Kankakee Valley Post, Volume 14, Number 38, DeMotte, Jasper County, 4 August 1944 — Page 2

THE STORY THUS FAR: Lieut. Col. Frank Kortx, pilot of a Flying Fortres*, tells of that fatal day when the Japs struck in the Philippines. Eight of his men were killed while fleeing for shelter, and Old 99, with many other Forts, was demolished on the ground. After escaping to Australia, what is left of their squadron flies to Java, where they go on many missions over the Philippines and the Java sea. Java is invaded and becomes untenable. The Dutch general grants permission for U. S. fliers to evacuate to Australia, if they will first strafe Jap landing barges, which is done. They leave for Australia in an overcrowded Fortress, reach Broome airfield, circle, and come in.

CHAPTER XX “Presently the old sheep-rancher who took care of this shack and also ran the general store strolled over, and we began to talk. " ‘Had any trouble around here?’ I asked him. “ 'No,* he said. ‘Jap planes come over once in a while. Over here, sometimes over Wyndham and Port Hedland too, they say.' “ 'What do you mean, once in a while?* “ ‘The last one was just last night, since you mention it,’ he said. ‘Came over very high, early in the morning.' “It could only be a recco plane. I looked at this little field, loaded with Fortresses and Consolidated four-en-gine B-24’s, plus some twin-engine stuff, Douglases and Lockheeds the Dutch were using to evacuate. The Japs wouldn’t waste time reccoing it if they didn’t have a carrier somewhere near. God knows we’d learned they were methodical —a recco plane and inevitably, within forty-eight hours, they’d hit. “So at breakfast I mentioned it to the officer in charge of the field (a new man, just out from the States). 'Did you know, sir, the Japs had a recco plane over last night?’ And went on to say that we had quite a bit of stuff here, and while of course the crews were terribly tired, maybe it should be moved out. “He listened, and because I was on edge, his hesitation somehow annoyed me. But he finally said maybe I had a point there. And thinking about it, he finished his breakfast. I was glad when we got out of there after breakfast for Melbourne." “You should have been glad,’’ said Charlie Reeves, the bombardier, “because we were still in Broome that evening. The field was still loaded, all right, mostly Forts —all of them planes pulled out of Java. That night all but three of the Forts, including ours, pulled out for Melbourne. We had to stay and work on our brakes. But it was a setup for the Japs. I didn’t like it a bit. Out behind the breakwater were a few big Dutch Catalina flying boats, loaded with women and children from Java. That night and very early next morning more came in. “We worked most of the night on the brakes, and then went to sleep in that hangar shack. I slept fitfully—woke at five, to get an early start It didn’t seem healthy to me or to any of the rest of us. After a makeshift mess—hot beans and coffee plus field rations —we went out to the ship at six and stood by. “Skiles had asked the officer in charge when he could take off. But he gave Skiles to understand we were evacuees just like the others. When we were given our passenger list we could go. “So we stood around the plane from six o’clock until 9:10, waiting for that list and those orders. At this minute Sergeant Britt happened to look up and hollered: ‘Make a run for it, fellows—here come some

ENTER TAINMENT for everyone in the family

Zeros!’ Five of us who were standing back of the plane dropped into a hole about fifty feet away. “One Zero peeled off and strafed the Fortress with incendiaries. It caught fire immediately, then the Zero went on down and strafed a B-24, setting it afire. Then it turned and, coming in directly over our hole from the rear, strafed them again. It repeated this six times, also firing a 20-millimeter cannon at us, which caved in our hole and covered us with dirt. “When Sergeant Britt first hollered out, a big B-24 loaded with twenty-six people had just cleared the runway. When the Zeros hit, it was out over the ocean headed for Perth. It had hardly had time to pull its wheels up—and there was no room in there for them to swing a gun in their own defense—when a Zero caught up with it and dropped it in the sea. “Two sergeants managed to get out. They swam for thirty-two hours, one of them giving up in sight of shore. The other told us what it had been like inside there when those bullets came smashing through that packed crowd, and a few seconds later when those dying and wounded were all struggling not to drown as the water came in. “That day the Japs got another B-24 on the ground (it had been the one General Brett himself used), three Forts, a DC-2 and a DC-3, a Lockheed—but the worst were the nine Dutch flying boats they caught out in the harbor. About forty or fifty people were killed on them, mostly women and children. “I saw one Dutchman swim ashore dragging his wife by the hair. The whole lower half of her face had been blown away, and ' she was dead. I saw another woman standing on the wing of one of the planes which was burning. She had a child in her arms, and was ready to jump and swim ashore, when a cannon shot hit her in the back and broke her into halves. They both fell forward into the water, but the arms on the top half which held the child never let go of it. “The men who were left were almost crazy with rage. One Zero was shot down by a Dutchman who stood in front of the hangar holding a .30caliber machine gun across his arm. The gun got so hot it scorched right into his flesh, but he never noticed it. It turned out that Broome’s antiaircraft defense consisted of just this one .30-caliber gun. The Japs did the whole job in thirty minutes—didn’t leave a thing. “It was a hell of a mess. And how were we to get out? For all we knew, those Zeros might be working in advance of a Jap landing party, and all we had was that one .30-caliber. “Finally the officer in charge told us: ‘We expect planes in between now and midnight, but we don’t know how many. We’re compiling a priority list, but if your name isn’t called by two o’clock, I advise you to get out of here quick, and the best way you can, even if you have to walk—and it’s a long walk.’ “He turned out to be right. I fooled around until 2:30 and then, when my name hadn’t been called, nine of us decided we’d string along with a civilian contractor who’d offered us a lift. He had thirty men and five Ford trucks, and said he was headed south down the coast for the nearest town, called Port Hedland, two hundred miles away. The Army had some emergency rations hidden in the woods, so we helped ourselves to enough of those to keep us on the trip. “Then I began to find out about Australia. Those guys are like our

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Westerners —pioneer types, except bigger. When we got twenty miles out of Broome the road ended entirely. After that— nothing at all. We had to push those trucks through sand, and make long detours around salt-water marshes. Even our drinking water had to be carried in the trucks. They talked about passing three ranches. We did, and I discovered they were the only three houses between Broome and Port Hedland. A million acres is nothing to an Australian. The country looks like West Texas, and is covered thinly with what they call gum trees. They’re like eucalyptus in the States. The only sign of life was kangaroos—we’d see half a dozen a day. The little ones are called wallabies and the others are big blues. They hunch low and run through the scrubby gum trees. I got tired living out of cans, so I borrowed a gun and shot a big blue, and the Aussies showed me how to eat it. You throw r away all but the tail,

The only sign of life was kangaroos. We’d see half a dozen a day.

which you make soup of, and it tastes like thick chicken broth. “If we were near a ranch we might see sheep, and we also shot some of these and ate them. The Australian law is that any traveler can kill a sheep for eating, but he must skin it and leave the hide on a fence post for the owTier. I got my first bath in a river we ran onto twenty miles out of Port Hedland. “Finally I got to Melbourne, where the Air Force was gathering again —and found they had me down as a deserter, but it wasn’t any trouble getting that explained.” “I got out of Java by boat,” said the Gunner. “They loaded us on a train at Jockstrap and took us to some town whose name I never did learn, where a Dutch freighter was waiting to take out fifteen hundred of us. They told us we were bound for Perth, a town in Southwest Australia —about the same location and size as San Diego in the States. Alongside us at the dock was a troopship of Aussies from Singapore. Before that they’d been in Egypt—hadn’t been home for years. Their boat was bound for Adelaide, way

W.N.U.TEATURI*

round on the other side of Austra-lia-same location as Miami. But lots of them lived in Perth. When they heard we were going there, they all skipped ship to come Aboard with us % . We divided our food and lent them our mess kits. They’d lost everything at Singapore, They probably caught hell for it, but they didn’t give a damn. “The first day out we sighted a Jap plane, but it. stayed up for a while, watching us. We had stuck machine guns in the belay in g-pin holes, and kept the soldiers hidden below decks so they wouldn’t know we were carrying troops. Our gunners were hidden, too. But when this Jap started down to strafe, one of our gunners gave the show away by opening fire too soon—otherwise we would have got him. “We zigzagged for five days, and then at Perth were loaded into a troop train for Melbourne. I was in the coach next the engine, and the Australians couldn’t do too much for us. The engineer drew a can of hot water from his boiler and made us some tea out of his strictly rationed supply, apologizing because it wasn’t stronger. “I guess I was about the last one of us to arrive,” “Not by a couple of weeks you weren’t,” said Harry Schrieber, the navigator, indignantly. “Because what about me?” “We weren’t worried about you, Harry,” said Frank with a grin. “We thought you were dead. Way back in the Philippines, when Jack Adams’ plane didn’t come back to Del Monte Field from that mission. We had given you up months ago. What had you been doing, anyway?” “Trying to get out of the damned Philippines,” said Harry. “And I didn’t manage it until the day before General MacArthur did —the sixteenth of March I think it was.” “Harry was the last man to come,” said Frank, “and now that the gang was together we could start doing business. You see Lieutenant General Brett, who had been commanding the United Nations Air Force under British General Wavell, who was supreme commander, needed a plane to take him around the war zone. His B-24 had been lost at Broome, remember. Colonel Eubank recommended me to General Brett as his personal pilot and senior air aide, and I selected the crew. Of course when it came to picking the plane itself, the General ordered a D, because all the E’s with tail guns were needed for combat and he wanted those planes saved for the boys who would be going out on missions. “But when it came to which D we would pick, it had to be the Swoose, because there was no other left. Every plane, even of the same model, handles a little differently. I’d flown our D’s out from the States, through the Philippines and Java, and I’ve always felt the old Swoose was just a few miles faster and answered the controls a little more smoothly than the others. “So now, as pilot and crew of the commanding Air Force General’s plane, we in the Swoose were making weekly trips into the war zone from Headquarters far dowm in Melbourne, up to Darwin and Port Moresby, which were then far-flung outposts on the battle line. The General would average sixty hours a month in the air—thirty of them at least in this combat zone. To get him in and out of it, the Swoose often hit 150 air hours per month. “At Moresby it was never safe to leave the Swoose on the ground by day. We’d sneak in at night, leave the General, and be off back to Townsville by dawn, coming in to pick him up again the next night. Sometimes the General would just

have time to scramble aboard while w r e cleared the field as the alarm sounded. He was bound he wouldn’t lose the Swoose. “We now began to get a peek out over the top at the broad picture of this Far Eastern war. There w’ere differences over strategy, but it was never Australians versus Americans. The cleavage was groundminded versus air-minded thinking. The Australian air generals saw eye to eye with our American air leaders. Likewise the infantry generals of both armies thought alike. “And there, was much to the infantry side of the argument. After Java fell, Australian civilians were panicky. Thousands of Australian boys had gone out to die in Africa and Singapore. Now the danger had suddenly rolled down on the Homeland. They wanted all the troops they could get r ght down there in that lower right-hand (southeast) corner of their continent, where ninety per cent of its population lives. “Not in New Guinea, or Tulagi, or Guadalcanal, or even in Darwin, w’hich, although on their own continent, is to the average Australian as remote as the Aleutians seem to New Yorkers. They think of Darwin as a tiny outpost separated from them by thousands of miles of impassable desert. They wanted the soldiers near the great cities of Sydney and Melbourne, where they could hear the marching and the military bands. “This was also sound infantry strategy. The only populous parts of Australia are down in this southeast corner. We didn't yet have many battalions, supply problems were enormous, so our infantry generals agreed with theirs and with their civil leaders. They wanted to keep the army near valuable objectives, not scatter it out across seas and jungle islands, where supply problems w'ould become formidable. “But we of the Air Forces (both Australian and American) felt that to defend this continent we must build our fighter fields not iri Australia itself, but on the outlying islands. Having these, with a few ground troops to hold our airdromes against Jap landing parties, no fleet would dare venture through our. air screen to threaten the continent itself. “We’d defended Java by pounding the Japs from Borneo. TIW Japs had not dared send their transports and landing barges through until they’d taken our advance bases and held air control over* the Java Sea. “The Australian Air Force was as anxious to move into this outlying island chain as we were. Early in April they’d wanted to seize Lae on New Guinea, before the Japs had had time to dig in on its north coast. At that time the Japs had only about four hundred men in the area, and it would have been easy. “But we lacked the men and the ships—the Japs pressed on and presently took Tulagi in the Solomons, threatening our supply lines home. (TO BE CONTINUED)

“BOMBS AWAY"