The American Fighter Aces Association Oral Interviews The Museum of Flight Seattle, Washington

John S. Stewart (Part 2 of 2)

Interview Date: August 1989

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Abstract: In this two-part oral history, fighter ace John S. Stewart discusses his military service with the United States Army Air Forces during World War II. In part two, he continues to describe his wartime experiences as a fighter pilot with the 76th Fighter Squadron in the China-India-Burma Theater. Topics discussed include his training and service history, notable combat missions, and stories about fellow servicemen. Special focus on a combat mission over Lingling on July 23rd, 1943 in which Stewart scored several aerial victories while suffering from hypoxia.

Biography:

John S. Stewart was born on September 13, 1919 in Basin, Wyoming. He joined the United States Army Air Corps in 1941 and graduated from flight training the following year. After serving briefly in the Panama Canal Zone, Stewart joined the China Air Task Force, the successor of the American Volunteer Group. He served with and eventually commanded the 76th Fighter Squadron, flying missions over China, Formosa, and other areas of the China-India- Burma Theater. Stewart remained in the military after the end of World War II and went on to serve as command director of the North American Air Defense Command Combat Center. He retired as a colonel in 1970.

Biographical information courtesy of: Boyce, Ward J., ed., American fighter aces album. Mesa, Ariz: American Fighter Aces Association, 1996.

Restrictions:

Permission to publish material from the American Fighter Aces Association Oral Interviews must be obtained from The Museum of Flight Archives.

Transcript:

Transcribed by Pioneer Transcription Services 3

Index:

Introduction and flight training ...... 4

Deployment to Karachi and assignment to the China Air Task Force ...... 5

Arrival in China ...... 6

Suffering from hypoxia during a Japanese bomber attack (July 23, 1943) ...... 7

Other service details ...... 10

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John S. Stewart (Part 2 of 2)

[START OF INTERVIEW]

00:00:00

[Introduction and flight training]

JOHN S. STEWART: To Eric Hammel from John Stewart. Initial orientation, Eric, for your information. I will start just prior to entering service with my background as a junior majoring in Animal Husbandry at Colorado A&M at Fort Collins, Colorado. I entered the Civilian Pilot Training Program in January of 1941. By April, I had completed that training and received a private pilot’s license. I immediately went to Lowry Air Force Base and applied for Aviation Cadets. I was accepted, and they notified me of such and that they would advise me of when to report. I then went home for the summer and finally, in mid-August, received a letter to report to Fort Francis E. Warren in Cheyenne, Wyoming, which I did, and signed in on the 15th of August 1941.

Apparently, they had started some sort of a war bond drive anticipating World War I—or World War II coming along because there were 11 of us, which is a goodly portion of the population of the State of Wyoming at that time, in—we entered class 42C, Aviation Cadets. We went by train to San Francisco, then by bus down the coast to King City, California, where we entered primary training. Completing that along in October, we—back up the coast a short ways to Moffett Field at the foot of San Francisco Bay, an ex-Navy base, where we entered basic flying training, flying the BT-13, the old BT Vulvibe—the Vultee Vibrator, it was nicknamed.

We completed that in that delightful cool climate the latter part of December of ‘41, and a goodly share of us reported to advanced flying training at Luke Field, Arizona, at Phoenix, reporting to Colonel Ennis C. Whitehead, then the commander, and the adjutant, Captain Barry Goldwater, later senator and presidential nominee for the Republican Party. In fact, Barry pinned the wings on most of us. They graduated us in two different groups, according to Jerry Collinsworth, another ace out of that flight who lives in Phoenix, but his story is the more advanced— graduated a week ahead of us dummies. But at any rate, Barry Goldwater pinned my second lieutenant’s bars and wings on on the 16th of March of 1942.

I immediately was transferred to Tallahassee, Florida, where I checked out in six different fighters. If I can remember all of them: YP-39, the YP-40, the YP-43—which is the baby sister of the 47 and the first supercharged engine I’d ever flown and I nearly killed myself—the P-36, the P-35, and I forget the other one. A total of seven hours of flying time and checked out in six different aircraft. It was very difficult to get checked out at that time.

00:04:41 5

[Deployment to Karachi and assignment to the China Air Task Force]

I had no more than completed checking out in all the airplanes than I got transferred to Charlotte, North Carolina, where I married my wife, Marilyn Ethel Miller of Worland, Wyoming, my hometown, on the 17th of May 1942. And after a long honeymoon of two days, I boarded the transport to go to Panama on one of those secret missions to an unknown destination that was common in those days, war having just started. I was in Panama until mid-August, when another set of orders came in transferring us to a top-secret, codenamed destination that nobody knew what it was. But being smart second lieutenants, it had a foreign name and we guessed that it was India, which turned out to be correct. After three weeks at Miami Beach getting shots and being issued two sets of khakis, two shirts, two pants, a baseball cap, and a set of headphones—that was our total flying gear—oh, I guess we got an A-2 jacket, excuse me—we loaded in the C-54 and headed south.

We eventually got to Natal, Brazil, where we transferred to the old Pan Am flying boat to cross the South Atlantic, landing at Fish Lake, Africa. From there, we transferred to a C-47, and of all the small world, the pilot of that C-47—or “gooney bird,” as we called it—was a classmate of mine in high school at Worland, Wyoming: Roger [Bower?]. After four or five days across Africa, over to Khartoum, up to Cairo, we landed at Cairo. And at that time, you could see the German armies from 5,000 feet coming in from the northeast, having come down from Russia. And you could see them to the west, having come in from the foot of Italy or the African coast, Tripoli and Libya. They just about had cut the Mediterranean in two. They were about to take Cairo. They were defeated. They never did, but they were within 40 or 50 miles of each other.

We spent a day or two at Cairo, then back into the gooney bird, down to Aden, then across Saudi Arabia, and ended up at Karachi. At Karachi, we spent a couple, three days in tents. And then, at a formation one morning, they brought in a truckload of GIs, took each lieutenant—most of us were second lieutenants. There were a few first lieutenants. Some 40 of us had come out of China to replace the AVGs, who had been deactivated on 4th of July. And each squadron—or each of the four fighter squadrons and the one B-25 squadron in China at that time, called the China Air Task Force, had about six or eight pilots. They were trying to fill it up, and we were it. Well, they assigned one officer and—or one enlisted man to each officer and said, “All right. Now, there’s the crates. Those are P-40Ks crated, and the engines are in those crates over yonder. As soon as you get those airplanes assembled, the engines in them and the engine’s running, you make a test flight, why, there’ll be somebody in from China to lead you to Kunming.” So we finally knew where we were going. We were joining the China Air Task Force.

00:08:57 6

[Arrival in China]

Well, some three weeks later, with all that great training we all had in maintenance—and these guys—the enlisted men had joined the service December the 8th and had been trained all evening the—December the 7th, I guess. They had a crescent wrench, a screwdriver, a pair of pliers, and that’s about it in the way of tools. Anyhow, we finally got our bird put together and test-hopped them and they flew. So Squeaky Turner came in to lead Jim Williams [James M. “Willie” Williams], myself, and—I forget the third guy—into China. After a four- or five-day trip across India, we ended up in Dinjan. And getting ready to take off, we had, of course, bought everything we could find in Karachi: beer, sulfanilamide pill, whiskey, whatever you could find—food, you know, canned food or anything. We’d taken all the ammunition out except for one belt leading to each gun out of the ammo trays, but we’d emptied the ammo boxes and put a wool sack in the tail from the tail wheel up forward to the baggage compartment. Held about 700 pounds. And those old P-40s flew like porpoises because we had the CG way aft with all that loot.

We had no more than taken off—and just ahead of us, a flight of four had taken off. It was Tex Sanders [Homer L. “Tex” Sanders], who was the commander of the 26th Squadron, then stationed at Dinjan. They got off and were at about 5,000 feet when the Japs hit them and shot them down. Well, at least Squeaky had enough sense not to get us involved in the fight. First of all, our birds were overloaded and not capable to fight. Second, we only had about 50 rounds of gun, so we kept climbing and finally got to the minimum en route altitude of 20,000 and headed west—excuse me, east, for Kunming. Went across Yunnani, then landed at Kunming on the 25th of October 1942. I taxied up, parked my bird in front of the alert shack at the 76th, where they directed me to, and found out I was being assigned to the 76th Fighter Squadron, then commanded by Major Ed Rector, an ex-AVG and a fighter ace.

And after unloading the bird and finding transport and getting it all up and being assigned a room at the hostel, about a mile north of the field, I reported in the next morning for alert, which started at daylight, about 4:30 or 5:00 in the morning. It didn’t bother this ex-farmer, but some of the city boys thought that was pretty damn early to be getting up, particularly when breakfast consisted of an egg and hot-a-cakes. And they had no baking powder in China, so those hotcakes were just a little bit heavy. But walking in the alert shack, you looked up at the kill record. Here it is for the 23rd Group: Tex Hill [David L. “Tex” Hill], of course, leading with then 13, I think—12 or 13—Bruce Holloway with 8 or 10 at that time, Johnny Alison was 5 or 6 or 7, Ed Rector with 8, yak, yak, yak. And down at the bottom was a guy named Stuart, S-T-U-A-R-T, Harold K. He was Big Stu, being six feet, and I was only five-nine, so I’m Little Stew. And of course, my name wasn’t on it. I’d fired the guns twice in an airplane at a rag at—down at Gila Bend while in advanced flying school. And I was one of the few in my class who had ever fired a gun. Well, that’s the background. 7

00:13:33

[Suffering from hypoxia during a Japanese bomber attack (July 23, 1943)]

Now, for the most memorable day in my two years in combat. I don’t know if you count Panama, which was also classified as a combat zone. At least when we came out of Panama, all the Navy types—commanders and captains and lieutenants—were saluting us second balloons because we had an overseas ribbon. We didn’t know it, but—and we hadn’t been in the service long enough to really find out military courtesy. And we were quite taken aback when we got saluted. At any rate, I looked at that and thought, “Holy kimono! What am I getting into? Look at all those pros.”

Well, I soon found out because they were the pros and the only winning record for the first two years of the war. I’m talking ‘42 and ‘43, before we ever won anything. But the AVGs and the China Air Task Force were racking up a kill record that, in six months, amounted to 294 Japs, so we were rather proud to have been selected to have joined such an organization. And thanks to Claire L. Chennault, we all lived through it. He knew the enemy. He knew the tactics to use, and he damn well taught us how to fight an airplane—the Zero—that was far, far superior to any other fighter built in World War II, for many years prior to World War II, and for many years after.

Well, the memorable day starts on, as I said, on December—or, excuse me—on 23rd July 1943. The squadron had moved from Kunming to Lingling, which is halfway between Kweilin on the south on the Li River and Hengyang on the north, just before you ran into Japanese-occupied territory, the Dongting Lake area and Changsha, where Mao Zedong was born. And Willie and I, by this time, were first balloons, finally, after a year in combat, and were made flight commanders. So we were each given a flight directed to detach duty at Hengyang while the squadron stayed at Lingling. So we took off for Hengyang, had been there two or three days when—and living in an upstairs room at the hostel, which had been an ex-school. And one morning, the houseboy comes in, punches Willie, “[Meiguo?]. Jingbow. Alert.” So Willie gets up and wanders out. I didn’t even—I’m told this. I didn’t even wake up. But a few minutes later, here comes this houseboy. “[Meiguo?]. Jingbow.” He wakes me up. And I look out and there’s a two-ball alert going, meaning there’s Japs within 50 miles.

So I gathered my flight, and we jumped in the ‘41 Ford station wagon that was our only transport. It carried a charcoal burner on the backburner, which burned charcoal. The methane is what ran the car, from the burning of the charcoal. We didn’t have car gasoline. We drove to the field, and as we approached the field, we could hear Willie’s flight winding up and they took off as we drove up on the mesa to the runway. We jumped in our birds as quickly as possible, scrambled, took off. I called Willie. He was, by this time, at about 7,000, climbing as fast as a P- 8

40 would climb. And this was just at daylight, probably 5:30 or 6:00 in the morning when he took off and 6:30 by the time I got off.

00:17:56

We climbed and climbed and climbed, and finally I spotted him at—by this time, I was at 25,000. Willie’s still ahead—above me. He’s up about 28,000. I climbed up to him and joined the flight. We circled the field, kept calling for plots of the Japs. Where were they? Because we got this from a ground radio, and all they had to go on was telephone plots that came in and/or engine noise that was heard. Well, after several circles—we had complete radio transmission— all of a sudden, I hear Willie on the radio. He says, “Stew, go down. You’re not flying right.” Well, I had been seeing a few spots, and I was woozy and just about out of my head, I guess. Anyway, I wasn’t flying good formation. Willie spotted it, and he said, “Go down.” So I peeled out, called my flight and said, “Stay with Willie. You’re minus a flight leader, but Vern, you take over. You’re element lead.” Vern Kramer, who was later my ops officer.

And I started gliding down. Well, at about 25, we got another plot, and I made another circle. And gosh, those spots began to join up. They got in formation. Well, I looked up ahead of me about a mile and a half, and here’s 50 bombers, Betty bombers, wing to wing, scattered out over about a half a mile, I suppose, from wingtip of the 50 to the first one. And I pulled up at the tail end of these and chopped the throttle a little, and I caught up with them, opened fire, and one of them flamed immediately. So I moved over to the second one and gave him a burst and an engine stopped, and you could see people evacuating, bailing out. Then I went over to the third one, and I fired on him, and I got an engine. But about this time, my prop stopped—just bang. I was dead in the air. Well, I’d been sitting back there like a dummy and was—I was out of my head. No oxygen. One and only time in two years of combat I had a malfunction of an aircraft because we had the best maintenance the world has ever seen.

Anyhow, here I was with no oxygen. I had passed out, practically. I’d cut the throttle, set there like a dummy and shot up two bombers confirmed—and I called the third one a probable—when this engine stopped. And by this time, I looked out and there was nothing—I was flying a sieve. Well, I had no choice but to belly in. In the meantime, the first wave had bombed the field, and there were nothing but bomb craters up and down the runway, which didn’t mean a whole lot other than that I had to touch down. I was bellying in, of course. No hydraulics. So I bounced over one bomb crater and slid to a stop, jumped out, and headed for the slit trench. I could hear the second wave coming. You could hear the engine noise. In fact, it was about 300 or 400 feet to the edge where we had the slit trenches. These were six-feet-by-four-foot-deep long trenches and about two feet wide, full of water, urine, refuse, you name it. And I saw one with a piece of cloth floating in it and went in fanny first with my knees bent up around my chin and hit this patch of cloth, and down into this muck I went, clear out of sight, because I could hear the bombs dropping. They were just about to explode. 9

Well, after they crashed, I came up out of this water. The day before, we’d had two World War I colonels come in on a gooney bird. They’d been recalled to active duty and were carrying gas masks. They had ordered Willie and I to take 50-calibers out of the wings of the P-40s and set up a perimeter machine gun defense of the base. We had disobeyed this order. Figured they were worth more in the airplanes, and they didn’t have any authority to order us to do anything. But I no more than cleared this slit trench, and here pops up this—one of these colonels. He was stark naked except for that patch of cloth that I had hit going in and that had been his fanny sticking out. He had on a pair of shorts. And for the first and only time in my life, I made a correct and smart comment. “Colonel, where’s your gas mask?” Of course, both of us had been very lucky to survive the bombing, actually. Bombs had hit within 50 feet of us, but buried in that water, we didn’t get shrapnel. Escaped unscathed except for dirt, muck, urine, and things all over us.

00:23:44

So we got out of that harangue, and the second wave roared on towards home. There wasn’t anybody intercepted them. I don’t know where—Willie and his flight had had to go on over to Chihkiang to land, which was east of us about 50 miles. So I cleaned up, washed my clothes in the river and took a bath in the river, then came back up to the alert shack. And one of the crew chiefs came in and says, “Stew, we’ve got an extra P-40 here. We just finished working on it. We’ve worked on it all night, but it wasn’t ready to fly this morning. But it’s combat-ready now, and the alert shack says we’ve got a raid at Lingling. You want to take that bird?” “Yeah.” So I go out and jump in this other P-40, head for Lingling, which was about 35, 40, 50 miles south of us.

On approaching Lingling, why, there was a wave of bombers coming in, escorted by Zeros, of course, which—who were always above us. We couldn’t even get to their top altitude, so it rained—whenever you got in a fight with Zeros, it was a raindrop—a beehive of them would fall on you out of the sky, just shooting the hell out of you. At low speeds, of course, they could out- turn us, so our only recourse to stay alive—you couldn’t turn with one—was to dive away. Well, as they dove down through us, we went out and circled and climbed as high as we could, came back and joined the fight. And I was fortunate enough I got on the tail of a Zero and got a Zero, so that made me three for the day. And I was pretty—as you can imagine, after all those months in China not having seen, much less shot down, an airplane—I’d seen plenty of them using— manning the antiaircraft at Kweilin when I was the OIC there from November of ‘42 until March of ‘43.

So I landed at Kweilin—or at Lingling and was—got some chow, went over to my room to go to bed. My roommate was walking out. He’d had a flight commander that’d got lost and had bellied in in Jap territory, and the Chinese—they’d been gone about three weeks, so I had an extra bed. Sam Berman’s bed was empty. I go in, and here’s the group commander, Colonel Bruce K. Holloway, who I mentioned earlier was an ace. By this time, he had 13, I guess, because he had 10

gotten one that day. Well, I had gotten one, and I, of course, was higher than a kite and just bragging to no—how great it was, and gee, I’d gotten three airplanes. Bruce listened to me rant for about ten minutes. Finally, he says, “Stew, roll over. Settle down.” He said, “You know we’ve got a ten-to-one kill ratio, and there’s no damn way I afford one P-40 and only get three Japs. You only got three Japs. Now roll over and go to sleep and settle down.”

Well, that took me off my high, as you can imagine. I rolled over and eventually went to sleep. Never another word, no anything else, but Bruce sure knew how to control people. Because he got me back to where I was probably worth something to somebody the next day. But that was my most memorable day in combat. It lasted—as I say, the first fight was early in the morning. I had bellied in by, oh, certainly by 7:30 or 8:00. By 9:00, I was in another airplane—or 10:00. And at Lingling, by 10:30 or 11:00, I run into the second fight and get a Zero, and the fight’s all over by 3:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon. But it had been a memorable day for the 76th Squadron. We’d shot down a lot of airplanes, diverted three raids—two at Hengyang, one at Lingling—and still had both fields operational because the Chinese would come out and repair a bomb crater with yo-yo sticks and carrying baskets of dirt and gravel—crushed gravel. They crushed it by hand. And in 24 hours, you could use the field again.

00:28:47

[Other service details]

So that about completes my most memorable day in combat. As I say, I was a first lieutenant, the flight commander, on 23rd of July of 1943, having been in China since the previous October—or what’s that? Nine months. And three months in Panama. I had been overseas then for 14 months. There, of course, were other days and other missions, a total of 113 in my two continuous tours in China. I came home when Casey Vincent [Clinton D. “Casey” Vincent] caught me flying. I had been grounded. I was down to 125 pounds and almost too weak to walk, but I wasn’t about to send the troops out on missions without leading them. And I’d made the mistake of getting in a fight and shooting down—confirming one Zero. And the second one got on my tail, and I dove out, forgetting I was in a 51, and went across the alert shack at Sichuan pulling 7 Gs, which pulled 18 inches of my gut out my anus.

I have just recently been told by the Awards Decoration—I didn’t get a Purple Heart and thought I deserved one—but I have been told that running from the enemy, as this smartass, paper- shuffling colonel in charge of that down at San Anton calls it, is not grounds for the Purple Heart. Of course, the fact that, for four years or five years of war, it was the one thing that kept everybody alive, was using the tactic that General Chennault said: dive and high speed and you can run away from them, or at high speeds they can’t turn fast enough to get on your tail because they’re built too light to take the stress that a P-40 will take. So much for the administration of the Army Air Corps and the Air Force. 11

I think that about finishes this side of the tape, Eric. I hope this is something along what you wanted. If you’ll go through it—if you need more, why, just call me or let me know. My home phone number is [telephone number]. You obviously have my address, having received your letter, I’m sure of that. So I’ll sign off now. Thank you.

00:31:48

[END OF INTERVIEW]