God is My Co-pilot

This book is about one man’s adventure from learning to fly at a young age in the rural South to piloting a fighter plane against the Japanese China during WWII. He witnessed a plane crash at a very young age in which the pilot died, but was obsessed with flying thereafter and was able to purchase his own plane as a teenager when surplus WWI planes were up for auction in a town nearby. He found a friend to teach him in exchange for sharing the plane and enlisted when he could in order to make flying his profession. He attended West Point and when he was done there was trained as a pilot. As he was born back in 1908, he was much too young for WWI and when he completed flight training WWII was still quite a ways off.

Luckily for him, the army took over airmail service from the USPS at that time and he was put to work there. His main route was Chicago to NYC with stops at cities in between, often Cleveland. This was a challenging route and many airmail pilots at the time perished in poor weather or due to the poor reliability of the machines of the time. This experience taught him a lot about flying different kinds of planes in all kinds of conditions and how to navigate. Later he worked as a pilot trainer for the army in the west. Finally when the attack on Pearl Harbor happens, he lobbies his superiors for a chance to get involved. They say he’s too old to be a fighter pilot at 34, but he’s finally given a mission to China.

Scott was given a B17 with a crew of ten and told to report to China. They had a group of ten bombers making the trip. The range of those planes was not great enough to make a direct flight of course, and with the Japanese in the way, the only way to get there was to head East. America was also at war with Germany by then so going through Europe wouldn’t be possible either. They flew South to Panama then to Brazil. From Brazil to Africa was his first flight over so much ocean and the navigator made an error which Scott trusted for too long, but by drawing on his experience from his days flying airmail he was able to land them at the desired location. From there they crossed Africa in several jumps, then to India and then across India to Assam in the East. They intended to move ahead to China from there but it wasn’t possible. The was had come to Burma and the last road to supply the Chinese was being threatened. They had to use their bombers to fly supplies over the hump to Kunming just to keep the pilots there, the Flying Tigers, operating and fighting.

This was immensely disappointing to everyone who had been looking forward to fighting the Japanese for months, but it was an important job and a terribly difficult one, too. The Japanese were all over Burma so to avoid them and the bad weather, they’d fly up over the clouds. From there they couldn’t see the ground though so they’d navigate by instruments, but because it was often windy, they could be quite far off course by the time they needed to come down, and if they had blown far enough off course, they might fly down through the clouds and straight into a mountain because there were so many high mountains in the area. Many pilots died this way.

Eventually the Japanese took all of Burma and the few remaining Chinese were either captured or had to make a long retreat to Yunnan or India. At that time, Scott was given urgent orders to fly into Burma to evacuate General Stillwell and his party as the Japanese were closing in fast. Scott managed to find the correct location and land the plane and find Stillwell, but Stillwell refused! He insisted on walking out to India with all of his men. So Scott took whoever was willing to come and returned to Kunming. For the following weeks, he dropped vital supplies on the route Stillwell said he would take, and sure enough after about three weeks Stillwell showed up in Assam.

After some time, a small and obsolete fighter called a P-43 was sent to Assam and Scott took it for himself. He took it to fly into Burma in his spare time. One time, because he had seen the giant mountains in the Himalayas on his normal route ferrying supplies, he took the little fighter to Everest to see how high the little plane could go. It took a long time to climb high enough, but it was able to get to roughly 40,000 feet, well over the peak of Everest at 29,000 feet. The air was thin and the cockpit was unpressurized, but he brought oxygen to breathe and a camera to take photos. At that time, few people had flown over the mountain.

After flying the ferry route for some time and getting to know the Flying Tigers and their commander, Chennault, Scott sent a letter begging for a real fighter, a P-40 which he could fly from Assam. Chennault agreed, and when a group of P-40s came in from America, Scott took one in Assam before they were sent on to Kunming.

Scott flew this P-40 all over Burma by himself and was eventually able to do quite a lot of damage. He strafed troops marching in the forest, shot up trucks, trains, and aircraft on the ground when he had the chance. Eventually he added a 500 pound bomb and used that on worthy targets. He did significant damage to the Japanese in Burma, but he never got a chance to engage an enemy pilot.

Finally his chance came. The volunteers who made up the AVG, known as the Flying Tigers, were no longer to be volunteers but members of the Army. Because of the way this was pitched to them, most of them decided to simply return home. Only five remained, so Scott was brought in as a flight leader while new pilots from America would be brought in. He couldn’t bring his plane from Assam but he got a new one in Kunming and joined the group.

As a fighter pilot in China Scott had great success engaging enemy fighters and bombers. The P-40 was not a superior aircraft to the Zero which was the most often engaged Japanese fighter. They had different strengths. The Zero could fly higher, climb faster, and turn much faster than the heavier P-40. The P-40, on the other hand, had better guns, much better armor, and could dive faster. It seems that the key reason that the P-40s were so much more successful was pilot training. Scott’s assessment was that the Japanese were not technically poor flyers, but when they got into an engagement they were nervous, anxious, and made foolish mistakes. Scott shot down at least 12 enemy aircraft without being shot down once, and the average ratios for that group was 12:1.

One particular show of strength was at night when they were called to protect Hengyang from Japanese bombers. At night it was difficult to located the enemy so they’d spread out in order to find them. Allison found them first and approached until he was right up behind them and then radioed, “watch the fireworks”. One by one, he shot three of them out of the sky with the whole city looking up in excitement as the burning planes lit up the whole sky. They had been getting bombed by the Japanese for months with no way to fight back. The other two bombers turned and ran, but the others chased them and shot them down too. The Chinese set out with farming tools to find the fallen Japanese pilots. But Allison was shot up and his plane couldn’t make it home, so he found a river where he could put it down and much of it could be salvaged later. It’s a dangerous landing at night and the others feared he wouldn’t survive it. Then, as they sat around discussing the battle, Allison arrived surrounded by Chinese who were carrying him on a sedan chair like a hero. He was mostly uninjured.

A funny detail of the war was the propaganda aspect. At that time, the villagers didn’t always know whose side a pilot was on when he fell out of the sky, so the Americans had a message on their back and they carried a card in several languages which said that they’re Americans there to help the Chinese people fight the evil Japanese. One time, a pilot named Sawyer went down near Lijiang. The people who found him were getting ready to kill him because none of them could read any of the languages on his card. Finally, someone showed up who seemed to explain that he was a friend. It was when he saw the sign of the US army, a blue and white star. It wasn’t until later that they figured out why that symbol was familiar. Some time earlier, when they were stationed in Kunming, someone flying over the hump noticed that a small Chinese village between Lijiang and Dali was besieged by horsemen that had come across the river from Burma. So Scott flew over there and blasted a few of the horsemen with small bombs and strafed them a few times. The horsemen retreated and for several days Scott returned with his P-40 to ensure that everything was alright in the village. The villagers must have noticed the star on the tail of the P-40 as it flew around the village.

The book is full of many such stories. The book ends with a couple of major raids on Hong Kong as the Americans in China finally get a small fleet of bombers to work with, and by this time they have virtual air-superiority over all of China.