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Show ff (SdDED IS MY mm II , CO-PILOT ffiT ssV Col. Robert L. Scoff wn.u. release came! The clouds built up so black and high and thick that you could no longer go around them or over them you had to just get on instruments instru-ments and bore through. In some ways, though, it was a relief for there In the safety of God's elements ele-ments the Japs couldn't bother our unarmed ships. Many times I heard the remark that there was always something good in everything even bad weather. I can hear still some of those pilots griping, saying they never thought the day would come when they'd be out looking for bad weather. But it was the truth. With the Jap fighter ships all over Burma now, it was comforting to know that there were rain clouds to dodge into with the transports. On April 26, the AVG finally had to leave Loiwing, due to the failure of the air-warning net to the South. They moved on back to Paoshan by Mengshih, and finally to Kunming. One day about that time I went over to see General Chennault, for I had a question I wanted to ask him one that I'd carried on my mind ever since I'd been shanghaied off the "dream mission." I still wanted to fight. Though this Ferry Com- I ' ' I Lieut. Gen. Joseph ("Vinegar Joe") Stilwell, one of the most popular popu-lar generals in the United States army, who has seen a lot of fighting on the Chinese front. mand was important, I'd been trained for a fighter pilot. And here I was, just sitting up there in a transport, like a clay pigeon for the Japanese. I still remembered that for nine years I had been too young; then when war came I was suddenly told I was too old to be a fighter pilot. When had I been the right age? I wanted to tell General Chennault that story. At the great age of thirty-four, I just didn't consider that I was too old to fly fighter planes and with his help I meant to prove it. Even with only one fighter ship in the sky with our transports, I know I could give the boys in the transports just a little more confidence. con-fidence. Besides, I kind of thought I had a date with destiny, .so to speak or at least a date with a Jap somewhere over there in Burma. I desperately wanted to slide in behind be-hind one of those enemy bombers or fighters and shoot him down. Finally I had my chance to tell the story of my ambitions to General Gen-eral Chennault. Busy as he was, he listened to my case, and even as I talked I admired the great man more and more. Here, I knew, was a great officer and leader as well as a great pilot. Here was an American Amer-ican who was a General in the Chinese Chi-nese Army, held by the Chinese in admiration and respect a soldier who could see the problems that his modern war imposed on land armies as well as on navies and air power. Here, I knew, was genius. I told the General that I wanted one single P-40 to use in India and Burma. I knew they were scarce, but I would promise him that nothing noth-ing would happen to it, and the instant in-stant he needed the ship I would fly it back to him in China. The General Gen-eral smiled. I'm sure he was thinking think-ing back and wondering whether, if he were in my position, he wouldn't have begged for the same chance. He didn't give me some excuse that he well might have used that the P-40's belonged to the Chinese Government, that it would have been against regulations, and so forth. General Chennault knew that I would use that "shark." as we called the P-40's, against the Japs. He made his own regulations regula-tions then; what did it matter who killed the Japs and who used the P-40's so long as they were being used (or China? By the twinkle in his eyes I knew that I had won my case. The General Gen-eral said, "Some Forties are on the way from Africa now. You take the next one that comes through. Use it as long as you want to." That's the way I got the single fighter plane that was to work out of Assam. With anxious eyes I waited, looking look-ing to the West for the next "sharks" to come to India. Three P-40E's or Kittyhauks came to us from Africa on April 29. Two went on to Kunming for the AVG, but Number 41-1496 stayed with me. It was mine, and I was as proud of it as of the first bicycle my father had given me. All through the I read the technical files and learned every little item about the Allison engine and the engine controls. I memorized the armament section of the book, and by morning I was ready to put theory into practice and test it out. That morning I found a painter. Buying red and white paint from the village, I had him paint the shark's mouth on the lower nose of the Cur-tiss Cur-tiss Kittyhawk. On that afternoon of April 30, I remember that as I waited for the paint to dry, I walked round and round my ship, admiring the graceful lines, a feeling feel-ing of pride in my heart. I gloried in the slender fuselage, in the knifelike knife-like edges of the little wings. The sharp nose of the spinner looked like an arrow to me the nose that sloped back to the leering shark's mouth. At sight of the wicked-looking blast tubes of the six fifty-calibre guns in the wings, I felt my chest expand another inch. This was shark-nosed dynamite, all right but even then I did not quite realize what a weapon this fighter ship could be when properly handled. I don't know how long I walked around the fighter admiring it and caressing its wicked-looking body. I know the paint on the shark's mouth hadn't dried yet but I'd held the suspense as long as I could. This was as if I were rolling old sherry around on my tongue; sometime I had to really taste it. Now, stepping step-ping on the walkway of the left wing, I threw first one leg and then the other over the side of the fuselage and slid into the little cockpit of the fighter. As I adjusted the rudder pedals and fastened my safety belt, I primed the engine a few shots. Turning on the toggle, switches, I energized and engaged the starter with my foot, and now I heard the Allison break into a steady roar as I moved the mixture control from "idle cutoff." Out in front of me a long distance, it seemed the heavy, eleven-foot, three-bladed prop became be-came a gray blur in my vision. An Allison, or any high-powered engine, doesn't have to warm up, and idling will soon foul the plugs. I was taxy. ing almost as soon as the engine settled down to the steady roar. Very proudly I taxied out for my first take-off in the new Kittyhawk. All around me on the airdrome I could feel the jealous eyes of every American and British pilot, even those of the earth-bound coolies or at least my ego thought it felt their looks. During the test flight over the dark green acres of Assam tea gardens, gar-dens, sweeping low over the Brahmaputra Brah-maputra and then climbing steeply for the Naga Hills, I contemplated with keen anticipation the wonderful days that lay ahead. Here was no defenseless transport, no lumbering and unwieldy four-engine bomber here was a fighting weapon, with a heart and a soul like the other combat com-bat ships. But more than that, here was an instrument of war with a distinct individuality, a temperamental tempera-mental devil of the skies. Truly like a beautiful woman, it went smoothly and sweetly at times; and then, as speed increased, it might yaw dangerously dan-gerously as the pressures built up. Again, it could become completely unstable. It had to be flown every second of the time; ignore it for one second and there was no automatic auto-matic pilot to keep it on course, no co-pilot to help you it would fall away and very soon would be out of control. Yes, like a beautiful woman, wom-an, it demanded constant attention. atten-tion. There were no extra members mem-bers in the crew to worry about, and here in Assam there were no other fighter ships to worry- about. We were both isolated individuals. When I had landed and had taxied back to my niche in the heavy jungle trees surrounding the field, I climbed out and reverently patted the hip on the cowling. The P-40 was fast becoming a personality to me. Next day I tested my guns and dropped aluminum-powder practice bombs, bombs that leave a splash of aluminum paint on the ground or an aluminum slick on the water where they hit, in order to show the pilot how near he has come to the target. I aimed at the black snags in the river with the guns, then came around again and tried to dive and glide-bomb the snags with the little bombs. I was trying to train myself, trying to make up for the four years that I had been away from pursuit aviation and from tactical tac-tical training in the art of killing. I needed a lot of this gunnery and bombing, for my life was very soon1 to depend on it. j I'll never forget the first time I pressed the trigger of my guns and heard the co-ordinated roar of the six fifty-calibre machine guns. Just by pressing a small black button below be-low the rubber grip on my stick 1 could make three lines of orange tracers from each wing converge out j ahead of my fast-moving fighter and meet on the snags in ihe Brahma-putra. Brahma-putra. Nearly a hundred shots s second those six Fifties threw out, and the muddy river turned to foam nfar the targets. The sense of their power impressed me as the recoil slowed me many miles per hour in my dive; I could fee! my head snap forward from the deceleration. Sometimes when the guns on only one side would fire, the unequal kicks from the recoil would almos' j turn the ship. (TO BE CON'TINTED) I The rtory thus far: Robert Scott, a West Point graduate, begins pursuit train. Lug at Panama after winning bis wings at tf;"ield, Texas. When the war coines'to. us he Is an Instructor in California, Cali-fornia, and fearing he will always be an Instructor he writes to many generals pleading for a chance at combat flying, and at last the opportunity comes. He says goodby to his wife and baby and leaves for Florida, where h picks up bis Flying Fortress. He flies to India where for some time he Is a ferry pilot, flying supplies Into Burma, but he does not Uke this Job. They By over bombed and burning burn-ing Chinese towns as Burma falls. After Burma Is In the hands of Japs he meets General Stilwell and his party. CHAPTER X Back at the field I found that Payne had loaded the transport with forty sick or wounded Ghurkas. In fact, we had to keep more from getting get-ting aboard by threatening them with our guns, for after all, we had the same small field for taking off we'd had for landing. Johnny swung the ship into the wind and we were off in some six hundred feet. We went in many times again, after the Ghurkas had lengthened the runway run-way slightly, and we finally moved out most of the soldiers before the monsoon rains ran us out. But I'll never forget Captain Payne's feat in that first landing of a transport at Fort Hertz. Following the defeat of the Allied armies down in southern and central cen-tral Burma, the refugees poured to the North and to, the Northwest. Those to the Northwest tried to walk out by the Lido Road, which was nothing more tnan a game trail. Many of them died, and of those who came out many died after entering enter-ing India. I heard stories of bodies bod-ies by the hundreds, almost buried in the mud, all along the trail from Burma to India. Those who kept coming North from Shwebo up the railroad to Myitkyina finally wound up on Myitkyina's small field, anxiously anx-iously waiting for aerial transportation transporta-tion over the remaining one hundred and ninety miles to Dinjan. Some of the loads that ferry pilots packed into those DC-3's would have curdled the blood of the aeronautical aeronauti-cal engineers who designed the ship. The C-47, or DC-3, as the airlines called the Douglas transport, was constructed to carry a full load of twenty-four passengers or six thousand thou-sand pounds. The maximum altitude alti-tude was expected to be about 12,000 feet but we later went a minimum of 18,000 across the hump, and sometimes some-times we had to go to 21,500 to miss the storms and ice. Carrying the refugees, we broke all the rules and regulations because we had to. There were women and children, pregnant women, and women so old that they presumably couldn't have gone to the altitude that was necessary to cross into India. There were hundreds hun-dreds of wounded British soldiers with the most terrible gangrenous infections. At the beginning we used to load the wounded first, those who were worst off; but later, when we realized that with our few transports trans-ports we'd never get them all out, we took only the able-bodied. That was a hard decision to make, but we looked at it finally from the theory the-ory that those must be saved who could some day fight again. I remember one of the bravest men I have ever seen, who helped us load and control the refugees on the field at Myitkyina. He was a big, bearded Sikh officer, one of the aristocratic British colonials. He must have been six-feet-two, a fine looking man. He worked religiously religious-ly with the refugees and soldiers, always efficient, always trying to send those out who should have gone, I can see him now, standing there in his tattered uniform, with his turban perfectly placed on his dark head, his beard waving in the wind from the idling propellers. He would patiently herd the passengers into the transport, sometimes holding hold-ing hysterical people back physically, physical-ly, and in more crucial times pulling pull-ing his pistol, but never becoming flustered or excited. I sometimes think he was the greatest soldier I have ever seen. Day after day, as the Japs moved North and ever closer clos-er to Myitkyina, he would be there, doing hs thankless job. When "the end came, and I knew that the field would be taken in the next few hours, I went to him and explained the situation. I found, however, that he knew more about it than I knew myself. The refugees had told him, he said, and he knew this was the last day we could land there. So I asked him to get aboard my ship and leave for India; after all, he was an officer and could best be used when once again the British entered Burma. The Sikh officer refused with majestic ma-jestic pride. His orders had been to stay there and supervise the evac. uation of those refugees, and he considered con-sidered that trust sacred. We had to leave him, and when I last saw him he was herding the ever-increasing numbers of stricken people on to the North, towards Fort Hertz and the blind valley that led inevitably to the impassable mountains towards Tibet. I guess the Japs finally got him. But 1 know how he must have died, with that pistol in his hand, and finally just the knife and I know that several Japs died before be-fore they killed him. The winds from the Indian Ocean grew stronger, and the monsoon sea-,son sea-,son began. And oh boy, the rains |