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Show .WHITE 6'??r'.J!.7$tit& W.N.U.TEATUREJ finally cleared the weather we were out over the Java Sea south o Borneo we were so far out that I realized we'd passed the point ol no return. The only way we could go on now was towards Java, which was the nearest land. "The field at Surabaya was a little lit-tle closer than Malang, but I was afraid of its short runway, so with what gas and altitude we had left, we decided to try for Malang, but as we approached the mountain pass we could see the weather was settling set-tling down tighter and tighter on us, and looking ahead, I got afraid that when we got on up into the pass, the cloud ceiling might push us right down onto the pass floor, and I'd spill all the boys out into a rice paddy pad-dy in that fog. I could see the crew was anxious too. I hadn't needed to tell them much of the fix we were in; they hadn't missed a trick. "So then I took my last decision. Rather than nose on into that pass and use up my last gas trying to see what the weather there was really like (it turned out later it was terrible), I turned and headed back toward Surabaya Field while I still had contact flying, and while I had gas and altitude enough to get in. (Which means while he could still see the ground.) "When I finally saw Surabaya Field we had less than 1,000 feet of altitude left and I didn't dare think how little gas. So I didn't try to circle just dropped my wheels, asked for the wing flaps, and set her down on that short runway, and 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 fleeing for shelter and Old 99 Is demolished before It can get off the ground. Kurtz escapes to Australia, spends Christmas there, and then flies & Fortress to Java. On a mission to Davao In the Philippines their squadron hltsa battleship, and sinks two cruisers and a transport. They take off from Malang Field for a target off Borneo, and fly through terrible fog for hours. When they pull out of It they see a frightful black cloud which proves to bo smoke from burning Dutch oil fields In Borneo. Dutch had fired their fields. t " CHAPTER X ' "I finally decide to give it that thousand, and if I get back, let them jerk the wTeck and put in a new one. With that extra thousand thou-sand now, maybe I can get over the target we're about to begin our bomb runs and bag a cruiser, which is a good trade for a ruined airplane air-plane motor. "Now we're approaching the exact ex-act position of the target, and I begin be-gin to realize the predicament I'm In. Because if I lose another motor on the same side, I'll have little chance of getting this plane home. "All the time Jim's doing his best to stay with me, but I continue to fall back. And just then Harris, my bombardier, peering down through the broken overcast, calls 'Target ahead.' I'm glued to the PDI needle cow, but when my bombardier starts to make his run and the bomb-bay doors come open, their extra drag on the air slows me down still more and I fall further behind Jim as I trim the ship both to compensate for those open doors and to keep the wing which carries that limping engine from falling. "Then over my earphones Jim is , calling: 'Bombs away, Frank I'm turning off the target,' and far ahead X can see the sun glint on his up-cocked up-cocked wing as he heads for home. But I'm still on the PDI needle, my bombardier has picked up a beautiful target a gang of transports trans-ports and a cruiser down through the overcast, the sea is laced with their curving wakes as they try to get away but he can't seem to hold any one of them in his sights long enough to make a good run. "Finally Harris, in desperation, pleads over the interphones, 'Frank, I just can't hang onto that cruiser-let's cruiser-let's turn east.' at Muroc Lake back home. "But in January the reinforcements reinforce-ments were a little thin trickle of the thousand planes we hoped for. Of course they were then terribly short of seasoned pilots, and often quickly trained kids were flying them, and cracking them up all across Africa and Asia. But it was all they had to send us. Sometimes six would start out from Tampa Field and maybe two would arrive at Malang. During the whole month of January we got only half a dozen. "We were in the old 7th, which came out to reinforce you," said Master Sergeant Charles T. Reeves, the bombardier. He had been sitting sit-ting beside the pilot, under the plane's wing. "So was I," said Master Sergeant Rowland A. Boone, the gunner, who sat next to him. "On the day ef Pearl Harbor, the 7th was sitting on Hamilton Field, California poised, waiting for one new plane to come off the Boeing assembly line before we took off across the Pacific for Manila. Of course the big news from Hawaii canceled that trip. We'd have to go around the world another way. "Then they put me to work ferrying ferry-ing E's from the factory to Sacramento," Sacra-mento," continued the Gunner. "I was picking them right off the assembly as-sembly line, two or three a day. It would have been wonderful if we could have had that many in Java. But the bottleneck then was pilots the planes were all stacked up waiting for them, and no matter how fast you build Fortresses, you can't jerk a kid out of a Beechcraft trainer train-er and put him in a Boeing. And by the way, when we got back to the States this summer, the bottleneck was still pilots. They still had several sev-eral dozen E's stacked up on the factory field, waiting for men to fly them. "I'll never forget my first look at the E-model Fortress. She had that big dorsal fin, and she looked a lot bigger more deadly, too. Because not only were there tail guns, but much better side guns. And a whole stack of power turrets. On the old D model, the angle of fire from the radio guns and the belly guns had been very small, but this was corrected in the E, and the top turret tur-ret was a honey! "It doesn't hurt to talk about the D model, because the enemy has captured plenty" of them. It's no more secret than the Model T Ford. But in those days the E was a surprise sur-prise package like the new F model " 'Can you just hold it, Frank?' pleads Harris over the interphones. 'Just hold it, and we'll hang out one in just a second!' "And then Jim Connally, 'For God's sake, drop your bombs and come on, Frank!' I can see Jim in the distance, getting smaller and smaller. "Harris, the bombardier, peering down from the navigator's compartment, compart-ment, couldn't see anything when his bomb train hit the surface. But the tub gunner, peering straight down from the belly of the ship, swears he saw one of them go smack down for a direct hit on a Jap cruiser. "With my limping motor, I could sit back and really begin to wqrry. I tried te level off, but of course I couldn't. I knew we were somewhere some-where over Borneo by now. The altimeter showed we were 24,000 feet high, and in spite of everything I was doing we were dropping 100 feet lower every minute. I thought of landing on the camouflaged field here on Borneo but we might be too low even to bail out if we nosed down through this dense weather and couldn't find the field at once. "Now dropping 100 feet a minute, If you can keep it from falling no faster than that, at the end of the first hour you'll be down to 18,000; the second hour, 12.000; the third hour, 6,000. So you see how it is. 'If you've got gas enough for four hours you've got barely enough altitude to make it back to Java,' I argued with myself. "But it was going to be tough on the other boys. We'd been on oxygen oxy-gen for four hours, and ordinarily after a fight In the high air. which Is a strain on everyone, the first thing you do is bring her down to 12.000 so everyone can take off his mask and relax. Only I had to hang onto my precious altitude, and it would be another two hours before we had fluttered down to 12,000. "But it seemed it was the only thing to do, so I told my navigator, naviga-tor, Walt Seamon, to set a course for Malang Field. Then it was up to me. I tried every trick in the book and a few I'd heard of to keep that rate of fall from rising, because if it went to 200 or 300 feet a minute only for' a few minutes I knew we'd lose the plane. The automatic pilot was out (a little gadget had busied, and of course we had no spare parts), so my co-pilot and I had to do all the flying, worn-out as we were, but at least we didn't have to keep stations on any other plane now, or have the nightmare of maybe crashing crash-ing into someone else. Then suddenly we had a breather, breath-er, for the clouds vanished behind us and we were floating free out Into the abyss of a cloud canyon the same old one. Peering down, I seemed to see the gray wisps of that canyon's bottom practically trailing on the dull-green jungle-clad mountains moun-tains far below. I doubt if there was even a thousand feet of ceiling, so we kept on our course. When we is now. "And when something is really new, the combat boys who have to take it up don't want it blabbed around. For instance when we were still out East, a copy of an American Ameri-can magazine arrived which gave a complete diagram of the E. It showed everything the angle of fire of every gun, even the break in the fire angles for the propellers. There weren't many blind spots on the E where an enemy fighter can sneak in, but this diagram showed every one. "Our gang talked over that damned picture for days. 'Hell's bells,' we said, 'why don't they give the Japanese a set of blueprints!' blue-prints!' In addition, it showed the exact position of every man on the plane, so the Japs could work in through the blind spots and pick us off. "It was all stuff we knew the Japanese didn't know, because all the E's we had lost up to then had either dropped in the ocean or burned after beaching. 'My God!' the other oth-er gunners said. 'They're selling us out back home. They might just as well take the guns off the plane and let the Japs shoot us down." That picture knocked our morale for days. "But what the hell! Now the F model is out nobody knows the exact ex-act improvements on that yet, and when the enemy fighters hit the F, they'll find out they've picked up a real hot potato. "Let's get back to the trip over," said the Bombardier. "In my plane we left the States December 28. I'd had a blue Christmas missed dinner din-ner because we were out testing guns but didn't mind much, because be-cause we were itching to get over and into it. "As we were approaching Brazil we ran into a hell of a front, couldn't get over it so our navigator could take sun shots and find out our position, posi-tion, weren't sure where In hell we were. My pilot, Captain Duane Skiles, first went up to 15,000, but there wasn't a break. Then he went back down through it. staying just 100 feet above the Atlantic. We hoped we were headed right for our field at Belem, but we didn't know. Finally I called to him over the interphones and said that in my old geography book, It said you could see the line where the yellow Amazon Ama-zon mixed into the blue Atlantic as far as four hundred miles out to sea maybe he could pick this up and follow it in. "Sure enough, we found this line between yellow and blue. But we were farther out to sea than we'd figured. By the time we hit shore, we were plenty low on gas and an hour overdue. It was getting dark, and there are no lights in that jungle jun-gle now and then you'd see a glint of a native with a torch down there. We couldn't pick up Belem, and we had just twenty minutes' gas left (TO BE CONTINUE D k I got Col. Eubank on the telephone at Malang. He was most anxious. could be thankful the Japs had left me my hydraulics so that my brakes would stop me on that strip. "We taxied into our revetment and I got Colonel Eubank on the telephone tele-phone at Malang. He was most anxious; I was the only one he'd heard from. I could only tell him what I thought were the results of the mission. It turned out later that the other planes had all come down at Kendari and Samrinda. "He told me to take my crew and stay overnight at the hotel in Surabaya and come back to Malang the next morning. It was the first time we'd seen the big beautiful seaport sea-port metropolis of Java except from the air months since we'd seen any big city. Here were stores, and glittering glit-tering bars, movie houses, and the picturesque natives and the Dutch a pageant of the Far East. But we were tired beyond any words I have to tell, from those eleven and a half hours in the air. The longest mission I'd ever flown. The manager man-ager of this big hotel wanted to make a big occasion of it. It was the first time they had seen the uniforms uni-forms of those American aviators who were going to save Java. But after what we'd seen that day down through the mist, I wasn't so sure we would do it There had to be more of us and soon. So we told him no, thanks, no party. We all wanted to tumble into bed. We had an early alert scheduled to check the ship for our return to Malang." "We soon got ou first reinforcements," reinforce-ments," Frank Kurtz continued. "They were Fortresses of the brand-new brand-new E model. We'd beard them talked of in the States but I'd never seen one. There were many improvements, im-provements, but most vital of all were the new tail guns. The old D model which I flew had been almost al-most defenseless there; if a Zero came in directly on your tail, you had to depend on the cross fire put out from the plane flying next you on your wing. If you were alone you were a goner. "The boys who flew these new E's were old friends of ours, the 7th Bombardment Group friendly rivals ri-vals in the Air Corps to our 19th Group. We'd competed with them at maneuvers and in practice bombing |