The Ragged, Rugged Warriors

by Martin Caidin

  There was also the mission of dragging supplies into China, and during the month of May the few transports hauled 160,000 pounds of equipment and supplies over the towering mountains, into Kunming. The only thing that could be said for this operation was that the 80 tons of supplies were better than no supplies at all; everyone involved in the operation, however, was painfully aware that this limited cargo hardly made up a single drop in the capacious bucket of desperate need.

  Nevertheless it was a beginning. During the month of June the ABC crews managed to double their cargo load to 320,000 pounds. The figures would certainly have risen higher except that the pilots were being dragged off to fly emergency missions in Burma, and transports were rushed off to Africa to help stop Rommel.

  The pilots flew missions with their transport planes that, after the passage of so many years, seem more impossible now than they did during those days of urgency. One of the greats of the transport campaign was a lieutenant who laughed at the odds, juggled the word “impossible” just for fun, and defied death at almost every turn. His name was Jakey Sartz, and one day at Myitkyina he made history in his own special way. He watched Japanese troops pouring onto one end of the airfield, firing wildly, while he sat at the controls of a Gooney Bird at the other end of the field.

  Normally the C-47 had a maximum load when it carried 24 passengers. But Myitkyina was a million miles away from normal, and Sartz had 73 human beings jammed into his airplane. The Japanese did their best to shoot down his unarmed and vulnerable transport, but failed to keep Sartz from a successful takeoff and flight.

  Sartz landed with seventy-four passengers—his latest addition was bom during the hectic flight over the Naga Hills!

  During the month of August, despite the special missions, the enemy fighters, the violent storms, the mountains, the terrible food and horrid living conditions, the lack of spare parts, and other everyday problems, the transports carried 600 tons into China. The pilots dragged the C-47s far above the altitudes for which they had been designed to fly. The engineering books said that 12,000 feet was the normal top ceiling for the Gooney Bird, but the engineers had never been to India and China. So the pilots took the planes on up to 18,000 feet as a matter of course, and when they ran into the seething turbulence of storms, and heavy ice, they dragged them wearily up to 21,000 and 22,000 feet; up there the planes labored mightily and the engines screamed under the full load in the thin air. The transports were loggy at the controls and they wallowed like drunks from the combination of altitude and overload, and the crews cursed and went through hell when the Japanese fighters came dancing in nimbly, while they could only do their best to keep the wings level so they wouldn’t stall out and fall helplessly like a piano tumbling through the air.

  Colonel Robert L. Scott, Jr., who blazed a trail of flight from the days of biplane pursuits in the Army Air Corps long before World War II, and who flew Army mail-carrying planes in that disastrous era, served with Colonel Caleb Haynes as one of the pilots who created the ABC ferry service. Following are excerpts from the notes and reports of Colonel Scott, who tells in unexcelled fashion just what it was like early in 1942:

  “On April 24, Colonel Haynes and Colonel Cooper transported a load of ammunition and aviation fuel to Lashio for the Flying Tigers, and on their way back an enemy fighter plane made an attack on their transport. Recognizing the ship as an enemy Zero, Haynes and Cooper left the flying of the plane to the co-pilot and went back into the fuselage, to ward off the attack as best they could with Tommy guns. Don Old, the co-pilot, dove the transport until they were actually skimming over the jungle trees. These evasive tactics kept the Jap ship from coming up under the vulnerable transport. Just one of the Jap tracers in that Douglas would have set it afire.

  “As the Jap dived towards them, Cooper and Haynes and their crew chief, Sergeant Bonner, fired magazine after magazine at the Jap. This either discouraged him or the enemy ship lost the transport in a turn, for they got away. But even considering the bravery of these flyers in using their meager armament against a fighter ship, it is poor policy to shoot Zeros with Tommy guns; 45-caliber ammunition is not very effective against aircraft, but, as usual in a case like this, if you have only a popgun to point at the enemy, it helps the morale. ...

  “Major Joplin, whom we called ‘Jop,’ was another of our pilots. This man claimed that he had been born in a DC-2 and weaned in a C-47. One of the Pan-American pilots had made a forced landing with one of the transports, putting it down with the wheels up in a rice paddy near the Brahmaputra. Jop took a crew to the transport, took the bent propellers off and roughly straightened them. With his crew and some volunteer natives, he dug holes under the folded-up landing-gear and then let the gear down until it was fully extended, with the wheels down, to the bottom of the holes. Now he placed heavy timbers from the wheels to the surface of the rice paddy, putting them in at a small angle to form an inclined plane. Next he had about a hundred natives pull on ropes that were tied to the wheels, and dragged the Douglas transport up the inclined plane until it rested on the more or less level ground of the rice paddy. Then Jop demonstrated that he could justify all his claims of having been bom in a Douglas transport. He gave the ship the guns, and in a flurry of mud and water and rice stalks, bounced it from the field and flew it home to base.

  “All the pilots were good, and they were eager. The weather never became too bad or the trip too dangerous for men like Tex Carleton, Bob Sexton, or the others to get through. The enlisted men were the best. There in Assam they fought a constant battle against boredom, malaria, and every form of tropical disease. They ate and slept in the mud, and didn’t grumble more than the average soldier gripes about the native food. The stringy buffalo meat was fairly tough; the mouthful used to get bigger and bigger as you chewed it. . ..

  “Colonel Haynes and I were ordered to leave immediately for Shwebo, Burma, down on the Mandalay-Rangoon Railway, and evacuate the staff of General Stilwell. It seemed that the Japs had crossed another place on the Irrawaddy and were about to capture the entire American Military Mission to China—the Ammisca. We didn’t even know whether or not there was a landing field in Shwebo, but I found it on a map and in the late afternoon we took off for lower Burma.

  “We flew through black storms all the way to the Mekong; then turning south, we found better weather, even if we were getting into Japanese-controlled skies. We landed at Myitkyina [for fuel]. .. .

  “Flying as low as we could without hitting the tops of the jungle trees, we followed the Myitkyina-Mandalay railroad to the South... .

  “All the country ahead of us was marked with columns of black smoke, rising straight into the clear sky. We looked for hostile ships until our eyes ached—or for any ship at all, for we knew it would be a Jap, ours being the only Allied plane in the air. We had been flying these unarmed transports so long that both of us had become used to it. Behind us in the empty cargo space I could see the crew chief and the radio operator searching the skies on both sides, with their inadequate Tommy guns at ‘ready* position. We kept the transport low to the flat country now, so that it wouldn’t be silhouetted against the sky. Moreover the trees under us caused the olive-drab of the ship to blend in, making us harder to see. I thought many times that we couldn’t get lower; but we kept going down until I know if the wheels had been extended we’d have been taxiing.

  “I guess we were both a little bit nervous as we peered ahead for any little dot that would mean a Jap. Fly specks on the windshield—and you get lots of them when flying as low as we were—scared us many times. I could feel the palms of my hands sweating as the tension increased. . . . Colonel Haynes saw the field at Shwebo and pulled the big transport around like a fighter, slipping her in and sitting her down like a feather-bed... .

  “Some of the loads that ferry pilots packed into those DC-3s would have curdled the blood of the aeronautical engineers who designed the ship. The C-47, or DC-3 . . . was constructed to carry a full load of twenty-four passenge
rs or six thousand pounds. The maximum altitude was expected to be about 12,000 feet—but we later went a minimum of 18,000 across the hump, and sometimes we had to go to 21,500 to miss the storms and ice. Carrying the refugees, we broke all the rules and regulations because we had to. There were women and children, pregnant women, and women so old that they presumably couldn’t have gone to the altitude that was necessary to cross into India. There were hundreds of wounded British soldiers with the most terrible gangrenous infections. At the beginning we used to load the wounded first, those who were worst off; but later, when we realized that with our few transports we’d never get them all out, we took only the able-bodied. That was a hard decision to make, but we looked at it finally from the theory that those must be saved who could some day fight again.

  “But as I say, at first we carried the terribly wounded, piling them in until the ship groaned and the door would hardly close. I always carried out fifty or more in this ship that had been designed for twenty-four....

  Douglas C-47’s—military versions of the old DC-3— operated out of crude fields and carried loads that “would have curdled the blood of the aeronautical engineers who designed the ship.”

  “It was hot as hell flying the loaded transport off the fields in Burma. We’d try to fly with the windows open in the cockpit, but that created a suction that drew the air from the cabin up to where we pilots were. With those filthy bodies and the terrible stench of gangrenous wounds we couldn’t bear it, and would have to close the side windows and just sweat. Sometimes the poor devils couldn’t stand the trip and we’d have dead men aboard when we landed in India. .. ."

  The removal of all the heavy bombers of the Tenth Air Force from India to North Africa wrecked the plans of that organization to mount a bomber offensive against the Japanese. During the three months of July, August, and September, 1942, the only bombers remaining in the Tenth—B-25 medium bombers—managed to drop a total of 135 tons of bombs. This was hardly enough to annoy the Japanese in their moment of triumph, and the bombing offensive that had been planned with such great hopes foundered even as it was getting under way.

  Brigadier General Clayton L. Bissell, new commander of the Tenth Air Force, received an immediate new assignment—creating the China Air Task Force (CATF), which was to be made up of the 23rd Fighter Group under the lead of Colonel Scott, and the 11th Medium Bombardment Squadron under Colonel Haynes, with nearly one hundred fighters and bombers, according to the table of organization, to make up the striking force.

  Bissell lost control of the CATF almost immediately, since there had been under way for some weeks a plan (on which Chiang Kai-shek and Claire Chennault were in agreement) for a renewed air offensive in China with the CATF, but under the command of Chennault.

  The “new” air war was about to begin in China—but it would be crippled by the familiar old problems of shortages in just about everything needed to fight that war.

  CHINA CASTOFFS

  During the first months of its existence the China Air Task Force functioned as the bastard stepchild of the Army Air Forces—a stepchild with precious little to fight a powerful enemy arrayed across a vast battlefront. The CATF at first could mount for combat operations no more than seven B-25 medium bombers and approximately 30 P-40B and P-40E fighters; the fighter force inherited by the CATF actually amounted to 35 fighters (of which several were always grounded for repairs). There were ten additional fighter planes—the intensely distrusted P-43 Lancers—which were considered as totally unfit for flying, let alone mixing it up with Japanese fighters.

  With its seven bombers and about 30 flyable fighter planes, in its early operations the CATF had to fight the Japanese along a front that stretched for approximately

  5,000 miles. The battle line of the air ran from Chengtu in northwest China to Chungking, on the Yangtze, and southward to the Red River of Indo-China. It encompassed the Tibetan plateau and the Salween River to the west, and to the east spread out over the China Sea. To meet the Japanese across this distance the CATF juggled its few airplanes with typical Chennault dexterity. That old China hand used Kweilin (500 miles east of Kunming) as his main operations center, and shuttled his planes through Hengyang, Yunnanyi, Nanning, and other Chinese airfields, as well as staging some operations through Dinjan in Assam.

  The men who operated in the CATF came from a bewildering variety of backgrounds, places, and former combat assignments; some of them “ordered themselves” out of stifling desk jobs and made the long trek to join Chennault in his one-sided air war. Bob Scott at least had the 23rd Fighter Group to launch into the Japanese; Caleb Haynes had only his meager handful of B-25 bombers which were flown by men whose experience had been in every type of bomber operation one might imagine, including veterans of the Doolittle raid against Japan.

  The personnel complement of the CATF grew in typical ragged fashion. Its maintenance crews included survivors of the Royal Air Force evacuated with the AVG from Burma when the Japanese rushed in. They had gone on to service AVG fighters, and now were with the CATF, an adaptable group of men who worked day and night to keep Chennault’s planes in the air. The CATF men were a group of wanderers and castoffs mixed with personnel assigned directly to CATF. But they all had in common the same curses and the same problems: they were poorly fed, clothed, and housed. They were ridden with Asiatic sores and diseases, they were sick to death of China, and they were desperately lacking in everything from toilet articles to sparkplugs.

  The first two bombers to arrive early in June, 1942, were the survivors of six B-25 Mitchells that had departed from Dinjan under command of Major Gordon Le-land. At 10,000 feet Leland was trying to break through thick clouds when his bomber smashed into a mountain and exploded. Two Mitchells followed him to the same disastrous end, with the loss of all three crews. A fourth bomber scraped by the mountain but became lost over the clouds and ran out of fuel; the crew bailed out safely. Two Mitchells survived the harrowing flight and made it to Kumming and Kweilin.

  Two weeks later six more Mitchells slipped into Kweilin for the 11th Medium Bombardment Squadron, and with them came pilots who were adept in their profession. The new squadron commander, Major William E. Bayse, had handled a B-17 Flying Fortress through the ill-fated Java campaign. Seven pilots aboard the new bombers were hand-picked veterans from the Doolittle mission against Japan.

  Caleb Haynes now had eight bombers with which to hit the Japanese, but immediately one of the Mitchells vanished from the CATF roster as mechanics stripped down the plane and cannibalized it for spare parts. For the next two months the skeletal frame of this one airplane was to keep the other seven Mitchells flying their combat operations. The mechanics also performed miracles of improvisation. Getting bombs into China was a formidable task and one way to overcome the problem of supply was to use everything at hand. The mechanics built “adaptable” bomb racks that carried missiles of American, French, British, Chinese, and even Russian manufacture—which were lying about at various airfields.

  The Mitchells roared into battle with a thundering cry that brought the Japanese straight up in surprise. On July 1 (three days before the AVG was phased out of existence), four Mitchells were escorted by five Flying Tiger pilots in a raid against the harbor facilities of Hankow. Although there were claims of heavy damage, intelligence reports failed to confirm any major effects of the attack. The next day the Mitchells struck again at Hankow, and flames leaping through buildings along the waterfront left no question of the effectiveness of the raid. That the Japanese were disturbed by the appearance of the swift bombers was all too evident later that same day when a heavy Japanese bomber force plastered Hengyang airfield.

  On July 3, the Mitchells made it three days in a row by raiding Nanchang; the Japanese were caught off balance by the attack, and promptly pounded the Hengyang base once again. On July 4, the Japanese installations at Tien Ho airfield near Canton took a severe beating from the mixed force of B-25s and P-40s. The crews were delighted with the absence of
enemy opposition, and discovered why there were no interceptions when they returned to Kweilin. They were forced to circle their home field, while P-40s of the new 23rd Fighter Group fought a pitched battle with new Japanese fighters—twin-engine, fast, and heavily armed.

  The rugged, maneuverable B-25 Mitchell, the only bomber for months available for strikes against the Japanese. It was also flown in the Doolittle raid against Japan, and became recognized finally as one of the greatest aerial weapons ever built

  As the weeks passed, the airfield scenes looked less and less like those of typical American installations—which our bases in China certainly were not. The picture of American airmen well fed and clothed was a hollow mockery. Men wore any clothes they could scrounge, and their old and worn garments were well mixed with the Chinese padded coolie coats, castoff British gear, American military issue, and a variety of civilian attire.

  The airfields were, at their best, crude in design, construction, and facilities. They lacked hangars or maintenance shops, and were barren even of protective revetments for the planes. Mechanics (aided many times by the pilots and crew members) worked out-of-doors on the fighters and bombers in every type of miserable weather one might expect. Equipment for the airplanes came from an international junkheap; spare parts were of Russian, American, Italian, French, German, Chinese, and other sources. Proper tools were a laugh to the mechanics, who adapted a bewildering variety of tools to fit our airplanes. Even the belly tanks for long-range missions were a travesty of modern equipment, since many of them were made of bamboo calked with clay, and had the distressing habit of leaking fuel.