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Show 51 (SdDED IS MY W r CQ-PHILOT ITf jr3VbCol. Robert L.Scott W-NU RELEASE fSWVak. from the interior of China to our base at Kunming. It's almost a saga, for Holloway was feted, wined and dined in the primitive fashion of the remote village people, who were tribesmen called "Miaows." Though Bruce was only fifty minutes min-utes by plane from Kunming, his mode of travel by sedan chair, donkey don-key and water buffalo required three weeks. From the moment he rode into headquarters on the last buffalo buf-falo he had hired, he became known as the "Lochinvar of the Salween." Later Lieutenant Welborn was shot down farther to the South. Welborn Wel-born had gotten out of his burning plane two hundred miles South of Paoshan, and his trip out of the rough country was the longest of any man that was lost. I remember that when he reached the first village from which he could get word to us, he sent a message that at first sounds facetious, until you understand under-stand the conditions under which one travels in the interior of China; then you realize that he was conservative. conserva-tive. His message read: "Landed safely such and such a sector. My motto is Kunming by Christmas." It was then September, and Welborn Wel-born beat his original estimate. He required fifty-four days to travel two hundred miles across the trails of southwestern Yunnan. Our truck-strafing caused us to lose several planes and two pilots, but we cost the Japs lots of material. ma-terial. Towards the first of October, there were skeletons of enemy trucks and tanks from the Salween to Kutkai, near Lashio. The Jap u ; fm'km mkam ill ?mmi s ttmsmmm fm:M Li VlS . .v, J Gen. Caleb Haynes, who went to China to head General Chcnnault's bombers. Tue thus far: After graduaHne from s'OfJ"0int, Robert' Scott wins his wings a ftelly Field and takes up combat Bying. He has been an instructor for four years when the war breaks out, and Is told that he is now too old for combat flying. He appeals to several Generals and Is finally given an opportunity to get Into the Bght. He flies a bomber to India, but on arrival Is made a ferry pilot and this does not suit him. After paying a visit to Gen. Chennault he gets a Kitty-hawk Kitty-hawk and soon becomes a "one man air force" over Burma. Later he Is made CO. of the 23rd Fighter Group and still keeps knocking down Jap planes. In one of these fights his "Old Exterminator" rets badly mauled up and Is condemned. CHAPTER XXII With my first burst the next ship rolled over and dove, with one engine en-gine shot-up. By now I had caught up to the lead 1-45, who was shooting shoot-ing at the bombers from exceedingly exceeding-ly long range. I methodically aimed for his engines, putting a short burst into one and then into the other. The Jap must have felt the fire, for he went into a steep, climbing turn which incidentally is very good if you have a ship that will outclimb your opponent. I thought this climbing climb-ing turn might be a trick; so I watched closely for him to turn on me. But when he rolled over he dove not for me but for the clouds. I kept going after him and must have put two hundred shots into him before be-fore he got out of my sight in the cumulus cloud. Pieces had begun to come from his fuselage, and smoke was trailing behind. I believe his engines were hit and were failing, for the props seemed to be "wind-milling." "wind-milling." And yet I could only claim it as a "probable," for I didn't see it catch fire or crash. We got all our bombers back, of course, and the pictures showed very good results for the bombing of Gia Lam field. We claimed nine of the thirteen enemy fighters definitely defi-nitely destroyed, and we hadn't even gotten a hole in one of our P-40's. In our opinion the new 1-45 had turned out to be a flop for the Jap. Either it was not all they expected or the pilots didn't know how to use the fast-climbing ship. Sometimes I noticed no-ticed that when I got on the tail of one, instead of climbing away from me and he could easily have climbed away from a P-40 he tried to dive away from me, which is definitely defi-nitely a very poor thing to try with your opponent in a fast-diving Kitty-hawk. Kitty-hawk. Just as the General had been expecting, ex-pecting, heavy movement began in late September along the Burma Road, from Lashio North towards Lungling. The Japs were seen by our observation to be moving many trucks filled with troops. They were evidently going to renew the attempt at-tempt to cross the Salween that the AVG had frustrated back in May. Bruce Holloway and I caught these trucks the first day and burned twelve of them near Wanting. On the next afternoon, I got through the rain with a single fighter and caught four of them on a curve in the road at Chefang. From then on for six days, until the end of September, Sep-tember, we harassed every movement move-ment on the wet and muddy road. Twelve of us burned ninety-six heavy trucks in six days. We used fragmentation bombs as well as the fifties. When we couldn't find their trucks, we'd hit the dark green troop barracks they were constructing from Lungling to Lashio. One day Daniels dove on a truck column to find that the Japs had' placed light tanks along with the truck convoy. When Daniels, who was an offensive-minded fighter anyway, any-way, saw the tanks he forgot about the trucks and concentrated on the more formidable vehicles. His Fifties Fif-ties tore two tanks rather badly, and his frag bombs knocked two more from the road, but he was wounded by the heavy fire from the tanks. Lieutenant Welborn, his wing man, saw the tracers from the ground firing at his leader's ship anrVnt to the aid of Pat Daniels. Bu" jie damage had been done. OiivTllet had come up through the sideVinel of Daniels' P-40 and had struck him in the shoulder. The wound was very bloody, and the shock had just about paralyzed the pilot's arm. Nevertheless. Cocky Daniels flew the ship back three hundred miles to Kunming and landed land-ed it there with his left hand. Maj. Bruce Holloway. the Group Executive, had been leading several fighters on the truck columns near Chefang. As he pulled from one diving attack he felt something strike his ship. At first he didn't notice it and continued to strafe from just about tree-top altitude. Then his coolant light popped on. Bruce turned immediately towards the friendly Chinese lines, which were nearly twenty miles away. He must have known immediately that Hie enemy bullet had punctured his prestone tank (the coolant of the American liquid-cooled engine). He had a very few minutes to stay in the air before the engine would catch fire or "freeze." He must be getting closer to the river, he knew, for he was indicating indicat-ing over two hundred miles an hour, but in his anxiety It seemed to go farther away. With almost his last gasp he crossed the river into friendly Chinese country and crash-landed crash-landed in one of the ever-present rice paddies. Now begins Bruce's trip back and asked what was going on what all these staring people meant? Major Ma-jor Shu replied that here in Kwey-ang Kwey-ang the people had never seen a foreign devil, and the Governor had given them permission to come in and look at one. General Chennault's other house-boys house-boys were "Wang Cook," who had been on the US Gunboat Panay, and "Gunboat," who had served in the American Navy for three years. The General used to take me hunting hunt-ing with him, and I came to understand under-stand that throughout these hunting trips he was giving me lessons in tactics, lessons he had learned the hard way against the Japanese. Without my knowing it, he would, in effect, criticize my method of former for-mer attacks and advise me about better ways to do the job. I used to listen to him for hours as he told of cases in which he had got his own ship shot up by going in too close, and then, after he learned how and knew that his longer range fifty-calibre guns would out-shoot the Jap, had accomplished the same destruction on the enemy without getting his own ship shot to pieces. These critiques taught me exactly what he meant to impart without his ever hurting my pride by telling me that I was wrong and could accomplish ac-complish more by fighting in his way. Coming home some nights from the exercise of our hunts together, I would think of my wife and little girl far away in Georgia, and get very homesick. Once I looked at the General and told him how I wished that I could press a button and kill all the Japanese, to end the war, so that we could all go home. He thought for a second or two and then looked back, smiling. "Aw now, Scotty," he said, "we don't want to do that. We've got to learn to hate this enemy. Think of how much fun it is to kill them slow." Yes, sir, the General's business busi-ness was killing Japs. Then we'd go home in the darkness, dark-ness, and Wang Cook would fix us a peppery dove-pie from the General's Gener-al's doves and some canned oysters out of the loot of Rangoon. Col. Meriam C. Cooper was the Chief of Staff to the General. His business was war, too. Cooper had been one of the greatest heroes of the First World War, and was one of the greatest soldiers I have ever seen. I never discovered when it was he slept. At any time of night, he was apt to come into my room, when he visited us in Kunming from his usual headquarters in Chungking. Or when I'd go to see him, I could find him smoking his ever-present pipe at any hour. Cooper Coo-per had served in the American Air Force in the last war, and when the war was over he had kept right on fighting. He had enlisted with the Poles in the Russian-Polish war, and had been second in command of the Kosciusko Squadron. After leading lead-ing many dangerous strafing raids, he was awarded Poland's highest military decorations. Later he made a reputation as an explorer in Persia, Per-sia, Siam, and Africa. Following an active part in the formation of Pan-American Airways, he became one of the best known moving-picture producers in America. Cooper was a soldier through and through, one of the most intelligent men that I could hope to meet, and the perfect Chief of Staff for General Gen-eral Chennault. Through his constant con-stant attention to our espionage in eastern China we learned of the Japanese Task Forces coming through Hongkong on their way to the Solomons and Saigon, and also of the large amount of shipping in Victoria harbor. Now Cooper was working tirelessly tireless-ly to plan our greatest raid against the Japanese. I remember vividly how he toiled for six days and six nights at the General's house on the logistics for our proposed attack at-tack on the largest convoy that had come through Hongkong. Morning after morning, when I went in to breakfast, the floor around the table would be ankle-deep with "Walnut" tobacco from Cooper's pipe, but the plans would be those of a master. General Chennault and Colonel Cooper Coop-er made, in fact, the perfect tactical tacti-cal team. Everything was ready for the bombing raid by the middle of October, and we merely waited for word from the East that the harbor har-bor between Kowloon and Hongkong was filled with Japs. General Hoyncs had come to Chi-na Chi-na to lead General Chennault's bombers when he left the leadership leader-ship of the Ferry Command. He had hurt the Jap plenty with his precision pre-cision bombing, and had built up a great bombing force, mainly through the inspiration of his personal per-sonal leadership on the most dangerous dan-gerous missions. Radio Tokyo had recently been "panning" Haynes, referring to him as "the old broken-down transport pilot." In a way, this was music to our ears, for it meant that the Japa. nese were being hurt by his bombings bomb-ings or they would not have resorted re-sorted to such propaganda. But il made General Haynes so mad that he could have torn the Jap to pieces with his bare hands. After all, he had been a pursuit pilot for years, and for the last ten years he had been dean ot American four-engine bombers. The records he had sel with the B-15 had made history and were inspirations to the Air Corps (TO BE CONTINUED) j may have moved a few at night, but not many after Morgan and Bayse got through bombing the bridges on the Burma Road. We caught a few Jap planes near Lashio and shot up several on the ground. I shot into a Zero there on October 5, and believe be-lieve it went down, but only claimed it as a "probable." The Japs kept coming towards Kunming from Indo-China nearly every ev-ery day in early October, but 1 think they remembered that the last time they had been in the capital of Yunnan, they had lost all their ships to the AVG. Way back on Christmas Christ-mas Day, 1941. Even with the hardships that a rugged country like China imposed, I was living a wonderful life there in Kunming. Those were days that I would never forget not only for the adventure that I was sharing with the other fighters in the Group, but for the great privilege of living liv-ing with my boss. General Chennault. Chen-nault. Gen. Caleb Haynes, Doctor Gentry, Gen-try, and I lived together with the General in a house the "Gissimo" had built for him. Situated near the field at Kunming, it was a modern mod-ern home, or as modern as a bungalow bunga-low could be in Yunnan. With a private room for each of us, with the Chinese houseboys the General had collected in his six years in China, we lived a wonderful life in a war-torn land. There was "Wong Chauffeur" who drove the General's car. Wong had a little boy of course called "Little "Lit-tle Wong" who was suspicious of foreign devils and who used to cover cov-er his face with his hands when I spoke to him. The General told me that as far as he had been able to find out from a long time in China, we'd always be foreign to the Chinese. Chi-nese. For, after all, the only word in China that could mean a person per-son other than a Chinese was "foreign "for-eign devil." The General told me about an automobile au-tomobile trip he had made with Major Ma-jor Shu down the road from Chih-kiang Chih-kiang to Kweyang. This was bandit country, through the wilds of Kweyang Kwey-ang province. Arriving at Kweyang, the capital, they had found an ancient an-cient walled city. The General, as a trusted servant of the Gissimo, had been taken to the Governor's house, and there dinner was served. All through the meal General Chennault Chen-nault noticed that strangers whom he did not meet would come in singly, sin-gly, sit down at the other end of the table, and after watching his every movement for a minute, would leave. Then another would come in and take the seat. After this had gone on during the entire meal, the General finally turned to Major Shu |