The Ragged, Rugged Warriors

by Martin Caidin

  It was the sort of incident that brought American advisors to China to pound their heads slowly against the nearest wall....

  Left standing around with sheepish grins on their faces were the aerial gunners assigned to the International Squadron. In strange contrast to their fellows, the gunners didn’t care with whom they flew and fought, just as long as they could get into airplanes to bomb the Japanese. Their spirit was commendable, but to a man they suffered one grievous fault—they couldn’t shoot worth a damn. It took weeks of crash-priority training to bring these men around to where they knew how to hold, maintain, and fire a machine gun in such a manner that they might be expected to protect their own airplanes. In the interim the pilots for the International Squadron would be brought to China.

  Through the years since those days of ragged combat in China, the conviction has grown that these foreign pilots were simply drunken louts who existed largely on whiskey and bombast, and that they came to China only to soak up easy money. In the cases of a few of these men perhaps the conviction is valid; of the majority it is not. Certainly these men were paid for flying for China and risking their necks for China—so was Claire Chennault and every member of the American Volunteer Group (the Flying Tigers), who came on the scene some years after the international group of pilots.

  Curtiss Hawk fighter of the type flown by George Weigel, who shot down four Japanese bombers in a single engagement

  Included in the International Squadron were men of brilliant piloting capability. The American pilots included Jim Allison, who was considered the prize of the group; he was a hardened and experienced combat veteran from the Spanish Civil War. Another American was a veteran pilot named Gibson who had wom the uniform and wings of the Army Air Corps. George Weigel came to China without a smidgen of military experience in terms of combat, but he brought with him a fabulous feel for flying and the rough-and-stumble school of pasture and barnstorming flight.

  The initial record of the International Squadron undoubtedly fell considerably short of what the Generalissimo had expected (though it did better than some others had predicted), but all China was to come to know the name of George Weigel. It flashed brilliantly and then, almost as swiftly, was lost in the horror enveloping the land.

  Weigel’s star shone during the murderous battering of Chungking by Japanese raids that were carried out on what amounted to a non-stop basis. The Japanese were putting the city deliberately to the torch; the casualties were appalling, and day by day sections of Chungking were burned to the ground. The city lay helplessly exposed to the enemy.

  Then there came that single bright flash of light in the darkness of the slaughter. A Japanese raid during one night had caused more than 10,000 Chinese to be burned to death. Smoke drifted in a ghastly, sweetish-sick stench from roasted flesh over the city the next day, when another wave of bombers thundered overhead.

  A single Hawk fighter rose swiftly from a field on the outskirts of the city. The airplane gleamed in the sun as its pilot, George Weigel, hammered the throttle against its stop to gain altitude as quickly as possible. His airplane was a modified Hawk 75M, with a heavy cannon fitted beneath each wing.

  Weigel streaked above the Japanese formation; then suddenly his Hawk wheeled about sharply and fell upon the broad sweep of bombers. Those men who knew him say the touch of madness was upon Weigel; he had become violently ill at the sight of hundreds of women and children burned alive the night before. The smell of the charnel house hung in the air over the city as the silver Hawk shot into the midst of the Japanese bombers.

  The man seemed to be untouchable. He twisted and dove and streaked in impossible maneuvers through the Japanese planes, forcing formations to shred. Tracers from the bombers strung glowing pearls about his plane, but above the massed thunder of the Japanese engines there could be heard clearly the snarling whine of the Hawk's powerful engine and the coughing bursts of the heavy cannon.

  Alone in the air against the enemy swarm, George Weigel smashed four of the Japanese bombers into flaming wreckage. Then, his guns and cannon empty, his airplane a sieve, he drifted in for a landing.

  The next day mechanical failure crippled his fighter, sending him to his death.

  One of the wildest of the international pilots was a hard-as-nails youngster, Herbert M. C. Walker, known to his friends simply as Tommy. Walker was a brilliant aerobatic pilot who learned his flying on the wing—in the second seat of a barnstorming biplane. He was also a daredevil stuntman, famous for his incredible feats of leaping from plane to plane in flight without a parachute, transferring from a plane to a speeding boat or a car, and back again. His wing-walking antics brought in huge crowds at county fairs the country over. After all this— enough for any man—it seems that Walker should have had enough. But he was famous among the barnstormers for his wild parachuting drops as well, including bailing out at 10,000 feet, and blowing a bugle wildly all the way down to the last possible moment of hauling on his D-ring to snap open his canopy. Walker was a Hollywood version come true of the pilot who would try anything and fly anything; he added to his legendary feats by learning to smash airplanes into poles, houses, and anything else —for a fee high enough.

  Wild in the air, he was remarkably even-tempered on the ground and bubbling over with warm friendship. His friends knew him as extraordinarily difficult, almost impossible, to rouse to personal anger. Yet Walker had been a deadly brawler in the ring, veteran of CCC camps, tank-town arenas, and other unsporting sports centers where a knee to the groin in a clinch was as much to be expected as a gloved thumb twisted in the eye. Walker had behind him more than 60 such professional fights—and he had won every match with a pulverizing knockout of his opponent. Tommy Walker’s story as it related to the International Squadron in late 1937 and 1938 is a behind-the-scenes, intimate look into the affairs of that luckless organization. Walker’s activities in the few years preceding his volunteering to fight for China also provide us with a view of what kind of man is likely to lay his life on the line. Dollars alone weren’t an incentive that great—not when you realized what the Japanese would do to you if you were ever to fall into their hands. ...

  Cloudbuster

  In late 1933 the barnstorming act with which Tommy Walker flew and jumped ran out of cash customers in Texas. For several months the group of men had lived and flown gloriously, but the depression was just too rough to sustain the many gypsy flying acts beating their way around the rural areas of the country. After two miserable weeks of collecting nickels and dimes—all their customers had to offer them—the men decided to break up the team and call it quits.

  A fellow pilot called Walker aside to explain the details of a smuggling deal that demanded sharp flying under conditions fit to make a brave pilot blanch. Walker knew the barnstorming troupe was through, and he jumped at the chance. It was flying; it was also a bundle of money in a short time for a fairly brief number of flights. His friend didn't know what his contraband cargo was, and Walker didn't want even a hint of what they would carry. He asked no questions, received no information voluntarily, but ran his winged delivery service as agreed. From Houston, Texas, Walker and the other pilot flew to a farmer's pasture just outside of El Paso del Norte, in Mexico, where their contact delivered the cargo and delivery instructions to them.

  It was a good life; their contract paid them $500 in hard cash before each flight, and awaited them on their return with another $500. One thousand dollars for less than two hours of straight flying was the kind of business that Walker and his friend enjoyed.

  It didn't take much longer for the ground to cave in beneath them. The Mexican Rurales had worked themselves into a towering rage at the will-o’-the-wisp antics of the old Fleet biplane that Walker pushed back and forth across the border. Neither Tommy nor his pilot friend paid much attention to the rumors circulating about plans of the Rurales to catch the smugglers; after all, a horse simply doesn’t fly very high and it just can’t catch a plane—even an old Fleet. But there was
a difference between Walker and the other pilot, a difference that would bring them down without their cherished airplane. Walker lived it up on the ground, but in the air he was an old daredevil, and you do not gain age in that business by being lucky. Good fortune runs out very quickly; Walker in the air was as sober and industrious as any justice on the bench.

  Not so the owner of the biplane; he stayed drunk most of the time, and it mattered little whether they were in the air or on the ground. His playful disposition, added to his contempt for the Mexican border patrol, brought them to grief.

  On a night with the moon washing coldly over the rough desert terrain, they hedgehopped across the brush, rising and falling with the swells of the land. Behind Tommy Walker his compatriot warbled happily, taking occasional swigs from a flask and shouting into the wind streaming past the open cockpits. Under that full moon, he caught sight of a mounted Mexican border patrol— searching for the smugglers—and immediately grabbed the controls away from Walker.

  Fun is fun, but Walker found the next several minutes too much even for him. At their low altitude he didn’t dare wrestle for the controls, and he had to sit helpless in the cockpit as his friend dove at full speed directly for the mounted patrol. The Fleet screamed low over the startled Mexicans, several of whom leaped headfirst from their horses to escape the slashing propeller. Laughing uproariously, the pilot turned sharply and thundered back for another pass to scatter the rest of the horsemen.

  The Mexicans had regained their wits, and the airplane was a clear target in the moonlit sky. More than a dozen rapid-fire rifles banged away at the swiftly approaching biplane. The odds were a thousand-to-one against their being hurt—but the odds caught up with them.

  A bullet spanged through a control cable, snapping it in two. Tommy Walker had just enough time to horse back on the stick to jerk the plane upward into a climb; at the top of the sudden ascent the Fleet slewed around wildly and whipped off into a tight spin. Before it completed the first turn both Walker and his friend—expert jumpers —were out of their seats and cracking silk. They barely sneaked back across the border.

  By 1934 Walker was the feature attraction at the Chicago World Fair’s Motordrome—especially its Wall of Death. For a month he rode a motorcycle at breakneck speed within a giant barrel, crushing centrifugal force glueing the wheels to the side of a vertical wall. With other riders, he crisscrossed in stunts that kept the onlookers gaping, with Walker always a split-second away from disaster in those tight, roaring confines.

  The Fair ended and the open road beckoned. Walker kept check on air shows, and wherever the remaining barnstormers showed up, he was on hand to fly, wing-walk, or jump—he didn’t care what he did so long as there was money in it. The depression, however, clung like a smothering blanket to the remaining barnstorming troupes, and weeks would slip by without a nickel coming in.

  Walker turned to his fists to eat. He bummed rides and rode the rails from Louisville to Memphis, then to New Orleans, stopping off in small towns to slug it out with vicious, experienced local fighters in smoke-filled arenas. He had come to be a deadly veteran in the ring, with his natural balance, swift reaction time, and steel-hard build. In a few weeks he slammed and pounded his way through one fight after the other; a natural southpaw, his powerhouse left crushed consciousness out of 26 opponents. Nine others were simply battered into limbo, or were saved from bloody punishment when even those hardened referees grabbed Walker's arms to save his opponents.

  His life settled down into a rugged pattern as an itinerant flying stunt man, daredevil parachutist, and brawling club fighter who had never known defeat. An air show in San Diego hit it lucky, and for a solid month Walker jumped, stunted, and flew wild aerobatics. The money was rolling in again, but weeks of a lean belly had taught Walker his lesson. Three times a week, at the San Diego exposition, he climbed into the ring (always betting his purse on himself) to smash other fighters into oblivion.

  Money bulged fat and crisp in his pockets. He had it made, and there seemed no limit to the suddenly bright horizon of flying, jumping, fighting—and a steadily growing pile of greenbacks.

  It was the summer of 1937 and all-out war flamed in China. Whatever his reasons—and Walker won’t try to recall them today—he turned away from the best moneymaking deal he had ever known, and walked into the office of the Chinese consul to offer his services as a fighter pilot. Walker’s visit came shortly after Chiang Kai-shek had made his decision to form the International Squadron. The Chinese offered him papers to sign, and said he would be called within 30 days. But in the meantime, they told him (after he had signed the papers) his life was in danger.

  “This building,” explained the consul to Walker, “is under the constant surveillance of Japanese intelligence agents. I assure you that you have been watched and that before the day is out they will know your name and a great deal about you. Be careful. Where will you be staying?”

  Walker explained that he would await his call in Seattle.

  “If you remain in that city until we call you,” the consul went on, “it would be, ah, wise to avoid—shall we say—too many dark corners?”

  Walker grinned at the warnings. He was immune to such advice; there had been too many narrow escapes as a parachutist and a stuntman, too many fights. To him the entire affair sounded exactly like a Hollywood thriller about the mysterious Orient.

  Three weeks later Walker had his first brush with the Japanese—and he learned, almost to his sorrow, that the Chinese consul had not overstated his case. With a close friend, Dutch Wendt, the two men were in one of the many Japanese restaurants of Seattle for dinner. Walker was to discover (weeks later) that the restaurant doubled in brass as a center of operations for Japanese intelligence in the northwestern United States; that same night, however, he learned that the Japanese truly did have the Indian Sign on him. Trying to get service at the counter, he and Wendt were steadfastly ignored—while several Japanese moved in to tables directly behind them. Dutch Wendt gave vent to what Walker describes as “his usual explosive temper” and shouted at the nearest Japanese waiter. That worthy responded with a burst of saliva directly into Wendt’s face.

  Both Walker and Wendt were sensitive to trouble when it was about to erupt about them; however, it must be noted that Dutch Wendt reacted in splendid fashion. His hand flashed across the counter and a massive fist twisted the waiter’s shirt. Abruptly the Japanese found himself in an unusual position—dangling in the air. But only for a moment, until Wendt’s other fist thudded with terrible impact directly into his face. Bones splintered and blood gushed; the waiter was unconscious before Wendt dropped him to the floor.

  For the next ten minutes both Walker and Wendt had the time of their lives. Japanese came at them from all sides, and instinctively they went back-to-back as they slugged it out with the “clientele” and an astonishing number of waiters for such a small restaurant. Walker was unbelievably swift with his fists, and Wendt was of the old roughhouse school, and a man of great physical bulk as well. The Japanese got in a few blows that drew blood, but the pistonlike effect of Walker’s fists and the hammering blows of his friend began to pile Japanese up on the floor around them. Sirens screaming just outside the restaurant ended the battle royal; the two men went out the back windows as police poured in through the door.

  Two weeks later Dutch Wendt departed for the East Coast, and Tommy Walker began his career as a soldier of fortune for the Chinese. The pay didn’t make him unhappy; under an alias, he went to the Orient with a monthly pay of $500 in gold (less than what he made a week as a stuntman), but with a bonus awaiting him in different forms. He was to receive $1,000 in gold for every enemy plane destroyed and confirmed, as well as additional bonuses for missions completed successfully against ground targets.

  The Chinese gave him a loaded .38 revolver and a shoulder holster, and they warned him—grimly—to stay very alert and always to be armed. He had been marked by the Japanese for death; those men battered and beaten
in the restaurant had lost face with their superiors, and the word had gotten around that they wanted nothing so much as to toss Walker’s mangled corpse into the nearest sewer. Tommy listened carefully; and he stayed “very alert and very well armed.”

  The next morning a new passport was in his hands. Tommy noted that he was going to Australia “for his health.” He was also a captain in the Chinese Air Force, and on his way to join the International Squadron then being formed in China.

  Weeks later, the ocean liner nosed into its dock in Hong Kong. There agents of the Chinese Air Force picked up Walker, and brought him to a meeting with three European pilots also joining the squadron. Later that same day they were on a train for Canton, where they checked in at the New Asia Hotel.

  The sight at Hankow airfield—after Chinese descriptions of the planes they would fly—evoked bitter laughter from the new pilots. The sprawling field displayed a sickly assortment of fighters, bombers, and trainers parked about at random. Mixed in with the different planes were a dozen Russian fighters. Tommy stared at Curtiss Hawk II and III biplane fighters, several of the new Vultee attack bombers, and a half-dozen Martin 139 twin-engined bombers. He stared in wonder at a decrepit Savoia-Marchetti trimotored bomber left over from the days of General Scaroni, and he looked with envy at six spanking new Gloster Gladiator biplane fighters from England. They belonged to a well-known Chinese fighter group, the Gypsy Squadron, which had started out life with 50 of the new British fighters. Less than a year later the squadron was down to seven planes, and it reached its end in a roaring clash over Hankow. Seven Gladiators and 35 Russian fighters went up to stop 100 Japanese fighters and bombers. Six of the seven Gladiators were shot down, and half the Russian force was shattered by the wild-flying Japanese pilots.

  For three weeks Walker and the other pilots languished on the ground. The International Squadron was still being formed, and for some obscure reason the Chinese refused to let Walker or the other men take up any planes on the field. Without airplanes to fly, they had little urge to watch other pilots in the air, and they set up camp in the largest bar in the city, where the whiskey flowed freely and females flocked to their sides.