At the start of the fourth week the Chinese assigned Walker to the Fifth Pursuit Group of the Chinese Air Force. It was here that he struck up a close friendship with Claire Chennault. The two fliers hit it off perfectly; Walker’s background as a stunt flier found a responsive chord in Chennault. It was a close and a personal war then; the days of the Flying Tigers and the bold newspaper headlines were years in the future.
The Chinese gave Walker a weatherbeaten Hawk III, a weary biplane fighter with two machine guns, of .30 and .50 caliber, each firing through the propeller. With a 750 horsepower Cyclone engine (which ground like a coffee machine, Walker recalls) the Hawk III could barely top 210 miles per hour. But she could maneuver and twist like a frightened angel, and to Walker that more than made up for old age and slow speed.
Gloster Gladiator, British-made biplane fighter, fought in limited numbers in China. Heavy odds and attrition wiped out the force.
Walker flew missions with three other Hawk fighters on four-plane patrol flights. Every other day he flew one or two missions, except when special strikes or intercepts were ordered. Up to now his adventures had been anything but a war for him, but with succeeding missions the face of China began to change both his impressions and his attitude toward what he was doing in the battered country. He could see the brown tides of thousands of troops locked in battle. On every point of the horizon, towns and villages cast their greasy smoke palls into the sky.
The narrow roads were choked with trucks, armored vehicles, and long files of men grinding dust into the air behind them. They were Japanese columns; they were also the primary targets of the Hawk fighters.
Walker and his wingmen strafed trucks and troop columns. Day after day they poured low over the roads, pressing rudder gently so that their streams of lead would hose back and forth into the densely packed men. The Japanese fought back with the snarling thuds of bullets pumping into the old fighter planes; holes appeared magically in the fabric wings and bodies. Sometimes the Hawks faltered, and sometimes they smoked, but they brought the men back to their home fields without loss.
Japanese gunboats infested the rivers and canals, and these became the favorite hunting grounds of the fighter planes. Dozens of the gunboats, as well as troop barges, splintered and burned under the fire of Hawk fighters in trail, creating the effect of a long buzz saw within the vessels. The waters of the canals ran red and choked with bodies, and the fighters swung at treetop level, always seeking the advantage of such surprise, to strafe bivouac areas, observation balloons, gun positions—anything that was Japanese.
Tommy Walker changed one night. The other men watched in unspoken curiosity as he returned to his barracks, white-faced, nauseated. He had been well out in the country, his natural bent of curiosity prompting him to join a Chinese patrol that penetrated into the shadowy zone through which moved the patrols of both nations' forces. They stopped at a small Chinese village where the townspeople had just begun the grisly task of disposing of the bodies of more than one hundred women and young girls—including the children of the village—all of whom had been raped and tortured, and then murdered.
From that day on, Walker flew every time he had an airplane available. He took every opportunity, in between his assigned missions, to fly solo raids. He stayed low, away from the Japanese fighters, using hills and trees for concealment. He was up before dawn, waiting in the Hawk’s cockpit for the first splinter of light on the distant horizon. The Japanese didn’t expect attacks at that time of day, and Walker slid his fighter into the air, wound up the gear, and went off on what became a series of devastating lone-wolf missions.
Curtiss Hawk biplane fighter flown by Tommy Walker in lone-wolf strafing attacks against Japanese ground targets.
He went after the troops on the narrow roads moving out on their early morning patrols, moving carelessly because no one ever struck from the air at such a time. He searched especially for the troop barges that bulged with men; catching them still half-asleep, he made his turns so that the sun, low on the horizon, always loomed directly behind him. In that savage early morning glare, he was all but invisible to the men on the ground and in the boats when his twin guns rattled in their mounts and the lead hosed into the thickly packed bodies. Always the sun; always that concealment of blinding light; always that precious advantage of time in which to strike and be gone before the massed guns on the ground could be brought to bear against him.
His fellow pilots thought he was mad, and the Chinese were convinced of it—and grateful.
The Fifth Pursuit Group maintained from six to ten Hawk fighters on hot alert, ready to fly at a minute’s notice. They were considered virtually helpless against the massive Japanese strikes in the air. The Japanese Navy came over regularly in formations of 27 to 36 twin-engine bombers escorted by a like or a superior number of the Mitsubishi fighters. Most of the time the pilots of the International Squadron did not make even an attempt to fight these powerful striking forces.
Claire Chennault had little interest in dead heroes— which is what his men would be if ever they tried to slug it out with the superior enemy forces. Chennault’s orders were specific: when an alert sounded, you were to run for safety. No heroics; Chennault explained acidly to his men that it would take only one or two major air battles for the Japanese to notch their guns in celebration of wiping out the remaining Chinese fighters.
The only exceptions to the rule came when the vast spotter network provided a long warning time. Under these conditions Chennault ordered the Hawks into the air, to climb as high as possible and try to put the sun between themselves and the approaching Japanese formations. They would take the weary biplanes as high as their laboring engines would permit, and circle above Hankow, waiting. If they saw the chance to slip past the screen of weaving fighters, then the Hawks were to “give ’em hell.” This meant a screaming dive at full power directly into the bombers, one long burst at one target, and then run for it. Keep up full power, keep the nose down, and dive for your life.
The Hawks screeched and buffeted madly at 300 miles per hour, great speed for them but easily attainable in the sleek Japanese fighters. Thus their only chance was to pour their slugs into the vitals of a Japanese bomber—“go for the tanks and the engines; if you miss them, you’ll still clobber the crew in the cockpit”—and escape before the swarm of fighters closed in on them. Walker flamed on© bomber—but that was all.
“Most of the time we never made it to the bombers,” he explained. “The Japs were a hell of a lot faster than we were, and we were usually outnumbered five or six to one. If we saw the fighters turning in toward us before we got to the bombers, our orders were to get out of that beartrap before we got mangled. So, we got.
“In a man-to-man fight, I could whip any Jap sonofabitch they had. Sure, the Mitsubishi was good, but in a brawl, that Hawk would do wonders. It was the export model of one of our best Navy carrier fighters, and it was a rugged machine. If you flew it right, it was light enough on its feet to take on the best the Japanese had. Now, those Jap pilots were good; make no mistake about it. But we were damned good, too. I had been barnstorming and flying square comers in the air before most of those Jap pilots ever got into training school."
The Japanese one day put Walker to the test. Cut off from a diving escape after making a futile stab at the bombers, he found himself boxed in by several fighters. Wisely, he didn’t try to run for it—the faster Mitsubishis would have been on him in a flash. Instead he went into a tight turn, his wings vertical to the ground, sucking it in tighter and tighter. One Japanese fighter tried to cut it in short to slice into his turn; Walker held his turn steady. As he knew would happen, the Japanese fighter clawed into a high-speed stall, and its high wing snapped the ship over. Immediately Walker rolled swiftly, not at the tumbling fighter but at the next man in line. The maneuver was completely unexpected; his twin guns chewed up the pilot in his cockpit and set the Mitsubishi aflame. Before the other pilots could react, Walker was through the h
ole and rushing earthward in a vertical dive.
But he was also on the receiving end of punishment. Ten Mitsubishi pilots came out of the sun in the classical maneuver and bounced the four-ship formation in which Walker was flying. It was a slaughter. Two of the Hawks went down immediately with dead pilots at the controls. A third Hawk stumbled in the air and exploded in flames; the pilot had only a last moment and he used it to pour a burst into the cockpit of a Mitsubishi. Then the Hawk disappeared in a huge fireball.
That left only Walker. He twisted and weaved like a madman, but it didn’t help. The Japanese fighters took their time, and they sawed his plane from one end to the other. The Hawk was coming apart under him as Walker snapped out bursts at the surprised Japanese pilots. Then two of them came up from underneath and the Hawk became a thundering ocean of flames. Walker stayed with the winged furnace as long as he could; over the Chinese lines his clothes were smoking. Then he went out, gripping the D-ring but not opening the chute. He fell so far the Japanese pilots thought he was dead and wheeled away. Six hundred feet up the expert parachutist yanked hard; the canopy cracked open, and two seconds later he was on the ground and running for cover—just in case.
Despite all their training, many of the Chinese bombardiers, as Walker put it, “couldn’t hit the broad side of a bam from twenty feet.” Chennault asked Walker to fly as pilot or lead bombardier on missions with the twin-engine Martins and the Vultees. When the weather was poor, Walker elected to fly. He led the formations in to their targets from heights of only 400 feet. The other crewmen and the Chinese screamed that it was suicide. The blast from the exploding bombs slammed with brutal force into the planes, and they were peppered with pieces of steel and debris from the uplifting targets.
Walker always answered their enraged shouts with one question: “Anybody get shot down by Japanese fighters?” He kept up the low-level raids as long as Chennault would let the planes take off.
“It was a wild war, real crazy,” Walker explained. “For one thing, it was the most disorganized mess you ever saw. The flying was ragged as hell and it was just plain dangerous to fly with most of the men—some of the International Squadron people were nuts who never did know how to fly, and most of the Chinese just couldn’t fly. In the air, the word discipline was a hollow joke. If Chennault could have seen those formations—I use the word loosely—over target, he would have wept. Everybody flew where the hell they pleased. It was worth your life to rely in battle upon a Chinese crew member. Most of them were brave enough, but they were always being insulted by some thing or another. The crazy bastards would sulk at their guns and refuse to fire at the Japanese whenever they thought somebody had insulted them.”
Ten months after he started fighting in China, Tommy Walker returned to his home field in a Vultee that was more wreck than airplane. A vicious crossfire from Japanese ground positions had tom the airplane into a smoking shambles. One gunner was dead, sprawled like a bloody and broken doll over his weapons. The other lay helpless within the airplane, both legs shattered.
Streaking down the runway, the landing gear of the crippled bomber collapsed suddenly. The ship careened wildly. There was a scream from tearing metal and the Vultee started through a huge somersault, breaking up as it smashed back to the runway as jagged, burning wreckage. Chinese soldiers dragged Walker bodily from the flaming, exploding plane, his skin seared and his right knee ripped wide open to the bone. He was in the hospital for five weeks, and finally hobbled out on crutches.
Vultee V11GB export attack bombers— good airplanes but poorly used by the Chinese and the International Squadron pilots.
He had behind him 70 missions in Hawk fighters, 12 in the Martins, and 35 more in the Vultees—as well as two confirmed kills. But he never flew again in China, for the International Squadron had disappeared; in fact, it was disbanded shortly after he entered the hospital.
The men had set themselves up in a “permanent roost” in Hankow, on a hell-for-leather thoroughfare known as Dump Street. It thrived with prostitutes, dope smugglers, perverts, unlimited supplies of excellent whiskey, and a sprinkling of Japanese agents. The latter cultivated the friendship of the foreign crews. Lax in discipline and with tongues loosened by liquor and females, the pilots, pure and simple, shot off their mouths. They were especially talkative about a major mission being planned.
The Japanese agents took it all in, and later that night their radios crackled with coded messages to Japanese airfields. The morning following, Chinese bombers were lined up neatly at the Hankow airfield. There was a deep thrumming drone in the sky and the long line of bombers on the ground disappeared in sheets of flame as Japanese bombs sliced neatly and accurately to the ground.
The International Squadron was sent packing.
American Warplanes In China
The Curtiss P-40B Tomahawks of the Flying Tigers, garishly painted with their shark’s-mouth insignia (copied after the same design on German fighters being flown in Africa), became famous the world over after Pearl Harbor. But these fighter planes were latecomers to the China scene, where many hundreds of American airplanes had been sent in the air war against the Japanese. The large numbers of these aircraft provide an excellent indication of the size of that air war.
The Bellanca 28-90B Flash was a fast (280 miles per hour) single-engine, multi-purpose, bomber-fighter which promised excellent use in China. That promise was never realized. An undisclosed number of the airplanes were shipped to Shanghai, where they were destroyed, still in their shipping crates, by Japanese bombers.
The Northrop 2E, export version of the U.S. Army's XA-13, was an outmoded light bomber by the time it went into action with Chinese pilots. It could reach 200 miles per hour with a bomb load, but only for a brief period of flight, and cruised at a much lower speed. The Chinese received 150 of these planes; they achieved some success against Japanese merchant ships and light warships, sinking several of their targets. All the Northrop 2E bombers were finally lost in combat and training accidents.
Thirty of the Vultee V11GB attack bombers, export versions of the Army’s A-19, were bought by China. Some of these planes were used with great success against Japanese army forces; finally all were lost. They proved so effective that the Chinese ordered 78 Vultee V12C and V12D bombers, improved models of the V11GB.
One of the strangest aircraft in China was the Spartan Executive, a five-place business airplane, which was converted to a two-place multipurpose military aircraft. Powered with a 400 horsepower engine, it carried three guns and up to 300 pounds of bombs. An unknown number were delivered to China.
Ungainly in the air and terrifyingly vulnerable to attack was the Curtiss BT-32, a bomber conversion of the Condor commercial airliner—in biplane configuration. It mounted five .30 caliber machine guns and carried nearly two tons of bombs. An unknown number were delivered.
The Martin 139 export version of the U.S. Army’s B-10 bomber had a top speed of 260 miles per hour, and was considered a fine weapon for its day. By the time it became operational in China (nine were delivered) it was considered to be greatly outclassed by Japanese twin-en-gine bombers. Almost all the Martins were destroyed on the ground by Japanese bombs, or lost in training accidents.
The Boeing XP-925A was the export version of the Boeing Model 218 fighter (from the series that produced the famous P-12 biplane fighters of the U.S. Army). Only one was sent to China, where it was to be demonstrated before a large order was committed. It became the first American fighter to destroy an enemy plane in China when it shot down a Japanese fighter over Shanghai. Only this one model was known to have been delivered; the Boeing was lost in battle.
A sharp improvement over the American biplane fighters was the Boeing 281, export version of the stubby, monoplane P-26 fighter designed for the U.S. Army. A 600 horsepower engine gave the airplane a top speed of 235 miles per hour. Ten were purchased in 1937.
The Grumman SF-2, in an export version of a scout-fighter biplane designed for the U.S. Navy, was
also purchased by China. The quantity is unknown.
Two of the best-known American fighters in China were the Curtiss Hawk II and Hawk III—different models of a biplane developed in export models from a Navy shipboard fighter design. Between 1932 and 1936 China purchased more than one hundred of these airplanes. Hawk III fighters were also built in that country under an export license agreement with the Curtiss company.
The Curtiss-Wright CW-21 was a very fast, highly maneuverable, and fast-climbing monoplane of modern design. Many of these were sold to the Netherlands East Indies; an unknown number were delivered to China, and some of them are known to have engaged Japanese fighters in battle.
Most of the nine Martin 139 twin-engine bombers sent to China were destroyed on the ground in Japanese bombing attacks.
Several other types of aircraft—Beechcraft light transports and Douglas DC-3 twin-engine airliners among them —were sent to China. Apparently several aircraft types were never identified publicly; there are references from several reliable sources to “the arrival of some fifty North American planes,” for example, but further information is unavailable.
The one airplane that represents the sorry state of airpower management in China in the period 1937-38, in a fashion unapproached by any other, was the Curtiss Hawk 75. (None of this involves airpower shipments from other countries besides the United States, such as 50 British Gladiator fighters, unknown numbers of French fighters and bombers, the hundreds of Italian fighters and bombers, and more than 400 warplanes from Russia delivered to China in the period 1937-39—to name only some of the quantities.) The Hawk 75 was the forerunner of the better-known Curtiss P-36 Mohawk designed for the U.S. Army. The export version of the Hawk was considered an outstanding machine for its time—and in most respects unquestionably superior to the Mitsubishi Type 96 (Claude).
The Ragged, Rugged Warriors Page 8