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Show GOD IS MY , CO-PILOT ,Col. Robert L.Scott w.NllBtl dM hi- After graduating HMrf W " ' e( d lieutenant, : i i, wimi Kcy Us UP purt fly";B- ,w he ll too lf H- appea., to Bfer, cbanc. to fly J,e"f d anMlv get! a break. V!LLm to India, where he W' v o loi but "e not ,,erryA fffWthiO chen-wtytaw chen-wtytaw to fly an ll' "one man r force" lm later be il made com-l"'1 com-l"'1 nt the 23rd Fighter I .toT-U friend. Maj. close. I began to wonder, and that evening as darkness settled over the river I went out to watch their tireless tire-less labor. Suddenly there was a movement among the rlvermen to tighten the four cables that tied the fighter to the barge, and I saw the canopy and the prop of Johnny'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; Ps I tried to talk to the officer with me I felt my lip tremble with emo-tion. emo-tion. But the Chinese never cheered or got excited; they remained as stoical as ever. Thpv m.j . 'N.U. RE.LE.ASl WlJk. that was a credit to the greatest country , the world? Towards the middle of August, as our pilots died '" 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 graded one for ten. We lost because ue Jap could replace his lost Ptoneg; we could not. It was more nan losing ships-sometimes our pilots pi-lots died in the unequal battles. One day in August, Johnny Alison was leading six P-40's to intercept a larger number of Japanese coming com-ing in against Hengyang from both Hankow and Canton. When interception inter-ception was made, the Japs had fifty-three planes. They were in three waves, so of course Johnny didn't get them all together 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. Re dove through nine of them, and his six planes shot down four of the enemy. In his second attack, after diving away and climbing climb-ing back into 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 numbers num-bers 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, but thought the closest one was another P-40. Too late he realized the error and went to help the pilot, 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 J wv.nvu know that they were going to be successful, suc-cessful, and had merely been wait-ing wait-ing for the crazy Americans to quit playing around with all the strange gadgets. They had floated the 9100 pounds of P-40, and now they towed it to shore. Our salvage crew put the wheels down in the water, and with the aid of about 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 dam-aged fighter could be installed, and more time had to go by before we got it completely worked over. But in the end it flew again in combat com-bat against the Japanese-thanks to labor of good mechanics, and the the bravery of a gallant officer, the unswerving patience and devotion of those brave Chinese coolies and riv-ermen riv-ermen who had never heard of the word "impossible." 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 m,mr elided to me field with engine, and then we 'Say that he couldn't make I End was It to U down . xhe moon made u Eftu but even at that I knew Jl'had to be mighty good lucky Then I wondered or not he was wounded. Mei against the light from Sbombers he had shot down. M looked awfully low. He V over the Chinese Junks on "m md I saw the splash as XwHk its whecis up, hit the gg, Down on the ground i E Mi engine give one more P at with a surge of power .Mhfrom full gun and a prop M.'ci,it lifted him over the !!& masts of the junks and Jlevel off to skid across the of the river. r.e jj, and landed now, for M Crew had gotten the IE boundary lights get out the runway as well ai the miters. We gathered togeth-Kk togeth-Kk the boys who had stayed .round, and talked about the Mult. I remember Tex Hill Milt head and saying, "I'm ihnnj didn't make it. Dog-pM Dog-pM wai a good boy." We all Jinking in our hearts. We Mud we kind of prayed too. Captain Wang, our salvage to see If he could get any Major Alison. We made our Jutand kept waiting on the gSust when we had really A hope, we heard the sound explosions. All of us ran he alert shack, to see the H sight that we ever saw, sson had entered the field. Aese sentry had passed the Hf people and was himself Has thuu.1. in the air calling H-ding-hao." In the midst Hcess'on and surrounded by shooting Chinese firecrack-jBlebration, firecrack-jBlebration, was a sedan chair Bn the backs of the villagers Myang. And Johnny Alison he sedan chair smiling. burned. Johnny watched for a chute to open, but nothing happened. 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 had failed to see him do it, but we suspected that we were merely being optimistic. The farther far-ther 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 towards the nearest village, carrying carry-ing an object lashed to poles, and carrying it in the old way of the East, with the poles over their shoulders. shoul-ders. 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 Lieutenant Minor, I Alison had a couple of i his hands and legs where s of the Japs' explosive bul-hithim. bul-hithim. He'd been slightly n forehead when, on land-N land-N river, his head had hit 7 metal of the gun-sight, icar that would leave would imon one after the war, for ihter pilot flies along with I just inches behind that iteel that contains the lights HI of the modern gun-Just gun-Just tiie ilightest accident out there to split your head. J Johnny why in hell he close to the bomber forma-1 forma-1 he grinned and said, "I ed I'd miss one of them." alvage crew worked and it the job of raising the P-40 bottom of the Siang-Kiang. the fourteen-foot depth and 1 current, they had more km engineering with the 's of our i! lating equipment wmplish. Under Captain Wnese-American and in our ley floated barges out to and tried to tow it ashore s Then they lowered steel W I them to the ship, tried we water from the sub-and sub-and thus float the ev'rything failed. all u. "My armament sergeant and the crew chief of the fighter." the houseboys better and more efficient ef-ficient ways to do things. But they never changed, and finally I realized real-ized that they were changing me. Now in raising this ship they had used a method three thousand years old. I have read since how they had employed it in Burma, long years before, when the great temple bell weighing over thirty tons was thrown into the deep lake to save it from the heathen. When the heathen heath-en 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 bam-boo 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 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 working and watching for material to come over that road with which to fight the enemy. Waiting patiently, as though they knew that some day 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 with the ship, for there was hardly a mark on his body. Wrapping Minor in his parachute, we took him back in a rickety Chinese Chi-nese bus that we commandeered. 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 Japanese plane. We took Minor's body to the Catholic Cath-olic mission across the river, and bought one of the old, ancient-looking Chinese coffins, made out of wood about six inches thick, with corners that turned up like a pagoda roof; they must weigh two hundred pounds. We put Minor's body inside in-side and held a simple service; for you have to work fast in temperatures tempera-tures of a hundred and eight, when the humidity is just about a hundred. 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 robbers rob-bers and rats, and left it there to wait for the next transport to Kunming. Kun-ming. The headquarters in Yunnan is the burial ground for all of our pilots killed fighting against the Japanese. There on the plateau in Yunnan is the only memorial ground the 23rd 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 Amer-ican Air Forces. They lie there in the shadow of a little Buddhist temple tem-ple 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 pilots, digest them all, and write out a comprehensive com-prehensive report. "Ajax" was from New Jersey. He had fought for nearly two years with the Loyalists in Spain, and had shot down seven Messerschmitts and Fiats in that war; when he became aD ace in the 23rd Group he was the first man in the war who had shot down German, Italian, and Japanese Japa-nese aircraft. Ever since America had entered the war he had led a hectic existence. Months before December De-cember 7th, he had left America from California to join the AVG and General Chennault, as a Lieutenant in the Air Corps. He had been stopped in Hawaii for a month and then had received permission to con tinue on. (TO BE CONTINUED) they would have a cnance iu uguv the Japanese who have tried to exterminate ex-terminate them. 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 Yangtse or near the lakes around Nanchang. I think we realized then, as General Chennault had realized for a long time, that all these people needed was a chance, with air support sup-port for their ground armies and modern equipment for their soldiers. Our small force had put new life Into them. They had plaques embroidered em-broidered In commemoration of the battles that we fought. These would sometimes represent the American eagle holding the flags of America. Britain, Russia, and China. In Chinese Chi-nese characters would be a poetic account of the battle that the pilot or the squadron had fought. As we drove along the roads in our jeeps to the field for the alert of the Jin-bao Jin-bao " 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 Sty of equipment for the Chinese ground armies, and us over tb.it heads with adequate air support Would the day ever e vhenwe could make an attack with a force - e worts of the Amer- windlass and block-and- Chinese villagers, who their services long be- Mood by. We asked What in hell could the Waei and rivermen do if general knowledge and Ration, couldn't raise We went on and aays, and then to the per-"ewe per-"ewe said, "Okay g0 jStf? "oat raft after J bnmbo poles to Ohm, ?W mark0d th SPOt fighter had sunk. ma 5 'mpnssib'e and got on the list. But went on cheerfully with Z ZmpuU tw I to ft. e u nver " ieen fghlCr' takin with jf length otkain. WP1P',nd lash "into ?S th?Pe- Hundreds mS,s' unU1 a Pect mat to ,h , Thcn "other rn 6 fusolae a"d jww under the wing. r ar. d men "Oh th ' We second day'a |