Flames in the Sky: Epic stories of WWII air war heroism from the author of The Big Show (Pierre Clostermann's Air War Collection Book 2)

by Pierre Clostermann

  The flames spread from one sky to another—from the yellow plains of Poland to the green Vosges, from the soot of London to the snows of Russia and from the blue of the Pacific to the ice of Alaska . . . too little—too late!

  CHAPTER TWO

  PEARL HARBOR AND BATAAN

  ‘Too little, too late’

  The tragedy of France and the Low Countries, the result of our superiority complex, improvisation, complacency, administrative chaos and improvidence, was to be repeated for the Americans when the Japanese attacked on 7th December 1941.

  There, too, cheese-paring while the spectre of war loomed large on the horizon, the hope of a problematical appeasement by dint of concessions, outworn tactical and strategical ideas, were to exact a heavy price in unnecessary sacrifices and lost lives.

  Luckily for the United States, just as England had the Channel, they had the vast Pacific Ocean between their territory, their factories and their people and the Empire of the Rising Sun. We French had only the Rhine and the Meuse.

  The Pearl Harbor disaster, which has been the subject of the most gigantic official enquiry in history—the record of the proceedings runs to over 20,000 pages—deserves a book to itself. The mystery of the Japanese code, of President Roosevelt’s foreknowledge of the enemy plans, of all that went on in the White House, will presumably one day be revealed.

  That is not the object of this story, but nevertheless certain features of that Japanese operation must be mentioned and also a brief sketch made of the air battles over the Philippines in order that the reader may appreciate the epic story of the 24th Interceptor Group of the U.S.A.F. in Bataan, from Christmas 1941 to the end of March 1942.

  Pearl Harbor

  7th December 1941

  It was Sunday morning—the first Sunday after payday for the G.I.s and sailors of the base. All night the dance halls and bars of Pearl Harbor had been turning people away. The Fleet had come in the day before—apart from the aircraft-carriers—and Hawaii had been the scene of the usual junketings on the first Saturday in the month.

  There were few people still up at 3.45 a.m., apart from the poker addicts and those wending their way back to their Mess.

  In a tent on a hillside overlooking the misty sea an alarm-clock went off. Technical Corporal 3rd Class Joe Lockard and Private George Elliot climbed grumbling out of their damp blankets and after a quick wash went to their post in the chilly morning air.

  By their tent stood a large square steel trailer with narrow slatted windows. On the roof, covered with a tarpaulin which the men carefully removed, was a large parabolic aerial shaped like an electric bowl fire. It was one of the three SCR 260-B experimental radar sets which had arrived from England. Nobody had much faith in this queer British contraption. Joe Lockard, an amateur radio fan in private life, was the only one—or at any rate one of the few—for whom the apparatus was now practically an open book.

  The radar sets had arrived in July and had been on the go continuously from 10th November to 3rd December whenever an ‘alarm’ warning had been given. Handled as they were by inexpert crews, they had begun to go wrong and there were now only three spare cathode-ray tubes. H.Q. had decided to use them only from one hour before dawn till one hour after sunrise, i.e. about from 4 to 7 a.m.

  It wasn’t much fun being on duty in this remote spot and in those conditions while the other fellows had all the Hawaii hotspots at their disposal and lived in air-conditioned barracks.

  They had switched on and the radar was warming up. Lockard was keeping an eye on the hypnotising dance of the oscilloscope. He busied himself plotting the permanent interference, to hand in at the next weekly inspection—if the officer on duty didn’t forget. Now and then Elliot asked if there weren’t at long last any blips to see. Lockard did not even bother to reply. Blips? What blips? There were never any planes up, so there couldn’t be any blips—especially on a Sunday!

  The radiant sun dispersed the mist and rose over the peaceful, flower-decked island.

  At 6.45 Lockard suddenly saw a very faint blip appear on the extreme edge of the screen, right at the top. Bearing 330 degrees. At 6.55 the blip, which seemed to be zigzagging slowly, coming back on itself and then going north again, became quite clear for a moment.

  Lockard, without warning Elliot, who was busy outside with the generator, put a call through to Control over the normal line. After a five-minute wait he was put through to a duty officer who took a dim view of the whole thing and told him pretty sharply to mind his own business.

  Out of sense of duty Lockard made a note of the tracks and the times. At 6.58 the blip, still very faint, disappeared completely. At 7 o’clock, as per instructions, Lockard switched off and locked up the trailer. The two men stood waiting for the truck which was to take them back to the Mess for breakfast, when they heard the phone go. It was to tell them they couldn’t get picked up till 7.30.

  Lockard, furious, and having nothing better to do, went back to his radar and switched it on again, while Elliot put a shine on his shoes in a corner.

  7.02—‘Hi, George, come over here, quick!’

  Elliot rushed over.

  ‘Look!’

  A miracle! For the first time for three months since they had been looking after that radar set, here was an honest-to-goodness blip, perfectly sharp. The big transparent green blip was moving fast southwards, towards Hawaii.

  ‘Plot it!’

  Elliot quickly placed a round sheet of transparent squared paper over the map, stuck a pin through the middle over where their station was, and got ready to take down the dope.

  ‘7.02. Point 130. That was where they were when I first saw them!’

  Probably Navy planes, thought Elliot, from an aircraft-carrier on manoeuvres out at sea, bringing ashore officers who wanted to spend a Sunday with their families. But they generally operated south of the island.

  ‘Take down—7.04—132.’

  Elliot did a quick calculation on a special slide-rule. The planes were going about 225 m.p.h. Lockard kept his eye on the bright dot quivering on the screen and hesitated. Would he get bawled out again? He unhooked the special phone on the direct line to Control at Fort Shafter, reserved for urgent messages. Only after furiously winding the handle for several minutes did he hear the receiver being lifted at the other end. He recognised the voice.

  ‘Hullo, Macdonald? Is that you, Joe?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Lockard here, from Opona Station. Find me someone at Central Control, it’s very important.’

  ‘There ain’t no one here any more. The place shuts at seven, didn’t you know?’

  ‘Say, listen, Macdonald, be a pal and find me an officer, any one will do.’

  Three minutes passed, while the blips got bigger and started to split up as they got nearer. Then a curt voice spoke in the phone:

  ‘Lieutenant Tyler here, duty officer.’

  ‘Lockard here, Lieutenant, with the SCR at Opona. I have spotted an important formation of planes making for Hawaii. At 0702 hours they were 136 miles away, and bearing zero to 10 degrees.’

  ‘H’m’—The voice was perplexed and hesitant. ‘O.K. I’ve got it. Don’t worry. It’s O.K.’ The duty officer hung up.

  At 7.28 the signs got lost in the fringe of permanent blips. The formation of aircraft was only twenty-two miles away. At 7.30 the truck picked up Elliot and Lockard, but they were fated not to get their breakfast that day.

  At 7.57, on the glass-fronted balcony of the tall control tower on Hickham airfield, overlooking the naval base, Colonel Bertholf, who was worrying about the arrival of sixteen Flying Fortresses coming from San Francisco, suddenly leaped to his ; feet. In his binoculars he could see a long line of black dots—aircraft—approaching Kanai. There were about fifty of them, all single-engined.

  The Colonel turned to the controller and asked him if they were Navy aircraft. Without even looking up he answered that it was unlikely, so early, on a Sunday morning.

  A few moments late
r the planes began to peel off one by one and dive on Pearl Harbor. Showers of spray arose among the ships of the line jammed tightly together and powerless to move.

  It was the Japs![1]

  At six in the morning Vice-Admiral C. Nagumo—commanding the First Air Fleet detailed for the attack on Pearl Harbor—had hoisted the ‘Z’ flag on the mast of the aircraft-carrier Akagi. It was the original flag hoisted by Togo at Tsushima in 1905 when he won the first great naval battle of modern times, brought on board the flagship in a lacquer and gold casket.

  ‘Z’—attack!

  To fulfil his mission Nagumo had under his command six aircraft-carriers protected by nine destroyers, two heavy cruisers and two battleships. His six aircraft-carriers, with their romantic names, were: the Akagi (Red Castle), the Shokaku (Climbing Crane), the Zuikaku (Happy Crane), the Kaga (Increasing Joy), the Soryu (Green Dragon) and the Hiryu (Flying Paragon).

  The squadron’s senior navigation officer had surpassed himself, in spite of the bad weather which had prevented him from verifying his positions and his time schedule by the stars. At zero hour the exact position for launching the attack—lat. 26° N. long. 128° N.—had been reached.

  The first wave comprised ninety Kates[2] (forty equipped with special torpedoes driven by oxygen, and the others with 1000-lb. bombs) and fifty Val dive-bombers, the whole escorted by fifty Zeros. This first formation was entrusted with the principal task, i.e. the sinking of the American battle fleet.

  The second wave, whose task was to neutralise the airfields, comprised fifty Kates, eighty Vals and forty Zeros.

  At 7.56 the war between the United States and Japan began.

  In the officers’ club at the great Wheeler airfield a poker game was just finishing. The previous evening—Saturday, 6th December—there had been a dinner-dance and the game had begun at 1 a.m., when most of the guests went home. At 6 in the morning play was still going on at one solitary table, and half an hour later two young Air Force Lieutenants, cleaned out to the last cent by three Navy officers, went out for a breath of air.

  What was there to do so early on a Sunday morning? Lieutenants Welch and Taylor were muzzy with alcohol and cigarette smoke. They decided to have an invigorating bathe in the sea, followed by a few hours’ sleep on the warm sands of Haleiwa beach by their airfield. Their car was the only one left in the car park. In front of them stretched the runways or Wheeler Field covered with aircraft. For a moment they admired the seventy-five magnificent Curtiss P-40s, just out of their crates, parked nose to nose and wing to wing to prevent possible sabotage by Japanese agents. In front of them two sentries were pacing up and down.

  Just as Taylor was slamming the door of the Ford, bought second-hand and painted bright orange—they were young—a formation of planes swooped over the hangars with a thunder of exploding bombs. For the fraction of a second the young men sat paralysed, but they sprang into action soon enough when a hail of bullets bespattered them with asphalt from the road. It was only then that they saw the red Japanese discs on the elliptic wings of one of the planes—a small squat monoplane with fixed undercarriage.

  ‘Jesus, the Japs! It’s a dive-bomber!’

  Welch backed his car viciously into the shelter of the club verandah and leapt to the telephone in the hall, while bullets were sending the tiles flying. He called up his unit.

  ‘Get two P-40s ready—mine and Taylor’s. Load up—it’s not a gag, the Japs are here! Get going.’

  He hung up, rushed out past the petrified Mess staff, who were cowering behind armchairs, tripped over a body and jumped into his car. Foot hard down on the accelerator, cursing his stupidity for having the car painted such a conspicuous colour, he roared along the twisting but luckily empty road at eighty miles an hour. The few cars he met were stationary, their occupants prudently lying in the ditches—including the traffic M.P.s apparently, as they saw three unattended red motorcycles propped up against some telegraph poles. No danger of a charge for speeding, anyway, and they took their corners on two wheels.

  The nine miles took them less than ten minutes and on the way they were strafed—and missed—three times by the Japs. On the airfield they skidded to a halt on the damp grass and ran towards their planes. The fitters jumped down from their cockpits and a private staggered up with their parachutes, helmets and gloves. The engines were already running.

  One minute later the two Curtiss’s took off wing-tip to wing-tip and plunged into the low clouds coming in from the sea.

  Haleiwa, tucked away at the northern extremity of the island in a hollow in the hills and covered by a providential layer of cloud, had miraculously escaped the attention of the Vals and Zeros, which had all been attracted by the enormous fires at Pearl Harbor and Hickham Field in the south. It is true that the well-informed Japanese knew it was a tiny training-field, where planes only came for shooting practice. As a matter of fact, 47 Squadron with its four P-36s and its fourteen P-40s had been there no more than a few days.

  In all only seven fighters—and each one on his own initiative, like Welch and Taylor—managed to get into the air and intercept. Between them they brought down twelve Japs, whom they caught by surprise. Welch alone bagged four. However, each time they came up against Zeros instead of Vals they were outclassed. Lieutenants Christiansen, Whiteman, Bishop, Gordon Sterling, Dains and finally Taylor, Welch’s friend, were all brought down in this way.

  Lieutenant Welch, who managed to survive not only the Zeros but also the threat of a court-martial for having taken off without orders, received the D.S.C. a fortnight later. Subsequently, when the reports were gone through in Washington and General Arnold saw that Welch had taken off no fewer than three times—the last time, with two machine-guns out of four out of action, he had baled out—he recommended him for the Congressional Medal of Honour.

  It was said at the time that the Air Officer Commanding in Pearl Harbor opposed the recommendation because Welch had taken off without orders. But finally, in spite of his outstanding war record, Welch was never awarded this high decoration.

  At 10.15 on the 7th of December it was all over in Hawaii. Those responsible for the defence of the island got their stories ready, knowing that they would have to account for what had happened, and that scapegoats would have to be found for public opinion to tear to pieces.

  Out of eight battleships in the harbour, five were sunk and three very badly damaged. At Kanehoe, the Naval air-base, out of thirty-six PBY Catalinas, large twin-engined long-range flying boats, twenty-seven were destroyed and six so seriously damaged as to be beyond repair. Only the three which were on patrol south of the island at the time of the attack escaped.

  At Ewa, also a Navy air-base, there were eleven Wildcat fighters, thirty-two observation planes and six DC-3 transports. Fifteen Zeros, by machine-gun fire alone, in four minutes destroyed nine fighters, eighteen observation planes and all six transports.

  The Army Air Force had, at 7 a.m., 221 good war-planes, dispersed on the three main airfields, Hickham, Wheeler and Bellows Fields, and the small satellite field at Haleiwa. Three hours later it had lost: eight B-17 Flying Fortresses, twenty-two B-18s and seven A-20s, all bombers. What was particularly serious was that every single fighter had been destroyed—sixty-two P-40Bs, eleven P-40Cs, twenty-three P-36s and nine P-26s. Every single plane, whether Navy or Army, which had escaped was damaged.

  The Japanese had lost nine planes in the first wave and twenty-one in the second, a loss of thirty planes to put out of action 75 per cent, of the total American naval and air forces in the Pacific. If the White House wanted the American people to be shaken out of its apathy, then it got what it wanted with a vengeance.

  A few hours after the blow at Pearl Harbor, at the other end of the Pacific, the Japanese hurled themselves with irresistible ferocity on the Philippines and Singapore. There, too, they had calmly gone ahead with their preparations amid the general somnolence.

  Twice, on 24th and 25th November, brazenly and in broad daylight, two Japan
ese reconnaissance planes had photographed from a height of 23,000 feet every American airfield in the Philippines.

  The interpretation of the photos revealed the presence of scarcely 300 American aircraft, instead of the 900 the Japanese were expecting. This considerably relieved Admiral Tsukahara, in command of the 11th Imperial Air Fleet, which was earmarked for these operations. And if he had known what aircraft they were—and in what state—he would have gone into the attack with a song in his heart.[3]

  The Japanese air forces stationed in Indo-China and Formosa consisted of the 21st Flotilla under Admiral Tada and the 23rd under Admiral Takenaka. Between them they had one hundred and fifty ultra-modern Bettys, eighty-four twin-engined Sallys, one hundred and thirty-eight Kate dive-bombers, and a hundred and thirty-six Zeros, plus a rather mixed collection of reconnaissance and observation planes.

  For the defence of the Philippines the American Army Air Force had five fighter-squadrons equipped with Curtiss P-40s, and there were also twenty-four old P-35s and twelve P-26s, of 1930 vintage, flown by Philippinos. At Nichols Field there was the 21st Squadron, at Iba Field the 3rd Squadron and at Clark Field the 20th Squadron, each with eighteen P-40s. At Del Carmen, the general maintenance centre, were the 17th and 34th Squadrons, which had received on 6th December, i.e. two days[4] before the attack, thirty-six P-40s.

  The thirty-six P-40s were quickly assembled, and in the course of the process the armourers discovered that the firing contacts for the machine-guns just were not there. Improvised ones had to be made by a watchmaker in Manila. ‘Prestone,’ the cooling fluid for the engines, had also been left behind in the United States. San Francisco’s reply was ‘anti-freeze [sic] is not necessary in a climate like that of the Philippines.’