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Show i .WHITE 6'?KJ!.7?litS W.N.U.TEATURE5 j THE STORY THUS FAR: Lieut. Col. Frank Kurtz, Flying Fortress pilot, tells of that fatal day when the Japs struck In the Philippines. Eight of his men are killed fleeing for shelter and Old 99 was demolished before It could get off the C round. After escaping to Australia, what Is left of the squadron flics to Java, ( where they go out on missions over the Philippines. On one of these missions one of the motors of Kurtz' Fort is hit and they begin to lose altitude. They stay with it, however, make the bomb run and try to make Malang Field on Java, but change their minds, turn back. The boys are wrought up at a U. S. magazine which publishes a complete diagram of the E model Fortress. - CHAPTER XI " 'Pilot to Radio,' calls Captain Sklles over the interphones. " 'Radio answering Pilot. Go ahead,' answers Sergeant Boudria. " 'Get the emergency rations out,' says Skiles, 'and the jungle kits, and set them by the door." "They'd given us up at Belem, but when they heard us circling up in the fog they went down the field in a truck, throwing out lighted flare flying boats had come out of Manila, Ma-nila, and now were operating off Java, from the big Dutch naval base at Surabaya, but mostly from coastal coves and the wide mouths of rivers. Patrol Wing 10 they were called, and a swell gang they were. Of course we thought it was Godawful God-awful stuff they were flying those clumsy twin-engined boats with the tail sweeping up in the air but they certainly did a job. "They came in with the news that on reconnaissance they'd picked up an enormous gang of Jap surface ships, coming toward us down Macassar Ma-cassar Strait. It was the same gang we'd pounded at Davao. They had to be stopped. Had to be! So the Colonel sent out everything he had, which was just six Forts, and the Dutch sent their little Navy, which couldn't scare them much alone, plus some old Martin B-10 bombers they'd bought from us before the war." "Take-oft was at 3:30 in the morning," morn-ing," said the Gunner. "We'd planned to bomb from a good altitude, alti-tude, but the weather was so bad that we had to drop down to 15,000 Zeros are sitting under a cloud when we come by. Four of them go in for tail attacks and are shot into confetti, con-fetti, so the fifth is smart he goes home- with the news. But for a while there it was a tail-gunner's heaven." "You never forget your first battle mission," said the Bombardier, "only I of course had a bomb-sight angle on the whole picture. "Just before we took off Major Robinson called all pilots, bombardiers, bombar-diers, radiomen, and navigators into the hangar room for a critique. He had a new idea. "My plane is to be in his flight. When we make our pass over the target, my navigator is to watch Robinson's bomb doors, and when Robinson's bombs appear, then he releases four of mine, I meanwhile sighting, the target Then the planes behind me release when I do. In this way we'll make a wide pattern, pat-tern, and get away from the target faster than by making a double run. "We have clear weather, climbing for our altitude through a few scattered scat-tered clouds, and thirty minutes as we approached the target. It broke light about seven and we began be-gan to see the gray, hazy sea, and the mountains piled up on both sides of the Strait below us. "We were about ten miles from the target when we saw that Jap surface gang. I'm not a Navy man, but I was knocked over by It They were strung out in two lines, trans- pots to mark the runway. Our gas was so low that before the ship was parked the No. 1 engine cut out. "Next morning we were off for Natal, and landed there at one o'clock. We were gassing up and the crew chief was supervising the loading the natives rolling out the steel drums, and the crew chief unscrewing un-screwing their tops to hurry it up when he happened to stick his finger into one that seemed a little heavy and, by George, it was full of water! wa-ter! The barrel looked like any other barrel, the native looked like any other native. Of course it was sabotage, sabo-tage, but what could you do! Brazil wasn't in the war yet. Somebody hoped that one drum of water would have brought us down with sputtering sputter-ing motors out in the Atlantic. "We took off for Freetown, Africa, at ten o'clock. It was an eleven-hour eleven-hour flight. We stayed with the British there and got along with them fine. It was a fighter station. sta-tion. They gave us a nice feed and all the warm beer we could drink ' it was New Year's Eve. "Then we started across Africa, and finally sighted the Nile, and I ate dinner at the British sergeants' mess at Khartoum. "When we got to Iraq," said the Gunner, "we began to smell the war. The British there told us not long ago the natives, led by Nails, had revolted, and two thousand rebels reb-els had tried to take the field away from the little garrison. All the British had on it was one plane, so old it looked like a box kite cruised about seventy miles per hour. "So they'd taken an empty gas drum, loaded it up with brace chains rivets, and bolts, and in the middle put a hell of a lot of sticks of dynamite dyna-mite and a fuse. It was so big it would hardly go into the door of tVm nlanp away from the target we reach 30,-000 30,-000 feet and then level off, following follow-ing the Borneo shore line of Macassar Ma-cassar Strait. We're all at battle stations, I fiddling with my bomb sight Presently we hear the top turret gunner over the interphone. " 'Planes!' he's calling. 'Formation 'Forma-tion of planes, right rear, high!' They were coming down at us from 32,000 or 33,000 feet but from the navigator's compartment I couldn't see them yet. "Then they peeled off for the attack, at-tack, concentrating on Robinson's plane. I could hear the gunners calling these plays over the interphones inter-phones couldn't see the Zeros my-self my-self yet but I could see their tracers trac-ers going into the tail of Robinson's plane. Then we turned in on our J bomb run, and I'd catch glimpses of the Zeros as they overshot Robinson, Rob-inson, some of them coming fifty feet from his plane. "But I'm busy on my bombing run. I've picked my first live target, tar-get, a row of three transports, broadside to our line-of flight. Everything Ev-erything else seems to be going smoothly. I can hear Charlie Britt on the top turret guns, hammering away at Zeros, and I cuss him a little because it shakes my bomb sight. "Now we're on the run, coming in on the target and I've set my drift in the sight, plus our true altitude alti-tude and true air speed, so I can put those cross hairs on the target. "Now the pilot and I switch our earphones over to command, so we can listen to any orders Major Robinson Rob-inson wants to give from his lead plane, while the copilot stays on the interphones, so he can pick up what our gunners are doing. "And in a minute I hear it. Major Ma-jor Robinson is calling. " 'Robinson to Flight. I've been badly hit in the tail having trouble "Then they flew over the rebel army, and when they had figured the best place to drop it, they lit the fuse. But when they tried to roll it out, it got stuck in the door of the plane. The British said they were quite worried for a bit while that fuse burned on. "Finally they jammed It through the door and on out, but it exploded about fifty feet off the ground. They said it killed about fifty rebels. "A couple of hops later we were in Bangalore, in India, where there was a Welsh regiment stationed. "Then we flew on down to Palem-bang, Palem-bang, Sumatra, and crossed the equator in a hell of a snowstorm at 12,000 feet, with snow packing in between be-tween our engines. "There we first saw the Dutch. Compared with the English, they seemed more rugged. But we liked them, even though they give you a loaf of bread, 8 hunk of baloney, and a cup of tea and call that breakfast, lunch, or dinner." "On the seventeenth of January we had reached Java," continued the Gunner, "and were looking down on their rice paddies in a drizzle which washed everything a vivid green. Then we flew over Surabaya and up between those two conical mountains moun-tains that guard the pass into Ma- lang Field. "Then we went down to barracks to meet the 19th. Well, there'd been quite a change. As a bunch they looked nervous and hollow-eyed, compared to the way we'd remembered remem-bered them back in the States. Looked like a few of them had been drinking quite a bit off duty, maybe trying to forget what they'd been through. You had to stop and remember re-member that those poor guys had been fighting a defensive war with those D's. "They'd look enviously across the field at the tail guns of the new E's we'd arrived in. No doubt it was a lot better combat plane. 'Yeah-a-uh,' they'd admit, 'but wait till a Jap gets on your tail and then see what happens.' They all looked so tired I wondered what I'd look like after a while. "We found out they were sending us out on a raid the very next morningwhich morn-ingwhich should show how badly they needed us so after we came back I went out to check again on my guns." "We needed the new boys badly," bad-ly," said Frank. "We'd got word trouble was on the way. You see the American Navy's PBY's big The next day we sighted the Pyramids Pyra-mids and dropped down to fly behind be-hind them, ports with escorts destroyers, cruisers, battleships riding the flanks, stretching back as far as we could see. I was as bowled over as a ten-year-old kid watching his first Sells-Floto circus parade start by. Only then I thought, 'My God, here we were, only six Forts, with all this power against us!' "When we sighted them we separated sepa-rated into two flights, following radio ra-dio command, and almost immediately immedi-ately their ack-ack fire opened up on us. We went in in a column of V's, each flight picking its ship, and by the time we were over them, the Japs had their antiaircraft fuses just right. Just after we'd dropped our bombs, the Jap pursuits hit us. I'd been watching them spiraling up from their aircraft carrier in flights of three, keeping formation as they spiraled, fifteen Zeros in all "When they'd got their altitude, they paired off. "Each pair would pick a Fort and go in for the attack, one hitting it from the side while the other would come in from behind. Remember, it was the first time any Zero had ever seen an E-model Flying Fortress. For-tress. The one who came In from behind would throttle down to our speed and, in a leisurely way, try to shoot the tail off. "It happened a couple came nosing nos-ing up around our tail the first thing. Just like the boys of the 19th had said, they first opened up with their four little .25-caliber wing guns, getting get-ting everything nicely lined up with their tracers before cutting loose with their cannon. "Well, our tail gunner, Sergeant Irvin Schier, waited, letting them come on in. Then just as they were about to uncork their cannon, he let them have it knocked hell out of them. If they hadn't been dead they'd have been terribly surprised. "We'd finished our bomb run, so then we headed for a cloud. But Major Robinson, the leader, came back with his flight for a second pass, and picked off another transport. trans-port. Then we headed for home. Every Fort got back, and we'd picked off seven Zeros. For days the damned fools kept up those tail attacks, and it was the same old grind we'd average four Zeros a j mission. i "They tell it that one day five Holding tne nose oi my plane down, I'm turning the formation.' "We had been coming in straight at the coast of Borneo. Now, turning, turn-ing, we go down the coast, the Zeros swarming around us like flies around a hunk of rotten meat. "The first one I really saw came up from beneath us. I'd known ha was there, because tracers had been coming up from under the ship's belly bel-ly past my face, as if someone down under there was throwing up hatfuls of live, smoking coals. "As he pulls up out from beneath us and banks away, I get in a couple of good bursts at him with the little .30-caliber machine gun we have down there in the nose. I couldn't really see if I'd hit him or not. Then: " 'Robinson to Skiles. Go ahead.' " 'Skiles answering Robinson,' says our pilot. " 'Take the lead,' Robinson tells him. 'I can't keep up with the formation. for-mation. I'll drop behind. And slow the formation down so I can keep up.' "We're still going down the coast, remember. And now: " 'Skiles to Robinson. Go ahead,' comes over the interphones. " 'Robinson answering.' " 'Do you want to make another pass at the target?' asks Skiles. " 'Yes, Skiles, take the formation over the target again.' "We make our turn, the rest following, fol-lowing, and head back. "Just then a Zero dives down on the formation from behind, going between me and the plane on our right wing about a hundred feet away and then it levels off out in front of me. I happened to have the gun in the right-hand socket of the nose, so I can really lay it on him with my little .30-caliber sewing sew-ing machine. It's taking plenty of stitches, but I can see my tracers slapping into his wing, close to where it joins his fuselage. He wobbles, wob-bles, goes into a dive. He is well out in front with plenty of forward speed, so it's almost like watching a bomb leaving my plane, which I can follow all the way down. This doesn't happen often. Usually I shoot at them, they go on back behind, be-hind, and the wing gunners confirm whether I really got them or not But now: " 'Robinson to Flight Vie as your target that heavy cruiser moving out from shore.' fTO BE CONTINUED) |
