The Ragged, Rugged Warriors

by Martin Caidin

  “While at 9,000 feet in pursuit of nine enemy bombers, I observed a bomb burst approximately three miles ahead at one o’clock. I immediately turned sharply to port, through 180 degrees, and saw a Japanese aircraft about

  1,000 feet below me. As a result of my turn I was coming up on the bomber from astern. I saw it to be a twin-engined aircraft with a single rudder. ... I overhauled the enemy at about 25 miles per hour. As my windshield was covered with oil, I was able to get only occasional glimpses of him. At 350 yards, as near as I could judge in these circumstances, I opened fire. After one burst three of my guns stopped; the remaining gun stopped after two further short bursts. I was unable to see whether, despite his rear gun, the enemy returned my fire. Indeed, I am of the impression that the rear gun was not manned, because the enemy took no evasive action as I approached. Breaking away downwards I returned to the aerodrome. . . .”4 By evening the first day, only 50 out of 110 British aircraft in northern Malaya were able to fly. In the first three days of the aerial attacks the Japanese rendered untenable every airfield in northeast and northwest Malaya.

  After the loss of the 21st Squadron on December 10, Greg Board’s fighter unit shifted its operations to Butter-worth on the west coast of Malaya. Here the squadron had its first encounter with the enemy when 13 Buffaloes took off to intercept a formation of Japanese bombers.

  “It’s the kind of a fight you never forget,” mused Board in recounting the battle. “The Zeros shot eleven out of the thirteen Buffaloes to wreckage in the air. One other pilot and myself were the only ones to land in our airplanes.”

  On December 13 the 453rd Squadron was dispatched to Ipoh, just south of the Thailand border in the center of Malaya. The fighter pilots struck immediately at Japanese troops pounding the hard-pressed 11th Indian Division. The Buffaloes went in at treetop height, strafing Japanese convoys and troop forces on the roads and in open areas. The fighters did a thorough job and inflicted heavy casualties wherever they caught the enemy. But the effort failed to have the effect needed in providing relief to the Indian forces; there simply weren’t enough planes with which to hit the Japanese.

  Soon afterward, with only ten fighters serviceable throughout the 453rd Squadron, the pilots rose to attack an approaching force of 27 bombers with an escort of 27 Zero fighters. The Zeros were lax in their formation discipline; they were following the bombers and left a slim opening between their formation and the twin-engine planes.

  That slim gap gave the Australians a rare opportunity and they made the most of it by roaring down in diving attacks against the bombers. The gap proved slimmer than they thought, for the Zeros were on them in a flash. Board had barely enough time to hammer out one long burst at a bomber, dive below his quarry, and zoom upward to close to pointblank range with a rear-quarter attack from below. Japanese bullets suddenly rocked the Buffalo; grimly Board kept firing. He watched his tracers pouring into the bomber. Without warning it disappeared in a tremendous explosion that shook the Buffalo almost out of control.

  Then the Zeros were in the midst of the Australian pilots, angrily snapping out bursts at their opponents. “Fortunately, there were enough loose clouds around for us to hide in,” Board admits candidly, “because if you mixed it up with a dogfight in a Zero, the outcome was very clear. Very quickly you were a dead man.”

  Working day and night, mechanics pieced together the wreckage of old airplanes, and rejuvenated the 21st Squadron with six ramshackle Buffalo fighters. It took the Japanese exactly one more fight to rip them down to only two fighter airplanes.

  There were fewer aerial fights than ground-attack missions. On the roads alongside the airfield the fighter pilots watched streams of refugees fleeing from the approaching Japanese. The lack of anything more than token resistance in Thailand had freed the Japanese Army, and it thundered down into Malaya with all the force of a tidal wave crashing onto a beach. Again and again the surviving Buffalo pilots went out on their treetop strafing runs against the enemy forces.

  Only three men were now left of the original group, and they took off one morning to hit a Japanese infantry column reported advancing on the main Ipoh highway. This time the Buffalo pilots found the road swarming with thousands of men packed tightly into close columns, and for the first time in the one-sided fighting, the Australians had the opportunity for which they had been waiting.

  The fast-firing machine guns of the Buffalo fighters slashed torrents of bullets through the dense ranks of the Japanese soldiers, exacting a gruesome toll. Down the long columns went the Buffaloes, the pilots squeezing out long bursts, gently sawing rudder back and forth to encompass the full road in their fire. Their guns became red hot as they poured the scythe into the bodies of the Japanese—a devastating sweep that killed (by Japanese confirmation after the war) more than 400 men, and seriously wounded another 200.

  Wings glinted in the sun as the three fighters completed their long strafing pass and swung sharply to come around for another lethal run. The Buffalo pilots were caught completely by surprise as two Japanese fighters “appeared out of nowhere and came hellbent for leather right at us.”

  On Greg Board’s right wing was Max White, who went down almost immediately in flames, caught by a single well-aimed burst from one Zero. Board tramped down hard on rudder, skidding wildly just above the trees, and slewed around on the tail of a Japanese fighter. It was first blood against the Zero for Board, and he made the most of the rare opportunity, glued to the tail of the Japanese plane, hammering out bursts. Flame mushroomed from the wings and almost at once a huge ball of red fire swept around the Zero; the blazing mass trailed greasy smoke into the jungle and then disappeared in a blinding explosion. The third pilot—Jeff Seagoe—managed to chew pieces of metal off the second Japanese fighter, but that airplane hauled upward into a steep climb and left the Buffaloes far behind.

  Seagoe remained in his turn, nose dropping as he came around again to bring his guns to bear on the Japanese troop column. Board climbed to fly top cover and prevent any more surprise attacks. Below him, Seagoe was taking a terrible beating. The brief respite brought on by the appearance of the Zero fighters gave the Japanese time to ready their weapons, and Seagoe’s Buffalo was quickly shot to ribbons; he struggled back to Ipoh with Board flying cover off his wing.

  The days melted into a nightmarish blur, and the flying and fighting of Board was representative of what the other British pilots went through. Japanese bombers staged down against Burma, Malaya, Sumatra, and other areas in round-the-clock raids until the pilots were bone-weary from intercepts and from trying to sleep in between. Finally only three fighters could be scraped and patched together for the entire 453rd Squadron. The end seemed to be at hand during one alarm; as Board rushed from a dirt strip to climb into the air, he was shocked to see the other two fighters streaking along an intersecting runway. All three planes were going too fast to slow down or to avoid collision; to save the other men, Board chopped his throttle, yanked up his gear, and belly-whopped the Buffalo into the ground.

  The barrel-shaped fighter careened off the dirt strip, hurling up a fountain of dirt on each side. It smashed into a tree with an ear-splitting roar, broke in half at the cockpit, and sprayed wreckage and fluids in all directions. Dazed and rattled from the crash, Board discovered that he was pinned tightly into his seat—which in turn was partly imbedded in the tree! He shook his head in wonder, noticed with disbelief that his feet were in a creek and that there wasn’t any airplane in front of him.

  At this instant he heard the thin scream from the sky that warned of bombs already falling from high altitude. An Australian ground officer dashed up to the tree, tore Board loose from his seat, and half-dragged and pushed the dazed pilot to a slit trench, where both men tumbled in desperately just as the first bombs exploded nearby.

  The mechanics did the impossible by existing on starvation rations and going without sleep and patched some more of the wrecked Buffaloes into machines that would get into the air. Board and the oth
er pilots still alive barely got their airplanes out of Ipoh even as Japanese artillery shells were falling on the field perimeter—and snipers’ bullets whined dangerously close by.

  “The men couldn’t even bury their dead,” he said coldly. “There were too many of them. They packed the living and the wounded into trucks, buried bombs in the runway, and as soon as we got into the air, they set off the bombs and tore up the airstrip. Then they drove for their lives to Kuala Lumpur, where we all began the same bloody struggle over again.”

  Hopes soared when British merchantmen fought their way to the Singapore area and unloaded replacement fighters, including new Buffaloes. Board and his friends hoped to be assigned to the Hawker Hurricanes, but instead—because of their experience with the Brewster airplanes—were kept in the “suicide barrels.” Board and the other pilots were dismayed when they watched the Hurricanes roar into battle with the Zeros—and saw catastrophe befall them. The British pilots tore into the Japanese planes with the same tactics employed against German fighters in Europe. They expected, no doubt, that the “inferior” Japanese fighters would be swept aside by these tried-and-true tactics.

  The Japanese pilots watched with delight as the Hurricanes broke up their formations to mix it up in swirling dogfights. They laughed and promptly tore the British fighters apart. The answer was, and had been, clear to Board and any other man who had experience against the nimble Mitsubishis: never dogfight with the Zero.

  Board and ten other pilots went up in spanking-new Buffaloes to intercept a skyful of Japanese planes—108 bombers and fighters. The Australians were given one of their rare opportunities to climb to high altitude before the fight—they reached 25,000 feet (the Buffalo would fly no higher) and watched the bombers sliding along nearly two and a half miles below them. It was just the chance they had been waiting for.

  An excellent fighter, the Hurricane was expected to “slaughter” the Zero. Unfortunately, the Zero was faster, could outclimb and turn inside the Hawker fighter. And when the British pilots used the Hurricane to dogfight with the agile Zero, there could be only one outcome— slaughter of the British, not the Japanese, fighters.

  Board shoved the stick forward, rammed the throttle to the firewall, and plunged from the sky in a howling vertical dive. He held the dive until a bomber appeared in his gunsights and expanded with tremendous speed; leading his target carefully he squeezed the trigger. The big Mitsubishi raider erupted in crimson flame and almost immediately afterward broke into large flaming chunks that tumbled earthward; that gave Board his third confirmed kill. # Gritting his teeth, he horsed the stick back into his stomach, sagging with the punishing g-forces as the Buffalo mushed helplessly through the pullout. Then the wings grabbed at air and the fighter screamed upward, using the momentum of the pullout to zoom swiftly back to higher altitude.

  The swift plunge against the bomber and rocketing climb away from the Japanese formation put Board into the clear. Spotting a Zero fighter below him, he halfrolled onto his back and brought the stick back toward his body; the Buffalo fell out of the sky like a stone. Before Board could set up the Japanese fighter for the kill, all hell broke loose behind him. He had never seen the Zero that flashed away from its own formation and that now was clawing at his back and with cannon and guns methodically chopping the Buffalo into small pieces.

  The instrument panel exploded and blew apart in Board’s face, showering him with sharp pieces of metal and glass. Instinctively he hunched lower in his seat—just in time. Mighty pistons crashed into his back, sending pain ripping through his spinal column; Japanese bullets spanged off the armor plate and 20-mm. cannon shells tried to drive the plating right through him. Yet those terrible, thudding crashes into his back were saving his life as the plating held off the fatal blow. It was all like a bad dream in slow motion.

  The Japanese pilot shot the top layer of the Buffalo’s wings clear off the airplane, revealing naked ribs beneath; Board could see and feel the fighter coming apart beneath and all about him. Desperately, he went wild in the Buffalo, trying every trick he knew to shake the Mitsubishi. He feels that he tumbled, cartwheeled, and corkscrewed madly in his airplane in between the more conventional maneuvers.

  “But whoever it was in that Zero was good, damned good,” Board recalled grimly, “and he had a hell of a better airplane under his hands. He chopped that Brewster into ribbons and pieces as though he was an artist at his work. I had nothing left but to try and get out by going straight down. I was pulling all the power the airplane had and I shoved the stick forward and tried to save my life by diving vertically. . .

  It didn’t help; the Zero stayed glued to his tail like a nightmare that wouldn’t go away, snapping out short, neat bursts that pumped bullets and exploding shells into the disintegrating Buffalo. Then there just wasn’t anything else that Board could do, because he was sitting in the midst of a thundering, white-hot furnace as the Buffalo flamed. Brilliant fire gushed wildly from the fuel tanks, ammunition exploded in the wing racks, and the acrid, stinging fumes swirled through the cockpit and tried to choke him.

  Blazing from nose to tail, Board sliced frantically into a cloud, trying to pull out of the plummeting dive. He needed to slow down to ease the tremendous air pressure about the cockpit as he slid back the hatch. Then there was only the screaming need to escape; as he flipped the stricken fighter onto its back, flames washed in a blast furnace of heat over his body. He released his belt and fell through the roaring fire, the blessed relief of cold air sweeping away the scalding touch of his airplane. For long moments he fell, hand on the D-ring of his parachute, but not pulling, keeping his wits about him, freed of the sensation of falling with his body stabilized in the long plunge, he delayed opening the parachute until he could visually separate the trees in the mountainous jungle beneath him. Convinced he was as low as he dared fall— and that there would be a minimum time swinging in the chute with the Japanese fighters still about—he hauled on the D-ring. Silk blossomed open with a loud crraaaack! and he was drifting gently downward.

  Good fortune stayed with him. Seconds later the canopy caught in the trees. A long branch bent slowly under Board’s weight, and he had the luck simply to unfasten his harness and step out. But that about used up whatever fortune was smiling on him. On his person he had a pistol —and nothing else in the way of survival equipment. The jungle about him was incredibly dense, choked with foliage and with a trap at every step in the form of gnarled roots and rotting vegetation. Following a creek, Board fought and stumbled more than an hour just to claw his way a distance of 400 yards.

  Two days later he staggered into a village clearing—and into the hands of friendly natives. They slipped him through Japanese Army lines and pointed him in the direction of Singapore.

  The Hapless Fighters

  Many of the pilots serving with the RAF endured the same sort of adventures as Gregory Board, who was extremely fortunate to escape without any serious injuries or burns. His friends were not so lucky.

  Early in the campaign, Pilots Williams and McKenny of the 21st Squadron attempted to stave off an attack by 54 bombers and fighters. As a reward for their audacity in taking on odds of 27 to one, they were bounced by a dozen Zero fighters and promptly torn to pieces. McKenny was shot down in flames, but managed to bail out and parachute into the sea. Attacked by three fighters that made a special target of his Buffalo, Williams was enraged to find his guns jammed before he could get off a single burst, and he plunged earthward in a howling dive to shake his pursuers.

  The Buffalo ran away from the Zeros and Williams rushed for his airstrip; he made it ahead of the Japanese fighters but was moving so fast he was unable to land and so came around in a screaming turn, to bounce onto the runway on his second try. He hurled himself from his cockpit and dove headlong for the nearest trench—as his pursuers pounded over the strip, pouring cannon shells into his downed fighter.

  Two other Buffaloes from the same squadron rushed against the Japanese force. Pilot Mo
ntefiore was the only one of the four who shot down a Zero fighter, and he had no more than a few seconds to enjoy his victory before the Japanese exploded his Buffalo into flaming wreckage. He bailed out, sailed out of the sky into a palm tree; climbing down the tree, he grabbed a native’s bicycle and pedaled madly down a jungle trail until he returned to his squadron. The fourth Buffalo pilot—A. M. White, who was to die on December 14, 1941—managed this day barely to escape with his life. Zeros shot his plane into a mess, which he was able to crashland on Penang Island without injury.

  Confusion was rampant at the forward bases. Although at these fields ground crews worked day and night under conditions that were considered intolerable, the proximity of the swift-moving Japanese combined with broken communications to bring on panic situations. One official report of a field abandoned in haste—after the aircraft at the field were evacuated—showed what lack of communications and direction could do. An Australian officer noted: “In half an hour that little flame of panic had spread like wild-fire. I looked out on a deserted station. . . . There were only four of us left—the C.O., the Adjutant, the Armament Officer and myself . . . myself still too numb to appreciate the sarcasm of the other men’s conversation. Then I realized they were talking of Australians, that I was an Australian, and that many curious glances were being cast in my direction. . . . For the first and last time I felt ashamed of being an Australian. . . •

  The next day twenty-three men returned in a couple of trucks .. .”4

  Operational problems—especially weather—proved to be an enemy as severe as the Japanese. One mission flown by three pilots of the 453rd Squadron ended quickly in disaster. The pilots—Neale, Brown, and Livesey—were swept up in a sudden storm and lost all direction. Livesey attempted a forced landing in a paddy field; his Buffalo went through incredible gyrations, flipping and tumbling over and over, leaving the pilot injured when it finally settled as a tangled mass of wreckage. His fellow pilots fared otherwise. Neale’s fighter smashed into a tree and exploded in flames, instantly killing its pilot. Brown’s aircraft crashed with terrible force into the ground and exploded violently, also killing the pilot immediately.