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Show If (Q)-FHILT WJ VfeCoI. Robert L. Scoff w.n.u, release This story is sponsored by the Eddington Canning Company for the enjoyment of our men and women in the armed forces and their friends here at home. cheerfully with their work. I saw them pull themselves down into the river with ropes tied to the fighter, taking with them an 18-foot 18-foot length of bamboo. 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 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 wasted effort and I heard men say, "Oh well, there are lots of Chinese anyway. Let them work." But toward the second day's close, I began to wonder, and that port?" Would the day ever corned when we could make an attack with a force 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 died in the unequal battles. One day in August, Johnny Alison Ali-son was leading six P-40's to intercept in-tercept a larger number of Japanese Japa-nese coming in against Henglang the only memorial ground the 2rd Fighter Group will ever have. Our pilots lie beneath a gray slate slab from the earth of Yunnan, under the wings of the Chinese and the American Air Forces. They lie there in the shadow of a little Buddhist temple 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 twen-ty pilots, digest them all, write out the most comprehensive report re-port in the world one that would give higher headquarters a ringside ring-side picture of the fieht that had A craft. Ever since America had en- ' tered the war he had led a hectic ' 1 existence. Months before Dec. 7th '' he had left America from Califor- ',' nia to join the AVG and General ' Chennault, as a lieutenant in the Air Corps. He had been stopped f in Hawaii for a month and then had received permission to con- ' tinue on. :r; (To Be Continued Next Week) taken place. "Ajax" was from New Jersey. He had fought for nearly two years with the Loyalists in Spain, and had shot down seven Messer-schmitts Messer-schmitts and Fiats in that war; when he became an ace in the 2rd Group he was the first man in the war who had shot down German, Italian, and Japanese air- from both Hankow and Canton. When interception was made, the Japs had fifty-three planes. They were in three waves, so of course Johnny didn't get them all together togeth-er 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. ene-my. In his second attack, after diving away and climbing back into in-to 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 super-ior numbers 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 ships following the Forty, For-ty, but thoufht the closest one was another P-40. Too late he realized the error and went to help the 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. CHAPTER XVII: In which i Scott tells about his friend, Major "Tex" Hill, to whom he owes his life. Maj. Allison is hit and tries to land his crippled bomber at night. 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 his 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 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 John-ny didn't make it. Doggone, he was a good boy." We all felt a sinking in our hearts. We waited and we kind of prayed too. I sent Captain Wang, our salvage salv-age 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 given up hope, we heard the sound of sharp explosions. All of us ran out of the alert shack, to see the strangest sight 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." ding-hao." In the midst of the procession proces-sion and surrounded by children shooting ' Chinese firecrackers in celebration, was a sedan chair carried car-ried on the backs of the villagers of Hengyang. And Johnny Alison was in the sedan chair smiling. While we cheered too and some of us even got some firecrackers from the kids and shot them off, we helped Johnny out and heard his story. He'd hit the river like a feather bed he said, and had swum ashore, having to kick off his good American shoes to make it. As he crawled up the bank of the river the Chinese had rushed upon him, thinking he was a Jap out of one of the bombers. Johnny said it looked as if they were going to cut him up, until he remembered the one word of Chinese that he'd picked up. He yelled this one that sounded like "Merugay," which means "American." And when they read the Chinese sign that each one of us carried on the back of his flying suit, which asks aid and protection for the American who has come to help China fight they realized who he was. Just the man who had shot down the three enemy ships. And from then on he was the hero of the town. Johnny Alison had a couple of burns on his hands and legs where some bits of the Japs' explosives had hit him. He'd been slightly cut on the forehead when, on landing in the river, his head 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 con-tains the lights and prisms of the modern gun-sights. Just the slight- evening as darkness settled over the river I went out to watch their tireless labor. Suddenly there was a movement among the rivermen to tighten the four cables that tied the fighter to the barge, and I saw fie canopy and the prop of Johr ny'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. But the Chinese Chi-nese never cheered or got excited: excit-ed: they remained as stoical as ever. They seemed to know that they were going to be successful, and had merely been waiting for the crazy Americans to quit playing play-ing around with all the strange gadgets. They had floated the 9100 lbs. of P-40, and now they towed it to shore. Our salvage crew put the wheels down in the water and wits the aid of 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 fighter could be installed, install-ed, and more time had to go by before we got it completely work- 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 bailed out and that Johnny failed to see him do it, but we suspected that we were merely being optimistic. The farther 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 walk-ing towards the nearest village, carrying an object lashed to poles, and carrying it in the old way of the East, with the poles over their shoulders. 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 Lieut. 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 wtih the ship, for there was hardly a mark on his body. Wrapping Minor in his parachute, para-chute, we took him back in a rickety Chinese bus that we commandeered. com-mandeered. 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 Jap plane. We took Minor's body to the Catholic mission across the river, and bought one of the old, ancient-looking ancient-looking Chinese coffins, made out of wood about six inches thick, with corners that turned up like est 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-4 from the bottom of the Siang-Kiang. Siang-Kiang. But with the 14-foot depth and the swift current, they had more than modern engineering with the limitations of our floating float-ing equipment could accomplish. Under Captain Wang Chinese-American Chinese-American and in our Army they floated barges out to the spot and tied them to the ship, then we tried to tow it ashore with lines. 'T'hen they lowered steel drums pump the water from the submerged sub-merged drums and thus floated the P-40, but everything failed. During all the work of the Americans with windlass and the block-and-tackle, the Chinese villagers, vil-lagers, who had offered their services ser-vices long before smiled and stood by. We asked ourselves : What in hell could the Chinese coolies and rivermen do if we, with our general gen-eral knowledge and advanced civilization, civi-lization, couldn't raise the ship? We went on and failed for three days, and then to the persistent Chinese we said, "Okay, go a-head". a-head". We watched them float raft after af-ter 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 again in combat against the Japanese Japa-nese thanks to labor of good mechanics, and the bravery of a gallant officer, the unswerving patience pa-tience and devotion of those brave Chinese coolies and river men who had never heard of the word "impossible." "im-possible." 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, and try to show the houseboys better and more efficient ways to do things. But they 'never changed, and finally fin-ally I realized they were changing me. Now in raising this ship they had used a method 3000 years old. I have read since how they had before, when the great temple bell employed it in Burma, long years weighing over thirty tons was thrown into the deep la'ke to save it from the heathen. When the heathen 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 bamboo 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 up 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 stoi-cally working and watching for the material to come over that road with which to fight the enemy. ene-my. Waiting patiently, as though they knew that some day they would have a chance to fight the a pagoda roof; they must weigh 20 pounds. We put Minor's body inside and held a simple Service, ior you have to work fast in a temperature of 108, where the humidity hu-midity is just about 100. Then we filled the casket with quicklime, quick-lime, sealed it up on our brother officer, covered it with ten layers of heavy bricks to protect it from robber and rats, and left it there to wait for the next transport to Kunming. The headquarters in Yunnan is the burial ground for all our pilot killed fighting against the Japs. There on the plateau in Yunnan is Japanese who have tried to exterminate exter-minate them. I've seen a Chinese woman run in a bomb crater, pull the dismembered dismem-bered pieces of her her child together to-gether and wipe the dirt from the face of her dead husband, a look of misery on her face. Then, when she saw me staring, she stood there and smiled. When I glanced at General Chennault with a question ques-tion on my face, he said, "Don't interpret that wrong now, Scotty, she's showing you she can still smile, no matter what happens." 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 Yangste or near the lakes around Nanchang. I think we realized re-alized then, as General Chennault had realized for a long time, that all these people needed was a chance, with air support for their ground armies and modern equipment equip-ment for their soldiers. Our small force had put new life into them. They had plaques embroided in commemoration of the battles that we fought. These would sometimes represent the American eagle holding the flags of America, Eritain, Russia and China. In Chinese characters was a poetic account of the battle the pilot or the squadron had fought. As we drove along the roads in our jeeps to the field for the alert of the "Jinbao," 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 Chi-their Chi-their heads with, adequate air sup-nese sup-nese ground armies, and us over |