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Show ' EID IS M , CCDP1L Col. Robert L.Scolf w.n.u 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 rivermen 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 11 I had swallowed something; as I tried to talk to the officer with me I felt my lip tremble with emotion. emo-tion. But the Chinese never cheered or got excited; they remained as stoical as ever. They seemed to know that they were going to be successful, suc-cessful, and had merely been waiting 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 that was a credit to the greatest country in the world? Towards the middle of August, as our pilots died in 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 traded one for ten. We lost because the Jap could replace his lost planes; we could not. It was more than 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. He 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 .torf Uiuj Jar: After graduating wt Point as a second lieutenant, " J s'ott wins his wlnei at Kelly SmS Te, and takes up pursuit fiylna. F' ' war breaks out ho Is an In-Wbe.nr In-Wbe.nr in California and told he Is too Tfor Tombat Hylnf. He appeal, to L Generals for a chance to fly a l,t nlane and finally gets a break. ' . a bomber to India, where he Be .. . ferry pilot, hut this does not 'S hlm Aerv.SlUng Gen. Chen- fets a Klttyhawk to fly and man 'Z Borma. Later he Is made com-Tlito com-Tlito officer of the 23rd FlEhter " no H. tells about his friend, Mai. HW, to whom .. owe. hi. life. CHAPTER XVm Bo Johnny glided to the field with tU missing engine, and then we beard him say that he couldn t make lie Held and was going to sit down to the river. The moon made It fairly bright, but even at that I knew that Johnny had to be mighty good wd very lucky. Then I wondered whether or not he was wounded. Silhouetted against the light from the three bombers he had shot down, hi, fighter looked awfully low. He dammed over the Chinese junks on the river, and I saw the splash as I the P-40, with its wheels up, hit the i Siang Kiang. Down on the ground they heard his engine give one more dying gasp, as with a surge of power r, -probably from full gun and a prop L in low pitch-it lifted him over the ? last of the masts of the junks and S let him level oft to skid across the 3 surface of the river, a We came in and landed now, for the ground crew had gotten the imudge-pot boundary lights set out to mark the runway as well as the s bomb craters. We gathered together togeth-er last with the boys who had stayed on the ground, and talked about the "" mat battle. I remember Tex Hill 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 saii 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 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 rivermen 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 ihaking his head and saying, "I'm IT tlraid Johnny didn't make it Dog-" Dog-" gone, he was a good boy." We all ,m felt a linking in our hearts. We j waited and we kind of prayed too. m I lent Captain Wang, our salvage nan, out to see if he could get any I news of Major Alison. We made our reports out and kept waiting on the alert Just when we had really given up hope, we heard the sound tal of sharp explosions. All of us ran ' s" out of the alert shack, to see the strangest sight that we ever saw, 'ars ven in China. A procession had entered the field. The Chinese sentry had passed the 2, crowd of people and was himself holding his thumb In the air calling m "Ding-hao ding-hao." In the midst yL ot the procession and surrounded by uLE children shooting Chinese flrecrack-t flrecrack-t tri in celebration, was a sedan chair 7su' ""led on the backs of the villagers ot Hengyang. And Johnny Alison fif J was In the sedan chair smiling. 4 , ? V js--.-""''-' I f .. xl 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 to 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, 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 fcla Johnny Alison had a couple of bunu on his hands and legs where tome bits of the Japs' explosive bul- I"My afmament 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 J, lets had hit him. He'd been slightly cut on the forehead when, on landing land-ing in the river, his head had hit Qfll the heavy metal of the gun-sight. But the scar that would leave would )k a common one after the war, for wt every Bghter pilot flies along with Evi J-lhis head just inches behind that Sjr'V'hunk of steel that contains the lights K m nd prisms of the modern gun-! gun-! g Jf) ''ghts. Just the slightest accident yjajij nd it is out there to split your head, fyjjj 1 asked Johnny why in hell he izo oim ent 80 c'se to the bomber forma-iy forma-iy millet tion, and he grinned and said, "I ISS'dlr"" " ,carel I'd miss one of them." . sn""1 Our salvage crew worked and rtidnn!Sorked at toe lb of raising the P-40 Jcn, undittom the bottom of the Siang-Kiang. 'Azo S ?ul fourteen-foot depth and m.ni10 iwift current, they had more umcnd""ian moieni engineering with the IJjimitationa of our floating equipment ijjiiJould accomplish. Under Captain Jng Chinese-American and in our Vrmy-they floated barges out to spot and tried to tow it ashore .( nth lines. Then they lowered steel in ll 1!' Ued tnem to the ship, tried had definitely not crashed with the ship, for there was hardly a mark on his body. j Wrapping Minor in his parachute, we took him back in a rickety Chi- : nese bus that we commandeered, j 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 coflins, 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 in-side 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 Kun- over that roa'd with which to fight the enemy. Waiting patiently, as though they knew that some day they would have a chance to fight 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 smaU 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 . plenty" of equipment for the Chinese , ground armies, and us over their . heads with adequate air support. Would the day ever come when we i rnuld make an attack with a force VI w- d pump the water from me sub. 4 " . drums and thus float the ?S5" '-but everything failed. lQ , During au the work of the Amer-,.,rans Amer-,.,rans wi windlass and block-and-S'.ckle, the Chinese villagers, who 1 bothS 0ffered their services long be-'trftM be-'trftM ' S,mile1 anl tood by. We asked d pece'ves: What in hell could the SS71,Lllit nd rivermen do if s. Wlth our general knowledge and ?n V Vn"d civiaUon, couldn't raise JrectloM- 'hip? We went on and failed -,i , days' and then to the Per- 1!"JeadL" We aid' "0kay- g0 -s-ft' ched them float raft after Tfml. v. 8 mck bamboo poles to UjW?i.r , ftat now marked the spot tTfen,!,! hnny'' flghter had ""k-AAr' ""k-AAr' ft m e set down raising mITcI1 lrt , lp " impossible and got ' 7''ch.tomarltitoatheUst' But e?e went on cheerfully with '.tfffi-l flghter- takin8 S& H righteen-Jo"t length of bam-"'wr.'e bam-"'wr.'e this under , nuw'ce wi.i, shlp and lasn 11 lnt0 rtwV ft? f.' rP. Hundreds of ,5 It m- tU a perfect X? f zt T ,? Was under e entire W' "Ue P-40' Then they Tl t0 fusge and -lle'C gh . " row n0er the wing. M T,and 1 heard men say. "Oh rtgtf i . " lots ot Chinese any- Ml Br toward the second day's 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 Ue beneath a gray slate slab from the earth of Yunnan, under the wings of the Chinese and the American Amer-ican Air Forces. They Ue there in the shadow of a Uttle Buddhist temple tem-ple which for aU 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 aU 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 an ace In the 23rd Group he was the first man in the war who had shot down German, Italian, and Japa-nese 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 continue con-tinue on. (TO BE CONTINUED) |