At 12.45 on 8th December two Japanese formations, one of thirty-four fighters and fifty bombers, the other of fifty-three fighters and fifty-four bombers, made a savage attack on the American airfields. Thirty-two Curtiss P-40s and twelve Flying Fortresses were destroyed in seven minutes—more than a third of the modern American aircraft available.
On the 10th the enemy attacked again, this time with one massive wave of a hundred bombers escorted by more than a hundred fighters. Twenty P-40s and fifteen P-35s took off to intercept them. The result was dramatic—only five American fighters returned to base, all badly damaged; twenty-three Japanese planes had been damaged. General George, O/C 5th Interceptor Command, only had three modern planes left.
The next morning the Japanese landed in strength. Captains Bud Wagner, Sprague, Dyess and their comrades covered themselves with glory through nine days of desperate fighting. The P-40 showed itself to be absolutely outclassed by the Japanese Zero.
On 22nd December MacArthur, whose troops no longer had any air cover, decided to concentrate all his forces in the Bataan peninsula, to await reinforcements. It was an epic retreat, and by 24th December a proper defence line had been established and was being held.
It was also on 24th December that General George learnt, by a signal in code, that he ought to have received eighty-four P-40s and a hundred pilots from San Francisco. They had already left at the beginning of November, but were recalled through some administrative tangle between the Navy and Army Air Forces. With those reinforcements he could have smashed the Japanese landings.
‘Too little, always too late!’ Those disillusioned words were on every flying man’s lips during the first two years of the war.
Bataan Peninsula
1st January 1942
5th Interceptor Command’s control centre was reduced to one radar and telecommunications post which the Signal Corps had succeeded in setting up on the summit of Mount Mariveles. The aerials were slung on the topmost branches of the trees and a telephone line linked the post with General MacArthur’s G.H.Q. in the tunnel of Corregidor fortress. Their SCR 297 transmitter was very powerful and could reach Del Monte, which was in communication with Australia. That was the only link these 800 men, lost in the jungle, had with the outside world.
To get the most out of his few remaining aircraft General George had scattered them on three tiny landing-strips hewn in the jungle. The best was a fairly straight section of the coast road at Mariveles. By a supreme stroke of luck large stocks of aviation spirit had been salved and hidden among the rocks. Even if the men starved, the twenty-odd Curtiss P-40s, the Americans’ last hope, would be kept going. The men camped out where they could in the brush. There were twenty-three pilots, plus fitters, radio mechanics, armourers and all the staff personnel. All the M/T, with the exception of half a dozen trucks, had been abandoned.
The 24th Assault Group, comprising Squadrons 3, 17, 20, 21 and 34, had already lost forty-three pilots in aerial combat since 8th December and eighty-two P-40s, not to mention the poor P-35s of 21st Squadron massacred by the Zeros one after the other. The rest of the planes had been destroyed on the ground by bombing raids.
Ten fighters, plus two u/s ones for cannibalisation,[5] was in the end all that 24th Assault Group had with which to hold off a Japanese force of about six hundred planes in the sector. MacArthur had ordered the transfer of the other eight P-40s to the reserve at Mindoro, on the other side of the sea.
On 4th January, the day of the transfer, eighteen P-40s took off to intercept a raid by twenty-seven enemy bombers. The Bettys were faster than the Curtiss’s with their engines worn out by three weeks of constant take-offs and dog-fights at full throttle.
The eight planes due for Mindoro soon gave up the useless pursuit and made for their new base. Only six got there—the other two vanished without trace, swallowed up by the sea or the jungle.
Unfortunately an enemy recce plane had seen the take-off that morning and had located two of the Americans’ improvised landing-strips. As a result, Mariveles had to be abandoned on 5th January after a severe bombing raid. Bataan Field was now kept under observation twenty-four hours out of the twenty-four by relays of dive-bombers, which immediately shot up anything that moved on the strip. At dawn on the 6th, eighteen Zeros strafed the field and killed four men. It was time to move. Finally, round about midday, the four grounded P-40s managed to get into the air and catch three Kates by surprise and shoot them down. One of the Curtiss’s crashed in flames during the fight but the three others got to Cabcaben.
Suddenly, in the night of 17th January, 2000 Japanese landed at Agasin, in the rear of the Americans, right in the south of the peninsula. At 3 a.m.. by the light of truck headlights, the precious surviving P-40s were evacuated to Baguio, as the Japanese were approaching their objective, the airfield.
At Baguio, a small clearing in the thick jungle formed by a dried-up paddy field, George’s men had managed to rough out a runway about 400 yards long and 35 wide. Carefully camouflaged shelters had been fashioned in the virgin forest and in the lee of rocks. And they did have six A.A. 75s and ten 13-mm. A.A. machine-guns.
In the night of the 19th, three Japanese destroyers landed 1500 more men. At dawn the P-40s tried to attack with pathetic 30-lb. anti-personnel bombs, but without doing much harm, as the enemy had already infiltrated into the jungle. When the planes came back the camp was under siege. The enemy had surrounded them on a perimeter of three miles. 5th Interceptor Command was irretrievably cut off.
The American Army, painfully defending itself in the north, was already short of men. 20,000 men, of whom 15,000 were Philippine Militia, stripped of everything, short of ammunition, with no artillery and no food, hemmed in against Mount Samat, were holding a line from Crion to Bagae against 100,000 crack Japanese troops, specialists in jungle warfare. The airmen could hope for no help from outside.
Every man took up arms, including the grounded pilots—staff, clerks, cooks, fitters, majors, colonels, everyone.
An old 300-h.p. Bellanca cabin passenger plane, flown by a heroic Philippine officer called Captain Jesus A. Villamor, did the dangerous trip to Mindanao every night, bringing back ammunition, submachine-guns, grenades and 45-calibre mortars in sections.
Then began a frightful ordeal which was to last until 12th February. Keeping the enemy out of mortar range of the airfield became a matter of life and death, otherwise the aircraft would be unable to take off. The battle in the jungle was joined. At the end of a fortnight the enemy had tightened his grip, and life became a nightmare. Less than fifty yards from the edge of the runway men were already lost, swallowed up by the jungle.
From the air the Philippine jungle is a solid mass of exuberant vegetation, as uniform as a pile carpet. But the plane only sees the serried tops of the trees, thrust up to the sky by the long smooth trunks, to which a mass of parasites cling. For men fighting in it, it is a degenerate putrefying plant-world, full of the stench of death. Daylight filters through an inextricable tangle of leaves, branches and creepers. When it reaches the ground it is only a sort of permanent watery twilight.
The Japanese were everywhere and nowhere. The dry crack of an automatic rifle, the shrill whistle of the tiny bullet, a hole in a leaf or in a forehead occasionally revealed the invisible enemy. The Americans built nests for themselves in the thickets with their hatchets, or scratched holes in the damp soil, and lay in them as in a coffin. On tenterhooks, they listened for the slightest noise, the least movement in the leaves—the first sign of the noiselessly rolling grenade or the quick bullet of the sniper in the trees. The hours passed slowly in that vitiated air, full of the stench of crushed toadstools and putrefaction, with never a breath of wind to give it life.
Water oozed through the soil and the hole soon became a cesspool. Soaked right through, teeth chattering with cold—and fever—men had to dig another foxhole further on and again expose themselves to the murderous bullets. A heavy silence till nightfall.
The shadows fe
ll suddenly, without any transition, and it was always at the hour when the fireflies begin dancing that the Japanese attacked. Suddenly, somewhere, howls as of wild beasts, screams as of animals being slaughtered, shrill whistles, grenades going off. When the submachine-guns replied, the men in the other sectors anxiously peered into the night with bloodshot eyes, knowing that the Japanese attacked with bayonets and knives.
Was the defence perimeter holding? Three minutes, five, ten and it was all over for the time being. Only the shouts of the wounded and the moans of the dying broke the silence. The stretcher-bearers felt their way in the darkness. Then a brilliant red light showed through the trees and shots rang out again. The Japanese had set another of their diabolical booby-traps—they had dragged two or three wounded men out of their hiding-places on to a path, but without finishing them off. One of the medical orderlies had tripped over a wire, setting off a flare behind him, by the light of which the Japanese effortlessly picked off him and his companions.
When all had grown calm again, a soldier carried round the men’s meagre rations from post to post. It was so pitch dark that he had to feel his way along a line of old telephone wire, a sort of Ariadne’s thread, in order to find the advance posts through the maze of noxious undergrowth and trees.
At about 11 p.m. the fitters dragged two or three P-40s covered with branches out of their shelters and warmed up the engines. The pilots took off by the light of an improvised flare-path—cans full of sand soaked with petrol—and set off to shoot up the landing-craft in Manila Bay. This take-off was a miracle every time, as P-40s were not designed for night-flying. The fitters had knocked up exhaust-baffles of a sort out of bent bits of sheet metal, but that still further reduced the power of the tired engines. In addition, the food was so poor that the pilots’ sight began to suffer, and night vision was the first thing to go.
Every take-off was an agonizing performance. Any plane deviating a few degrees from straight, or whose engine dropped a couple of hundred revs, immediately crashed into the trees. In two nights three planes were destroyed and two pilots killed. The third, Lieutenant Baker, was horribly burnt and could not be properly looked after with the resources at their disposal at Baguio. Captain Villamor took him off to Mindanao in his old Bellanca, but poor pain-maddened Baker took advantage of a moment when the pilot was not looking, opened the door and jumped into space.
In the night of 26th January General George decided to throw his seven remaining aircraft into a spectacular attack on Nichols and Nielsen Fields, now the Japs’ main air-bases in the Philippines. The M.O. spent the afternoon examining the sixteen pilots one by one, to choose those in the best physical condition.
It was pitiful. They had on an average lost about forty-five pounds in weight and their blood pressure was so low that, according to the General’s own final report, ‘they ought even to be forbidden from climbing on the wing of a plane on the ground.’ Their legs were devoured by leeches and covered with festering sores, and they all had dysentery so badly that half an hour in the air was absolute torture.
Finally Bud Wagner was chosen to lead the show, and Woolery, Stinson, Hall, Obert, Ibold and Brown were to go with him. The preparations were made in great haste. Two Jap planes, which took it in turns to keep a watch on Baguio, spotted the water-truck beginning to sprinkle the middle of the runway and destroyed it. That was serious, as it was going to be impossible to avoid raising a cloud of dust on take-off.
As it was essential to take the enemy by surprise, and as the Japs signalled any move of a plane to their anti-aircraft spotters on the coast by sending up multi-coloured rockets, everything had to happen fast.
A man stood by each can of the flare-path, ready to put a match to it the very second the engines started up. The moon shone in the sky, which would make the pilots’ task a little easier.
At the given signal, a whistle-blast, a dozen flares lit up simultaneously, while the silence was shattered by the roar of the seven 1200-h.p. Allisons. No time for warming up the engines, as the aircraft had to be over the sea before the A.A. batteries had time to open up.
The first six P-40s succeeded in getting away in turn, but an impenetrable cloud of dust swirled up, worse after each take-off. The pilot of the seventh plane, completely blinded and unable to see the flare-path, swung drunkenly from side to side and did a ground-loop at a hundred miles an hour and turned a somersault. Three of the bombs under his wings exploded and the shattered fragments of the plane burst into flames. Badly burnt, his body riddled with splinters, Lieutenant Ibold was snatched from the flames by two of his mates, who rushed up, one of them being at once killed by a bullet going off in the blaze.
The characteristic whistle of the Curtiss formation faded in the night towards Corregidor.
The Japanese, who had by now completely written off the American Air Force, had taken no defensive precautions at all.
The lights of Manila stretched a dazzling chain round the bay, mirrored in a narrow luminous fringe on the still sea. The houses and barracks between Cavite and Calumpit were lit up and the pilots had no difficulty in getting their bearings. But Paranaque plain was covered by a patch of fog, as white as snow in the moonlight, and underneath were Nichols and Nielsen Fields!
Was there any clear space underneath? A difficult decision to make. Bud Wagner, taking the bold course, decided to attack Nichols with half his force, while the other three, led by Woolery, looked after Nielsen.
The Curtiss’s came straight down through the mist, flying blind. The mist cleared a hundred feet from the ground.
The surprise was complete. A row of Bettys and Zeros in front of the control tower were machine-gunned—twenty-four planes left in flames. The N.C.O.s’ Mess, lights blazing just as in peace-time, got sixteen direct hits from 60-lb. anti-personnel bombs, which created havoc inside. In one dormitory alone, thirty Japs were killed or wounded.
Same story at Nielsen Field. Thirteen enemy bombers destroyed.
The six Curtiss P-40s returned to base without a scratch. ‘If we had had sixty instead of six P-40s, we might have altered the whole situation. Every night we angrily listened to senators or generals on the radio, promising the United States a production of 40,000 planes between now and the end of 1942. No doubt, but it didn’t get us anywhere, we should have preferred four extra planes straight away. Always too late, always too late.’[6]
The Japs, shaken by the Manila show, attacked furiously for a whole week. One of their patrols got right through to the airstrip and threw two grenades on General George’s tent, but in the end they were repulsed.
On 8th February, 24th Interceptor Command received orders to carry out a special daylight operation as requested by MacArthur. The Corregidor batteries wanted air photos of the area between Ternate and Cavite, to try and locate three heavy artillery pieces whose firing was getting dangerously accurate.
As they had no reconnaissance plane, they fixed a camera under the forward seat of an old training bi-plane, a Stearman PT-13. Mucking about over Cavite at 100 m.ph. and in broad daylight, without even a revolver, was plain suicide. Once again Captain Villamor heroically volunteered for the Job. A flight of six P-40s, led by Ben Brown, was going to try to keep the Zeros off him.
An hour after they had gone there was still no news, and all the men who were not actually on duty were collected round the General’s tent, which had the loudspeaker tuned to the planes’ wavelength.
The suspense was appalling. The General lay on his camp bed, struck down by a severe bout of malaria, and drops of sweat trickled down his pale, drawn face.
‘Hullo, Leo to 9 MN, Leo to 9 MN, we are coming back.’
They were, but twelve Zeros had taken off beneath them. It was going to be a race to the death. Would the Stearman manage to land first? On top of that, the P-40s would literally have to protect its landing with their fuselages. They would thereby lose the advantage of altitude, without which P-40s were no match for Zeros.
There they were! Everyone rushed
out on the strip. Villamor put his plane into a vicious side-slip which made the bracing-wires hum like the strings of a harp, then he levelled out between the trees, swish-tailed savagely and literally slammed his plane on the ground. Three of the six Curtiss’s, in order to protect him right to the end, had put down their wheels and flaps, while the three others were circling round the strip at treetop level. Immediately afterwards the six Zeros came hurtling down.
But the Stearman had already been dragged into the lee of some rocks. The P-40s raised their flaps and their undercart. Propellers at fine pitch, they desperately tried to get up to 3000 feet—the difference between life and death.
Carried away by their momentum, and over-estimating the speed of the Curtiss’s, the Zeros misjudged their first attack and their firing was wide. The Jap fighters gained height and turned back on the P-40s, which had regrouped in pairs for mutual protection. The Curtiss’s, hanging desperately on their propellers and practically stalling, were at the mercy of the fast, agile Zeros. As the latter separated, waggling their wings, to choose their individual victims, the six other Zeros came up from behind, in the sun. Taken by surprise, and mistaking the new arrivals for American reinforcements, the first Zeros broke away. It was a miracle, and Ben Wagner, an old hand at this game, seized his chance. Diving into the disordered group of Jap planes, the Curtiss’s let fly with all they had and finally escaped into the clouds.
Two Zeros went into a spin, belching smoke, a third crashed in flames, and a fourth exploded, covering the airfield with burning fragments. The pilot’s crumpled body fell between two shelters.
Just at that point the airfield’s anti-aircraft defences opened up against the bewildered Japs. A Zero, framed by bursts, climbed towards the clouds and vanished into them. A few seconds later they heard the chatter of a Curtiss’s machine-gun and then the crash of a collision—the interlocked remains of two planes floated down through the layer of strato-cumulus.
Flames in the Sky: Epic stories of WWII air war heroism from the author of The Big Show (Pierre Clostermann's Air War Collection Book 2) Page 3
