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.
So some of us had to just listen while we heard Sandell, over the radio in operations, making contact with the enemy. No doubts, they were pouring it to some twenty unescorted Japanese bombers, judging from the high-pitched and excited conversations. No Nip fighters had accompanied their bombers, or we would have heard.
The action lasted for an eternity, it felt, before Sandell called for a return to base. Sandy realized that they could chase the remaining bombers no farther and still have enough fuel for the return trip.
How eagerly I listened to the accounts of this first AVG action. How two of these bombers had burned in the air. How one of the twin engines of a bomber had torn out of its mounting, leaving the wing to disintegrate before their eyes. How one pilot was close enough to see the limp form of a tail gunner slumped over his gun.
Micky Mickelson’s eyes were like saucers as he told of the horror of the terrific blast that rocked his P-40 when he followed an injured bomber to the terrain below. Jim Cross returned with a P-40 full of bullet holes. And this patternseemed to follow Jim, and his plane always seemed to collect bullets, apparently motivated only by to-whom-it-may-concern. “Cokey” Hoffman, former aviation pilot in the Navy, the most ancient of all active pilots by far, was asked why he had persisted in making passes, after he had informed us upon returning that his guns were jammed.
Spitfire
Cokey said: “I figured I’d
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.
So some of us had to just listen while we heard Sandell, over the radio in operations, making contact with the enemy. No doubts, they were pouring it to some twenty unescorted Japanese bombers, judging from the high-pitched and excited conversations. No Nip fighters had accompanied their bombers, or we would have heard.
The action lasted for an eternity, it felt, before Sandell called for a return to base. Sandy realized that they could chase the remaining bombers no farther and still have enough fuel for the return trip.
How eagerly I listened to the accounts of this first AVG action. How two of these bombers had burned in the air. How one of the twin engines of a bomber had torn out of its mounting, leaving the wing to disintegrate before their eyes. How one pilot was close enough to see the limp form of a tail gunner slumped over his gun.
Micky Mickelson’s eyes were like saucers as he told of the horror of the terrific blast that rocked his P-40 when he followed an injured bomber to the terrain below. Jim Cross returned with a P-40 full of bullet holes. And this patternseemed to follow Jim, and his plane always seemed to collect bullets, apparently motivated only by to-whom-it-may-concern. “Cokey” Hoffman, former aviation pilot in the Navy, the most ancient of all active pilots by far, was asked why he had persisted in making passes, after he had informed us upon returning that his guns were jammed.
Spitfire
Cokey said: “I figured I’d
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