Weller's War

by George Weller

  The young armorer Perry heard something in Soerabaya that drew him closer to the Dutch: “When I was walking down the street, after dinner at the Café Royal, I met my friend, the father of the Dutch girl. I called twice before he recognized me, then came over. The following conversation resulted in one of the deepest personal tragedies I have ever had. ‘How is Doreen, and her mother?’ I asked.

  “He looked away for a moment and then, straightening up, he said in almost a trembling voice, ‘Doreen is gone. She was taken from us a few days ago … when they hit the Tip Top Café.’

  “Doreen, the fairhaired girl I had spoken to and laughed with only a few days before! I turned away, but I kept thinking of it all day. The beautiful daughter of the first friends I'd made in Java had been killed by the Japs. An innocent civilian who, only a little before, had been joking about the war. If coming too close to bombs myself and being shot at by strafers hadn't brought the full meaning of war to me, this did. I knew I would never be satisfied until I killed at least one of them myself.”

  There were only ten Kittyhawks left to defend Java, and this was the day when the Japanese invasion force was beginning to mass itself in Sumatra, at Balikpapan, and in Macassar Strait. The navy, having at this time only three serviceable PBY Catalinas, was to have none at all the day before the Japs landed.

  General Brereton in Bandoeng, knowing that he would need a fighter force in Burma to save India, crooked his finger to Mahony and once again the Seventeenth lost a commander. When Brereton took off in a Fortress for Colombo, Mahony was ordered to go with him.

  The last time anyone met the second commander of the Seventeenth was in Jokjakarta, where McNeil, Caldwell's armorer, saw him across the street. The ace and the armorer had both been reading a western novel about a wild and untameable mustang, California Red.

  “Hey, McNeil, did they ever catch that California Red?” Mahony asked.

  “No, sir, they never did get close enough,” answered the sergeant.

  Mahony shook his head and walked away, never to be seen by his squadron again. They said of him afterward, He had the darkest, tiredest eyes, with deep rings under them, you ever saw.

  The night after Mahony flew with Brereton to India, the writer had dinner in a mountain inn with three ground mechanics of the Seventeenth. They resembled high school kids; one wore a sweatshirt with an Indian's head. They looked strange in the middle of Java, suspended at the far end of the thread of American retreat.

  But there was no question of leaving. “You can't run a war out of your pants pockets,” they said. “But as long as the pilots stay with the Dutch, we stay. Until we have nothing flyable left, until we're just as hard up as the navy, we'll stay.”

  Japan, having wrecked Darwin, was throwing her full force at Soerabaya. What they sent the next day can only be compared with what the Luftwaffe sent over the British Channel when the sun was obscured with German planes. They had bombers and fighters; they had height. The bombers were stepped up from 27,000 to 30,000 feet. After every 9 bombers came 6 Zeros, totalling 54 bombers and 36 Zeros against 12 American lone wolves. (Two more Kittys had been tinkered into operation by the grease-balls in sweatshirts.) This was meant for the knockout blow.

  Jerry McCallum, the Louisianan picked to succeed Mahony as squadron head, led his first command into action—Marion Puchs of Big Springs, Texas, Williams, and Irvin. At the same time Dale, Johnson, Paul Gambonini of Petaluma, California, and Bernard Oliver of Prescott, Arizona, tried to climb to the lowest level of bombers. A thousand feet below those red-balled wings, the hive of Zeros opened on them.

  At such a height it was foolhardy to try outmaneuvering the butterfly Japs, and the eight went into their dive. But the other four Americans—Adkins, Hennon and Reynolds, with Kiser giving them signals—were able to dive upon the Zeros' tails after the leader followed the first two flights down far enough.

  Irvin saw a Zero about to attack, dropped back and got him.

  Hennon and Reynolds each got a Zero in their sights and burst him open from the rear; in a diving match a heavy P-40 could beat a Zero any day. But McCallum, feeling his responsibility to cover the tails of his companions in the escaping dive, was reached by one of the leading Zeros.

  His plane faltered, his engine smoked. When the Japanese saw his canopy open they left their dive and twisted away after it. McCallum was machine-gunned in his parachute as he fell. He had bailed out like “Chief” Fields, and his bushido-loving, chivalrous enemy followed him down. Death was mercifully quick. There were thirty holes in his chute—he had been hit twice each in his head and heart.

  When Jerry McCallum went, the officer who had tried to run their rude little engineering shack, to hold airplanes together by gum and by God, was gone. You could feel Java creaking and cracking around you, getting ready to break up. This was the day Wavell and his staff turned the defense of Java over to the Dutch and followed Brereton to Colombo. That afternoon there was a report that a big Jap fleet had already been sighted north of Bawean Island, off Soerabaya.

  The invasion of Java had begun.

  Fighters had more chance to get away from the cruiser-based seaplanes, that were playing the role of sheepdogs of the Jap invasion, than the single navy Catalina remaining in Soerabaya. Kiser and Hennon were sent off as the sun was descending to hunt for the Japanese convoy. They hunted for two hours, but never saw it.

  There were now more Zeros because the new Japanese fighter base at Den Pasar in Bali was in full operation. Java was being hit in the face with bombers and stabbed in the ribs with fighters, simultaneously.

  The next day [February 26] 26 bombers unloaded everything they had upon the Soerabaya navy yard from 30,000 feet. Their protective cover of Zeros flew at 27,000 and attacked the rising handful of P-40s, which could only dive away.

  Hennon, more persistent than the others, followed the bombers and fighters until they parted company, then intercepted all by himself two Zeros that were flying low on their way home. He sent one of them down aflame into the wet ricefield and was back at his little field shortly after eleven o'clock.

  The Fortresses were leaving Malang, having been badly shot up by strafing Zeros. They asked for protection, but the air direction control could not give it to them. There was enough work for 120 fighters, and there were only a dozen.

  Around lunchtime word came that six Brewster Buffaloes with Dutch pilots—some rescued from Singapore—would arrive at Blimbing and lend a hand as well as they could, with their 16,000-foot operating ceiling and 160-mile-an-hour speed.

  The Dutchmen landed at two in the afternoon. Next arrived six Hurricanes piloted by Dutchmen averaging of two or three hours' experience only. This was not so bad as it sounded; some American fliers had left Australia with only two fast fighter hours on their logbook. The Hurricanes took the air only the day after the Japs landed, because at the American field the hydraulic fluid and ammunition were unsuitable for British motors. Little Lester Johnsen wrote in his notebook: “These Dutchmen were very courageous and excellent pilots. Lieutenant Anamott was their commanding officer, a half-caste Dutch Javanese, a smart man and well-liked.”

  The relations of the Americans with all tints in Java had been good, right from the pure Dutch through half-castes to the full-blooded Javanese. Staff Sergeant Jung, who spoke no Malay, had been teaching a class of Javanese mechanics, who spoke no English, the guns and vitals of the 1150-horsepower Allison engine. Though lectures consisted mostly of dumb show by the professor and grunts of comprehension by the class, the visiting pedagogue said his pupils “caught on in no time at all.”

  Now the Japanese convoys were on the way across the Java Sea and the invasion of the last fort in the Indies was in full progress. By working hard on each gasping and weary engine, and repairing every bullet hole, the ground crew had managed to keep a dozen P-40s still in flying condition. The Jap fleet was coming in not straight for Soerabaya but to the west. It was only one of three fleets trisecting Java.

  The
one remaining navy PBY Catalina counted eighty Japanese transports. It took this last battered “Cat” ten minutes to fly the convoy's length, with every anti-aircraft gun in the enemy fleet sending up hot needles.

  The three remaining A-24 dive bombers were still anxious to do their part in making invasion costly. That afternoon, with the Japs just off Bawean, they set off to attack. They were protected by four Kittys in the first flight, and six in the second.

  This attack was almost simultaneous with the first joining of the battle of the Java Sea, from whose final phase not one of five Allied cruisers escaped. The dive bombers put their loads directly on the deck of a 14,000-ton transport. It burned beautifully before their eyes. It was only a pinprick among the eighty transports but there was one delight: everybody got home.

  Here's what little Lester Johnsen, the Stanford relay runner, wrote in the notebook he was saving to show his wife: “We encountered no enemy planes. The Jap fleet was composed of forty-five transports and twelve warships: subs, corvettes and cruisers. One could not see from [one] end of the convoy to the other. … On this day our operations staff consisted of one clerk and one Dutch army lieutenant.”

  The last day of February was Java's black day. Six more Fortresses had been sent away to the final American base at Jokjakarta to be evacuated. The remaining members of the Seventeenth were beginning to feel like the last tenants in a house that is being demolished.

  By nine in the morning, the first gong of enemy aircraft approaching sounded in the village, and the twelve P-40s with four Brewsters took off. They missed them.

  It was pretty hard that day to hold a breakfast down; you could not tell whether you would live until sunset. The next warning came at ten past two and the P-40s and Brewsters went up. The P-40s led the way—the Japs had sent a dozen bombers and nine Zeros up about five miles but the P-40s could not get there in time.

  Zeros, recognizing cold turkey in the Brewsters, went into their dive, but the little barrels on wings could match rates of fall with anybody, and they got away. One Brewster motor stopped, and the Dutchmen bailed out safely. The Americans struggled to get up at the bombers, but the Japs stayed too high.

  By this time interceptions were being broken off repeatedly on account of motor trouble. The engines had been fighting full throttle for over 150 hours. They could not be repaired or overhauled; they were too few. All had to remain on alert all the time. One flyer took a sad inventory of the P-40 that had brought him all the way from Australia and kept him alive in the face of all the Zeros, and he wrote: “My plane has two tires that have huge blisters in them. It has no brakes and no generator and hydraulic fluid is leaking into the cockpit.”

  Meantime the Japanese were landing at Rembang, about seventy miles west of Soerabaya. The Dutch motor torpedo boats were to attack the Jap destroyers under the leadership of the Dutch Lieutenant Henry Jorissen. (Jorissen, incidentally, is one of the leading young Dutch poets, a tall, blond and delightful Hollander.) They were to hit the beach at dawn, as soon as they could see.

  The Japs used the perfectly moonlit night for unloading. Nearly everything was on the beach the next morning.

  The little fighter force took off. It was to be the last blow struck for Java; already the Allied fleet was scattered and the Japs were picking off the cruisers one by one. Only nine Americans had P-40s that could fly, so they were broken down in flights of three each. They knew it was to be the last time.

  So did the Dutchmen, who desperately forced the engines and guns of their Hurricanes into shape; all seven took off together with their five flyable Brewsters.

  As they came down over the paddy fields outside Rembang they could see the line of transports parallel to the coast. It was a peaceful sight; the landing barges were shuttling back and forth in the usual systematic fashion of the Nipponese grab.

  The Japs had already landed aircraft on the shore. These guns and the ack-ack on the destroyers and cruisers opened up a terrible fire. The orange dawn was seared with grey smoke tracers, and scarred with gleaming incendiaries.

  Kiser led the flight around in a broad curve to approach the bay out of the sun for possible protection. The orders were that the P-40s should lead the way in, and the Dutchmen and Hurricanes, flying in two strings, should follow. But the Japanese crisscrossed their fire closely. Jock Caldwell went down with a crash into the water.

  Reagan's plane caught on fire, and only a glimpse was seen of him as he tried to land. McWherter signalled Reagan, whose motor was spitting flames, to fly with him to the beach and bail out. Reagan understood and waved back. Possibly he was shot or his parachute was holed. Whatever the reason, he did something McWherter never forgot. He plucked himself a cigarette, rolled back the canopy, reached forward, lighted the cigarette on the burning motor, and put it in his mouth to await the end. When the plane fell McWherter followed him down, but was met with more fire from the ground and ships, and turned away before Reagan struck the ground.

  Kruzel received a cannon shell in his tank and oil line. Hot black oil spewed back as he fled for Blimbing He landed covered with hot black oil himself, in a ship black with oil from nose to empennage, with an inch of oil in the cockpit.

  Adkins was shot down, too, and was thought lost.

  The enemy anti-aircraft from the beach and ships was chewed to pieces by the strafing American fighters, making the way for the Dutch somewhat safer. The enemy barges and small boats were shot up and sunk. They were strung seven or eight deep in long columns, indicative of the confidence the Japanese felt that their landing was safe. Several burned and sank.

  They never saw Caldwell or Reagan again, although Reagan may have lived.

  Jock Caldwell was interwoven in the lives of all at Blimbing. It was he who handled the uncrating in the critical first days in Australia, when they realized once they began to negotiate about unloading the ship that they stood alone. It was Little Tarzan who made the Japanese real to them, worthy of the sacrifice of their lives—a creeping disease that would spread far unless lanced with an American sword. “You can tell Chinese and Japs apart,” he told them, “because the Chinese are lighter and fleshier than the Japs.” He was their kindergarten master in the politics of Asia—so vital to their country, so neglected in their educations, so intimate with his.

  Adkins had an incredible experience. He landed on the beach and bounced off the water after pulling out of his power dive. He made two attacks in all, and finally bailed out over the beach, only about three hundred yards from the Japs.

  A Javanese, frightened by the exchange of fire, was pedalling by along the beach road on a bicycle. Adkins was still full of the will to live and commanded the Javanese to stop, jumped on the handlebars, and yelled to his chauffeur: “Come on, let's go!” The legs of the terrified Javanese soon grew weak. Adkins, with the Japs close after him, ditched the owner of the bicycle, and pedalled away at top speed.

  The remaining planes got back to the field at twenty to eight, tragically shot up. Skimming after the landing barges with everything blazing, one fighter had gone so low that the concussion of the wave tops bent back the supports for his belly tank against the body of the plane. The waves also bent in the combing of his under plane radiator. Only six P-40s could still fly. But none could fight.

  By nine o'clock not one of them could fly. The Japs sent over two Zeros, and strafed the entire field back and forth, wiping out every one of the six. It was over.

  For once the enemy had done the earth-scorching of the Americans for them at the last moment. Just to make sure—the Dutch are great people for making sure of things—the Dutch native soldiers burned the perforated Forties. The Kittyhawks died like phoenixes in fire and ashes, and the army fighters, like the navy patrol bombers, left Java only when they had nothing left that was fightable.

  It was the end, too, of the Seventeenth Pursuit, Provisional. Provisional they had been, indeed. But their wings were broken.

  One staff car and two trucks remained, and they loaded themse
lves aboard, deeding what was left to the Dutch. They paid their last bills, down to the groschen, as a departing Dutchman would have done. Their papers were torn up and burned.

  Shaking hands for the last time with the Dutch family that had cooked and cared for them, looking around the debris and ashes-strewn quarters for the last time, the men of the Seventeenth heard a sound like weeping. It was the coolie-boy, Judy, and he was crying, a line chief said, “fit to break your heart.”

  Judy was just a brown mite from the swarm of Java's forty millions, twelve years old some said, while others thought he was twenty. He seemed to love to work for the Americans, so they made him a staff sergeant. They painted the herringbone chevrons on his skinny brown arm with whitewash, renewing them each day. They gave him metal parts of the Forties to polish, and got him an artilleryman's hat from one of the dozen Texans that Sprague had shanghaied from the camp at Malang.

  They had taught Judy to call the camp roll, while all hands stood gravely at attention before the slim brown boy-man. “’E Jung, 'e Little, 'e Merriman, 'e Schott,” the little top kick would say.

  Now that he was weeping, so clearly wanting to go away with them, they did not know what to do. They filled his hands with all the gliders they had left, more than he would earn the next ten years of his life. Still he could not stop weeping. So they took him out to the shattered workshop, put tools in his hands, and gave him an old cartridge case to clean. “Have it ready by the time we come back,” they told him.

  Judy nodded through his tears and began to polish earnestly.

  Under the orders of Major Fisher, the whole party, pilots and men, started for Jokjakarta, now the last Fortress base since Malang and Madioen were abandoned. En route the trucks got separated from the staff car, and ran into some Dutch troops whose officer told Washburn, whose linguistic talents later made him a lieutenant, that the Japs were only a half mile away. They saw the Dutch blowing up their sugar mills, and through helping a fleeing Dutchman fix his broken cart, they missed being bombed on Jokjakarta field.