March 26, 1945 (4 pages)

aP cD NEVADs. CIT} ( . . Ray SO. tf CO-PILOT Col. Robert L.Sco W.N.U. RELEASE, . . . Quartz Parlor to Observe jof the organization show 185 mem-. Sixtieth Anniversary l'bers of whom. 55 are today, serving . Quartz Parlor, Native Sork ‘of tt se country throughout the world. . Golden West, of Grass Valley, Will “ivy parlor to date has purchased this evening observe its 60th anniv-. . . _ ; ersary with a friedchicken {23,500 in war bonds. the Veterans Memorial B lowed by a dinner in. * Heol . uilding fol-. * musical program. an Legion Auxiliary at The first meeting of the parlor 690 . years azo was held in Webster’s Hail The dinner will be served by the. long since destroyed by Americ fire. Five ¢ p. . fraternal organizations pooled. their m. Charles Othet and William Mut. resources and built Auditorium Hall, ler, charter members of the parlor where the Native Sons of the Golden are expected to present. The rolls West now meet. Plan now for fanctional arrangement, ; complete equipmen and adequate wiring — Be really positive, insistent and “fussy” about the functional arrangement and convenience details of your next kitchen. Clip ideas you like out of magazines and paste them in your new home sctapbook. Save kitchen layout plans and articles. Careful planning now will result in a 194X kitchen that will be convenient to work in. Functional planning ties the kitchen together for easier work.py handy arrangement of shelves and cupboards in relation tb your range, sink, and refrigerator or food storage space. Food can be ptepared and cooked with a minimum of tiresome trotting about. Your 194X kitchen will be well lighted by a ceiling fixture— probably a smart new fluorescent lamp, together with local lighting at range, sink, under kitchen cabinets and other work centers. Adequate wiring, provided by several circuits, will take care of the many plug-in outlets for all the kitchen appliances you now have or the new-ones you will buy after the war. Now is the time to plan ahead for 194X— the new era of the joy of living in your present or future home. P-G-E: PACIFIC GAS AND ELECTRIC COMPANY Buy and HOLD WAR BONDS GE13W345 ~ Hotel Clunie UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT IT’S FAMOUS COFFEE SHOP AND COCKTAIL BAR ARE RENOWNED IN CALIFORNIA RATES FROM $1.50 UP Excellent Service—Best Foodpar 8TH AND K STREDT, TOY AND JAOOBS. JACK BRUNO, Manager SAGRA NTO, CALIFORNIA — F The Christian Science Publishing Society i One, Norway Street, Boston 15, Mass, H NAME. . oc cccccnccccetsessocsereevecs ERMOECT., ois cece ccanasunetas CUTV ince sinc cicdvenecce STATE.» oS will find yourself one of the best informed persons in ‘Saya ba uate when you read The Christian Science Monitor 4 ESES) wegularly. You will find fresh, new viewpoints, a fuller, richer. understanding of world affairs . . truthful, accurate, unbiased fy mews. Write for sample copies today, or send for a one-month ial subscription to this international daily newspaper. . Pd ahan ae T.’omienn Sewiee en " Please send sample copies . of The Christian Science Monitor including copy of Weekly Magazine Section, Please send a one-month . trial subscription to Christian Science Monitor, for which . enclose $.. ‘ uu -= CHAPTER XXVII Another theory was that the realization that you had strafed enemy ground tfoops, shot down Japanese pilots, strafed: troons getting out of an enemy transport, or even killed } . Japanese would ae 18 BY + satellites, come . back to-you at night, and you’d wake . up in horror at having “blood on your hands.’’ To that I say ‘‘Nuts.”’ . I’ never knew a pilot who thought about it. All the pilots I ever saw . were so happy over even their first . enemy kill that I began right off to know that we were not the soft race we had been charged with be. ing early in the war. Personally, to pieces in Burma, strafed Japs swimming from boats we were sinking, or blew a Jap pilot to hell out . of the sky,*T just laughed in my heart and knew that I had stepped on another black-widow spider or scorpion. Later, when the newness of combat had worn off, I used to watch a Japanese pilot come towards me on a head-on run, picking me out, I guess, because I was leading she Group. I’d get my-sights on him and yell, perhaps a bit hysterically: “You poor sucker, with my six Fifties that out-range your short-range little cannons that jam lots of times, I’m going to blow you apart before you get close enough to hit me!”’ Overconfidence, perhaps, for I didn’t get every one who came:at me, and I took lots’ of hits in-my own ship— even had to ‘dive away sometimes when two came on me at once. But I’m still here, and from thirteen to twenty-two Jap pilots who fought against me are dead. That’s the ‘‘chip’’ of invincibility that I carried on my shoulder into combat. That’s the combat. spirit that a fighter pilot. must have who fights alone in a little ship where he’s the loneliest person in the world —sometimes. But do you know what makes the pilot understand that he’s got-to-be better than the Japanese; makes him know what we are fighting for, gives him faith that in the end, when we're all properly trained and equipped, we’ll be the best Air Force in all the world? It’s the understanding that comes when you’ve seen the rest of the world,. when you’ve glimpsed the filth and corruption of all the hell-holes that Americans are fighting in today, . ever time I cut Japanese, columns . opy had been shot away and I could see the Jap’s face—and on it was a look of terror such as I had ‘never seen before. The realization went through me with-stich force that as I nosed down to fire again I nearly cut the tail from the; Jap fighter with my -prop. Then I savagely held a long burst from less, than fifty yards while I shot the. ship to pis Even.after the enemy plane had fallen and I had ¥dwn through the debris, I found that I was continuing to fire at the empty heavens, for I had learned to hate a!so. No, the Jap is'far from a superman; ‘But-we must never again belittle the fanaticism of the Japanese. They are as dangerous as mad dogs. They think they ‘will win--and they can if we continue to underestimate them. r Strange things happen in the air, strange as the fiction of the ages. . Six.of us shot into a ship that de. tached when you’ve had the blood and’ brains of your brother officers or: of your soldiers splashed in your face by an enemy bomb. Then you know—for it’s seared on your soul —that we have the best country in the Universe, whether it’s run by the Democrats or the Republicans or the new party that springs up tomorrow. You know that you have everything to live for, and that the Jap has everything to die for. : That's his only hope of reaching the heaven that we already have. Yes, they are suicide pilots; at times they will try to ram your plane, or will dive their ships into our carriers. I’ve seen a Japanese dive low over Hengyang and circle while they shot at him with everything on the field and we shot at him with every ship sbove the field. But he flew his ship in a slow circle, as if he were blinded”~ and couldn’t see, or were only partly conscious. Then, with a half roll at barely three hundred feet, he dove his plane into the only building on the field—our thatched-roof alert shack, which burned with the Jap in his ship. When the wreckage had cooled enough we finally pulled his charred body out—and by his side was his Samurai sword, and through his body the doctor found one lone bullet-hole, severing his spinal cord near the small of the back. He had been able to move his hands but not his feet. But with his last consciousness: he had picked out one more object on our field to destroy for the gods of the Shinto Shrine. But they have fear too. Don’t think they’re supermen, for I assure you they’re not. They’re little, warped brain savage animals with the complex of suppression— but they have fear, like any one else. Their fear is worse, for there’s that phobia of having nothing to live for—the inferiority-complex they try to overcome. I once saw that fear on the face of a Japanese pilot when he knew he was going to die, and it did me lots of good: I told of it many times to youngsters in my Group and it always made them feel better to know that the Japs were afraid when they met them — probably more afraid than we were. Oh, the Jap is a wonderful pilot when he meets no or little opposition. They come in over undefended Chinese cities and loop and roll and zoom, shooting at the helpless pedestrians while arrogantly flying inverted on their backs. But when they meet ‘good American fighters, with pilots who know how to fight them, they are the most anxious people I’ve ever met to leave.our territory and go ‘‘hell for leather” towards Japan. One day I flew up very close to a lone Jap pilot during a fight near Kweilin. I placed my sights right where his wing joined the fuselage of the 1-97-2 and steadily squeezed a burst from two hundred yards, holding the trigger down while I moved into closer range. Then I swerved out from behind the enemy ship, expecting it to stream fire and perhaps explode. I had seen pieces come off, and I had seen the canopy glass turn to a fine, shining powder: that sparkled fn the slipstream as the ship nosed almost straight up. But when it didn’t burn, I skidded back across its tail, first with a look to my rear quarter lest I be surprised. : a I saw into the cockpit, The canitself from one of the cling Japanese ‘‘eircuses’’ we encountered one day East of Hengyang.When you meet the Jap in his larger-numbered formation, once goes into the circling technique that Baron von Richthofen made famous in the last war. This ‘‘circus”’ gradually moves in on or away from their objective as a defensive maneuver, for in it the ship behind protects the tail of the one in front. Our tactics were to dive through the ‘‘squirrel cage” and get snap shots at as many ships as wé could, but keep ‘our speed to prevent their getting on our tails. It was in one of these attacks that this lone Jap Zero left the protection of his other ships and began . to do aerobatics—sloppy loops, wingovers, stalls, and then another loop. Thinking it was a trick, we were wary; but after two of our pilots had made passes on it, two. more of us went down towards it. As I kept getting closer and closer to the enemy. plane I could see that the pilot } was evidently hurt, but when I 8 Ancther friendly coolie who gave aid to Col. Scott. crossed the top of the strange-acting plane I saw that he was leaning _ forward over the stick control, obviously dead. As the speed of the dive would build up pressures on the tail surfaces, the nose would. rise, for a Jap ship is rigged that way. As the ship climbed more steeply, the pilot’s upper body swung to the back of the seat in the normal position and the plane made a sloppy loop. For several minutes we watched the pilotless Zero in fascination. From 16,000 feet a ship that is shot down cay dive into the ground in a few seconds—it can even spin in from an explosion ing little longer than that; but we watched this plane for twice the time that it would normally have taken. It worked closer and: closer to' the ground over the same area, as’it lost altitude gradually in the maneuvers. Then, after the longest wait that I can remem-. ber having gone through in the air, in one of its dives from a loop. it struck the hills below and burned. We could have burned it with a long burst many times during the minutés of our watching, but I imagine we were all spellbound at the spectacle. No one spoke for several minutes as we turned back to Hengyang. Then some call over the radio broke the spell, and we just marked the Jap off as another confirmed Zero— another ‘‘good”’ Jap. Over in Yunnan we fought the Japs a few times in Burma and had the sadness of another military funeral. Those moments in the Buddhist burial grounds were the hardest in China. As the Chaplain read the prayer and the flag-draped casket was lowered into the red earth of Yunnan, a small formation, with slow-turning engines that gave forth a muffled sound, would fly over the grave. There would be one vacant niche in the evenly spaced fighters, in honor of the brother airman who would fly no more. . After eight months in combat I was sent with five other pilots to ferry six new P-40K’s over from thé air base at Karachi. During our wait for the planes to be ready for combat, we were permitted to go to Bombay for the detached service. There, in this splendor of the Hotel Taj Mahal, we had a glorious time. In fact, it became very hard to realize that a war was going on over in Burma and China, 2s we looked at the night clubs from. Malabar Hill and from) inside them too, at the horse-races for the Aga Khan's Pyrse—and’at all the thjngs that: e had forgotten to remember. The return across India was a mom happy one, for we were ferrying new and higher-powered ships back to the war, and all of us were eager to try them out in combat; From Assam we took the o'd familiar frail that I used to fly with. the traxs ports, and it felt especially good to look around and see those friendly looking P-40's along with me over the Burma Road where: 1] had, m earlier months, been compelled to fly alone. The shark-mouths had not yet been painted on, but the silhouettes of the new fighters looked friendly nevertheless. A fast trip over thé five hundred miles from. Assam is. like: this: We're off from our base:and heading 118 degrees across the twelvethousand-foot Naga Hills to the first cHeck-point, where the upper fork of the Chindwin forms the likeness of a shamrock. Up to our left now, cir. he. at . from the altitude of eighteen thousand that we've attained. so effortlessly with the new ships, can be seen the higher snow-capped peaks of Tibet and Chinese Turkestan. Down below us the valley of the Irrawaddy is low and green, but forbidding nonetheless. Ahead, as we cross the “‘Y”’ in the httle known “triangle of the Irrawaddy,’’ we see the real hills of the ‘‘hump’’ begin to rise. Snow-capped peaks everywhere. Our map reads that our highest peak is going to be 15,800 feet; yet we well. know from experience that we’ve tried it many times and we ‘need to be very sure that we are at 18,000 to clear the mountains from the Tali Lake. Below us are the villages of the Miaows. We climb to 25,000 feet to test the ‘‘suped-up’-~ships, and a smile’ comes to our faces under the oxygen masks—for this is going to surprise the Jap. We’re going over the Mekong now, and from the time that has elapsed we’ve certainly picked up a tail wind—must be making over three hundred. The gorge of the Mekong runs like a gash in the sinister country of Burma to the South, and we know it goes on and . .0n towards Saigon and the sea. ., It’s barely twenty miles to the Salween, and we make it so quickly . that we begin to doubt that the other.tiver had been the Mekong. Our ' ground-speed is well over three hundred as we-see Lake Tali dnd start . the down-hill run.to Kunming. Now we catch the first glimpse of the Burma Road, North of Yunnanyi, and soon we see the small laké-that is near our field at that town. The mountains to the North are very high, and we know they get higher and higher and stretch-almost with-. out break to the East’ and the Pacific. We see the hairpin turns of the Burma Road near Tsuyung, and know that we’re nearly home from the Taj Mahal and India. We dive over the field of our headquarters just one hour and twentyfive minutes from the time we took ' off from Assam, five hundred miles away. I can teli by the smiles on the faces of the other men in the flight that we're all thinking the same thing: We have bad medicine for the Jap packed into the increased horsepower of these new “Kays’’—our Warhawks. They .are the latest of the P-40 series, and coming to us this time of year we look upon them as Christmas presents from the States. : The P-40 was in production when the war began. Then the decks were definitely stacked against us, and everything was in favor of the enemy. During the past year of our war these ships produced as no other fighter plane did, for they were serving or every front. Any pilot who actually fought the Axis ene“mies in the P-40 Tomahawks, Kitty“hawks, or Warhawks will tell you they are tough and dependable. They will dive with the best of projectiles —including a bomb. All of us hope © that the best fighter plane has not been produced, but we know that . America will develop it. In the meantime, through those lean months when America had te fight on many fronts with so little, the glorious P-40 series paid off when the chips were down in a ratio of between ;twelve and fifteen to one— twelve to fifteen enemy ships for every one of ours lost. Some day, when the war is over and our sturdy American engines driving great American ships have won victory with air power, I hope and pray—with all fighter pilots who have faced our enemies in aerial combat, from the hot sands of Libya to the cold tundra of the Aleutians, from the jungle heat of Guadalcanal to those torrential rains of the Burmese Monsoens—that some understanding group of citizens will go to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. There, beside the statue that commemorates the first flight of the Wright Brothers, I hope that they. will build a monument to the Curtiss P-40 with its Allison Engine. y&ad now, with a few minor battles in the air, we saw Christmas in Chi‘na draw near, and I couldn’t help wishing for fast action somewhere. After all, there’s only one place a person wants to be at Christmas. I took off from Kunming one day just before Christmas to inspect.the warning net in western Yunnan. It didn’t take long to find out that it was very inefficient near the Burma border, where a steady influx of fifth-columnists and Japanese money was filtering across the Salween. Even then I knew that instead of getting the Chinese officers who were in charge of the net to investigate, it would be much better to have a few engagements with the Jap over the failing net-area. There was no ‘onic like burning Jap planes over’ ‘ne country to improve the functioning of the air-raid warning net. (TO BE CONTINUED) Irrawaddy to. Pa ge Three Ye te testers “Mestests % Me toe afenfente fe ofenge fe nfe reste teste ote ole she shea fa hehe tte ate fe starts aX ote > we RK? \/ ae +, st teste ste! R? teste os ati este ENC ee A eye eat, Sees oe te ot elo g Hinteleloleloinietetets AAA tleioiolnt ate % RA DG Sa we ae he So eH tant 4 yt =a 2 ‘ rd ff % A as yy, RA x e ae 2 wpe, em pt gt x TLyjoOYV akiGuyt Mi Kx al Oo ‘KM Ec Pe 4 X ‘ dives CA, ws “st & ea 3 Wy : : 3 53 pe s ™ § fe oe al Our patrons find that despite 7 2 2 % rationing and -wartime condi4 “a . 7 a 5 tions the quality of our meats + 1 measures up to the same high je 4 . stadnards we have’ always + as oe . maintained. Our, meats come 4 4 *« from the best cattle, lambs and E S? 2 eM Hee; ees es + Woe swine that money can buy. Our service to ‘our patrons is built on a foundation of high quality and reasonable prices. Ask your neighbors about us. 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aP cD NEVADs. CIT} ( . . Ray SO. tf CO-PILOT Col. Robert L.Sco W.N.U. RELEASE, . . . Quartz Parlor to Observe jof the organization show 185 mem-. Sixtieth Anniversary l'bers of whom. 55 are today, serving . Quartz Parlor, Native Sork ‘of tt se country throughout the world. . Golden West, of Grass Valley, Will “ivy parlor to date has purchased this evening observe its 60th anniv-. . . _ ; ersary with a friedchicken {23,500 in war bonds. the Veterans Memorial B lowed by a dinner in. * Heol . uilding fol-. * musical program. an Legion Auxiliary at The first meeting of the parlor 690 . years azo was held in Webster’s Hail The dinner will be served by the. long since destroyed by Americ fire. Five ¢ p. . fraternal organizations pooled. their m. Charles Othet and William Mut. resources and built Auditorium Hall, ler, charter members of the parlor where the Native Sons of the Golden are expected to present. The rolls West now meet. Plan now for fanctional arrangement, ; complete equipmen and adequate wiring — Be really positive, insistent and “fussy” about the functional arrangement and convenience details of your next kitchen. Clip ideas you like out of magazines and paste them in your new home sctapbook. Save kitchen layout plans and articles. Careful planning now will result in a 194X kitchen that will be convenient to work in. Functional planning ties the kitchen together for easier work.py handy arrangement of shelves and cupboards in relation tb your range, sink, and refrigerator or food storage space. Food can be ptepared and cooked with a minimum of tiresome trotting about. Your 194X kitchen will be well lighted by a ceiling fixture— probably a smart new fluorescent lamp, together with local lighting at range, sink, under kitchen cabinets and other work centers. Adequate wiring, provided by several circuits, will take care of the many plug-in outlets for all the kitchen appliances you now have or the new-ones you will buy after the war. Now is the time to plan ahead for 194X— the new era of the joy of living in your present or future home. P-G-E: PACIFIC GAS AND ELECTRIC COMPANY Buy and HOLD WAR BONDS GE13W345 ~ Hotel Clunie UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT IT’S FAMOUS COFFEE SHOP AND COCKTAIL BAR ARE RENOWNED IN CALIFORNIA RATES FROM $1.50 UP Excellent Service—Best Foodpar 8TH AND K STREDT, TOY AND JAOOBS. JACK BRUNO, Manager SAGRA NTO, CALIFORNIA — F The Christian Science Publishing Society i One, Norway Street, Boston 15, Mass, H NAME. . oc cccccnccccetsessocsereevecs ERMOECT., ois cece ccanasunetas CUTV ince sinc cicdvenecce STATE.» oS will find yourself one of the best informed persons in ‘Saya ba uate when you read The Christian Science Monitor 4 ESES) wegularly. You will find fresh, new viewpoints, a fuller, richer. understanding of world affairs . . truthful, accurate, unbiased fy mews. Write for sample copies today, or send for a one-month ial subscription to this international daily newspaper.. . Pd ahan ae T.’omienn Sewiee en " Please send sample copies . of The Christian Science Monitor including copy of Weekly Magazine Section, Please send a one-month . trial subscription to Christian Science Monitor, for which . enclose $... ‘ uu -= CHAPTER XXVII Another theory was that the realization that you had strafed enemy ground tfoops, shot down Japanese pilots, strafed: troons getting out of an enemy transport, or even killed } . Japanese would ae 18 BY + satellites, come . back to-you at night, and you’d wake . up in horror at having “blood on your hands.’’ To that I say ‘‘Nuts.”’ . I’ never knew a pilot who thought about it. All the pilots I ever saw . were so happy over even their first . enemy kill that I began right off to know that we were not the soft race we had been charged with be. ing early in the war. Personally, to pieces in Burma, strafed Japs swimming from boats we were sinking, or blew a Jap pilot to hell out . of the sky,*T just laughed in my heart and knew that I had stepped on another black-widow spider or scorpion. Later, when the newness of combat had worn off, I used to watch a Japanese pilot come towards me on a head-on run, picking me out, I guess, because I was leading she Group. I’d get my-sights on him and yell, perhaps a bit hysterically: “You poor sucker, with my six Fifties that out-range your short-range little cannons that jam lots of times, I’m going to blow you apart before you get close enough to hit me!”’ Overconfidence, perhaps, for I didn’t get every one who came:at me, and I took lots’ of hits in-my own ship— even had to ‘dive away sometimes when two came on me at once. But I’m still here, and from thirteen to twenty-two Jap pilots who fought against me are dead. That’s the ‘‘chip’’ of invincibility that I carried on my shoulder into combat. That’s the combat. spirit that a fighter pilot. must have who fights alone in a little ship where he’s the loneliest person in the world —sometimes. But do you know what makes the pilot understand that he’s got-to-be better than the Japanese; makes him know what we are fighting for, gives him faith that in the end, when we're all properly trained and equipped, we’ll be the best Air Force in all the world? It’s the understanding that comes when you’ve seen the rest of the world,. when you’ve glimpsed the filth and corruption of all the hell-holes that Americans are fighting in today, . ever time I cut Japanese, columns . opy had been shot away and I could see the Jap’s face—and on it was a look of terror such as I had ‘never seen before. The realization went through me with-stich force that as I nosed down to fire again I nearly cut the tail from the; Jap fighter with my -prop. Then I savagely held a long burst from less, than fifty yards while I shot the. ship to pis Even.after the enemy plane had fallen and I had ¥dwn through the debris, I found that I was continuing to fire at the empty heavens, for I had learned to hate a!so. No, the Jap is'far from a superman; ‘But-we must never again belittle the fanaticism of the Japanese. They are as dangerous as mad dogs. They think they ‘will win--and they can if we continue to underestimate them. r Strange things happen in the air, strange as the fiction of the ages. . Six.of us shot into a ship that de. tached when you’ve had the blood and’ brains of your brother officers or: of your soldiers splashed in your face by an enemy bomb. Then you know—for it’s seared on your soul —that we have the best country in the Universe, whether it’s run by the Democrats or the Republicans or the new party that springs up tomorrow. You know that you have everything to live for, and that the Jap has everything to die for. : That's his only hope of reaching the heaven that we already have. Yes, they are suicide pilots; at times they will try to ram your plane, or will dive their ships into our carriers. I’ve seen a Japanese dive low over Hengyang and circle while they shot at him with everything on the field and we shot at him with every ship sbove the field. But he flew his ship in a slow circle, as if he were blinded”~ and couldn’t see, or were only partly conscious. Then, with a half roll at barely three hundred feet, he dove his plane into the only building on the field—our thatched-roof alert shack, which burned with the Jap in his ship. When the wreckage had cooled enough we finally pulled his charred body out—and by his side was his Samurai sword, and through his body the doctor found one lone bullet-hole, severing his spinal cord near the small of the back. He had been able to move his hands but not his feet. But with his last consciousness: he had picked out one more object on our field to destroy for the gods of the Shinto Shrine. But they have fear too. Don’t think they’re supermen, for I assure you they’re not. They’re little, warped brain savage animals with the complex of suppression— but they have fear, like any one else. Their fear is worse, for there’s that phobia of having nothing to live for—the inferiority-complex they try to overcome. I once saw that fear on the face of a Japanese pilot when he knew he was going to die, and it did me lots of good: I told of it many times to youngsters in my Group and it always made them feel better to know that the Japs were afraid when they met them — probably more afraid than we were. Oh, the Jap is a wonderful pilot when he meets no or little opposition. They come in over undefended Chinese cities and loop and roll and zoom, shooting at the helpless pedestrians while arrogantly flying inverted on their backs. But when they meet ‘good American fighters, with pilots who know how to fight them, they are the most anxious people I’ve ever met to leave.our territory and go ‘‘hell for leather” towards Japan. One day I flew up very close to a lone Jap pilot during a fight near Kweilin. I placed my sights right where his wing joined the fuselage of the 1-97-2 and steadily squeezed a burst from two hundred yards, holding the trigger down while I moved into closer range. Then I swerved out from behind the enemy ship, expecting it to stream fire and perhaps explode. I had seen pieces come off, and I had seen the canopy glass turn to a fine, shining powder: that sparkled fn the slipstream as the ship nosed almost straight up. But when it didn’t burn, I skidded back across its tail, first with a look to my rear quarter lest I be surprised. : a I saw into the cockpit, The canitself from one of the cling Japanese ‘‘eircuses’’ we encountered one day East of Hengyang..When you meet the Jap in his larger-numbered formation, once goes into the circling technique that Baron von Richthofen made famous in the last war. This ‘‘circus”’ gradually moves in on or away from their objective as a defensive maneuver, for in it the ship behind protects the tail of the one in front. Our tactics were to dive through the ‘‘squirrel cage” and get snap shots at as many ships as wé could, but keep ‘our speed to prevent their getting on our tails. It was in one of these attacks that this lone Jap Zero left the protection of his other ships and began . to do aerobatics—sloppy loops, wingovers, stalls, and then another loop. Thinking it was a trick, we were wary; but after two of our pilots had made passes on it, two. more of us went down towards it. As I kept getting closer and closer to the enemy. plane I could see that the pilot } was evidently hurt, but when I 8 Ancther friendly coolie who gave aid to Col. Scott. crossed the top of the strange-acting plane I saw that he was leaning _ forward over the stick control, obviously dead. As the speed of the dive would build up pressures on the tail surfaces, the nose would. rise, for a Jap ship is rigged that way. As the ship climbed more steeply, the pilot’s upper body swung to the back of the seat in the normal position and the plane made a sloppy loop. For several minutes we watched the pilotless Zero in fascination. From 16,000 feet a ship that is shot down cay dive into the ground in a few seconds—it can even spin in from an explosion ing little longer than that; but we watched this plane for twice the time that it would normally have taken. It worked closer

and: closer to' the ground over the same area, as’it lost altitude gradually in the maneuvers. Then, after the longest wait that I can remem-. ber having gone through in the air, in one of its dives from a loop. it struck the hills below and burned. We could have burned it with a long burst many times during the minutés of our watching, but I imagine we were all spellbound at the spectacle. No one spoke for several minutes as we turned back to Hengyang. Then some call over the radio broke the spell, and we just marked the Jap off as another confirmed Zero— another ‘‘good”’ Jap. Over in Yunnan we fought the Japs a few times in Burma and had the sadness of another military funeral. Those moments in the Buddhist burial grounds were the hardest in China. As the Chaplain read the prayer and the flag-draped casket was lowered into the red earth of Yunnan, a small formation, with slow-turning engines that gave forth a muffled sound, would fly over the grave. There would be one vacant niche in the evenly spaced fighters, in honor of the brother airman who would fly no more. . After eight months in combat I was sent with five other pilots to ferry six new P-40K’s over from thé air base at Karachi. During our wait for the planes to be ready for combat, we were permitted to go to Bombay for the detached service. There, in this splendor of the Hotel Taj Mahal, we had a glorious time. In fact, it became very hard to realize that a war was going on over in Burma and China, 2s we looked at the night clubs from. Malabar Hill and from) inside them too, at the horse-races for the Aga Khan's Pyrse—and’at all the thjngs that: e had forgotten to remember. The return across India was a mom happy one, for we were ferrying new and higher-powered ships back to the war, and all of us were eager to try them out in combat; From Assam we took the o'd familiar frail that I used to fly with. the traxs ports, and it felt especially good to look around and see those friendly looking P-40's along with me over the Burma Road where: 1] had, m earlier months, been compelled to fly alone. The shark-mouths had not yet been painted on, but the silhouettes of the new fighters looked friendly nevertheless. A fast trip over thé five hundred miles from. Assam is. like: this: We're off from our base:and heading 118 degrees across the twelvethousand-foot Naga Hills to the first cHeck-point, where the upper fork of the Chindwin forms the likeness of a shamrock. Up to our left now, cir. he. at . from the altitude of eighteen thousand that we've attained. so effortlessly with the new ships, can be seen the higher snow-capped peaks of Tibet and Chinese Turkestan. Down below us the valley of the Irrawaddy is low and green, but forbidding nonetheless. Ahead, as we cross the “‘Y”’ in the httle known “triangle of the Irrawaddy,’’ we see the real hills of the ‘‘hump’’ begin to rise. Snow-capped peaks everywhere. Our map reads that our highest peak is going to be 15,800 feet; yet we well. know from experience that we’ve tried it many times and we ‘need to be very sure that we are at 18,000 to clear the mountains from the Tali Lake. Below us are the villages of the Miaows. We climb to 25,000 feet to test the ‘‘suped-up’-~ships, and a smile’ comes to our faces under the oxygen masks—for this is going to surprise the Jap. We’re going over the Mekong now, and from the time that has elapsed we’ve certainly picked up a tail wind—must be making over three hundred. The gorge of the Mekong runs like a gash in the sinister country of Burma to the South, and we know it goes on and . .0n towards Saigon and the sea. ., It’s barely twenty miles to the Salween, and we make it so quickly . that we begin to doubt that the other.tiver had been the Mekong. Our ' ground-speed is well over three hundred as we-see Lake Tali dnd start . the down-hill run.to Kunming. Now we catch the first glimpse of the Burma Road, North of Yunnanyi, and soon we see the small laké-that is near our field at that town. The mountains to the North are very high, and we know they get higher and higher and stretch-almost with-. out break to the East’ and the Pacific. We see the hairpin turns of the Burma Road near Tsuyung, and know that we’re nearly home from the Taj Mahal and India. We dive over the field of our headquarters just one hour and twentyfive minutes from the time we took ' off from Assam, five hundred miles away. I can teli by the smiles on the faces of the other men in the flight that we're all thinking the same thing: We have bad medicine for the Jap packed into the increased horsepower of these new “Kays’’—our Warhawks. They .are the latest of the P-40 series, and coming to us this time of year we look upon them as Christmas presents from the States. : The P-40 was in production when the war began. Then the decks were definitely stacked against us, and everything was in favor of the enemy. During the past year of our war these ships produced as no other fighter plane did, for they were serving or every front. Any pilot who actually fought the Axis ene“mies in the P-40 Tomahawks, Kitty“hawks, or Warhawks will tell you they are tough and dependable. They will dive with the best of projectiles —including a bomb. All of us hope © that the best fighter plane has not been produced, but we know that . America will develop it. In the meantime, through those lean months when America had te fight on many fronts with so little, the glorious P-40 series paid off when the chips were down in a ratio of between ;twelve and fifteen to one— twelve to fifteen enemy ships for every one of ours lost. Some day, when the war is over and our sturdy American engines driving great American ships have won victory with air power, I hope and pray—with all fighter pilots who have faced our enemies in aerial combat, from the hot sands of Libya to the cold tundra of the Aleutians, from the jungle heat of Guadalcanal to those torrential rains of the Burmese Monsoens—that some understanding group of citizens will go to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. There, beside the statue that commemorates the first flight of the Wright Brothers, I hope that they. will build a monument to the Curtiss P-40 with its Allison Engine. y&ad now, with a few minor battles in the air, we saw Christmas in Chi‘na draw near, and I couldn’t help wishing for fast action somewhere. After all, there’s only one place a person wants to be at Christmas. I took off from Kunming one day just before Christmas to inspect.the warning net in western Yunnan. It didn’t take long to find out that it was very inefficient near the Burma border, where a steady influx of fifth-columnists and Japanese money was filtering across the Salween. Even then I knew that instead of getting the Chinese officers who were in charge of the net to investigate, it would be much better to have a few engagements with the Jap over the failing net-area. There was no ‘onic like burning Jap planes over’ ‘ne country to improve the functioning of the air-raid warning net. 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