The Bluffton news. [volume] (Bluffton, Ohio) 1875-current, 1944-04-27
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M.N.u.f FEATURES

Gods sake, drop your bombs and
come on. Frank!' l can see Jim in
the distance, getting smaller and
smaller.
What did we do to the target?
Probably plenty. but we didn't claim
anything. Seeing through that over
cast layer was like looking down
through a net curtain with big gobs
of cotton clinging to it--now you see
the target and now you don't.
Harris, the bombardier, peering
down from the navigator's compart-
ment, couldn't see anything when
his bomb train hit the surface. But
the tub gunner, peering straight
down from the belly of the ship,
swears he saw one of them go smack
down for direct hit on Jap cruis-
er. But since only one of them saw
it, we couldn't in fairness claim it,
no matter how much I'd like to hand
the credit to Harris.
with my limping motor, could
sit back and really begin to worry.
/ tried to level off, but of course /
couldn't. I knew we were some
where over Borneo by now. The
altimeter showed we were "a 1000 feet
high, and in spite of everything /
was doing we were dropping 100
feet lower every minute. I thought
of landing on the camouflaged field
here on Borneo but we might be
too low even to bail out if we nosed
down through this dense weather
and couldn't find the field at once.
Nov dropping 100 feet minute,
if you can keep it from falling no
faster than that, at the end of the
first hour you'll be down to $4,000;
the second hour, $4,000; the third
hour, 5000. So you see how it is. If
you've got gas enough for four hours
you've got barely enough altitude to
make it back to Java, Iargued with
myself.
''But it was going to be tough on
the other boys. We'd been on oxy-
gen for four hours, and ordinarily
after a fight in the high air, which
is a strain on everyone, the first
thing you do is bring her down to
10000 so everyone can take off his
mask and relax. Only had to hang
onto my precious altitude, and it
would be another two hours before
we had f1uttered down to $4,000.
"But it seemed it was the only
thing to do, so l told my naviga-
tor, Walt Seamon, to set a course for
Msiang Field. Then it was up to
me. tried every trick in the book
and few I'd heard of to keep that
rate of fall from rising, because if
I went to 200 or 800 feet a minute
FOR few minutes knew we'd
lose the plane. The automatic pilot
was out Ga little gadget had busted,
and of course we had no spare
parts), SO my co-pilot and / had to do
all the flying, worn-out as we were,
but at least we didn't have to keep
stations on any other plane now, or
have the nightmare OF maybe crash
ing into someone else.
"Then suddenly we had breath
er, for the clouds vanished behind
us and we were floating free out
into the abyss of a cloud canyon
the same old one Peering down, ]
seemed to see the gray wisps of that
canyons bottom practically trailing
on the dull-green jungle-clad noun
tains far below l doubt if there
was even a thousand feet of ceiling,
SO we kept on our course. When we
finally cleared the weather-we were
out over the Java Sea south of
| Borneo-we were so far out that /
realized we'd passed the point of
no return. The only way we could
| 60 on now was towards Java, which
| was the nearest land.
''The field at Surabaya was little
| closer than Malang, but was afraid
] of its short runway, so with what
gas and altitude we had left, we de-
cided to try for Malang, but as we
| approached the mountain pass we
| could see the weather was settling
down tighter and tighter on us, and
looking ahead, got afraid that
when we got on up into the pass, the
cloud ceiling might push us right
down onto the pass floor, and I'd
spill all the boys out into rice
paddy in that fog. I could see the
crew was anxious, too. hadn't need