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Show S (BdMD) IS MY 08k Mj, CdD-PHL'OT Wl 3 Cot. Robert L.Scott W.N.U. RELEASE. WA. Tht story thus far: After ( raduatint, from West Point as a second lieutenant, Robert Scott wins his tries at KeUy Field, Texas, and takes op pursuit flylnr. When the war breaks out he It an Instructor In-structor In California and told he Is too old for combat flylnc. lie appeals to several Generals for a chance to fly a combat plane and Anally gets a break. Be flies a bomber to India, where he becomes a ferry pilot, but this does not appeal to him. After vlsltln- Gen. Chen, nault be lets a Klttyhawk to fly and soon becomes "one man air force" ever Burma. Later he Is made com. mandinr officer of the 23rd Fighter Croup. He tells about his friend, MaJ. "Tex" Hill, to whom be owes his life. . CHAPTER XVIII So Johnny glided to the field with his missing engine, and then we heard him say that he couldn't make the field and was going to sit down In the river. The moon made it fairly bright, but even at that I knew that Johnny had to be mighty good and very lucky. Then I wondered whether or not he was wounded. Silhouetted against the light from the three bombers he had shot down, his fighter looked awfully low. He skimmed over the Chinese Junks on the river, and I saw the splash as the P-40, with its wheels up, hit the Siang Kiang. Down on the ground they heard bis engine give one more dying gasp, as with a surge of power probably from full gun and a prop In low pitch it lifted him over the last of the masts of the junks and let him level off to skid across the surface of the river. We came in and landed now, for the ground crew had gotten the smudge-pot boundary lights set out to mark the runway as well as the bomb craters. We gathered together togeth-er fast with the boys who had stayed on the ground, and talked about the great battle. I remember Tex Hill shaking his head and saying, "I'm afraid Johnny didn't make it. Doggone, Dog-gone, he was a good boy." Wt all felt a sinking in our hearts. We waited and we kind of prayed too. I sent Captain Wang, our salvage man, out to see if he could get any news of Major Alison. We made our reports out and kept waiting on the alert Just when we had really given up hope, we heard the sound of sharp explosions. All of us ran out of the alert shack, to see the strangest sight that we ever saw, even in China. A procession had entered the field. The Chinese sentry had passed the crowd of people and was himself holding his thumb In the air calling "Ding-hao ding-hao." In the midst of the procession and surrounded by children shooting Chinese firecrackers firecrack-ers in celebration, was a sedan chair carried on the backs of the villager! of Hengyang. And Johnny Alison was in the sedan chair smiling. Johnny Alison had a couple of burns on hit hands and legs where some bits of the Japs' explosive bullets bul-lets had hit him. He'd been slightly cut on the forehead when, on landing land-ing in the river, his head had hit the heavy metal of the gun-sight. But the scar that would leave would be a common one after the war, for every fighter pilot flies along with his head Just inches behind that hunk of steel that contains the lights and prisms of the modern gun-sights. gun-sights. Just the slightest accident and it is out there to split your head. I asked Johnny why in hell he went so close to the bomber formation, forma-tion, and he grinned and said, "I was scared I'd miss one of them." Our salvage crew worked and worked at the Job of raising the P-40 from the bottom of the Siang Kiang. But with the fourteen-foot depth and the swift current, they had more than modern engineering with the limitations of our floating equipment could accomplish. Under Captain Wang Chinese-American and in our Army they floated barges out to the spot and tried to tow it ashore with lines. Then they lowered steel drums, tied them to the ship, tried to pump the water from the submerged sub-merged drums and thus float the P-40 but everything failed. During all the work of the Americans Amer-icans with windlass and block-and-tackle, the Chinese villagers, who had offered their services long before be-fore smiled and stood by. We asked ourselves: What in hell could the Chinese coolies and rivermcn do if we, with our general knowledge and advanced civilization, couldn't raise the ship? We went on and failed for thrte days, and then to the persistent per-sistent Chinese we said, "Okay, go ahead." We watched them float raft after raft of long thick bamboo poles to the buoy that now marked the spot where Johnny's fighter had sunk. Mentally we set down the raising of the ship as Impossible and got ready to mark it off the list But the Chinese went on cheerfully with their work. I saw them pull them eves down Into the river with rcpes tied to the fighter, taking with them an eighteen-foot length of bamboo. bam-boo. They would slide this under ; the wing of the ship and lash it Into place with grass rope. Hundreds of times they did this, until a perfect mat of bamboo was under the entire 1 wing of the little P-40. Then they lashed the mat to the fuselage and started another row under the wing. , Through It all we smiled at the wasU ed effort and I heard men say, "Oh well, there are lots of Chinese anyway. any-way. Let them work." But toward the second day's close, I began to wonder, and that evening as darkness settled over the river I went out to watch their tireless tire-less labor. Suddenly there was a movement among the rivermen to tighten the four cables that tied the fighter to the barge, and I saw the canopy and the prop of Johnny's fighter ship rise above the surface of the river. Involuntarily I cheered, and I felt a lump in my throat as if I had swallowed something; as I tried to talk to the officer with me I felt my lip tremble with emotion. emo-tion. But the Chinese never cheered or got excited; they remained as stoical aa ever. They seemed to know that they were going to be successful, suc-cessful, and had merely been waiting wait-ing for the crazy Americans to quit playing around with all the strange gadgets. They had floated the 9100 pounds of P-40, and now they towed it to shore. Our salvage crew put the wheels down in the water, and with the aid of about a hundred coolies the ship was pulled up the river bank and then out to the field. We counted eleven bullet holes through the engine and in the cockpit. Next day the ground crews began the work of repair. Days had to pass before an engine from another damaged dam-aged fighter could be installed, and more time had to go by before we got it completely worked over. But in the end it flew again in combat com-bat against the Japanese thanks to labor of good mechanics, and the the bravery of a gallant officer, the unswerving patience and devotion of those brave Chinese coolies and rivermen riv-ermen who had never heard of the word "Impossible." When I first went to China I think I Imagined in my short stay that I would gradually change the simple Chinese. I used to rant and rave about this and that nd try to show "My armament sergeant and the crew chief of the fighter." the houseboys better and more efficient ef-ficient ways to do things. But they never changed, and finally I realized real-ized that they were changing me. Now in raising this ship they had used a method three thousand years old. I have read since how they had employed it in Burma, long years before, when the great temple bell weighing over thirty tons was thrown into the deep lake to save it from the heathen. When the heathen heath-en had occupied the land and had himself been beaten in due time, probably by the country and by time itself, they had come back to the lake, these Chinese, and with bam-boo bam-boo poles had raised the thirty tons of metal. During my stay in China I have watched the Chinese being bombed, and have seen them go out and pick their dead from among the ruins of their cities. Then wait bravely for the Jap to come again, while they went on scratching out a road with their bare hands, stoically working and watching tor material to come over that road with which to fight the enemy. Waiting patiently, as though they knew that some day they would have a chance to fight the Japanese who have tried to exterminate ex-terminate them. Even with the small fighter and bomber force that we now had in China, the people had taken a new lease on life. Every time we had an air battle over Hengyang they would capture another town along the Yangtse or near the lakes around Nanchang. I think we realized then, as General Chcnnault had realized for a long time, that all these people needed was a chance, with air support sup-port for their ground armies and modern equipment for their soldiers. Our small force had put new life into them. They had plaques embroidered em-broidered In commemoration of the battles that we fought. These would sometimes represent the American eagle holding the flags of America, Britain, Russia, and China. In Chi ncse characters would be a poetic account of the battle that the pilot or the squadron had fought. As we drove along the roads In our Jeeps to the field for the alert of the "Jin-bao," "Jin-bao," the little children would hold their thumbs up and call again and again, "Ding-hao." More and more we asked ourselves, our-selves, "What couldn't we do with plenty of equipment for the Chinese ground armies, and us over their heads with adequate air support?" Would the dsy ever come when we could make an attack with a fore that was a credit to the greatest country in the world? Towards the middle of August, as our pilots died in the old ships that we had, we had begun to doubt it For no. we didn't win all the time. Sometimes we lost, even when we traded one for ten. We lost because the Jap could replace his lost planes; we could not It was more than losing ships sometimes our pilots pi-lots died in the unequal battles. One day in August Johnny Alison was leading six P-40's to intercept a larger number of Japanese coming com-ing in against Hengyang from both Hankow and Canton. When interception inter-ception was made, the Japs had fifty-three planes. They were in three waves, so of course Johnny didn't get them all together and let them take shots at his little force. He circled in the sun, waiting for the opportunity to strike, and get away with all his ships. Then it came. He dove through nine of them, and his six planes shot down four of the enemy. In his second attack, after diving away and climbing climb-ing back into the sun, he sent four of his six down against them and then came on with the other two, just in case the enemy should follow the small attacking force out of the familiar "circling movement" that the Jap with his ever superior numbers num-bers always went into. The little force of fighters knocked down another Zero. But one of the P-40's was In trouble. Johnny said later that he had seen the enemy shipi following the Forty, but thought the closest one was another P-40. Too late he realized the error and went to help the pilot whom he knew by then to be a boy named Lee Minor. The Zero rode the American fighter's tail and shot it down with cannon, and the P-40 burned. Johnny watched for a chute to open, but nothing happened. As we drove out along the highway high-way that afternoon Baumler and Alison, Jack Belden of Life magazine maga-zine and I we were hoping by some fluke that Minor had balled out and that Johnny had failed to see him do it but we suspected that we were merely being optimistic. The farther far-ther we drove down the road to the South, towards the battle area of the morning, the more we expected what we found. Finally we saw it Four Chinese coolies were walking towards the nearest village, carrying carry-ing an object lashed to poles, and carrying it in the old way of the East, with the poles over their shoulders. shoul-ders. The thing they were carrying was wrapped in grass matting, but I saw the bare feet sticking out We stopped the jeep and called to the coolies. Jack Belden spoke to them in Chinese and took the cover from the face. It was Lieutenant Minor, and of course he was dead. His ship in exploding had evidently thrown him out and opened his chute, but the explosion had killed him. He had definitely not crashed with the ship, for there was hardly a mark on his body. Wrapping Minor in his parachute, we took him back in a rickety Chinese Chi-nese bus that we commandeered. We knew we'd miss Minor and men like him. He'd been one of the up-and-coming younger pilots, and had already shot down one Japanese plane. We took Minor's body to the Catholic Cath-olic mission across the river, and bought one of the old, ancient looking look-ing Chinese coffins, made out of wood about six inches thick, with corners that turned up like a pagoda roof; they must weigh two hundred pounds. We put Minor's body inside in-side and held a simple service; for you have to work fast in temperatures tempera-tures of a hundred and eight when the humidity is just about a hundred. Then we filled the casket with quicklime, quick-lime, scaled it up on our brother officer, covered it with ten layers of heavy bricks to protect it from robbers rob-bers and rats, and left it there to wait for the next transport to Kunming. Kun-ming. The headquarters in Yunnan is the burial ground for all of our pilots killed fighting against the Japanese. There on the plateau in Yunnan Is the only memorial ground the 23rd Fighter Group will ever have. Our pilots lie beneath gray slate alab from the earth of Yunnan, under the wings of the Chinese and the American Amer-ican Air Forces. They lie there in the shadow of a little Buddhist temple tem-ple which for all practical purposes is the Christian temple of our God. Captain A. J. Baumler was the best operations officer I ever saw. He could go out and shoot down Japs all day, then come in and read the combat reports of twenty pilots, digest them all, and write out a com prchcnslve report "AJax" was from New Jersey. He had fought tor nearly two years with the Loyalists in Spain, and had shot down seven Messerschmitls and Fiats In that war; when ho became an ace In the 23rd Group he was the first man in the war who had shot down German, Italian, and Japanese Japa-nese aircraft Ever since America had entered the war he had led a hectic existence. Months before December De-cember 7th, he had left America from California to Join the AVO and General Chennault as a Lieutenant In the Air Corps. He had been stopped In Hawaii for a month and then had received permission to continue con-tinue on. (TO CE CONTINUED) |