Evening star., 1943-06-05
They Call 1t Pacific
by CLARK LEE

parently those orders went astray
or at any rate were never carried
out"
Another factor in what happened
at Clark Field was undoubtedly the
fact that, at the time the Japs hit,
we were not officially at war with
Japan. Congress did not declare
war until the following day. In the
Philippines we knew that the Japs
had attacked Pearl Harbor but, from
the record, even that did not neces-
sarily mean that we would go to
war with them. They had sunk the
U. S. S. Panay near Nanking four
years before and no war had re-
suited. 1t seemed incredible, but
there was always possibility that
they could apologize for this attack,
too
In any case, the disaster at Clark
Field was another chapter in the
tragic story that shows we were not,
as an Army, Navy or Nation, pre-
pared militarily and psychologically
for the shocks of war. Even indi-
viduals had a hard time realizing it
when they came into combat for the
first time.
On Bataan, in January, 1t. L. E.
Mcdaniel, who had lost his plane
and was attached to the anti-air-
craft at that time. told me more
about the Clark Field raid
Il was flying my P-40 from field
near Clark and was up on patrol
when the Japs came over. 1 saw a
plane on my tail, way back When
he first opened up and I saw the
blue flashes of his guns I thought
he was signaling to me- Then I
snapped out of it and got in there
and fought him. The sky over Clark
was full of Jap planes and it looked
like the entire field was on fire"
A pursuit pilot who had been at
Iba Field, which was designed as a
pursuit field to protect the bombers
flying from Clark, told what hap
pened there. They caught us fiat
footed. Our warning system failed,
but the main thing was that we
were all green and inexperienced
The Jap high-level bombers took
one pass on their way to Clark
Then the fighters dove low and
strafed our parked planes Nat
urally they were all lined up in
pretty rows. We didn't know any
better then We never had time to
get one in the air Only a few were
still f1yable after the attack
The pilots whose P-40s were still
fyable soon found out that they
couldn't fly so well, that in a COM
bat airplane there is no substitute
for soup-for power. The P-40-B,
the model they were flying, proved
to be very much underpowered for
modern war conditions. 1t was far
too heavy and unmaneuverable to
dogfght Zero, although it had a
good score against the japanese
Army's older type airplanes, the
T96 and T97. in Burma. The Zero
was light and fast and it had the
horses in it's engines to take it up
stairs fast. 1t would turn twice
while P-40 turned once The only
advantage our planes had was
greater fire power and armor pro-
lection for the pilot.
The P-40 was useless against the
high altitude Jap bombers. 1t would
only climb 1000 to 1900 feet min
ute when fully loaded, if that, and
the bombers would come over way
up, between 10000 and 10000 feet.
The P-40s never bothered them.
HI1r nilnts nllicI1y MT ~
dogflght. They found the only
chance they had was to take one
pass at enemy planes and keep on
going down fast, using their weight
and diving speed to get away. They
saw that the Japs had built plane
which could outfly anything we had
in the air, and finding that out
made them very angry.
Those who lived through the earlv
days of the war used to come into
the Manila Hotel in the evenings.
It's damn high time our airplane
manufacturers stopped wasting ad-
Vertlslng space trying to prove to our
people that We have the worlds best
airplanes,' they said, and started
producing them instead. The Japs
can't be convinced by those beauti-
full ads. We've got to have more
horsepower in our engines. We can't
fight them in those planes"
Even So our pilots fought in the
Philippines in the few planes they
had left.
Copyright, 1a43, by Clark Lee the viking
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