Weller's War

by George Weller

  The delay meant that the Japs would have established their fighter protection on P1, Palembang's fighter airdrome where most of the British Hurricanes had been destroyed a week before the parachutists fell upon Palembang.

  The morning of February 17, eight Jap fighters met the Seventeenth as the Americans came in over Sumatra from the Java Sea and got the lie of the Moesi River. This time the Japs had no bombers to protect. The Americans, intact, had themselves to protect: in Madioen they had become dive bombers.

  The Jap fighters were not Zeros, but 97s—a low-winged monoplane used principally for ground strafing, scouting, and light bombing jobs, such as troops on a tropical highway. Six of these 97s came in on the heavily laden Kittyhawks. Sprague shook off the weight of his bombs, and Coss, McCallum, and Kruzel got rid of their own to fight as the 97s came in. Egenes coolly made a good bombing run first.

  Sprague got one 97 immediately. McCallum and Kruzel, now feeling light as angels, went into the 97s with their fingers on the button. Two more 97s went down.

  The 97s did not blow up like a Zero in a puffball of flame; they fell away smoking, like matches fallen to the ground.

  Mahony had already led the way down onto the Japanese ships in the river. His bombs fell away among the landing barges on the Moesi bank, lightening his wings of machine gun bullets, and emptying his cannon. Egenes got another fighter.

  Kentucky “Kay” Kiser wanted to be in on both strikes, fighting and bombing too. He held greedily to his bombs. Even though he knew what would happen if a Jap bullet should hit one, he went in among the three 97s that were left. He got the cone of his fire leading one of the 97s the right number of inches and sawed him apart. Then he peeled off and went down among the river craft with his bombs.

  The Seventeenth were happy when they got back to Batavia and came in one by one. None was lost.

  The dive-bombing of Palembang had been a peculiar mission for fighters. But it was typical of the shoestring methods necessary to stop the leaky Dutch dike, at which the waters released by the fall of the dam of Singapore were now rushing.

  While Sprague had been leading his pilots over the smoking refineries of Palembang, things had been happening at the two home fields of Soerabaya. The Dutch handed over operation of the interceptor control to Bill Fisher, a major who'd been with the American bomber command. This transfer was made with the best of good will on both sides. Now Soerabaya had no more Dutch Brewster fighters to send up against the Zeros. Cavite had fallen. Singapore had fallen. The defense of the only naval base remaining in Allied hands was up to the Americans.

  The change was timely, though it did not remedy the basic need of a radar. The Japs, possessing Palembang, were ready to work the eastern half of the pincers round Java. In spite of daily flights over Soerabaya to check American submarines and other craft in the harbor, they did not intend to strike yet with full force.

  At this time a Japanese aircraft carrier had crept down into the Arafura Sea. The Dutch bases on Timor, meant to defend the Indies as far east as New Guinea, were already swept clear of fighters.

  The Japs were preparing a raid against Darwin that was to be one of the most terrible and tragic of the war. Their plan was to begin at the outside and work across the stepping-stone islands from Darwin through Timor, Soembawa, and Bali to Soerabaya. The intention was slowly to cut off Java from the east or Australian side, stop the flow of fighters at their source, and cut off in Java the whole withdrawal of forces from Singapore. In this scheme the Japs were in general successful.

  The Allies had anticipated this plan in part. The American aircraft tender Langley had already left Darwin for Fremantle, due to sail on for Burma with thirty-two more Kittyhawks and pilots. If necessary the Langley could turn toward Java and drop her fighters there. This was what she eventually attempted.

  The Japs usually sent their bombers from the southeastern Celebes (possibly also from eastern Borneo) and allowed the Zero fighters, with belly tanks beneath, to overtake the bombers over the target. Japanese timing is excellent; one noon this same week, within minutes the writer saw four Zeros run off a beautiful crisscross on the airdrome at Batavia, piercing the warning system and raking the Hurricanes and Brewsters on the field with two 90° sweeps. But this day for once Japanese timing did not function perfectly, and the new Dutch-American warning system did.

  Because Bud Sprague was in Bandoeng, Cy Blanton—who comes from Earlsboro, Oklahoma, and is very proud of it—got his chance to lead the squadron into battle. Cy is a boy with thin blond hair and a tremendously friendly manner. He was a little older than the others, and that was why he got the call.

  The Japanese bombers were caught in the unhappy position of having their arrival forewarned adequately for the first time, without their fighters having yet reached the rendezvous. The first Americans left Blimbing at 10:45, zipping down the field with tails high, leaping over the terraced ricefields.

  When the Japanese bombers saw them, and knew their own nakedness without fighters, they must have known they were facing death. What happened in that melée of spitting machine guns was this: The Japs knew that they could not turn away. Blanton led the four flights in, and got his own bomber immediately. His was the lead bomber, and it fell in smoke. The enemy formation began to break up.

  The Japs were in the position of flying toward the sun and toward Soerabaya, with more P-40s concealed in each than they could see or guess at. Almost every Kittyhawk got in one, two or three passes at the bombers. The Japanese turret and belly gunners fought back, but there were simply too many P-40s around them.

  The Japanese bomber rarely bursts into flames. Instead the motors begin to smoke. The head of the bomber droops as though weary. The glassed-in nose sinks. Rarely does the fire spread. But the smoke from the engines gets thicker. The nose gets heavier and nods lower. The bomber slopes away, sags, droops until it passes the oblique angle and becomes perpendicular. Then it goes down, straight down.

  Four were flaming as they fell.

  This was the first time that the American pilots, free of the buzzing Zeros, were able to meet enemy bombers on fighterless terms. As far as this correspondent has been able to keep record, it was the only time in the Pacific war that Japs failed to provide top or bottom cover for their bombers by daylight. Even over Singapore, when the Japanese were positive that they had grounded all but a scattered residue of Hurricanes, they never failed to send a protective sheet of fighters across the island under the blanket of bombers. When the Japanese commander knows the bottom sheet of fighters is already on the bed, he always separates his blanket of bombers with another sheet of fighters. Sometimes he puts another sheet on top of the blanket, just to be sure that nothing gets close to those precious bombers.

  When you lose Zero pilots, as the Japs figure, you lose nothing. You simply throw butterflies into a furnace. But when you lose bomber crews you lose a team of men. There is far more team play called upon within the big complicated mechanism of the bomber than among wasplike fighters. An attack by fighters starts orderly and ends disorderly; there are only about two seconds when interplay counts (though some commanders believe formations should be drawn up again). A bomber crew is functioning as a team from the moment it leaves the airdrome, and the battle is only an accentuated form of that team play. The bomber cannot dodge; each crew within each fuselage is a part of the greater phalanx of the bomber formation itself.

  The gunners of American bombers have to take handling Zeros as a matter of course, and have learned to rely upon their own firepower. Japanese bomber crews have not yet been pushed to this point, because their air generals have followed—necessarily—the principle of not sending their bombers unaccompanied by Zeros.

  Seen over time, this appears a good way to conserve bomber reserves and keep crews intact. Sometimes called the Seversky system, it is ideal for a frugal nation like Japan. The fighters get no bigger; they merely carry more fuel. The big economy comes in the size of the bombers, and their equipment. The bo
mbers cut down on armament and defensive armor, while increasing the bombload. Although the Jap bombers do have machine gun blisters and tail gunners, their firepower is weak compared with the B-17 and B-24. They can be built much smaller, effecting great economies of metal, and still carry an efficient bombload. For night raiding they can do about as good a job—providing no night fighters arise to meet them—as the big American bombers. The Seversky system is ideal for the hard-hitting nation short of raw materials, which hopes to get them by the stab-in-the-back method. If she can catch her enemy bending, as the army likes to put it, and can get her raw materials, she may be able to change over to the big bomber plan of production.

  But the Seversky system is harder to work out than it sounds. A fighter must be built to fly fast; a bomber, fast in the pinches, cannot cruise long distances at fighter speeds. The two planes cannot start together; they must rendezvous. And anyone who has tried to rendezvous in the sky, even by good weather and broadest daylight and at determined altitudes, knows how difficult it can be.

  Another difficulty with the Japanese system when it faces a fully alert and equally armed enemy is the number of imponderables that go into computing fuel for the fighters. Britain lost most of her Hurricanes in the battle of Crete through their being based in Africa and falling into the sea, because fighting had used up their homing fuel. When the Japs tried to raid Darwin after American fighters and warning planes had been put into operation, the same thing happened; the Zeros, chased by P-40s, fell like the dry and weary flies of autumn into the Timor Sea.

  The Seversky system, with which the Japs opened their war, places almost the whole burden on the Zero pilot. When good planes and fast-working warning systems put him to the test, the disadvantages of interdependence begin to show.

  Our Fortresses and Liberators take occasional lickings, but have initiated a period of self-protected heavy bombers which, operating like submarines of the air, can go by daylight anywhere along the enemy's coasts—anywhere except within his anti-aircraft-fringed harbors—and persecute any unescorted freighter or transport ship. This commerce-raiding, also effective in knocking out isolated enemy dumps and garrisons with inadequate anti-aircraft, is something the Japs cannot do yet.

  Bomber crews want fighters overhead whenever they can get them; it is difficult to be in a bombing run over the smoking volcano at Rabaul, be attacked, and keep on target while fighting off a hornet swarm of Zeros. But whereas at the beginning of the war the bombers were asking—sometimes a little querulously—for fighter escort both ways to any targets fighters could reach, now all they ask is protection when actually making their bombing runs. Give them peace for these three minutes, and the .50 calibers will take care of the Zeros the rest of the time.

  So much for the contrasted views of American and Jap bombers. We like fighter protection; they must have it.

  The Japs, preparing their plans of conquest, used the Seversky idea of a long-range fighter protecting the long-range bomber. When fighters drop belly tanks to defend bombers, their fuel margin narrows even though the first intake is from the belly tank. This cascade—“It's raining Jap belly tanks,” the Seventeenth's pilots used to say—occurs just when the fighter is avidly pulling gas for fighting speed.

  What happens inside a Japanese bomber when attacked? What happens to the hard morale, the desire for self-sacrifice for the Emperor? Ordinarily it would be hard to say. The processes of the Japanese mind are alien to ours. But one principal diversion of fighter pilots is listening to each other's radios, and it so happens that a Japanese-speaking American aviator who listened in on one such conversation during the battles over the Pacific is able to furnish us with a pretty good idea.

  This American fighter pilot dived upon a bomber and set it aflame and had the unusual experience of overhearing—and understanding—what the Japanese commander said to the tail gunner. It went like this:

  Pilot: “We have been hit. We are burning. For the eternal honor of the Emperor and the glory of Japan I am about to cause this plane to dive upon that American warship down there.”

  Tail Gunner: “I don't care what you are going to do for the honor of Japan and the glory of the Emperor, but this plane is burning and I am going to leave it by parachute immediately.”

  If any such conversations went on in the burning bombers outside Soerabaya that day, the Seventeenth did not know. The Dutch saw nine come down, with at least 45 Japanese crewmen. Fuchs and Williams got their first officially credited bombers.

  Another nine enemy bombers appeared, making eighteen in all. But by this time the twelve Zeros that were to furnish “cover underneath” appeared, and rolled the Americans into a wildcat fight.

  The Japs were flying a stepdown formation of nine bombers, each tail gunner in the staircase protecting the belly of the bomber above. To attack meant to face the concentrated fire of all the tail gunners. Jock Caldwell, flying in close as usual, had several tail trifles (empennage) entirely shot away. This student of the Orient, whose perfect physique had earned him the name of “Little Tarzan,” decided to attack.

  He made his way straight down the staircase. He set the top bomber afire, and the bottom one. The staircase lost its upper and lowermost treads; they fell away in flame and smoke into the sea. The staircase flew on. Jock stretched his dive over the rice paddies, and bailed out. Somebody saw him; someone else picked him up.

  That day Jock, who was just twenty-five, earned the Silver Star that General Brett was to give him. Little Tarzan's armorer, square-built Sergeant Lewis McNeil of Lubbock, Texas, was not the only member of the squadron for whom Caldwell was like a god. There is a tendency, after death strikes a group of fliers, to elevate those who have offered their lives, and by reminiscence to give them an influence in the squadron that they had not possessed. Although Jock Caldwell never became squadron leader, he might very likely have carried that responsibility.

  Caldwell got a severely wrenched back out of his two bombers, but used nevertheless to help his armorer plugging in cartridges. He did not smoke or drink himself, and when he heard that the merry McNeil was slightly awash, whether at the Trocadero in Brisbane, or the Shanghai, the Café Royal or (till the Japs hit it with a bomb) the Tip Top Café in Soerabaya, he would find a rickshaw or taxi, whatever the hour of day or night, and bring the errant home.

  Caldwell was the one to whom the squadron looked for its slight political education. He had been brought up in China, and taught and studied in Japan. “I've seen Japs at war for five years and I know what to expect from them as enemies,” he used to say. Of his parachute jump after being shot at by the nine Jap bombers he said merely: “I found I was in the cockpit, falling to pieces, but still indicating 450 an hour. I tried to get out, and the slipstream pushed me back. I decided it was all over and that I might as well let it happen. Then I thought: ‘What the hell, let's have another try’ That time I managed to get out.”

  Although a teetotaler, Caldwell was no absolute puritan. He had McNeil paint the names of girls on the guns: Lois, Beatrice, Helen and on the smoky other wing Elizabeth, Ruth and Lavelle. “Beatrice jammed up on me today,” he would say after landing, pulling back his canopy. “Beatrice always was a bitch,” McNeil would answer. … The Japanese thinks of the Anglo-Saxon, particularly the American, as weakly uxorious. But there are reasons that are not purely affectionate why a pilot may name his guns after women.

  The afternoon after this big interception under Blanton's leadership, the Palembang force came back. There were handshakes; the little force had fought at two places in the dike six hundred miles apart. The score in favor of the Seventeenth, confirmed and ascertained—which meant watching them all the way to the water—was four Zeros, four 97s, one Messerschmitt 110, and fifteen heavy bombers.

  It was impossible for the Seventeenth to intercept the raids that occurred over the middle of Java, which was simply too enormous for them to hold everybody off. They were stopping everything thrown at Soerabaya, when they had time to climb hig
h enough. With more planes they might have protected Batavia and Bandoeng, at the other end of the six-hundred-mile island.

  But the Japs had to have Soerabaya. The moment was coming for the great attempt to break the lifeline of the barrier islands. Soerabaya was the last unburned hangar of Allied air strength. Soerabaya had to be silenced.

  At times they sought Soerabaya to forget Blimbing. There were planes with 400 hours on them that should've been taken down 200 hours earlier. You shouted at the coolies as they rolled the big drums across the field, and watched that the gas did not dribble onto the field as they pumped, their brown backs running with sweat. The planes had brakes that were worn out; the tachometers were gone or broken. “Wild Man” Morehead, wild no longer, was the thrifty armament officer who kept reminding the armorers as he walked in the sun from revetment to revetment: “Save every loose round. We might not get any more. The ammo isn't coming through from Australia. Keep looking around the grass and grab any rounds you see. Never let a round get corroded. We need every round. We might never get any more.”

  We might never get any more … we won't get any more … there's no more coming … when this is gone, we won't get any more. …

  The ships had to be kept on alert, and when they rusted, the armorers were hard put to keep them firing. There were too few ships; there was no relief. When an engine had to be taken out they rigged a pulley under a tree and hoisted it that way. Often the pilots had to attack the Japs from the right or left wing, instead of aiming dead-on, because only half the guns were working. When “enemy aircraft sighted” came to the thatched Operations shack, the pilots had to be reminded before they ran for their ships to clear their guns at every 5000 feet, otherwise they would freeze up.

  And we probably won't get any more … no more. …

  No wonder they had to go to Soerabaya, sometimes.