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Show 4 I TBCS FAB: Lieut. Col. ; l ol Flyl-K Fortress, i,jU' ,.. Elfht ot hU i I!! Fortresses, wai i coold take off. After 1 ! ver the Philippine.. 11 before JP """ Jd over Java. Thre. Y wd Zeroi get J fig eomm-der t i Jap carrier In the , Bd ' UmPlnr orti arrive. APTEB XIV ' ibynowere stirred up. Itf-obriously off a car-f car-f 5omewhere near-and Lt of Timor airdrome. ie was nothing on the f began to see that it fl i matter of time un-it'ook un-it'ook that steppingstone L which connected us i'and it would all be Lore fighters could get s under their own pow-Ibers pow-Ibers had already hit If we got no more nght-ls nght-ls before they smashed Malang? The skies Ing fast jt this time we did a I for the Dutch. I was headquarters on busi-' busi-' iKommander van der probably be on the ground for a while, so I couldn't understand it Nobody in the States doubted yet that Java would hold. I told him I'd call him as soon as I rc.ched Florida.. And then he said a curious thing. "'Darling he said, 'I'd better warn you that these calls may not last much longer.' "I didn't ask why, because I knew it must be something the censor would not let him tell me. So because be-cause the time was up, I just said good night. Without ever talking it over, we'd always made it our rule never to say goodby. That was too frightening. Always it was good night." "I was worried, Margo," said Frank, "because I'd just got word from our Navy's PBY's on patrol that a new Jap invasion fleet was coming down Macassar Strait, apparently ap-parently headed for Balikpapan on Borneo. It has a fair harbor and is the last base they would need before be-fore they took over Java. And I couldn't see how we were going to stop them. "But next day Colonel Eubank gathered his Forts together and they took oft at 3:30 in the morning, so that they would be out over Macassar Macas-sar Strait in time to make their bomb run just at dawn. "They had to come down below the overcast to see the target, which was two converging lines of Jap ships, heavily escorted one coming in from the northeast and one from rived which we hadn't heard ot So -e watched as they came closer, uniy whpn We saw the white points t our Army Air Force star with I the red disk in the middle were we relieved. It hadn't occurred to us that ycu can take the red sun ol Japan and with a few strokes of paintbrush make five white star Points around it. (Shortly after Uii, incident, the army air force emblem uxu changed, and the red central disk removed.) "We didn't dream of this, but still we watched what we were so sure were P-40's. They were flying along with us, about Jiree thousand yards away, apparently paying no attention. atten-tion. We didn't suspect they were Japs, mapping out their attack. "There was nothing about this maneuver ma-neuver which surprised us, for the Japs so far had always attacked us from the rear. Then they wheeled in for their nose-on attack, nd too late we saw those Army Afr Force stars on their fuselages had been crudely forged. "They concentrated on our first three planes, and remembei now that this first attack, which caught us completely off guard and far below our regular altitude, happened in only a few seconds. One Fortress For-tress they hit only In the motor. The next Fortress, they put an incendiary incendi-ary through the bomb-bay gas tank-they tank-they must have known through subversive sub-versive activities in Java that we didn't have leakproof ones yet in that model. This set off the oxy. ie running up. 'You got he said. 'Our bravest fouble-she can't dive.' plained that she was free hundred miles out I Sea, moving slowly to-)ase, to-)ase, but that Zeros were head, and had probably Jap bombers to polish t Dutch PBY's had been if, but those big flying jfcmsy as ducks, and the Iready shot one down. 1 had to have. Van der ilained, was fighters to bmarine. But the little is fighters didn't have jet out and back. I Sprague on the phone, i fas coming out urgent, te down on a piece of Van der Straaten told r submarine's course, lourly position, it out on a chart and It was a long distance, belly tanks, his fight-irely fight-irely get out there and i minutes patrolling the then they'd have to start Egured he had enough rp two of them over her e-in fifteen-minute re-tey'd re-tey'd escorted her back where the little Dutch iters would have the :e over. the first pair out him-io him-io swivel-chair officer), ch, in addition to being tteful, woke up to the 0 gen system, and the whole Fortress flared in front of our eyes in a pufl of flame and smoke. Out of this we could see two or three parachutes para-chutes floating down. Maybe the men dangling from them were alive. More probably they had never pulled the rip cords themselves, but the explosion opened the chutes. "I was working the top turret gun, and from here I could see exactly what was happening on the third Fortress Captain Duke Duphrane's ship which was just on our left, and very close. I saw it, and so did Sergeant Jim Worley, the bombardier, bombar-dier, who was working the little .30-caliber .30-caliber nose gun, and had brought down three Zeros. We all saw some of it, but Worley and I saw most. "First, we saw Duphrane's plane shudder as the Jap tracers crashed into its cockpit and into its bomb bay. But she didn't go down yet. For a while she continued on with her chin up, like those pictures you see of Marie Antoinette or Mary Queen of Scots walking proudly toward to-ward the scaffold. And she didn't waver or flinch, even when we could see that dull-red flames from the bursted gasoline tanks of that bomb bay were sprouting out of her, from the cockpit clear back to the tail. "We surged just a little ahead of her nose, and from here we could see Duke Duphrane and his copilot both slumped over dead, their heads leaning against the shattered pane of the cockpit window. So it wasn't any man who was keeping her chin up. It was the Old Queen herself who wanted to die this way. "We dropped back and came in a little closer you had an awful feeling you wanted to help, and you couldn't and we saw Sergeant Keightley, her radioman and right-waist right-waist gunner, climb through his escape es-cape hatch and bail out, and his chute optn. And then her left-waist gunner, doing the same on the other oth-er side. We saw her tail gunner bail out and his chute open they found him four or five days later on an island. "She was enveloped in red flames now from nose to tail, and through her windows we could see flames shimmer inside her cabin, and as her plates melted she began to sink in a steepening curve, and along the wake of that curve we were to count seven parachutes, like seven swirling dandelion seeds. "But as yet she hadn't gone down much, and our own pilot. Captain Strother a brave, skillful pilot (who was presently to die and every man of his crew feels he gave his life to save ours) was keeping abreast of her, so that with our guns we could keep the Japs away in her last moments, and give her men a chance to jump. "The last to leave her was Sergeant Ser-geant Leonard Coleman, her turret gunner we could see him working his .50's. but now he left his turret. We saw him go by the side window, and he was struggling to put on his parachute which he hadn't worn in that cramped top turret, for it would have interfered with his sighting and shooting struggling to get his arms through it like a jacket among those licking flames. We saw him go back to the rear escape hatch, saw him drop through it with his clothes afire, saw him jerk the cord he must have done it immediately, because be-cause by the time he had cleared the flaming tail by twenty feet, we saw his chute crack tight-open. But then almost instantly, we saw that parachute begin to billow loosely like a silk scarf in the wind, be-causeOh, be-causeOh, God!-we saw something else We saw the poor guy had had to jump without having time to buckle the belt strap of his parachutethe para-chutethe price he paid for staying stay-ing in his turret for a few last shots at Zeros, protecting the others while they jumped. Maybe he figured he could hold the ends of the belt together to-gether with his hands. Maybe his hands were so burned he couldn't work the clasp. (TO BE CONTINUED) Jybe liaison was a good ier Straaten noticed I'd I getting a car getting Jeld I'd been spending I salary on taxis getting I business done and the IS a Dutch staff car with ft the wheel reported to jphoteL They assigned 16 duration of the war. his point another sub-fed sub-fed up with a hard-luck as one of ours which through the Jap block-toegidor, block-toegidor, with a load Passengers most of 1 knew, who had lost and been left when we out of the Philippines. r' roaring into the ho-y ho-y were sick of fiddling c'ataan with rifles, and to get into the air wtion to which, they'd UP for days under waging wa-ging little tin cigar 'j imagine how a pilot t. Here they were n a big luxurious ho- I was working the top turret gun and could see what was happening on the third Fort. Tarakan. Well, we hit it. And of course we do some damage. But it's a big force the Navy doesn't dare go in. We have only a handful hand-ful of Forts, so the Japs keep coming. com-ing. "But we're desperate, and so are the Dutch. Their entire bomber force now consisted of eight old B-10's (a 1934 model Martin twin-engine twin-engine bomber), which were based at Balikpapan. These boys knew if the Japs were ever to be stopped, it had to be now, to give our reinforcements re-inforcements time to get in if we were going to get any. So that afternoon after-noon they made their last desperate stab damaging that Jap fleet of course, but not stopping it. And just as these Dutch bombers were coming in to land on Balikpapan Field, they were hit by carrier-based carrier-based Zeros and every plane destroyed. de-stroyed. Now the Dutch had noth-ins. noth-ins. and everything depended on our and girls. They , to Pieces, and a" the girls in the place " a chance with them . B"t in between they 01 news. e they had me in liai-; liai-; 1 ow. and they said, ? Merits like that, the : .was on Corregidor. "my had the Navy r,d of a tunnl sted into the oth-oni oth-oni were so strained irvf cmmu- ;thiS Daiquiri rum wmuch lalk about? foem quieted down : gtrba?ng- They 'CIS cau 'rorh Marg0 came JS?1 .;- war fob td de ButFrank n though he wasn't Soo7, VaCation' 80 lmutPngonetodofor hL ,cm11 tell he inhh that worried un- vo,Ce. ihadbeen told tee he would Forts. "So the next day they put out from Malang to strike at the Japs in Macassar, and if possible sink a carrier. But what happened on that j mission should not be my story. For I wasn't there. Two of our Sky Queens died that day in battle and I didn't see it. It doesn't happen often. Plenty of them had come home crippled. Others were beached, like Shorty Wheless' plane. Many others have cracked up when fog shrouded the field. But we'd lost only five by enemy action, and rarely rare-ly have the Japs seen one fall. Colin crashed through the overcast near Clark Field, so they didn't see him they saw Adams, but not Major Robinson. Seldom do our own boys ever see the old Queens go down in battle. So you tell it," said Frank, and here he looked at Sergeant Boone, the gunner. "I saw it," said the Gunner, and I can tell you how they die. "It began like this. Nine of us , had taken off from Malang to Ma- j cassar Strait to look for carriers. We had only started, we were about sixty miles off the coast, slowly climbing-had reached 7,000 feet-when feet-when we noticed some fighters in a tight formation. We assumed that they were P-40's. but we weren't taking tak-ing any chances, because there seemed to be quite a gang of them- , maybe some reinforcements had r- i |