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Show 7Jfe IPIRDTLTlILlf -SS? .WHITE jawtits THE STORY THUS FAR! Lieut. Col. Frank Kurtz, pilot of the Flying Fortress known "The Swoose," which escaped from Clark Field, tells of that fatal day when the Japs struck In the Philippines. Old 99, another Fortress, is struck down before It can ct off the ground. The (round Is littered wltn the skeletons of U. S. planes. No longer safe to sleep In the barracks, because Japs are photo rraphJn Clark Field, cots were moved Into the middle of a cornfield. Later, they evacuate to Mindanao, and as they arrive ar-rive Japs are already putting troops ashore on the Island. Squadron Commander Com-mander Major Glbbs goes out on a secret mission and fails to retnrn. Harry Schrel-ber, Schrel-ber, the navigator, takes up the story. CHATTER VI "About an hour out of Del Monte, Shorty Wheless drops out of formationwe forma-tionwe guess it's engine trouble and he can't keep up this rate of climb and half an hour later Pease. As we come to the rendezvous point where we're due to make our turn and go straight in on our target, .only thirty-five miles away, Lee Coats drops out his motors we can see are weak, he can't make the altitude. al-titude. "That leaves just my pilot. Jack Adams, and Vandevanter to go on in alone. When we thought there would be six planes, we had planned to divide into two flights of three planes each. The flights were to come in on the target at three-minute intervals inter-vals and at different angles. "There are just two planes now, so Jack decides he'll pretend he is one flight and Vandevanter will play like he was the other. The two of us against this big gang of Jap ships we are closing in on. "So, as agreed on, we come in first flying north to south. But the overcast is so thick we have to get down to about 18,000 before we can see the target, and there it is we're glimpsing it and then losing it and glimpsing it again through breaks in the clouds a row of transports and naval craft escorting them. "When we come in on the target, I'm down there in the lower jaw. But now my job as navigator is temporarily over, so I can leave it and go back to the bomb bay, where the bombs are hanging in racks on either side of a little aisle. "Now the bomb-bay doors are opened, and light comes up around the bombs. And now the bombs are away. I lean over to look down through the open bomb-bay doors, feeling a little woozy because my oxygen mask is back by my seat in the navigator's compartment, and Just before Jack Adams from his pilot's seat slammed those bomb-bay bomb-bay doors" closed,' looking down below be-low the belly of the ship I think I see something, but then the doors slam shut and there is only blackness. black-ness. So I run back to the navigator's naviga-tor's compartment, and, boy! there they are a whole gang of eros coming up after us. How did I feel? Just the way anybody feels the first time, no matter what they pretend later it scared the hell out of me. "There were five qt them after us climbing up and in on our tail. Our bottom gunner shot down the nearest one, but the other four kept coming in a tight formation. Jack Adams began wish-washing our tail up and down to give our top gunners gun-ners a chance at them no reason why the bottom gunner should have all th fun and sure enough, the top gunner picked one out of that formation. That left three. "So then Jack pulled a cute one. He throttled back suddenly and one Zero overshot us to the left, which made him a clay pigeon for our side gunner, who picked him off. Then rtill another came up under our stabilizer in the tail, and our bottom gunner got his second for the day. That made four Zeros down and one to go and it was still going for us in spite of all we could do. "We'd dribbled on down through the bottom of that cloud, and Jack was looking for a nice beach to set her down on. But there wasn't any beach only Jagged rocks with white surf wrapped around them and we kept losing altitude. "The hell with those, so Jack nosed her in toward land, still losing altitude fast, and then right ahead of us we spotted a big clump of trees about sixty feet high. Well, there wasn't time for anything but a prayer, and not any long rambling one either. But Jack handled the situation beautifully. He pulled her nose up as high as he dared and Just cleared those trees, and then, cutting the remaining two motors so we wouldn't have to climb out of her In flames, he made as nice a belly landing in a rice patch as you could hope for, "You've forgotten that one remaining re-maining Zero? Well, I hadn't, because be-cause it had followed us all the way down. I crawled out as fast as I could and started running away from the plane parallel to the wing. The funny thing was Bill Railling, the co-pilot, was either stunned or felt comfortable right where he was. Anyway, he stayed right in his seat while this Zero circled and then came in, right along the line of our wing. I just had time to fall down on my chin and then it all happened in split second. The Zero's guns opened up, so that -the first slugs began ( kicking up the dust about thirty yards away in a straight line Just a yard from my chin as she went by with a big wh-h-h-M-lsh-sh-sh! the slugs beating a tattoo along the length of the Fort's wing, with old Railling dreaming away there, all relaxed in his seat, right In the middle of them, and, believe it or not, the boy wasn't even scratched! "Within three minutes of the time we crash-landed in the rice paddy behind those tall trees we were surrounded sur-rounded by a gang of Filipinos, all waving the longest, sharpest knives you'd want to see. But pretty soon we convinced them we weren't Japanese, Jap-anese, so they all got helpful and told us we were on Masbate Island. "Because these natives wanted to honor the American officers who were fighting for their country, they brought me a donkey to ride. Of course to have refused would insult them, and yet I didn't dream the kind of a deal I was getting into. The first half-mile wasn't so bad, and I even thought I was lucky I wasn't waUcing and getting sore feet, like you do in the infantry. But pretty soon I began to realize, first just a little bit, and then more and more, that there are worse things than having sore feet. "We crashed on the fourteenth of December and on the twentieth we bought an outrigger canoe for ' fifty pesos, and hired natives to sail and paddle us to the island of Panay, with me getting a chance to brush up on my navigating. When we were about forty miles from land I noticed the skipper of this craft of ours had Because these natives wanted to honor me they brought me a donkey to ride. crawled up into its nose and was peering down into the water. Why? Well, he explained, there were supposed sup-posed to be a lot of floating Japanese Japa-nese mines here, and he thought it would be all right if we didn't bump any of them. "The next day we landed on Pa-nay, Pa-nay, and were told the American forces were all ganged up down at its southern end, and when we got to them we reported' to General Chynoweth. Then we really were in for it. Because it seemed the old 19th Bombardment Group had left Mindanao for Australia; so they grabbed us and attached us to a Filipino Field Artillery regiment, giving Jack Adams, Bill Railling, and myself a battalion to command, which we thought was going to be a considerable honor, since we were only lieutenants. . "Then we looked them over. They were all about high-school age. Half of them didn't speak English, and the job was to get them to understand under-stand you. Of course they didn't know what to do with a rifle, but this didn't matter, because we had only fifteen rounds of ammunition per man not enough for an hour's target practice. "The Field Artillery part of it all consisted of the name, plus six sights for old World War French 75-millimeter field guns. The guns themselves had been sunk on a supply sup-ply ship in Manila Bay. The sights had been shined up and were in prime condition. "We didn't encourage these kids to keep their rifles loaded, being afraid that if one of the guns went off in the dark they would start banging away and shoot each other and maybe us, so we gave them bayonet bayo-net practice instead. Early in January Jan-uary they moved us over to Caygay-en Caygay-en on Mindanao Island we heard all the troops from all the islands were to make a stand there. But no Japs. They gave us a section of the beach a mile and a half long to defend if they came. "Right behind our lines there was a small Jap colony. We knew they were there, of course we'd gone through theMr houses looking for radio ra-dio equipment, anything they might use to send information to the Davao Japs and we posted a small guard around them. But they'd slip out and go on down to Davao to join the Davao Japs, and there wasn't much we could do to stop it. We were only a handful ourselves. "So I was tickled to death when word came to go back to old Del Monte Field, where the planeless aviators were being assembled for evacuation to Australia, where we would get safely back into the air again. "I got to Del Monte on March thirteenth thir-teenth and we were all ganged up on the field, where we were expecting B-17's to carry officers and men to Australia. At 9 p. m. we heard the motors of a plane and turned on our landing lights. But it didn't see them and kept on going. We didn't know it then, but we didn't have Al priority, for those planes that night were intended to take out General MacArthur and his party and their baggage and records only the General Gen-eral hadn't yet arrived. But we supposed the planes were for us. "About 11 p. m. we heard another plane and snapped the landing lights on, and this time it saw them and landed. Out of the Fortress stepped Lieutenant Pease of our own 19th Bombardment Group. He told us the other plane we had heard was Godman's it had got mixed up and bumped into the sea. "But Pease was immediately called over by General Sharp, who told Pease that General MacArthur had been delayed, and that the plane should wait over a few days until he came. "Now Pease didn't want to wait over for a single hour of daylight on Del Monte Field, for by that time the Jap planes were swarming over the place. Pease knew the Air Force was trying desperately to hang onto what few Forts they had left, and he realized that If he stayed over the next day the infantry would make him quite comfortable in a foxhole at the edge of the field, where he could watch his plane become the prize for a Japanese turkey shoot, for Del Monte by this time was as unsafe as Clark had been, a fact the infantry didn't seem to have quite grasped. "So Pease explained to Sharp it would be all right with him, provided provid-ed General MacArthur understood what he was getting into, that he had a fine plane here except that it had just come from the Java war and was slightly out of repair. It was too bad, for instance, that the superchargers were out, but . he hoped he'd be able to clear the runway run-way on the take-off and not slip off into a cartwheel at the end of it, spilling the General's party and all that baggage all over central Mindanao. Minda-nao. And then, if he did take off, there was the little matter of his hydraulic hy-draulic system, which had gone bad on him, so when he came to land the brakes wouldn't work, and he might not be able to stop when he came to the end of the runway. "Well, General Sharp decided that it certainly wasn't suitable, and told Pease he'd better get started back to Australia before dawn. " 'Pease,' I said, Tm goin' with you. You don't know it, but you got a new navigator for this trip. Because Be-cause I'm not goin to stay in this damn place no more.' "Well, Pease agreed to let me work out my passage that way, and also said he could take off fifteen other planeless aviators if they didn't mind the risk, "We all got in, and discovered Pease hadn't been bragging a bit about his plane when he talked to the General. It was in just as terrible terri-ble shape as he had said it was; in fact, he had been overly modest about it. "Now take a look at us in Australia. Austra-lia. Exactly forty-eight hours after we arrived the Australians told us Radio Tokyo had broadcast, 'It is now understood the American Flying Fly-ing Fortresses are operating from Batchelor Field near Darwin,' and they were one hundred per cent right. "How they knew it we never learned for sure probably from Jap pearl fishermen, who bad been thinly scattered along this Australian Austra-lian coast and who when war broke out went back and hid in the bush. The RAAF (Royal Australian Air Force) boys would spot their camp-fires camp-fires at night and try to track them down, without much luck. Probably they had radio senders, and even a layman could count our four engines en-gines and recognize us as Flying Fortresses. "The country itself is as desolate and sparsely populated as the worst parts of West Texas and New Mexico, Mex-ico, and the most important town for a thousand or so miles is little Port Darwin, with seven or eight thousand people, sitting there on the rim of Nothlng-at-All. It has wide streets like one of those Midwestern Midwest-ern towns built in the boom of the eighties a good hotel which is .subsidized .sub-sidized by the Qantas Airways and reminds you of the one on Wake Island, Is-land, a band which plays in a bandstand band-stand in the park, and a zoo with a few emus, kangaroos, and koala bears. No fresh vegetables, everything every-thing imported in cans. There you have Darwin. "Batchelor Field was about forty miles back in the brush, and it consisted con-sisted of a couple of runways hacked out of the mesquite (it was hard to get tools for grading or dynamite for stumps) and a hangar run by the RAAF. (TO BE CONTINUED) |
