Interview by Daniel Jackson, January 11, 2009
Daniel Jackson:
Okay, can you hear me sir?
Robert Austin:
Yeah, I can hear you.
Daniel Jackson:
Excellent. You’re coming in nice and clear.
Robert Austin:
Good.
Daniel Jackson:
Okay. Well if we want to start at the top of the questions that I sent you. When exactly did you arrive in the China-Burma-India Theater?
Robert Austin:
When did I arrive in—I can’t remember exactly. Probably in the middle of February 1944.
Daniel Jackson:
Okay, and when you arrived there, did you go through an operational train unit or theater-specific training before you went into combat?
Robert Austin:
Yeah, I’ve got most of that down somewhere. We ended up at Karachi, India—or what you call Pakistan now—and there was two little training fields there, at Landhi and Malir. And we flew—and I got it in my notes there and we were—some of the guys going home from China, the 23rd and 51st group, they stopped off for a few days at Landhi and Malir and flew with us. It was the first little indication of what we were going to go do.
Daniel Jackson:
How long were you in Karachi?
Robert Austin:
I don’t remember. A few weeks. It wasn’t very long.
Daniel Jackson:
Okay. And then from there you went to Dinjan, is that right?
Robert Austin:
Yeah, I’ve got it all in my notes here. I added a little more than what you’d requested.
Daniel Jackson:
Well, there’s nothing wrong with that.
Robert Austin:
Well, I would suggest that you let me read what I’ve got here. I got seven pages. It’s going to take about thirty minutes.
Daniel Jackson:
That’s okay. Go for it.
Robert Austin:
Okay, and then you can keep notes on which questions that whatever I’ve written that you think about, you keep track of questions you want to ask me and I can clarify them because I’m not always clear. Well, it’s hard to know what you don’t know.
Daniel Jackson:
Right. Well, that sounds like a good plan. Go ahead.
Robert Austin:
Okay. All right, I’ll start out a little personal. I graduated Class 43-K, 5th of December ’43. I was single-engine school at Moore Field, Mission, Texas. From there, I went to Florida for P-40 transition at St. Petersburg, Florida. And then finished there flying the P-40, orders to Newport News, Virginia. And then it ended up there were about a hundred of us lieutenant fighter pilots, and then we were shipped out on a general-type ship with about five thousand GIs. So, we didn’t know at the time where we were going. By the sun, we kind of traveled southeast. We arrived in Cape Town, South Africa, I don’t know, fifteen, twenty days later. It’s a pretty place. Go there if you ever have a chance. Then around the Cape up to Bombay, India, it’s now called Mumbai. It’s where they had the shooting a while back. I didn’t know that until I had put it together.
Then from Bombay, we went by narrow gauge railroad to New Delhi, India, then over to Karachi, India, which is now Pakistan, then to a couple of small airfields, landing in Malir, where we flew P-40s, A-36s, P-51s— these are old aircraft that the regular units got rid of them. Plus we had some A-24 Dauntless Douglas fighter-bomber and some Helldivers that are all World War II Navy aircraft. We used those mainly for instrument training. And one of my instructors at Landhi Air Base was from the 528th Fighter Squadron and he was at—they were at Tingkawk Sakan, Burma, and he talked to some of us that we ought to go to Tingkawk Sakan as replacements.
As it turned out, five of us got orders to Tingkawk Sakan, Burma, and we left Karachi and flew to Dinjan, Assam. And there, there were a lot of white-nose 51s sitting on the ramp. So we went over and talked to the guys there. They had people there in their ops building. And the 529th commander said, “We’re getting some of you guys, you can just stay here.” And so they changed our orders and we were assigned to the 529th.
Housing was bamboo huts. We were in the jungle that had been cleared out. The runway was fair, but it was dirt and gravel and there was an air transport group there with C-47s and C-46s. They’re transport air, twin-engine transports. I don’t know if you know anything about them or not, but the food was something else. Spam was good. We also had Australia mutton. It smelled bad and tasted worse, but by and large the food wasn’t too bad. And we pilots there really had no interaction with the local people. Probably they did our laundry and some of the cooking. And the weather there at Dinjan was hot, humid, and rainy, and we didn’t really fly into any forward bases. Our 530th Squadron was at Mohanbari, which is near Dinjan. And there’s another airfield right by Dinjan, it’s Chabua. And I sent you a map and you can pick it up. And this map was one that I used to fly the Hump the first time.
Daniel Jackson:
Oh, wow.
Robert Austin:
Okay. From Dinjan, our primary mission was to provide air cover for Dinjan because the Japanese, particularly at night, were practicing coming up and flying around trying to bomb the airfield. So, we were there for close air support and we did close air support and interdiction in Burma, which is right next to Assam. The Japs still held most of Burma and the United States was building the Burma Road into China, and otherwise there was no way to get any supplies into China, except by air over the Hump. Fighter support was very important to Burma because of the road and the C-47, 46 transports into China. Also, the fight to retake Burma was important and was going on and there was a General Stilwell in the Army who was having a hard time getting out of Burma.
And higher headquarters—off on another subject—would receive their intelligence reports and requests or order air operations to the squadron and we would schedule the missions down into Burma and we usually had four flights in the squadron with about six pilots to a flight. Plus we had additional pilots that were attached to us from group and wing. And initially, the squadron would have about twenty-four aircraft on the tech order business. Before a mission would be flown, the intelligence officers would brief what info he had: target, escape routes. And basically, intelligence was poor—not all the time but most of the time—and not current.
And also the flight leader would brief his flight: details of entering, leaving the target area, altitude, ordnance, and ordnance delivery, radio frequencies, and so forth. And there were several instances of Jap engagements of fighters, Japanese fighters, but not in any time that I was down there in Burma. And of course, a fighter isn’t engaged by the enemy. A fighter’s mission is to engage them.
And we did not normally work with any other units. Squadrons usually did their own business, of course under the direction of a group. The Hankow mission that you seem to know something about was a different thing. It was really a complicated mission. I’ll get into that later.
If someone in the flight went down, we would have to determine the location, status of the pilot. And in Burma we carried a small survival kit: a .45 pistol and a survival kit, we knew had opium, money, some sort of language book that we could communicate with somebody on the ground. We had also some medical stuff packed with us. And then we knew positions of friendly forces in Burma. And Burma had Naga headhunters and I saw some of the heads that they shrank down to about the size, a little bit bigger than a softball—kind of gory thing. Most Burmese hated the Japanese and as long as we knew where the bomb line was and the position of friendlies, we could go ahead and hit just about anywhere that we needed to or found a target of opportunity.
On one of my first missions out of Dinjan down into Burma, I was flying—and this really isn’t—it’s more of a little story. I was flying Captain Erdmann—Birdman, we called him the Bird Man—and he had a 51B or C, I can’t remember, but I was flying his airplane one day. We were near Bhamo, Burma, strafing an ammo dump, and I saw, oh, ten, fifteen, twenty soldiers sneaking into a building on the edge of the area and I called in, rolled in, hosed that building pretty hard with the .50 calibers. We had six of them, three on each wing. Anyway, as I came off the target, I noted tracers going by. Well, it was only my own guns had cooked off and the barrels get hot and they cook off the ammunition. Well, we got back to Dinjan and the guns were ruined and Captain Erdmann the Bird Man really chewed me out. He never had any trouble with his guns before and I was never a friend of the captain again, that I know of, but I learned to be more careful.
You ask about strengths and weaknesses of the A-36 and 51A. It’s in that magazine and the stuff that I sent you yesterday.
Daniel Jackson:
Okay.
Robert Austin:
And at Landhi, I didn’t do much, we didn’t do much above fifteen thousand feet and the A-36 and 51A didn’t have a supercharger. And the British had got some of the A models and they found out that above fifteen thousand feet they weren’t too effective. And so they recommended putting in the Merlin Rolls Royce engine, which was done in the Bs, Cs, Ds and the Ks. The D and K is same. They were just made at different factories, put together at different factories. And with the A-36, we didn’t use the dive brakes. They were wired shut and apparently they wouldn’t always come down at the same time. So, it’d give you a problem if one came down and one stayed up. And I was also careful flying the Allison engine, not to what we call “throttle burst,” push the throttle up to full throttle real rapidly, because it must have misfired or something on me one time because I wouldn’t do that, but I could do it with the Merlin Rolls Royce engine.
And I’m flipping pages. The ordnance we used in the 51 were the .50-caliber guns, three in each wing is the rule. We used tracers, armor piercing, and regular ball ammunition. And we had some rockets, 2.75-caliber rockets that we carried the tubes on the wings and we used, generally had 500-pound bombs that we liked to use on bridges and stuff. And we used instant and time delay fuses. We would damage a bridge somewhere and the Japs would have building material hidden somewhere nearby and then rebuild it. Well, put a one- or two-hour delay on a couple bombs right around the bridge, it delayed rebuilding the bridge we found. We’d come back the next day and the bridge was still out.
As for commanders of the 311th Fighter Group, at Dinjan and Chengtu, I never did know—I was still a second lieutenant—I never did know who the commanders of the group were, but at Hsian, Colonel John—we called him Jack—Chennault was the group commander and he was the son of General Claire Chennault who was the commander of the Fourteenth Air Force. And Colonel John or Jack went home early after we got up to Hsian and Colonel Gabe Disosway took over from him, from Colonel Chennault. And I happened to be by the ops building just coming back from a mission, when a C-47 came up and parked and Colonel Gabe Disosway got out. And of course, John Chennault was there to meet him. And we also had another flight come in and they had a hot mission. They caught a locomotive with a bunch of freight cars on that had tanks and a lot of equipment. They’d run out of ammunition, so they left and reported that the engine was damaged. They weren’t going any place for a little while. So Colonel Chennault says, “Well, we’ll divert, set up another mission to go up there and try to finish up the job.”
And I was standing there with the two of them and some other people and Colonel Chennault said to Colonel Disosway, “We got a hot mission. You want to go?” Disosway said, “Sure.” Well, he went on that flight and—okay, I got to drop the page now. They got to the target all right. And on Colonel Disosway’s first pass, as he came off, he said he had been hit and was bailing out. Well, he got out a pretty good distance away from the railroad and bailed out and was last seen running away. And I don’t know all the details, but Colonel Disosway was picked up by apparently some puppet troops and those, they were friendly to the Japanese and they were kind of outlaws in a way, I guess.
Anyway, apparently, there was a bid between Fourteenth Air Force and the puppet troops to turn Colonel Disosway loose. So he’d get back to either the Japs or the Americans. Apparently, Fourteenth Air Force outbid the Japs and Colonel Disosway was moved to a little old field out in the boonies away from anything. And we sent a–what we call an L-5, kind of a Cessna little airplane in with some cans of gas, and they flew in and picked up Colonel Disosway. And while they were picking him up there, they also sent a flight of P-40s in from the 528th Squadron, who strafed a nearby town to keep the Japanese busy from trying to disturb Colonel Disosway being rescued. Colonel Disosway never flew a mission after that, but he was a fine, fine officer and gentleman. And I later knew him: I was in the training command and he was a three-star at Randolph, head of the training command. He later became a four-star and took command of the Tactical Air Force. They don’t call it the Tactical Air Force anymore. I can’t remember what they do call it.
Daniel Jackson:
They call it Air Combat Command now.
Robert Austin:
Yeah, okay. And when I was at the Pentagon, I saw General Disosway several times and he’s a fine officer.
As far as commanders of the 529th Squadron, Joe Hornsby made colonel, and I saw him a number of years ago. He passed away just recently. He was commander at Dinjan. Fitz Coleman, major who, deceased, at Chengtu. And Major Donald Gordon made colonel. He was at Hsian. And then Major Al Calendar was at Hsian. He lives in Lafayette, Louisiana, but he’s in the hospital right now. I got a letter a while back that he was in the hospital. All these officers are fine and excellent officers as far as I can see.
You asked about duties of a pilot. In a squadron, usually, a pilot follows this route: He’s a second lieutenant. He’s a wingman in a flight either with the first element or the second element. We normally operate in a four-ship flight. Have you got that? Or you knew that, I suppose. And by the time you make first lieutenant, you may be an element leader. You lead the second element. And by the time you make captain, you may be the flight leader of your flight and you have four to six pilots underneath you in your flight. And then you may become an assistant operations officer and then you could become be, a captain or a major, the operations officer of the squadron. And it’s kind of like the deputy for operations of flying in a wing. You run the flying end of the squadron under the guidance of the commander.
And as I recall the 311th Fighter Group, the 528th, 529th, 530th, moved to China in the late spring of ’44, and you will have, I say the history of the 529th when you get that pad back. The bases that I was stationed at over there were at Dinjan. I enjoyed Dinjan because weather was desirable. We had bamboo huts, not too bad, plenty of gas, missions, flying, and we could go up to Ledo, which is close to Burma. They had a big hospital, an American hospital up there and there were nurses. So some of the guys would borrow a Jeep and drive up there a couple hours and be back in time to fly. When you’re a young lieutenant, you can do a lot of things. That’s not in the script.
Okay. At Chengtu, A6, China, where we were there to support the B-29s that were based there. There’s no way that we could escort the B-29s on a raid to Manchuria or Japan, but we could protect them somewhat from the Japanese, and we had Japanese bombers come overnight. Thank goodness they never could find the fields. And we didn’t have P-61s, a night fighter, then, and I tried a P-47 trying to chase them around at night, but the 47 is a fine airplane, but the exhaust, it’s hard to see anything out with the exhaust pipe sticking out.
Anyway, I wanted to also bring up the fact that in China we didn’t get any—we maybe got a can of beer once a year, particularly at Christmastime because everything had to be flown in over the Hump into China. We had a half-Indian pilot named Woodrow Bussey. His dad had been a bootlegger and he knew how to make whiskey, and so we were living in tents and he set up a still in his tent, there’s four guys to a tent. And I didn’t know whiskey was clear when distilled. And he put brown sugar in it, burnt brown sugar in it to color it brown. And he charcoaled the wooden barrels and then we’d sit there and rock the barrel to age it. And I got so sick on whiskey one night that I spit up blood. So today, I don’t smell it or drink it because I’m afraid I’ll upchuck. Bussey made quite a bit of money by going into Chengtu and setting up the Chinese-American company and sold American whiskey in Chengtu, the town of Chengtu.
Our mission in China was mainly interdiction of the railroads and transportation of material between occupied towns and air support on request to the Chinese army that didn’t seem to do much during the time when we were there. And also provide air cover to our air base in Hsian.
We did have one interesting incident. I wasn’t there. We rotated detachments up there initially from Chengtu and I wasn’t there. One morning, early, they were taxiing the airplanes around on the field, warming them up, and they had two aircraft airborne as top cover when a—let’s see, what was it? A Tojo and an Oscar showed up at the end of the runway, strafing. And there was a crew chief taxiing a 51 across the runway; they shot it and he got killed. And the Tojo went around to make another pass and he was turning back into the field and he pulled it in too tight and spun the darn thing right in at the end of the runway. And that was him and the Oscar, seeing his leader gone, headed back down the railroad to the Yellow River and one of the Japanese bases across the Yellow River. And the two aircraft, the top cover, never saw him. They finally saw him and they began chasing him, and the Oscar pilot committed Hara-kiri on the railroad. He just dove the airplane into the railroad. So we never were really bothered again. They were caught with their pants down really.
Let’s see, where am I at? Oh, the Hankow mission, in my opinion, was a huge success. The heavy bombers went in. They went in early and we at Hsian never had any information on it, and we never did get any information later on, just all that happened. But the heavy bombers went in supposedly B-29s, probably B-24s, but I never did see them. And I was a wingman on one of the four flights that the 529th put in. We were assigned twenty-six thousand feet. And as I recall, we arrived over Hankow from Hsian about one o’clock in the PM. There was smoke everywhere down on the ground around the airfields, and there were pilots talking on the common frequency. One or two were shooting at a stray Jap fighter here and there. We never knew where.
The heavy bombers of course were gone. And apparently the 23rd Fighter Group, the 51st Fighter Group and the 311th Fighter Group—I know we were involved and they were involved too. Les Arasmith, a classmate of mine in flying school, was with the 530th Squadron. He got three confirmed kills that day. And since the action was all down below, I suggested to my flight leader that we should go down there where the action was. And he said we were assigned twenty-six thousand feet, and that was it. I thought really seriously of going down and getting into the action. But I knew that’d be a court-martial affair, so I didn’t do it. I did not see the heavy bombers. I can’t say even if they were B-29s because I didn’t see them. The weather at Hankow was good, perhaps some low clouds, ceiling clouds, cumulus type.
And as I can figure it out, the bombers must have damaged the Jap runways and not many of the Japs got airborne because from listening to it, what was going on, there was never a major effort by the Japs to shoot any of our fighters down. Anyway, we got back to Hsian and I never knew, didn’t know about the aftermath and we never went back again. But you got to realize when you’re based four hundred miles from somebody else, you don’t get much information. And we didn’t have the facilities that we had to have today to transmit.
And another factor went in, that’s in there is you got to realize that the war was ending in Europe and everything was going well in the Pacific. And the B-29s were operating from Okinawa, Saipan, near Japan since they left Chengtu. And everything I’ve read, the Japanese were apparently pulling back their defense for the defense of Japan itself. I never saw a Jap plane in my entire time in China. We strafed some fields, and I was in on that, strafed Tojos and Franks and Oscars, and never one of them burned.
However, we did have an incident that we were flying up as far as Beijing—Peping—on the railroad, shooting up trains and boxcars and whatever, and even the Japanese had convoys of carts pulled by oxen. And you know, I hated to do it, I’ve shot a lot of oxen, but they had to get things moved. And like I said, the only ace in our 311th Group is Lester Arasmith, and he’s recorded in the books of the Air Force with five kills.
Daniel Jackson:
Right.
Robert Austin:
And oh, the question is about the difference in 51s: with 51D and K with the bubble canopy were kind of prestige. And the only real difference that you had with the Bs and Cs was that you couldn’t see out of the cockpit covers from the Bs and Cs behind you, unless you made a turn to look back. And when you get down to it, any aircraft with liquid-cooled engines such as the P-39, P-40, the 51s, that has coolant for cooling the engine in the radiator, when you get a bullet in the radiator or in the coolant line, it’s not if you’re going to bail out, it’s when. And so I’ve also flown a P-47 with the Jugs, and I’ll tell you, there’s instances when they’ve shot cylinders off the 47, the dang thing still ran. But I liked the 51 better because we could strafe at a higher speed than the Jug. The Jug uses a lot more gasoline than the 51.
Let’s see what—and I certainly wanted to go to Shanghai with the group and the squadron, but I waited until October for the 529th to get orders to go to Shanghai. We practiced twenty-four-ship formations to impress the Japanese, who were still in control of most of China. You understand that when the war ended, the Communists were all outside of the Japanese towns. And the Communists, under Mao Tse-tung, wanted to take over. And we had to fly Chinese Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek into all the major cities to take control of those cities. And so the war really didn’t end with the Japanese surrender. It really ended when we took possession. I know I went into Suzhou and there was an article in there about going into Suzhou that you’ll get. And it’s self-explanatory.
Well, anyway, since I was about the senior guy in the squadron after the war, I waited until October. Homer Smith, whose job I took when he got shot down, he walked back in from being shot down. And so I told him to take his job back and I had orders cut and went home. I got a ride in a Gooney Bird, a C-47, to Calcutta and got out of there in a general-type troop ship, sailed down, went through the Suez Canal, landed in New York, and got back to Kansas City, Missouri, my hometown, before Christmas. And that’s about what I’ve got down. I’ve covered most of your questions, but I’m certainly open to clarifying anything that is not clear.
Daniel Jackson:
Well, sir, I was wondering, back in Burma when you were flying close air support, how were those missions coordinated? Would you talk to them over the radio or would they drop smoke shells on the target?
Robert Austin:
Normally we coordinated with the work teams or somebody on the ground with a radio because otherwise we couldn’t do it because we wouldn’t know who they were or where they were at. Of course, one way was to fly down over them and if they shot at you, they were enemy. Normally, we would have somebody on the ground, an American on the ground, and they would be talking to you and we would know his frequency and he would come up on the radio when we showed up. And otherwise, we could find those bomb lines and could be assured by somebody that we were inside the Jap territory and we never really had any trouble identifying. It was usually pretty clear-cut that they were Americans. And you’re right, they did use some smoke bombs, but not often.
Daniel Jackson:
Okay. Let’s see here. On the mission to Hankow then, were you flying the bubble canopy P-51s or were you still flying the Bs and Cs?
Robert Austin:
No, we were still flying the regular Bs and Cs.
Daniel Jackson:
When did your unit receive the D and K models?
Robert Austin:
I don’t remember. I don’t know whether I could look in my form one or not. It was late in the war. It was late in the war. It was in the late—well, sometime after we had gone to Hsian.
Daniel Jackson:
That’s okay.
Robert Austin:
I can’t answer that. I don’t really remember.
Daniel Jackson:
That’s okay.
Robert Austin:
I know I have pictures of regular 51s, the Bs and Cs in that folder, and late in ’45, while we’re still there in the spring of ’45, I think we began getting a few Ds and Ks. I can’t remember exactly, but I did have a bubble canopy at the end of the war.
Daniel Jackson:
Okay. You talked about on the mission to Hankow seeing smoke. Was the smoke covering the city in general? Was it just around the airfields? Do you remember?
Robert Austin:
It was generally around the airfields, as I can recall. I believe there were at least two airfields there. I can’t be sure. We tooled around at twenty-six thousand feet and all by ourselves. And meanwhile, Arasmith was down there shooting.
Daniel Jackson:
Were the airfields on the edge of town or were they in the middle of town?
Robert Austin:
Oh, they were—you know, I can’t really remember. I’m sure that they were on the edge of town.
Daniel Jackson:
Okay. One more thing: I’m interested in your tactics, especially with the close air support and interdiction in Burma. You talked about using 500-pound bombs and rockets. Would you primarily do skip bombing, dive bombing? What kind of approach would you take as far as altitude into the target?
Robert Austin:
We did mostly dive bombing. Some of us did try to skip-bomb bombs into—there’d be tunnels through the valleys. They’d run, the Japs would run, or somebody had the tunnel through a hunk of rock in a valley to get through to the next valley. And I’ve tried to toss-bomb 500-pound bombs into the mouth of the cave or the tunnel, and it’s pretty hazardous, especially if you’ve got to pull up over the mountain that the tunnel’s going through. And I know on one occasion that one of the guys had a moving train going through a tunnel. And he timed it just right; as the engine came out of the tunnel on the other side, he was sitting in strafing distance. He got the engine as it came out of the tunnel, strafed it. And of course we always tried to get, wanted to catch a railroad engine that would steam up because we could really tell we’d done damage if we could steam it.
I know one time I had a bomb, an extra bomb, and I found an engine sitting in the, it looked like it was steaming in a revetment in a railroad yard. I apparently hit it dead-on with a 500-pound bomb because when I pulled up, I don’t know, it was three thousand, four thousand feet after pulling up and I looked over there and there was a big round cylinder about the same altitude as I. And the only thing I can figure, it was out of that locomotive that somehow had steam in it, it kind of blew itself up in the air. But it was there. I looked at it and it was about the same altitude I was. Anyway, that’s another war story.
Daniel Jackson:
Okay. So, did the Japanese use a lot of railroad to supply their forces in Burma then?
Robert Austin:
I don’t recall any railroads in Burma. I don’t really. Where we were operating, it was pretty much jungle. And where the Burma Road went in, they would cut through over a river. There was a river right along near the Chinese-Burma border, and I can’t say how far apart anymore. That was a long time ago.
Daniel Jackson:
So most of your shooting up trains was in China then from Hsian?
Robert Austin:
Yeah. We used to go out and if we didn’t get ten engines on a mission, we’d feel kind of bad, but we also lost people doing that. Sometimes the Japanese run flak box cars that they could drop the doors or the walls off and they’d have their machine guns on the flat car. We could put them out of operation too.
Daniel Jackson:
Okay. Well, that’s about all the questions I had for you, sir. Was there anything that you wanted to add? Any other missions that you wanted to talk about?
Robert Austin:
Yeah, let’s see here. Well, I’ve got, there’s a picture in a newspaper article and then films of a 51 that I crash-landed on one main gear and a tailwheel. I knew I’d been hit. We were supporting some Chinese and I knew I had been hit. The engine was running good enough and everything, and there was a little hole on top of the wing, but they wouldn’t—and I never even had anybody look at me as long as the engine was going. And anyway, I got back to Hsian, I put the gear down and the right main gear just kind of fell out and hung there and swung. And so I let the rest of the flight land, burned my fuel down, and I wheeled it in. And with the one gear, a main gear gone, two main gear and a tail wheel, one gear, you’re going to ground loop. And so I just put it down and rolled on one gear, a main gear and the tailwheel. And I’d already done it in a P-40 back in Florida, so I knew if the right gear is gone and the left gear is good, you’re going to turn to the right because the wing is going to drop when you lose speed. And we just had a nice little ride to a hundred [miles per hour]. I put three aircraft in commission [with the parts from the wrecked plane], the canopy, the rudder, and I can’t remember what the other thing. Three airplanes went in because I crash-landed that one. Okay. That was a war story. Let’s see. Let’s see what else.
Oh, in the squadron, Jim Nixon had a four-ship flight up near Beijing, Peping, Peking, or whatever you want to call it. And he was on the railroad and he looked over and saw a cloud of dust quite a ways away. And so he just, out of curiosity, just way winged over there and there were six Tojos that just landed and were taxiing up to park at a deserted airfield. And so Jim got two and well, the four-ship flight got the six Tojos on the ground, taxiing and so forth, and they all burned. From there on, we didn’t send any more two-ship flights out because we were kind of concerned about—we didn’t even know there was Tojos in the area. And I don’t know, we still don’t know where they were going or what they were doing, but they’d landed on this dirt strip and they knew what they were doing. We didn’t know. Let’s see what else. Yeah, that’s all I can think of right off-hand. A lot of that stuff has faded away from my memory over the years.
Daniel Jackson:
Right.
Robert Austin:
I had some questions, though. How did you get my name?
Daniel Jackson:
Well, I’ve done a couple of papers on the air war in China, and one of the veterans I talked to gave me a 2007 Fourteenth Air Force Association roster.
Robert Austin:
Oh, okay. Yeah, I’m a member of that. Fourteenth Air Force Association is pretty much, well, they have disbanded. There’s some guys still around New York or someplace that meet periodically and my squadron met this year—where’s the Disneyland in Florida? Orlando? There’s a Disney World there. Orlando, I think.
Daniel Jackson:
Right.
Robert Austin:
They met there. The year before, it was in Atlanta. But I’m not traveling anymore. The last time I went to Atlanta, they lost my luggage on the way and I didn’t have any all the time I was in, the three days I was in Atlanta.
Daniel Jackson:
Well, that’s great.
Robert Austin:
And at eighty-eight years old, my wife’s kidneys aren’t that good anymore. I went to China a couple of years ago. That was an interesting trip. There’s a travel agency in San Francisco and one via Shanghai that were sponsoring trips from fighter pilots World War II over there. And so they paid our way for three or four years, somebody. I guess the 528th the first year sent three, and then we sent two, and then we sent three, and we had two last year. But we didn’t send any this year because when they had the doings [Olympics] in China.
Daniel Jackson:
Right.
Robert Austin:
But we didn’t see much. The only airplane I saw was a light airplane in Peking or Beijing, Peiping, or whatever you want to call it. And they’re supposed to have a pretty good airfield there in Hsian. In Hsian, we visited that, but we were kind of restricted from doing anything, seeing anywhere that they didn’t want us to go.
Daniel Jackson:
Right.
Robert Austin:
And I never saw—well, I saw some transports when we landed in Shanghai and landed in Beijing and landed in Hsian and several other towns, but I never saw a fighter that entire time—except in Beijing, we went to an airplane museum out in the country and it had a lot of old airplanes, but it didn’t have any P-51s or P-47s. And of course, we got on the Great Wall. Although I’d flown over the Great Wall several times during World War II when we were in Hsian.
Okay, now how are you going to present in this? How are you going to put this in a paper?
Daniel Jackson:
Well, that is a good question. I usually like to collect information first, then figure out the specifics. I was going to, probably for the purpose of this paper, it’s going to probably be a twelve- to fifteen-page paper plus photos. So twelve to fifteen pages of text, probably focusing on the 311th’s role in supporting the drive through North Burma and the significance of that, especially down to Myitkyina, which allowed the transports over the Hump to fly the southern route, which was a lot more safe and economical. So, that’ll probably be the crux of the paper. I just interviewed a pilot from the 528th earlier this morning, and there’s another one that’s sending me some stuff.
Robert Austin:
What’s his name?
Daniel Jackson:
It was Joseph Walters.
Robert Austin:
I don’t know him. I know Hank Snow from the 528th. Hank worked for me in Thailand, and that was F-105s.
I’ve got one of my, when I had a flight, named Crawford, he bailed out and walked out of the—he wasn’t a POW. He bailed out after strafing a train and got hit. I got his name and address. I’ve got a couple of the crew, at least one of the crew chiefs. Al Calendar, the former commander, a few days ago was still in the hospital, but he was the commander, the last commander.
Walters, I’ve heard of that. I’ll have to look and see. In the 529th, my name was never entered in [the squadron history]. Somebody sent me, it was an enlisted man, a sergeant I think, that put together that 529th full history. And I guess he wrote and said he needed info and I never did answer it. And so my name isn’t listed as one, but I can prove I was there.
Daniel Jackson:
But anyway, as far as the information that you provided me on China, like I said, I’m writing a book about the air war in China. So, I’ll definitely use your information from the Hankow mission.
Robert Austin:
I don’t know anybody that ever got any info out of the Hankow mission.
Daniel Jackson:
Well, I’ve got some official reports. And what it sounds like is you were over Hankow between when the B-24s hit the airfields. They bombed the airfields first, then the fighters went in and the B-29s followed up and firebombed the city and the docks.
Robert Austin:
Well, I never paid much attention to the city. I was looking for airplanes. And I know there was smoke and we were twenty-six thousand feet, locked in, but apparently, we’d taken the Japanese by surprise, and we did that several times. The 530th went into Peping one time when they were up there, and they did a lot of damage. And the 23rd went into Taipei or Formosa and got about thirty or forty airplanes sitting on the ground. The Japanese, apparently you could do it one time, then the second time would be bad. They’d be ready. But I have never seen anything much on the Hankow raid. And now there’s a source of information that you may be able to get to, and that’s at Maxwell Air Force Base.
Daniel Jackson:
Right. They’re actually sending me a CD-ROM with an electronic copy of the 311th Fighter Group’s records from the war right now.
Robert Austin:
Okay. I was reading with my last turnover at the university there, and I didn’t know that all those records were there or I would’ve went over and got them because I was one of the guys at the Command and Staff College. And I was interested, when I was in the National War College, I did a paper on Diego Garcia. It’s a little island off of Australia. And we still use it as a bomber refueling area, although I haven’t seen it in the paper recently.
So anyway, any way I can help you again anymore, I’ll be glad to.
Daniel Jackson:
Okay.
Robert Austin:
I can give you the names and addresses of Crawford particularly.
Daniel Jackson:
Yeah, that would be great.
Robert Austin:
He walked out and I can call him and tell him that you’ll be calling.
Daniel Jackson:
Yeah, that’d be excellent.
Robert Austin:
You want to do that?
Daniel Jackson:
Sure.
Robert Austin:
Okay. Just a minute. I’ll get his address and telephone number. Okay, Paul Crawford. His wife recently passed away. He didn’t stay in the Air Force. He got out. He was in my flight and his address, are you ready?
Daniel Jackson:
Go ahead.
Robert Austin:
522 North Chace, C-H-A-C-E. Atlanta, Georgia, 30328-4235 zip code. And phone number is area code 404-255-1155 And I’ll give him a call. I talk to him all the time. And I could give you the Calendars, but he’s in pretty bad shape.
Let’s see, I can give you an enlisted man, but I don’t know how much he could tell you because he didn’t have a source in the material or in our—Joe Hornsby passed away just a while back. There’s not many of us left that I know of. Still a few names, but they’re in nursing homes and so forth.
Daniel Jackson:
Right. Well, this will be a good start. Looks like I should have plenty of information for what I’m looking for.
Robert Austin:
Oh, I got one other war story. Crawford and I and Eric Armstrong—Eric played football for Stanford University back years ago before the war. And the three of us were out along the coast of China and we ran across a freighter about four-hundred-foot long, I guess. And we started strafing it. We didn’t have any bombs left. I don’t even remember what we were doing out there, but we were. And we’d made several passes on it and I was leading. And I don’t know what happened to our fourth—he aborted or something, didn’t get off. So there was just the three of us. And Eric, he was number three and I was strafing and there was something wrong. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with that boat—ship, I should say. And as I came over the top, there was something wrong. About that time, I heard Eric call in, he hit the mast. And that was what was wrong. I went right through it. There was about four foot of mast hanging down on ropes, and it was just as clear as it could be. And I said, “Head for home.” And anyway, I caught up with him and there was about a six-inch hole. It went back to the main spar, which is about a foot into the leading edge of the wing. And there was just a hole there about a foot long and six or seven inches wide. And you could even see the main spar of the wing there. And what I’d seen was the mast, four-foot of mast hanging down by ropes when I went over. Anyway, he got home all right. And I think they had to put a new wing on the airplane. Off of a wrecked airplane, so that’s just another war story.
I’ve kept you tied up.
Daniel Jackson:
Well, I appreciate the call, sir. I appreciate the information. And I’ll tell you what, I’ll look through that packet when it gets here and give you a call if I have any questions over that information.
Robert Austin:
Yeah, you can read the mission reports. On the mission reports, there’s an index on where your name shows up periodically. And I haven’t read them all, but they’re there. And that magazine on the 51, now you’ll probably be able to fly 51 after you read it thoroughly.
And of course, there’s another improvement probably over the A-36s and the 51As was a computing gun site.
Daniel Jackson:
Interesting. Was that the gyroscopic gun site that had—
Robert Austin:
Well, I don’t even know how to describe it anymore, but you could crank in the width of the airframe and the wings and so forth, and that helped you compute the distance out. I can’t remember all the details, but when I was in Suzhou on the side—and you got the story in the folder that I sent you—there was a brand new Frank sitting in an underground hangar. And I think I took a picture of it sitting in there. Anyway, I took some of the instrument gauges out of it, the attitude indicator and I don’t know what else. And while we were there in Suzhou, we got Japanese swords and a Nambu pistol. And I gave the sword to my crew chief, and I finally gave the Nambu away to another friend. That’s just one of the little things that happened. Well, let me know anything you think you need and I’ll give Crawford a call. He can tell you how it was to walk out.
Daniel Jackson:
Okay.
Robert Austin:
Okay? And I talk to him anyway all the time.
Daniel Jackson:
Well, that sounds good. I really do appreciate it.
Robert Austin:
Well, anyway, General Disosway, he turned out to be quite an officer.
Daniel Jackson:
Right. Okay. Well, thank you for your time, sir. I’ll let you know when that packet arrives and let you know if I have any questions.
Robert Austin:
Well, I got a return receipt so on the pack, so that way I know that you got it.
Daniel Jackson:
Excellent. Sounds good.
Robert Austin:
Okay. All right. Bye for now.
Daniel Jackson:
Okay, you take care, sir. Have a good rest of your day.