Pressure on Airfield

Interviewer: During this period you referred to the pressure that you were putting on the Japanese airfields, can you describe what that pressure actually was?

Well we would attack a squadron, I haven't emphasized this, but we were sort of lone wolves. Most of our operations were done with two air crafts or one. We got, later in the war, just one because it, bigger bang for your buck. Ah, but we did have squadron attacks on airfields, and that would be six aircraft usually, sometimes more. And ah, we would try to surprise them and come out of the sun at dawn ah... and we drove them back from the forward airstrips that existed from ah, the days when Burma was um, part of the Indian (inaudible) of Great Britain. They built airfields, Magway and Prome and several others along the Irrawady, they were all-weather airstrips. And all-weather is a key word here because you can't fly out of a, a grass field ah, for five months of the year. So ah, so they were driven back to places like Yeu, Meiktila, which was a big group of airfields in Central Burma and Myingyon at Rangoon. And back, and they had big airfields in Northern Siam also.