Baa Baa Black Sheep (5 page)

Rangoon was probably the city in which most writers stayed while working on their books about Burma, because in no other city in Burma were there any permanent buildings as we know them here. Probably those writers stayed at the Grand Hotel, which is really quite modern, and it could have been there that they turned out their mysteries.

What I first noticed about Rangoon was that the paved sidewalks were covered with blotches of red, indicating that many murders had been committed the previous nights. But I later found that this red was merely the spit from the people who chew betel nut.

Our little detachment was under orders to stick closely together until we departed that afternoon on the train. So I hadn’t gotten rid of ex-Captain Smith quite yet, as I had imagined I would.

Anyhow, I thought that I could stand his formations a little while longer. And there in the AVG I was to run into more Smiths, as Smith is a common name. Both of these new Smiths were wonderful guys, much younger than the one that got my nanny. And the differentiation between the two new Smiths had already been handled before I arrived, one was called Bob, and the other R.T.

All the time we waited for our train, with the exception of a shopping trip for tropical clothing, bush jackets and shorts, was spent at the Silver Grill, which was taken over by the pilots. It was a restaurant, or the only so-called night club in this large city. And it turned out to be a nightly hangout of the AVG later, when we were finally stationed back in Rangoon.

Here in the Silver Grill, where everyone wasn’t talking at one time, we were able to inquire further about the AVG. As the story was told to us, the group had been stationed in the big city when the first arrivals had shown up, but recently they had been moved northward in order to pacify the British long-hairs running this fair city.

And as it went, the Rangoon newspapers had printed articles about the American ruffians who called themselves
the American Volunteer Group, and had said in no uncertain words what they were going to do about these roughnecks. They were capable of defending their own land as they always had before. After all, hadn’t they an adequate supply of Brewster fighters (lend-lease from the United States) the same as Singapore? Who are we to let trash defend us? If we should need more aid, England will gladly supply us with an ample supply of Hurricane and Spitfire aircraft.

Brewster Buffalo

Another illusion the English had been under for some time was the potential of the water buffalo, a semi-domestic beast that tilled the rice-paddies; they thought that these beasts would become ferocious killers if a white man came near them. And, come to think of it, it must have been aggravating when some playful, drunken Texans shot their myth full of holes, for they rode these buffalo down the streets of Rangoon while they yelled: “Yee, ho-oo-oo.” Actually, the only reason I could see that this superstition had been carried on for so long was that the English in those colonies had stayed away from any physical labor for so many generations.

But the English weren’t the only ones who were talking about the AVG, even if the Americans didn’t know about us at
this time. The Japanese were talking about us. We hadn’t fooled them for one minute, and they stated that our being over there had to be considered another warlike act. The Japanese gave the United States an ultimatum of quite some length, and in it was: Get your flying missionaries and laborers out of the Far East.

Our stateside belongings, plus our new purchases and ourselves, were herded aboard a small train that ran on a narrow-gauge track. Doors opened both sides of its cars completely, not unlike some of the European trains I had seen in motion pictures. So the tiny cars could be opened up for complete ventilation, or closed for the monsoon season. So by this conveyance we moved on up to the AVG training center, shooting our sidearms at the telegraph poles as we traveled along.

This place in central Burma, where we finally arrived in the middle of November 1941, was a small village named Toungoo. We found nothing in Toungoo but grass shacks and the airstrip the RAF had constructed. But our airplanes were there, and we were met by other members of the group who had preceded us to the Orient, arriving in May or June of 1941.

These older members assigned us to grass-thatched barracks with wooden floor, and windows with no glass. Breeze was more important than anything else. There were nightly attacks of millions of squadrons of mosquitoes, though. These little devils would start blitzing us at dusk. Their work was serious until sunup the next morning.

The heat was so fatiguing that, as one example, I couldn’t get enough energy to jump out of my net-covered bunk while some of the other pilots were busy in the grass barracks near my bunk killing a cobra.

A scorpion sting is not fatal, but it can be damned painful. One morning I forgot to shake out my shirt while getting dressed, and for two days after that I wore on my back a lump the size of a cantaloupe.

Little wonder some of the earlier arrivals to the group went home in disgust. Six months of waiting. No action. The monsoons had to play themselves out before the pilots could fly.

We were informed that our detachment made one hundred pilots and about two hundred ground crew who had
come over to date. But we were also informed that forty of the pilots who had preceded us had become fed up and retured home again. And we were to be informed a few days later that no more personnel of any kind would be coming, or any supplies of any nature. This came straight from Franklin Roosevelt, as this was one of his secret babies.

Toungoo was where I first set eyes upon our leader, who was to become famous, Claire Chennault, and I was genuinely impressed. In fact, seeing Chennault, and listening to him talk, was the only thing about this deal I had seen so far that did impress me.

Chennault was in his fifties, a stern-appearing military man, and looked as though he had been chiseled out of granite. This character had furrows and crow’s-feet on his granitelike face that I thought bottomless.

Everyone addressed him as Colonel, I gathered right off, and with genuine respect as far as I could see. Chennault seemed to be a person who commanded respect. Colonel wasn’t his real rank, because we had no ranks, for Claire had been shanghaied out of the Army Air Corps and told to retire as a captain. I was told that he was one of those who had backed Billy Mitchell to the hilt, and a premature retirement was the result.

Lack of hearing was the diagnosis, so I was informed, for his being retired from the Air Corps, but I noticed that the old man could hear everything he wasn’t supposed to hear. Physically I admired him tremendously, for it was something to see a man of his age so trim. When we played baseball occasionally, Chennault was always a part of it. I never saw him hit a ball out of the infield, but he never stopped running, either, although it was obvious that he was a sure out at first base.

The admiration that was shown the old man by the three female members of the AVG—this was a setup wallflowers dream about—didn’t impress me as completely military. As a matter of fact, my wife said that she had been attracted by Chennault ten years later, when she met him at a banquet at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood. No use, I told her, for he is now married to a beautiful young Chinese woman, and they have at least two children that I know of.

Two of these women were American nurses. The redheaded gal married one of the pilots, Petack, who was killed
later. And the other nurse was holding hands steady with some other pilot.

Curtiss P-40

Then there was Olga, wife of the executive officer of the AVG, Harvey Greenlaw. They said that Chennault had found Harvey and Olga, his Mexican-Russian mate, stranded in the Orient and had employed them both. I never did know exactly what her job was supposed to be.

Here at Toungoo, the first week of December 1941, our airplanes were finally ready for action. They were P-40s that had been equipped here in the field in far-off Burma with machine guns, self-sealing gasoline tanks, and armor plate added to make them war planes. Actually, these P-40s had been borrowed (lend-lease to Britain) back from our English ally. One hundred of them. Furthermore, that was all the AVG was able to borrow.

Shark faces were painted in brilliant color combinations on the natural silhouettes of the P-40 engine cowlings, an idea appropriated from a magazine picture of a P-40 in North Africa.

Having never flown before in an aircraft with a liquid-cooled engine, I knew nothing about their manipulation, least
of all this airplane doctored up with armor plate behind the pilot’s seat, with guns and ammunition, none of them taken into consideration when it was designed. The pilots who had flown them said these “Shark Fins,” the name the British hung on us, had an unorthodox manner of spinning end over end with their unengineered modifications, and that unless one had sufficient altitude to get them out of a spin it was impossible. They had several tombstones to prove their point.

One day, after I had been given a cockpit check-out by a qualified pilot, I had my first ride. The revised P-40 didn’t feel too strange, considering that I had never flown one before and had been inactive for three months. I didn’t spin it, however, for I believed their story even though I didn’t think it possible.

Everything went okay until I came in to touch down for a landing. Having been accustomed to three-point landings in my Marine Corps flying, I tried to set this P-40 down the same way, even though I had been instructed to land this plane on its main gear only. I bounced to high heaven as a result of my stubbornness, and I started to swerve off the runway. So I slammed the throttle on, making a go-around. In my nervousness I had put on so many inches of mercury so quickly that the glass covering the manifold pressure gauge cracked into a thousand pieces. After I had landed in the proper manner on the second try, I was informed in no uncertain words: “You can’t slam the throttle around like you did in those God-damned Navy air-cooled engines.”

Jim Cross took the same P-40 up after lunch and the engine blew up. When this happened, Jim was lucky to make a wheels-up landing in a nearby rice paddy. Even though Jim wasn’t hurt, I felt very bad about it, as they were forced to use this P-40 for spare parts.

This feeling left me shortly when I discovered that I wasn’t the only one, and that even my squadron commander had arranged for spare parts in three P-40s. One pilot had five American flags painted on his plane, for he had wrecked five P-40s, which made him a Japanese ace. This became the only way of getting spare parts, as there was to be none shipped from the United States. I suppose it was only human to want somebody besides oneself to supply these parts.

There were three squadrons of nearly twenty each.
Approximately sixty pilots and sixty P-40s remained intact by the end of the first week in December. These squadrons were called the First, the Second, and Third Pursuit on what little paper work the group had to contend with. But to us pilots they were the Adam and Eve, the Panda Bears, and Hell’s Angels.

Our detachment of twenty-seven was split up, nine of us being placed in each of the three squadrons. My squadron was the Adam and Eve, the First Pursuit, which is the first pursuit man knows of, incidentally.

Shortly after I had arrived in Toungoo, I began to cause consternation in some of the so-called staff of the group, although Chennault never said anything to me. In my way of thinking most of the men in this non-flying staff Chennault was stuck with were Asiatic bums of the first order. Chennault later had to call us pilots together when he realized we wouldn’t take orders from the staff, telling us his sad story. He said: “I was to have a competent military staff for this group. However, everyone of staff rank is frozen in the United States. I have to do the best I can with what little staff I’ve been able to pick up out here. And all I ask of you is—please understand—and bear with me.”

His talk touched me deeply, but I couldn’t get over the fact that his staff damned nearly outnumbered his combat pilots. Maybe, I reasoned, he had to have so many because, in more or less his words, it took about ten of them to do one ordinary man’s work. At this time I hadn’t been able to discover exactly what each did do, except to show up at mealtime.