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Show . WHITE W.KI.U.TEATURES THE STORY THUS FAR: Lieut. Col. Frank Kurtz, pilot of a Flying Fortress, tells of that fatal day when the Japs truck In the Philippines. Eleht of his pien were killed fleeing for shelter, and Old 99, with many other Fortresses, was demolished before it could take off. After escaping to Australia, what Is left of the iquadron flies to Java where they go out on many missions over the Philippines. Nine P-40 flKhter planes arrive from Australia a few days before a Jap bomber bomb-er force Is reported over Java. Three waves of Japs come over, and Zeros get Major Straubel, squadron commander. The Forts spot a Jap carrier In the Java sea and send It away limping. Then more Forts arrive. CHAPTER XIV "The Japs by now were stirred up. They came over obviously off a car-rier car-rier hidden somewhere near and strafed hell out of Timor airdrome. Luckily there was nothing on the field just then. "Now we began to see that it would be only a matter of time until un-til the Japs took that steppingstone field at Timor, which connected us to Australia, and it would all be over for no more fighters could get through to us under their own power. pow-er. Jap bombers had already hit Surabaya. If we got no more fighters, fight-ers, how long before they smashed our Forts at Malang? The skies were darkening fast. "But about this time we did a curious job for the Dutch. I was In their Navy headquarters on business busi-ness when Kommander van der Straaten came running up. 'You got to help me!' he said. 'Our bravest sub is in trouble she can't dive.' Then he explained that she was more than three hundred miles out In the Java Sea, moving slowly toward to-ward home base, but that Zeros were circling overhead, and had probably summoned Jap bombers to polish her off. Two Dutch PBY's had been guarding her, but those big flying boats are clumsy a ducks, and the Zeros had already shot one down. "What they had to have, Van der Straaten explained, was fighters to cover the submarine.. But the little Dutch Curtiss fighters didn't have the range to get out and back. "I got Bud Sprague on the, phone, told him I was coming out urgent. Then I wrote down on a piece of paper what Van der Straaten told , me of their submarine's course, speed, and hourly position. "Bud laid it out on a chart and figured fast It was a long distance. Even with belly tanks, his fighters fight-ers could barely get out there and spend fifteen minutes patrolling the submarine when they'd have to start ' back. i "But he figured he had enough planes to keep two of them over her all the time in fifteen-minute relays re-lays until they'd escorted her back to a point where the little Dutch Curtiss fighters would have the range to take over. "Bud led the first pair out himself him-self (he's no swivel-chair officer), and the Dutch, in addition to being tearfully grateful, woke up to the fact that maybe liaison was a good Idea. Van der Straaten noticed I'd had trouble getting a car getting out to the field I'd been spending most of my salary on taxis getting everybody's business done and the next morning a Dutch staff car with a sergeant at the wheel reported to the door of the hotel. They assigned it to me for the duration of the war. "But at this point another submarine sub-marine showed up with a hard-luck story she was one of ours which had sneaked through, the Jap blockade block-ade from Corregidor, with a load of fourteen passengers most of them pilots I knew, who had lost their planes and been left when we had to pull out of the Philippines. "They came roaring into the hotel ho-tel late. They were sick of fiddling around on Bataan with rifles, and now were itching to get into the air again. In addition to which, they'd been cooped up for days under water wa-ter in that stinking little tin cigar box. You can imagine how a pilot would take that. Here they were at last, free In a big luxurious hotel, ho-tel, with lights and girls. They nearly pulled it to pieces, and danced with all the girls in the place who would take a chance with them on the floor. But in between they had plenty of news. "I told them they had me in liaison liai-son work just now, and they said, hell, if I had talents like that, the place for me was on Corregidor. Because the Army had the Navy stuffed into one end of a tunnel while they were stuffed into the other, oth-er, and relations were so strained that the staffs would only communicate commu-nicate by courier. And now how " about a shot of this Daiquiri rum they'd heard so much talk about? "I finally got them quieted down and on the bus for Malang. They were crazy to get back up in the" air after all those weeks. "And then, just as I was about to go to bed, a call from Margo came through." "Some friends wanted me to go to Florida with them," said Margo. "The girl's husband had a war job there. I couldn't decide. But Frank said it looked as though he wasn't going to get any vacation, so I should take a good long one to do for both of us. I must go, and it would be our vacation. I could tell he was very tired, and that worried undertone un-dertone was in his voice. I had been glad when be told me he would probably be on the ground for a while, so I couldn't understand it Nobody in the States doubted yet that Java would hold. I told" him I'd call him as soon as I reached Florida. And then he said a curious thing. " 'Darling,' he said, 'I'd better warn you that these calls may not last much longer.' "I didn't ask why, because I knew it must be something the censor would not let him tell me. So because be-cause the time was up, I just said good night. Without ever talking it over, we'd always made it our rule never to say goodby. That was too frightening. Always it was good night." "I was worried, Margo,'' said Frank, "because I'd just got word from our Navy's PBY's on patrol that a new Jap invasion fleet was coming down Macassar Strait, apparently ap-parently headed for Balikpapan on Borneo. It has a fair harbor and is the last base they would need before be-fore they took over Java. And I couldn't see how we were going to stop them. "But next day Colonel Eubank gathered his Forts together and they took off at 3:30 in the morning, so that they would be out over Macassar Macas-sar Strait in time to make their bomb run just at dawn. "They had to come down below the overcast to seethe target, which was two converging lines of Jap ships, heavily escorted one coming in from the northeast and one from I was working the top turret gun and could see what was happening on the third Fort. Tarakan. Well, we hit it And of course we do some damage. But it's a big force the Navy doesn't dare go in. We have only a handful hand-ful of Forts, so the Japs keep coming. com-ing. "But we're desperate, and so are the Dutch. Their entire bomber force now consisted of eight old B-10's (a 1934 model Martin twin-engine twin-engine bomber), which were based at Balikpapan. These boys knew if the Japs were ever to be stopped, it had to be now, to give our reinforcements re-inforcements time to get in if we were going to get any. So that afternoon after-noon they made their last desperate stab damaging that Jap .fleet of course, but not stopping it. And just as these Dutch bombers were coming in to land on Balikpapan Field, they were hit by carrier-based carrier-based Zeros and every plane destroyed. de-stroyed. Now the Dutch had nothing, noth-ing, and everything depended on our Forts. "So the next day they put out from Malang to strike at the Japs in Macassar, and if possible sink a carrier. But what happened on that mission should not be my story. For I wasn't there. Two of our Sky Queens died that day in battle and I didn't see it. It doesn't happen often. Plenty of them had come home crippled. Others were beached, like Shorty Wheless' plane. Many others have cracked up when fog shrouded the field. But we'd lost only five by enemy action, and rarely rare-ly have the Japs seen one fall. Colin crashed through the overcast near Clark Field, so they didn't see him they saw Adams, but not Major Robinson. Seldom do our own boys ever see the old Queens go down in' battle. So you tell it," said Frank, and here he looked at Sergeant Boone, the gunner. "I saw it," said the Gunner, "and I can tell you how they die. "It began like this. Nine of us had taken off from Malang to Macassar Ma-cassar Strait to look for carriers. We had only started, we were about sixty miles off the coast, slowly climbing had reached 7,000 feet when we noticed some fighters in a tight formation. We assumed that they were P-40's, but we weren't taking tak-ing any chances, because there seemed to be quite a gang of them ! maybe some reinforcements had ar rived which we hadn't heard of- So we watched as they came closer. Only when we saw the white points of our Army Air Force star with the red disk in the middle were we relieved. It hadn't occurred to us that you can take the red sun ol Japan and with a few strokes of a paintbrush make five white star points around it. (Shortly after this incident, the army air force emblem was changed, and the red central disk removed.) "We didn't dream of this, but still we watched what we were so sure were P-40's. They were flying along with us, about three thousand yards away, apparently paying no attention. atten-tion. We didn't suspect they were Japs, mapping out their attack. "There was nothing about this maneuver ma-neuver which surprised us, for the Japs so far had always attacked us from the rear. Then they wfieeled in for their nose-on attack, and too late we saw those Army Afr Force stars on their fuselages had be-en crudely forged. "They concentrated on our first three planes, and remember now that this first attack, which caught us completely off guard and far below our regular, altitude, happened in only a few seconds. One Fortress For-tress they hit only in the motor. The next Fortress, they put an incendiary incendi-ary through the bomb-bay gas tank they must have known through subversive sub-versive activities in Java that we didn't have leakproof ones yet in that model. This set off the oxy. gen system, and the whole Fortress flared in front of our eyes in a pufl of flame and smoke. Out of this we could see two or three parachutes para-chutes floating down. Maybe the men dangling from them were alive. More probably they had never pulled the rip cords themselves, but the explosion opened the chutes. "I was working the top turret gun, and from here I could see exactly what was happening on the third Fortress Captain Duke Duphrane's ship which was just on our left, and very close. I saw it, and so did Sergeant Jim Worley, the bombardier, bombar-dier, who was working the little .30-caliber .30-caliber nose gun, and had brought down three Zeros. We all saw some of it, but Worley and I saw most. "First, we saw Duphrane's plane shudder as the Jap tracers crashed into its cockpit and into its bomb bay. But she didn't go down yet. For a while she continued on with her chin up, like those pictures you see of Marie Antoinette or Mary Queen of Scots walking proudly toward to-ward the scaffold. And she didn't waver or flinch, even when we could see that 'dull-red flames from the bursted gasoline tanks of that bomb bay were sprouting out of her, from the cockpit clear back to the tail. "We surged just a little ahead of her nose, and from here we could see Duke Duphrane and his copilot both slumped over dead, their heads leaning against the shattered pane of the cockpit window. So it wasn't any man who was keeping her chin up. It was the Old Queen herself who wanted to die this way. "We dropped back and came in a little closer you had an awful feeling you wanted to help, and you couldn't and we saw Sergeant Keightley, her radioman and right-waist right-waist gunner, climb through his escape es-cape hatch and bail out, and his chute open. And then her left-waist gunner, doing the same on the other oth-er side. We saw her tail gunner bail out and his chute open they found him four or five days later on an island. "She was enveloped in red flames now from nose to tail, and through her windows we could see flames shimmer inside her cabin, and as her plates melted she began to sink in a steepening curve, and along the wake of that curve we were to count seven parachutes, like seven swirling dandelion seeds. ' "But as yet she hadn't gone down much, and our own pilot, Captain Strother a brave, skillful pilot (who was presently to die and every man of his crew feels he gave his life to save ours) was keeping abreast of her, so that with our guns we could keep the Japs away in her last moments, and give her men a chance to jump. "The last to leave her was Sergeant Ser-geant Leonard Coleman, her turret gunner we could see him working his .50's, but now he left his turret. We saw him go by the side window, and he was struggling to put on his parachute which he hadn't worn in that cramped top turret, for it would have interfered with his sighting and shooting struggling to get his arms through it like a jacket among those licking flames. We saw him go back to the rear escape hatch, saw him drop through it with his clothes afire, saw him jerk the cord ha must have done it immediately, because be-cause by the time he had cleared the flaming tail by twenty feet, we saw his chute crack tight-open. But then, almost instantly, we saw that parachute begin to billow loosely like a silk scarf in the wind, because be-cause Oh, God! we saw something else. We saw the poor guy had had to jump without having time to buckle the belt strap of his parachute para-chute the price he paid for staying stay-ing in his turret for a few last shots ' at Zeros, protecting the others while they jumped. Maybe he figured he could hold the ends of the belt together to-gether with his hands. Maybe his hands were so burned he couldn't work the clasp. (TO BE CONTINUED) |