Kankakee Valley Post, Volume 14, Number 19, DeMotte, Jasper County, 24 March 1944 — QUEENS DIE PROUDLY [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

QUEENS DIE PROUDLY

©.WHITE

by W.L. White

W.N.U.TEATURES

FOREWORD SINCE Lieutenant Colonel Frank Kurtz and the other members of the crew of the Swoose, who furnished the material for this story, are as modest as they are brave, they asked me to point out that this does not pretend to be a complete history of the air force in the Southwest Pacific war, or even of the achievements of the flying fortresses in those islands. After they had read my completed story, they insisted that many men who did as much or more in this war as they, are mentioned here only casually or not at all. These omissions were necessary because I wished to build the story on personal narratives, confining it wherever possible to what these five men had seen and felt, so in fairness to them it should be judged only on that basis. But within these limitations we have striven for accuracy. Consequently I am proud that Lieutenant General George H. Brett, izho is one of the ablest of that small group of officers who pioneered air power in the American army and who, soon after the original debacle on Clark Field, took command of the I ar Eastern air forces and in six months laid the foundations for our eventual Pacific victory, could, after reading the manuscript, write me that “as far as memory serves, the incidents you described of operations in Java and Australia are historically correct! 9 W. L. WHITE

CHAPTER I The grizzled old Flying Fortress stood on the runway of an American airfield, presently to depart for another continent and another war zone. Those scratches on her running gear were made by sand grains of Wake Isjand w’hen she was on her way to the Far East before the war. That little dent on her wing was made by a spent-bomb fragment the day the war began, when the Japanese destroyed all but a very few of our Far Eastern Air Force on Clark Field in the Philippines. She was one of those few. The battle paint on her wings was later blistered by the sun in the high skies over Java, and still later nicked by sandstorms over the Australian desert. Of the very few to escape Clark Field, she is the only one to come home, and now, her guns removed, she is an old w’ar horse turned out to pasture, the transport plane of a three-star general of the American Air Force. (Lieutenant General George H. Brett, USA, who until recently commanded the Far Eastern skies for the United Rations.) On her side is a jaunty emblem daubed there by the hand of some >boy, unknown now and probably dead—the outline of a misshapen -foird “The Swoose” —“half swan and half goose”—taken from a jingle, and beneath it the skeptical legend “It Flies?” It did, for countless thousands of miles through cloud canyons and over oceans and islands of the war zone, and now in the shade of her wing sit six who have a story to telL The pilot is standing. He is Frank Kurtz, who hai been three times a member of the championship American Olympic Team as a

high diver, who a year ago was a lieutenant in the 19th Bombardment Grodp, and who now holds the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Silver Star, and is a lieutenant colonel at thjrty-one. The others are Margo, his pretty, blonde, blue-eyed wife; Captain Harry Schrieber, his black-eyed, blackhaired navigator; Master Sergeant Charlie Reeves, his bombardier; Master Sergeant Rowland Boone, his gunner; and Master Sergeant “Red” Varner, the merriest embalmer in the Ajr Corps, who a few years ago ran a comfortable little undertaking parlor out on the Coast. “Reid” is now crew chief of the Swoose, and lords it over the ground crews who swarm over her to check her engines when she hits the ground. He brings hot coffee and sandwiches to her pilot and passengers \Vhen she is aloft, and it was his duty in Java and Australia to steal anything from a carburetor to a roasting chicken necessary to keep the General comfortable and the Swoosd in the air. But this is getting ahead of the story. (Since this was written, all the master sergeants of the Swoose crew have been commissioned.) Meanwhile Frank, the pilot, paces up and down. It isn’t easy for him to begin. Few things have been easy for Frank Kurtz. It wasn’t easy a§ a boy, when he earned his living selling papers on the streets of Kansas City. It wasn’t easy later to leave Home when he was fourteen because he had decided to become an Olympic platform diver and there was a famous instructor on the the boy hoped he could persuade to coach him. He did persuade him, but it wasn’t easy to earn his way through Hollywood High School while he took the training. Before leaving him, Frank had decided to become a pilot. He’ll tell you it’s so much like diving—all you need is perfect balance and timing and control; yet it wasn’t easy to take thojse many hours of flying lessons, or later to win the Junior World’s pLandplane Speed Record, or to work pis way through college and marry sb popular and pretty a girl as or to learn to fly the Army way at Randolph Field. All of it was hard, and Frank is never quite satisfied, because he’s sure, locking back, that they all could have been done maybe a little better or at least a little quicker if he’d only! worked harder; so naturally he’s modest about them. “I don’t know where it begins,” he said. “Maybe with the Swoose. Yet she wasn’t my plane at the very first. I think it begins with Old 99, my very first plane, and with old Tex (Lieutenant Arthur Edward Gary), my co-pilbt, and the rest of my crew, that I saw lying there on Clark Field—eight in a line. “Maybe it begins w r ith Old 99 and those eight in a line, lying so still, and it was such a bright, sunshiny day, and! so quiet after the Jap bombers left. “You see, on the morning war began Old 99 was clear down at the other end of the field, out of sight beyond the hump in the runway, and my crew was waiting with her, keeping her all warmed for the takeoff while I went to lunch and to the pilots’ meeting. “I was to have bicycled over to them, and we were to have taken off for Formosa, to take pictures of what the Japs were doin* “1 had finished lunch when the first wave hit. After that I had to stay in the foxhole for about an hour while they strafed the field. But when the fighters left. I jumped on my bike and rode down the runway through the smoke of the other burning Fortresses, to see what had hap- | pened to Old 99.

“Only if I begin here, maybe nobody would understand what his plane and his crew means to a pilot; that it’s like his home and his family. Boys you’ve lived with and worked with for months. Your life has depended on them and their lives on you. And you’ve seen the pictures of their wives or girls, and know just where they carry them in their wallets, and how proud they are of them, and you’ve told them about your wife, and they know what you hope for in the future, and what you haven’t told them you know they’ve guessed, and the same with you about them. “And the plane—it isn’t something that belongs to the Government with a number; it’s Old 99. the beautiful new Flying Fortress that belongs

to you. It’s more than your home —it’s, well, a kind of a sweetheart. All of you picked her up off the assembly line at the Boeing plant where she was born—a beautiful, smooth, shining, naked thing. Then all of you took her up over the clouds and wrapped that beautiful blue star-spangled gown of the skies around her, which is the way every Fortress ought to be dressed, because they’re the Queens of the high skies. “And you’re so damn proud of her, all of you—knowing you’re flying a Fortress, which everybody admits is the best ship in the business. So there isn't anything any of you won’t do —pilots and greaseballs of the ground crew alike —to keep her polished and adjusted and ticking like the high-precision watch she was when you got her. “Well, as I said, there was a rise in the runway, and as I pedaled up it, for a minute I was afraid w’hat I w’ould see, looking ahead. But then my heart suddenly gave a big pound, because there was Old 99’s vertical stabilizer—the big curve of her tail rising high like a game salmon’s tail fin—gleaming above the runway; so I pumped the bike a few times more, being thankful it was a good American bike I’d bought off a fighter pilot instead of the junky Jap copies that are so cheap in Manila, only, my God, then —just then— r

•‘I don’t know whether I got off the bike at that point or not. < Or fell off it. Or rode on a while, and I ,o F then left it lying by the runway. All I can remember is how’ Old 99 looked and, a little later, walking over the field, slowly, toward her; afraid to come too close, too fast. Think about it not as a plane that has burned, or even your own house, but like it was a good friend burned up. And all that is left is that tall silver tail still up in the air, not even scorched or smoke-stained, and I am walking over the field toward her. “Her poor old ribs black, twisted now; and with the aluminum skin melted off them so her carcass is naked, and you can see right through into the pilot’s compartment. and the seats where I sat. and good old Tex, my co-pilot, right beside me. And my control wheel, and my two sets of pedals, and the duplicate set for Tex. only all melted or twisted with the heat—even the wall bracket where the coffee thermos used to hang is still there, only all twisted. And her four motors tumbled forward out of their nacelles in her crumpled wings onto the ground—everything about o Old 99 still there, only melted and bent and ruined and her back sagging and broken, like you would take a delicate silver flying fish between your fists and break its back and drop it on the ground to die. “Everything there, only something else, too. And I couldn’t make out what it was. Yet I must have guessed. Because I began to feel sick at my heart and my stomach when I saw that curious, half-burned bundle of something lying there under the crumpled wing, and as I got closer I couldn’t even deny to myself what it was. One of my crew. Lying under there. And right beside him another. Poor faithful boys, following orders, staying loyally by Old 99 even in the face of the advancing Japanese bomb pattern across the field like a hailstorm —and under the plane’s crumpled belly still another, and under the tail our little Dodson—he must have run under there for shelter, and Old 99’s tail settled down on him as her back girders melted when she burned. But only after I had walked around the tail could I see the eight in a line. “There they were, lying so very still on this beautiful quiet day, my eight boys of Old 99’s crew in a senseless, irregular line toward the

woods, to which they had been running for shelter when they all had been killed at once, and left sprawling as they died. “I remember standing there by the tail and counting one, two, three, in that line and so on up to eight, toward the woods—my boys and each one I knew. Standing there, I could see it but not realize it even though I knew it —knew which ones would have their wives’ and girls’ crumpled pictures in their pockets. I knew they were dead now, and I started walking down that irregular line of men who had been running toward the woods, and then very suddenly it began to get me. For a while I don’t know what I did. Then I remember going along the line from one to the other, talking to each the way I always would, and patting him on the shoulder like he were alive, because for me they weren’t dead yet. And crying. And I’m not ashamed of that. “Talking to each, from good old Sergeant Burgess, who was nearest the plane, on down the irregular line to dear old Tex at the very end, with all his clothes torn off by the blast. I recognized his shoulders. They were a fighter’s big broad shoulders —Tex had been boxing champion of Texas A. & M. “It was like that other crash back in the States where two of them burned up, but I identified Kenny by his legs—remember, Margo, I told the flight surgeon they were quartermiler’s legs, and it could only be Kenny? Darling, is this bothering you?” “If it did, dear. I wouldn’t have married you,” said the pilot’s wife. “Good - devil-may-care Tex—on hot days he would fly Old 99 stark naked except for a pair of shorts, sitting beside me in the copilot’s seat, sweating like a mule and cussing the tropical sun. I loved the guy like a brother. “So maybe for me it begins when I got to where Tex was lying, and sat down by him to talk it over, lifting his curly head with one hand and patting his hairy back with the other. It was still soft and warm. It wasn’t a body yet. It was Tex himself at the end of that sprawling line. I told" him I didn’t know why this had happened any more than he did. But they could trust me to find out, so it would never happen again. But regardless of that, he must understand this wasn’t the end. (TO BE CONTINUED)

The grizzled old Flying Fortress stood on the runway.