Interview by Daniel Jackson, March 13, 2009
Daniel Jackson:
Okay, can you hear me, sir?
Joseph Walters:
Yes.
Daniel Jackson:
Okay. Well, I appreciate you-
Joseph Walters:
Okay, is that loud now?
Daniel Jackson:
Yeah, I can hear you just fine. Thanks.
Joseph Walters:
Yeah, okay. I don’t know what area you’re interested in, and so maybe let me take kind of a quick background for where I’m coming from and what I was doing, that sort of thing, coming in to flying the 51s, okay?
Daniel Jackson:
Okay, that sounds great.
Joseph Walters:
Yeah, just about five or ten minutes here, just personal. I volunteered and went into the Army Air Corps in March of 1941, nineteen years old. And then I went to Chanute Field, Rantoul, Illinois, that’s the Army Air Corps’ technical school, and I became an airplane mechanic before Pearl Harbor. And then I was working as an airplane mechanic at a basic flying school at Shaw Field, Sumter, South Carolina, and I applied for pilot training when Pearl Harbor broke out. At that time you had to have two years of college and be twenty years old, and I was neither. Now, they redid the requirements: if you could see lightning and hear thunder, then they’d start training you. I was in [inaudible].
However, I was working with some other—I was up to a sergeant by that time, promotion, and I had now a couple of other friends there working, and we had applied for pilot training and then were accepted. But the base commander wouldn’t let us go, wouldn’t let us go for pilot training because we were already ahead training pilots, and so we were stuck. So, in 1942, just a little after Pearl Harbor, I heard that the Inspector General—you know what the Inspector General is? Have you heard that term?
Daniel Jackson:
Yes.
Joseph Walters:
Yes, okay. He can get things done. So, I talked to the other mechanics, about three or four of us, and went in to see the Inspector General. I just said, “Well, look, we’re going to walk off here.” And I know you don’t walk off your job in the military, but I had two brothers that were career military and I knew some of the ropes, what they talked about. So, we went in to see the Inspector General and the next morning we were called for flight training. That’s all it took. And then I took pilot training and got my wings in class 43-G, and that’s the middle of July in 1943. After we got that, usually they send you off to bomber training or fighter pilot or whatever. But I went down to Florida and got a little—a few hours, three or four hours in a P-51, and then they shipped me off with some others to India.
We got into India, and our first combat was in November 1943. Now that was in A-36s, and that was in the Tenth Air Force. The flights out of India and Burma were with the Tenth Air Force. When we went to China, we were in the Fourteenth Air Force. I was the 528th Fighter Squadron and now I don’t know anything about the other squadrons. I have met them, but we didn’t fly with them. In essence, we were really a separate unit, the type of work that we were doing. We went straight at combat from India. The Japanese had taken all of Burma—that’s Myanmar now—right up to the India border. And there’s the Digboi oil fields right over the Hump. And Assam—that’s the eastern part of India—India was one country at that time. But Assam is a portion of India that is above Burma and it’s in the tea-planters section there. We flew off of concrete runways and slept in tea-planter’s homes, and it was comfortable, very nice.
And what we did, we flew down into the middle of Burma, primarily below Myitkyna, and shoot up railways, bridges. We would destroy anything we could of use to the Japanese. One time we went in and shot up about forty or fifty elephants. They had herded them in—it was a scorched earth policy. And that really affected me in a way. I hated like thunder to go down and kill fifty elephants. With a 51, of course, you can do it in just a few minutes. Anyway, that’s the type of thing we were doing to all the connections that the Japanese had, we would just destroy them.
Now we moved from India—Assam was that section, had these beautiful runways, at Dinjan, D-I-N-J-A-N, and another airbase that was a little closer, Sookerating. I don’t know how that’s spelled. I’m just doing this from memory, S-O-O-K-E-R-A-T-I-N-G. They were along the borders of India that joins into Burma.
Now, we were the Tenth Air Force for all of our work in Burma. Now, we went to Burma on 5/16/1944, and we went into a primeval forest that had been blasted out of the heaviest rain forest in the world, and the base was Tingkawk Sakan, that’s T-I-N-G, Tingkawk, K-A-W-K, I think it is, S-A-K-A-N, Tingkawk Sakan. That was right in the middle of the rainforest of the world. It has been known to run from five hundred to one thousand inches of rain per year. Most of that came down in the monsoon season. So, that’s something else.
Now, to show you the nature of that, one afternoon, oh, maybe three o’clock up in India, they called four or five of us together and said, “Your airplanes are loaded up. They’re bombed up. They got gas in them and so on, and you’re moving out. We’re not telling you where, but you’ll find out. One will lead us down there.” And so we go in and flew right across this primeval swamp. They had bulldozed out a runway of sorts. It was really gravel and mud and so on. And we operated out of that base for about four or five months. We lost many more planes on the runway than we did in wearing out, and collisions and things, and getting shot down elsewhere.
Now, to give you the nature of it, that afternoon we landed, and there we’re sitting there sucking their thumbs. There’s nothing, nothing, except just a jungle, monkeys swinging around the trees, and so on. We just sat there and wondered, what next? Nothing there, nothing to lie on. And about an hour or two getting on toward dark, some C-47 transports came in. And what do you think they brought us? They brought us tarpaulins, axes, rope, kerosene lamps, and cots. They said, “Now make yourself a place to live, a place to sleep.” At that point, we started the operation, no phone, no commanders, no nothing. And the next morning we were flying missions. And if you stepped off the runway you were six inches deep in muck and mud. That’s the way we started.
And that was just unbelievable. However, what we did, we’d fly a lot of missions, and we were up close to where the Japanese were and could respond very quickly. And what we were doing, really, is heavy artillery or air support for Wingate’s Chindits—the British troops going down the west side of Burma—or Merrill’s Marauders, which is on the east side of Burma. What they were doing, they were running a few thousand troops down—these are battle-hardened troops—down in the east coast and the west coast of Burma, and they had nothing except what was dropped to them. They were carrying their rifles, and food and everything were dropped to them.
We had direct radio contact. They’d call us up and say, “We need you right here, and they’ll throw you a smoke bomb.” And we’d go down and bomb it and strafe it, take it out, just zip zap, zip zap, really very effective, and did a marvelous job there. Some come away with malaria. Everybody lost weight. And the one thing that really got to us was land leeches, like a water leech. You walk in the jungle. If you walk a hundred feet, you got ten leeches popped onto your clothes, and they would get on your body where they could, and you didn’t feel them when they’d bite you, and if you didn’t strip that off of you every day or two—you’d change daily, mainly, pull your clothes down every night, inspect your body—they would kill you and suck you to death, you’d never know it. Now, that was really what it was.
And the other thing, it’s just passing interest, I didn’t smoke. I never did, but I could tell you—now the squadron’s like twenty-five pilots or whatever. And I could tell, when they didn’t get cigarettes for a week and had been under combat conditions, and I could tell who was a smoker and who wasn’t. And I thought, “Well, thank the Lord I don’t have that problem.” And that was really a rough operation there.
And that was all A-36s. We didn’t have anything else besides it. The A-36, it was one of the early 51s. It had dive brakes on it, and it had two .50-calibers through the prop, as well as the four in the wing. It had a pick-tooth propeller that is a three—I can’t think of the—I’m eighty-seven, so, I can always think—the propeller blades, there were three blades. Anyway, and they had an Allison engine, and it was fairly good up to about five thousand feet. In fact, around the ground they were really very good.
We didn’t use the two .50s through the propeller because they had trouble keeping the synchronization or something. I don’t know what was the technical problem. Anyway, we stopped using them because sometimes you’d pop a hole or two through your propeller blade. So, we didn’t use that, and the dive brakes, they had problems with those, to get both of them to come out the same way or other. What exactly the problem was were the mechanics—and I should have known—the mechanics that we were using weren’t experienced and didn’t know. Anyway, we couldn’t use them for dive-bombing and so we’d just simply get straight above and come straight down. Incidentally, you’ve had physics at the Academy?
Daniel Jackson:
Right, yes.
Joseph Walters:
You have can targets, perfect targets, perfect sighting, perfect bombing. And if you keep your sight right on target, it is impossible to hit the target. Well, think about that for a while, the reason being, your wing lifts no matter what position you’re in with respect to the earth, and you’re diving straight toward straight toward a target, and we aim right dead-center on it, and when you release the bomb it has a count on it that is pulling you past the target. You must go straight down toward the target and then pull it back under to give it some more, because it’s a confluence of thrust and that bomb will [inaudible 00:15:30]. Anyway, that was a side issue.
I flew about 140 missions roughly, maybe five missions more or less, before we moved into China. When we went into China, we went to Chengtu, C-H-E-N dash T-U—its Chinese name. Now its several things. That was 8/22 in ’49 [sic, 1944] we went China. I had about 140 missions when I went to China, and flew one of the biggest missions that—I don’t know if you’ve run into it anyplace, the biggest mission in China was on December the 18th, I think my logbook shows 1944. And we were flying from Hsian, that’s S-I-A-N, or spelled another way, H-S-I-A-N. That’s up around the Yellow River, up in northern China. Anyway, we staged from there to go down to this battle down on the Yangzi River, and that was in Hangkow, that’s H-A-N-G-K-O-W. Hangkow is right on the Yangzi River, about halfway across China from the sea. And it’s now called Wuhon, W-O-H-O-N [sic]. And that was the largest air battle—in December—that’d ever been flown up until I left, and I left about February of ’45. I didn’t fly hardly any missions there. I flew top cover on that. There was about—I don’t know what the figures are. I’m relying on my memory. But it’d be something like two to three hundred planes went in on this one mission.
The Japanese had docks there at Hangkow. They had a lot of supplies and whatnot. And they sent B-29s, B-25s, P-40s, P-51s—everything they could get in the sky, and sixty-nine Japanese planes were shot down that day. I shot one of them down. But I came in, I had a wingman, a second element, and he had a wingman, and so there was four of us took off from Hsian going down to Hangkow. One of them developed engine trouble and so I sent him back to base. Of course, they take their [wingman]. We never let one get out by themselves for protection—it was riskier—and so on. So, anyway, it was just two of us, flew the top missions on that darn thing, and we had B-29s coming in, and we had to climb up and escort them. And we went in as the wingmen, and they went in at twenty-eight thousand feet.
I got down there and the battle had been going on for a while, and all of a sudden I looked around and there’s a great big orange ball—looks like the size of a melon—that’s sitting right above me, a Japanese fighter. I didn’t expect anything up there, so naturally, we skedaddled out of there, and that was quite a fight, whatever. Anyway, I ended up with 160 missions, and there’s several things you may or may not want to know. Any questions in that?
Daniel Jackson:
Well, I do have a couple of questions that relate to what you talked about, if you don’t mind. First of all, you said that when you arrived in India, you went straight into combat. Did you have theater-specific training before going into combat? Or did they just give you an airplane and tell you to go fly?
Joseph Walters:
No. Well, you don’t go out by yourself, never if you can help it.
Daniel Jackson:
Right, right.
Joseph Walters:
Yeah. No, I had gone to the regular conventional flight [school] just as all pilots do. As soon as the war broke, they wanted fifty thousand pilots real quick, and they shoved you through. They wouldn’t fool with you. A hundred of them would go in for the class and thirty of them might graduate. In other words, they were ramming them through.
And as soon as I finished flight and got my wings, I went down to Florida and flew the P-51. They checked me out after I flew three or four hours in it, but I could land it and get it up and down and so on, and then just shipped me off to combat. And of course, this was not heavy engagement. Most of ours, the real danger was getting the darn things in and off the ground and so there wasn’t much aerial combat at first until we got to China, and then we started getting it. Anything you want to know about the airplanes themselves? I mean the different models, whatnot?
Daniel Jackson:
Well, you said that when you were flying from Tingkawk Sakan, you were flying primarily the A-36?
Joseph Walters:
Everything before we went to China, almost everything was A-36s. And they were very fast along the ground—they were very good—but they had no altitude. You get up a thousand feet, at five thousand, and it starts—it’s just like driving a car up in the hills. You start losing power very quick. When they brought out the P-51, that’s the P-51A, it’s the same engine, but it was just a little nicer design in a way. But then the B and C models got the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine, and that gives you a lot more horsepower. And especially for high altitude, you had a two-speed turbocharger, but you could switch it to high-blower or low-blower. And I have gone out on missions at forty thousand feet. Now, that’s darn something, people can hardly believe it, but I have gone out at forty thousand. And they can really be moving. You’ve got a big windmill paddle prop like a windmill, and the air is thin up there, and you can move the darn thing.
The fastest I ever remember flying one was at the Hangkow mission. I went down, I got chased around the sky a little bit, my wingman with me, and we ended up just diving straight for the ground and got down close till we came across an airbase they had there, and we started shooting up airplanes as we were passing. They were redlined at 515 miles an hour. It said, “Do not shoot your guns over 515.” And I thought, well, I haven’t shot anything yet today here, I’m going to shoot at whatever it is. And I was over 515 and blasted. I don’t know if I did much damage or not, but I know it was moving. That’s the fastest I ever remembered.
Incidentally, the later models, your B and your C with the Merlin engine, they put a 75-gallon tank behind the pilot’s seat, and the thing about that is, it throws your center of gravity off. And it warns you not to get into any dogfighting until you use your gas out of that tank, because in other words, you get skidding around, it’s not balanced out. So, I don’t know if you’ve ever run into that or not.
Daniel Jackson:
Interesting. So, if you were to take off in a scramble in P-51s, let’s say your airbase was being attacked, would they even fill that tank then? Or would they just leave it empty so you could dogfight?
Joseph Walters:
I didn’t quite hear what you made in the last comments.
Daniel Jackson:
Well, I was just saying, if you had to scramble for a Japanese air raid, then, would they just not fill that 75-gallon tank so that you could—
Joseph Walters:
Well, no, you’d want to use it because you’d want to know where the fight’s going to take place, because we were being the aggressor, and so you’d use up—that’d give you extra range. You could take wing tanks, which we never did, but the 51, if you’re climbing up, you got a lot of range on it. With that seventy-five gallons, that changed, and we could move about four or five hundred miles.
Daniel Jackson:
Okay. Back to the A-36, I’m curious, since it was only effective at low altitudes, what kind of approaches would you take into a target: dive-bombing, skip-bombing, strafing?
Joseph Walters:
Well, bridges, buildings, whatever in—just below—that’s going south in Burma—after you get out of the jungles, well, there were industrial buildings. And so, what we did, we turned to a scorched earth policy: anything that moved—and we knew where the Wingate’s Chindits and the Merrill’s Marauders were—anything that moved, destroy it. So, in a case like that, you can just get up, come down, and dive.
There’s one thing here, the P-51, in my mind—I have flown P-40s and P-47s and some of those a little bit but never in combat—but it has one basic limitation, and that is—like after I left China, they had bridges where trains run across and whatnot, and they’d put a thousand troops out there with rifles. Now, with a thousand troops, or five hundred on each end of this thing, you come across that and you’re going to skip-bomb it or whatnot, you can make one pass, maybe. By the time you get to the second, if you got five hundred shots coming at you, they’re going to hit your liquid coolant lines, radiator, something, and you’re going to be bailing out in three or four minutes. About a third of our squadron, about a third, got shot down just from that very thing—ground fire. So, it does not have protection. Now, your P-47 Thunderbolt, you got those big radial air-cooled engines, you can blow some cylinders off that darn thing and it’ll still fly. So, that was great if you’re doing ground strafing, especially in Europe and so on. But the 51 was definitely limited. Just don’t get anyplace where a rifle could reach you or you’re in trouble.
Daniel Jackson:
Right, right. Okay, were there any other big differences between the A-36 and various models of the P-51 that you can think of?
Joseph Walters:
No. It’s the engine that really is the difference in the thing. They’re basically the same machine, but the supercharger, with the Merlin Rolls Royce engine, you just keep on going up. You can go up high as you want to go. You’re going to go higher than anybody else, as a matter of fact. They’re a nice airplane. They’re easy to fly. You don’t have to sweat, don’t have to break your arms trying to control her. It’s easy. They’re just a doll, really are. We didn’t have pressure suits. You were on oxygen of course, just as you go up. We didn’t have pressure suits at those times. Have you flown any yet?
Daniel Jackson:
Yeah, I have my private pilot’s license, and then I’m a glider instructor pilot here at the Academy.
Joseph Walters:
I’m just trying to make this talk a little louder. Okay, now two or three things: you’ve heard of the John Birch Society?
Daniel Jackson:
Yeah.
Joseph Walters:
Okay. You either like it or you hate it. I mean, now here is—he was—I happen to know some of this, or I’ve read from people who knew John Birch or had met him—and so John Birch was born in China of missionary parents, and he was as much a Chinaman as anybody else. He could go across lines between the Japanese and the Chinese and so on. He didn’t particularly believe in the war, but inasmuch as they were missionaries, and they thought, well, there we’re not going to be any missionary if there’s no China. So, he acquiesced and went to Chennault and said, “I can give you information and get you in and out that you don’t know anything about. They got a whole system here. And if you’ll just let me go and leave me alone, if I end up anyplace in China, occupied or not occupied, I’m going to preach the Gospel, and that’s the deal. Take it or leave it.” And Chennault took him up on it. Well, now you remember Jimmy Doolittle?
Daniel Jackson:
Yeah.
Joseph Walters:
You’ve read? Yeah, I think it was February or so of ’42 [sic], Jimmy Doolittle took seventeen [sic] B-25s, I think it was. I had an older brother who was flying B-25s then, but Doolittle was practicing short-field landings down in South Carolina, in Columbia. And so anyway, I know just a little bit about him. As a matter of fact, I went to school, I was trying for West Point and I didn’t make it. I didn’t get the first appointment. But anyway, one of Doolittle’s sons was at the school there. But that was of course 1940. But remember they were heading for Japan to take these bombers off, which Japan never imagined could be done, and they took them on an aircraft carrier of some sort. And they got notified—well, they’re not sure. They had fishing ships or somebody saw him coming in and so they had to take off and fly and get back to China if they could after they bombed Japan. In any case, you know the story probably.
So, they went up there and bombed Japan, and they didn’t have any place to go and land that has been planned. So, anyway, Doolittle and his men bailed out and they got off someplace, and John Birch went in and made connections and got them out of China. Now most people never heard of that—They don’t know. Later on—and he had these connections between the Chinese—those that were loyal. Let’s see here for a minute. In any case, John Birch was going in and out, this, that, and the other, and when the war came and it ended he went up to take—oh, I don’t know, several hundred or thousand, I don’t know what Japanese troops in Northern China. He went out and they were going to sign a release, a surrender, and they got talking to him, and they shot him and murdered John Birch. It’s verified. It was never publicized much. But anyway, that’s a side story. You want to know a bear tale about something?
Daniel Jackson:
Go ahead.
Joseph Walters:
Well, try this one. This is a true story here. I was in Burma and we were getting beat up, and under the conditions there. At the end of the pipeline, you use whatever you got or improvise. And the airplanes, the leading edges of the wings were getting beat up, propellers getting chewed up from gravel and stuff, and they were just getting—they weren’t combat-usable. So I took three planes out of Burma and flew them up into India, and then flew them across to—brain-dead now, on the west—Karachi, on the west side. That’s about like flying across the United States. In any case, as you can appreciate, as far as maps and as far as direction finders and as far as anything like that, you’re just going by your horse sense—where north is and where south is.
In any case, to make a long story short, across the center of India from Karachi on the west side over til you fly the Hump into China, it’s a lot of desert through there. And they flew supplies from there to China, gas, ammunition, everything. It took six gallons of gas from their transports to deliver one into China. They flew those supplies day, night, summer, winter, around the clock. When you’re operating like that with not much between the two ends, what they did, they made a concrete emergency landing strip about every—oh, I don’t know, seventy-five miles or there about—across that desert because if you run into any engine trouble or gasoline or whatever, well, at least you could get it on the landing strips. There was nothing there except just emergency landing. You couldn’t land in the sand. So, I said, yes, I’ll take these three planes out to Karachi and get new ones. And Agra, which is the town where the Taj Mahal, you’ve probably heard of the Taj Mahal. It’s one of the sites of the world, one of founding places. It was on the trip there. And I said to the other two men, “There’s a British airbase there. We can get gas there, so we’ll stop and stay the night at the Taj Mahal down there.”
Okay, so we take off and we fly. You know what I mean when I say, “dead reckoning?”
Daniel Jackson:
Right.
Joseph Walters:
You take a direction and the wind and the speed and the time, and that gets you there, or you are dead! Dead reckoning, you didn’t have much to go on. We just started heading west, didn’t have any radio guidance or anything, but there’s rivers and things. Well, anyway, to make a long story short, we took and had been flying and pretty well out of gas before we got up to Agra. And I looked around, I’m sitting here in the desert, and I look to the left, and look to the right, and I look behind and up and crossways, and I said, “Fellas…” I did have radio contact between us. I said, “I know we’re within twenty or thirty miles here, but I don’t know whether I missed it to our left or to our right. I haven’t got any way of checking. So, it looks like what we’re going to have to do here is we’re going to spiral right up so we got a long-range view and so we know what we’re doing here, or else we’re sitting out in the sand.”
Anyway, just as I started to pull up, I look down and there is a concrete runway right smack under me. And guess what? Three camels with camel drivers were along the side of that. And I took some quick mathematics, figured in about one-and-a-half seconds these birds know where the nearest civilization is. If they don’t, they’re not going to live long, and I was confident we were quite close. So, I said, “Well, fellas, we’re going to land here.” So, we landed and I had been in India so I knew a little bit of Hindi, and so we made our bowing and greetings, you know, and I asked them if they understood Hindi, and they said, “Yes, ambalam Hindi.”
They said yes, and then we pointed and said, “Where Agra? Agra? Agra?” and started pointing around different directions. “Agra?” “No, I’m sorry, we don’t understand.” And I said, Taj Mahal, they’ll know that. “Taj Mahal?” “Ah.” three of them pointed off to our right. Thanked them, got in the airplanes, and flew right to where we were going. Now, my story, I use that story for something that you may or may not know, and that is, if you’re married and if you’re not, ladies always complain about their husbands will never ask for directions. They just will not ask for directions. They won’t ask. And I say, “Ladies, ladies, husbands will ask when it’s necessary, ask directions.” That’s what I use that story for.
Daniel Jackson:
That’s a good story.
Joseph Walters:
I was flying one of the most advanced airplanes in world—although it was beaten up—and I had to ask a camel driver directions. So, I get a response. I teach classes in Bible schools and [inaudible 00:40:51] and so on, and I bring that up. I ask the ladies, “Does your husband—whose husband won’t ask directions?” One of them will timidly raise her hand, then another will say, “Well, neither will my husband.” Pretty soon you got a whole room full of them saying, “Well, no, they won’t ask. They won’t ask,” and I give them this story, so whatever that’s worth. I’ll give you one more if you’ve got time to take it.
Daniel Jackson:
Sure.
Joseph Walters:
In China, when I first went to China, we didn’t fly very much because they didn’t have gas. It was needed for emergencies. But they wouldn’t let us fly maybe once a month, once a couple weeks just to keep your hands in, because you really do. It does make a difference. It’s like walking a tightrope, when it’s getting real critical you better be practiced a lot. Anyway, sometimes they let you fly just a little bit, maybe take the mail over to another base or something or other. Of course, it was just you, yourself. You couldn’t take any passengers. So, I went to take something one day and the mechanics, it was a little damp or something, and the mechanics there said, “Give us a good, fast take off.” It had been sort of dull, not busy, whatnot. And so, yeah, I have a heart for mechanics and I’ll do that. So, I said, “Okay, I’ll give you a good fast takeoff.” So, I’m pretty sure that it was with the Merlin engine. I’m pretty sure it was because this was in China. It wasn’t using the Allison engines then. So, anyway, I turned that around and got off the runway and give a good, fast takeoff. I was holding it down.
It’s hard to tell. Your judgment gets disturbed sometimes. I would judge I was about 175 on the ground, maybe. I was really putting the coal to it. And you know, that thing exploded as far as I was concerned—that something just blew like you hit a brick wall, went kaboom, and it started shaking that airplane like it’s going to shake it apart. And I thought sure as the world that I lost a propeller blade or something here. That’s just the way it was acting, and I didn’t know what in the world happened. So, I just pulled in and I thought, well, I can’t land here like this. I’ll get up here as high as I can get from the initial velocity, then I’ll jump out of this thing. But as I started climbing up, it starts quieting down, still shaking. I thought now why in the world would that smooth out and the aerodynamics would—if it was a notch in something, you know? Anyway, it just smoothed out. It was silk, like silk. And I thought, I’ve lost it, but I don’t know what’s wrong.
Anyway, I went around, come back by the tower, and I said, “I’ve done something here. I’m going to come by real slow. Take a look and see if you can see anything wrong with the airplane.” So, I came back right slow and gently. They said, “It looks like you’ve broken off the landing gear one side there.” And I thought, “Gulp.” So, I backed off, I’d say at least twenty-five miles, and I brought that thing down, the slickest landing that was ever made. I just touched the ground, and it kept pulling to the left and I’d pull it back, and I’d brake it and give it power and so on. And I got thing down and I finally come to a stop before the end of the runway, and did a little, well, I’d say half-a-ground loop and just swung around. And what had happened, it had blown a tire and the tire had jumped off of the rim and was whipping around the landing gear, that is the part that’s just sticking down there. And that thing was just whipping around there at 170 miles an hour. And it was swinging around like that, well that’s where all that shaking was coming from. Well, they had to put on a new tire and a break, the multiple disc brakes, and that froze tight. And of course, the wheel rim was all chewed up, I mean beat up. So, the Lord brought me through those and I’m here and getting old and simple. Can I do anything else for you?
Daniel Jackson:
Just a couple more questions, if you don’t mind, sir? First of all, you talked about Tingkawk Sakan being pretty much just an airfield when you go there. Did the facilities improve over the time that you were stationed there?
Joseph Walters:
They did in the sense that we had a fellow—like what we did, you’d go out, you’d have to be a country boy and you’d get an ax and you’d go out there and cut off some branches and throw them down in a hole, and then get a rope, some tarpaulins, and you’ll survive if you have to. But then they started building. They had brought in some ground personnel that could break out some tree logs that had fallen and then make up just a crude thing. You had no electricity of course, and you could have a—you’re sleeping in cots, but they had the mosquito nettings that you got in. The food got in. Now, food was—the average person lost about twenty-five pounds in those four months because there was nothing fresh and what we did get, most of it was from British. And one thing they’d have, and I don’t care what you got in the world, they had orange marmalade, which I didn’t love, but they’d give you a dozen cans of orange marmalade. The food was pretty scarce. But this is wartime and so we had a job to do, that’s all. Just young, you’re dumb, you’re foolish, and you’ve got a job to do. That’s it. You do it. No more than that, basically.
Daniel Jackson:
Was the 528th the only squadron there?
Joseph Walters:
The 528th, we were the only one there. What was your question again?
Daniel Jackson:
I was just wondering if there were any other squadrons based at Tingkawk Sakan?
Joseph Walters:
Any other?
Daniel Jackson:
Squadrons? Any other airplanes?
Joseph Walters:
No, no, no. No one was there so far as I know. Now when we left—now, what we did, we drove the Japanese down to Myitkyina. You’ll find that on a map. I’ll give you the name of that in just a moment here. I’m doing all this from memory and I have a—
Daniel Jackson:
That’s okay. I know where Myitkyina is.
Joseph Walters:
All right, Myitkyina. As soon as we got down to Myitkyina, the Japanese were in a very bad position. They couldn’t hide like they could in the jungles as much. So, we left, went to China, and I think they brought some P-47s over to Burma to use for the Japanese, against the Japanese. No, it never improved too much. It was a little on the rough side. Of course, you must understand, at that time, basically, was back in—well, the country, a lot of people didn’t have work and it was rough living, so they were tough. They weren’t babied around very much. In other words, I think there was a toughness. I can only say from my own experience, there was much more—there was a tougher personality. They could put up with more than what we do today. That’s just an observation. So, what? So you went on a diet and so you lost a little weight. So what, you know? I didn’t see any rebellion. It was of one purpose and one mind.
Daniel Jackson:
Interesting. When you guys were flying out of that base, did you guys fly primarily close air support for the friendly troops? Or interdiction? Or was it just a pretty good mix of both?
Joseph Walters:
I’ll have to get the structure of what you just said. When you’re going out to a target—
Daniel Jackson:
I was just wondering if you guys were flying primarily close air support for the friendly troops, or if you were flying interdiction mostly against Japanese transportation or rail lines or whatnot? Or if it was just a good mixture of both?
Joseph Walters:
Well, both, I guess, yeah. For example, we could have direct radio contact with the troops sometimes. And sometimes, on one or two occasions, the Japanese, who were just as fluent in English as some of us, would talk to us and give us you know. And we would ask a question that every Japanese there would not know. But anyway, we had direct radio contact. Merrill’s Marauders only had about, I think maybe twenty—it may have been upwards toward a hundred—men that were still able to walk in and fight as they went all the way down through from—you see, between northern Burma and India, there’s some low hills there, and they’re at about four or five thousand feet. And the Japanese had come right up to the bottom of that. But right over the hill was the Digboi oil fields, and they weren’t going to let the Japanese get over there. But it was different, of course. You’d get shot at. Sometimes in an area where you’re going to drop a river or something, and here they got cables hanging down that you don’t know that are there. You’d get into that sort of thing sometimes. We had—our mechanics, I think they did a good job. There was some trouble with—we usually had enough bullets, but sometimes the discharge chutes weren’t just right or something and you don’t want to run out of bullets for the job you’re sent to do, but they did a good job.
Daniel Jackson:
Who would assign you missions? Would you get that from group headquarters?
Joseph Walters:
We had an intelligence officer with the squadron, and they would tell us. Now, unbeknownst to us—to me and some of the others—we had a couple of pilots that were—oh, what do you call it? They’d go out and they’d find the target for you. I’m trying to think of the word. You’ll think I’m simple but that’s all right. I know I’m simple. I can’t think of the word.
Daniel Jackson:
That’s okay, reconnaissance?
Joseph Walters:
Reconnaissance, recon ships, yeah. And they would report back to our intelligence officer, and then he’d look at the map and say, “Here, right here at this cross between this hill and that hill and the other and so on. You’ll see a road. You’ll see this. You’ll see that.” And so we’d get so—although, we didn’t really have maps much, as such. We had some. And besides, you’re sitting in a 51, your knees up against your chin, you got to watch what you’re doing and it’s kind of hard to pull out and unfold a big map, and the weather would be very changing.
But when we had—the best effect was to throw a smoke bomb: get in the vicinity, in the area, and ask them to throw a smoke bomb, well, you can see that. You can’t hide. So, they’d say, “Well, take that out, or a little bit further away,” or whatnot, that just simple way to strafe. We did some rocketry, early rocketry tubes on occasion or so.
Daniel Jackson:
Interesting. Did you have to get special training on that? Or did they just—
Joseph Walters:
Well, I don’t know. Just—no. No, you got to aim. You got tubes strapped onto your struts or your bomb racks and you just aim for what you want to hit. They were three or four inches but they’d take out a building.
Daniel Jackson:
Are there any close air support or interdiction missions that stand out in your memory?
Joseph Walters:
Are there any?
Daniel Jackson:
Could you describe a typical mission that you’d fly out of that airbase? Is there any one that stands out in your memory as particularly significant?
Joseph Walters:
Well, I’d say most of the pilots, by and large, had flown a hundred missions, before they left China, before they left, yeah. I came in as a replacement with two others. I think the squadron had gone down in ’43 in the late summer or something, and they took a big—went down to, way down, and gone and pulled a big a raid and got shot down. So, we came in is as replacements after about a month that they’d been there. There weren’t a lot of people who they are now—see, there’s the 528th, the 529th, 530th, the three squadrons out of the 311th, and we were separated from the other two completely. We actually acted almost like a whole—we had our own squadron commander. So we had very little contact with the other squadrons.
Daniel Jackson:
Right. Was your squadron ever engaged by Japanese fighters while doing these ground support missions?
Joseph Walters:
No, we weren’t. When I first went there, the base that we were on was not run by the 528th. It was some other one, and they got Japanese came in, and we watched them bombing, and watched the guys come in with bombs on them and drop them on the runway when it was safe. We’ve seen some. Like there was a man, they call him England, can’t remember what his first name was. Anyway, I was listening on the bases in India, and he’d say, “Somebody is on my tail.” I can’t think, John England or something. The guy was screaming, “Get him off of my tail, hey.” He says, “Don’t get excited, hold on. He’s off.” That was like calm, someone.
Fighter pilots have to be calm if they’re ever going to make it. That’s just the nature of the beast. You lose your cool and you’ve lost it. I was very fortunate I didn’t get hit, and it wasn’t because I was running. It’s just the Lord was good to me and I got—war is dangerous times. One time I had a—I was riding in a jeep with a couple of other people around the end of the air base, and someone was taking off in a P-51 with two 500-pound bombs. And he just got off the ground a couple hundred feet maybe and his engine was spittering and sputtering, so he dropped his bombs, but they weren’t on a safety. Well, sometimes you get excited and one of them just went, wham. And as you know, an explosion blows up like a dish. I mean, it sprays up, gets bigger as it comes away from it. So, anyway, it was about, I’d say, a couple of hundred feet, this is tea planters in the runway and the bank was maybe three or four feet high. And we were driving along and the first bomb went off, and it stripped leaves off stuff very close, but it hurt somebody a half-a-mile away, frag flying. And then we thought, well, that’s it. The second one, when it got us, couldn’t hear for about a week. You know, your own bombs accidentally.
I’m just rambling and taking your time.
Daniel Jackson:
No, no, that’s okay. I’ve got just two more questions written down.
Joseph Walters:
Sure.
Daniel Jackson:
I was wondering, do you remember who your commanding officers were? Especially there in Burma when you were deployed to Tingkawk Sakan? And do you remember what they were like? What kind of leadership style they had?
Joseph Walters:
Yes. John Habecker, Colonel Habecker, he was a West Point graduate, and he himself flew more missions than other people, and he was a gentleman. He wouldn’t ask you to do something he wouldn’t do. He set a good example, so there was no friction that way. No, very excellent. Most of our squadron—and he’s dead, Colonel Habecker, and I went to his funeral up at West Point. He graduated from West Point during the early part of the 30s, I guess, and he worked at an embassy someplace around the world, and then they put him in charge of the squadron. Most of the five or six of our pilots left alive, we go every year to someplace. So, they’re dying off pretty quick.
Daniel Jackson:
Right. The last thing I wanted to know about was that mission that you mentioned at Hangkow, I was wondering, you had said that you were flying high cover for the B-29s going in?
Joseph Walters:
Yes, B-29s and B-25s, and I guess B-24s. Well, I’ve been trying to think the last day or so why they brought the 29s in, but I do know that the reason was they were dropping incendiaries to burn up all that on the docks, and that was the general of the 20th Air Force, I guess it would be, and I can’t remember his name. And he went over and bombed Japan with—in other words, how much damage can incendiary bombs do? And it was so effective there on that Hangkow or Wuhan area on the Yangtse that he started flying then from India over to Japan and bombing with the fire, I mean incendiary. That really with that wood and timber construction, you can do a lot of damage with fire.
Daniel Jackson:
Right. Did you see the B-29s dropping the incendiaries?
Joseph Walters:
No. Well, I don’t know what I saw because the first thing I noticed, apparently, the fight had been going on for an hour or two when we got there, and I did a dumb thing: I was sitting there at twenty-eight thousand and I’m waiting for somebody to give me orders to do something, until I saw that big red ball just swish right past me real quick. And needless to say, a P-51 will gain speed going down. You don’t know where, you know, somebody’s sitting on your tail, you want to get away from him.
Daniel Jackson:
Okay, so were they circulating fighters in over the course of the day to cover the big bombing?
Joseph Walters:
That I don’t know. They were just chasing each other around as far as I could see.
Daniel Jackson:
Okay.
Joseph Walters:
My wingman, we were coming up after our first dive. We started to flatten out, and then—our motto is never get lower than about 200, 250 miles because the Japanese can maneuver around you and you’re in trouble. Keep your speed up and you’re safe. So, we were climbing up and we’d get down around 250 or so and I could see tracers going right by me and my wingman. And so we just rolled over and went down again. And what happened, right at that time they shot the top off his canopy. Those are not bubble canopies on those early models. And his goggles, it ripped the goggles off the top of his helmet. And he and I, as we started back to Hsian, I was thinking that we weren’t gonna make it, because we’d been chasing around, getting into scraps. Everybody is chasing everybody else. And you eat up gas in a hurry when you fly that way. So, we started flying out. I said to my wingman, “We’re gonna go out of here as far as we can get and bail out in friendly territory, so let’s move along.” And as we moved out there a little bit, I looked down and here’s transports down, set in a grass field, and there are P-40s and whatnot landing and gassing up. I didn’t know there was one going to do that. So, we went down and gassed up. And when he came out, he was shaking. And I said to him, “A little excitement?” He said, “No, I’m about to freeze to death.” I said, “What do you mean?” because this was his first mission. And he said, “Well, they shot the top of my canopy off. I’m freezing.” Poor boy. You get things like that.
Daniel Jackson:
So, did you say that you guys were flying the bubble-canopy-type Mustangs?
Joseph Walters:
That’s the only time we had while I was there was the early models. Your B and your C are identical except one is manufactured in one city and one in Dallas, or someplace. Anyway, we didn’t have any bubble canopies while I was still there. But later on, I think they did have some, but I don’t know anything about that because I left. They sent me home. They sent me home after I had a hundred and fifty missions. And I was an engineering officer for a place down in Florida, a basic school of some sort. Anyway, one day they came there about a month—Napier Field, Dothan, Alabama. They called in all pilots who had been in combat to report to headquarters immediately, and so I thought, well this is probably a special mission. What it was, the war was winding down and they was going to release the first bunch of people, just released in bulk if you wanted to go and be discharged from the service. If you wanted to stay in, well, they could decide that for a while. I don’t know why I’m telling you this except—oh, yes. See, then I hadn’t had any leave—no leave for 150 missions, hadn’t gone on leave anyplace for month or a week or two. So, I took the choice to get out in two days and I signed up for Purdue University. I had a month of leave to use there, so I got discharged officially on the 3rd of July, I think it was. And on the 5th, I was a student at Purdue University.
And I had the two brothers, one who went to West Point and flew B-25s down in New Guinea, and the older one was a flying sergeant and flying liaison planes. That was over in North Africa with the British. This is something that’s hard to believe: he had gone in—well, we were raised on a dairy farm, hard times. And so when you got old enough to go into the service, well, that’s a way to get out of the farm and complete poverty. So, he signed up in 1933 and joined the Army Air Corps. And they took him into the service but they said, “We can’t let you get into the Army Air Corps until there’s an opening. You have to wait for somebody to die or there’s an opening.” I mean, this is peacetime. He went in as a private in the tank corps and stayed in about six months, and then he got into the Air Corps. Then, in 1939 he got promoted to corporal, if you can imagine, and he was up on Long Island, and he became a radioman at a tech school, got to fly with the B-18s, the B-17—no, they were B-18s. They were twin-engine bombers up on Long Island. And they had rugs on the floors, and they were something fancy. So, he learned to fly with that, sort of, being part of the crew. He wasn’t married. He spent every nickel he had on flying lessons. He bought a couple of private planes, and he could maintain them, and he had a license, and so on and so forth. So, comes Pearl Harbor, next thing I know he’s in the African Campaign. And they grabbed him, put him on British float planes to fly and rescue people from the sea and then behind German lines and so on. It is a hard story to believe. But there’s one thing: When you’re losing the war day in and day out, anybody that can do anything, they want him. And right now. And he went on to do some things you would never believe as a flying sergeant. He’s dead now, and the West Point one is dead—died of cancer.
Well, I bent your ear and I’ve told you more than I know as best as I remember.
Daniel Jackson:
Well, I really appreciate you willing to do this interview and everything. You can bet that I’ll send you a copy of the paper when it’s done, probably around April timeframe. Do you happen to have any pictures of you in India or China?
Joseph Walters:
I may have. Yes, let me have your address. I have it. Yes, here’s your address here. Yes, I’ll get a couple sent to you.
Daniel Jackson:
Okay, I appreciate it.
Joseph Walters:
I can send one out of China, I guess, and I probably got one out of Burma.
Daniel Jackson:
Yeah, that’d be great. And I’ll just scan those into the computer and send them right back to you.
Joseph Walters:
Okay, that’s fine. Okay, well, good luck to you, my friend.
Daniel Jackson:
Well, thank you very much, sir. I do appreciate it.
Joseph Walters:
I’m sorry, I don’t have—it’s just the wife and I. We have children, grandchildren, and everything, but not everything is orderly and it takes me a few minutes to look up to spell something, and yet my spelling is terrible.
Daniel Jackson:
That’s okay.
Joseph Walters:
But that’s what they have dictionaries for. The problem is, if you know the word, you have to know how to spell the word before you can find it! Well, okay. I’ll see what I can do for you right away.
Daniel Jackson:
Well, thank you very much, sir. I appreciate it.
Joseph Walters:
Do you know what future direction you’re thinking about? I mean what area?
Daniel Jackson:
Well, I will graduate from here in May, and then I’ll go to pilot training. And then, depending on my performance in pilot training, they’ll assign me to fighters or transports or bombers or whatever.
Joseph Walters:
Okay. Yeah, my brother that went to West Point, he flew B-25s down in New Guinea, early, and got shot down twice or three times and survived it. And at the end of the war, he became director of flight training at West Point and I helped him inspect the troops once, and so on. But he died of cancer. Well, listen, thanks a lot and I hope I haven’t bent your ear too much. I’ll get a couple of pictures out to you.
Daniel Jackson:
You’ve been a big help and I appreciate it. I look forward to seeing those pictures in the mail.
Joseph Walters:
Okay.
Daniel Jackson:
Okay.
Joseph Walters:
Bye-bye. Thank you.
Daniel Jackson:
I’ll talk to you later, sir.
Joseph Walters:
Bye-bye.
Daniel Jackson:
Bye.