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Show Then there was the incessant ringing of the telephones In the warning-net plotting-room that got on all our nerves. After months I found out that without exception every pilot tried not to let others know of his nervousness. nervous-ness. But it became unmistake-able, unmistake-able, for the tension that built up around the card tables in the alert shacks was not the most effectively effective-ly disguised in the world. (To Be Continued) their getting away to the gueril- la lines. They escaped, and later we received a letter signed by the other two crewmen which said the pilot had been captured and was then in a Japanese hospital. The letter was a Japanese propaganda propagan-da leaflet that the Japs had dropped drop-ped near Kweilin, but being properly prop-erly signed, it gave us hope for the remainder of the crew and for the heroic pilot, Lieut. Allers. That night Morgan led a night raid to bomb Canton, and had a successful attack. Later the same night, Ed Bayse led six bombers to destroy the power station on Hongkong Island. In his return to Kweilin, five of his ships landed but the other continued to circle Another memory that always brings a smile is Lieut. Couch's face when he was explaining what happened the first time he got a Jap Zero in his sights. The enemy ship was a lone "sitter," probably some inexperienced Jap pilot who wasn't looking around and didn't know the P-40 was behind him. Couch said he kept moving up closer and closer until he knew the Jay was going to be dead the instant he pressed his trigger. Then he pressed and nothing happened. He squeezed the trigger until he thought he'd press the top off the stick; he found that he shut his eyes, flinched, and bit his lip, but still the guns didn't fire. until I could properly identify my ship. Then I landed and changed the fuselage number to lucky "7" but definitely not seventy. There just wasn't much relaxation relax-ation in China with Scotch at one hundred dollars gold a bottle, when you could find it. In fact, we did not get to drink anything except boiled water and that really terrible ter-rible rice wine. This we had to learn to down with the Chinese and in their manner, which was the inevitable salute, "Gambey," or "bottoms up." Then they'd come and proudly show you the bottoms of their glasses and you'd have to follow suit with a weak little gambey. , CdD-FHILdDT Col. Roberf L. Scoff VN.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. informing the radioman that he had no air speed and thus was having difficulty bringing the fast bomber in to land. Bayse, who had worked all the day and most of the night over enemy lines, started his ship and went aloft, got the other ship on his wing in formation, and told the pilot to keep the position. And then this experienced bomber pilot led the younger pilot to a safe landing. It was teamwork of the sort that had begun to appear among the bomber crews and was more important still, as the coordinated co-ordinated attack had shown, between be-tween the fighters and bombers. This was what Colonel Cooper had been working for during the past several months. Cooper had done another fine job, one that we learned of only after we returned to Kunming from the attack. In India the field in Assam had been raided heavily by the Japanese at the same hour as our attack on Kowloon, and simultaneously the Japanese had tried to strike at Kunming with a large force. Colonel Cooper had been left behind in the hospital with a sinus infection. He was chafing at the bit, and we sympathized sympa-thized with him for after having planned the greatest raid of the war in China, he had been forced out of accompanying the mission. But it has always been our contention con-tention that "everything happens for the best." And it proved out again. When the enemy planes aproachd Kunming, Colonel Cooper Coop-er left the hospital and took charge of the defense of the home base. He sent Schiel's Squadron towards the South at exactly the right time. They not only intercepted inter-cepted the enemy and foiled the The American pilot from the Carolinas swore and throttled back, dropping to the rear while the Jap kept flying innocently on. After Couch had recharged his guns he began to stalk the Zero again, going closer and closer until un-til he could see the enemy pilot at the controls. He set his sights right, on the cockpit and pressed the trigger once more. And again nothing happened. Couch came home disgusted and I think he worked on his guns all night. One memory brings back a joke on myself. I had been on a long flight towards Hankow and from the time of take-off, all the way to the enemy base, all during combat, com-bat, and then back home, I had been forced to pump my landing-gear landing-gear up manually every ten miles. At J8.000 feet, in the rarefied air and with an oxygen mask on, this becomes monotonous work, but in combat it's even a dangerous danger-ous kind of work. I had pumped and pumped, and just as I'd get the wheels back up the hydraulic valve would release the pressure and I'd feel that the wheels were slowly dropping again. Now, after nearly 700 miles of it, over some three hours and a half, I pumped them up once more and they seemed to hold. I asked my wing pian to fly up close and investigate. investi-gate. Bruce Holloway told me later that they had all been listening for reports of the fight, via the Command Radio back in Kunming, Kun-ming, when over the ether they heard a very Southern drawl disgustedly dis-gustedly calling, "Dubois, fly up close to me and see if that goddam god-dam wheel is down again." Wo f-riprl tn hold the chatter CHAPTER XXIII: Col. Scott leaves on his greatest mission to date, with Gen. Haynes in the lead bomber. "Tex" Hill gets a Zero. CHAPTER XXIV As I looked around now the bombers were gone, but climbing up from the South I saw four twin-engine ships that I thought were 1-45's; later we decided they were Japanese Messerschmitts. I had plenty of altitude on the leader lead-er and started shooting at him from long rang, concentrating on his right engine. He turned to dive and I followed him straight for the water. I remember grinning, grin-ning, for he had made the usual mistake of diving instead of climbing. But as I drew up on the twin-engine ship, I began to believe be-lieve that I had hit him from the long range. His ship was losing altitude rapidly in a power glide, but he was making no effort to turn. I came up to within fifty yards and fired into him until he burned. I saw the ship hit the water and continue to burn. We had been going towards the fog bank fn the direction of the Philippines, Phil-ippines, and I wondered if the Jap had been running,for Manila. I shot at two of the other twin-engine twin-engine ships from long range but couldn't climb up to them. Then I passed over Hongkong island, flying fly-ing at a thousand feet; I was too low but didn't want to waste any time climbing. And I saw something some-thing that gripped my heart a fenced-in enclosure which I knew was Fort Stanley, the British and American prison camp. There was a large group standing in the camp and waving at my ship. My saddest feeling of the war came 'over me then. Here were soldiers who had been prisonerso ft he Japs for nearly a year. Month after month they had waited for the sight of Allied airplanes attacking attack-ing Hongkong and at last it had come. : Even in their suffering they vere waving a cheer to the few United States planes that had finally come, and I swore to myself my-self I'd come back again and again. Then I saw above me the crisscrossing criss-crossing vapor paths of an area where fighter ships have sped through an air attack. They almost al-most covered the sky in a cloud. Here and there were darker lines that could have been smoke paths whre ships had burned and gone down to destruction. I was rudely jerked back to attention at-tention by a slow voice that yet was sharp: "If that's a P-40 in front of me, waggle your wings." I rocked my wings before I looked. look-ed. Then I saw the other ship, a P-40 nearly a mile away. I think from the voice it was Tex Hill. I went towards him and together we dove towards home. The presence of the other P-40 made me feel very arrogant and egotistical, for I had shot down four enemy ships and had damaged damag-ed others. So I looped above Victoria Vic-toria harbor and dove for the Peninsular Hotel. My tracers ripped rip-ped into the shining plate-glass of the penthouses on its top, and I saw the broken windows cascade cas-cade like snow to the streets, many floors below. I laughed, for I knew that behind those windows were Japanese high officers, enjoying that modern hotel. When I got closer I could see uniformd figures fig-ures going down the fire-escapes, and I shot at them. In the smoke of Kowloon I could smell oil and rubber. I turned for one more run on the packed fire-escapes filled with Jap soldiers, but my next burst ended very suddenly. I was out of ammunition. Then, right into the smoke and through it right down to the tree-top levels, I headed northwest to get out of Japanese territory sooner, and I went as fast as I could for Kweilin. Kwei-lin. . I was the last ship in, and the General was anxiously waiting for me, scanning the sky for ships to come in. He knew I had shot down an enemy, for I had come in with my low-altitude roll of victory. But when I jumped from my cramped seat and said, "General, "Gen-eral, I got four definitely," he shook my hand and looked very happy. "That makes nineteen then," he said, "for the fighters and the bombers." We had lost a fighter and a bomber. The bomber had become a straggler when one engine was hit by anti-aircraft; then it was shot to pieces by one of the twin-engined twin-engined Jap fighters. The pilot had managed even then to get down, but he had remained in the ship to destroy the bomb-sight, and had been shot through the foot by a Jap cannon. Two of the bomber crew had bailed out and were captured. The other two carried car-ried the injured pilot until he had begged them to leave him alone and escape. They had bandaged his foot tightly but had refused to go without him. As they moved on through the enemy lines that night, they stopped stop-ped to rest, and the wounded pilot crawled away from them to insure attack but shot down eight of the enemy. That made the score for the Group twenty-seven enemy planes on October 25th, and three highly successful bombing raids. We were ordered home the next day, although we now had the enemy at our mercy without fighter fight-er protection against future raids towards Hongkong. But heavy attacks at-tacks had come to India, and we were needed to protect the terminus termi-nus of the ferry route to China. We managed, however, to leave a small force of P-40's under Holloway and Alison, with mission mis-sion to dive-bomb shipping in Victoria Vic-toria harbor within the next few days. They took eight planes down and dove through the overcast towards some big enemy freighters freigh-ters that were on the way south towards the Solomons. Their bombs damaged two 8,000-ton freighters and sank a 12,000-ton vessel. Captain O'Connell made this last dirct hit by almost taking tak-ing his bomb down the smokestack smoke-stack of the enemy vessel, and in doing so he was shot' down. He over the radios to a minimum but there were times when the men released their emotions into the microphone, and we thought it better not to try to cut it out al-togther. al-togther. We had codes for every purpose, but we found that when you really needed something, it was just as good to ask for it in the clear or in veiled American slang. Sometimes ,the retorts that came as a natural response to actions ac-tions were better than any that could have been planned and written writ-ten by the masters. Up between Hengyang and Lingling we had broken the main Jap force with several attacks and there were only stragglers around the sky. We had been searching them out for fifteen minutes when I saw and heard a remark that was nothing short of classic. From 21,000 feet I observed ob-served a lone Zero. But there was a P-40 trailing him, and so I held my altitude and watched. The P-40 P-40 closed the gap more and more, following the acrobatics of the took the bomb very low, and in recovering from the dive he was attacked by a single enemy, who got one of the best pilots in the Squadron. Clinger and Alison saw the enemy ship but from their distance dis-tance they could do nothing in time to save O'Connell. While Alison Ali-son was getting the lone enemy ship, Clinger dove down in anger along the docks of Kowloon, strafing straf-ing three anti-aircraft positions in the face of very heavy ground-fire. ground-fire. The most vivid memories of our air war in China come from the little things. Like the memory of Genral Chennault, sitting there at the mouth of the cave in Kweilin through the long hours while we were away on the attack missions. Sitting there smoking his pipe and like a football coach, planning plan-ning the next week's work. Joe, the General's little black dachshund, dach-shund, would be burrowing into the rocks, looking for the inevitable inevita-ble rats. When with the passing minutes the P-40's or the bombers bomb-ers were due to return, the General Gener-al would begin to watch the eastern east-ern sky. There he would sit without with-out a word until the last ship was accounted for. Sometimes I would think: the General lives through every second of the combat with us. With his keen knowledge of tactics and of the Jap too, he sees exactly what we are doing. Jap, and then drew up for the kill. As the tracers from the six guns went into the Zero I heard the voice of Captain Goss say, "There, Hirohito, you bastard God rest your soul." Over the radio you could also hear the staccato roll of the six Fifties. The Zero slowly slow-ly rolled over to destruction. Sometimes the hated Japs had the last word. In regions where the airwarning net was working poorly or not at all, our first knowledge of the approach of the enemy would be the sight of Japanese Japa-nese bombers overhead. As the bombs blasted the runways and the Jap radial engines were taking their ships at high altitude back towards their bases, we would hear over the radio on our exact frequency, in perfect English : "So sorry, please, so sorry." We would just shake our fists and wait for better days. When I first brought "Old Exterminator" Ex-terminator" to China, I had painted paint-ed the number 10 on the fuselage. Later on we used the last three numerals of the Air Corps numbers num-bers for call letters, or were assigned as-signed some name like "ash," "oak," or "pine." But the first time I came back from Chungking Chung-king late one afternoon, I approached ap-proached Kunming down the usual us-ual corridor, expecting that to identify me automatically, and from far out I called by radio: "One Zero, coming in from the north." Of course I was using the numerals of tthe number "ten" to identify me to the radio man. Instead, as I came over the field I saw anti-aircraft men of the Chinese army running for their guns, and I saw six P-40's taking off to shoot the invader down. Meaning me. You've probably guessed it by now the radioman gathered that somone had just warned him that one enemy Zero was about to strafe the field. Needless to say, I took myself to safer places for a few minutes |