February 8, 1945 (4 pages)

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 1945 NEVAD/. Asi. Page Three . Col. Robert L. Don Bluxome Opens Modern Paint: Shop Nevada City’s ;new © paint’ shop which opened during the past week . end is a most modernand up to date store, and the. new manager. Don Bluxome, deserves much suecess and praise for his new undertaking. Forty three different floral pieces were sent by friends and admirers of the new owner wishing him success. Besides carrying the ‘best brand of paint, including the well known DuPont varieties he will have a cabinet shop with all latest tools in the rear of the building. This new store will fill a long felt want in the city and community. Bluxome no stranger to this city as he conducted the Long John Tavern for several years disposing of his interests there to purchase the old ‘bank building owned iby’ the old (Citizens Bank and Richards ests recently. : is interIndian Springs School Corresponds With English Thomas Scales, @ounty rural school supervisor, states that Indian Springs schobdl will be the first th 60D IS . ‘CO-PILOT Scott W.N.Y. RELEASE of letters with children in British schools. Miss Helen Heffernan, of the Division of Education originated the plan for correspondence’ ‘between children in California schools and those in,.the British Isles, In a letter to Walter A: Carlson, county superintendent of schools, Miss Heffernan writes: “This is a project in in¢ ternational understanding and good will.”’ The first consignment of 5,090 letters received from the United Kingdom were. distributed as far as they would go in California schools. The plan has been sowell received that Miss Heffernan has asked for more British letters. YOUTH ARRESTED a _ institution in “County, several days ago. Edward Mulli, 17, was {Sunday by California highway pat'yolmen in. Truckee; Nevada County, ‘and lodged in the county jail here. ,It is alleged that Mulli was travejling west in a car he had-stolen in . Reno, Nevada. The youth confessed he had escaped froma -reformatory ~ Camarilla, arrested Ventura . . verse. on 1 eer . r . . : 4 the county to participate in exchange To The Public COMMENCING TODAY—FEBRUARY 8, 1945 Pacific Motor Trucking Company WILL DISCONTIN UE FREIGHT DEPOT F ACILITIES IN NEVADA CITY All business transactions will be handled through our Grass Valley Freight Depot, located in the Union Terminal Building, Bank*Street. Phone 103. a Nevada City patrons phoning us are jinvited to call. ENTERPRISE 10842—-FREE OF 'CHARGE PACIFIC MOTOR TRUCKING COMPANY 246 Saeramento Street A HAVEN OF REFUGE— In time of dire need it is comforting to find friends whose chosen mission in life is to render consolation and advice and the assumption of greatest responsibility. HOLMES FUNERAL HOME Phone 203 24-HOUR AMBULANCE SERVICE Nevada City . ~ Hotel Clunie IT’S FAMOUS COFFEE UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT BAR ARE RENOWNED IN CALIFORNIA RATES FROM $1.50 UP Excellent Service—Best Food SHOP AND COCKTAIL 8TH AND K STREET, I TOY AND JACOBS. JACK BRUNO, Manager SACR. NTO, CALIFORNIA — . there was a Catholic priest in the _ BUILDING 244 Boulder Street NEVADA COUNTY LUMBER COMPANY “THE PIONEER LUMBER YARD” Telephone 500 MATERIALS Nevada City, Calif. . of the ferry route from Assam to ' play of fireworks he’d ever seen. We . symbol. CHAPTER XX . When strange things would -happen, we talked about things of the sort which had once been told in . story books. All of us*d%recd that! when this war was-over, there would . be nothing that had ever happened . in fiction that wouldn’t have actuaily . happened in this battle of the uni. For instance: Likiang is a city in China far up thebig,',northern loop of: the} Yangtse-Kiang. It is China, yes, but thet: part of China is as wild as Tibet and Arabia. The people are called Lolos,’’: and they must be descendants of Genghis Khan. I had flown over the place, for it was just North Kunming, and I“had seen the, flat clearing South of the village that could have been an emergency landing field. I noted that it was close to nine thousand feet above sea level, and therefure not-a field to use unless one had to. Capt. Charlie Sawyer hadcrashlanded just South of there, closer to Talifu, and had been unable to identify himself. While the wild-looking Lolo tribesmen were getting set to execute him with ancient-looking flint-lock muskets;-Sawyer said the holes in the barrels looked twice as big as fifty-calibre bores.; Just at the crucial moment, however, when his fate looked darkest, some new arrival in the party saw the identification card that Sawyer had been pointing to. Jt was inscribed in various languages, and with pictures. The new arrival didn’t recognize the Chinese flag, or any of the languages, or the Generalissimo’s signature “‘chop’’—but he saw a star. As it happened, it was the star of India over the imprint in Hindustani. Then the tribesman pointed to the same star-on the.wing of Sawyer’s ship—the insignia of the Army Air Force. Sawyer was saved, and later he was feasted on wild buffalo :and rice wine., But why?’ Here in the wilds of the Lolo country; where very few white men had ever been, the tribesmen were more familiar with the white star of the Air Force than with . Genghis Khan. any written language. We learned the principal reason later. A report had come in to General Chennault’s headquarters that a native village in the Lolo country, between Lake Tali-and Likiang, was under siege by the Burmese northern tribesmen who had crossed the tion of the Japanese. Holloway and I, were sent to look the place over in two P-40’s. We were told by the General that we -Salween, perhaps under the direc. Two of us, ; could determine whether the town . was under siege by noting whether or not the usual pedestrian traffic was passing in and out of the city. gate. All the cities are walled, and are obviously very far from roads or from civilization. 6 : We made our observation and returned with the report. The village was besieged, and. we had seen the horsemen encamped a, half mile around the city wall. We loaded up and went back with six eighteenkilogrdm frags on the wing racks and plenty of fifty-calibre ammunition. I also carried a Very pistol and all colors of shells. As we circled the town, we could see the villagers watching us; then we dove on the besiegers and bombed them from a thousand feet. The lines of prehistoric cavalry broke and retreated towards the Salween and Burma. We machinegunned them until they spread in panic.» Then I used the Very pistol, shooting first green lights, then red. Holloway said it was the best dischecked up for several days, but the raiders hadn’t come back, and normal pedestrian traffic was passing through the city wall. Holloway and I, with two of the General’s P-40’s, had stopped a war. The white star of the Air Force had been seen by those villagers, and they had told the surrounding country that we were friends. Perhaps the constant sight of transports from India to-China and return had made the big white star a familiar At any rate, the Lolos:who were about to execute Sawyer recognized it, and to them it meant more than written languages and sealed orders. Such is the strangeness of this global war. More true fiction came out of the Lolo country during the autumn: A Ferry Command pilot, Lieutenant Aronson, “‘lost an engine’’—which means that his engine failed—on his trip from Assam to Kunming. He barely made the big meadow that was South of the town of Likiang, in the hairpin loop of the Yangtse. After several days we went in there to look the improvised landing-field over, in the hope that we could fly another transport to him with a good engine, or carry in the mechanics and the tools with which to repair the bad ‘one. More romance of the war was in progress. When the transport had come down, the villagers were not hostile but merely indifferent. They were somewhat enlightened, for town, but they offered very. little help—there was no food to spare, and things were. generally unfriendiy. Late the first night, word came to Aronson that a Lolo infant was dying with what the priest diagnosed as double pneumonia. Aronson began to think the situation over, and : later in the night he went with the priest to the mud hut of.the Lolo mother and received her permission to spread over the child’s bed the canvas engine-cover from one of the transport engines. Then, using the bottles of oxygen from the Douglas, he successfully improvised a pretty . good emergency oxygen-tent. The baby lived.’ We hope the engine-cover and the oxygen: saved it, but. we don’t know.: Anyway, “we of the Air Force,with Aronson: asthe messenger of good-will, received the credit. é si We.agree now that whentthe war . turn from the strafing raid of Sep-' i is over, out in the world they won't . even know that one had been going on there among the grandchildren of But the white star of the Army AirForce will be as well known among the savage tribes= men as the symbols of the moon and . the sun. In every organization there is al. ways one’ person who holds up the . morale; some one who makes the . darker moments. brighter and who tember 2, 1942. We had taken sixteen P-40’s back tq Hengyang when we had gotten them in shape te fight, had landed” there just about dark fo: surprise the Japs. That's the night the Flect landed: and the night I had been kidding Henry Elias. can bring a little sunshine into the . tense reality of war. Out China theatre, and especially in the 23rd Fighter Group, my most unforgetable character was Lieut. Henry Elias. skies. When I first reached Hengyang he was acting as assistant operations officer to Ajax Baumler. He had a reply for every person, and a come-back to every joke. .He was definitely a morale builder, and you can ask anyone if they’re not as valuable at the front as ammunition. Elias had been on several raids ahd had shot down two Japanese when I heard the first joke about him. Nanchang, and as the ships turned for home in the fading light of late in the . . This pilot was a Southerner, . like most of the others in the China. He’d been on an attack to } afternoon, some one in the rear,of . the formation observed something peculiar. Up ahead there were five few Fhese pilots are tired out by almost constant alert without relief for 21 days. P-40’s with their sleek silhouettes showing wheels up and everything in proper order. But off to the flank, in almost the position of the numberthree man in a Vee formation, was one ship with its wheels extended. Some one called on the radio, “Hey, Elias, who’s that flying in formation with you, with their wheels down?” As the words sank into the consciousness. of the flight,-and of Elias especially, their ominous significance became _ apparent. Elias jerked his head around and looked at his wing man. Even to an inexperienced eye, the silhouette was unmistakable. It was a Jap Model I-97, one of the ‘old fixed landinggéar types. The entire formation tried at once to get it as they finally realized what it was. But they had the laugh on Elias. Just as he recognized the Jap, the enemy pilot evidently recognized the P-40’s in the twilight before darkness—perhaps he saw the leering sharks’ mouths. For as Elias shoved the nose of his ship straight down and dove for him, the Jap pulled his ship straight up and climbed for the sky. Later, when our imaginations began to embroider the joke, Elias took the kidding in good part and always had a comeback. A small. two-seater biplane, a Fleet, came to engyang from Kweilin one day with a Chinese officer. We looked the little ship over as it came into the field wide open at some seventy-five miles an hour, and I told Elias that I saw his future destiny. “We now have just the bait .we need,” I said. ‘Lieutenant Elias, I want you to borrow that Fleet from the Chinese, 1 know a trick to make the Japs lose lots of ‘face’ and airplanes.”’ Elias had laid down his Operations reports and was listening attentively. ‘This ought to get you promoted,” I went on. “Now you get that plane and service it tonight, then early in the morning you take off for Hankow. Alison, Baumler, and I will be along later and will arrive over the Jap city before you do.” Elias was looking at me in wonder. ‘‘Then, when you get there, fly over the enemy airport at thirtyfive hundred feet—that’ll keep you just above their small-calibre fire and they can’t shoot accurately that low with the big stuff. Over the field you fly. with one wing low, kind of skidding, cutting your switch on and off so the Japs will think you’re either wounded or over'there with a bad engine.”’ Elias was trying to figure out whether I was serious or not. Then I added: ‘‘We’ll be up there in the ‘sun, and as fast_as the Zeros come up for you, we’ll knock them down. After all, Elias, if they get you, a Fleet isn’t worth much.” But by now Lieutenant Elias was walking out and calling over his shoulder: ‘‘No sir, Colonel, I just want to be a plain pilot—I don’t want to be no ball of fire.’ Well, we saw the value of Elias when we lost him, for in this second battle around Hunan he failed to rewothe Lake. Next morning we got into the air before daylight and went for Lake Puyang Hu, near. Nanchang. where the’ Japs were moving the Chinese rice out by junks and barges—robbing the breadbasket of China in the yearly rape of the rice. Hill took eight of the P-40’s and I tvok.the other eight Elias was.0n Tex Hill’s wing. We split at Nanchang and my eight went to the Scuth to catch some gunboats that had been reported in the Sintze-Hukow Strait, near’ Kukiang, coming from the Yangtse to I heard Hill call that he had caught the rice ships and was burning them. Later he told me that he found twenty-six ‘of them, junks -and -steel barges; he sank some and saw others with their sails on fire, floating for shore where the hungry Chinese coolies would salvage the rice Through the four passes at the. Japs Elias was right on Tex’s wing, but on the fourth pullout he dropped behind the formation, perhaps to shoot at something Hill hadn’t seen. . Maybe he’d seen a Jap fighter and . had gone for it; we knew there were . eight Zeros supposgd to be over Nanchang. Elias’didn’t return with the flight, and for two days we carried him as ‘‘missing.”’ Then the Chinese net reported that a group of Chinese soldiers had seen a lone American P-40’ engaged by. four Japanese Zeros. The American had fought them but his ship had been shot down. The American had jumped out in his parachute and four Japanese had strafed him on '! the way down. The body had been found, with the identification .flag number listed. The pilot’s name was Lieutenant Elias. All of us watchéd for Japs bailing out, sod that we could shoot one or two Gown for Elias, but we ' didn’t get the chance. We sent Captain Wang down to. Kian to get Elias’s body. Wang had to travel a hundred and sixty miles by buffalo cart, by alcohol bus, and on foot, but he finally got there. Th« trip took him. twenty days. When the body of our lost pilot finally arrived at the field from which he had . ; last taken off, it was in a Chinese . coffin that Wang had gotten at Kian. _We placed. the flag over the grim reminder of war and sent it by transport to Kunming, to lie beside . his other brother pilots in that Buddhist graveyard in Yunnan. ‘And so-it went: tragedy—humor —tragedy. For on the same raid I had led the other eight ships, with elements led by Holloway, Schiel, and O’Connell, and had caught the Jap gunboats, ten of them, at SintzeHukow Strait. They were coming to Puyang Hu to convoy those rice barges—but we were going to in-. -terfere with their rendezvous. Even as we circled them from sixteen thousand feet, I think they knew they were going to have lots of trouble. line, nose-to-stern, for they were going through the narrow strait. We circled warily for a minute, looking the sky over for enemy fighters, then ' spiralled down. As soon as we got close enough to the Jap ships to see distinctly, we noticed that the seamen were jumping over the side into the water. Only a few seemed to have remained to fire the antiaircraft guns, and Schiel and Holloway silenced most of those with their initial pass. I saw two of the boats turn sharply off course and try to run aground. I think most of the ammunition had been fired at us while we circled at sixteen thousand feet, for we were the whole show now. We’d rake the steel decks from stem to stern and then swing out low to the water and come back with quartering Shots from the beam. We were so low that we were actually shooting up at the decks of the boats. I saw many human heads above the water as.the Japs tried to swim from the boats, and I fired at them. Those bullets ricocheted from the water into the steel side of the gunboat and went on through. As my range would reach the ‘‘sweet spot’’ of some 287 yards, where. the six lines of tracers and armor-piercing Fifties converged, it would appear as though an orange-colored hole the size of a flour barrel was being burned into the side of the Jap vessel at the water-line. Looking back at the next man in the column and observing his hits, I could see his tracer bullets coming through the boat and out the other side, — We S-ed along the ten-ship line and shot at them all from both sides. On the second pass, two of the vessels were listing, and others were smoking. On the fourth attack, seven out of the ten were smoking and burning and some of these were on the bottom with their masts barely out of water. Photographs taken later from an observation plane showed that seven had sunk immediately in the strait, and that the other three had sunk within a thousand yards of the battle area. I was so-happy, so excited and eager, that I tried to ve glamorous that morning. After the fourth attack I had called to re-form and head for the rendezvous point to the Southwest. But as the ships left the target, I saw something I had to 89 back for. It was a Japanese flag! waving defiantly from the mast of one-of the sunken gunboats. Forgetting caution, and with the other seven planes speeding away to the rendezvous point, I dove to strafe the flag ina gesture of hate:oo A are ee ‘(TO BE CONTINUED) They had to stay almost in . eee te atedtesteteatentetesteolertentestestetets Neate ote thy serpents ey * * R2 ly + * tose} *, os he ot Re ler a eae + + RAR Rt ey 4 * % te s a ae ‘3 ‘y te L BS? : te i me ee ae le t8 a * 2 i icy % a) *, Ba ee + +, se + cf B : Ki S, + ° enter oo SY, o res ete) Mele: <7 me iegeteietectotetegetetenion oymeni Enj . 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THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 1945 NEVAD/. Asi. Page Three . Col. Robert L. Don Bluxome Opens Modern Paint: Shop Nevada City’s ;new © paint’ shop which opened during the past week . end is a most modernand up to date store, and the. new manager. Don Bluxome, deserves much suecess and praise for his new undertaking. Forty three different floral pieces were sent by friends and admirers of the new owner wishing him success. Besides carrying the ‘best brand of paint, including the well known DuPont varieties he will have a cabinet shop with all latest tools in the rear of the building. This new store will fill a long felt want in the city and community. Bluxome no stranger to this city as he conducted the Long John Tavern for several years disposing of his interests there to purchase the old ‘bank building owned iby’ the old (Citizens Bank and Richards ests recently. : is interIndian Springs School Corresponds With English Thomas Scales, @ounty rural school supervisor, states that Indian Springs schobdl will be the first th 60D IS . ‘CO-PILOT Scott W.N.Y. RELEASE of letters with children in British schools. Miss Helen Heffernan, of the Division of Education originated the plan for correspondence’ ‘between children in California schools and those in,.the British Isles, In a letter to Walter A: Carlson, county superintendent of schools, Miss Heffernan writes: “This is a project in in¢ ternational understanding and good will.”’ The first consignment of 5,090 letters received from the United Kingdom were. distributed as far as they would go in California schools. The plan has been sowell received that Miss Heffernan has asked for more British letters. YOUTH ARRESTED a _ institution in “County, several days ago. Edward Mulli, 17, was {Sunday by California highway pat'yolmen in. Truckee; Nevada County, ‘and lodged in the county jail here. ,It is alleged that Mulli was travejling west in a car he had-stolen in . Reno, Nevada. The youth confessed he had escaped froma -reformatory ~ Camarilla, arrested Ventura . . verse. on 1 eer . r . . : 4 the county to participate in exchange To The Public COMMENCING TODAY—FEBRUARY 8, 1945 Pacific Motor Trucking Company WILL DISCONTIN UE FREIGHT DEPOT F ACILITIES IN NEVADA CITY All business transactions will be handled through our Grass Valley Freight Depot, located in the Union Terminal Building, Bank*Street. Phone 103. a Nevada City patrons phoning us are jinvited to call. ENTERPRISE 10842—-FREE OF 'CHARGE PACIFIC MOTOR TRUCKING COMPANY 246 Saeramento Street A HAVEN OF REFUGE— In time of dire need it is comforting to find friends whose chosen mission in life is to render consolation and advice and the assumption of greatest responsibility. HOLMES FUNERAL HOME Phone 203 24-HOUR AMBULANCE SERVICE Nevada City . ~ Hotel Clunie IT’S FAMOUS COFFEE UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT BAR ARE RENOWNED IN CALIFORNIA RATES FROM $1.50 UP Excellent Service—Best Food SHOP AND COCKTAIL 8TH AND K STREET, I TOY AND JACOBS. JACK BRUNO, Manager SACR. NTO, CALIFORNIA — . there was a Catholic priest in the _ BUILDING 244 Boulder Street NEVADA COUNTY LUMBER COMPANY “THE PIONEER LUMBER YARD” Telephone 500 MATERIALS Nevada City, Calif. . of the ferry route from Assam to ' play of fireworks he’d ever seen. We . symbol. CHAPTER XX . When strange things would -happen, we talked about things of the sort which had once been told in . story books. All of us*d%recd that! when this war was-over, there would . be nothing that had ever happened . in fiction that wouldn’t have actuaily . happened in this battle of the uni. For instance: Likiang is a city in China far up thebig,',northern loop of: the} Yangtse-Kiang. It is China, yes, but thet: part of China is as wild as Tibet and Arabia. The people are called Lolos,’’: and they must be descendants of Genghis Khan. I had flown over the place, for it was just North Kunming, and I“had seen the, flat clearing South of the village that could have been an emergency landing field. I noted that it was close to nine thousand feet above sea level, and therefure not-a field to use unless one had to. Capt. Charlie Sawyer hadcrashlanded just South of there, closer to Talifu, and had been unable to identify himself. While the wild-looking Lolo tribesmen were getting set to execute him with ancient-looking flint-lock muskets;-Sawyer said the holes in the barrels looked twice as big as fifty-calibre bores.; Just at the crucial moment, however, when his fate looked darkest, some new arrival in the party saw the identification card that Sawyer had been pointing to. Jt was inscribed in various languages, and with pictures. The new arrival didn’t recognize the Chinese flag, or any of the languages, or the Generalissimo’s signature “‘chop’’—but he saw a star. As it happened, it was the star of India over the imprint in Hindustani. Then the tribesman pointed to the same star-on the.wing of Sawyer’s ship—the insignia of the Army Air Force. Sawyer was saved, and later he was feasted on wild buffalo :and rice wine., But why?’ Here in the wilds of the Lolo country; where very few white men had ever been, the tribesmen were more familiar with the white star of the Air Force than with . Genghis Khan. any written language. We learned the principal reason later. A report had come in to General Chennault’s headquarters that a native village in the Lolo country, between Lake Tali-and Likiang, was under siege by the Burmese northern tribesmen who had crossed the tion of the Japanese. Holloway and I, were sent to look the place over in two P-40’s. We were told by the General that we -Salween, perhaps under the direc. Two of us, ; could determine whether the town . was under siege by noting whether or not the usual pedestrian traffic was passing in and out of the city. gate. All the cities are walled, and are obviously very far from roads or from civilization. 6 : We made our observation and returned with the report. The village was besieged, and. we had seen the horsemen encamped a, half mile around the city wall. We loaded up and went back with six eighteenkilogrdm frags on the wing racks and plenty of fifty-calibre ammunition. I also carried a Very pistol and all colors of shells. As we circled the town, we could see the villagers watching us; then we dove on the besiegers and bombed them from a thousand feet. The lines of prehistoric cavalry broke and retreated towards the Salween and Burma. We machinegunned them until they spread in panic.» Then I used the Very pistol, shooting first green lights, then red. Holloway said it was the best dischecked up for several days, but the raiders hadn’t come back, and normal pedestrian traffic was passing through the city wall. Holloway and I, with two of the General’s P-40’s, had stopped a war. The white star of the Air Force had been seen by those villagers, and they had told the surrounding country that we were friends. Perhaps the constant sight of transports from India to-China and return had made the big white star a familiar At any rate, the Lolos:who were about to execute Sawyer recognized it, and to them it meant more than written languages and sealed orders. Such is the strangeness of this global war. More true fiction came out of the Lolo country during the autumn: A Ferry Command pilot, Lieutenant Aronson, “‘lost an engine’’—which means that his engine failed—on his trip from Assam to Kunming. He barely made the big meadow that was South of the town of Likiang, in the hairpin loop of the Yangtse. After several days we went in there to look the improvised landing-field over, in the hope that we could fly another transport to him with a good engine, or carry in the mechanics and the tools with which to repair the bad ‘one. More romance of the war was in progress. When the transport had come down, the villagers were not hostile but merely indifferent. They were somewhat enlightened, for town, but they offered very. little help—there was no food to spare, and things were. generally unfriendiy. Late the first night, word came to Aronson that a Lolo infant was dying with what the priest diagnosed as double pneumonia. Aronson began to think the situation over, and : later in the night he went with the priest to the mud hut of.the Lolo mother and received her permission to spread over the child’s bed the canvas engine-cover from one of the transport engines. Then, using the bottles of oxygen from the Douglas, he successfully improvised a pretty . good emergency oxygen-tent. The baby lived.’ We hope the engine-cover and the oxygen: saved it, but. we don’t know.: Anyway, “we of the Air Force,with Aronson: asthe messenger of good-will, received the credit. é si We.agree now that whentthe war . turn from the strafing raid of Sep-' i is over, out in the world they won't . even know that one had been going on there among the grandchildren of But the white star of the Army AirForce will be as well known among the savage tribes= men as the symbols of the moon and . the sun. In every organization there is al. ways one’ person who holds up the . morale; some one who makes the . darker moments. brighter and who tember 2, 1942. We had taken sixteen P-40’s back tq Hengyang when we had gotten them in shape te fight, had landed” there just about dark fo: surprise the Japs. That's the night the Flect landed: and the night I had been kidding Henry Elias. can bring a little sunshine into the . tense reality of war. Out China theatre, and especially in the 23rd Fighter Group, my most unforgetable character was Lieut. Henry Elias. skies. When I first reached Hengyang he was acting as assistant operations officer to Ajax Baumler. He had a reply for every person, and a come-back to every joke. .He was definitely a morale builder, and you can ask anyone if they’re not as valuable at the front as ammunition. Elias had been on several raids ahd had shot down two Japanese when I heard the first joke about him. Nanchang, and as the ships turned for home in the fading light of late in the . . This pilot was a Southerner, . like most of the others in the China. He’d been on an attack to } afternoon, some one in the rear,of . the formation observed something peculiar. Up ahead there were five few Fhese pilots are tired out by almost constant alert without relief for 21 days. P-40’s with their sleek silhouettes showing wheels up and everything in proper order. But off to the flank, in almost the position of the numberthree man in a Vee formation, was one ship with its wheels extended. Some one called on the radio, “Hey, Elias, who’s that flying in formation with you, with their wheels down?” As the words sank into the consciousness. of the flight,-and of Elias especially, their ominous significance became _ apparent. Elias jerked his head around and looked at his wing man. Even to an inexperienced eye, the silhouette was unmistakable. It was a Jap Model I-97, one of the ‘old fixed landinggéar types. The entire formation

tried at once to get it as they finally realized what it was. But they had the laugh on Elias. Just as he recognized the Jap, the enemy pilot evidently recognized the P-40’s in the twilight before darkness—perhaps he saw the leering sharks’ mouths. For as Elias shoved the nose of his ship straight down and dove for him, the Jap pulled his ship straight up and climbed for the sky. Later, when our imaginations began to embroider the joke, Elias took the kidding in good part and always had a comeback. A small. two-seater biplane, a Fleet, came to engyang from Kweilin one day with a Chinese officer. We looked the little ship over as it came into the field wide open at some seventy-five miles an hour, and I told Elias that I saw his future destiny. “We now have just the bait .we need,” I said. ‘Lieutenant Elias, I want you to borrow that Fleet from the Chinese, 1 know a trick to make the Japs lose lots of ‘face’ and airplanes.”’ Elias had laid down his Operations reports and was listening attentively. ‘This ought to get you promoted,” I went on. “Now you get that plane and service it tonight, then early in the morning you take off for Hankow. Alison, Baumler, and I will be along later and will arrive over the Jap city before you do.” Elias was looking at me in wonder. ‘‘Then, when you get there, fly over the enemy airport at thirtyfive hundred feet—that’ll keep you just above their small-calibre fire and they can’t shoot accurately that low with the big stuff. Over the field you fly. with one wing low, kind of skidding, cutting your switch on and off so the Japs will think you’re either wounded or over'there with a bad engine.”’ Elias was trying to figure out whether I was serious or not. Then I added: ‘‘We’ll be up there in the ‘sun, and as fast_as the Zeros come up for you, we’ll knock them down. After all, Elias, if they get you, a Fleet isn’t worth much.” But by now Lieutenant Elias was walking out and calling over his shoulder: ‘‘No sir, Colonel, I just want to be a plain pilot—I don’t want to be no ball of fire.’ Well, we saw the value of Elias when we lost him, for in this second battle around Hunan he failed to rewothe Lake. Next morning we got into the air before daylight and went for Lake Puyang Hu, near. Nanchang. where the’ Japs were moving the Chinese rice out by junks and barges—robbing the breadbasket of China in the yearly rape of the rice. Hill took eight of the P-40’s and I tvok.the other eight Elias was.0n Tex Hill’s wing. We split at Nanchang and my eight went to the Scuth to catch some gunboats that had been reported in the Sintze-Hukow Strait, near’ Kukiang, coming from the Yangtse to I heard Hill call that he had caught the rice ships and was burning them. Later he told me that he found twenty-six ‘of them, junks -and -steel barges; he sank some and saw others with their sails on fire, floating for shore where the hungry Chinese coolies would salvage the rice Through the four passes at the. Japs Elias was right on Tex’s wing, but on the fourth pullout he dropped behind the formation, perhaps to shoot at something Hill hadn’t seen. . Maybe he’d seen a Jap fighter and . had gone for it; we knew there were . eight Zeros supposgd to be over Nanchang. Elias’didn’t return with the flight, and for two days we carried him as ‘‘missing.”’ Then the Chinese net reported that a group of Chinese soldiers had seen a lone American P-40’ engaged by. four Japanese Zeros. The American had fought them but his ship had been shot down. The American had jumped out in his parachute and four Japanese had strafed him on '! the way down. The body had been found, with the identification .flag number listed. The pilot’s name was Lieutenant Elias. All of us watchéd for Japs bailing out, sod that we could shoot one or two Gown for Elias, but we ' didn’t get the chance. We sent Captain Wang down to. Kian to get Elias’s body. Wang had to travel a hundred and sixty miles by buffalo cart, by alcohol bus, and on foot, but he finally got there. Th« trip took him. twenty days. When the body of our lost pilot finally arrived at the field from which he had . ; last taken off, it was in a Chinese . coffin that Wang had gotten at Kian. _We placed. the flag over the grim reminder of war and sent it by transport to Kunming, to lie beside . his other brother pilots in that Buddhist graveyard in Yunnan. ‘And so-it went: tragedy—humor —tragedy. For on the same raid I had led the other eight ships, with elements led by Holloway, Schiel, and O’Connell, and had caught the Jap gunboats, ten of them, at SintzeHukow Strait. They were coming to Puyang Hu to convoy those rice barges—but we were going to in-. -terfere with their rendezvous. Even as we circled them from sixteen thousand feet, I think they knew they were going to have lots of trouble. line, nose-to-stern, for they were going through the narrow strait. We circled warily for a minute, looking the sky over for enemy fighters, then ' spiralled down. As soon as we got close enough to the Jap ships to see distinctly, we noticed that the seamen were jumping over the side into the water. Only a few seemed to have remained to fire the antiaircraft guns, and Schiel and Holloway silenced most of those with their initial pass. I saw two of the boats turn sharply off course and try to run aground. I think most of the ammunition had been fired at us while we circled at sixteen thousand feet, for we were the whole show now. We’d rake the steel decks from stem to stern and then swing out low to the water and come back with quartering Shots from the beam. We were so low that we were actually shooting up at the decks of the boats. I saw many human heads above the water as.the Japs tried to swim from the boats, and I fired at them. Those bullets ricocheted from the water into the steel side of the gunboat and went on through. As my range would reach the ‘‘sweet spot’’ of some 287 yards, where. the six lines of tracers and armor-piercing Fifties converged, it would appear as though an orange-colored hole the size of a flour barrel was being burned into the side of the Jap vessel at the water-line. Looking back at the next man in the column and observing his hits, I could see his tracer bullets coming through the boat and out the other side, — We S-ed along the ten-ship line and shot at them all from both sides. On the second pass, two of the vessels were listing, and others were smoking. On the fourth attack, seven out of the ten were smoking and burning and some of these were on the bottom with their masts barely out of water. Photographs taken later from an observation plane showed that seven had sunk immediately in the strait, and that the other three had sunk within a thousand yards of the battle area. I was so-happy, so excited and eager, that I tried to ve glamorous that morning. After the fourth attack I had called to re-form and head for the rendezvous point to the Southwest. But as the ships left the target, I saw something I had to 89 back for. It was a Japanese flag! waving defiantly from the mast of one-of the sunken gunboats. Forgetting caution, and with the other seven planes speeding away to the rendezvous point, I dove to strafe the flag ina gesture of hate:oo A are ee ‘(TO BE CONTINUED) They had to stay almost in . eee te atedtesteteatentetesteolertentestestetets Neate ote thy serpents ey * * R2 ly + * tose} *, os he ot Re ler a eae + + RAR Rt ey 4 * % te s a ae ‘3 ‘y te L BS? : te i me ee ae le t8 a * 2 i icy % a) *, Ba ee + +, se + cf B : Ki S, + ° enter oo SY, o res ete) Mele: <7 me iegeteietectotetegetetenion oymeni Enj . 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