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Show "Not by a couple of weeks vou ! weren't," said Harry Sehrieher. "the uJviK:itor, indignantly. "Because , whrt about me?" "We weren't worried about you. "arry," said Frank with a grin. we thought you were dead. Way back in the Philippines, when Jack Adams' plane didn't come back to Del Monte Field from that mission. We had given you up months ago. what had you been doing, anyway?" "Trying to get out of the damned Philippines," said Harry. "And I didn't manage it until the day before General MacArthur did-the sixteenth six-teenth of March I think it was." "Harry was the last man to come," said Frank, "and now that the gang was together we could start doing business. You see Lieutenant General Brett, who had been commanding com-manding the United Nations Air Force under British General Wa-vell, Wa-vell, who was supreme commander, needed a plane to take him around the war zone. His B-24 had been lost at Broome, remember. Colonel Colo-nel Eubank recommended me to General Brett as his personal pilot and senior air aide, and I selected the crew. Of course when it came to picking the plane itself, the General Gen-eral ordered a D, because all the E's with tail guns were needed for combat and he wanted those planes saved for the boys who would be going out on missions. "But when it came to which D we would pick, it had to be the Swoose, priority list, but if your name isn't called by two o'clock, I advise you to get out of here quick, and the best way you can, even if you have to walk and it's a long walk.' "He turned out to be right I fooled around until 2:80 and then, when my name hadn't been called,' nine of us decided we'd string along with a civilian contractor who'd offered of-fered us a lift. He had thirty men and five Ford trucks, and said he was headed south down the coast for the nearest town, called Port Hed-land, Hed-land, two hundred miles away. The Army had some emergency rations hidden in the woods, so we helped ! ourselves to enough of those to keep I us on the trip. "Then I began to find out about Australia. Those guys are like our Westerners pioneer types, except bigger. When we got twenty miles out of Broome the road ended entirely. en-tirely. After that nothing at all. We had to push those trucks through sand, and make long detours around salt-water marshes. Even our drinking drink-ing water had to be carried in the trucks. They talked about passing three ranches. We did, and I discovered dis-covered they were the only three houses between Broome and Port Hedland. A million acres is nothing to an Australian. The country looks like West Texas, and is covered thinly thin-ly with what they call gum trees. They're like eucalyptus in the States. The only sign of life was kangaroos we'd see half a dozen a , day. The little ones are called wal- IS this n: Ueut- Co1' f 3V It ol '"lvi"s Fortre-ss' 'ftl ly "en the Jap. a while 6V"1' ,or she1' .M ma Forts' 11 a In the cround. After I JaV hat l left ol J " , to Java, where the, 'bisons ever the Philip. " ' ,S 'nV8ded W ,.Mble The Dutch ren- "lSla, ey will first " ,! ..km. "hich Is done. reach Broom, air-t air-t tod eme ln- CHAPTER XX ..j, the old sheep-rancher rare of this shack and also Jneral store strolled over. Lan to talk. sny trouble around here? un. h(said. 'Jap planes come ("lD a while. Over here, ,s over Wyndham and Port too, they say.' I do you mean, once in a last one was Just last night, mention it,' he said. 'Came r high, early in the morn-breakfast morn-breakfast I mentioned it cer in charge of the field Iman, just out from the ( bid you know, sir, the Japs L plane over last night?' t on to say that we had :t of stuff here, and while ,' the crews were terribly tbe it should be moved out. ened, and because I was his hesitation somehow an-, an-, But he finally said may-a may-a point there. And think-it, think-it, he finished his break-las break-las glad when we got out after breakfast for Mel-irked Mel-irked most of the night on is, and then went to sleep sngar shack. I slept fit-;e fit-;e at five, to get an early didn't seem healthy to me of the rest of us. After a mess hot beans and cof-?id cof-?id rations we went out to at six and stood by. had asked the officer In fen he could take off. But Skiles to understand we cuees just like the others, were given our passenger fiuld go. i stood around the plane o'clock until 9:10, waiting list and those orders. At :e Sergeant Britt happened ;? and hollered: 'Make a fellows here come some ve of us who were stand-"f stand-"f the plane dropped into a : fifty feet away, ero peeled off and strafed ess with incendiaries. It re immediately, then the i on down and strafed a J it afire. Then it turned because there was no other left. Every Ev-ery plane, even of the same model, handles a little differently. I'd flown our D's out from the States, through the Philippines and Java, and I've always al-ways felt the old Swoose was just a few miles faster and answered the controls a little more smoothly than the others. "So now, as pilot and crew of the commanding Air Force General's plane, we in the Swoose were making mak-ing weekly trips into the war zone from Headquarters far down in Melbourne, Mel-bourne, up to Darwin and Port Moresby, which were then far-flung outposts on the battle line. The General Gen-eral would average sixty hours a month in the air thirty of them at least in this combat zone. To get him in and out of it, the Swoose often hit 150 air hours per month. "At Moresby it was never safe to leave the Swoose on the ground by day. We'd sneak in at night, leave the General, and be off back to Townsviile by dawn, coming in to pick him up again the next night. Sometimes the General would just j have time to scramble aboard while we cleared the field as the alarm sounded. He was bound he wouldn't lose the Swoose. "We now began to get a peek out over the top at the broad picture of this Far Eastern war. There were differences over strategy, but it was never Australians versus ' Americans. Ameri-cans. The cleavage was ground-minded ground-minded versus air-minded thinking. The Australian air generals saw eye to eye with our American air lead- ng in directly over our r the rear, strafed them ' repeated this six times, ; a 20-millimeter cannon at caved in our hole and cov-' cov-' til dirt. Sergeant Britt first hol- big B-24 loaded with 1 People had just cleared ''I When the Zeros hit, it w the ocean headed for I had hardly had time to eels up and there was no fee for them to swing a eir own defense when a t up with it and dropped sea. iergeants managed to get 1 swam for thirty-two :e of them giving up in shore. The other told us :ai been like inside there bullets came smashing -at packed crowd, and a ;Js later when those dying M were all struggling not the water came in. JaJ the Japs got another 5 ground fit had been the fral Brett himself used), " DC-2 and a DC-3. a but the worst were the J tying boats they caught ""arbor. About forty or e were killed on them, fflen and children. b one Dutchman swim ;ng his wife by the hair. 'er half of her face : DIwn away, and she " saw another woman ,D ie wing of one of the II was burning. She had 7 "ms, and was ready ;na swim ashore, when a in the back and ',.mt0 halves. They both "to the water, but the ; ,7 half which held the go of it. ''"J!.0 were left were al-with al-with rage. One Zero was 'L chman wh st0d ' hangar holding a .30- ' . J"" 8Cr0SS h'S arm- H k ' U scorcbed right a. i cut he never noticed that Broome's anti- "Cm consisled of 3ust -T, 'ber n. The Japs . .u """J' minutes- thing. 'i "mr 'n charge told I 7cl Planes in between Clg, .but we dont "ere compiling a The only sign of life was kangaroos. kanga-roos. We'd see half a dozen a day. labies and the others are big blues. They hunch low and run through the scrubby gum trees. I got tired living out of cans, so I borrowed a gun and shot a big blue, and the Aussies showed me how to eat it. You throw away all but the tail, which you make soup of, and it tastes like thick chicken broth. "Finally I got to Melbourne, where the Air Force was gathering again and found they had me down as a deserter, but it wasn't any trouble getting that explained." "I got out of Java by boat," said the Gunner. "They loaded us on a train at Jockstrap and took us to some town whose name I never did learn, where a Dutch freighter was waiting to take out fifteen hundred of us. They told us we were bound for Perth, a town in Southwest Australiaabout Aus-traliaabout the same location and size as San Diego in the States. Alongside us at the dock was a troopship of Aussies from Singapore. Before that they'd been in Egypt-hadn't Egypt-hadn't been home for years. Their boat was bound for Adelaide, way round on the other side of Australia-same location as Miami. But lots of them lived in Perth. When they heard we were going there, they all skipped ship to come aboard with us We divided our food and lent them our mess kits. They'd lost everything at Singapore. They probably caught hell for it, but they didn't give a damn. "The first day out we sighted a Jap plane, but it stayed up for a while, watching us. We had stuck machine guns in the belay. ng-pm holes, and kept the soldiers hidden below decks so they wouldn t know we were carrying troops. Our gunners gun-ners were hidden, too. But when this Jap started down to strafe, one of our gunners gave the show away by opening fire too soon-otherw.se we would have got him. "We zigzagged for five days, and then at Perth were loaded into a troop train for Melbourne. I wes im he coach next the eng.ne. and the Australians couldn't do too much for us. The engineer drew a can of ho water from his boiler and made us supply, apologizing because wasn't stronger. I guess I was about the last one of us to arrive." ers. Likewise the infantry generals gener-als of both armies thought alike. "And there was much to the infantry in-fantry side of the argument. After Java fell, Australian civilians were panicky. Thousands of Australian boys had gone out to die in Africa and Singapore. Now the danger had suddenly rolled down on the Homeland. Home-land. They wanted all the troops they could get right down there in that lower right-hand (southeast) corner of their continent, where ninety per cent of its population lives. "Not in New Guinea, or Tulagi, or Guadalcanal, or even in Darwin, which, although on their own continent, conti-nent, is to the average Australian as remote as the Aleutians seem to New Yorkers. They think of Darwin Dar-win as a tiny outpost separated from, them by thousands of miles of impassable im-passable desert. They wanted the soldiers near the great cities of Sydney Syd-ney and Melbourne, where they could hear the marching and the military bands. "This was also sound infantry strategy. The only populous parts of Australia are down in this southeast corner. We didn't yet have many battalions, supply problems were enormous, so our infantry generals agreed with theirs and with their civil leaders. They wanted to keep the army near valuable objectives, not scatter it out across seas and jungle islands, where supply problems prob-lems would become formidable. j But we of the Air Forces (both Australian and American) felt that j to defend this continent we must build our fighter fields not in Australia Aus-tralia itself, but on the outlying islands. is-lands. We'd defended Java by pounding pound-ing the Japs1 from Borneo. The Japs had not dared send their transports and landing barges through until they'd taken our advance bases and held air control over the Java Sea. "The Australian Air Force was as anxious to move into this outlying island chain as we were. Early in Aoril they'd wanted to seize Lae on New Guinea, before the Japs had had time to dig in on its north coast. At that time the Japs had only about four hundred men in the area, and it would have been easy. But we lacked the men and the ships-the Japs pressed on and pres. enUy took Tulagi in the Solomons, threatening our supply lines home. I (TO BE CONTINUED) |