Sumatra was falling, and it was up to the Americans to do something about it. But Palembang, for a P-40E, was miles away around the elbow angle of Java, Sunda Strait and Sumatra.
At Blimbing the first team of the Seventeenth Pursuit took off for Batavia.
The manager of the Hôtel des Indes at Batavia could accept no more guests. The dining room was closed at nine. There was no more food. Well, perhaps he could get some food. But there was no room; there was positively no room. All the hotels in Batavia were overcrowded. There were so many refugees, from Singapore and Sumatra; there were British refugees, Dutch refugees, American refugees from the big ship that had tried to leave Padang and was bombed before it got its anchors up. The manager would be glad to help if he could, but he could not eject guests from their rooms. The crew of the American Fortress would have to go elsewhere.
The Seventeenth Pursuit was not too pleased at being called bomber pilots. The point of view of a fighter pilot to a bomber is sometimes—though not always—that of a despatch rider toward a brigadier's chauffeur. The Indies, delighted by the long-range raids of the Fortresses in Malaya, had gone a little Fortress-crazy In Soerabaya the Dutch women knitted sweaters for “Yankee fighters;” in Batavia they thought the Seventeenth was just some little adjunct of the B-17s.
(The Fortresses served their uses. When Stauter got his flying jacket riddled and his messkit shot up—at Blimbing everyone lined up together, tin pans and cup in hand—and there were no replacements, an enlisted man thought of an errand at the Singosari bombers' field. He came back with a new jacket and shiny mess gear.)
The boys who had come in to the Hôtel des Indes were too tired to argue. They were grimy with the long flight from Soerabaya. They had no ground men of their own to service their planes. Batavia was a strange and dark city, and everything was closed.
On the way over, the eight pilots—Sprague was to meet them in Batavia—had stopped at Madioen to transform themselves into bomber pilots at this sub-field of the Fortresses. Bending and manipulating with the makeshift bomb catches, they somehow managed to attach to the wings of each plane four 20-kilo bombs, then made Batavia. Most of all they wanted to get out of their clothes and get into bed.
An American war correspondent, one of those who maintained simultaneous quarters in Soerabaya, Bandoeng and Batavia, heard that a “Fortress crew” were in the dining room of the des Indes. It seemed a lot of men even for a Fortress. He went in and sat down with them. They looked tired and he asked them where they were going to sleep. They replied, “It looks as though we'll have to go back to the field and sleep under the plane.” The American correspondent went to the manager, who said he could do nothing. Then the correspondent began to move things around.
First he wandered through the darkened rear arcades of the des Indes to the door of Big Bill Dunn of the Columbia Broadcasting Company, who looks so much like Hermann Goering that few can believe him the son of a midwestern minister. Bill was sharing a room with Syd Albright of NBC. While the fighter pilots were finishing up their rice and chicken the three correspondents prowled the dark arcades of the hotel. In some rooms there were two beds and only one person sleeping. In some rooms there was no one, the army or navy officer incumbent having gone up to the mountains to Bandoeng to confer with the ABDA command.
Where there was a single vacant bed, it was quietly commandeered. Where there were double beds, and only one occupied, the man who hired the room for his exclusive use woke up to find himself rooming with a war correspondent. And the fighter pilots moved into the rooms of the war correspondents themselves.
You could hardly tell the leader of the raid from his officers, except by his red hair. None wore any insignia of rank. They looked like a tug-of-war team at the end of a fraternity picnic. They were not too dirty or tired, however, not to be curious where they were going. When the correspondents told them of the 'chutists over Palembang one said: “Oh-oh, so that's it.”
It was.
Mahony, being Irish, stayed up a little longer than the others, and so did the slit-eyed and quiet Coss. Mahony told how Walt Coss had escaped the Zeros over the northern shore of Luzon. It was just after one of his pals, dying, signed a statement that he had been machine-gunned after bailing out.
When the Zeros caught Coss their first bullets chopped into his tail, then bit into his cooling system. Coss climbed out but kept his clenched finger on the rip cord without pulling. When the waves began to look toothy and white, he had to open up. The canopy snapped out just in time. The Zero chased him down to the water and the canopy lit flapping on the waves beside him. Coss struggled out of his yellow swimming jacket as the Jap's bullets ate into the canopy. His lungs were suffering. But he dove under, hearing the rap of bullets on the water.
When he came up there were holes in both parachute and yellow vest. Every time the Jap dived, Coss dived. Finally he reached the beach at Aparri and walked all the way around to Baguio, where he reported for duty again.
Mahony could not be induced to talk about his Philippine days, but finally one episode was pulled out little by little.
It seems that as soon as the Japs got their hands on Legaspi field in southern Luzon, using formerly American equipment, they began trying to jam the radio communications of the American fighters there. Mahony knew the station well, and was even acquainted with the Filipino who had lived in the shack with his family. Mahony decided to eliminate the jamming nuisance by a one-man raid. Dodging around bays and valleys he reached the field safely, and dove upon the radio shack.
“What happened was like one of those old two-reelers of Mack Sennett's that we used to go see as kids on Saturday afternoons.” He grinned a little. “Remember how the first shot would be just a telegraph pole standing on a street corner? Then the head of a cop would stick out from behind the pole. Then he would put out his whole torso and look around. Then he would step out himself. Then he would go back behind the telegraph pole and ride out on a motor cycle. Finally a whole patrol wagon full of cops would ride out in a big open truck, all waving their nightsticks and yelling—all of them coming from that one skinny telegraph pole.
“It was like that when I dived on the Legaspi radio shack. The Japs came pouring out of that little building first by ones and twos, then by half-dozens, then by what looked like scores. Maybe I'm exaggerating, but it certainly looked like at least a hundred came out the windows and through the doors and went tearing down the hill to take cover in foxholes.
“As soon as I began my dive their AA gunners began winking little lights at me from over in the corner of the field. I tur
ned away, and they kept on winking. I dove down to swing over the trees and what should I see tucked away very cutely in a corner of the 'drome but twelve big bombers of the kind that were hitting Cavite, about 28 Zeros, and a Lockheed transport of the kind the Japs bought to use as a model for construction. I thought: This is mine. I was just putting my stick over to go for them when I took a quick look up just to be sure everything was all right.
“Everything was not all right. There were four Zeros standing straight up and down, falling on my tail as perpendicularly as raindrops. I swung over toward the parked bombers and fighters, leading them out of their dive. We reached a place over the aircraft about the same time, and everybody was shooting, the Japs at me, and I at the Mitsubishis and fighters. I don't know whose bullets did more damage to the aircraft. But they hardly touched me.
“I went over Mount Mayon, and they were still chasing me. They could do everything better and faster than I could and I thought I was a goner. I decided to try playing ring-around-a-rosy The mountain is about a mile high, with a perfect cone-shaped peak. I went around it twice, while they hunted in both directions. But they got so confused guessing which was themselves and which was me that I was able to slip down to tree-top level and make a getaway through the valleys.”
Next morning the weather was misty with monsoon clouds and rain, a providential consideration for the Japanese unloading their barges at Palembang. Monday was ugly weather too. Over the low land between Batavia and its port of Tanjong Priok, whose canals gave it a strange resemblance to Holland, a low soft mist lay upon the ricefields and the godowns. For the P-40s it was no use taking off to find a place one had never seen, under weather where it could not be observed.
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