Ship of Ghosts by James D. Hornfischer Page B

weak for either. If kept concentrated it is difficult, owing to distance involved, to reach a vital point in time. Wherever it is, it is liable to heavy air attack.” Without fighter cover, the number of ships the Allies had to oppose the Japanese was almost academic. The
Houston
’s sailors marked time by the regular appearances of Japanese bombers overhead, three and four times a day.
    The members of the threadbare U.S. fighter squadron charged with providing land-based fighter cover in the Dutch East Indies were mostly veterans of the Philippines campaign, evacuated and taken to Brisbane, Australia, where they set up a makeshift training program for the green second lieutenants arriving from the States and cobbled together several squadrons from available parts and personnel. It wasn’t the way the Army Air Forces preferred to organize itself, but there were enough planes and people on hand to patch together five squadrons. Assigned to Java, the Seventeenth Pursuit Squadron (Provisional) came into being on January 10. Maj. Charles A. Sprague’s pilots had flown their P-40E Warhawks from Brisbane to Darwin and then on a thirteen-hundred-mile, six-leg flight up to Java.
    Under the overall command of Col. Eugene L. Eubanks in Malang, Sprague’s pilots found a home at the Ngoro (or Blimbing) airdrome, located about forty miles southwest of Surabaya. Flying from the sodden rice fields of their hidden hive, they took to the skies daily in flights of eight, twelve, and sixteen P-40Es to intercept Japanese air strikes and escort the AAF’s own bombing strikes against Japanese targets in the area. The Dutch air warning service relayed ground observers’ aircraft sightings and all-clear signals to Surabaya via wire or native drumbeats. Sprague’s aviators typically got no more than twenty-five minutes of advance notice to get into the air. By the time they reached interception altitude of 21,000 feet or more, as often as not the bombs had already fallen. Gamecock-tough but ill-equipped, they could do little to prevent the daily pasting Surabaya was taking from Japanese bombers. Their own airdromewas substantially safer, owing to their proficiency at hiding their planes under tangles of tapioca brush.
    After the fall of Kendari on January 26, the attacks had been coming incessantly. All during February, the squadron’s pilots waged a determined campaign to intercept the inbound bombers, flying occasional reconnaissance and strike missions over Bali, Lombok, and the surrounding Java Sea as well. They suffered every handicap possible for a gang of aviators, from shortages of spare parts, fuel, and Prestone to muddy airstrips, perpetual bad weather, and a lack of early warning about enemy strikes. That the Japanese opposing them were fiercely well trained, with skills sharpened through years of war on the Asian mainland, was the final imbalance. Nearly every day this pickup squad took to the skies in their P-40s to tangle with the Japanese. Even when the Dutch coast watchers gave them sufficient warning, sometimes the old planes couldn’t get the job done. The oily life was being flown out of them. Their weary engines often had trouble reaching the bombers’ cruising altitude—around 27,000 feet—which was close enough to the P-40E’s service ceiling to make interception difficult even on the best of days.
    Refusing to wear insignia, not only out of egalitarian esprit but also from fear of Japanese snipers, Sprague got up every day and fought, driven by pure, haunted anger. The Japanese had captured his wife and children in the Philippines. His anguish over their fate was well-known to his men. Soon enough they would be anguishing over him.
    On the morning of February 20, the squadron escorted a motley dive-bomber strike against Japanese shipping off Bali following that island’s fall. While a handful of Douglas A-24 Banshees zoomed down to attack the ships, Sprague turned his sixteen Warhawks against a swarm of Japanese