OCR Text |
Show .WHITE. W.KI.U.TEATUREJ phony alerts were a constant strain, even though each one was called off fifteen minutes later. I've since wondered if maybe fifth-columnists weren't turning in most of them. "That morning our fighters (yesterday's (yes-terday's raid had left maybe fifteen out of the two dozen which had been on Iba Field) were doing a magnificent job. And learning, too this was their first day of real fighting, and there is just a hell of a lot about war that you can't find in any book and that they can't teach you in maneuvers. Buzz Wagner, Wag-ner, the best fighter of them all, would have told you that. "Buzz, with a single P-40, had done a job that ordinarily would be assigned to an entire squadron. (A fighter squadron is 25 planes.) Buzz had been sent out in the early morning morn-ing full of ammunition for his six .50-caliber .50-caliber guns and with 30-pound fragmentation frag-mentation bombs under hifl wings, so he was ready to tackle almost anything he saw. "He was out over the sea north of Luzon, sitting on the overcast, when suddenly a terrific ack-ack barrage bar-rage came snorting up at him through the cloud layer. There was so much of it Buzz figured it must have been at least a Jap battleship shoveling it up at him, so he was pulling off to the south still staying stay-ing above the cloud layer when he spotted four Jap fighters high above him. He was tempted to dump his bombs which would give him more speed and maneuverability and go up there to tangle with them, but those bombs, according to his brief- ft ; ' T THE STORY THUS FAR: Lieut. Col. Frank Kurtz, pilot of the Flying Fortress known as "The Swoose," which escaped from Clark Field, tells of that fatal day when the Japs struck in the Philippines. Old 99, another Fortress, is struck dwn before it can get ofT the ground, killing eight of her crew. Kurtz and his men are getting ready for a reconnaissance trip over Formosa when they heard the whistling of bombs. They ran for the nearest foxholes and stayed in them until un-til tin first Jap formation flew away. Then they get what antiaircraft is available. avail-able. In action. The fletd Is Uttered with the charred skeletons of Flying Fortresses, For-tresses, ' Including Old 99. They plan to salvage the wrecks. CHAPTER IV "A lot of damned fools were waving wav-ing flashlights around unnecessarily, and I thought, 'Suppose a Jap Recco plane catches a glint of this.' Pretty soon I heard a plane and raised up to listen, but when it came in plainer plain-er I recognized the deep four-motor grind of one of our own Fortresses it was undoubtedly one of the dozen which had been left down on Del I Monte Field, now coming in from the long trip from Mindanao to spend the rest of the night on Clark and in the morning pound some of those scores of Jap transports which were said to be swarming off Luzon. "And I hoped to God that single remaining runway strip had been cleared so they could get down, and they wouldn't have to circle and go back home. Just then a nervous antiaircraft battery opened up on the Fortress, and then they all did. "And what about Margo, halfway around the world? Had she heard anything? And how long would it be before I could tell her that Eddie Oliver and I were all that were left of Old 99 she had waved goodby to at Albuquerque six weeks ago? Or would I ever tell her? "I had promised the boys this was Just the opening game and that there were a lot more Saturdays coming, so what did it matter if this first one belonged to the Japs? In the end we would win. Only now I began be-gan wondering about that sprawling line and where it pointed to. Maybe it trailed off into nothing, and at the end would be only chaos and defeat. de-feat. I didn't know, and when I realized it would do no good to guess or hope, then I went to sleep. "Over at the field, six of the Mindanao Min-danao gang had come up from Del Monte, coming In tw and three at a time and landing on the two-thousand-foot strip of runway which was all that remained of Clark Field. Then they had been pulled off Into dispersed areas while ' they were gassed up and loaded with bombs. The pilots of this half-dozen were now assembled while the Colonel gave them their targets, and towering tower-ing over the group was Colin Kelly I could see his curly black head, his shoulders back as usual. I knew the boys would be headed out into plenty of trouble, and I couldn't help walking over to listen while the Colonel Colo-nel briefed Colin. I felt a little brotherly about him because he'd been one of my co-pilots back on March Field. Now he was headed out on his first battle mission. "Colin was photographing every word in his mind. He looked tired from flying all night, had had little if any sleep his ordinarily neat uniform uni-form was smeared with grease as though he'd been working on his engines himself and we had time only to exchange waves as he headed head-ed for his plane to load his bombs and I climbed up into the tower. "The thing was practically a sieve from bullets which had ripped through the corrugated iron during yesterday's strafing. A couple of privates had been up there for twenty-four hours without food or relief I guess everybody must have forgotten for-gotten them, but they'd done a swell job. Looking at all those jagged holes in the sheet-iron walls, I didn't see how they'd come out alive, but they explained it told me if I got strafed, I could lie down along one sheet-iron wall behind a pile of lead battery cases used to run the field lights. "My job of course was to handle the tower lights give the boys the signal when they could come in to land on the field but the Colonel wasn't taking any chances losing any more on the ground. He said when any Fortresses came back, to keep them in the air, circling the field, until he changed the order. "Presently there comes scooting in one of those little low P-36's that were used by the Filipino Air Force an old stick-and-wire job with non-retractable non-retractable landing gear which is practically a museum piece. I give him the green light, because I can see he is already so full of bullet holes I don't see how he can stay in the air and out jumps this little Filipino fighter pilot All he wants is more gas and more bullets for his little .30-caliber gun. and he's back up in the air for more of it Those kids did a magnificent job for their islands with that decrepit junk. "Everybody was jumpy we didn't know what minute the Japs would come back. I watched one truck that was wandering around the field with a gang filling up bomb craters. Suddenly the air-raid bell sounded, and those guys dived out of the truck in every direction to run for foxholes, fox-holes, leaving the driverless truck to keep wandering right on over onto its nose in a shell crater. Those neatly lined-up Jap planes, and then Buzz still watching Russ pulled up at the end of the field In a slow half-roll and went in. Buzz says it's just possible Russ was able to bail out he couldn't wait to be sure, for now he was getting ready for his second sec-ond run, all alone. He came tn on this second pass through the Jap ack-ack with his six .50-calibers pounding away at those parked planes some were already burning from the bombs he and Russ had dropped crossed the field once, and had banked to come in for a third pass when Jap tracers began whizzing whizz-ing past his cockpit from behind. He looked over his shoulder to see that the last two of those four Zeros were diving on him. Of course there was nothing he could do but push his throttle up to the fire wall jamming on all the gas his engine would take and try to get away. (Air force slang meaning his plane went into the ground.) "Inch by inch he pulled away from those Zeros he looked back at the field once and saw about six good fires going and Buzz said it was damned lucky he got back to the field, because he could tell the boys that a P-40 could outrun a Zero at sea level. Remember, though, he said outrun, not outma-neuver. outma-neuver. "In those days everybody was learning stuff that wasn't In the book, and passing it on. Everybody had to learn, which is why we don't get bitter at being mishandled at first. , s "But Buzz always hated to talk about himself. 'Did you hear about the Rat?' he asked me, very excited. The Rat of course was our old friend Lieutenant Sam Marrett, who had picked up this nickname at Randolph Ran-dolph Field because of his pointed nose and small face. "The Rat took four winglings out on patrol, and they were laying back above a hillside on Lingayen when they spotted spot-ted a Jap landing party, so they climbed to get altitude and then peeled off out of the sun onto it the Rat leading, of course in one long string, each picking his barge. What happened no one knew for sure. But one of the Rat's bullets must have touched off the magazine racks in the Jap barge he picked, anyway the barge blew right up in his face, and the Rat's plane disintegrated. But the other four kids continued on their runs, first dropping their frag bombs, and then strafing back and forth they had Japs diving off those barges in every direction.' "That day," said Frank, "my job was the tower, not going on missions mis-sions myself or even listening to gossip. A little after noon I happened hap-pened to be looking up at the overcast over-cast toward the roar made by one of our planes which I thought maybe would be trying to come in when suddenly I saw a parachute blossom blos-som just under the overcast and another and another. I counted eight, so it must be a Fortress but no ninth. Instead, at the very end of these eight I saw a dark object go hurtling into the ground. One of our Forts, but whose? I didn't find out until evening that it was Colin Kelly. He'd been out there following follow-ing his briefing that I'd heard that morning, which was to attack .Jap transports and their naval escorts. He'd laid a direct hit square on the very biggest target any pilot could hope for and had been on his way home had been about to let down through that overcast onto Clark Field when two Jap fighters, who had been hanging on ever since he left the convoy, hit him. They put a lucky incendiary into his oxygen system, and of course it started to burn like cotton soaked in gasoline. But Colin wasn't rattled. He gave the regular orders over the interphone inter-phone system for the other eight boys of his crew to climb into their chutes and abandon ship. "Now a part of this procedure In a Fortress is that the pilot must be the last to leave. It's the same in the Navy, except that it's sometimes just a gallant gesture, particularly when the captain can't help much by staying, and if the ship does go down under him he can float away from the bridge in his life jacket, and pretty soon someone's giving him a slug of rye and a brisk rub-down rub-down in the wardroom of another ship. "But in the Air Force it's the real McCoy. Because if a Fortress is on fire, somebody has to stay on the stick to keep her level and right side up while the other eight make their jumps. That somebody is the pilot, and that's one of the things you must be ready to do in order to wear those pretty silver wings on your chest that the better-upholstered better-upholstered girls stare at in the better-upholstered bars. "Well, Colin stayed on the stick as his plane dropped with its oxygen system flaming, and all eight got out. and I suppose carefully counted one thousand two thousand three thousand like it says in the book, before they pulled their cords and their chutes blossomed. "But by the time the last one was out. and Colin got his own chute on and opened his top escape-hatch window win-dow above that fume-filled cockpit and crawled up through it well, he cleared the plane all right, but he was so close to the ground that he never had a chance to crack his chute. TO BE CO-TIrr;ED The air raid bell sounded and those guys dived out of the truck. ing, were destined for some planes the Japs had just put ashore on a field near Lingayen, so he kept on his course. "But all of a sudden about three bushels of red-hot Jap tracers came whizzing by his cockpit.' He pushed the stick forward to nose her down, and then in a climbing turn to the right pulled her back up into the sun and then he looked back to see that two of the four Jap fighters had detached to work him over. "They were coming hell-for-break-fast, so he pulled a cute maneuver throttled back suddenly to let them go roaring on by him, and then opened up on their vanishing tails. His first burst put them both on fire. Those good old .50-calibers the P-40 had six of them and when they speak, they do all the talking. "Remember all this time Buzz hadn't dumped his bombs. They might easily have cost him his life, but his job was to get to Lingayen Field, where he had a rendezvous with Lieutenant Russell Church. "As he approached Lingayen, first he saw Russ, who fell in on his wing, and then he saw his target all those Jap planes on the ground lined up just like it was for an ordinary peacetime Saturday-morning inspection. I want you to get this to see it isn't only the American Ameri-can Air Force which gets caught with its pants down and its suspenders suspen-ders trailing. "They started the long glide down, circling the field, and then Buzz peeled off and started in en them. Russ was to follow, but at a good distance, so he wouldn't pick up in his propellers the fragments of Jap planes tossed up by Buzz's frag bombs. "So down they went Buzz first, then Russ, just skimming the field. As the first target came into sight Buzz let go first one and then the other of his 30-pound fragmentation bombs, and looking back over his shoulder, he saw old Russ was just coming in behind him. Buzz went on across the field and then pulled up sharply to watch Russ' bombs go right down the line. Russ' tail was on fire from Jap ack-ack. and he knew it, but he stayed dead on his run, making direct hits on those , |