War Stories II: Heroism in the Pacific

by Oliver North

  July 1942 was when the U.S. Army Air Corps took over the American Volunteer Group that included some of the great characters of aviation, like the great Marine pilot “Pappy” Boyington, who later put together the famous Black Sheep Squadron. They had been fighting the Japanese since December 1941 and were a really experienced bunch.

  My first fight was at night in late July. When I got to Kunming air base in China, Chennault assigned me to the 75th Fighter Squadron. Tex Hill had been commander of that squadron, and Chennault put me in as his deputy.

  It was hard to get through to the Japanese bombers, particularly when they had an overwhelming number of fighters as escorts. You’d get involved in a fight with the Zeros before you got to the bombers, and pretty soon the bombers were gone. But we still shot down a lot of bombers.

  One night with a full moon the radio calls me and says, “John, we can hear ’em. There are bombers approaching the airport. Now they’re right overhead.”

  I said, “I can’t see ’em.” Then, all of a sudden, I see these flickering exhausts, about 3,000 feet above me. So I start after them; they’re headed north, away from the airport. I’m going full-throttle, climbing to meet them. They make a 180-degree turn, back into their bombing run. So I cut them off, turn into them, but at night you have no depth perception. I’m going so fast that I realize I’m going right into them! So I pull the throttle back, lift the nose, sideslip the plane, and suddenly I’m the fourth man in their formation.

  And they begin shooting at me. The first burst from the turret machine gun from the airplane on the right started hitting the front of my airplane, went right on back along the fuselage. They put several slugs through the cockpit—I got one right through the parachute. My radio’s in the cockpit; they took that out. I got grazed on my left arm. I had a five-inch hole through the crankcase of the engine, but didn’t know it at the time. Of course the oil ran out, and later my airplane caught fire. But not before I kicked it around and hit the first Japanese airplane. It didn’t explode but I think I killed everyone aboard. The other two bombers exploded when they were hit.

  But now I’m in big trouble. My engine is running badly and I’m 15,000 feet above the airport. So I start down, hoping to slide the airplane in on its belly if I can’t get the wheels down. That’s when my airplane catches fire, and fire in an airplane is kind of terrifying. Fortunately this wasn’t a gasoline fire, just the oil from the crankcase. Still, flames are coming out of both sides of the engine and this is enough to frighten me.

  I misjudge the airport approach. There’s no way I can pull the nose up. The engine is still running, but poorly. Fortunately, the Lord put a river about two miles ahead. And the airplane barely made the river. It was a relatively soft landing in the water, and soon the airplane’s under fourteen feet of water. But it did put the fire out. I had hit my head on the gun sight and received lacerations. I had no doctor, no medical corpsman. I don’t believe we even had a first aid kit. Fortunately there was a missionary in this little town. And he had a suture needle. So I finally got a rowboat; it took me across and through to our lines. The doctor wouldn’t let me out of the hospital. I wanted to get right back to the air base, because I knew we were going to be attacked the next morning. So I went to the roof of the hospital and watched the air battle. I’d been in my first combat and we had five airplanes; there were forty-five Japanese planes. I guess we did all right.

  If the Japanese had taken Kunming air base, I’m convinced that China would have fallen. But Chennault wasn’t going to let that happen.

  Thanks to the skill and daring of the Flying Tigers, Kunming didn’t fall—and the Chinese stayed in the war, effectively tying up more than twenty-five Japanese divisions that wouldn’t be used elsewhere against the Americans. And Claire Chennault, the man who had gone to China as a retired Army Air Corps captain in 1937, returned to the United States in 1945 as a major general.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE FORGOTTEN FRONT

  CHINA-BURMA-INDIA THEATER (1937–1945)

  BRITISH BASE AREA

  LALAGHAT, INDIA

  JUNE 1943

  The decision to dissolve Claire Chennault’s American Volunteer Group and reconstitute it as a regular U.S. Army Air Corps unit wasn’t the result of petty jealousies or a “power grab” by the 14th Air Force, as some claimed at the time. Rather, it was the consequence of a major reorganization in the Allied war effort that British prime minister Winston Churchill had been advocating since shortly after Pearl Harbor.

  With England struggling against Hitler in Europe and Africa, the warlords in Tokyo decided that the time was right to “liberate the Asian people” in Burma. Churchill had initially believed that Britain could defend her empire alone, but he soon realized that American help would be essential if the crown were to hold on to its most prized possession in the Far East: India.

  By April 1942, the U.S.-British Joint General Staff had hammered out a compromise command arrangement for what they called the China-Burma-India theater. The British would have overall command and the mantle was given to Field Marshal Harold Alexander. General William Slim was the British ground forces commander, and his American counterpart, “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, Chiang Kai-shek’s senior American advisor, was designated the chief U.S. officer in the region. Even though Stilwell had his headquarters with Chiang Kai-shek in China, both British and U.S. combat forces were intended to operate independently, relying on the combined staff in India for coordination and support.

  Though the command-and-control arrangement was less than ideal, it was far from the greatest challenge the new CBI commanders faced. They were all aware that Churchill and Roosevelt had decided that the European campaign was to have first priority for all ships, planes, tanks, troops, and war-fighting matériel. Stilwell also knew that MacArthur, smarting in Australia and anxious to avenge his humiliating withdrawal from the Philippines, would receive the second-highest allocation of those scarce resources. These realities meant that a constant shortage of men and matériel would characterize the entire Allied campaign in the CBI theater.

  The new command measures had little effect on the Imperial Army’s relentless advance into Burma. The Japanese 15th Army, commanded by General Shojiro Iida, had four well-supplied, combat-hardened divisions, the 18th, 33rd, 55th, and 56th, supported by more than 400 aircraft. The demoralized British colonial troops and the two understrength Chinese divisions led by Stilwell lacked almost everything and had virtually no air support other than Chennault’s AVG.

  General Joseph Stilwell

  By 21 April, as the Japanese were preparing for their final offensive in the Philippines, the outnumbered and outgunned British forces in Burma were in full retreat, hacking their way 600 miles through mountainous jungle back into India. Stilwell’s Chinese troops commenced a retreat of their own, fighting their way back into China, arriving emaciated and exhausted after more than a month in the jungle.

  By mid-May 1942, the Japanese held all of Burma, were on the attack against Chiang in China, and were threatening India. From this point onward, the Allies’ shortages of conventional combat forces and extraordinary logistics challenges would dictate their strategy and tactics in the region. Their paucity of combat power made it necessary for both the British and the Americans to employ highly irregular warfare techniques and made the CBI theater the venue for some of the most spectacular unconventional operations of World War II.

  By their very nature, unconventional operations require leaders with imagination who can “think outside the box” and motivate those they lead to undertake daring action deep in enemy territory against numerically superior adversaries. The British had such a man in Major General Orde C. Wingate. For the Americans it was Major Frank Merrill on the ground and Claire Chennault in the air. The forces that these three men commanded were outnumbered 700 to 1 by the Japanese. Yet between spring 1942 and late 1944, these three leaders and the men they commanded succeeded in inflicting enough damage on the Japanese 15th Army
in Burma that it were unable to exploit its initial advantage and launch successful offensives against India to the west or northward against Chiang.

  Major General Orde C. Wingate was a maverick in every sense of the word. He had been serving in Palestine when the War Office assigned him to the British campaign to liberate Ethiopia from Mussolini’s Italian Occupation Army in early 1941. Wingate organized a unit of irregulars mounted on horses and camels that he called the Gideon Force. Though his troops made only a modest contribution to the success of the five-month fight, on 5 May Wingate was accorded the honor of riding beside Haile Selassie, the “Lion of Judah,” when the Ethiopian emperor made his triumphal entry into Addis Ababa.

  The positive press coverage of Wingate’s Ethiopian escapade convinced Churchill’s senior officers to overlook the man’s considerable eccentricities and grant his wish to try his Long-Range Penetration (LRP) concepts against the Japanese in Burma. As soon as he arrived in India, Wingate set about recruiting a force of more than 2,500 Burmese and Indian troops led by British officers and NCOs to start operating deep inside Burma. He called them Chindits—and worked them mercilessly, marching them up and down the mountains and teaching them to fight in the jungle and live off the land with minimal supplies.

  Major General Orde Wingate led Britain’s Special Forces in Burma.

  By February 1943, Wingate believed his men were ready. British HQ gave the green light for 2,800 Chindits to launch an LRP attack into the trackless mountains along the Indo–Burmese border frontier. In a break with traditional warfare doctrine, Wingate sent RAF officers with each of his units to help maintain contact with British aircraft that would parachute supplies to his troops.

  For four months, the Chindits, operating hundreds of miles deep inside Burma, cut Japanese communications and supply lines, destroyed railroads, and thoroughly disrupted General Iida’s plans for an attack into India. By the end of April, with the weather deteriorating and his outnumbered, exhausted men suffering from malaria and prolonged exposure in the mountainous jungle, Wingate decided to break contact and hastily withdraw to India before they were surrounded by the Japanese. Though they were closely pursued by the Imperial 15th Army, the withdrawal of the Chindits proceeded in relatively good order, unlike the British rout less than a year before.

  When Wingate’s men arrived back in India in June 1943, the LRP operation was deemed to have been a great success—though it had come at the cost of more than 800 British and colonial soldiers killed or missing. But during the course of their hurried withdrawal, Wingate had been compelled to make some agonizing decisions. Lacking any means of evacuating his wounded, he had no choice but to leave them behind rather than slow his entire column and put them all at risk of death or capture.

  On several occasions, rather than sacrifice 2,000 still able-bodied men, Wingate gave the sick and wounded extra ammunition, some grenades, water, and a Bible—and left them beside the trail as the others marched away. Often, before the departing troops were out of earshot, they heard the explosions or gunshots from the place where they had left wounded comrades who had chosen not to wait for the Japanese troops to arrive and use them for bayonet practice. Distraught over the inability to evacuate his casualties, Wingate spent the balance of 1943 training replacements, refitting and repairing his battered LRP force, and trying to solve the demoralizing medical evacuation problem.

  Wingate wasn’t the only one using the interval to rebuild in India. Stilwell was also utilizing bases along the Indian plain to train Chinese troops. U.S. Army engineers were busy trying to reopen the Burma Road so that Chiang’s forces would no longer have to rely solely on American pilots flying over the Himalayas for resupply. By the winter of 1943–44, with Admiral Louis Mountbatten now in command of the Allied effort in the CBI theater, the British in India and the Americans in China were finally preparing to go on the offensive.

  Unfortunately, so were the Japanese. Having consolidated its positions and established puppet regimes in Indochina, Malaya, and the Philippines, Tokyo ordered the commander in Burma, General Renya Mutaguchi, to launch a fresh offensive against India.

  The Japanese set a start date of 17 April 1944 for the campaign, code-named Operation Ichi-Go, to commence. British code-breakers intercepted the message, and Mountbatten decided to disrupt Mutaguchi’s plans by sending two LRP columns into Burma. Wingate’s Chindits were to enter from the west and Merrill’s Marauders from the north. For the first time in the CBI theater, gliders and paratroopers would be used to insert forces deep behind enemy lines and Claire Chennault’s Flying Tigers—now part of the 14th Air Force and equipped with more than 300 bombers, transports, and fighters—would support the British with “air commando” operations.

  The daring plan, approved by Admiral Mountbatten, also solved Wingate’s dilemma of how to evacuate the sick and wounded from deep behind enemy lines. American “air commandos” would bring in equipment to cut landing strips in the jungle from which light aircraft could operate and fly out casualties to hospitals in China or India.

  Such cooperation was relatively rare in the CBI theater. It was no secret that Chiang Kai-shek and the acerbic “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell all but hated each other. Nor did Stilwell make any pretense of getting along with Chennault. Nonetheless, after being pressured by General Hap Arnold in Washington, he gave his grudging approval to Mountbatten’s plan. The concept of using gliders and light aircraft to support LRP operations was the brainchild of two brilliant young aviators, Lieutenant Colonels Phil Cochran and John Alison. Because heavy transport aircraft would never be able to take off from the rough-cut airstrips carved out of the jungle, Cochran and Alison proposed using American-built CG-4A Waco gliders to ferry men and matériel behind enemy lines. Thousands of the CG-4A gliders were being built for use in World War II. Designed for a one-way trip into combat, the plywood and fabric craft were inexpensive to construct, could be towed to the vicinity of their landing sites by conventional transports, and required only a clearing in which to land. But they also needed incredibly daring pilots and crews to fly missions in them.

  The Waco CG-4A glider

  Cochran and Alison also convinced Hap Arnold that the air commandos would need an allocation of tiny, single-engine, Stinson L-5 aircraft to use as air ambulances. They had run some tests and confirmed that the little planes could carry one ambulatory patient and one litter patient from the bare-bones landing strips built by the air commandos.

  General Arnold approved the Cochran-Alison air support plan and convinced Stilwell to go along with it. Alison recalled Arnold’s admiration for Wingate: “This man walks into Burma, and it takes him six weeks to get into position to where he can really hurt the Japanese. When he gets there, his men are tired, many of them have malaria, and a lot of them are sick. Some of them are wounded—some killed.” The plan Wingate’s subordinates had developed would move the irregular troops into place in just a few hours by air. Arnold then told the two young officers, “I don’t want them to walk. I’m going to give you everything you need to do it. Now... which one of you is gonna go?”

  After briefly thinking about it, Arnold dispatched both Alison and Cochran as “co-commanders” to India to oversee the delivery of equipment, the assembly of the Waco gliders, and the training of the 523 American pilots and aircrews who volunteered to join the 1st Air Commandos. The two men were uniquely suited to the task.

  Alison had already proven himself a skilled pilot, a gifted flight instructor, and a resourceful staff officer. He was already an ace, having shot down more than five enemy aircraft while flying with British and Russian pilots that he’d helped train.

  Alison’s close friend Lt. Colonel Phil Cochran was the epitome of the suave and daring fighter pilot. Milton Caniff, creator of the Terry and the Pirates comic strip, fashioned Terry’s flight instructor after Cochran. He wasn’t just a great fighter pilot; he was also a charismatic leader who instilled confidence in the men he led.

  Charles Turner served with Alis
on and Cochran as one of the Waco glider pilots in the 1st Air Commandos. Sergeant Raymond Bluthardt was an Army engineer who helped cut airstrips and build roads deep inside Burma during Operation Thursday—the largest unconventional warfare campaign in the CBI theater.

  LIEUTENANT COLONEL JOHN ALISON, USAAF

  Forward HQ 1st Air Commandos

  Allied Expeditionary Air Base

  250 Miles Inside Japanese-Controlled Burma

  5 March 1944

  Phil Cochran and I started out as co-commanders, but after about a month, it was so confusing I said, “Look, Phil, let’s just go back and be regular soldiers. You’re the ranking officer; I’m your deputy, let’s get this job done.” So then we considered what tools were available. We had the option of using either gliders or paratroopers. We used paratroopers as pathfinders to mark landing sites, but needed a way to take in an airborne engineer company, scrapers, and carry-alls. So we decided that we should use gliders, to get the troops and heavier equipment in so they could then make airfields for transports that could deliver the rest of the troops and their equipment. General Arnold gave us thirty P-51s, fifteen B-25s, thirty C-47s, a hundred L-5s to use as ambulance planes, and almost a hundred cargo gliders.

  C-47 towing two Waco gliders

  Somebody suggested that we try snatching the glider’s tether with a moving C-47. American Aviation of Wilmington, Delaware, had developed the technique for picking up mail sacks in the West Virginia mountains. They had devised a level-winding reel that had an automatic brake and you could adjust the tension. At the end of this line we put a loop of nylon rope that had a catch just like a big fishhook.