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Show the darkness, and pray the leak didn't get worse or a hot exhaust stack didn't set it off in mid-air. We chanced it, and made it all right, but it turned out to be my last trip, because the next day the Japs came back and put out of commission com-mission what was left of Clark Field. "I got the story from Eddie Oliver, who had been my navigator on Old 99 he and I were the only survivors of the entire crew when he got down to Del Monte a few days later. "The Japs, having reccoed Clark Field thoroughly, came over all ready for business. Some guy had carelessly left a pillow exposed in the cornfield, so they knew we'd been sleeping there. They blew hell out of it with their high-altitude stuff, and didn't touch the regular flying field, which they'd put out in the first day's raid. Then their fighters fight-ers came over and with incendiaries set fire to the nipa shacks which had been our quarters. In them was everything I owned, including the watches, diaries, and wallets which had belonged to the crew of Old 99. "It was now hopeless to operate from Clark, everyone saw. Anyway, Any-way, the Japs had landed light tanks on the coast at Apari, so five hundred hun-dred rifles were issued to what ground personnel we had left there and they went off with infantry units to chase them out if they could. The poor devils ended up on Bataan. "So here we were now at Del Monte, about fifteen Fortresses in all, but patched up and in such bad rjggU I couldn't tell him I was worried, because that would be letting him down. He would think I didn't have complete confidence in him. I would start to write the little news about family affairs, and it seemed so trite because maybe he'd be reading read-ing it in a foxhole, not having eaten for a week. Maybe he'd be wounded. wound-ed. And maybe each one would be the last letter he would get for a long while the only thing he'd hear from me. "Then I had to do something about myself-l could see that. Sitting in my room thinking, I would go to Pieces. And I wanted to get started doing something useful before Christmas. Christ-mas. Back in October Frank promised prom-ised me he'd call on Christmas Day, and now I realized I'd been building on hearing his voice then more than I knew. I also realized that maybe he wouldn't be able to. If that call didn't come through, it would be hard for me to take. "My little brother (he's a fighter pilot now) was getting married out on the Coast during the holidays. They were asking me to go out. But suppose Frank did call me Christmas, Christ-mas, and missed me? I decided to wait in Omaha for that call. "But Just waiting would drive anyone any-one crazy. I wanted to help to get close to the Air Corps. So I went down to Colonel Houghland's office he was air officer of our 7th Corps area in Omaha and put it up to him. "He didn't laugh because I wanted to work without pay he couldn't have been nicer. He showed me huge piles of applications for aviation-cadet assignments in the Air Corps that were coming in. I could help, he explained, by classifying and filing these, getting them in their proper groups, help speed up the stream of reinforcements which the boys out East would need so badly we didn't dream how badly." "We needed everything," said Frank. "Ground crews, pilots, copilots. co-pilots. And to make it worse, our own group commander, Colonel Eubank, Eu-bank, had been hurt and was in a Manila hospital. "We were getting more and more uneasy. Here we were, comfortable comforta-ble on this beautiful field. It was as peaceful as Clark Field had been before December eighth. We'd fled from Clark down here to Mindanao, and even as we were arriving the Japs were putting troops ashore at the southern tip of this same island, where thirty thousand Japanese "farmers" had taken over the city of Davao on the first day. "But here at Del Monte we saw people who didn't seem to know a war was on. The only military around was some kind of a transportation trans-portation outfit. The first day we were there I got hold of a couple of privates and gave them orders to dim out the headlights of every car no matter whose that approached ap-proached the field. But the transportation trans-portation officer decided he'd stop all that. It seemed the boys, carrying carry-ing out my orders, had even stopped a staff car, and the transportation officer explained that they needed more light. "Well, our planes were on that field, and I knew the Japs were headed down the coast and would be here soon enough anyway, and I didn't want to attract them any sooner than necessary. "But before they, did come, the old 19th Bombardment Group or what was left of it got in some mighty hard licks at them. For instance, in-stance, there was the Le Gaspi Bay mission. Our Intelligence reported a big concentration of Jap ships moving south toward us down the coast of Luzon. Of course that meant the handwriting on the wall for us, particularly if one was a carrier with Zeros which would presently be in range of us and could strafe us on the ground remember we hadn't a single American fighter within five hundred miles. "Sure enough, Intelligence presently pres-ently reported that they thought one of this concentration was a carrier, and now they were Just off Le Gas-pi. Gas-pi. It was up to us to take off and do what we could. We'd been working work-ing like hell to get the planes in shape, and finally had six which we thought could complete the mission and get home. But remember Old 99 was back on Clark, and I was a planeless pilot. So it ought to be Harry's story he was navigator on Jack Adams' plane." JL? THIS FAB: Lieut. Col. pilot of th. Flying. Fortress ft,,, swoose," which escaped I Field tells ol that fatal 1 n, .truck In the Philippines. Jher Fortress, Is "truck down f with the skeleton, of U. 8. i , Wasner, air ace. U chased i n, P -40. He meet. IJeut. '! sod together they bomb a ikburch fail, to return. Other fj?v U.eir targets, Includ.n, 2 Kelly'. Plane settles for a Ihip, but the plane 1. ablaze, jit. Kelly bale, out but 1. .0 , me iround h. never had a CHAPTER V fl ,rse when I heard all this ,rd about the whopping big V'd hit and sunk. But I ilt much of this at the time, t think Colin did either. 1 ,ow the boy, and I think I he saw his oxygen system re, and had given orders her guys to Jump, and was ere hanging back on his fighting his rudder in order . iem a chance to do it, he linking about how many s that Japanese ship dls-iut dls-iut about his parents and I j nd little Corkie. And later lefwas trying to crawl out of -f escape hatch before his i aught on fire, it was the still later, when he cleared -j but saw the ground coming : i, too close and too fast for i ever to have a chance to 0 en, I don't think he was r.j about how big' his post-! post-! nedal was going to be, but ; tying about Marian and ; e later in the afternoon one t jhters came in and began 1 the field, fluttering like a bird. I could see it was g serious guessed even ileron might be shot away, i e him the green light to 'j and land. He began to i ises at the field, cutting his to pick out the strip of ' and through the bomb cra-ked cra-ked by a maze of red flags up. But each time he'd jack his left wing would he'd have to gun her again, , a slow climbing circle up I ld. :an to get me. 'Come on, e on, put it down, before to trouble.' On the last trial i it, came around, and then till up straight, but too late. : down the field, he caught on one of our slightly 'i Fortresses, tearing it off, himself cartwheeled off into -killing a sergeant who had iing on a plane back there, wasn't hurt much himself, ) more of our precious few ' is gone. ollowing orders, I was still ! e Fortresses the red light n the air, and I began to i iout this. Maybe orders ' i issued to bring them in, ?one had failed to notify ie of them would circle for and then would head on Del Monte, more than six miles away, while they still Sh gas to get there, y old Jim Connally said 1 with it, and came on in t ny giving him any light at ' needed more gas to get tindanao and couldn't perch all day, and a little after olonel said I could give the e green light to come in JP, although any hour, any e were expecting the Japs ! wanted to save those re-Forts re-Forts at any cost, it out of bed just as dawn sing and, folding our sheets t brown blankets so no aid show, stuffed them unpaid un-paid cots we didn't want that would indicate on a Picture that we were now n that field. The Japs were the hell out of the place '-altitude cameras, two or es daily. t the next day in the tower a much like the first, ex-as ex-as plainer and plainer that J have to abandon Clark, next morning the evacu-an. evacu-an. They gave me one of P they had patched up, and Fr and I made two trips I forth to Del Monte loaded n members of the ground fowere to service our planes He wasn't thinking about how many gross tons that Jap ship displaced. dis-placed. repair we were lucky if we could get half a dozen off the ground at any one time. "But otherwise it was a lovely setup. A pretty turf field right up against the big pineapple cannery the executives had used it for their little private planes before the war. A country club these executives had built, swell food (until we ate it all up), a swimming pool, turf tennis courts even a few white women, which set all the boys staring but not an antiaircraft gun or a fighter plane to protect us for hundreds of miles, around. "Pretty soon we improvised our own ack-ack. A couple of ships cracked up, and we jerked their ,50-caliber guns out of them and installed them in sandbag pits; this would be of some help against low-altitude low-altitude strafing if the Japs were accommodating enough to come in low. "And one of the first things that happened was that we lost our squadron commander, Major Gibbs. He had taken off under cover of darkness dark-ness on a secret mission and did not come back. We never knew what happened. Weeks later the native constabulary of Negros Island was to bring in the cushion of his plane it had cracked up against a mountain in the dark." "But, sweetheart," said Margo, "you're forgetting your first cable." "No, I'm not," said Frank. "I got it off as soon as I could. "All it said," Margo explained, "was: " 'Beloved Doing all right under circumstances Wire Eddy's brother. broth-er. Frank.' "Of course I sent the wire, but I couldn't understand at all. Eddie, of course, was Frank's navigator on Old 99 But what about the other boys' Why hadn't Frank told me to wire their families of all the sergeants. It wasn't like Frank to forget. "Anyway, all cables are unsatisfactory. unsatis-factory. This one was dated at Manila Ma-nila on the seventeenth, so of course Frank had been alive then. But x hadn't got it until the nineteenth Anything could have happened. " those two days, and for the first time in my life I was Peerless to help him. I'd been furious y writing writ-ing letters-still addressing them to Clark Field. Each was a problem, because I wanted each to fill a need. "Well," said Harry Schrieber, the navigator, "it was like this. The six of us were to start at ten o'clock, and Jim Connally rolled out first, and got a fiat tire right on the runwaythrowing run-waythrowing one wing into the ground and crumpling it. That left five, and it wasn't so good, because there is safety in numbers in Fortressesthe For-tressesthe more of them that go over a target together, the more fire power you can bring to bear against the Zeros, and the more Forts will get back home. "But anyway we started. The pilots pi-lots were Shorty Wheless. Pease, Lee Coats, Vandevanter, and of course jack Adams I was his navigator. "We are flying in formation to our agreed rendezvous, in case we eot lost in heavy v.eth.er-a point thirty-five miles due west of our tar-eet-and we are due to be there In tw0 hours and fifteen minutes after our start JTO BE CONTINUED) ever forget my last trip at night of course it ale to leave a plane on J" by day at Clark any ie were taking off at three 'n'ng m order to be through zone by dawn, and I'd st no sleep at all. But y were warming the mo-me mo-me ninning to me with 'hat there was a pretty my fuel lille. So what ; do? I could wait while '-a a fuel line from one of recked Forts standing n "e field, and installed it ut by then it would be dawi. and if we encoun-f encoun-f fighters, there I'd be. ,"ts stuffed into every LT Plane' 50 tha we nve room to swivel a ma- a our own defense. BW tape up our leaky "e heU out of there In |