Brewster Buffalo
Another illusion the English had been under for some time was the potential of the water buffalo, a semi-domestic beast that tilled the rice-paddies; they thought that these beasts would become ferocious killers if a white man came near them. And, come to think of it, it must have been aggravating when some playful, drunken Texans shot their myth full of holes, for they rode these buffalo down the streets of Rangoon while they yelled: “Yee, ho-oo-oo.” Actually, the only reason I could see that this superstition had been carried on for so long was that the English in those colonies had stayed away from any physical labor for so many generations.
But the English weren’t the only ones who were talking about the AVG, even if the Americans didn’t know about us at this time. The Japanese were talking about us. We hadn’t fooled them for one minute, and they stated that our being over there had to be considered another warlike act. The Japanese gave the United States an ultimatum of quite some length, and in it was: Get your flying missionaries and laborers out of the Far East.
Our stateside belongings, plus our new purchases and ourselves, were herded aboard a small train that ran on a narrow-gauge track. Doors opened both sides of its cars completely, not unlike some of the European trains I had seen in motion pictures. So the tiny cars could be opened up for complete ventilation, or closed for the monsoon season. So by this conveyance we moved on up to the AVG training center, shooting our sidearms at the telegraph poles as we traveled along.
This place in central Burma, where we finally arrived in the middle of November 1941, was a small village named Toungoo. We found nothing in Toungoo but grass shacks and the airstrip the RAF had constructed. But our airplanes were there, and we were met by other members of the group who had preceded us to the Orient, arriving in May or June of 1941.
These older members assigned us to grass-thatched barracks with wooden floor, and windows with no glass. Breeze was more important than anything else. There were nightly attacks of millions of squadrons of mosquitoes, though. These little devils would start blitzing us at dusk. Their work was serious until sunup the next morning.
The heat was so fatiguing that, as one example, I couldn’t get enough energy to jump out of my net-covered bunk while some of the other pilots were busy in the grass barracks near my bunk killing a cobra.
A scorpion sting is not fatal, but it can be damned painful. One morning I forgot to shake out my shirt while getting dressed, and for two days after that I wore on my back a lump the size of a cantaloupe.
Little wonder some of the earlier arrivals to the group went home in disgust. Six months of waiting. No action. The monsoons had to play themselves out before the pilots could fly.
We were informed that our detachment made one hundred pilots and about two hundred ground crew who had come over to date. But we were also informed that forty of the pilots who had preceded us had become fed up and retured home again. And we were to be informed a few days later that no more personnel of any kind would be coming, or any supplies of any nature. This came straight from Franklin Roosevelt, as this was one of his secret babies.
Toungoo was where I first set eyes upon our leader, who was to become famous, Claire Chennault, and I was genuinely impressed. In fact, seeing Chennault, and listening to him talk, was the only thing about this deal I had seen so far that did impress me.
Chennault was in his fifties, a stern-appearing military man, and looked as though he had been chiseled out of granite. This character had furrows and crow’s-feet on his granitelike face that I thought bottomless.
Everyone addressed him as Colonel, I gathered right off, and with genuine respect as far as I could see. Chennault seemed to be a person who commanded respect. Colonel wasn’t his real rank, because we had no ranks, for Claire had been shanghaied out of the Army Air Corps and told to retire as a captain. I was told that he was one of those who had backed Billy Mitchell to the hilt, and a premature retirement was the result.
Lack of hearing was the diagnosis, so I was informed, for his being retired from the Air Corps, but I noticed that the old man could hear everything he wasn’t supposed to hear. Physically I admired him tremendously, for it was something to see a man of his age so trim. When we played baseball occasionally, Chennault was always a part of it. I never saw him hit a ball out of the infield, but he never stopped running, either, although it was obvious that he was a sure out at first base.
The admiration that was shown the old man by the three female members of the AVG—this was a setup wallflowers dream about—didn’t impress me as completely military. As a matter of fact, my wife said that she had been attracted by Chennault ten years later, when she met him at a banquet at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood. No use, I told her, for he is now married to a beautiful young Chinese woman, and they have at least two children that I know of.
Two of these women were American nurses. The redheaded gal married one of the pilots, Petack, who was killed later. And the other nurse was holding hands steady with some other pilot.
Curtiss P-40
Then there was Olga, wife of the executive officer of the AVG, Harvey Greenlaw. They said that Chennault had found Harvey and Olga, his Mexican-Russian mate, stranded in the Orient and had employed them both. I never did know exactly what her job was supposed to be.
Here at Toungoo, the first week of December 1941, our airplanes were finally ready for action. They were P-40s that had been equipped here in the field in far-off Burma with machine guns, self-sealing gasoline tanks, and armor plate added to make them war planes. Actually, these P-40s had been borrowed (lend-lease to Britain) back from our English ally. One hundred of them. Furthermore, that was all the AVG was able to borrow.
Shark faces were painted in brilliant color combinations on the natural silhouettes of the P-40 engine cowlings, an idea appropriated from a magazine picture of a P-40 in North Africa.
Having never flown before in an aircraft with a liquid-cooled engine, I knew nothing about their manipulation, least of all this airplane doctored up with armor plate behind the pilot’s seat, with guns and ammunition, none of them taken into consideration when it was designed. The pilots who had flown them said these “Shark Fins,” the name the British hung on us, had an unorthodox manner of spinning end over end with their unengineered modifications, and that unless one had sufficient altitude to get them out of a spin it was impossible. They had several tombstones to prove their point.
One day, after I had been given a cockpit check-out by a qualified pilot, I had my first ride. The revised P-40 didn’t feel too strange, considering that I had never flown one before and had been inactive for three months. I didn’t spin it, however, for I believed their story even though I didn’t think it possible.
Everything went okay until I came in to touch down for a landing. Having been accustomed to three-point landings in my Marine Corps flying, I tried to set this P-40 down the same way, even though I had been instructed to land this plane on its main gear only. I bounced to high heaven as a result of my stubbornness, and I started to swerve off the runway. So I slammed the throttle on, making a go-around. In my nervousness I had put on so many inches of mercury so quickly that the glass covering the manifold pressure gauge cracked into a thousand pieces. After I had landed in the proper manner on the second try, I was informed in no uncertain words: “You can’t slam the throttle around like you did in those God-damned Navy air-cooled engines.”
Jim Cross took the same P-40 up after lunch and the engine blew up. When this happened, Jim was lucky to make a wheels-up landing in a nearby rice paddy. Even though Jim wasn’t hurt, I felt very bad about it, as they were forced to use this P-40 for spare parts.
This feeling left me shortly when I discovered that I wasn’t the only one, and that even my squadron commander had arranged for spare parts in three P-40s. One pilot had five American flags painted on his plane, for he had wrecked five P-40s, which made him a Japanese ace. This became the only way of getting spare parts, as there w
as to be none shipped from the United States. I suppose it was only human to want somebody besides oneself to supply these parts.
There were three squadrons of nearly twenty each. Approximately sixty pilots and sixty P-40s remained intact by the end of the first week in December. These squadrons were called the First, the Second, and Third Pursuit on what little paper work the group had to contend with. But to us pilots they were the Adam and Eve, the Panda Bears, and Hell’s Angels.
Our detachment of twenty-seven was split up, nine of us being placed in each of the three squadrons. My squadron was the Adam and Eve, the First Pursuit, which is the first pursuit man knows of, incidentally.
Shortly after I had arrived in Toungoo, I began to cause consternation in some of the so-called staff of the group, although Chennault never said anything to me. In my way of thinking most of the men in this non-flying staff Chennault was stuck with were Asiatic bums of the first order. Chennault later had to call us pilots together when he realized we wouldn’t take orders from the staff, telling us his sad story. He said: “I was to have a competent military staff for this group. However, everyone of staff rank is frozen in the United States. I have to do the best I can with what little staff I’ve been able to pick up out here. And all I ask of you is—please understand—and bear with me.”
His talk touched me deeply, but I couldn’t get over the fact that his staff damned nearly outnumbered his combat pilots. Maybe, I reasoned, he had to have so many because, in more or less his words, it took about ten of them to do one ordinary man’s work. At this time I hadn’t been able to discover exactly what each did do, except to show up at mealtime.
Harvey Greenlaw, the self-made executive officer, called himself Lieutenant Colonel Greenlaw, although no one else would. The manner in which Harvey was forever talking courts-martial to threaten a group of civilians gave me the impression that he must have been at least one jump ahead of a few himself in his military days. The poor guy gave the impression that he hated everybody. Maybe Harvey had his reasons. Who knows?
Harvey was even going to court-martial Frankie Croft and me for unofficer-like conduct when we came back from the native village of Toungoo, pulling two grinning Burmese in their own rickshas. We had to pay them plenty to do this. If only Harvey had known how much trouble it had been, with a language barrier, to get these two ricksha runners to let us pull them in a race.
Of course this was all prior to our going into action, and I guess Harvey had to be important. However, there were a heck of a number of times later on when he should have gotten disciplinary. But I always managed to change Harvey’s mind, when these times came, with one of my appropriate expressions. One I used was: “Get lost, Greenlaw, or I’ll bend your teeth,” and while trying to figure this one out he would forget all about the court-martial.
Japanese planes flew overhead at considerable height on more than a few occasions, probably taking aerial photographs. They never got close enough for us to get a decent look at them. I imagined that they were laughing and thinking what damage can a few little planes like this cause us. As we never flew out of this Toungoo area, how were we to know what was going on in Japanese-occupied territory in next-door Thailand or French Indo-China.
And then it started—or at least action of some kind—and war for the United States. Everyone had been sound asleep in our grass-covered barracks. Now lanterns were moving about in the darkness. Then I heard Harvey’s excited shouting, and he said: “Pearl Harbor has been attacked! Pearl Harbor has been blown up! Get everybody up. Hurry. Take off as soon as possible.”
“Harvey has finally flipped his wicket,” I thought, and so did the others. But we were awake, and might just as well get up, and I suppose I was curious to see where they were going to confine poor Harvey. But this was no gag. This was real. This was war. It was coming in over the radio.
We were instructed to take off as soon as possible. Good God, what would we do? It was pitch black. There weren’t even any lighting facilities on this field. Later I found out that the idea was to have our planes flying in case the Japanese had planned a simultaneous attack (the reason for darkness was the time difference between Pearl Harbor and Toungoo).
Some of the pilots had gotten air-borne as their Allison engines coughed and sputtered, owing to the fact that they had not been sufficiently warmed up. Some others refused to take to the air, and came to a grinding and clattering halt just beyond the airstrip, having their landing gear torn off and bending the propeller blades.
Curtiss P-36 Interceptor
About this point in the wild confusion the rest of us who hadn’t started to take off were instructed to cut our engines, and the planes in the air were called down. They figured it was better to take a chance on the Nips’ bombing accuracy in the dark than to lose our entire air force to the black night. And a wise decision it was, too, for in that unlighted country, on a night like that, it would have been a miracle if anyone had found his way back and sat down in one piece.
There was no such thing as sleep the rest of this black night of confusion. The following morning found us still in a state of bewilderment. But the realization finally dawned: what we had come over to do—our plans—everything had been changed for us—by the Japanese.
In facing fact this meant the finish of our training program before it had even started. We were now standing by for alerts. In place of the gloriously planned offensive we were completely on the defensive.
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We waited for the Japanese to attack us at Toungoo. There was no such thing as a warning system, no spotters, no radar, so the wait was cut short.
Chennault bundled up his little air force and sent them on their way to Kunming, China, a much safer place to be stationed. Kunming had been originally chosen as the main base of operations, and our original job was to work for the Chinese, not the Burmese.
Besides our P-40s the group had three Curtiss interceptors, high-powered, air-cooled craft, led by Eric Schilling, and they took off first. Their very capable pilots gave us an air show before they disappeared to the north, which helped boost our morale considerably. These three lads took my thoughts back to the Miami Air Races, where I myself had done stunts in formation for the spectators’ thrill.
The rest of us in our P-40s took off, one by one, joining up in our respective positions after we were air-borne. “Sandy” Sandell was in charge of the group, responsible for taking us a little over six hundred miles of unfamiliar terrain to the north and east of Toungoo. The weather, as far as cloud formations, was definitely against him. Neither Sandy nor any of the others had ever flown into inland China.
As we continued to fly northward, the mountains became higher, and the terrain was by far the most rugged I had ever witnessed. At that time the maps of this territory we were forced to use, for lack of anything better, happened to be very inaccurate indeed. We found that points of reference, in some cases, were off a hundred miles or so.
But I had to give Sandy all the credit in the world. He found the six-thousand-foot-high valley, and the three lakes nestled within, amid the surrounding high mountains and the layers of stratus that covered them. A reminder of the complete lack of weather stations or radio navigational equipment I do not believe is necessary.
Sighting the lakes near Kunming—verification of the proper position long after passing the point of no return on fuel—was indeed welcome. The P-40s had all made it. Landing on the main strip we found to be impossible because it was under construction, so we landed beside the strip on the dirt.
This seven-thousand-foot runway at Kunming had been under construction for over five years, we were told. And it never was completed until the United States forces came in to complete the work long after we were gone. An all-coolie project was this large airstrip. Men and women alike broke the rock by hand, forming the foundation for the strip. Any time one glanced over in the direction of the new strip, he would see in the neighborhood of some two hu
ndred coolies pulling a huge roller by ropes. This roller was tamping the crushed rock into a firm foundation in the claylike soil, so it would be capable of supporting heavy aircraft.
Our Curtis interceptors were not as fortunate as the P-40s. For all three had crashed into the side of a mountain, lacking about a thousand feet of having a name like Mount Everest, or some of the other mountains people climb. All three interceptors were lost, as well as two of their pilots, Eric Schilling being the lone survivor. And he had to bury these two friends up on the mountain.
The living quarters assigned to the group were in two places in this centuries-old city. Over half of the working personnel plus the entire staff were in an old stone schoolhouse on the other side of Kunming. This was headquarters, Hostel Number One, and probably about as modern as any building in the city.
Hostel Number Two, as it was called, was where the rest of us ended up. It was situated not far from the flying field, a series of ancient adobe quarters with well-worn wooden floors. If one dropped anything smaller than his sidearm on the floor of his quarters, he would have no way of retrieving it through the spacious cracks between the boards.
The name of our quarters, and everything else, seemed to stand for second-best. In fact I gathered that the entire attitude was one of first come first served. As far as I could determine, this applied to squadron commanders, staff, and to women. It didn’t take long for my new friends to teach me that I was all mixed up and everything in China ran in a different direction. Come to find out, I had been wrong in my definition for Semper Fidelis; it meant, instead, Every Man for Himself. I only hoped that this didn’t apply to fighting as well.
Baa Baa Black Sheep Page 4
