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Show .WHITE W.Kl.U.TEATURES go down in on his run and never come up again. Yet his boys what are left ol them still like to hope maybe he succeeded In landing on that Ball beach, which looks so nice In the travel folders, and will turn up grinning some day, telling them what a social success he was with the natives. "But it was pitiful. We lost almost al-most all our dive bombers' there, and about half our P-40 fighters. Of course Bud and his gang made the Japs pay ten to one for taking that airfield but the Japs had it to pay. "With the Japs holding that Bali field, they could send bombers and fighters into every corner of Java, and we knew it was almost over. But anyway the Forts could now bomb our own field the Japs had taken tak-en from us very convenient, because be-cause we knew exactly where everything every-thing was. "When I got back late to the hotel ho-tel there was that beautiful Dutch girl, the one with the black hair and the pale face which was so wistfully sad in repose. Only there were no sudden little smiles lighting light-ing it up now. She was at the table where she and John Robertson one, the assistant said he would paj a man who volunteered a bonus oul of the money his chief had left It the bank. "Now asking our Colonel for a ra. dio operator was like asking him foi his right arm. But Java was cavini in, the situation was tense. Our Colonel Colo-nel hesitated, and then said thai while he couldn't order anyone on sc dangerous a mission, he thought, even after we explained clearly whal it was, we could get a volunteer. "And we did. We told the men the mission was most dangerous but of the greatest possible service tc our country. And out of the lin stepped a clean-cut, alert-looking kid called Sergeant Warrenfeltz. Only after this did I tell him of the five-thousand-dollar bonus. We let Warrenfeltz War-renfeltz go down and look over th ship, loaded with surgical equipment, equip-ment, food, drugs, and three hundred hun-dred thousand rounds of .30-caliber ammunition, so that she was practically practi-cally a floating bomb. He talked to the captain (a Swede) and looked over the Negro and Chinese crew. There were two one for topside dressed like Javanese natives so the Japs might mistake her for a fishing fish-ing trawler. Then Warrenfeltz came Imm THE STORY THUS FAR: Lieut. Col. Prank Knrtz, pilot of a Flylns Fortress, tells of that fatal day wben the Japs track In the Philippines. Eight of his men were killed while fleeing for shelter, and Old 99, with many other Fort?, was demolished on the ground. After escaping escap-ing to Australia, what Is left of the squadron flies to Java, where they go on many missions over the Philippines and the Java sea. The Japs learn the weakness of the E model Fortress, but the boys stick a JO-caliber gun in the navigator's compartment. Kurtz senses he Is being watched In Java and one night wakens at the glare of a flashlight. The hand that held It also held a dagger. The would-be assassin gets away. CHAPTER XVII "We dreamed and prayed for this. And as a matter of fact the Navy did make an attempt. An aircraft tender was loaded with P-40's and started out from Australia. But what happened was just what was feared. Those P40's were In crates stacked high on her decks, so she had to come clear in through skies the Jap bombers ruled. She went down with her entire crew and those crated P-40's forty miles off the southwest coast of Java but I'm sure the Navy was doing the best it could for us with what they had. "Of course It gave our morale a kick In the belly. Late the next afternoon young Jack Dale (he'd won his spurs in the Philippines with the 17th Pursuit) came In from Gnoro on a personal mission from Major Bud Sprague. When he'd finished fin-ished it he stayed a few minutes. "The next night a Navy man who had just got In from our little fleet told me what had happened to the Marblehead and the Houston, those two beautiful cruisers which had been the nucleus of our Asiatic Fleet helping the Dutch and Australians defend Java. With the rest of the fleet they'd been out in the Java Sea. When they sighted a Jap recco plane overhead about noon, they knew they were in for trouble. They had no carrier, of course, which could send a fighter up to shoot it down. He said the Jap bombers presently pres-ently came over them from their bases in Borneo and the Celebes (our bases they had captured) In three waves, spaced about half an hour apart. By skillful maneuvering maneuver-ing they dodged the bombs of the first two waves. But the third, which crippled them, caught them just at sundown, and chewed their superstructures into steel spaghetti. "In the darkness, they were able to crawl away out of range, and the Marblehead eventually got back to the States." "But troubles of our own were looming ahead. The boys In Navy Patrol Wing 10 came in with the report that their planes on reconnaissance recon-naissance had sighted a force of six Jap transports and five warships headed toward Bali Strait, which divides di-vides Java from Bali. They were after the Den Passar airdrome on Bali our last stepping-stone having hav-ing already occupied the airfield at v Timor. This was, as maybe you now begin to see, a war of airdromes Clark, Del Monte, Kendari, Sama-rinda, Sama-rinda, Kupang. all of them lost pearls in the United Nations' defenses, and now Den Passar. Next it could only be Malang, KNILM, Gnoro, and Ma-diun Ma-diun all we had left on the strand. Seldom in this war did the Japs make a brutal assault; always it was the skillful surgeon's technique isolate and occupy the airdromes and then you have the country. It was a game we knew well too, but you've got to buy chips before they will deal you a hand, and we didn't have the equipment. "All I can say is the Dutch and Americans were ready to defend Bali with what we had. Our little surface navies moved in that night to clip them a glancing blow on the run, as they'd done at Macassar Straight, and our submarines did a grand job in the moonlight. The Colonel sent his Fortresses out and down to 5,000, to paste them from the air. We left two transports burning in the moonlight, and a crippled crip-pled cruiser. "Next morning it was up to the Air Force alone, because the Navy was too tiny to venture out by day. The Forts went over, of course in fact everything we had, to smash at those Jap transports as they poured thirty thousand troops onto the beach at Ball. The P-40's were led by Bud Sprague himself. That morning he got his commission as a lieutenant coloneL He paused just before the take-off to scrawl his signature on his papers, but he didn't take time to pretty himself up in his new silver leaves; I guess he was satisfied to die in his old gold ones. Because what they desperately desperate-ly needed was dive bombers, and about all they had was P-40's a fighter plane which was never built as a stable platform to launch an egg from. But all right, there the job was to do, and so Bud climbed into the cockpit. " "How many passes at the target are we going to make?' someone asked. " 'Depends on how many wild hairs I'm sprouting when we get over her,' says Bud with a grin, and they were off. "He led them cold pigeon into that Jap barrage over the Bali beach-Christ! beach-Christ! back here the people don't know that boy ever did a thing out there and the other boys saw him to me with written orders from the bomber command and I told him the ports of call. They were to slip out at night, down the north coast of Java, through Lombok Strait, then along the Netherlands East Indies, then cut up east of the Celebes, running the Jap blockade block-ade into the Philippines till they came to Manila Bay entrance, where they would be challenged by the Rock. And he was to answer on the radio with the proper signal. "Then he asked what were the other ports of call. So I told him (it makes me creep to repeat it) they were then to run the blockade block-ade through the Jap-mandated is-l is-l lands past Guam (now held by the Japs) to Honolulu. " 'What else?' asked Warrenfeltz, grinning. He was game for arry thing. And I told him his third and last port of call would be New York. And then what? he wanted to know. I told him If he got that far, he was to have himself some fun, and I was sitting down now to write him out an order for thirty days' leave. "He knew what he was getting into. We'd been flying over those waters for months; he knew Just how thick the Jap surface ships were, and also that they had hardly a fifty per cent chance of escaping being blown up by a Jap mine just outside the breakwater. Why did he do it? To help those poor devils in the infantry, dying on Bataan. He'd seen the cargo. And then the money he told me exactly what to , do with that, and the message I must send, but we'll come to it later. lat-er. Of course it was all pretty irregular, ir-regular, paying a man for heroism. Maybe when peace comes, somebody some-body in a swivel chair in Washington Washing-ton will start writing us letters asking ask-ing us why we did it, and I don't know what We'll say. And then it all ended happily for us, because the money Warrenfeltz was supposed to receive for trying to do what ha did was never paid. But that comes later. "Meanwhile we had other things to worry about. The Japs had put a little landing force ashore on a tiny island sixty miles north of Surabaya, and taken over its radio station. "They hadn't told us yet," said the Bombardier, "but we smelled it Rumors were running all ever the place that we might evacuate any time now. Madiun, where I was based, was being bombed every day now we'd go out on a mission and always come back to find craters in our runways. When we'd land. Immediately Im-mediately there'd be another alarm and we'd have to hop off the field without servicing the planes or loading load-ing more bombs. "Also, Instead of going out to targets tar-gets in formations, we now were going singly. As soon as we'd get one ship on the ground Ung enough to get it gassed and bombed up, we'd take off by our little lonesome, dodging Zeros to pick Just any target from the countless transports that were swarming off Java. In the last week I got a light cruiser and a transport blew the end off the transport, "Mostly we were flying in a mental men-tal fog. Rumors! Every day they'd say no, we weren't going to evacuate, evac-uate, because more reinforcements were going to land on the field any day now even our own maintenance crews were about to land by boat. Then we'd hear their boat had been sunk (it really went on past us to India) and that we were pulling out. Nothing was sure, except the faet that all those Jap ships moving toward to-ward Java weren't pleasure yachts, and that we didn't have any reception recep-tion committee to meet them. On what turned out to be my last day I got my plane loaded with bombs and took off,. headed for a huge convoy con-voy we'd heard was coming down toward us from Borneo. We met it halfway the plane ahead of us was already pasting It when we arrived. ar-rived. We came in at 28,000 watching watch-ing this first ship plunking direct hits on two parallel strings of transport seventeen in each string, thirty-four thirty-four in all, with fifteen or twenty naval craft circling them. m (TO BE CONTINUED) Caught them Just at sundown and chewed their superstructures into steel spaghetti. usually sat, alone. When she saw me she jumped up and came running run-ning across the room. Had I seen John? she wanted to know, in her pretty broken English. "Out in the lobby they had told me John was missing. He'd been out on reconnaissance patrol in that lumbering slow old Navy flying boat, and there had been two messages from him: 'Many Zeros sighted,' and then about a minute later a final one: 'Zeros closing in.1 That left only three of the ones I knew in gallant Patrol Wing 10, Commander Peterson, Bill Hardy, and Duke Campbell. None of them had been able to tell her, and when I looked at her face I found I couldn't either. Because it was the face of someone frozen with fear in a nightmare so frozen you knew she daren't move to accept the truth if you told her, so I too was afraid. "In all the evenings that were left (there were not to be many) I avoided avoid-ed that lobby, because it was haunted haunt-ed by a ghost a pretty, pale, fear-frozen fear-frozen face that came running up to you and asked, with hope forced into a frightened smile, if you had seen John. To me the most frightening frighten-ing ghost of all the ghost of a dead love which will not die. "But there's something else that should be told, only I must go back in the story a little. The Army had sent a high ground officer to Surabaya Sura-baya on a special mission of great importance, and with about a million mil-lion dollars deposited to his credit in the Javische Bank. With this he was to buy and equip with supplies three blockade runners which would carry to Corregidor ammunition, medical supplies, and food for those poor devils on Bataan who were still fighting on. Two of the ships had already left. A third was almost ready to go. "This officer left Java the twenty-sixth twenty-sixth of February. The day after he left, his assistant, a young second sec-ond lieutenant, called me up in considerable con-siderable anxiety. His chief, he explained, ex-plained, had paid him the compliment compli-ment of leaving him in Surabaya in entire charge of completing the arrangements. ar-rangements. "Nothing remained to be done except ex-cept the most important thing of all: the officer before leaving had been unable to find a radio operator for this last ship. Without one they could not start, because unless they gave a prearranged radio signal when they approached Corregidor, the Rock's guns would blow them to pieces. Could the Air Force possibly let them have a radio operator? Since the mission was a dangerous |