Baa Baa Black Sheep (6 page)

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.

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 hundred 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.

Of course everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but I had the feeling that the organization dealt us just enough to keep us around prior to the action. Much the same way I feel about politicians. And the lads who were controlling this were politicians.

We couldn’t wait to get downtown that first night for a tourist’s tour. Japanese bombers had come over that very morning and dropped bombs upon this defenseless city. We viewed the destruction in various parts of the downtown area. Several hundred Chinese had been maimed or killed outright.

In walking along these narrow cobblestone streets it was educational to me to realize that people had existed in such filth for so many generations. How many generations? I do not really know, but the surrounding hillsides, where the city had buried her dead for centuries in peculiar little mounds, covered areas many times the size of this large city.

Somehow I had a feeling that, if this kept up, in time they would be forced to plant a little rice on top of some of the older graves in order to be able to make new children.

It was bitter cold in Kunming in December. Perhaps the change of climate had something to do with it, though. I was amazed to see tiny tots running about these streets in pants that resembled a cowboy’s chaps. Their little round bare buttocks, which stuck out of these pants in this cold weather, gave me the impression of a well-ripened peach back home.

One day I saw a little fellow doing his daily elimination upon the sidewalk, without the obvious necessity of having to take down his trousers. A Chinese woman, apparently the child’s mother, came out of a doorway and spanked this tot severely. At first I imagined the discipline was for adding to the accumulated filth of centuries. But no. Even though I wasn’t able to understand the language, it was obvious the mother was instructing her child to use one of the wooden buckets beside the stone building.

Human excretion was a commodity of value here, for it
was the only means of fertilizing the land. Many years later I found that persons I had referred to as though they were completely formed of this raw product have a very definite purpose on this earth of ours.

God, what a place! Many mongrel dogs seemed to infest the outskirts of Kunming. They had chowlike heads, and these dogs would slink off with their tails between their legs, even when you offered them food. These dogs trusted no one. They preferred to feast upon the unclaimed bodies that lay in the cemeteries, people who could do them no harm.

Our generation, to say the least, certainly learned a lot of geography fast. And in a manner to make it stick. So I pity the poor geography teachers unless, by chance, they may have been around in the war too. For my ideas about the world had been confined to what schoolteachers had told me, or to books.

The Chinese were supposed to have stopped binding tiny girls’ feet before I started to grade school. It wasn’t quite that way. I witnessed many women in inland China, when I was nearly thirty years old, whose feet had been bound long after I had been instructed in school that no longer was there any such binding.

Getting back to flying and shooting down the enemy aircraft, the reason I personally had gone over to China, I believe that I had better predict the future. Which is easy in this case, for I’m only relating the past.

The definition of flying is: hours and hours of dull monotony sprinkled with a few moments of stark horror.

Maybe it is better this way. Or you might get the same impression I got when I read the
Black Ace of Germany.
After getting along to the monotonous, repetitious twenty-fourth kill or so I became so bored and confused that I hoped to God someone would shoot him down and get it over with.

Flying then was, and still is, a problem of having our aircraft in flying condition. Flying is a strain. So we worked out a day-on, day-off schedule for the pilots, which happened to fit in perfectly with the P-40s our small ground crew labored day and night to keep in readiness.

Here in China was a unique air-warning system for our Japanese invaders. It was as good, if not better, than radar was at that time. It consisted of countless country telephones,
spread over this rugged interior of China. How any human could understand several hundred people on the same party line was beyond me, but it worked wonders.

Gingbow
was the Chinese expression for air raid. And when they came, the Chinese in the plotting room in operations, from the maze of sounds over the telephone system, would work out the courses, the speeds, and the number of enemy aircraft. Even if the Japanese were unidentified, we knew they had to be enemy, because our P-40s were either on flight plan or on the ground. This system worked better than radar inland, but it wasn’t worth a damn on border territory, we found.

In December there occurred several
gingbows
, which I tried desperately to run down. Each turned out to be a lone aircraft that streaked for home long before I was able to intercept it. No doubt these were observation planes, as fate would have it, and were looking for no fight. On the twenty-first of December I was having my day-off routine, not having a P-40 naturally, when the real McCoy came. In hopes that there might be a spare P-40 I ran like a madman to each one, checking to see if it had a pilot. I found that the only planes that didn’t have pilots were out of commission.