Anti-aircraft Fire

Most of the tours were bombing railroad tracks and railroad stations, and trying to knock out the supplies of ammunition or fuel dumps, and so forth. But I think everything has some humour in it, even when there’s disaster associated with it, and this was on 159. We were detailed to lead in and destroy a large supply of fuel, right in the middle of Bangkok, but not damage the pagodas at all. And this was on a little island right in the middle of the river. So we came in, but the anti-aircraft fire that we’re usually used to was these so-called 20 minute, 20 second predictors. The Japanese would start a fire, and they’d pick up the sound of the aircraft, and they’d fire eight rounds. So, you got so used to it, you’d just count “a thousand and one, a thousand two, a thousand three” round until about “a thousand and fifteen,” then change course, up down or down and over. And then, of course, they’d just fire. Once they hooked onto you, they’d fire.If you counted a little slowly, the tail gunner got a little upset, particularly when that one came a little close. But that was okay. We never got hit, but this time they did what’s called a pattern. It’s set just like a checkerboard, you know. They had to fly through it, and we lost our outboard engine completely on the starboard side. Just came right out of the wing, a big hole. And inboard engine, on the port side, lost three cylinders off of that, so ... Well, we wanted to get away, as far away as we could, of course, from Bangkok at that time. We didn’t think we’d be too popular and, uh … but the aircraft was quite heavy. It wouldn’t, couldn’t lift. So we destroyed all of our navigational equipment, which we had. It was a brand new aircraft and it had this H2 air switch, which was, which was a radar type of thing, very heavy. We got rid of that and we got rid of everything that we could on the aircraft that was, like, including the ground racks. And the aircraft started coming up.