Authors: Oliver L. North

War Stories II (28 page)

BOOK: War Stories II

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Today would be different. Chennault sent up one squadron over the airfield as bait and told the other to swing westâanticipating that when the Japanese pilots saw the “bait” P-40s they would drop their bombs in the jungle and run for home. He was planning an aerial ambushâand that's what he got. In the wild melee that followed, the Americans destroyed six of the bombers and sent the other four back to their base in Hanoi smoking and full of holes. Only one P-40 was damagedâwhen the pilot ran out of gas and had to put his fighter down in a rice paddy.

Chennault had left his third squadron in Rangoon, anticipating that the Japanese would be attacking there, too, since every other part of the Far East appeared to be under Japanese assault. The 3rd Squadron didn't have long to
wait. On 21 December, fifteen AVG P-40s, accompanied by eleven RAF Brewsters, ambushed a flight of fifty-four Japanese bombers, escorted by a dozen Nakajima I-97 fighters. Though the AVG lost two aircraft and a pilot, the RAF reported thirty-two confirmed wrecks of Japanese planes in the jungles and rice paddies around Rangoon. Chennault tallied the battles more conservatively and claimed Japanese losses as fourteen bombers and thirteen fighters against two AVG pilots lost, four planes destroyed, and seven damaged.

Over the course of the next month, the AVG continued to run up scores like this and better. By the end of January 1942, Chennault and his pilots were front-page news. And by February, stories about the Americans who flew planes with menacing sharks' teeth painted on their noses were describing the AVG as the Flying Tigers. Asked where the name came from, Chennault told a reporter, “It wasn't meâit was one of you guys.”

By March 1942, the AVG had racked up an extraordinary record. Chennault and his colorful aviators were destroying Japanese formations in every engagement. Though plagued with the familiar problems of insufficient spare parts and too few mechanics, Chennault had a better “up” record than any aviation unit in China, Burma, or India. And in a way, he became a victim of his own success. The Doolittle Raid was a case in point.

Flying Tiger P-40 fighter

When planning the raid, Doolittle assumed, incorrectly, that Washington would use Chennault's early warning network and his AVG resources to help recover any of his B-25 crews that went down in China. But because Chennault was not “officially” an American officer, in an excess of secrecy, Washington decided not to inform him of the raid. He was therefore unable to put any AVG people in position to help.

In spring 1942, the U.S.-British Joint Staff decided that China, Burma, and India (CBI) deserved to have their own “theater of war.” And in the new CBI theater, there was no need for a group of cocky, mercenary pilots fighting their own war against the Japanese.

On 25 April 1942, Chennault was informed that effective 4 July, the AVG would be dissolved and reconstituted as the 23rd Pursuit Group, U.S. Army Air Corps, reporting to the 14th Air Force in India. Any Navy or Marine pilots who wished to return to their services could do so and all others would be accepted into the U.S. Army Air Corpsâor returned to the United States as civilians.

Neither the Japanese nor the weather cared what the men of the AVG called themselves. As the pilots and mechanics were deciding what they wanted to do, the Japanese ground offensive continued unabated. In May, the monsoon began, turning the ground into a quagmire and filling the air with dense clouds that made the hazardous flying even more dangerous.

By the time Lieutenant General Joseph (“Vinegar Joe”) Stilwell arrived to assume responsibilities as the senior American officer in the CBI theater, seventy of Chennault's men had decided to stay with him and fight on against the Japanese as members of the U.S. Army Air Corps.

Chennault's pilots liked to say, “We lived like dogs and flew like fiends.” It wasn't a boastâit was true. They shot down more than 200 enemy planes while losing only six of their own aircraft.

But it wasn't enough. Tojo's infantry in Burma was far more effective than anything the Allies could cobble together on the ground. Three months after invading Burma, the Japanese captured Rangoon and drove General Stilwell's Anglo-American troops back into India. It was a terrible defeat. Stilwell summed it up: “We got a hell of a beating. We got run out of Burma and it is as humiliating as hell. I think we ought to find out what caused it, go back, and retake the place.”

After Burma fell on 11 May 1942, every bean and bullet needed to fight the Japanese in China had to be flown over the most inhospitable terrain in the world, the Himalayas. Chennault's pilots called it “flying over the hump,” and crammed C-46 transports and B-25 Mitchell bombers with up to four tons of supplies for the 525-mile trip across the roof of the world. Flying in terrible weather at very high altitudes, without rescue beacons, communications, or decent charts, they were at the mercy of treacherous updrafts and downdrafts, blinding blizzards and intense monsoon storms.
A sign on the hangar at the Kunming air base said it all when the pilots got back: “You made it again.”

The flight was so perilous that they nicknamed it the “aluminum trail,” because the ground below was littered with the remains of 1,000 men and some 600 planesâmany more were lost to the unforgiving weather than to the Japanese. One of those who made it over the hump to fly with Chennault was John Alisonâthe pilot who had demonstrated the P-40 at Bolling Field for the Chinese officials in late 1940.

FIRST LIEUTENANT JOHN ALISON, USAAF
23rd Pursuit Group
Kunming, China
July 1942

After Pearl Harbor and America's entrance into World War II, I sat down and wrote a letter to General Arnold that simply said, “Dear Chief, Please send me to a combat assignment.”

And I got this wire, just one line: “Report to China.” We flew across India and landed at Dinjan, which was the Indian terminus, for the flight over the “hump” to China. Our airplanes were so old and decrepit I couldn't get enough altitude to clear the clouds and the first mountain range. So I called the squadron commander and said, “Look, I can't keep up. I'll find a way and meet you in Kunming, China.” I flew south until I found a break between two big thunderheads, and I got over the first mountain range and headed for China.

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 cockpitâI 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.