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Show i .white yr.j:.?vttB WUI.mTll, screw to lighten it and then, turn-tog turn-tog the motors on full blast, had made a Jump take-off from that little lit-tle strip. He grabbed a sandwich and went on in to Malang. "The air-raid alarm in Surabaya was now going of! regularly, sometimes some-times three times a day, because the Java Sea was stiffer than an old sock with Jap carriers. Colonel Eubank Eu-bank was now faced with a real problem. The three main bases for our Forts were at Malang, Madiun and another town which was spelled Jokyakarta, but the American boys couldn't chew this one, so they all gave it up and everybody Just called it Jockstrap. "The Dutch had no system to detect de-tect planes coming in from over the sea. Their only warning system was a tiny island about seventy-five miles out. It had a radio, so Surabaya Sura-baya got fifteen minutes' notice and Malang about thirty. "So what was the Colonel to do? Our P-40's were badly overworked, so when the alarm sounded, if the Forts took to the air the Zeros might shoot them down, while if they stayed on the ground, the Jap bombers bomb-ers might blow them up. Never were we able to keep more than twelve planes in the air, even Including reinforcements, re-inforcements, for we were losing them about as fast as they were coming in, and a number were always al-ways under repair and therefore un-flyable. un-flyable. "Also we had some bad breaks in luck. One afternoon Lieutenant Ray Cox had his plane up on a h!gh-alti- 1 It was darker than the inside of a black cow. but every now and then lightning would rip everything wide open-the whole cloud around us would flame up, and you could see to read fine print in the cabin. We were like a bug in a neon tube. en blaness would close in. and it would be a long time before your eyes could make out the little blue-Pink blue-Pink exhaust flame of the plane next to you. "After about an hour we had Plowed through toe storm, and were ymg above scattered moon-flecked overcast down below us at about 4,000. "At 10:30 we were over the target, and we glided down to 3,000 feet to see what was going on. Through the hunks of clouds we could see the gun flashes of Jap warships lobbing lob-bing shells into that poor old town. Then we would see the flash when the shells exploded. They had fires already going in several places, and of course the town had absolutely nothing to hit back with. "But clouds protected the Jap fleet, so we couldn't make a run on Just where we guessed those gun flashes were the thickest. Bombs were scarce. Orders had been if we didn't find a good target, to bring them home, so we did. We had no flares aboard to light up that harbor, har-bor, or any installation for dropping them. The old Forts were never cut out for nightwork, but of course In a war you sometimes get into cracks where you use whatever you've got to do what must be done. L THIS FAB: Lieut Col. 'TZtZt lor setter, -a o Fortresses, was ' . round. After escap- l -"at " ,e" ' f Java, where they (O on K. ine Foru :re iT JP wrrlers when they L J "" who fly w,th u twy ,he lored 'm Foru and three cBAPTEB XV ILat chute cracked open, 1-ched him out of the har-iSrst har-iSrst and as the chute bil-Liy bil-Liy back of the plane's L him dropping down with 1 imoking, getting littler , I Oh, Heaven! I couldn't gnore. fane was settling faster, Lpening curve now. be-fi$ be-fi$ all over. So we who i Fortress die in battle L how they do it. They fe men who fly them and em would want them to I die like the great Sky jey are. And Queens die Jen I heard our pilot Cap-fer Cap-fer over the interphones, , I Worley, our bombardier, I opened the bomb-bay jj for the bombardier to ind salvo all the bombs as tanks carried there. Sim Worley is about to jjjust then he sees a Zero light in on us, head-on fun there in the nose Is be who can handle this he's got to stay on it, ts her one burst and then jalvo his bombs and gas there's a crashing sound, ontrols don't work. He ilize a bullet has wrecked s-doesn't know what has !1 of a sudden Bang! ell of an explosion inside and dust, and the stink . After seeing what had ened to the other two i thought it could mean i :ag. We must be on fire! I on, ask me about that :ke. f.nehow there were no I we kept on pounding le Zeros swarming around the only thing to do. What jfr.ed was that a bullet had Jfcto our compressed-oxy- and also cut a gasoline ,so that gas was spurting jhe cabin, but we didn't en. Finally the tail gun- gas streaming along the i.v past him to trickle off I the tail, guessed what fed, and called out to the over the interphones for I not to smoke. With that with pure oxygen and tees, it would have been W ml "We hated it, leaving that poor old town burning while the Japs sat out there and tossed shells into her, without giving it even a little help-but help-but it had to be. "On our return we found that storm had moved on down Java and was squatting right on Malang Field. The turf was soaked into apple ap-ple jelly, and our pilot did a wonderful wonder-ful job on the landing. We were worried, because we knew that a single pound weight on the brakes would start our twenty-five tons sliding slid-ing over that slippery field like it was the frozen surface of a pond. So to keep from piling up In a crash at the end of the runway (remember, (remem-ber, we had all our bombs aboard and couldn't dump them because they were precious), our pilot ground-looped her, so she would start sliding sideways in that muck. Skidding along, he waited until she had revolved in a 180-degree turn and was sliding backward. Of course she would then have crashed tail-first tail-first into the end of the field and blown up all of us, but he was able to stop her by gunning the motors. Even if the wheels couldn't bite into that slippery ground, the propellers could bite the air. It was neat. "Another gripe we had on Malang Field was the food. The mess was in charge of the Dutch, They served only one hot meal a day, and this was always at noon usually hot soup with boiled beef and potatoes. But I only got to eat this hot noon meal three times I was always out on missions, which should give some idea hnw husv we were. I Don't forget to ask me I railroad spike. je got back to our field Ming about it, someone I tail gunner if he wasn't ! right after watching two go down in flames, urst our oxygen system bang. 'No,' he said, 3't time to be scared, pone had pushed a rail-1 rail-1 into my mouth, I would f e head of it off, clean and f Wing Fortress was de-I de-I lie high skies, and if er in her groove, for her I the safest plane in the r her enemies the most e 'ound this out not from i hut we learned it that (oat, which is learning it ay. And we hoped it J too long for this les-cate les-cate upstairs." home," said Frank reeof the remaining Forts y afternoon rainstorm. m ceiling were zero, and rfy flew around the is-pra, is-pra, off the coast of Vs for a Place to land. We saw him dropping down with his clothes smoking, getting littler and littler. tude test giving the superchargers a workover. With him in the cockpit cock-pit was Johnny Hughes, who had been checked off as a first pilot just after we arrived in Java. They finished the test, and at two o'clock were spiraling down when Zeros came over to strafe the field below. These strafing Zeros also had a top cover of Zeros hanging up at 18,000 feet, in case our P-40's might come in to break up their ground party. "Well, when the strafing began, our boys in the control tower remembered re-membered that Ray was up, and they tried to tell him by radio to fly south over the sea for an hour, until the Zeros were gone that was our usual procedure. "But Ray and Johnny, alone in this plane, probably intent on their test, must have had their headphones off. Anyway they couldn't be reached, although the boys on the ground tried frantically to let them know what they were coming down into. Finally they saw three Zeros hit them at 15,000 feet. Ray imme-riiatelv imme-riiatelv turned out to sea, while John- "They had baskets of food for us to take up in the plane pineapples, tropical fruit, and then sandwiches which were either a slab of cheese, or else raw bacon, in between two thick hunks of bread. We found this heavy stuff made gas in your intestines intes-tines and just as you got to high altitude al-titude going over the target, this gas swelled up, giving you the gripes. So we'd eat the fruit and throw the sandwiches away. "Also Malay cooks don't know hot food the breakfast soft-boiled eggs were always hard, and they'd bring out a No.. 10 can of jam for a hundred hun-dred and fifty men. What with getting get-ting two or three hours' sleep a night, we all lost weight two of us lost nineteen pounds and Charlie lost twenty-three, and it wasn't scared off us, either. "We all felt that with a decent meal we could do a lot more. So as much as we needed sleep, at eight or nine o'clock at night we'd take the Dutch bus into town to a restaurant owned by a Javanese, which had a Dutch waitress who spoke English, just to buy us a thick, rare steak. Americans have got to have red meat to fight on. Give almost gone they de- them. Luckily no but two of the three My washed out on the ' Ks-they Eet fire to the ' Japs couldn't find about the planes. But ,'r Crimmons did a . of setting his plane 8 ach in the rain. He lo"king at his then squared away ; her jn-she held firm, 'I'We. I had the har- Ct !king bar8e. With wn engineers, on its L wybreak. They were , 6 f ub''e with the na--they wens warned tellutists. our V at them a password . taught them to use if ? wn: 'Kancha Kom- 'Our Army.' they a full day-shoring 'd.ng a base of rj4 U.ndf it. clearing a ft" "instorm. in ! Maiy ?ni0 Surabaya 'SSiT he'd striPed 'wythmg he could un- 1 I ny probably did what he could on the guns. But one gunner can't cover every side at once, and they didn't stand a chance against three Zeros. Next day the plane was found shot down and burned about twenty miles from Malang Field." "Shortly after that," said Boone, the gunner, "we had a tough little mission a night flight to bomb a Jap task force which was attacking one of the islands down toward Australia. Aus-tralia. I forget which one it was if I ever knew that was the navigator's naviga-tor's business. Six of us took off from Malang, but before we started for the target, we had to fly over to Jockstrap and load up with Dutch bombs they were running low at Malang, and the Dutch at Jockstrap had plenty. Then we took off at eight o'clock at night in some of the dirtiest weather I ever hope to fly. In that country a storm at night is so black it's like going into the closet under the stairs where all the old overshoes are, and pulling pull-ing the door shut For our rendezvous rendez-vous we turned on the wing lights. But even with them it took us forty-five forty-five minutes to assemble. Then we went up to 18.000 trying to climb out, but we were still in that storm. inem mat oiiu w.w sleep when they can. "We finally took over the mess, but that didn't help much, because by then the field was being bombed regularly. The mess sergeant had his kitchen blown up three times in a single day, and this didn't improve the flavor of things. But the worst thing was, he'd got hold of three truckloads of Reigel pale beer, and had the cases neatly stacked when a Jap bomb scored a direct hit, leaving leav-ing not more than three dozen bottles. bot-tles. I never saw men any madder than we were when we came out of our foxholes and word went around they had blown up our beer." "They'd moved us over to Madiun Madi-un Field," said the Bombardier, "and we had your troubles and some more besides. WTien we first arrived ar-rived there were no P-40's or antiaircraft anti-aircraft guns for miles to keep the Zeros up. But we did have three D-model Fortresses out of commission commis-sion we were using for spare parts. So Lieutenant McGee dismounted their guns, and Master Sergeant Sil-va Sil-va and I decided to mount them in holes around the airfield. At least these would keep off strafers. (TO BE CONTINUED) |