The Ragged, Rugged Warriors

by Martin Caidin

  There are, unhappily, few complete official records of those days. In the early weeks of the CATF, the records were largely nonexistent because there was no means of recording—paper was as much in short supply as spare parts and tools. For months the men kept notes, combat logs, and other information on rice paper, envelopes, the backs of letters and order sheets, and even matchbox covers.

  Unquestionably the worst problem was illness—many of the pilots, crewmen, and mechanics were so ill from a variety of ailments and diseases that had they been in the United States they would have been declared unfit for duty and ordered immediately into a hospital. But the CATF had to make do with men who were ailing, whose bodies revealed sores that could not heal because of the lack of medicine, whose bodies and clothes often were filthy, and who could only dimly remember what soap was like. Not only were medical supplies in critically short order, but medical personnel also were not available, and missionaries performed around the clock in the absence of army doctors and nurses.

  Yellow jaundice and dysentery were so widespread (from the basic diet of filth, greasy pork, sweet potatoes, and rice) that these ailments were considered to be “normal health.”

  And against this pitiful assembly of American military might the Japanese had so many aircraft that the complement of fighters and bombers at a single Japanese base exceeded all the planes in the entire China Air Task Force.

  The promise of supplies ferried over the Hump faded with the onset of winter weather; storms shrouded the peaks and lashed the air with a violent fury, and for weeks at a time no pilot in a C-47 dared to brave the terrors of weather within the Asiatic mountain country. Without tools or spare parts, few planes could be put into the air to make an effective showing against the enemy.

  And yet, miraculously, the fighters continued to go up, continued to intercept the Japanese on their bombing missions, continued to strike at Japanese ground forces and to strike in strafing and bombing raids across the combat front that stretched for thousands of miles.

  The CATF was still a squalling infant when it opened its campaign against the enemy with the raids of July 1 through July 4. Haynes personally made a daring follow-up raid to these initial four missions by flying in a single B-25, escorted by two P-40s, against the Japanese air headquarters of Tengchung on the Salween. To make the most of the mission, the three airplanes on their way home pounded a supply column on the Burma Road, making repeated strafing runs against the exposed Japanese force and inflicting casualties estimated in the “several hundred.”

  The Weary Fighters

  Sixteen veterans of the AVG had promised to remain in China for approximately two weeks after the AVG on July 4, 1942, officially ceased to exist, to assist the CATF in getting combat-ready. They made certain not to overstay their temporary duty. Promptly on July 18, as Chennault was planning to increase his fighter operations against the enemy, his personnel ranks were severely and suddenly depleted. A transport slid into a landing at Kunming with several replacement fighter pilots. When the plane took off it carried with it the “we’ve had it!” pilots of the AVG. There were, however, only 15; one man had been killed in the brief interval of extra volunteer combat duty.

  Even in mid-July the CATF was being crippled by a shortage of fighter pilots, and the 23rd Fighter Group was unable to count even one dozen experienced men. Replacements unfortunately need training, and training replacements has the distressing habit of burning up precious fuel, wearing out airplanes, and sometimes wrecking them as well.

  The combination of the woes that beset the CATF made all the more incredible its feats in combat.

  The Japanese closed out the month of July with a major attempt to cripple or destroy the CATF. Fighters and bombers for several weeks had made sporadic raids against the CATF fields, but on July 30 and 31 the enemy went for the knockout punch. An estimated 120 fighters and bombers, including many Army fighters (with numbers of the Oscar, a radial-engine dervish considered the most maneuverable Japanese fighter of the war), tried to inundate CATF opposition and smash the fields. For 36 hours the badly outnumbered CATF pilots hurled their fighters against the enemy. In the frantic fighting the P-40 pilots of the CATF burned and shot apart 17 Japanese fighters and bombers, while losing only three P-40s in combat (the pilots survived).

  Caught by surprise at the unexpected intensity of opposition, the Japanese immediately shifted to night bombing operations, pounding Kweilin and Hengyang (100 miles to the northeast of Kweilin) in attempts to destroy CATF operational capability. In this campaign they ran into their “old friends,” Flying Tiger pilots Major David Hill and Major Gil Bright. Flying night interceptions with Hill and Bright were Major John R. Alison and Captain Robert J. Baumler.

  The men climbed into a dark Chinese sky to fight a heavy raid against Hengyang; no one knew just how many Japanese planes were in the air, since their number could only be estimated as “several dozens of planes.” John Alison achieved fame among his fellow pilots by shooting down three bombers out of a formation of five planes, and Baumler cut down two more bombers in the shadowy combat. To complete excitement for the evening, Alison’s fighter, severely damaged in the battle, overshot the landing strip and thundered beyond the field to crash deliberately into a river. Alison escaped from his plane, and later the Chinese salvaged the precious fighter by dragging it from the river with bamboo mats.

  On August 5 Alison was in the thick of it again. An estimated 100 fighters and bombers roared toward Kunming, and Alison with seven other pilots tried to turn the enemy formation. In the fight the CATF pilots shot down four Japanese fighters which blocked their intercept; Lieutenant Lee Minor was killed in the crash of his P-40, for the only American loss of the battle.

  Abruptly—and strangely, since they had not suffered excessive losses—the Japanese pulled back their claws, and for the month following did not make further attacks against the CATF.

  A Pilot Named Scott

  There is a “side story” to the tale of the CATF in the form of the 23rd Fighter Group’s Commanding Officer— Colonel Robert Lee Scott, Jr. Scott pulled every trick in the book (and invented a few of his own) in order to get into combat with fighters. In April, 1942, while flying transport missions with Caleb Haynes in the struggling ABC Ferry Command, Scott managed to wangle a new P-40E Kittyhawk from Claire Chennault. Scott’s argument was that with one Kittyhawk he could raise enough hell in India and Burma to give the Japanese all sorts of problems.

  “I told the General,” explained Scott, “that I wanted one single P-40 to use in India and Burma. I knew they were scarce, but I would promise him that nothing would happen to it, and the instant he needed the ship I would fly it back to him in China. The General smiled. I’m sure he was thinking and wondering whether, if he were in my position, he wouldn’t have begged for the same chance. He didn’t give me some excuse that he well might have used—that the P-40s belonged to the Chinese Government, that it would have been against regulations, and so forth. General Chennault knew that I would use that ‘shark,’ as we called the P-40s, against the Japs. He made his own regulations then; what did it matter who killed the Japs and who used the P-40s so long as they were being used for China?

  “By the twinkle in his eyes I knew that I had won my case. The General said, ‘Some Forties are on the way from Africa now. You take the next one that comes through. Use it as long as you want to.’ That’s the way I got the single fighter plane that was to work out of Assam.”1

  Immediately on acquiring his new P-40E (Serial Number 41-1496) Scott had the famed shark’s mouth painted on the lower nose of the airplane. Starting on May 1, 1942, Scott hurled himself into a wild month of flying that raised eyebrows through the Allied camp and threw the Japanese into consternation. Within a week the Japanese were convinced that they were facing an entire P-40 squadron rather than just one man in one airplane, and Scott went to great pains to further this belief.

  He flew from the first light of day into the night, every single day
that his new fighter could be taken into the air. During that one month, Bob Scott put in a total of nearly 215 combat hours in the Kittyhawk, averaging just over seven hours a day of flying for May. For a while Scott used the fighter to escort the unarmed transports across the Burma jungles, flying 3,000 feet above the Gooney Birds, hoping for Japanese fighters to go after the “sitting duck” targets, so that he could come barreling in from out of the sun after them. But four days of escort flights failed to flush a single enemy fighter. Then, on May 5, Scott drew first blood—and launched his amazing campaign against the enemy.

  North of the now Japanese-held air base of Lashio he caught sight of a twin-engine bomber being serviced, gasoline drums and trucks in front of the airplane. This was his first opportunity to cut loose with the six heavy guns of the Kittyhawk; after three passes the bomber spewed forth flames and smoke and Scott turned his attention elsewhere.

  He found his next targets on the Burma Road—two long columns of Japanese soldiers, marching in closely packed formation, with a dozen trucks making up part of the column. The Allison engine screamed as Scott came down in a flat dive. A thousand yards out he gripped the trigger, and streams of .50-caliber lead hosed in a devastating blast the length of the entire column. For several minutes Scott pounded the trapped Japanese force, then raced away to the south. Low over the horizon, he turned sharply and came back in again. He caught the survivors, already re-formed, completely by surprise. When he left the second time, his ammunition exhausted, four trucks blazed brightly and there were dozens of bodies sprawled along the road. (The Chinese confirmed more than 40 dead.)

  Later that day Scott was out on his second mission— but went home grumbling about a lack of targets.

  For the next three days he waited for news of the destruction of a huge fuel cache of 100,000 gallons—an RAF fuel dump at Myitkyina which the British were supposed to set off before abandoning the field so that the aviation gasoline would not fall into enemy hands. While he waited, Scott strafed and set aflame Japanese fuel barges on the Irrawaddy, south of Bhamo, and on the Chindwin.

  Then, on May 8, came the fall of Myitkyina—and no towering plume of black smoke in the sky to mark the destruction of the valuable fuel stores. As Scott related the mission:

  “When I came over the field at Myitkyina, the enemy fired at me while I was yet ten miles away; I could see the black bursts of the 37mm AA in front and below me. I started ‘jinking’ and moved to the northeast, so that I could come from out of the sun and be as far as I could get from the field. With my first burst the whole woods seemed to blow up—I have never seen such a flash as that which came when that veritable power-train of high octane fuel caught fire from the tracers. I also fired at two of the gun installations on the field. But the bursts from the Jap guns were so close to me that I decided to let well enough alone, and turned for home in Assam. Many times on the way home I looked over my shoulder, and the smoke from the thousands of gallons of gasoline was visible when I was sixty miles from Myitkyina.”

  Scott quickly discovered the severe battle discipline which held the Japanese ground forces together as a powerful fighting force. On May 9, he made four separate missions into Burma. On one of these, he returned to Lashio where he found a “choice target” waiting for him:

  “. . . I turned West for the field and came in right on the treetops, strafing the anti-aircraft guns in two passes.

  On the second run across the field I felt and heard bullets hitting my ship, but didn’t see their origin until nearly too late. Down close to the West end of the field, almost under the trees, were Japanese ground soldiers. They were grouped into two squares like the old Macedonian phalanx, and were firing rifles at me. I turned my guns on them and could see the fifty-calibre fire taking good toll from the Jap ranks. But even after I had made three runs on them, I noted that they continued to hold their positions, an excellent demonstration of perfect battle discipline. Later on one of the AVG aces, Tex Hill, told me that he had seen the same thing down in Thailand, and that after he’d strafed one of the squares of about a hundred men and there were only two or three on their feet, those few still were shooting at him when he left the field.”

  A fighter plane is an unbelievably deadly weapon, and under certain conditions it can seem—the men on the ground can only see it this way—to be all hell on wings coming after them with flaming death. Near Chefang, where the Burma Road is 8,000 feet above sea level, Scott caught a long Japanese troop column, and proved the lethal effectiveness of his Kittyhawk:

  . I turned to the side, to watch them—they were in heavy rain, and from the standpoint of their own safety they were in the worst possible place on the road. The Burma Road was cut out of red Yaunnan clay, and there were steep banks on both sides of the column—besides, I don’t think they had heard me over the roar of the rain, and I know they hadn’t seen my ship.

  “I turned my gun switches on and dove for the kill, sighting carefully through my lighted sight. My tracers struck the target dead center, for I had held my fire until the last moment. There was no need of doing this job at high speed, for if I merely cruised I’d have longer to shoot at them and could also look out for the hills hidden in the rain and the clouds. This time there was no dust, but the red, muddy water went up like a geyser. The six Fifties seemed to cut the column to bits. As I passed over, I could see those who hadn’t been hit trying desperately to crawl up the muddy bank to the safety of the trees and slipping back.

  “Turning very close to the hills, I came back over. Every now and then I’d lose them, for the rain was heavy and it was dark in the clouds, so dark that my tracers burned brilliant to the ground and then ricocheted away into the air again, still burning. I think it was in my third pass, as the Japs seemed to be giving up the effort to climb off the road, that I decided my ship would be called ‘Old Exterminator.’ ... I kept on cutting them to pieces until my ammunition was gone; I fired 1890 rounds into those three or four hundred Japanese, and I don’t think more than a handful escaped.”

  The effectiveness of his strafing and bombing attacks against Japanese ground forces prompted Scott to think up ways of bedeviling the enemy as well as tearing him up with guns and bombs. Each time that Scott flew, on three or four missions a day, his fighter took on a different appearance:

  “. . . I’d go out early in the morning with the spinner on the ‘shark’s’ nose painted white, and I’d attack Lashio or Mogaung from the South. Later in the morning I’d strike from the West, with the spinner painted blue. After lunch the eager painters or my drafted crewmen would have the spinner another color for my flight. By the time I made the fourth sortie, with the spinner a fourth color and my approach from a fourth direction, I’m sure the Japs didn’t know where I came from—and most certainly they didn’t guess that the American fighter force in Assam was composed of one single Kittyhawk. If they had, they would have been forced to do something to ‘save face.* For at the moment, with me drunk with the wine of my first combat, the Jap was losing face.”

  Scott’s repeated missions and his tactics with the “always being repainted” spinner of his Kittyhawk quickly created the reputation of the “One Man Air Force.” But Bob Scott had other ideas about his fighter—he was fairly straining at the leash to meet the Japanese in the air. During May he flew to China at every opportunity to discuss combat tactics with the AVG pilots. He knew several of them—as an Army instructor he had actually checked out some of the pilots to whom he now turned for combat savvy. And he took every opportunity that came along to fly combat with the AVG veterans.

  Scott’s unusual role—a transport pilot flying his own shark-painted Kittyhawk fighter both in China and alongside with AVG—has in subsequent years clouded just what position he held in Burma and China, before the AVG was phased out and Scott took over as leader of the 23rd

  Fighter Group, finally commanding several former AVG pilots assigned to his group.

  Russell Whelan, who wrote a detailed history of the AVG, Th
e Flying Tigers, discussed the arrival in the theater of Bob Scott as a fighter pilot:

  “Col. Scott had arrived in April to learn of the technique of downing Japanese from the A.V.G. Although he had commanded the Seventy-eighth Pursuit Squadron in Panama and was a former supervisor of Army Air Corps pilot schools in Southern California, Col. Scott ‘demoted’ himself to the role of wing man on every A.V.G. strafing and bombing mission that came along. When the A.V.G. had no flight scheduled, Scott operated as a one man air force over Burma. He won the Army Silver Star award for destroying a Japanese plane and two [later confirmed as four] supply trucks near Myitkyina on May fifth. In quick succession thereafter he knocked out a Japanese anti-aircraft battery, bombed the Myitkyina airbase runway three times and raided Homalin. Col. Scott was learning the ropes the hard way and everyone in the A.V.G. was delighted with him.”2

  The brief phrase, “raided Homalin,” obscures a wild combat day for Colonel Scott, when he attacked the target not once, but four separate times during the day. Each time he dropped a 500-pound bomb and slashed through Japanese bodies and targets with the murderous firepower of the Kittyhawk’s guns. Homalin was a concentration of Japanese military forces.

  From -11,000 feet on his first mission, Scott watched four barges easing from the broad Chindwin and heading for the Homalin docks. Alongside the wharf, the barges were caught by surprise as the Kittyhawk screamed down from the sky. The explosion of the heavy bomb hurled chunks of one barge 100 yards down the river, and cut two other barges free. As they drifted on the river, Scott put 200 rounds of tracers into each barge; one blazed from gasoline stores he had ignited, and the other was settling in the water. For good measure, Scott strafed the Japanese in the water.