Baa Baa Black Sheep (11 page)

There was another puzzling factor about this that I could not understand at all. I realized that Chennault had experienced hunger after his forced retirement, and had to roll his own cigarettes for a while, and I appreciated that he would welcome any opportunity to be retired as a general after the war. However, he appeared to fight this much more at the time than he pretended to resist the inducting of Navy and Marine Corps pilots later on.

Furthermore, this induction was to take place even though the Air Corps could not supply the group with so much as a toothbrush (cost $5.00), let alone any airplanes or other supplies. Without post exchanges a person couldn’t even exist upon a service salary with the sky-high inflation that existed in China at the time.

I momentarily left our ungreeted arrival back in Kunming to explain why our esteemed staff was too preoccupied with ticker tape to bother with us. We had come to welcome ourselves back, out at good old Hostel Number Two.

At the time we had figured that we were back where a bit of relaxation was in order, safe in Kunming. Our faithful ground crew had brought back an ample supply of whisky besides the leopard, and some refugees. Anglo-Burmese girls, as well. Some of the fellows were interested in making love, while others were occupied with target practice on the adobe walls of our hostel with their sidearms. But everyone seemed interested in getting drunk.

The soirée we put on for ourselves would have probably
gone unnoticed but for the fact that an ancient Allison-engine representative happened in on it. And we apparently frightened the poor old devil to death when one of our bullets ricocheted near him. This representative then went to the trouble of driving across Kunming to headquarters and spilling a story to Chennault, who was forced to look into the matter then, and as a result I was chewed out for not controlling my troops and for my part in the drinking festivities. My punishment was—a limit of two drinks per evening. He hadn’t said how large, however. So I assumed this to mean two full water glasses.

After our arrival things settled back to normal for a few days, with nothing much going on at the field but to think of other ways to bore oneself. Nothing ever seemed permanent in my life.

Indeed, because of a series of incidents occurring fast in March 1942, six of us Flying Tigers (as we were called by now) were fortunate that we did not become guests of Japan right then and there. This was almost two years before I finally was shot down and did become such a guest. But the first time we literally came within thirty miles of landing plumb into Japanese-held territory, and without knowing at all where we were.

The whole thing started one March morning when word came into our pilots’ ready room at Kunming that eight fighters were needed to escort the transport plane carrying China’s first man and lady. There was no hesitation for volunteers, for this was the same as being asked to escort Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. But the catch was that no one told us where we were going. Each thought the other might know, or at least that the leader might know, so we did not bother to find out. I look back on the whole thing as some experienced old man might at some of the damned-fool things of his childhood.

As we scrambled into our P-40s, with their hideous shark-faces painted on their noses, we could see a farewell reception gathering next to the DC-2 transport waiting for the famed couple.

A jeep messenger came up to us at the last minute with some instructions from good old Harvey, but not enough of them. The instructions were merely that we were to circle in sections of two at three thousand feet and then put on a
demonstration, and “make it good.” It was this last phrase in the order that helped cause the havoc, for when pilots are told in addition to “make it good,” then believe me, they usually will take up the stinging sort of challenge and everybody else had better watch out.

Off we went in the shark-faces, and as we circled the field, climbing, we could see the official cars stop and let out Madame and the Generalissimo. Much bowing and handshaking could be detected in the tiny forms down on the field, the official party next to the transport.

At a signal from the leader the shark-faces moved into a Lufbery column. In turn each of us dove at the far side of the field at full throttle. Each pilot leveled out just off the ground. As the planes approached the official party, they started to roll, so that by the time they arrived over the transport each plane was on its back.

And this is where we overdid it. The lead planes were so low that all the figures on the ground—and this included the famous pair and our own boss—threw themselves flat on their faces, and stayed that way. And we knew then what Chennault and his dignified guests must be thinking about us, or saying about us, as they lay there. But it was too late.

One pilot with very limited flying experience told us afterwards that he had rolled quite naturally to the upside-down position by merely following the P-40 in front of him, but when the time came to roll right side up again, he was a total loss because the P-40 in front of him had left his vision by pulling up. He said the only thing that saved him was remembering: center the needle and then the ball, which was taught him in instrument-flying school.

With this novice, and another pilot whose baggage door flew open, the distinguished pair had only a Higher Power protecting them from their own airplanes. Yet all this was but the beginning of a long series in what could be termed a “comedy of errors”—except that the comedy was lacking, at least at the time.

No sooner had we finished “making it good” in regard to the demonstration, and were back up in formation, than the formation leader saw that he couldn’t continue with his open baggage door and motioned for me to take over for the escort mission.

As I recall, one other plane dropped out of formation
too, leaving only six of us. The tired old P-40s were weak from lack of spare parts and from other ailments.

Finally the DC-2 transport was loaded with the dignitaries and took off. And now it was my turn, as leader of the escorts, to wish that I had been informed of where we were going. I just simply did not know, and neither did the other escorts. It had all happened so fast. But on top of all this my compass was not working, and I couldn’t hear anything on my radio. As the trip progressed, I divided my time between scanning the sky for Nip fighters and trying to pick out some landmark, any landmark at all, on this unfamiliar, rugged terrain of interior China. We had, for all practical purposes, just arrived in this interior country, it must be remembered, and had not had a chance to fly around much. What few charts any of us had were virtually worse than useless.

We had flown for about two hours when it finally dawned on me that the precious load in the transport might be bound for Chungking. Thick, billowy clouds were forming rapidly, and no longer were the rugged mountain peaks visible at all. We were flying through a windstorm, and this would never do, for our little fighter planes did not carry enough gas for much of this. And what a storm it was we were to learn later, when told that the wind in this particular locality often reached the velocity of a hundred miles per hour. And we were in such a storm now, with cross winds.

Knowing that no Japs could possibly find a DC-2 in that cloudy weather, I wobbled my wings good-by to the transport pilot and started my own fighters back for home or some landing place. But with my compass not working, and my radio not working, and no familiar landmark anywhere, all I could do was to try to guide our way back out of the thick clouds and be able to see something. The whole thing became a race between the clouds and our remaining gas.

The gas finally won, but only by ten minutes. This is all the supply of gas I had left when at last we broke out of the heavier clouds and I spotted what appeared to be a tiny field in a valley between rugged peaks.

On flying by for quick inspection the field turned out to be not a field at all but a hill with the top flattened off. In reality it turned out later to be a Chinese cemetery way up there in the mountains. But it would have to do, even though it was much too small to land anything as fast as a P-40, and
especially at that distance above sea level, six thousand feet. Yet this cemetery was our last and only chance.

So one by one we dropped over the edge of this tiny clearing, and each landing was disastrous to the plane, for all around this little plateau of a cemetery was a couple hundred feet of drop-off, and we had to set our planes down with the gears retracted. A couple pilots tried it the conventional way but were far worse off than those who didn’t.

Each plane, on being stopped in this manner, would skid along on its belly, damaging the landing gear even though it was retracted, and either one or the other wing tip in some cases. But what surprised us after that was the speed with which we immediately became surrounded by a horde of Chinese. All of us had not yet had a chance to drag ourselves from the damaged planes before the Chinese began pouring in around us. We did not know at the time where so many could be coming from, but it turned out that they were coming from a neighboring village and there were hundreds and hundreds of them. None of them seemed to understand English, but they stood there and stared at us, and we stared back at them.

Finally a young Chinese came up to me and in very broken English explained that he was the only man who could speak our language. Among other things he tried to tell us, while all that horde stood round jabbering, was that the nearby village was Wenshan and no white man had been there for more than ten years. This man had learned English from missionaries when he was a boy.

The village, we further found out, was only a few miles from the Japanese-occupied border. In other words, I had barely missed becoming a captive of the Emperor of Japan two years before I finally did become one.

On one of the plane radios that still happened to be working we finally managed to contact the home base. We informed the base where we were. The answer, from our very good friend Harvey, had this to say to us: “Happy to hear from you fellows. We have made arrangements for you to stay in the bridal suite of the Grand Hotel, and God damn it, don’t ever come back.”

We did, though, live for a week with the mayor of Wenshan. During this time we learned about ten words from our genial host. The only one I can remember now is
“gombay.”
At each meal the mayor would propose a series of toasts, first to the United States, then in turn to each one of us. Each time he would fill his cup with rice wine, drink the entire contents, turn the empty cup upside down, and say:
“Gombay.”

We did the same, first drinking a toast to China, and then to the mayor. Fortunately we had two meals a day or we could not have stood up under it.

The mayor, through the English-speaking interpreter, wanted to know when we were going to fly away. But with our planes strewn in heaps all over the cemetery we had no answer to that one. Instead, we politely explained that we were out of gasoline or we would not have dropped in on him.

The mayor came out with the classical remark that he had five gallons in a can at his home, and that he would lend these five gallons to us. We hardly could keep straight faces because obviously this would not be enough to make our planes even cough.

During this stay at Wenshan we took daily hikes about this ancient city up in the mountains, to see if we could find a means of getting out. Wenshan was surrounded in its entirety by a huge rock wall of the approximate vintage of the Great Wall of China. We were told that for centuries the present populace had been supplied by convicts, in much the same manner that Australia had gotten its beginning. We climbed nearby hilltops so that we could see what lay beyond. In doing this we scaled stone fortifications that were former lookout towers in various forms of dilapidation. We found that excellent construction had battled time, and quite possibly repeated attacks, in a remarkable fashion. But we found nothing to help us.

After a week of all this we were becoming desperate. In our wandering about the village we discovered a camouflaged U.S.-manufactured truck hidden in the brush. After much double talk we finally managed to locate the driver. Because he was the only one among them who could drive a truck, or at least who thought he could, he had been made a colonel in their army.

We dickered with him to take us back home, and he finally agreed to do so. But we no sooner had gotten under way over that rugged terrain than we observed that he hardly
could drive at all. The mountains were so steep, the trail was so rough, and his driving was so terrible that after four days of moving we had gone only a little more than a hundred miles.

We were so afraid that he was going to run us off one of these thousand-foot drops that we begged him to let one of us take over the wheel. But the colonel would have no part of it. So then we tried to take over the wheel through force or trickery, but he was on to this, also, and each time we tried to grab the ignition key, he would jump out of the truck, running up the mountainside with the key in his hand. He would sit on his heels in the brush, and wait at a distance, until we convinced him that we would not try again.

Not only was there room for only one beside the driver in the truck cab, but he insisted that it be that way after the first key-stealing attempt was made. We alternated for this choice position, because trying to be comfortable in any position in that truck bed was impossible.

Even at comparatively slow speed, on this rocky, gutted roadway, the constant jarring had us physically sore from head to foot, not to mention our mental attitudes. At times the up-and-down jarring became so rapid it would leave the loose chaff and dust that had been lying upon the wooden flooring of this canvas-covered truck suspended about two inches above the floor like a false bottom.

Along the way our driver ran across four Chinese soldiers, and got the idea over to us that they would ride in the back too. We said okay, and the soldiers gave us toothy grins, climbing aboard the truck. After but a few miles of this careening and constant jarring, it became evident that Oriental boys were unaccustomed to vehicular motion, and then these Chinese soldiers commenced to vomit. Now the truck bed became covered with slimy rice as well as unbearable thumps.