Weller's War

by George Weller

  Bud Sprague used to get them together, when mess was over—“and I've seen the major standing twenty-fifth in line.” His talks came about two or three times a week. They met in the abandoned sugar factory where the Dutch had installed a ping-pong table and a pool table. The windows were blacked out, and it had a tile floor. “I just called you in to say that you needn't be worried if the Japs come here,” he would say. “This isn't the best America can do; you know that. It just happens to be the best right now. But don't think you're going to be just sacrificed to this thing. We'll fight as long as we can. But if things get hot, we'll leave with three days' start. This war is just beginning and we're going to be in it for a long time.”

  They could not know, then, that they would get away, but he would be the one left behind.

  Anyhow, they went to Soerabaya. Some of them looked at the brown girls. Most, however, did things like Sergeant Perry: “We visited the famous Soerabaya zoo, the aquarium and the city in general. We were each ceremoniously presented with an Air Raid Warden's badge. A Dutch friend gravely pinned it on our shirts and explained that we were the first ever made ‘Honorary Air Raid Wardens’.”

  Air raid wardens indeed, guardians of Soerabaya.

  “After we got our badges, our Dutch friend took us home and introduced us to his daughter Doreen and his wife. Doreen was a little taller than me, with long blond hair, more on the beautiful side than cute or pretty. I stayed there till late that night talking to Doreen, she telling me Dutch words and I telling her the English counterparts. We really had a good time and I promised myself to see her again.”

  On the 19th of February, a black day, the Japs went for both Soerabaya and Darwin simultaneously. The Australians had no radar to give Darwin any warning and paid dearly for the omission. This, the only successful Japanese attack against Australia, was to be revenged within a matter of minutes.

  The day at Blimbing began with a false alarm, the squadron taking the air at 9 and getting back at 10:30 without any bombers coming over. At noon they were up again and two flights of ours met eight Zeros: exactly even terms numerically.

  Half the Zeros were shot down. Mahony and Lane each got one. So did Hague, whose plane was called Colleen, and Kruzel, whose armorer (Lyman Goltry of Glenwood, Iowa) loved a girl in a San Rafael chainstore. Kruzel thus carried into battle against the mystified Japs a sharkface with the inscription J.C. Penny-Lou.

  The other two flights moved in on the bombers, which fled without opening their hatches. But when it came to nose-counting time on the field at Blimbing, there were three pilots missing: Gilmore, Blanton and Fields. Gilmore was shot down and was burned, but the Dutch doctors took care of him and saved his life. Blanton was thought lost, but it turned out that he had only brought down his ship on a beach along the Straits of Madura. But Fields never came back.

  Fields—a full-blooded Cherokee tribesman from Grove, Oklahoma, with the curious first name of Quanah—was the first American Indian flier lost in the war. He got out of his plane alive, but when they found him he had bullet holes through the canopy of his parachute. One bullet had gone through his head. He was buried, like the others, in the Graafplaats Kembang Koening in Soerabaya, and went to his rest in the wet dark soil of Java. Like the Maori pilots from New Zealand who in aged Brewsters met the Zeros over Singapore, flying wingtip to wingtip with the white kiwis, the American Indian died a warrior.

  The invasion of Bali was the knot in the noose with which the Jap garroted Java. On February 20, with Soerabaya saved by the “Forties” but Darwin's harbor filled with sinking ships and her streets with bodies, the great simultaneous invasion of the island chain got under way by night. A Japanese fleet with two cruisers, four or five destroyers and four transports slipped down the east coast of Bali, swung around and prepared to attack from the south. The Japs landed on this side because they knew most of the Dutch, British and American warships were operating in the Java Sea. Having already made Den Pasar's field useless, they could protect the landing operations by getting through Lombok Strait—thus closing both it, and the Bali Strait, with patrolling destroyers.

  At the same time, the parachutists came down upon Koepang. The Japanese had broken the lifeline in two places. Just to be sure of having the first stepping-stone, the Japs also landed on this day in Portuguese Timor, forcing the Australians there back into the mountains.

  The chain of islands was severed. Now no more fighter reinforcements could be flown to Java. And the little band of P-40s already there could not be flown out. They would fight until their end.

  The fleet moving upon Bali had been under observation since two days before. On the night of the 19th, Bandoeng sent down orders for a bombing mission against the force on the bay by Den Pasar, and its destroyers and cruisers.

  For the mission to Bali the P-40s took off early on the 20th, led by Sprague, to rendezvous over Malang with the A-24 dive bombers and three LB-30s flown over from Jokjakarta. These A-24s, seven of fifty-two landed at Brisbane before Christmas and assembled by Fortress ground crews, had made the same hazardous pilgrimage to Java as the Seventeenth. Their pilots were experienced, their gunners were nothing but pickups from B-17s who had never dive-bombed in their lives.

  The writer had gone up to Malang to see this first take-off. It was a bright blue morning. The A-24s came in and circled the green hangar. The dive bombers were navy planes, converted for army use, and the mechanics had some difficulty fitting the big bombs to the attachments. As “raid time” approached, one by one the pilots and observers pulled down their goggles, climbed in and took off on the first army dive-bombing raid in history. This little group of dive bombers, with an occasional loss here and there, was to go on fighting the war all the way to Papua.

  The P-40s had the hazardous job of staying over the enemy in Bali and protecting the dive bombers and the LB-30s as they came over from Malang. Time after time the Zeros attacked from above. All four flights fought to protect the bombers. But when the sweaty and drawn pilots got back to Blimbing four faces were missing. One was Sprague.

  How they got the Major no one knows exactly. Stauter reported by radio: “The Major didn't have a chance,” and someone else was supposed to have said—they thought it was Gallienne—“I can see him going in.”

  On the raid before, Sprague's mechanic—a staff sergeant from Seattle named Robert Jung—had complained about the redheaded commander buzzing the field too low when he came in. “You shouldn't do that; I got a weak heart,” he said. He had already painted the name Hell Diver on Sprague's plane; the day just preceding the Bali landing Sprague asked him to put the name of his wife, Lillian, on the ship.

  How the nineteen-year-old Perry felt at Sprague's fall is somewhat how all the members of the Seventeenth felt: “All of us liked Major Sprague and considered him the best CO. we ever had. He flew for the love of flying, he fought for the love of fighting and to avenge the deaths of his partners in the Philippines. He instilled his courage and fighting spirit into all the pilots and men and there was no one who did not admire him. He was a square-shooter and hell on wings for the Japs. When he buzzed the field he came lower than anyone else, and that was low. Prop blades chopped the grass as he soared over the field at 300 miles an hour. We had to clean his coolers a couple of times a week because of the collection of leaves and grass inside. He was usually first to take off on an alert and never asked his pilots to do something he could not do himself. The Seventeenth will long remember him.”

  Lieutenant Gallienne, the San Franciscan, was not heard from again.

  Thomas Hayes of Brooks, Oregon, who had his elevators virtually shot away by the 20-mm cannon in the Zero's noses, was nevertheless just able to make the home field alive and walk away from his fighter's wreckage. He was saved largely by the circumstance that ordinary rubber bath sponges, which the ground men had tied onto the gunsights frame in lieu of the regular cushions, held the snap of his forehead as he fell on the runway. As soon as his tailskid caught the weeds, Colbert
peeled back his canopy and dragged him out, bleeding.

  Three Zeros had been shot down, and one destroyed on the field at Den Pasar.

  Two of the four missing pilots, Stauter and Johnson, made emergency landings in out-of-the-way places on the beach.

  Stauter crash-landed, pulled himself out and found that he was wounded and his plane was ruined. He walked, losing blood rapidly, until he came on a native pedalling along a path on a bicycle. He bade the native get on the handlebars and began pedalling himself. Then he passed out from loss of blood. When he came to he found himself in the hands of the Javanese police. They had taken away his gun, and for some reason his shoes—perhaps standard practice to keep a tenderfooted white man from running away. They brought him, shoeless and disarmed, to the hospital at Malang where he, Hayes and Foy were nursed, along with wounded Fortress pilots and gunners, by a Celebes-Javanese nurse who refused to get under the bed with Americans during air raids because she anticipated amorous advances.

  Johnson, of Mesa, Arizona, had the most peculiar experience of all in that he was rescued by the baby ship of the Asiatic fleet, the little schooner Lanakai.

  The Lanakai was the schooner that had been used in the movie The Hurricane and sold to the navy as a patrol schooner three days before war broke out. In an extraordinary series of escapes from Japanese bombings she had made her way through the straits of Macassar to Soerabaya, and later around through Bali Strait, always just one jump ahead of the Japanese coming the other way.

  The Lanakai had seen Johnson hunting up and down the coves of southern Java for a landing and watched him come in on the tight little beach. They sent a boat ashore, tried to help him get the P-40 off, failed, and helped him dismantle his guns and remove his ammunition before touching off the plane. In his first flight Johnson, unused to the new belly tanks upon which the Americans depended to give them time over Bali, had used the gas in his regular tank above the belly tank. When he was attacked by Zeros and had to drop his belly tank, he quickly ran dry.

  The coverage to the bombing attack furnished by the P-40s made it possible for the Dutch mixed force of cruisers and torpedo boats, together with American destroyers, to creep up on the Japs before the convoy could get away. The battle of Bali Strait resulted in the probable sinking of several Japanese ships. Two of the seven dive bombers did not come back, but the Fortresses did well; when the writer spoke to the returned pilots on the field at Malang, they were jubilant.

  Almost a week later, after returning to Bandoeng and coming back for the last hours to Soerabaya, the writer was able to talk with the crew of one A-24 who had dropped their 600-pounder on a cruiser. They were Lieutenant Richard Launder and Sergeant I. A. Lnenicka, both barely twenty.

  They said: “We started up under the umbrella of P-40s and dived straight from 14,000 feet. Our 600-pounder hit exactly on the cruiser's bow, and our two little bombs, just to make no mistake, hit on both sides, showing a direct straddle.

  “We came out of our dive, but then our oil line burst. Black oil covered our windshield and we could see nothing. With the motor getting hotter every minute we scooted across the Den Pasar field—the Japs must have thought we were finished. We skimmed over the surf, aiming to put her down where the breakers were not too big. Finally we hit the water about 15 miles west. Somehow we got through the surf.

  “We climbed up into the jungle, still carrying our Colts—useless because the ammunition was wet. The Japs were looking for us, but suddenly a Balinese chief turned up. One boy asked us 100 guilders (50 dollars) to take us to Banjoewangi on the Java side. This chief gave us two coolie hats to wear for camouflage and the equivalent of 35 cents for food, and told the boy to take us across for nothing. After thirteen hours paddling through the cross currents of the Strait in this little prau we reached Banjoewangi. I guess we were the last American tourists to leave Bali.”

  It is possible they were not. Months later, as we sat together on an Australian beach facing the sunset, Lieutenant-Commander Frederick Warder, one of the most successful American submarine commanders, told the writer how, just about at the hour of the air battle, he had seen the white canopy of a parachute break out over Bali and a man come floating down on Nusa Besar Island. Was this Bud Sprague?

  Everyone who knew the commander of the Seventeenth hopes that it was.

  The next day at 9:30, four flights of the squadron went up to meet a force of eighteen bombers at 20,000 feet directly over Soerabaya. Just as they started in on the bombers, waddling badly in the thin air, the Kittyhawks saw a cloud of Zeros coming upon them. The attack was broken up. Lieutenant George Hynes—a quiet boy from San Antonio who always carried rosary beads—was caught by Zeros and killed before Mahony (leading his flight), Hennon and Fuchs could go to his rescue. The third and fourth flights were able to get through to the bombers; Frank Adkins, a dark-haired, usually unshaven pilot from Tennessee, got his first Zero.

  Walt Coss led in Oliver, Reynolds and Wally Hoskyn. This flight had the most success; the air directional control, watching through binoculars, saw two bombers go down and crash. There were twelve Zeros in all and they outnumbered each flight of Kittyhawks. But Hoskyn, even after the Zeros were on his tail, kept coming back to the bombers; he got at least one, and probably a Zero. (When they gave “Hosk” the posthumous Silver Star months later, they wrote: “His tenacity of purpose, coolness under fire and outstanding courage were instrumental in much of the success enjoyed by the squadron and an inspiration to all of the men.”)

  The day before Hosk's last flight, Perry and Deyo, his pals, had painted, at the pilot's direction, the name Stub and Lou on his plane. Whenever he took off, Hoskyn always used to give the rounded thumb and forefinger signal, the American signal of okay, to his line chief. On his last flight he forgot to give it.

  When both Sprague and Hoskyn fell immediately after putting names on their ships, no more names were given. Christening seemed a prelude to death. Both Jackson and Kiser, the more reserved members of the squadron, had never painted anything on their ships anyway. Egenes, given ship #13, re-named it Eight-Ball, and got behind it. Gilmore, who got his first Jap in the Philippines, and two in Java, had Drummer Boy and Michigan Kid on his ship. Fliers like Morehead and Adkins, however, flew any plane they were given, even the over-decorated shark on whose guns twang-voiced Benjamin Culpepper, of Pine Bluff, Arkansas, had inscribed Tom, Dick and Harry, and on the other wing vents Sally, Irene and Mary.

  The squadron was now leaderless, having lost two of its best-liked pilots. But it was getting recognition from the Japs, the low hissing obeisance of ever more Zeros.

  The surviving seventeen P-40s were all flyable. The next day the signal came from Brereton in Bandoeng that Mahony was to take Bud Sprague's empty place.

  The Japs were now closing upon Java in earnest. Things began cooking immediately. Just before ten o'clock the Soerabaya air control signified that trouble was coming over from Kendari. The Seventeenth found them up at 22,000 feet.

  The battle split unequally from the beginning. The Japs had sent over nine bombers with nine Zeros as guardian angels. The two first flights to take off put their cannon shells into three bombers and chopped up three pursuit ships. Two smoking birds were a Zero that Ray Thompson caught over Malang and a bomber Bill Turner brought down over Soerabaya. But things were too hot and the air too full of loose things to watch everything, and none of these crashes were confirmed. Throughout the time in Java the totals of Dutch air controls systems of how many ships were shot down was about twice those which the Seventeenth claimed. The pilots paid scant heed to tallies when Zeros were around; they wound their heads around, not down.

  This day Cy Blanton's gang drew one of the combinations that nobody likes: nine bombers with no less than fifteen Zeros over them. Besides Cy (“Baldy” to the gang when they wanted to tease him) there was Dockstader, the boy from Long Beach, Irvin and “Jack” Jackson to help him. Cy got his bomber and everybody else took his pass and away safely from this hot alley
of overhead thugs. Fifteen Zeros upstairs was too many for four P-40s to tackle, especially when they knew they could not strike the bombers again. They dived off and away.

  The squadron now had many more pilots than planes, and some were ordered away immediately by Major Fisher to pick up Kittyhawks elsewhere. A number of boxed P-40s had been landed at Tjilatjap in southern Java, and the Langley was coming out with more. Twenty officers and twenty men left on February 23, and another sixteen men the next day.

  The men who left had not the slightest idea of where they were going, and little apprehension what was happening to Java. The order came suddenly; actually when Mahony called those departing together for the last time it was for a checkup on their work. “What I called you in for was to bawl you out,” he said. “That's no use now. Where you boys are going, you'll get a good deal. I'd like to be going with you. You'll go into Blimbing, gather your belongings and leave for Soerabaya.”

  Winding across the old temple-laden hills of central Java, where Buddhism once came and went, and where the beetle-browed Java man stalked strange animals before time was, they discussed in the sleepy train all night long the question of where they were going. Most thought it was merely a routine transfer to India. But it was Mahony, not they, who was to go to India. They were still to cross the Indian Ocean, the great Australian desert, the coastal rim of parasitic cities; and they were to go north to the tropics again to strike the Japanese in the humid skies of Papua.

  None of them had dreamed anything like this would happen to them.

  The Japs kept coming. The handful of P-40s rose and fell, day after day.

  On the 24th the largest swarm of Japs yet seen came over. The naval PBYs wrote succinctly in their log: “There were 44 to 54 bombers over the navy yard today. Able damage was done.” The Americans met them this time at 21,000 feet with four flights of fighters. “Kay” Kiser caused one big bomber to bend its flight until it touched the ground—in flames. Dockstader shot up another badly and the sharp eyes of the air control saw it fall into the sea. All the others came back safely, but some were severely shot up, and others were worn out with this heavy daily use.