The Mammoth Book of Fighter Pilots

by Jon E. Lewis

  Whatever its later shortcomings, the Curtiss-Wright P-40 was an excellent fighter for the battles over Rangoon, all of which were fought below 20,000 feet. At those altitudes the P-40 was better than a Hurricane and at its best against the Japanese Army Nates and Navy Model Zeros. The two .50-caliber machine guns gave the P-40 a heavy, fast-firing gun that neither the British nor Japs could match. Pilot armor saved many a P-40 pilot’s life, and the heavy rugged construction, though a disadvantage in maneuverability, was certainly an advantage in field maintenance and putting damaged planes back into battle. P-40s could be repaired after damage that would have made a Japanese plane a total loss.

  The ground crews were a vital factor that most newspaper correspondents on the spot overlooked. It was the speed with which the ground crews repaired, refueled, and rearmed the P-40s that kept the A.V.G. from being floored by the Japanese one-two punches. The ground crews displayed ingenuity and energy in repairing battle-damaged P-40s that I have seldom seen equaled and never excelled. Their performance at Rangoon was in many ways symbolic, for in all the long years of the war to come, it was American maintenance that was one of the keystones in our eventual arch of triumph. Until the very end of the Rangoon holocaust our ground crews managed to keep a minimum of 10 P-40s ready to fight every day. In contrast the R.A.F. commander, Air Vice Marshal Stevenson, complained of his maintenance men who allowed a squadron of 30 Hurricanes arriving in January to slump to 11 planes fit for combat by mid-February and only 6 by March. I had never favored liquid-cooled engines for combat planes but the Allison engines in our P-40s certainly did more than the manufacturer claimed for them.

  Our leadership at Rangoon was also superior. All of the squadron leaders who saw action there – Olson; Sandell and Newkirk before they were killed; “Tex” Hill of Hunt, Texas; and Bob Neale, of Seattle, Washington, were leaders of the highest quality. It was no accident that Hill and Olson became full colonels and commanded Army Air Forces fighter groups in combat or that the A.A.F. offered a lieutenant colonelcy to Bob Neale, who entered the A.V.G. as a Navy ensign.

  Above all it was the kind of teamwork that is so typically American, wherein there is plenty of scope for individual brilliance but everybody contributes toward a common goal. You can see it on an autumn Saturday afternoon in a top-notch football team. It will take the same kind of well-co-ordinated teamwork to operate a guided-missile or push-button group in the next war or to pull us through the perils of peace.

  In January my annual attack of chronic bronchitis laid me low in Kunming, and a projected trip to Rangoon had to be canceled. I alternated between brief spells in my airfield office and longer sieges in my sickbed at the University of Kunming where the A.V.G. was quartered. A radio was installed near my bed, so I could listen to the radio chatter of my pilots during their fights over Rangoon. It was over this radio that I heard of the Japanese attack on Toungoo, February 4. They struck at 6 a.m. There was no warning. All personnel were asleep. The operations building and a hangar were destroyed by direct hits; three P-40s still under repair were wrecked; and half a dozen R.A.F. Blenheims burned. That might all too easily have been the fate of the entire A.V.G. eight weeks earlier.

  After the fall of Singapore in mid-February, the Japanese transferred the crack air units that blasted the R.A.F. out of the Malayan air to Thailand to join the assault on Rangoon. These reinforcements boosted enemy plane strength available to attack Rangoon to four hundred planes. Before the month’s end, they were hammering at the city with two hundred planes a day.

  It was during this period that a handful of battered P-40s flown by Bob Neale’s First Squadron pilots wrote the final lurid chapter in the A.V.G. history of Rangoon. Neale had become First Squadron leader after the death of Bob Sandell, who died flight-testing a repaired P-40 over Mingaladon. Since the fall of Rangoon was already looming, Neale no longer retained damaged planes at Mingaladon but had them flown or shipped north by rail. About this time I also ordered Neale to cease all strafing and bomber-escort missions due to the worn condition of the P-40 engines, which were long overdue for overhaul. The fact that shark-nosed planes were observed flying north and were no longer seen over Thailand airdromes or accompanying R.A.F. bombers gave rise to rumors that the A.V.G. had left Rangoon. Neale radioed me for orders regarding the actual evacuation. I replied, “Expend equipment. Conserve personnel utmost. Retire with last bottle oxygen.”

  Neale took me literally. With 9 P-40s he waited for the final Japanese daylight assaults with their crack units from Singapore. R.A.F. strength had dwindled too. All the Buffaloes had been lost in combat or accidents. Thirty Hurricane reinforcements had shrunk to a dozen serviceable planes. New reinforcements of 18 Hurricanes and Spitfires being ferried from Calcutta to Rangoon cracked up in the Chin Hills with a loss of 11 pilots. When the Japanese began their final aerial assault on February 26, there were only 15 Allied fighters to meet the attack by 166 enemy planes. They fought off three raids on the twenty-fifth with the A.V.G. bagging 24 Jap planes. The next day was even worse, with 200 enemy planes over Rangoon. The A.V.G., now reduced to 6 P40s, bagged 18 Jap fighters to bring their two-day total to 43 enemy aircraft without loss to themselves.

  In those two days of almost constant air fighting Neale’s detachment turned in one of the epic fighter performances of all time. With the best of equipment it would have been a brilliant victory, but under the conditions Neale and his eight pilots fought, it was an incredible feat. The report of Fritz Wolf, who left Rangoon just before the final battles began, describes those conditions well.

  Planes at Rangoon are almost unflyable. Tires are chewed up and baked hard. They blow out continually. We are short on them, and battery plates are thin. When we recharge them, they wear out within a day. There is no Prestone oil coolant in Rangoon. British destroyed the battery-charging and oxygen-storage depots without any advance warning to us so we could stock up. We are completely out of auxiliary gear shifts and they are wearing out in the planes every day.

  Fresh food of any kind is completely lacking. We are living out of cans. Water is hard to get. Most of the city water supply has been cut off.

  Dust on the field fouls up the P-40 engines considerably. It clogs carburetion so much that it is dangerous to increase manifold pressure when the engine quits cold. Entire carburetion systems are cleaned on the ground, but they are as bad as ever after a single day’s operations. This tendency of engines to quit makes it hard to dogfight or strafe. Of the eight planes that took off for an air raid two days ago, only five got off the ground.

  Conditions in Rangoon are getting dangerous. Authorities have released criminals, lunatics, and lepers to fend for themselves. Natives have broken into unguarded liquor stocks and are in a dangerous state. There are continual knifings and killings. Three British were killed near the docks a few nights ago. Stores are all closed. At least twenty-five blocks of the city are burning furiously. All fire trucks were sent up the Prome Road to Mandalay several weeks ago.

  Our only contact with British intelligence was a visit from one officer about ten days ago. There seems to be little co-operation between the R.A.F. and British Army and less between the R.A.F. and us. It seems certain that the Japanese have crossed the Sittang River (only eighty miles from Rangoon), but we have had no word on it.

  On the night of February 27 the R.A.F. removed the radar set from Rangoon without previous notice to the A.V.G. For Neale that was the last straw. The next morning he sent four of his remaining six P-40s to cover the route of the last A.V.G. truck convoy to leave Rangoon. He and his wingman, R. T. Smith, later an A.A.F. fighter group commander, stayed to make a final search for an A.V.G. pilot who had bailed out over the jungle some days before. Neale ripped out his own radio and enlarged the baggage compartment to hold a stretcher case if the pilot turned up injured. Neale and Smith sweated out February 28 waiting for news of the lost pilot, Edward Liebolt. The next day the Japanese cut the Prome Road, last land line of retreat from Rangoon. Neale and Smith j
ammed two cases of whisky into Neale’s baggage compartment and took off for Magwe, two hundred miles to the north. Two days later the Japanese Army entered Rangoon.

  The battle of southern Burma was over.

  TO KILL A MAN

  GUNTHER BLOEMERTZ

  Bloemertz was one of the famed “Abbeville Boys”, flying Me 109s out of Abbeville in Northern France during the German Occupation.

  What was it father said long ago – “You want to be an airman? Now think, my boy. Downstairs there’s a family like ours: father, mother and child, saying grace before supper – and you want to go and drop a bomb into all this peacefulness!”

  “No,” I replied, “no, father, I want to be a fighter pilot, one of the ones who shoots bombers down.”

  Then I was stretching both hands out of the window of the railway carriage, with mother quietly crying and father saying in a low voice, “Come back safely, my . . .” The first flight over the fields and the wide forest, above the red tiled roofs of the town . . . the heavy suitcases when I arrived at the front. Oh – they were heavy! I had put them down and entered the dusty, dry barracks. That was in Abbeville . . . Abbeville – the front.

  The spare man in the plain linen flying-suit standing before me was the Kommandeur of the Abbeville Boys. A bright yellow life jacket hung loosely across his shoulder and chest, and a black, white and red ribbon stood out from under his collar.

  “How old?”

  “Nineteen, Herr Major.”

  His lower lip came forward and he stared at me for a moment. “Have you any request to make?”

  It sounded like an execution. But I did actually have a request – to get near two of my friends. Werner and Ulrich were a reminder of home . . .

  The sun-warmed air was shimmering above the long concrete runways and wide stretches of grass. I had to walk on for quite half an hour with my heavy cases to the other side of the airfield. Close above the horizon, far beyond the shimmering layer, something sparkled for a second. A dozen fine streaks lay mutely across the sky: twelve fighters were either flying away from me or would be over my head in a few seconds. The streaks grew larger. Soon cockpits, wings and armament could be made out – the aircraft were already flying so low over the grass that in the hot eddying air they seemed to fuse with the ground, and still I could hear no engine noise. I saw the heads behind the goggles, the blunt noses of the motors hurtling towards me. A thin singing hum grew momentarily louder, then they were roaring over my head in lightning and thunder – and away.

  I turned my head. The twelve trails with their dots in front were once again high in the sky. So those were they: the Tommies called them the “Abbeville Boys”, and feared and respected them.

  “Line-shooters!” I said to myself.

  The line-shooters returned. Banking steeply, they circled the airfield and then swept in to land, whistling and bellowing, sharp explosions punctuating the flat accompaniment of idly-turning propellers. For a fraction of a second they displayed their flat, silver-blue bellies, drew down ever more closely towards their shadows on the grass, and alighted carefully with legs spread wide. Perhaps that’s my squadron, I thought, perhaps Werner and Ulrich are with them. Or had they already been killed? I hauled my suitcases on a bit further, spurred by the joyful anticipation of seeing two old friends again.

  At that very moment, from the squadron dispersal area, a “bird” rose in a leisurely, awkward fashion into the air. Its engine roaring, it vibrated slowly along towards me, splaying out its thin stork-like legs as though about to land again any moment. In fact the “Storch” landed scarcely thirty paces away on the greensward. The pilot jumped out, clowning in dumb show.

  “Hallo, old boy! What a sight for my poor old eyes. You, too, taking your bones to market?”

  Ulrich was standing before me: Ulrich, the dark-eyed, spare-framed reservist with the long, almost black hair – Ulrich, my pal of recruit days, who had worn his service nightshirt with such lazy distinction and had climbed every night into the topmost bunk of the row.

  “Ulrich, old fellow, how did you know I was here?” I mumbled.

  “Slow as ever in the uptake! How did I know you were here? Caught sight of you during the approach, recognised your old moon face quite plainly. Hawk’s eyes, old boy – hawk’s eyes! Cigarette?”

  Ulrich’s lapels smelt as they always had done of Soir de Paris.

  “Incidentally, you look a regular porter,” he went on unkindly. “There wasn’t a car handy at the squadron but a Storch is just as good. Simple, isn’t it? Coming?”

  We went laughing to the aircraft. Ulrich’s walk was as it used to be, leaning forward so you expected him to fall on his nose any moment. Around his mouth and at the corners of the eyes there had appeared finely drawn wrinkles.

  “Yes, the Abbeville Boys have had a good deal of scrapping,” he grinned. “And this evening we’re going to drown it all.”

  “Where’s Werner?” I asked, hesitating.

  “Baled out an hour ago over St Orner. Got a bit above himself. The little Spitfires gave him a bellyful. Poor chap rang up just now. He’s flying back with a replacement in the morning. Chuck your cigarette away!”

  We climbed in to the cockpit of the Storch, and the shortest air journey of my career began. A few seconds later we climbed out between two dispersal hangars.

  “The one in front is the Kapitan,” Ulrich muttered under his breath. The Kapitan might well have been a cadet, for his fresh, brown face made him look just like an eighteen-year-old. The pilots were lying back in their easy chairs between the aircraft and waiting for the next sortie. The Kapitän led me round from one to the other, and Ulrich drew me finally to a chair next to his own.

  The pair to my right were called Vogel and Meyer II, a strange couple who seemed only to exist for each other.

  “The best of the whole squadron,” whispered Ulrich, indicating them with his eyes.

  The pilots’ attention was jerked to the loudspeaker. Ulrich listened tautly with his lips pressed together. Only a hum could be heard at first – the current as it was switched on – and then came the announcement.

  “Achtung! achtung! Enemy aircraft forming up in strength over London, probably four-engined bombers.”

  Ulrich swallowed a curse. “Off we go again.”

  Drawing nervously at his cigarette he turned abruptly away, making for his machine. The other pilots were already clambering into their cockpits.

  “Immediate readiness!” came through the loudspeaker, and the latecomers sprang into their aircraft. I stood on the wing beside Ulrich, who was crouched in the narrow cockpit, fastening his harness.

  “Do your stuff!”

  Laughing, he punched me in the chest.

  “Can do,” he nodded, and then, softly and nervously, “can do-can do. . . .”

  His fists were clenched and I could see he had become suddenly serious. His eyes, lost in an unearthly distance, reflected something strange and rare, not fear – but perhaps a certain figure with a scythe coming towards him across the wide field. Since I had got to know Ulrich it was this curious expression in the eyes which had led me to the fancy that he might be a visitor from another planet wishing to study affairs on earth, moving among human beings to experience their habits, joys and sorrows, so he, too, could love, fight and die like any of them.

  “Achtung! Achtung! Squadron take off at once! Enemy formation airborne over Thames Estuary. Course Flushing.”

  The two-thousand-h.p. engines sprang into deafening life, their slip-stream forcing me backwards, as if eighty thousand horses were thundering all around. Forty small, compact single-seaters roared across the airfield, rose laboriously from the ground and drove with gathering speed towards the enemy.

  That very day one of the pilots in our squadron had won his twenty-fifth victory in the air. In the evening a crowd of fellows came into our mess to celebrate in the company of their successful comrade. The Kommandeur with his staff, the Kapitäns of the neighbouring units and the
pilots of our own squadron were all there. The men of the morning had changed very much in appearance, for instead of oily flying-suits they were wearing smart white or dark-blue uniforms, white shirts and – in accordance with a special squadron custom – loosely fitting white socks. Even in the Palace of Versailles you would not have found greater correctness in social conduct than here; but in spite of this, the conversation was pretty easy.

  The Welfare Officer of our squadron was there too, a reserve major who always wore uniforms of English cut. Known as “Papi”, he could easily have been the father of any one of us. He got now to telling a story about the evening a strange guest had been entertained in a small château not far from St Omer: a legendary Englishman who had already lost both his legs and who had now been shot down in combat. The brave Englishman had landed safely, but his artificial limbs had been smashed. So there was the captured enemy airman, the renowned Wing-Commander Bader from the other side, sitting in the middle of a group of German pilots – the Fighter General himself had invited him to an evening party.

  The two of them, both experts at their craft, had sat in deep armchairs by the fireplace, their gaze fixed on the crackling embers. The atmosphere was rather oppressive, everyone appreciating the feelings of their guest, the airmen’s immobile expressions flung into relief by the light of the flaming logs. No one spoke a word. Every now and again they sipped their drinks quietly and with reserve, never forgetting the little formalities which went with it. Germans are incapable of behaving in any other way – they honoured their guest as the man who had forgotten both his legs were missing to go out and fight for his country.

  The strangeness of the occasion and reflections about their shot-down opponent led every man’s thoughts the same way, suddenly to anathematise the war and that fate which throws a man into one particular society at his birth, and makes it his duty to conform to it. Why hadn’t each of them been born in England? That would have given England one more pilot. Why was the Englishman sitting by the fireplace not a German? He might perhaps have been a kommodore of our own. Hadn’t we often enough in peacetime sat down at table with those whom today it seemed our highest duty to kill? It was suddenly impossible to understand how men of the same sort, with the same feelings, desires, and needs could come to mangle one another to death.