The Mammoth Book of Fighter Pilots (43 page)

The lightness with which this cardinal military sin was excused by the American high command when committed by Regular Army officers has always seemed to me one of the more shocking aspects of the war. Americans have been prone to excuse the failings of their military leaders partly because of the glow of final victory and partly because they still lack all the facts from which to form an honest and accurate appraisal – facts that have been carefully withheld from the public under the guise of censorship allegedly necessary to military security. It is high time the American people made it their business to find out more about why the men they paid for twenty years to provide for the national defense were so pitifully unprepared for the catastrophe that nearly engulfed us all. The penalty for the failure to do so will be a new and even more disastrous Pearl Harbor.

The Japanese attack on Hawaii confronted me with an abrupt change in plans. Although my fighter squadrons at Toungoo were ready for action, other phases of the project were in a more precarious state. Except for the P-40 tires sent by General MacArthur and Admiral Hart from the Philippines, we had no spares so vitally needed to keep the planes repaired after combat. Hudson bombers for the Second American Volunteer Group were parked on Lockheed’s airport at Burbank, California. They were immediately taken over by the Air Corps, and we heard no more of them until they arrived in China for the Chinese Air Force in the late summer of 1942. A sizeable group of bomber crews already at sea on their way to Burma were diverted to Australia and inducted into the U.S. Army. First shipment of replacement fighter pilots met the same fate.

Events of December 7 and 8 made it clear that the fighter group was the only salvage from all the elaborate plans that had been so painstakingly woven in Washington. Had I known then that for over a year this fighter group would be the only effective Allied air force to oppose the Japanese on the Asiatic mainland I probably would not have entered the combat with such high hopes.

It was immediately evident that both ends of the Burma Road would have to be defended from heavy air assaults since the wrecking of Rangoon, the port of entry, and Kunming, the main division point in China, by air attack would offer a relatively cheap and effective means of tightening the Japanese fingers on China’s throat without draining the far-flung enemy offensives in the southern Pacific. Rangoon was the only funnel through which supplies could still come to China. Kunming was the vital valve in China that controlled distribution of supplies to the Chinese armies in the field.

From the beginning there was dissension among the new Allies. The Generalissimo offered the British six divisions of his best troops and all of his heavy motorized artillery for the defense of Burma. The British spurned the offer, and Chiang’s troops sat idle in Yunnan until March 1942 when the fall of Rangoon finally convinced the British they needed help. The British however showed no such reluctance over the American Volunteer Group of the Chinese Air Force. They pressed hard for transfer of the entire group to Rangoon to operate under R.A.F. command.

I opposed this transfer just as stubbornly as the British refused the help of Chinese ground troops. Early in the fall I conferred with Group Captain Manning over the aerial defense of Rangoon. He then had no warning net and only a single runway at Mingaladon, ten miles from Rangoon, on which to base his fighters. I suggested he build some dispersal fields to the west of Rangoon and fill in the gap between the new fields and the Thailand border with a network of air spotters’ posts linked by special telephone and radio. With those facilities our fighters would have been able to meet the enemy over Rangoon with plenty of warning and altitude and be securely protected on the ground at fields beyond the Japs’ range. I had learned early in this long game against the Japanese that it is suicide to fight air battles without adequate warning of the enemy’s attacks and a main base out of his range. Manning, however, regarded his single runway within Japanese range as adequate and placed a reliance on his combination of radar and long-distance phone that was never borne out by experience. Manning had also committed the R.A.F. under his command to combat tactics that I regarded as suicidal. By serving under his command, I would have lost my own authority over the group and forced my pilots to accept his stupid orders. All during the period we were negotiating for transfer of all or a part of the A.V.G. to Rangoon, Manning refused to allow me to enter his fighter-control room or become familiar with any of the facilities that we were supposed to use jointly in the air defense of Rangoon.

We finally worked out an agreement, satisfactory to both the Generalissimo and the British, whereby one squadron of the A.V.G. would assist the R.A.F. in the defense of Rangoon with the other two squadrons to be stationed at Kunming, the China end of the Burma Road, where we had adequate warning net and dispersal fields. The Rangoon squadron remained under my direct command subject-only to operational control by the senior R.A.F. officer in Burma. In this way the American pilots remained free to use their own tactics while coming under strategic direction of the R.A.F. Manning agreed to provide housing, transportation, food, and communications for the American squadron at Rangoon. This he failed to do.

The day after Pearl Harbor (December 9 by our calendar) we had half a dozen false alerts. With each new clang of the brass warning bell, Tom Trumble, my secretary, grabbed his rifle and tin hat and dashed for the slit trenches while I slung on my binoculars and trotted to the control tower. On December 10 Thailand “surrendered” to the Japanese, and enemy troops, ships, and planes poured into Bangkok to establish a base for the assault on Burma and Malaya. I sent Erik Shilling on a photo-reconnaissance mission over Bangkok in a special stripped-down P-40 equipped with an R.A.F. aerial camera. This improvised photo plane was about 18 miles per hour faster and could climb 3,000 feet higher than the average P-40, but it was completely outclassed by the speedy Japanese high-altitude photo planes that continued to do their work unmolested over Asia until the first Lockheed Lightnings (P-38) arrived in China in the summer of 1943. Escorted by Ed Rector of Marshal, North Carolina, and Bert Christman of Fort Collins, Colorado, in regular P-40s, Shilling photographed the docks and airfields of Bangkok from 26,000 feet.

When I saw his pictures, I exploded. Docks along the Menam River were jammed with enemy transports disgorging troops and supplies. Don Maung airdrome outside the city was packed with Japanese aircraft, parked wing tip to wing tip and awaiting dispersal to the chain of advanced bases closer to the Burma border. A dozen bombers could have wrecked the Japanese air offensive in twenty minutes.

This was but one of the many times during the war when a kingdom was lost for want of a few planes.

The Third A.V.G. Squadron commanded by Arvid Olson, of Hollywood, California, moved to Mingaladon airdrome on December 12 to join the R.A.F. in the defense of Rangoon. At Toungoo we encouraged every possible movement rumor about the rest of the group to confuse the Burmese spies while we tied up our loose ends preparatory to establishing a new base at Kunming. There were still twenty-five pilots not sufficiently trained to be turned loose in combat and a dozen P-40s under repair at Toungoo, but when the radio crackled from Kunming that the Japanese were bombing the city on December 18, it was apparent that the time to move had come.

The group was so organized that everything essential to immediate combat operations could be airborne. Permanent base personnel and supplies left Toungoo by truck convoy up the Burma Road. Three C.N.A.C. transports swooped down on Toungoo on the afternoon of the eighteenth and whisked me, my combat staff, and the oxygen, ammunition, and spare parts we needed for fighting to Kunming before dawn the next day.

The First and Second Squadrons flew from Toungoo to Kunming on the afternoon of the eighteenth with a refueling stop at Lashio. At Toungoo the First Squadron circled on patrol covering the Second Squadron’s take-off, and at Kunming the roles were reversed as the Second stayed in the air until the First Squadron had landed, refueled, and was ready for combat again at Kunming.

By dawn on the nineteenth we had thirty-four P-40s ready to fight at Kunming with a fighter-control headquarters hooked into the Yunnan warning net and the Chinese code rooms that were monitoring Japanese operational radio frequencies and decoding enemy messages. For the first time since mid-October I breathed easier.

It was this kind of lightning mobility that was necessary to realize the full potential of airpower. To achieve it meant that I would always have to operate on a skeletonized basis with airmen doubling in ground duties and a few key men doing the work of an entire staff. It meant that I could never afford the excess staff personnel required by more orthodox military organizations.

It was this ability to shift my combat operations six hundred and fifty miles in an afternoon and a thousand miles in twenty-four hours that kept the Japanese off balance for four bloody years and prevented them from landing a counterpunch with their numerically superior strength that might easily have put my always meager forces out of business.

We had little strain on our patience for the first pay-off on these tactics. December 19 passed quietly with three P-40 reconnaissance patrols over southern Yunnan but no sign of life from the enemy. At 9:45
A.M.
on the twentieth my special phone from the Chinese code room rang. It was Colonel Wong Shu Ming, commander of the Chinese Fifth Air Force and Chinese chief of staff for the A.V.G. His message said, “Ten Japanese bombers crossed the Yunnan border at Laokay heading northwest.”

From then on the battle unfolded over Yunnan as it had done a hundred times before in my head. Reports filtered in from the Yunnan net as the enemy bombers penetrated deeper into China.

“Heavy engine noise at station X-10.”

“Unknowns overhead at station P-8.”

“Noise of many above clouds at station C-23.”

Position reports recorded on our fighter-control board added up to a course designed to bring the enemy bombers to about fifty miles east of Kunming, from which point they would probably begin the circling and feinting tactics designed to confuse the warning net before their final dash to the target.

I ordered the Second Squadron to make the interception. Jack Newkirk, of Scarsdale, New York, led one four-plane element in search of the bombers while Jim Howard, of St. Louis, son of former medical missionaries in China, led another four-plane formation on defensive patrol above Kunming. Sixteen planes of the First Squadron commanded by Robert Sandell, of San Antonio, Texas, were held in reserve in the stand-by area west of Kunming, ready to join the fray at the decisive moment.

I fired a red flare sending the Second and First Squadrons into the air and drove with my executive officer, Harvey Greenlaw, and interpreter, Colonel Hsu, to the great timbered clay pyramid looming above the grassy mounds of a Chinese graveyard on a gentle slope over-looking the field. This was our combat-operations shelter with a duplicate set of radio and phone communications. Inside the dark, dank interior we studied the plotting board by the light of matches held by Greenlaw while Hsu took phone reports from the Chinese net. Outside, the winter air of the Kunming plateau was crisp and clear. Scattered puffball clouds floated lazily above the city at 10,000 feet. Weather reports to the south indicated a solid overcast brushing the mountain peaks.

This was the decisive moment I had been awaiting for more than four years – American pilots in American fighter planes aided by a Chinese ground warning net about to tackle a formation of the Imperial Japanese Air Force, which was then sweeping the Pacific skies victorious everywhere. I felt that the fate of China was riding in the P-40 cockpits through the wintery sky over Yunnan. I yearned heartily to be ten years younger and crouched in a cockpit instead of a dugout, tasting the stale rubber of an oxygen mask and peering ahead into limitless space through the cherry-red rings of a gunsight.

Suddenly voices broke through the crackling radio static.

“There they are.”

“No, no, they can’t be Japs.”

“Look at those red balls.”

“Let’s get ’em.”

Then maddening silence. I ordered Sandell’s reserve squadron to dive to Iliang about thirty miles southeast of Kunming along the Japs’ line of probable approach. There was nothing more on the radio. The Chinese net reported the bombers had reversed course and were heading back toward Indo-China. Sounds of gunfire were heard, and the heavy fall of Japanese bombs in the mountains near Iliang was reported. There was nothing to do but return to the field and wait.

Chinese were already streaming back to the city from their refuge among the grave mounds, incredulous that no bombs had fallen. Howard’s patrol over Kunming came down. They had seen nothing. Newkirk’s flight returned, sheepish and chagrined over a bad case of buck fever on their first contact with the enemy. They had sighted the Jap formation of ten gray twin-engined bombers about thirty miles southeast of Kunming, but for a few incredulous seconds could hardly believe the bombers were really Japs. The bombers jettisoned their bombs, put their noses down for speed, and wheeled back toward Indo-China. By the time Newkirk’s flight recovered and opened fire, the bombers had too big a lead – too big that is for everybody except Ed Rector. The last the other pilots saw of Rector he was still chasing the Japs at full throttle.

Finally Sandell’s squadron came straggling in. From the whistling of the wind in their open gun barrels and the slow rolls as they buzzed the field, we knew they had been in a fight. They had sighted the Jap formation in full retreat over Iliang about thirty miles southeast of Kunming, scuttling along on top of a solid overcast with Rector still in pursuit.

As the P-40s dived to attack, everybody went a little crazy with excitement. All the lessons of Toungoo were forgotten. There was no teamwork – only a wild mêlée in which all pilots agreed that only sheer luck kept P-40s from shooting each other. Pilots tried wild 90-degree deflection shots and other crazy tactics in the 130-mile running fight that followed. Fritz Wolf of Shawano, Wisconsin, shot down two bombers and then cursed his armorer because his guns jammed.