FA28P-AF

Far Pacific 1941-1942 Commentary: Letter by Col A “Bud” Fletcher

                Vern Chandler arranged for me to meet Bud Fletcher, the last day of the ’93 reunion -- I could only attend the last day. I’d expressed an interest to Vern in talking with those who had been in the Far Pacific. Our discussion with Bud soon migrated to what happened at Clark Field Dec 8, 1941. Bud had made it clear that he arrived in Java after they had fallen back from the Philippines. I told of what historians I’d read and what they said. My primary reference was “General of the Army” by Ed Cray a detailed accounting of what happened from Gen Marshall’s perspective (Marshall died without writing his own story). We shared what we knew about that first day and speculated on why the delay in authorizing a strike against Formosa. When I returned I mailed Bud what information I had, what follows is one of his letters.

                Bud helped write the “Introduction” to this history and provided much insight about what had gone on in those first few months.

                He did not tell me he was having a bout with cancer – thus it was a surprise and feeling of personal loss that I leaned of his death in June ’94. DL

Oct 12, 1993

Dear Darrell,

Nearly a month has passed since receipt of your newsy and insightful letter with your generous inclusion of enclosures. The full text of the Eubank interview was like a bonanza -- especially since I had devoted more than an hour extracting random notes from it the day before I met you. At that time, of course, I didn't know of your presence at the reunion, nor did I suspect I would be meeting you and having that very interesting bull session with you, Vern Chandler and others. It did stir up some long-dormant memories which spilled out of my mind with a few unfortunate inaccuracies on my part that, in his tactful way, Vern brought to light in his joint letter of 16 Sept to you and me. This ,of course, relates to my implication that on Pearl Harbor Day, MacArthur's hesitancy may have stemmed from his somewhat ambiguous status as a retired US Army General but an active Field Marshal in the Philippine "Constabulary", requiring a split allegiance that may have accounted for his reluctance to act offensively, absent an overt Japanese initiative against the Philippines.

            So now I must fess up and admit that "crow" has not been entirely alien to my diet on a previous occasion or two in my meandering 70 plus years. And I know that Vern's purpose was only to set the record straight. Well, I have to believe that part of my own misconception stemmed from vague memories of history-in-the-making during my high school years. It was then that the Philippines were accorded Commonwealth status (1935) with Manuel Quezon as its president. This amounted to virtual independence with limited ties to the US (including defense) for a 10-year period, whence full independence was to be awarded. I guess my mind pictured a Philippine constabulary force for defense, rather than a Philippine army during that interim period, and I labored under that impression right up to WW II. To compound the error, my attention to world events must have suffered a major hiatus when MacArthur was recalled to active duty a full four months before the Japanese attack. If it was big news at the time, I guess I flat missed it, because even as you, Vern and I discussed the PI fiasco in Albuquerque, I thought MacArthur's return to active duty was concurrent with our declaration of war with Japan.

            I remember Vern Chandler professionally as a stickler for details and accuracy, and this probably wasn't the first time in our lives that he has called my hand and prevailed. But it did cause me to want to go into the matter in a bit more historical depth than a mere encyclopedic paradigm, so I fetched a copy of William Manchester's excellent biography of MacArthur, "American Caesar", and I now feel a little better about my misconceptions. It appears that MacArthur himself was a bit unsure as to the extent of his authority and was more than once humbled by the occasional dilemma of trying to serve two masters. Some short references from the biography follow:

            Page 182 -- "Now that the General no longer represented the United States -- now that he was just another official on the U.S. payroll, -- Quezon treated him with diminished respect.

            Page 185 -- "on Sep 27 (1940) Tokyo signed the Tripartite Pact -- Quezon watched helplessly . . . nothing was done to mobilize the islands, and the annual defense appropriation (by the Commonwealth gov’t) was one-eighth of what MacArthur had been promised in 1935. He considered resigning, but the unpredictable Quezon pleaded with him to stay, and the General agreed . . .”

            Page 187 -- "Over three years had passed since his retirement. The War Dept. regarded him as an outsider . . . . Nevertheless on Feb 1, 1941 he moved to reopen his relationship with them . . . . Nothing happened . . . . Concluding that all his efforts had been futile, MacArthur wrote Marshall on May 29 (1941) that he had reserved a stateroom on the next ship home . . . . He was going to shut down the Manila Operation and move to San Antonio."

            Page 189 -- "Mark S. Watson, the military historian, has been unable to trace the exact sequence of events that led to MacArthur's return to the U.S. Army, but we know generally what happened." . . . . Roosevelt made his move on July 26 (barely 4 months before Dec 7) . . . American and Filipino troops merged into a single army, and MacArthur its commander re-appointed as major general . . . later to be jumped to full 4-star rank.

“ . . . . On July 26, no reinforcement of the Philippine garrison had been contemplated."

            Page 208 -- "To Louis Morton he (MacArthur) later insisted: 'My orders were explicit not to initiate hostilities against the Japanese.' . . . . John Bulkely, however, believes that Quezon 'was not convinced that the Japanese were making war. He was the one who insisted on the three-mile limit until the Japs actually dropped their bombs. it was Quezon who put the clamp on things.’ “

            So, to you Darrell and to Vern, my apologies for not knowing what was going on in those 4 months before Pearl Harbor Day, but I was busy flying training missions in B-17s out of Salt Lake City, Utah with the 7th Bomb Group with orders in hand to proceed at an undetermined date to a secret destination -- code name PLUM. It was a well-kept secret. There was a war going on in Europe, so PLUM could have been anywhere. Events that then followed prove that I was not alone in my ignorance. Nobody in Washington or anywhere else knew what the heck was happening either. It was a Keystone Cop tragedy that finally put us on the island of Java in Jan 1942 where we joined the remnants of the 19th Bomb Group which had retreated from the Philippines in December.

            We of the 7th Bomb Group and two recon squadrons (88th and 38th) were primed and ready to launch from Hamilton Field, CA on the night of Dec 6, 1941 in our B-17s to head westward to PLUM, wherever that was. All we knew was that the first leg of the flight was to Hickam. The recon sqdns were to launch first at 5-minute intervals, which they did; but at all altitudes they were experiencing head-winds much stronger than predicted. By the way, there was not a round of ammo aboard any plane, and all guns were immobilized with cosmoline preservative. Upon being apprised of the heavy head-winds; somebody in Operations made the only sensible decision during the 6-month period with Dec 6 as its center: they opted to postpone the balance of the launch for 24 hours.

            Needless to say, those that did launch arrived in extremis mostly during the Jap raids but a few luckily between the two Jap strikes. The fates of each of the arriving planes and crews were both harrowing and ludicrous; and although just about all the planes were destroyed one way or another; providentially, most of the crews survived.

            For those of us who did not launch, an account of the chaos attending the next 30 days would beggar the skills of the world's most imaginative chronicler. A phantom Jap flotilla -- was "sighted" approaching San Pedro, and six of our crews (including me) were sent out at dusk to bomb it -- in weather with no measurable ceiling and in complete radio silence, without a single radio aid in operation west of Albuquerque and El Paso. Meantime, our launch point went below minimums while observing the radio blackout. What should we do? Tops were 13,000 feet and darkness descending. Read the next hair-raising episode.  Not enough time or space here.

            Once out of that mess, we of the 11th Sqd turned our B-17s reluctantly over to ferry squadrons for delivery to the Canal Zone, and we boarded a troop train to Tucson where we picked up brand new LB-30s -- a maverick breed of B-24s built for the Brits with no turbo superchargers and a pitiful set of guns (with the exception of the top turret). After a bare-bones checkout, we headed westward with consternation to that still -- undefined destination, PLUM. Our route was via Hickam; Palmyra Is; Canton Is (later made famous by Eddie Rickenbacker’ ditching); Fiji; Townsville, Australia; thence to Darwin, where we learned that PLUM was the Del Monte air patch on Mindanao but no longer tenable; so we were going to a place called Singosari airdrome (or Malang) on the Dutch colonial island of Java, where we (the 11th Sqd) joined our sister squadron (9th) with their B-17s and the pitiful remnants of the 19th Bomb Gp. My buddy and classmate Harl Pease was one of those. Perhaps you read my letter to Bob Ley about him.  They reprinted it in the last 19th Bomb Gp newsletter.

            In less than 2 months on Java, it was all over. We lost all but three of our 13 LB-30s and God knows how many of the B-17s by the other sqds in the 7th and 19th Groups. We evacuated Java in early March, licking our wounds and mourning our dead (including our group comdr and sqd comdr).

            So I know what happened in the air against overwhelming numbers of Jap fighters, and it wasn't pretty. And if I said to you and Vern that notwithstanding all the indecisive screw-ups, it was probably a divine providence that allowed the 19th BG to lose all those B-17s on the ground at Clark Field, I'll stand on that; because I'm convinced that all 19th Group aircraft would have been lost on any attempted raid on Formosa, and the crews too to the last man -- no prisoners. We never recovered a single bail-out from the waters between Java and the PI. The Japs killed them all on the way down. And for that matter, with very few exceptions, the same was true for the next couple of years in the the Coral Sea, the Bismarck Sea, etc. off New Guinea.  So I say "forget any recriminations about who was at fault and why for not launching the 19th Bomb Groups B-17s against Formosa." Manchester's book confirms my belief that the Japs would have been sitting on ready, licking their chops; and the damage we might have inflicted under those circumstances would have been minimal if not negligible. As it was, we lost only half our B-17s (the ones at Clark), and nearly all our crews lived to fight on.

            And yes, I guess you could say that MacArthur had the authority, but he wasn't all that certain that he did, and I'll bet the s--- would have hit the fan with an entirely different interpretation of that authority by the command authority in Washington if all those B-17s had been launched against Formosa prior to the Jap strike and none had returned. On the other hand, nobody can explain away why the balance of the 19th B.G. B-17s were not at least removed to Del Monte.

            After the Java evacuation, the decimated 7th and 19th BG remnants were now scattered about Australia and on 13 March were merged under the banner of the 19th BG. We performed desultory recon and occasional bomb strike chores for the next 3 months while rebuilding our capability with replacement B-17s and crews from the US.

            My crew was sent to Melbourne in May 1942 to pick up one of the LB-30s which had been put in an Aussie depot there to have ASV radar installed and the engines reworked. We were to g0 and conduct sea surveillance off the north and northwest coasts of Australia. Unfortunately, the engines caught fire shortly after takeoff, and we never got high enough to bail out, so I bellied her in all ablaze in an open area with no houses or trees. By the time we ground to a stop, both wings had slumped to the ground due to the heat, and raw gas was spilling out and feeding the fire. We all got burned trying to evacuate, and the bombardier did not survive. Three others had extensive hospitalization (up to 3 years). Five of us were released from the hospital in late July and returned to combat status just about the time the group settled into our new base at Mareeba in Queensland, Australia. From there, most of our missions staged through Port Moresby, New Guinea, (for refueling) which was subject to daily bombing by the Japs.

            Comes November 1942, and Uncle Sam said the 19th BG had had enough and was rotated back to the States. I volunteered to stay over with our successor group, the 43rd, and by Jan 1943 Port Moresby had been declared defensible, so we moved up there. From then on, it was a different ball game, and we never looked back. We developed the skip-bombing technique and used it with all our bombers (including the B-17s) when conditions were right. It was dog-eat-dog for many months -- mostly against the Jap bastion at Rabaul (New Britain), where they had a first-class harbor, 4 airfields, and supply assets that served the entire area of activity, including Guadalcanal and the rest of the Solomons.

            Then in March 1943 we annihilated a 22-ship invasion convoy (bound for New Guinea, which was now a major thorn in their side). I flew two missions that day and lost my ex-copilot and best friend, Jim Easter. The entire action was like from a Cecil B. DeMille movie -- skip bombing, level bombing, fighters making passes at us from every direction, dog fights everywhere between our P-38s and P-40s and the Jap fighters; burning/sinking ships, destroyers darting about like water bugs, and the water black with Jap swimmers.

            There's more to the story, and it is much more interesting from that point on. I'm one of the few if not the only one that I know of who participated almost from the beginning through the bad times and lived to stuff it down their arrogant guts. I still don't like Japanese Japs, and all I need to reinforce all this is to talk to some of our 19th BG Assn guys who were POWs, as I did in Albuquerque. They have bitter, bitter memories.

            Well Darrell, I've bent your ear too long, but with great respect for all you have done and are doing for the 19th BG and the Assn, I thought the least I could do after your kind and informative letter, would be to share with you some of the continuity of events, to which I was exposed, and to the best of my knowledge, from which I am the sole surviving witness whose service spanned most of that anguished era on a continuous combat status (excepting hospitalization). That was the era of the B-17 in the Pacific, because in late 1943 when the Japs were finally reeling backwards, we needed longer legs; and the B-24s were becoming plentiful from a number of mass production plants in the States. So the B-17s were retired from combat in the Pacific, and most of their crews were returned to the States. Very quickly, they were replaced in the 43rd  BG by B-24 aircraft and crews. By the time the B-24s took over, I too had been returned to the States, so I didn't participate in that transition; but they did a great job -- flying long missions and relocating several times at Nadzab and Owi and ever northward toward the Japanese heartland in the wake of the Jap retreat.

            I am of course a member of the 43rd BG Assn, and it is considerably larger than the 19th. Just this month, we had a reunion in Omaha with over 300 people attending. Through this avenue I have become acquainted with many of the B-24 crews who succeeded us, and had no picnic either, but they moved swiftly all the way up to Okinawa and covered thousands of miles of ocean areas that included all the areas where the Japs had previously kicked butt when we were there in such pitifully small numbers -- Timor, Bali, Java, Halmaheras, Borneo, Celebes, Sumatra, Singapore, Philippines and more. They have some great tales to tell too, and I love a success story. The 43rd is a great bunch, in the main a little younger than the 19th BGs B-17 vets. We always have a golf tournament at our reunions, and two years ago, I scored a hole-in-one. But they have a great deal of respect for the 19th, because they have an overlap continuity with the 19th -- a number of them having served in the 19th during the first few months of their overseas service. They (the early ones) were with us at Mareeba on a "training" status between about June and November 1942. And a good bit of that “training" was on live missions as members of 19th B.G. crews.  . . . .

Warmest Regards

Bud