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Show si B us my gfc (CdD-PILOT Wl YJu5Co. Robert L.Scoft The story thui lar: After (raduaUng from West Point, Robert Scott wins hit rtntt at Kelly Field and Uket up combat lying. He bai been an Instructor lor (our years when the war breaks out, and he Is told that bo Is now too old lor combat flying. Ho appeals to several Generals and Is Anally given an opportu nlty to get Into the light. He flies a bomber to India, but on arrival Is made ferry pilot and this does not suit him. After visiting General Chennault he gets Kittyhawk and soon becomes a "one man air force" In the skies over Burma. Later he Is made commanding officer ol the 23rd Fighter Group and still keeps knocking down Jap planes. He tells the story of Capt. Ellas. CHAPTER XXI When I finished the Job and pulled up again, I could barely see the last of my flight several miles away. I gradually climbed after them, forgot for-got to look around, and Just sat there, "dumb and happy." Just sat there too long over enemy terri-tor, terri-tor, without looking around every second. Without thinking about it, I bad become a straggler. In a high-powered engine, as soon s we go into combat we take military mili-tary power from the engine that is, we take as much boost as the engine en-gine will stand without "detonating," "detonat-ing," put the prop in low pitch, high speed position. As you leave the combat and the area, if you're not too excited the hand automatically automati-cally pulls the prop controls to maximum max-imum cruising position to save fuel and to keep the engine from running run-ning hot I began subconsciously to do this. Just then, very dreamily, I heard pop-pop-pop-pop-pop. I raised my head slightly, to try to see my other oth-er fighters ahead, and pulled the 41 l.l I 1. j . , ; i a 1 U1IUIUQ UOUJl JUBl luuo muie. i That popping sounded like engine ! detonation to me. Then I tensed, for I had seen that my manifold pres-i pres-i sure was barely 85 inches (on the manometer gauge), and therefore 1 could not be detonating from too tnuch boost. At the same Instant I heard again the pop-pop-pop, and became all attention in flash; my nose went down I had been cllmb-! cllmb-! tag my prop went back to low pitch and my throttle really went forward enough to cause the engine to detonate. de-tonate. A cold shiver went down my spine, there In that hot glass cage. I skidded the ship to the left and looked around as my speed built up fast. : What I saw in the sun, ahead of me, chilled me more. I saw winking wink-ing lights and the blurred outline of an airplane and not so far away. Then I saw another, and I guess there were others. I could see the orange lights winking down at me even in the glare of the sun. They were Japs firing at me, and I bad only slightly more than a thousand feet. Cold turkey and a stragglerl While I fumbled with my mike button to my radio to call Holloway and Baumler for help, I realized the futility of It I don't believe my dry throat would have made a sound anyway. I Just acted and thank the Lord, my reflexes let me do something. I turned directly towards the ships with my nose down, and pulled up firing. I know now that If I had turned away from them they would have shot me down In their cross-fire. As It was, I surprised them and went underneath them very fast and into the sun. Thus, when they looked around, I had the sun In my favor, and from that time on I was using it. But as I pulled up firing, I held the trigger down and "froze." I heard the cannon of the Zero I felt the recoil of my six funs-I felt things hit "Old Exterminator" Extermi-nator" and then I saw a cloud of black smoke in front of my nose. I shut my eyes involuntarily and dove again. Something hit my ship with the ame sound you get when you suddenly sud-denly fly into heavy rain. I opened my eyes and everything was dark. Z smelled the smoke and cordite and gasoline and thought I was on fire. Just then I realized I was still firing. I reached up, grabbed the handle, rolled' the canopy open and saw light I rolled it shut again and realized that the blackness black-ness had been caused mostly by oil on my windshield. The speed of my dive had blown most of that oft bow, and though I couldn't see very well, I could make out the horizon. With a long sigh of relief I leveled lev-eled the speeding ship over the rice (addles, and as they say In the slang of fighter stations, "I took off like a acaldcd dog." S-ed and skidded but tried not to lose speed. Looking back, I saw the smoke and oil that I had gone through, and down under un-der the place where I had been I law fire and a plume of smoke-one smoke-one Jap that wouldn't fly again. I think I was halfway home before I fully realized that I had shot It down and hadn't run Into It For twenty miles I skimmed over the paddles, "Jinking" to fool the enemy en-emy who might be pursuing, skidding skid-ding to make him miss, and watching watch-ing my boost read seventy Inches of mercury. The engine heated up and the coolant light came oa to warn me, before I eased the throttle back a little. I called AJai Baumler on the radio and told him t was hit-bad hit-bad been Intercepted, my engine was heating up and I didn't know what all wss the matter with the hip. but 1 was on course for borne and going like a bat out of hell. AJax stood by to take my position If worse things should develop and I should have to land. But the coolant light finally flickered flick-ered and went off, the engine cooled off when I got a little of the boost off and stopped abusing it And I breathed again, feeling that I'd been holding one breath for fifteen minutes. min-utes. All was clear behind me, and I gradually climbed to ten thousand and went back home to Hengyang. All the boys came out to see me. Of course Elias was missing and they'd been worried lest I was a goner too. There were cannon holes in my wings and tail; one had gone Just across the back of the canopy. There were smaller holes in the fuselage from the cockpit back to the tall; there was oil from the spinner spin-ner of the prop to the tall. Oil from your own ship can hardly get on the very tip of the nose of your ship, and this was proof that it w.s Jap oil. As we looked the plane over, I got more and more settled down from my narrow escape. But then I realized real-ized that my ship, which I had now flown in combat from April until September 2nd, was badly damaged. "Old Exterminator" was shot to pieces. We had tea in the alert shack and sent the other mission out to dive-bomb dive-bomb Nanchang and strafe the trains from Kukiang to the North towards to-wards Hankow. Also we got the Chinese net looking for Elias, and reported that I had shot down one Zero near Kukiang. General Haynes led some missions on Canton, and after fair bombing results the fighters stayed behind and engaged the enemy Zeros. Lieut. Pat Daniels shot down his K&z4 (fv. -feiiiiiiMliUi ' in " j Fighter pilots ready to take to the air on a moment's notice. They bad plenty of opportunity to fight all the time. They never had to alt on the defensive and worry. And, strangely strange-ly enough, they liked It first Jap, and Charlie Sawyer got his third. In the next raid of the bombers General Haynei again led. MaJ. Butch Morgan who the newspapers news-papers used to say was the only Yankee on General Chennault'a staff . . . "Wonder how he got thereT"-was thereT"-was leaning over the lead bomb-sight bomb-sight and directing the bombing. This objective was to burn the docks of Haiphong on the coast of Indo-China. Indo-China. The small bomber force of six B-25's went In with only three P-40's for escort, MaJ. Ed Rector led the fighters, with Lieutenant Marks on one wing and Pat Daniels on the other. Just to make the bomb load against the Japs heavier, the fighters fight-ers carried a five-hundred-pound bomb on each ship. With these they dive-bombed the docks after the bombers naa wasted inem and set them on fire. Here the attack was entirely successful; the fighter boys came back and said it was the best bombing that they bad ever seen. The bomb train bad covered the Haiphong wharves from one end to the other, and when the ships went back to their forward field to refuel and return to base, the smoke was covering the town. Rector led bis three fighters down In a strafing attack at-tack over the wharf fires and kept the Ore-fighters from working. We were brought back now from the Kweilln-Hengyang front to watch the situation in Burma and to harass the Jap to the South In Indo-Chlna. Our situation was peculiar In China we were Just about surrounded by the Japanese on all sides except to the North, toward Russia, and that was so far and over such mountains moun-tains that It seeded not to matter. To our backs was Burma, filled with Japs. To the South was Indo-Chlna and Thailand, and out to the front and Northeast were Japanese. Where In bell could you find a worse situation? But we got to fight all the time; we never had to sit on the defensive de-fensive and worry. We liked It and there was never a word of complaint 1 had to wait at Hengyang a day longer than the others, for my ship was being repaired enough for me to By It to the repair depot at Kunming. At Kunming the blow fell: the engine of "Old Exterminator" Extermina-tor" was bad and there were no more new or serviceable engines. The cannon from the Zero had damaged dam-aged the wing so badly that pullouta would be dangerous. The fuselage was peppered with over two hundred hun-dred holes from the last five months of combat But the old ship wasn't junked or salvaged, for we needed parts too badly In China. There were new planes on the way to us now in monthly Increments, but we could take this plane and put several back in commission. The scheme that we devised helped my morale greatly, for to have junked the old ship that had been my fighter for five months would have been like seeing the horse that you've ridden for twenty years cast aside and destroyed. I could remember too well that day when I landed at Hengyang and looked at the damage the ship had suffered. There had been a lump in my throat and I had felt as though my sword had been taken away. "Old Exterminator" had taken me nearly five hundred hours into combat com-bat against the enemy. That's over a hundred thousand miles and you just ask any pilot If that Isn't a long way on trips where people shoot at you. We took the guns out of the ship that General Chennault had given me in April and put them In my new P-40E. They were well broken In, and the Armament Officer, Captain Hoffman, who had been with the AVG and In my squadron in Panama Pana-ma seven years before, bad worked them Into perfection. I had had no Jams or stoppages in over a month. The landing-gear we put on another ship;' the instruments were scattered scat-tered throughout the group; the armor ar-mor plate was taken out to make a hot-cake griddle for the mess. All parts of the fighter were cannibalized, cannibal-ized, and In a month were spread out over eighteen P-40's in the or ganization. I remember especially that the automatic fuel-pump was put on a P-40B, which permitted the lighter ship to go higher than It had ever gone before, and on its second flight with the booster pump, the pilot, Lieut. T. R. Smith, shot down a Japanese observation plane over Kunming. ' I never did go out and look at the old engine that had come out of my first fighter. After all, an engine is exchangeable anyway, and we get used to different ones. The shot-up shell of the fuselage, and the wing that had held me up over a hundred thousand miles of enemy country, I didn't want to see again. I Just thought of my six fifty-caliber guns flying with me in my new fighter as the real soul of "Old Exterminator." And I thought of the hundreds of parts from Air Corps number 41-1458 that were helping to keep eighteen ships of our Group In the air. For the men of the Group, the cannibalized ship had been a help, out to me u naa Deen a iraamon to keep. In my mind, no matter how long I myself might be fighting In China, "Old Exterminator" would be on all those flights some of It would be on every mission that we flew. And thus it would fly forever. On September 23, Ma.' Ed Rector led the assault of a flight down to raid Hanoi In Indo-Chlna. I led the support and we kept a thousand feet above the first echelon. Our mission was to escort ten bombers for the bombardment of Gla Lam airdrome. We went South and "topped-off" our gas load at a secret base, then routed our flight to the West of Laokay to keep from alerting alert-ing the Jap warning net Until we were close to Hanoi, we kept well West of the railroad that led to our objective. Even with these precautions to keep from alerting the enemy, we found the Japanese 1-45' s in the air and over the field as we came In from the West The twin-engine fighters absolutely Ignored our fight ers ana maai runs on me oomoers, but they didn't get very far with1 their orders. Rector took the first four P-40's In on the leading Japs and hit them five hundred yards behind our bombers, who were at-1 ready dropping their eggs. I saw I two of Ed's flight gang-up on the first steeply climbing 1-43, but before be-fore they could shoot It down Daniels Dan-iels went In fast to within a tew yards of the Jsp and shot him down In flames. As the ship exploded I thought Pat Daniels' plane was on fire too, they were so close. We all confirmed the first ship for the esger Dartlela, who was from Van Nuys, California. The bombers were on the way home now, and we sighed with relief re-lief and tried to catch the Japs. Ed Rector took the next ship he got his sights on and blew It apart Then he fought all the way to the ground with two others. Marks shot down one, and the others were about equally divided. I caught a Bight of three I-43'i going go-ing hell-bent for the bombers from below and to the rear, and shot the last one In the formation down with a short burst It was point-blank range and occurred very fast I first saw a thin trail of gray smoke that looked like the usual condensation cloud that forms behind the wings of fighter ships doing maneuvers at high altitude, when the atmospherle conditions are Just right And the Berne poured from the right engine It spread up over the cockpit and stretched thirty feet back in the slipstream. slip-stream. I moved up towards the second enemy fighter and didn't lee the fiamer go down. (TO M CONTINVKD) |