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Show life IPROTB1Y r .-i FAB: Lieut CoL 1 -h the Japi truck In FW"E"bro men ar. . f .h Iter nd Old 99 was "T-. K could get TJt to Australia, what 0 cSS-J' " -Mrtonmlss.om over the 1 f je of these missions . 1 guru' Fort Is hit VTl taTutud.. The, , tSwM, Field o- t B model Fortre... ) CHAPTER XI 3 Radio.' calls Captain i ,r the Interphones. J answering Pilot. Go wers Sergeant Boudrit. J emergency rations out, .j, 'and the jungle kits, : m by the door.' riven us up at Belem. they heard us circling up they went down the field throwing out lighted flare rk the runway. Our gas , that before the ship i the No. 1 engine cut out. Coming we were off for d landed there at one Se were gassing up and ijchief was supervising the h natives rolling out the s, and the crew chief un-k.ir un-k.ir trms to hurry It up- flying boats had come out of Ma-nila, 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 Ma-cassar Ma-cassar Strait It was the same gang we'd pounded at Davao. They had to be stopped. Had to bet 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-off was at 3:30 In the morn-lng," morn-lng," 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 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- Zeros are sitting under a cloud when we come by. Four of them go in for n 1 attacks and are shot into con-lettl, con-lettl, so the fifth is smart-he goes home with the news. But for a while there it was a tail-gunner'i heaven. "You never forget your first battle mission." ,aid the Bombardier. only I of course had a bomb-sight ngle on the whole picture. "Just before we took off Major Robinson called all pilots, bomber-.hi' bomber-.hi' radiomen- and navigators into tne hangar room for a critique. He bad a new idea. 'My P'ane 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 1 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 comine down nt u from Ik ' 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 interphonescouldn't inter-phonescouldn'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 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 , holding the nose of my plane down. I'm turning the formation.' "We bad 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 he 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 for-mation. for-mation. I'll drop behind. And slow the formation down so I can keep up.' "We're still going down the coast !:ppened to stick his finger :at seemed a little heavy eorge, It was full of wa-irrel wa-irrel looked like any other i native looked like any e. Of course it was sabo-,hat sabo-,hat could you do! Brazil the war yet. Somebody one drum of water would ;ht us down with sputter-out sputter-out In the Atlantic, ol! for Freetown, Africa, ;ock. It was an eleven-i eleven-i We stayed with the ere and got along with , It was a fighter sta-r sta-r gave us a nice feed and rm beer we could drink Year's Eve. tt started across Africa, i sighted the Nile, and I it the British sergeants' Mourn. w got to Iraq," said the , 'we began to smell the British there told us not lie natives, led by Nazis, ed, and two thousand reb-ied reb-ied to take the field away little garrison. All the id on It was one plane, looked like a box kite ibout seventy "miles per . jjy'd taken an empty gas led It up with brace chains I bolts, and in the middle I of a lot of sticks of dyna-a dyna-a fuse. It was so big it Idly go into the door of I rthey flew over the rebel I when they had figured the 1 to drop it, they lit the I when they tried to roll it i stuck in the door of the ft British said they were fied for a bit while that id on. they Jammed it through nd on out, but it exploded feet off the ground. They ed about fifty rebels. of hops later we were jre, in India, where there : regiment stationed. flew on down to Palem-Mtra, Palem-Mtra, and crossed the hell of a snowstorm at with snow packing in be-'ngines. be-'ngines. first saw the Dutch. ith the English, they lore rugged. But we liked a though they give you a hunk of baloney, and nd call that breakfast, dinner." seventeenth of January we 'ei Java," continued the J were looking down on PMdies in a drizzle which ;-Tthing a vivid green. ; over Surabaya and up se two conical moun-Nard moun-Nard the pass info Ma- went down to barracks Well, there'd been As a bunch they "nd hollow-eyed. the way we'd remem-5 remem-5 in the States. ' fe of them had been 'f bU oil duty, maybe i0W what they'd been had to stop and re-poor re-poor guys had defensive war with ."j envious!y across the t guns of the new E's No doubt it was a , -at Piane. Yeah-a-' 'taut, -but wait till a Jwar tail and then see looked so what I'd look like tey were se"g h itVery nextmorn-, nextmorn-, WW show how badly Eat !T?0 after w came S to check again on boy! bad; 31,. , Wei got word 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 a"" .tra" port Then we headed for home. Every Fort got back, and wed picked off seven Zeros. For days toe damned fools kept up those tail Stacks, and it was the i same q old grind-we'd average four Zeros a mission. . . "They tell it that one day five remember. And now: " 'Skiles to Robinson. Go ahead, comes over the interphones. ' 'Robinson answering.' Do you want to make another nass 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 rieht wing-about a hundred feet away-and then it levels off out in front of me. I happened to have the ana in the right-hand socket of the note so I can really lay it on him with my little .30-caliber sew-S? sew-S? machine. It's taking plenty of stitches, but I can see my tracers .lapping into his wing, close to Ihere it joins his fuselage. He wobbles wob-bles goes into a dive. He is well out S front with plenty of forward Led. so it's almost like watching a Domb leaving my plane which I cw fnilow all the way down. This doesn't happen often. Usually I St them, they go on back be- and the wing gunners confirm whether I really got them or not B Robinson to Flights, as your target that heavy cruiser moving out from shore.' (TO BE CONTINUED) a |