China Blitzer
Combat over the Hump
There have been countless tales of U.S. Army Air Forces World War II fighter pilots weaving over boxes of bombers pulling contrails high over Europe and then slugging it out with the Luftwaffe, taking the fight from the lower reaches of the stratosphere down to the deck. The majority of war correspondents were stationed in Europe during WW II, so it was only natural that many of these documented exploits came from the European theater. But this story takes place in a far-off corner of the world, over inhospitable terrain filled with malaria, high humidity, and subzero temperatures—not a place many war correspondents dream of traveling to. Nevertheless, the fighter pilots that protected the Hump routes always seemed to be outnumbered, outgunned, and short on supplies. Follow along as one young fighter pilot from Texas cuts his combat teeth in the skies over China.
Go Get Those SOBs!
When the war broke out in December 1941, I was a 19-year-old kid from north Texas, and like most guys my age, I wanted to enter the fight. My father had other ideas, though. He had made it as far as earning his wings at Kelly Field in Texas, flying Jennys before WW I ended. I’m sure he knew guys who never made it back and had read many accounts of the horrors of war, and understood a lot more than I did what I would face. Finally, in early 1942, with constant nagging on my part, he said, “Go get those sons of bitches!” I followed in his footsteps and entered flight training, flying PT-19s, BT-13s, and the AT-6 Texan. It was while I was flying the BT-13 that one of my instructors casually pulled me aside and said, “I think I’m going to recommend you for fighters.” And in my poor old Texas farm-boy accent I said, “What’s that?” As flying cadets, we didn’t have time to think about the future. We ran around knowing there was a 45 to 50 percent washout rate. You didn’t blink, unless you were ordered to. If you screwed up, you were out, ’cause we had a whole bunch of guys coming along behind us. But after I understood what flying fighters was all about, I remained focused on earning my wings. That finally happened in 1943, and as a newly commissioned 2nd lieutenant, I got my chance to prove myself at the controls of a P-47 Thunderbolt. I was sent to Richmond Army Air Force base in Virginia along with a cadre of others to be trained in the art of high-altitude bomber escorts. The Thunderbolt was huge, and once in the cockpit, it was like sitting under a big tent. It was the biggest cockpit I had ever seen in my life; you could have had a dog race inside of that airplane. The only bad thing about the P-47 was that when you got it above 37,000 feet and pushed the nose below 30 degrees, you entered compressibility. The elevator just froze up and the only way out of it was to roll the trim forward and shove the throttle to full power as you tried to pull that stick back with your trembling hand. At about 18,000 feet, the plane would slowly come out of it. It was an interesting ride down, to say the least. After flying and surviving our new learned tactics, we would gather and talk about what we were going to do to the Luftwaffe with our Thunderbolts when we got to England. Unfortunately, we never made it to jolly old England. Right before we finished our training, 18 of us were pulled out and told to report to Miami, Florida, for further instructions. We figured that we were going to be put on submarine patrol or some damn thing and finish up our training over the Caribbean. Leaving Miami, we were given secret orders and told not to open them until we were over Cuba. We all scratched our heads when they said we were to report to the commanding general in New Delhi, India. [Some of us thought,] “Where in the hell is India? And where’s New Delhi?” And I said, “I know where India is. I always painted it pink on a map when I was in grade-school geography [class].” I got many of the guys to chuckle, and it was the last time many of us laughed for a long time.
Young Tiger
Our final destination turned out to be Lahandi Field in Karachi, India. They had some fighters there; P-40Bs that had come from the AVG [American Volunteer Group, or the “Flying Tigers”]. They didn’t look so good—all bruised and battered. To be honest, I hadn’t ever seen an airplane look quite that
ONE OF MY INSTRUCTORS CASUALLY PULLED ME ASIDE AND SAID, “I THINK I’M GOING TO RECOMMEND YOU FOR FIGHTERS.” AND IN MY POOR OLD TEXAS FARM-BOY ACCENT I SAID, “WHAT’S THAT?”
THEY DIDN’T LOOK SO GOOD—ALL BRUISED AND BATTERED. TO BE HONEST, I HADN’T EVER SEEN AN AIRPLANE LOOK QUITE THAT BAD BEFORE. THE DISTINCTIVE SHARK MOUTHS WERE STILL ON THEM, BURIED UNDER MUD, EXHAUST STAINS, AND OIL.
bad before. The distinctive shark mouths were still on them, buried under mud, exhaust stains, and oil. Our instructors were a group of battle-hardened pilots who had seen a lot of action with Claire Chennault’s AVG and Chinese Air Task Force after the deactivation of the Flying Tigers in July 1942. It was the first time I had fired a gun since advanced flying school in AT-6s and the first bombs I had ever dropped. These were desperate times, and there wasn’t a lot of time to prepare, with the Japanese pushing their way through China and the rest of the Pacific region. The early P-40s were heavy and sluggish, and grew tired quickly. The top operating ceiling was between 21 and 23,000 feet, depending how much you could nurse it up there. It turned like a Mack truck, but it could take a lot of damage, and that was the main reason we had great trust with it. With my rapid checkout complete, I was pushed out of the nest and joined the 51st Fighter Group, 26th Fighter Squadron—the “China Blitzers”—of the 14th Air Force, led by Gen. Chennault. We were operating out of the upper Assam Valley, and our strip was cut right out of the rice fields with PSP [perforated steel planking] laid over it. When the rice grew up with the constant rain we had, you couldn’t find the damn airstrip. You had to know exactly where you were going, but it was perfect camouflage. Turn by the big dead tree off of this end, and that's how you lined up to land, because all the rice fields looked the
same. Another treat was malaria; it affected the squadron 100 percent, along with dengue fever. As a west Texas boy, you couldn’t give me anything to deal with it, so you lived with it. Our main mission was to defend the eastern edge of the Hump route, along with protecting air bases in the Kunming area. Our early missions were bomber escorts. They put us up at 21 to 22,000 feet because the Air Force had lost many B-24s trying to fly over French Indochina, and they thought they could fly without escort; they found out that they couldn’t. Many of the early missions were over Hanoi and the Haiphong area. Gen. Chennault put us down there, and the tactics were to fly in a string formation, at 500 feet above the bombers, just weaving back and forth. Sometimes we were lucky to put up eight P-40s if we could get them all running. But most times, we ended up with only four of us going, as others turned back with mechanical issues. The Zeros sat up above us at between 30 and 35,000 feet. The “fun began” when they would push over and make gunnery passes. But if we held our ranks and stayed in our string formation, we could meet any Zero coming in. When you had to turn, you’d turn and that’s when the guy behind you picked him up. Our tactic was to try and be above them when they dove on the bombers. Then we would dive on ’em, shoot, and get the hell out of there, because you can’t turn with a Zero and you sure as hell can’t climb with it. The only thing you can do is dive. It doesn’t take a mental genius to figure out what tactics you have, especially when you’re always outnumbered by them. And the only guy that’s going to hit you is the guy that you don’t see. If you can locate him, he can’t track
you. When he starts pulling, and it looks like, uh-oh, he’s just about got enough lead now to start shooting, you throw that stick to the side and break. You know where you’re going, so you take some time, set up again, and set up another sight picture. One thing we did have over the Zero was the fact we had pressurized carburetors. We could fly inverted all day long, and the engine would never quit out. If the Zero stayed inverted too long, its engine was going to quit and it was going down. Eventually, I was assigned to my own P-40N, and I christened it Anvil Chorus. The “Anvil Chorus” was a popular Glenn Miller song from the early 1940s. Back in Texas, I did a lot of beating on an anvil, and those .50-caliber machine guns in the P-40s sounded like somebody was beating on it. Everybody else named their airplanes Anne or Betty or something like that. The problem was the only girlfriend I had had Dear John’d me already, so I didn’t want to put her name on anything. Our P-40s also carried the infamous shark mouth as a tribute to our lineage to the AVG.
Shiny New Fighter on the Block
A lot of our mission also involved ground support, which consisted of strafing, bombing, and rockets. I became the rocket projects officer for our group when we began switching over to P-51 Mustangs in early 1944. I was told by our group commander to report to Gen. Chennault’s office, and when I arrived, he said, “Get yourself a sheet-metal mechanic, and go to Burma. Don’t know what in the hell’s going on, but Cochran’s First Air Commando Unit is using them on their P-51s.” So we went down there, and I saw what they were doing, got all the information, and got myself a North American Aviation tech rep; we procured the mounting plates in India, flew ’em back up to China, and then installed the rockets on the P-40s and P-51s. We managed to get them set up, with the P-40s first, and they would hang out of the bomb rack. The weapon of choice was the M10 triple-tube rocket launchers, firing
THE MUSTANG COULD PERFORM WITH AND MANY TIMES OUTPERFORM THE ZEROES. NOW WE COULD STAND AND FIGHT, AT LEAST IN THE AIR.
4.5-inch fin-stabilized M8-type rockets. We tried to put them on the Mustangs’ bomb racks but realized we couldn’t carry drop tanks if we did—no way was that going to work because we needed the gas. We finally got it worked out and began using them. They were impressive as hell, zooming out under our wings, but it was like throwing rocks—not very accurate. When the first P-51s began to arrive in February of ’44, we had no pilot check out the manuals. Nobody in the squadron had ever had any time in one. By comparison, a P-40 is all muscle—lots of muscle. A P-51 you can fly with the tips of your toes and fingertips. And of course, the first mission we flew in one was on a combat mission. The one thing we found out right away in the B model is that they installed a fuselage tank right behind the pilot in the fuselage. With 80 gallons of fuel sloshing around back there, we found out you can’t turn because you get a stick reversal. Instead of pulling on the stick, you’re pushing on it. It’d snap on you. We learned to use that fuel first and burn it out as soon as we could, and then we were in business. Flying the Mustang in combat became a whole new game. Everything we knew before was just different. The Mustang could perform with and many times outperform the Zeroes. Although it was not as tight a turning airplane as the Zero, we found out we didn’t need that. You could zoom off, get away, come back, and still fight, you didn’t have to give up altitude. Once you give up altitude, you’re going home—hopefully. Now we could stand and fight, at least in the air.
War Stories and Combat Memories
By mid-1944, China was falling fast and the Japanese were pouring men into the area, wanting to push us out. They called it “Operation Ichigo.” They came down from the north, through Changsha, Lingling, Kweilin, and Liuchow. We operated from a forward base out of Nanning, a stone’s throw from French Indochina. As they were making their way down the railroad, with 40 to 50,000 troops marching, hell, it was an easy target. We carried frag bombs and rockets. It wasn’t a long haul to get to them, but the P-51 is the most vulnerable airplane to ground fire that I think was ever designed, anywhere. It’s beautiful and a heck of a fighter, but all the coolant lines and all the oil lines come back behind the cockpit. A hit from a 7.7mm (about .30-caliber) round anywhere in there and it’ll run exactly 90 seconds. So we learned real quick that the only pass you make is from about 8 to 9,000 feet, abreast in a fingertip. None of this classic peel off; we wanted as much surprise as we could get over the target and then come out the other side of the column. And the Japanese tactic for that was pure discipline: Nobody would dive to the ground; they all stood there and shot straight up in the air with their rifles. It was very effective. It was like flying through rain. The only good news was the aerial opposition at that time, which was almost nonexistent. The only time we ran into anything was around the CantonHong Kong area. It was still pretty heavy there, with Zeroes as the main opposition. Late in the war, I had just returned to Kunming after flying two strike missions down in Indochina. When I landed, I was told to report over to Yunannyi with a P-51. I said, “What in the hell am I gonna do over there?” I was told I was going to rendezvous and fly on a mission with some P-40s. I understood they had some trouble over on the Salween front, and they were trying to open up Ledo Road. The Japanese were bombing some of the Chinese forces that were trying to hold the line. It had been damn good intelligence because as we arrived overhead, there were two “Betty” bombers in the valley. I was doing S turns to keep up with the three-bomb laden P-40s, and as I looked up higher, to the left, I spotted 18 Zeroes. The P-40s gave up the only thing they had—little altitude—and they were down in the valley. And I said, “Well, hell, I can get one of those damned bombers and still get back, 'cause I
have an airplane that can fly and fight.” I went down, lined up on one of the Bettys, and squeezed the trigger. I watched as my rounds hit home, as smoke and flame shot out from the left engine. I danced on the rudder, and my next rounds hit him right in the cockpit; the Betty blew right there. Turning around, I laid the hammers of that P-51 right back up through those 18 Zeroes. I found myself on top of them as they were going down. They had trapped the three P-40s in the valley, with big mountains on either side. Up on the north end, there was a cloud deck, where the mountains come together—about a 500- to 600-foot deck. As soon as I passed the Zeroes, I turned and was quickly riding right back around on their tails. We were all coming down like the “hammers of hell” as the P-40s broke and scattered. They hightailed it straight home to Yunannyi. Now it was just me, right on the Zeroes, and hell, they didn’t like the P-51, so they broke and went up under that little cloud deck. And I said, “Well, sooner or later, one of them has got to come out.” I got up about 5,000 feet above ’em, and sure enough, one of ’em came out. I made a pass at him and went after him, but he turned and went back under the cloud before I could get him. So I was smarter: I backed off a little further and let the next one come out a little bit further ahead. He paid for that mistake, as I nailed him. I waited and waited, and I heard someone over the radio say, “What’s going on down there?” And along comes a P-38 Lightning. He wouldn’t come down in the valley with me, but he was an extra set of eyes as he remained my top cover. And I waited until it almost sundown, but I refused to drop my drop tanks. I didn’t need to because I had all my gas. And I said, “Well, I can stay there until maybe I can run ’em out of gas.” They had come out of an airfield at Liuchow, so they would have been getting low on gas soon. I stooged around a while, hoping to get the whole lot of them. My better sense took over, so I went back and landed at Yunannyi. About three days later, I saw some workers come into our base, carrying a three-bladed prop on a pole. It turned out to be the prop off the bomber that I had shot down. Some of the squadron crew chiefs sought out a piece of it and made me a cigarette lighter out of it. I still have it today.
Lt. Col. Ashmore flew a total of 78 combat missions with the 51st FG. Of 18 men that joined the 26th FS, only six returned home.