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Show IPROTUBPEY -CS? .WHITE W.N.tKTEATUftEJ with an altitude of about 9,500 feet. But about eight o'clock we bit a tropical front which was a night-mare night-mare fog so dense you could hardly see to light the tip of your cigarette. "When we saw it coming ahead, each V spread out a little, so we wouldn't collide. Only we didn't dream how dense and how long it was going to be. "It was like trying to fly Inside a giant bale of cotton so dense that when you looked out at the side you could barely see your own wing tips. And looking straight ahead, that bale of cotton seemed tightly packed against your windshield, only it was a dull flat gray-white, like the cotton I imagine they'd spin winding sheets out of. And you'd stare into the windshield, trying to see how close you were to your wing man, but there would only be that flat white, squeezed tight against your windshield, muffling everything. every-thing. Then all of a sudden, the wing of the plane ahead would come surging into view out of that winding wind-ing sheet, so terribly big and close that you-would frantically jerk back all four throttles to cut your power, and begin fishtailing your rudder to slow the big brute down a little, praying that by this you'd miss crashing into the plane ahead at least by a few yards. "We'd been fighting through it on instruments, because inside that cot- THE STORY THUS FAR: Lieut. Col. Frank Kurtz, Flying Fortress pilot, tells of that fatal day when the Japs struck in the Philippines. Eight of his men are killed Seeing for shelter and Old 99, his favorlt Flying Fortress, is demolished before it can get off the ground. They escape to Australia, spend Christmas day there, and shortly after General Brereton orders them to take the bombers to Java. From there they start on flight for Davao, la the Philippines. They see a great concentration con-centration of ships below them a Pearl Harbor set-up, but fighters come up and ack-ack gets hot. They make the bomb run, the bombs are flicked out one by one, the bombardier shouts "hombl away," and they turn and speed forborne. CHAPTER IX "I poured on every ounce of power we had, and was about to turn for the getaway when I saw, just in time, that old Jim, who had dropped his bombs before I did, had already al-ready started his turn to get off the target a few seconds before me. "The next thing I did was to call down to the bombardier and the navigator nav-igator to come on up and tell me what we'd done to the Japs. "They said it had been a sight to watch. A few of the Jap cruisers and destroyers had managed to get under way, and their wakes laced the water in great spirals and sworls as they tried to dodge the bombs. Aside from these few, they said, we'd caught the Japs absolutely flat-footed. flat-footed. If there had been enough of us, we could have blown a chunk out of their fleet they would never have recovered from. "As it was, tbey had watched four direct bits on a Jap battleship, seen pieces of debris flying in every direction di-rection and smoke starting to billow bil-low up. In addition to this, our squadron had sunk three smaller craft two cruisers and a transport. "They said our bomb pattern had churned the whole area white with spouts of foam, and what few ships had their power up were running around like crazy. They said thousands thou-sands of skilled personnel had been killed or drowned, and also that we had torn hell out of the dock workers and docks at Davao Harbor. "Only I don't have time to gloat long, for something approaching us from ahead catches my eye through the windshield. It's practically flying fly-ing our course and our altitude, except ex-cept that it's off to the left. But am I seeing a ghost? It can't be what I think it is, a Messerschmitt 110, the kind that Ernst Udet told me all about in Berlin when I visited there In 1934. There can't be a Messerschmitt Messer-schmitt 110 in this hemisphere, but what else could it be with that split tail? "He doesn't alter his course and I don't alter mine; and after he's passed the point where I could set continuing the long slow circle inside in-side the canyon in the hope we'll pick up some of the others, and won't have to go in on the target alone. Meanwhile the radio operators of the two planes have started talking to each other by winking their Aldis lamps back and forth. We're so near the target I don't want to use the radio any more than necessary. And just then I spot a third plane about 500 feet below us and farther far-ther west down the canyon. Just as I'm wondering which one it is, my radio operator reports that the plane we're circling on isn't Jim at all, it's Bill Bohiiaker. So we drop on down the canyon and sure enough, that third plane turns out to be old Jim. I can read his number plain now on his tail. Now there are three of us in the circle, wondering what in hell has become of the other six. We haven't got the gas to stay in this golden dream castle much longer. long-er. But just then my radio operator comes in with a m'essage from Combs, the leader. God knows where he is, but he's telling us, 'Continuing to target,' and he's sending it out by key, where he can use code, because be-cause he daren't use voice so close to the target as he must by now be, because most of these damn Zero pilots seemed to have graduated gradu-ated from Los Angeles High School and understand English as well as you do. "All right, continue it is, so now we plunged back into that damned front the opposite canyon wall and the gray mist packed down around my windshield again. We continued to climb in that deathly whiteness first one wing and then the other surging into my view. I flew it for forty-five minutes and decided it was just too much to risk crashing into each other when we were so close to the target. So without any message to Jim or Bill I decided I'd spread out. I flew 45 degrees for thirty seconds, then back thirty more seconds, and then continued on the old course flying on instruments, of course. But now that we were taggered both in altitude and in interval, it wasn't so bad. "Finally we broke out into the clear at 27,000 feet at a quarter after ten and discovered we had lost interval in-terval only by a very little. But I was groggy we'd been on oxygen for four and a half hours already. "But the weather was still playing tricks. Now the mist was coming in great tufts, thicker than cotton wadding, while below us was a thin layer of overcast. "We were getting close to the target tar-get now. Should we climb higher? There wasn't much point, because If we did, that overcast layer might thicken so that we couldn't see the target, and we'd have to come down below it to unload. "But Where's Bill Bohnaker? I look back and see that he's very slowly peeling off. I wonder why. jsii up a collision course with him, I begin Jo come to my senses, to realize real-ize that I'm the pilot of a Flying Fortress and my job is to get home safely with these boys and this plane, which was never designed to engage in dogfights with Messer-schmitts. Messer-schmitts. "We got back to Malang feeling pretty pleased with ourselves," said Frank, "and I personally felt I had made headway settling my old Philippine score. But in Java we found there were troubles ahead, and the least of these was that our Navy was accusing us of bombing their ships. They didn't say any of them had been hit, just that they'd had to beat off an attack, and it occurred to me that this might explain ex-plain all those fireworks which came whooping up under our chins through the overcast that night over the Celebes Sea. But we were never sure. "So we said, 'Then why don't you tell us where your ships are going to be?' but it seemed that had never been done a ruling from the Navy Department in Washington. I guess those guys must take some kind of a bomb-sight oath never to tell anything any-thing to anybody who doesn't wear black shoes. "But plenty more was going on. It developed that our smash at the Jap fleet in Davao had been almost al-most too successful. Because Davao was no longer a safe base for them, they had apparently boosted up their schedule by two or three weeks. Our reconnaissance went clear up to the Davao area and reported re-ported nothing there; then we found out the whole gang had moved out together and they were off the coast of Borneo, moving down into Macassar Macas-sar Strait, and it was clear they intended to clean out Borneo not only because of our advance bases there, but because they wanted the rich oil fields at Tarakan and Balak-papan Balak-papan on the eastern coast of Borneo, Bor-neo, where the oil is so rich they say you can pump it right into the bunkers bunk-ers of ships. Of course they'd built up big oil reserves which they had bought from us before Pearl Harbor, Har-bor, but now they were out to grab off some fields of their own. "And who was going to stop them? It was up to us to try, because we seemed to be the only force the United Nations had in that area big enough to tackle the Jap fleet. "We were briefed before dawn told everything that was known about this big Jap gang of ships off northeast Borneo and at 6:30 in the morning nine of us took off from the Malang Field. We planned to fly over the Java Sea and then inland in-land over Borneo, carrying to start The gallant Dutch are burning up their Borneo oil fields.' ton bale you couldn't see stars or ocean, and it took so much hard flying fly-ing that I was having my co-pilot handle the power for me. If I thought I was dropping behind the rest, maybe I would get lost and have to go over the target alone, which by now we knew was a dangerous dan-gerous business, I'd say to him, 'All right, give me a little more mercury now about four inches.' Then when I'd catch a glimpse of the plane ahead I'd say: 'Okay, now you can bring it back to thirty inches. We're sitting okay I can see him fine.' And I could for a minute or so. "Without warning I break into the clear. I haven't climbed over that cloud, but instead have flown out of one of the walls of an enormous cloud canyon and am now flying around in the clear air between the precipices. . "Ahead of me looms the other canyon can-yon wall. Maybe it's thirty miles away, maybe fifty you can't ever judge the distance of a cloud, because be-cause they don't come in standard sizes. But cloud canyons like this one are one magnificent sight that yeu never see any place except in the high skies. "Because, you see, the morning sun was slanting down from behind me, over the top of the canyon wall out of which I had just come, to hit the top half of the cloud-canyon wall ahead. That top half might have been built out of burnished silver feather beds piled one on top the other, and yet you looked again and it seemed to be so firm it could be carved of glistening ice or marble. mar-ble. "I am wondering if old Jim is also looking at all this when suddenly sud-denly his voice comes out of nowhere no-where into my earphones. " 'Connally to Kurtz,' he is calling. call-ing. " 'Kurtz answering Connally,' I say. " 'Have you broken into the clear yet?' he asks. " 'Into the clear, Jim, at 14,500. Now I'm turning onto 270 degrees.' That means I'm turning west to fly down that canyon to see if I can't catch sight of Jim, whose voice is so loud in my ears. Suddenly I see a single Fortress ahead there in the canyon. I pick him up when the reflecting sun hits his uptilted wing. He is circling. " 'I think I see you, Jim," I call. 'Continue to circle.' I head toward the plane and fall in on its wing, Probably supercharger trouble. Then I think to myself, "There he goes, and I'd hoped maybe at least three of us could go in together.' Because in my mind is that rain-check idea the score isn't settled yet, and 11 that target is open at all, I've made up my mind I'm going in. And I think to myself, 'Here we go again, Jim, just you and me.' "About this time I hear a gunner on Combs' ship they've broken radio ra-dio silence, which means they're on the target saying, 'Lots of enemy fighters sighted!' "But they're still far ahead, out of sight. Here we are again. In a staggered attack the stragglers to bear the brunt of what the first flights stir up. We ought to know better, but still I'm going on in. "The weather gets crazier and crazier these enormous tufts not stratified at all, but floating around at almost any altitude. And my copilot co-pilot seems to be fascinated by a big black one that isn't shaped quit like a thunderhead. It might be one of those Dakota tornado funnels, only it doesn't revolve. "Then suddenly he says, staring at it: 'Hell, Frank, that isn't a cloud at all look!' I follow his finger, and down at the base of that cloud, on the ground, is a crackling, flaming oil field! The gallant Dutch are scorching the earth for fair burning burn-ing up their Borneo oil fields right in the face of the advancing Japs, millions of dollars' worth of it Imagine Imag-ine all of East Texas crackling and pouring black smoke into the sky. "We can't stop to watch a billion bil-lion dollars go up in black smoke. The Dutch are doing their job and we have ours, which just now is scanning for fighters. I realize that in this weather and so close to the target they might be anywhere, only for some reason I never think of them when my No. 1 starboard engine en-gine starts jumping around in its mount, rattling the whole plane. "I only curse my luck and ask, 'If we were going to have engine trouble, trou-ble, why in hell couldn't it have been on the way home instead of now, when we're about to begin our run over the target?' "I watch the oil pressure drop sickeningly, and still it doesn't dawn on me what hit that motor. I'm just sore at it for letting me down. And also, what will I do nurse it along by feathering it, or see if I can't give it maybe 1,000 RPM's (revolutions per minute), while I push the other three up to 2,600? (TO BE CONTINUED) |