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Show '" irjZ7PAiti .,,,, porches to deliver Christmas packages, pack-ages, and maybe hear the real American voices of some real American Amer-ican girls in a Christmas choir singing sing-ing 'Holy Night' or '0 Little Town of Bethlehem' or some of the other old-time songs. "What we got instead was a lot of politicians doing their stuff on war aims. They were from all over the world, sounding off all over the dial, and we argued with those Australian Aus-tralian kids as to which ones were the corniest, theirs or ours. They insisted theirs were, but we couldn't agree, because ours were all stuffed full of roast goose, optimism, plum pudding, hard sauce, and production produc-tion figures. "But something was coming in over the CW radio (Continuou, K at e, or Dot-Dash) and the Australian with the earphones on, after writing lt down, instead of sending it in to his commanding officer gave me' a queer embarrassed look and handed it to me. And my heart thumped, because I thought it Just might possibly pos-sibly be from Margo, although I didn't see how it could be. "It was from Schaetzel. He'd waited until he flew out of the danger dan-ger zone before breaking radio silence. si-lence. He said he'd be in after dark with one body aboard and to have the ambulance on the stand-by at the field. That meant there were more wounded. It finished Christmas Christ-mas for us. We didn't say much, i "But as he talked we got curious. Just how big was this American Air Force of the Far East which the General commanded, and whose task it was to smash the Japanese in the Philippine Islands so they couldn't reach out to the Dutch East Indies? The 19th had started out as a Group, commanded by a coloneL Its strength was now practically one squadron, an adequate command for a major in peacetime. Just how many Groups would this two-star General have at his command for this four-star task ahead? "But there was big news for me. Ever since the loss of Old 99 I had been a planeless pilot a kind of ghost walking with the living, a head without a body. "But now Lee Coats was to go with the General to Brisbane as engineering en-gineering officer, and I was to take over his plane and crew for the Java war. Now at last was my chance to settle the score for Old 99." "From Australia to Java is a full day's work even for a Fortress," Frank went on, "but the weather was fine, and all of us were feeling great. The ocean was a deep blue, and we were constantly passing over islands, green with jungle growth, which are practically steppingstones connecting Asia with Australia. "The last one of all was maybe the most beautiful the famous island is-land of Bali, just before you get to Java and as I saw it coming ahead over the horizon, I couldn't help thinking about those pictures of it you used to see on the round-the-world cruise folders. Always on the cover was a color photograph of a beautiful golden-brown sixteen-year-old girl with a wicker basket on her head and a printed cotton sarong gathered low around her hips and nothing much in between except a completely unself-conscious smile. "I was feeling pretty good, and I guess the crew was too. You see, we'd been on the alert for six weeks and not so much as an hour's leave for them to go into any town for even a glass of beer. "Java in the late afternoon was as beautiful as anyone had ever promised prom-ised it would be rich green velvet, except where the sloping sun gleamed on the rice paddies, or burned the standing water gold against the soot-black mud. "We flew over the big seaport city of Surabaya and straight on toward to-ward the smaller city of Malang sixty-six miles away, which was to be our base. To get there you have to climb a little and then enter en-ter through a narrow mountain pass, which usually is filled with clouds in the afternoon, like a thick cotton stopper in a bottle. At least later it served to keep the Zeros out. "They'd told me the field was well THE STORY THUS FAR: Lieut. Col. Frank Kurtz, Flying Fortrtsi pilot, tcUi of that fatal day when the Japi itruek In the Philippine!. The ground It eov. ered with the ikeletoni of U. S. planet. No longer tafe to tleep In barrackt, be-eaute be-eaute Japs are photographing Clark Field, cott are moved Into eornfleld, which It later bombed by Jar. They evacuate to the Island of Mindanao. Har: ry Schrelber, the navigator, now taket up the ttory, telling how two Fortrejief out on a miislon to get a row of Jap transport! are attacked by a twarm of Zerot. They crash land In a rice paddy on Masbate Island, buy an outrigger canoe, ca-noe, tail to Isle of Panay and later gel to Australia. CHAPTER VII "Well, it was nice, for a few days, to be out of danger to start getting get-ting our dozen planes overhauled. "As quick as we could, we began flying missions. Each Fortress had brought out about' fifteen men from Del Monte, and they got to work putting the planes back into shape. But the missions were terribly long. It was seventeen hundred miles from Darwin back to Del Monte almost as far as from New York to Denver. We'd leave Darwin in the morning, fly all day, land at Del Monte after dark to be safe from the Japs, service serv-ice the plane, eat, catch a little nap, and then gas up in time to be off for an early morning bombing of the Jap invasion fleet off Luzon. Then back to Del Monte it was daylight now and risky as hell, so get in quick, gas up, load bombs, and get the hell out fast and away to an afternoon target, coming back toward Del Monte in the darkness, thank God, when no Jap pursuits are hanging around, arriving about midnight, a cat nap again, gas up, and you're off for Australia. "Think of the pilots and crews going through that grind day after day. You might fly eighteen hours straight and be out of the cockpit for only one of them. "And yet the thing we dreaded most was Christmas. It was right ahead of us now Christmas in defeat de-feat and on this barren, hot, dusty desert field, with no word or mail from home and no way to get word back to them. We'd send cables we knew would never be answered, because be-cause we could give no address." "I'll put my Christmas up against the one you had," said Frank, going on with his story. "We were all feeling feel-ing low. We knew there would be no, letters or packages or even cables ca-bles for us, so it was natural that on this hot, dry, dusty, sun-scorched Christmas Day some of us should wander over to the Australians' radio ra-dio shack, just to see what little word from home we could pick up on the air. "I should say that part of us were gone on a mission into the Philippines; two Forts, - including George Schaetzel, and they now should be on that dreary, nine-hour drag back to Batchelor Field. We hoped none of them would be shot down on Christmas Day. "The Australians were damned nice to us. They let us watch them open their packages and handed us their Christmas cards to read, and then they'd say, 'What part of the : States are you from, Yank?' so we could tell them about our own families fami-lies and wives or best girls if we wanted to and most of us did. But we kept wondering about that mission, mis-sion, although we didn't talk about it. And of course we didn't know they had run into serious trouble, hit by Zeros at high altitude, and that Schaetzel's plane during this Christmas Day fight had been given a burst of machine-gun fire right through his radio compartment. Sergeant Ser-geant Killian, his radio operator, was' shot through the top of the head as he was helping the gunners reloadpicking re-loadpicking up new ammunition cans full of .50-caliber b!ts and handing them up, and taking back the empty cans, while the gunners pounded away at the Zeros. "Two others had been badly wounded by the same burst, and I since this was at high altitude, it j was very serious. Because maybe i the boy topples over so that his I oxygen mask falls off. There isn't much you can do for a wounded i man durine combat at high altitude. camouflaged, but because they d laid it out for me carefully on the map I had no trouble in finding it. It was a better job of camouflaging than anything we'd ever dreamed of in the Philippines. Looking down on it from altitude, you took it to be just an ordinary tilled field. There was what looked like a cornfield almost across the runway, and in addition a fake railway line crossing cross-ing it. I even had difficulty in picking pick-ing out the hangar roofs, so carefully care-fully were they painted into the tropical vegetation. "We crossed it, turned, circled, and landed. The Dutch weren't even using their radio to bring us in for fear of giving away the location of that beautifully hidden field. They brought us in with a flash gun, and luckily I could show my new crew the precision-type landing required on that grass field which was later to prove tough as hell. We came In in the usual soft Javanese afternoon after-noon rainstorm, and of course I didn't dare apply brakes as you would on macadam. I was to find it was a tricky job getting off and on that slippery turf with a full load of bombs. And my heart thumped because I thought possibly it might be from Margo. and neither did the Australians. But pretty soon one by one we got up and wandered out of the hut. "When Schaetzel got in, his plane was so badly shot up that we decided de-cided to call it a wreck. It was a toss-up between his plane and Lee Coats', which was also full of bullet holes, buf looking them both over, we decided Schaetzel's was somewhat some-what the worse. We just had to have a wreck on the field to serve as a spare-parts reservoir to keep the other planes in the air. The old Swoose, here," and he jerked his thumb backward, "still has those tail surfaces we took off that plane. We needed everything, but most of all, we needed bomb-bay gas tanks. "Of course we were in terrible shape. The old 19th Bombardment Group had lost two-thirds of its original orig-inal strength in three weeks, and we were now reduced to about a dozen planes about enough for a decent de-cent squadron. But there was one hopeful fact: of the two dozen odd we had lost, only two Colin's and Jack Adams' had been shot down in combat by the Japanese. The rest had been blown up on the ground or, like Wheless' plane, had been wrecked on the beach to save the crew when it didn't have the "The boys were of course in a lather to get into town, but first there had to be the usual pilots' meeting, and it's always the same I don't care who the officer is, Captain, Cap-tain, Major, or Lieutenant Colonel, he's got to stand up there and dish out the old college pep talk about how we're here to do this and that while the boys are snorting to get into town. "Only this one wasn't so bad. Because Be-cause at last we were going to do what we had for years been trained to do with our Fortresses. When those reinforcements came streaming stream-ing in we could go out in big formations forma-tions and drop a pattern that meant something. "Later they were to find that Dutch dating wasn't as simple as it looked, because the first three or four times you had to take Mama and Papa along. "At the end of dinner, before they left, we'd all stood up and drunk just one New Year's toast to the memory of all those guys we'd known so well back in the islands who couldn't be with us now, and a score the Air Force had to settle set-tle in their behalf. Java seemed fat and lush and peaceful, but I knew just ahead of us was terribly hard work, long missions, hitting again and tsy if we were to hold the Japs back until those thousand American planes arrived." (TO BE CONTINUED) range to get home. "And just about the time we were adding up this score and wondering wonder-ing what would happen to us next we found out, for without warning General Gen-eral Brereton landed on the field, and we were immediately summoned sum-moned to a meeting in Operations. "He's a tough, quick, cocky, fighting fight-ing little Air Force officer who doesn't like to sit down when he's laying out plans or giving orders, and standing there before us, his shoulders reared back, he lined us out. "He told us the United States Army Air Force of the Far East, of which he was commander, was moving mov-ing all its bombers to Java, and at once. Its main base would be on a field near the city of Malang. From there we would operate out of advanced ad-vanced bases already prepared by the Dutch on the outlying islands of Borneo and the. Celebes. From these our first missions would all be concentrated on breaking up an immense concentrauon of Jap transports trans-ports which was gathering at Davao Bay, on the southern tip of the Philippines. ' when you have wounded men ! aboard, you try to get down to at ! least 10,000 feet as soon as you I 'can so they won't be under the j strain of breathing through oxygen ; 'masks. ! "But there were Zeros still be-' be-' low them. One of the Fort's prime defense weapons is altitude, and ' George knew if he broke away from 1 formation and dived down alone, he stood a very good chance of being picked off. I -so he did the right thing-stayed with the formation, only it was a hell of a hard decision to make on Christmas Day. with those poor wounded men in back, fighting for breath in the high air. "We knew nothing of this yet, but already we were feeling pretty low, iand the Australian radio operator iwas twiddling his dials trying to get "us a program from the States so we wouldn't be homesick. We hoped maybe we'd get just a homely description de-scription of what kind of a Christmas Christ-mas Day it was in a typical American Ameri-can town that might te any of ours and how the snow crunched under the feet of the people walking up on |
