Air Taxi, Air Transport Command and the Bamboo Fleet

During the dark early days of 1942, air transport kept the defenders of the Philippines supplied. Unfortunately, there wasn't enough of it.

The last Liberator to fly into Del Monte.

Someone, some say Napoleon while others that it was Fredrick the Great, once said that “an army marches on its stomach,” a reference to the logistics needed to maintain any military force for combat operations. By 1941 logistics had come to include not only food, but also ammunition, medical supplies and fuel for vehicles and airplanes. It was lack of logistical preparation that led to the Allied defeat in the Philippine Islands, where a large American army was forced to surrender, not because they had been defeated on the battlefield, but because they had run out of food, medicine and other supplies that had been expected to be replenished from the United States in the event of war. Yet even though their efforts turned out to be futile, a small contingent of US Army aviators did the best they could with what they had to resupply American troops fighting on Luzon and Mindanao.

US Army planners had given very little thought to the value of air transportation in the intervening years between the 1918 Armistice and December 7, 1941. The Air Corps Maintenance Command established a number of air transport squadrons just before the war to support HQ Air Force combat squadrons in the United States, Alaska and Panama but none had been assigned to the Army’s Philippines Department even though US senior officials had accepted the fact that war in the Pacific was imminent. A single Douglas C-39, a militarized version of the DC-2, was assigned to the Far East Air Force air depot at Nichols Field in Manila. The only nod in the direction of air transport came with the reassignment of a number of Douglas B-18 transports to logistical transport duty when the 19^th Bombardment Group arrived on Luzon in September 1941 with four squadrons of B-17s. The B-18s were a bomber version of the reliable Douglas DC-2 and could easily be converted to the transport role. However, they remained with the 19^th Bombardment Group, which controlled their operations and restricted their use for support of other units. Consequently, when war broke out, Far East Air Force commander Maj. General Lewis Brereton was forced to turn to the small contingent of civilian airplanes in the island for transport duty.

Prior to the war there had been two civilian aviation concerns in the islands, although by the time war broke out, only one was still in operation. The older of the two, Philippines Air Taxi Company, had operated a small fleet of single-engine airplanes on charter flights throughout the islands. PATCO’s senior pilot and general manager was William R. Bradford, a Texan and World War I veteran who had moved to the islands in the 1920s and had over ten years experience and almost 5,000 hours flying time as an air taxi pilot in the islands. In 1939 another aviator, who would become one of World War II’s greatest characters, came to Manila. Paul I. Gunn, who went by his initials P.I., was a former US Navy enlisted pilot who had originally retired in Honolulu. Gunn went to work for K-T Air Service, which was owned in part by Bob Tice, who would become the first person killed by Japanese bullets on December 7, 1941. While working for Tice, Gunn met wealthy Filipino Andres Soriano, who hired him as his personal pilot. After he arrived in Manila, Gunn convinced Soriano that the time was right to start an island airline.

By 1940 many Americans living in the Philippines were becoming convinced that war with Japan was inevitable. One who saw the writing on the wall was Bill Bradford, who advised his employers not to spend money to expand their aviation business in an attempt to compete with Soriano’s Philippines Airlines because he felt that when war came, they’d lose everything. PATCO’s owners sold their business to Soriano and Bradford joined the Army. His initial assignment was as Base Engineering officer at Nichols Field. When Far East Air Force activated in November, 1941, Bradford was assigned to the new Air Service Command as Technical Inspector. Service Command included the Philippines Air Depot whose commander was Captain Richard W. Fellows, who would later fly transport missions. Another officer who would later play a role in air transport was Lt. Roland J. Barnick, who was assigned as squadron commander of the FEAF Air Service Command headquarters squadron. Another Air Service Command officer who would be involved in transport operations was Captain Cecil S. McFarland, the FEAF Fuel and Oil Officer.

While PATCO had operated single-engine airplanes that had been designed primarily to carry passengers and had limited payload capacity, P.I. Gunn’s Philippines Airlines operated six twin engine Beechcraft D-18s, which the military designated as C-45s. Although considerably smaller than a DC-2 or DC-3, the Twin Beeches, as they were commonly called, could carry up to eight passengers or a sizeable load of cargo, along with two pilots. Three larger Lockheed Lodestars were on order and were on their way to Manila by ship when war broke out. In addition to himself, Gunn originally had five American pilots as well as several Filipinos, but by December, 1941 two had returned to the United States and one had just taken a job with China National Airways Corporation, a Pan American Airways subsidiary based out of Hong Kong.

Although he only had a sixth grade education, P.I. Gunn, who would later became famous as Pappy, possessed superior intelligence and was arguably a mechanical genius. Like so many other young rural men of his day, he had dropped out of school to work on the family farm after a few years of elementary school. In his case, he was forced to drop out after his father, a law enforcement officer, was killed in a shootout with a bad man. He enlisted in the Navy in 1917 while still a teenager at the insistence of a local judge after he was arrested for running moonshine through the foothills of the Ozarks north of Little Rock. As is so typical of the military, Navy classifications personnel sent him to cooks school. His knowledge of mechanics eventually led to a transfer to the motor pool. After he was reassigned to the Naval Aviation training facility at Pensacola, Florida, he caught the attention of the flight line maintenance chief who had him reassigned to the flight line to work on airplanes. When his first hitch in the Navy was up, he was offered the chance to attend flight training for rating as an enlisted pilot.

Gunn had been in Manila for more than two years by the time war broke out. His wife and their four children, all teenagers in 1941, lived with him in a villa not far from Neilson Field, where the Army’s Far East Air Force was also headquartered. Shortly after the outbreak of war, Far East Air Force commander Brereton called Gunn to his office and told him that Philippines Airlines and its airplanes was now a US Army transport squadron and that he was a captain and squadron commander. Gunn had offered to return to the Navy but was told there was no place to use him and to try the Army; he would say later that it didn’t matter to him, war had come and he was in it. A few weeks earlier Gunn had moved his operation to Nichols Field when the Army decided to take the field over completely. Although neither Nichols nor Neilson had yet been attacked – the December 8 attacks were aimed at Clark Field and Iba – Gunn knew an attack was inevitable. He remembered that PATCO had originally operated from a small airfield in northern Manila adjacent to a Chinese cemetery called Grace Park. After PATCO left the airport, the cemetery had developed around it, using the former runways as driveways. Gunn and his men knocked over some of the tombstones and memorials along the driveways so they wouldn’t interfere with the wings of the airplanes. He knew that the Japanese were superstitious and didn’t believe they’d interfere with a cemetery. As it turned out, he was right.

Gunn and his pilots flew passengers and cargo to destinations all over the islands, but particularly to the island of Mindanao where FEAF had set up a new base at the airfield on the Del Monte pineapple plantation on the northern end of the island. Japanese troops landed on the other end of the island at Davao on December 19 but they were separated from the US installations to the north by a rugged mountain range. On the next to last flight he made out of Manila, Gunn flew a load of turkeys to Del Monte for Christmas dinner. He would later report that most of his flights to Mindanao were for passengers – “there were an awful lot of colonels who had to go south after December 10.” December 10 was the day Japanese planes attacked Manila. Gunn and his two American pilots, Captains Harold J. Slingsby and Louis J. Connelly, flew the most dangerous missions. Bradford also flew some missions in the former PAL airplanes, as did McFarland and perhaps Barnick and Fellows. Bradford, in particular, may have also flown some missions.

The flights in the unarmed transports were dangerous, even though most Japanese activity was mostly north of Central Luzon until just before Christmas. The transport pilots took to flying as low as they could get to avoid detection. Gunn never flew above five hundred feet. On December 13, he was flying the first of the transports to be lost when he was attacked by Japanese fighters on the northern end of Cebu, an island some three hundred miles south of Luzon. He managed to get away by diving to the ground and weaving through mountain valleys. The airplane was badly shot up but he nursed it all the way back to Luzon. He flew as straight a course as he could since the airplane was barely flying, and it took him across the Philippines Air Force Zablan Field. The Filipino gunners opened on him with every .30 and .50 caliber machinegun on the field. The airplane was barely flying before, and he knew it wouldn’t make it to Grace Park so he decided to put it down at Nichols Field, which was blacked out. He made a crash-landing and walked away, but the wreck was unsalvageable. One of the other Twin Beeches was later destroyed on the ground at Bataan Air Field by a strafing Japanese fighter.

Other transport in the islands was provided by personnel from the 19^th Bombardment Group, who flew their B-18s on logistical missions to Del Monte, and by the Air Service Command C-39, which had been turned over to the recently arrived 27^th Bombardment Group, along with four B-18s. The 27^th was a light bomber outfit but while its personnel had arrived in Manila in late November, their Douglas A-24 Dauntless dive bombers were following in another convoy which ended up diverting to Australia after the December 8 attacks. When word that the airplanes were in Brisbane reached Manila, the group commander, Major John Davies, was instructed to go to Australia to pick them up. He was allotted three transports, the C-39 and two B-18s, from the pool at Nichols Field for the trip, which only offered enough room for twenty men besides himself. They departed at 0300 on the morning of December 18. The slower C-39 was the first to go. In addition to the dive-bomber pilots, Captain Grant Mahoney, who had already made a name for himself in a series of daring operations in his P-40, had been ordered to Australia. They flew south to Del Monte, where they had to spend the night, then through the Netherlands East Indies and after several stops for fuel and food, finally arrived in Darwin. The three transports were loaded with badly-needed .50-caliber ammunition and returned to the Philippines. The passengers eventually made their way to Townsville in a Qantas Airlines flying boat.

The need for .50 caliber ammunition in the Philippines led to the assignment of four B-24As that had been modified as transports to the Southwest Pacific. Before the war, the Army Ferrying Command received eleven of the Army’s newest bomber, the Consolidated B-24, for use on overseas transport missions supporting the new US missions that had been set up in the UK, the Middle East and the Soviet Union. A few days before Christmas, two Pan American Airways Clippers departed New York bound for Manila with a load of ammunition, but for some reason they were diverted to Karachi, India (now Pakistan.) Three B-24s were sent to Karachi to pick up the ammunition and deliver it to the Philippines. It is unclear if they delivered their loads to Mindanao or if they flew on to Manila or Bataan. Originally, the B-24s were supposed to return to India and resume the transport duties they had been performing before they were diverted for the special mission, but they remained in the Southwest Pacific. A fourth Liberator also arrived in Australia in December carrying Army Air Corps commander Maj. Gen. George Brett, who was on an inspection trip in the Middle East, India and China when war broke out. Brett was reassigned to command a newly organized United States Army Forces in Australia where troops, supplies and airplanes that had been on their way to the Philippines were arriving.

When the 27^th Bombardment Group pilots left Manila, they were expecting to pick up their A-24s and return with them to Luzon. However, the worsening situation in the Far East led President Franklin Roosevelt to decide to write off the Philippines because the Navy, which was still demoralized from the Pearl Harbor attacks, was unwilling to take responsibility for escorting convoys carrying supplies and reinforcements to the islands. Although the Navy had lost four battleships at Pearl Harbor, none of the cruisers or destroyers had been sunk or even severely damaged while the three carriers assigned to the Pacific Fleet were at sea. It still had plenty of strength and could have brought in reinforcements from the Atlantic Fleet, but senior naval officers were afraid to leave Hawaii undefended or to risk the three carriers to Japanese air attack. Far East Air Force commander Brereton had already concluded that his headquarters and force of heavy bombers should be removed to a location where they would be out of range of Japanese aircraft. On Christmas Eve, MacArthur issued an order to Brereton to move his headquarters and the following day the FEAF headquarters left Manila. Brereton originally intended for P.I. Gunn to fly him out, but the former naval aviator was on a mission to Mindanao and was late returning so the FEAF commander left in a Navy PBY that was bound for Java and had seats for four Army personnel. He had to make a fifty-mile trip by road to Mariveles to catch the flight; had he simply waited, he could have gone out with Gunn. After he arrived at Surabaya, he decided to set up his headquarters there instead of at Darwin as originally planned. His intention was to establish a base for heavy bombers for operations against Japanese targets in the Philippines and to refuel pursuit ships coming up from Australia. The Navy had already set up operations near the city.

Gunn returned to Manila and landed at Nielson Field to talk to Brereton. When he found that the FEAF commander wasn’t there, he got back into his airplane and flew to Grace Park. At some point he went home to tell his wife he was leaving and give her some money. He was not aware that he was being transferred to Australia. If he had, he would have flown his family to Mindanao first then come back to Manila to pick up his load of passengers. He would return to Luzon, and would actually land his C-45 on Quezon Avenue in an attempt to retrieve his family, but he wouldn’t see them again until 1945. On Christmas Day at 3:30 PM he and Slingsby left from Grace Park with eleven FEAF staff officers as passengers. Two days later they reached Australia. When he learned that they were to remain there, he was fit to be tied. For the next three years he had only one goal in life – to defeat the Japanese and free his family.

The other two Beechcraft were still on Luzon, (There may have been three; one was lost at Bataan at some point and the date of the loss isn’t recorded.) A few days after Christmas Col. Harold George, who was now the senior air officer in the Philippines, ordered fourteen pilots from the 17^th and 20^th Pursuit Squadrons to Australia where a shipment of P-40s originally intended for Manila had arrived. On December 31 Captain Louis J. Connelly departed at 4:00 AM with his contingent of fighter pilots on board. Their first stop was at Tarakan, where Japanese aircraft had already begun attacking the field. They managed to get in and out unmolested and arrived at Darwin on January 2. The passengers were picked up the next day by a LB-30 that had been assigned as Brereton’s personal airplane. The LB-30 was the designation of a special version of the B-24 that had been built for export to Britain and France. When the US entered the war, a number of LB-30s that had been consigned to the British were repossessed and assigned to the 7^th Bombardment Group, which was building up strength in preparation for a move to the Philippines. Some were reconfigured for transport use.

On January 2 the second contingent of fighter pilots – which included Lt. Boyd “Buzz” Wagner, America’s first ace of the war, who had been wounded by shrapnel and pieces of his windshield on December 22 – went out to a field north of Bataan to depart. They were somewhat put off by the sight of the Beechcraft, which had previously been strafed at Neilson Field and had – literally – been repaired with baling wire and duct tape. The leading edge of the left wing had been replaced with a piece of tin. They counted 130 bullet holes in the airplane’s skin. An additional fifty gallons of gasoline was installed in the cargo compartment in Jerry cans. A pipe had been rigged in the back of the airplane with a funnel so they could pour the gasoline into it and refuel the wing tanks in flight. Captain Cecil McFarland, the FEAF fuels officer, was assigned to fly it. Although they were expecting to be attacked at any moment, they flew the length of Bataan over a layer of broken clouds and never saw a Japanese airplane. When McFarland landed at Del Monte, he found that only one brake was working – and that marginally – while the tail wheel wouldn’t lock.

They remained at Del Monte for two days while a crew of mechanics from the 19^th Bombardment Group and the 5^th Air Base Group worked on the airplane. The mechanics weren’t able to accomplish much. McFarland departed Mindanao with his passengers on the morning of January 4 under a three hundred foot overcast, which protected them from Japanese aircraft. Their map was the size of a magazine and covered the entire Pacific, so their navigation was truly a WAG (wild-ass guess.) The route they and all of the other airplanes took was actually roundabout. It was only 1,300 nautical miles from Del Monte to Darwin, but much of it was overwater so the pilots prudently attempted to stay close to land by flying along the chain of islands that connected the Philippines to Borneo. When they reached the vicinity of Tarakan, they weren’t sure if they were north or south of the field. They turned south, which turned out to be the wrong direction, then turned around and headed in the opposite direction and finally found the field. By that time their last five-gallon can of gasoline had been depleted and the engines were running, or trying too, on nothing but fumes. They coughed their last just as the wheels touched down.

After refueling they discovered that one of the magnetos on the right engine wasn’t operating but, reasoning that they wouldn’t be able to get it repaired at Tarakan, they decided to take the airplane further south anyway. The weather was bad, with lowering ceilings, and they flew down the coast of Borneo at a hundred feet until they arrived at Balikpapan that afternoon. When they reached Bandjarmasin on the south of Borneo, the right engine quit altogether. After working for twenty-four hours to repair it, they gave up and sent a message to the Navy at Surabaya begging to be picked up. On the afternoon of January 6 a PBY landed to pick them up and took them on Java. McFarland waited with the airplane for parts, and after they arrived he flew it on to Java.

January 8 saw the end of the first month of war in the Philippines, and the situation had become desperate. Although General Douglas MacArthur, the senior officer in the islands, was being reassured that “help is on the way,” he was being given false assurance. While the messages were technically true, the reinforcements and supplies were actually going to Australia. Several convoys that had been on their way to Manila when war broke out were diverted to Brisbane and Melbourne. Later convoys that departed as late as early January were also diverted. Some ships went into Cebu. Two groups of heavy bombers that had been intended for service in the Philippines before the war were diverted to Australia and Java, although one didn’t arrive until mid-1942. MacArthur was led to believe that a large relief force was being built up in Australia to come to his aid. In reality, while a sizeable force was arriving in the Land Down Under, there was very little organization. Furthermore, the Japanese had defeated the British in Singapore and were moving into the East Indies.

After Japanese troops began breaking through US lines in Central Luzon, MacArthur decided to execute the war plan that called for all troops to withdraw to the Bataan Peninsula and the island fortress of Corregidor to wage a defensive war until reinforcements could arrive. It was a sound plan and history records just how effective the US and Filipino troops were as they battled the Japanese on Bataan, but no reinforcements ever arrived. The only supplies that came in were mostly aboard submarines, or on the small fleet of transport airplanes that was, in fact, being built up in Australia.

Records of US activities in the early months of the war in the Southwest Pacific are practically non-existent, and what little is known about operations in the region came mostly by word of mouth. It is known that after they arrived in Australia, Captain P.I. Gunn and his pilots flew missions back to the Philippines in the C-45s, the C-39 and the B-18s, sometimes going as far as Bataan. They were joined in their efforts by other US pilots who had arrived in Australia by ship as part of the 7^th Bombardment Group and the 35^th Pursuit Group but whose airplanes had yet to arrive or were in various stages of assembly. While the little Beechcrafts could make the trip from Darwin to Mindanao, larger transports were arriving in Australia. The three Philippines Airlines Lockheed Lodestars arrived in Brisbane in the same convoy that brought in the crews for the 7^th Bombardment Group and the 35^th Pursuit Group along with eighteen P-40s in crates and the 27^th Bombardment Groups’ dive-bombers. The Lodestars were appropriated by the US Army, given the military designation C-60 and painted olive drab. A quintet of Douglas C-53s, a version of the DC-3 that had been configured to carry troops, arrived in a convoy.

Throughout January, Captain Gunn was fighting his own private war. He was a man driven by fear for his family and was trying to figure out a way to free them. On January 7 he led a flight of P-40s crewed by some of the men who had just been flown out the Philippines to Java. The P-40s had been sitting in crates on the docks at Brisbane when Gunn found them and rounded up a crew of mechanics to assemble them. A week later he led another flight of P-40s north to Darwin, then on to Java. On January 25 he somehow acquired a B-17Cs that had been abandoned at Darwin and used it to fly supplies to Java. When a Japanese fleet was sighted in the Makassar Strait, he loaded the B-17 with bombs and flew seven missions to attack the enemy ships. His records indicate that he was nominated for a Distinguished Service Cross for his actions but he never got it.

He flew flights back to the Philippines, carrying badly needed supplies. It was during this period that he landed on Quezon Boulevard in Manila after paying a Filipino soldier a substantial sum of money to find his family and bring them to him. He landed at the appointed time and waited for a quarter of an hour, then took off when no one showed up. Some believe he made his way to Rabaul, New Britain, which was still in Australian hands, and was shot down in a RAAF Wirraway fighter, an airplane developed from the North American AT-6 trainer although Australian records make no mention of him having been there. He is reported to have spent two weeks walking out of the jungle and finally made contact with Australian troops. According to his son Nathaniel, his hair had turned white, and when he returned to Australia the young officers and enlisted men started calling him Pappy. The name stuck, even though his hair soon turned back to its normal brown.

While Gunn was incognito, Far East Air Force activated the FEAF Air Transport Command, with 1^st Lieutenant Edgar Hampton, who had formerly been Brereton’s aide, as commander. The three B-24 transports were reassigned to the new command, which consisted initially of one squadron which eventually became the 21^st Transport Squadron. Ten trained transport crewmembers also joined the unit, which was made up primarily of men who had come to Australia with bomber squadrons, but who were waiting for airplanes to fly. When Gunn returned with the B-17 in early February, he was placed in command. The new organization was responsible for controlling all transport aircraft in the Far East Air Force area of responsibility, which included Australia, New Guinea, the Philippines and the Netherlands East Indies, which were still in Allied hands, at least for the time being. The term “transport aircraft” was a broad one, as it included former combat aircraft, particularly older B-17s which had been replaced by newer airplanes in the combat squadrons, as well as an assortment of civilian transports that had been appropriated by the military. Moving supplies to the Philippines and bringing personnel out was the new command’s major mission, but Japanese naval forces were threatening Java and it became involved in supporting bomber and pursuit squadrons on the huge island and in Australia’s Northern Territories. One of the new command’s first operations was the transport of a US antiaircraft battalion and its guns to Darwin in the first military airlift in US military history.

Although the 19^th Bombardment Group and some personnel from the 27^th Bombardment Group and 24^th Pursuit Group had been pulled out of the Philippines, a sizeable contingent of air force personnel still remained in the islands. Some had been assigned to ground combat duty on Bataan, but the remaining P-40s and P-35s on Luzon continued to operate from airfields on the peninsula and from Mindanao, where nine P-40s were transferred in early January. Although the larger transports had been sent to Australia, a handful of civilian light airplanes and a few obsolete military airplanes remained on Luzon and the pilots of the Air Service Command decided to start using them for scrounging flights. Major Bill Bradford, who the younger pilots had started calling “Jitters Bill” because he seemed to always have the jitters (perhaps from alcoholism), assumed a form of command because some of the airplanes had previously belonged to his former employer, Philippines Air Taxi Corporation.

Although a number of claims have been made of the types of aircraft rounded up by Bradford, there is no exact record other than by manufacturer. They included at least one Bellanca, a WACO, a Fairchild, two Beechcraft and two “decrepit” P-35s along with a Curtis O-1. In addition, Captain Joe Moore, commander of the 20^th Pursuit Squadron, supervised the raising of a US Navy Grumman Duck amphibian that had previously been sunk by Japanese bombs. There were also two PBYs used for inter-island transportation, at least for a time. The Bellanca, which was evidently flown mostly by Bradford, was most likely the largest of the single-engine airplanes. The company developed a series of large cabin single-engine airplanes in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Whether the single engine airplanes had been put to use by the military as transports before the final weeks of the Bataan campaign is unclear. Pappy Gunn’s transports definitely were operating into Bataan prior to the defeat in Java. Very little has ever been published about transport operations in the Philippines other than what little was put into the 24^th Pursuit Group history, which was actually written long after the Allied defeat and is believed to be largely contrived.

At some point during the latter stages of the struggle for Bataan, Bradford asked General George – Col. Harold George had been promoted to brigadier general in January – for permission to take the Bellanca to Cebu, which was still in friendly hands, to pick up a load of medical supplies and rations. George was enthusiastic about the idea and gave permission. Bradford made two trips to Cebu and came back with quinine and other medical supplies along with all of the food he could carry. Captain William Edwin Dyess, a hero of Bataan who later escaped from the POW camp at Davao, related to interviewer Charles Leavelle of the Chicago Tribune, that the Bellanca had food stashed all over it. Encouraged by his success, other pilots, mostly from the Air Service Command, began going out on foraging missions. A Captain Whitfield flew the Beechcraft while Captain Fellows and a Captain William Cummings flew two of the other airplanes. Some of the grounded pursuit pilots also made trips to Cebu and Mindanao, including Dyess, who flew at least one flight to Cebu. As it became apparent that the little fleet of decrepit airplanes could get through, they were assigned to transport passengers to Mindanao and bring back whatever supplies they could. The men on Bataan and Corregidor began referring to the small air transport unit as The Bamboo Fleet.

While getting supplies to Bataan was difficult, it was even more difficult to bring anything in to the Philippines from outside. US Army Col. John A. Robenson, who was originally assigned as base commander at Darwin, was allocated a $10 million fund to purchase supplies for the Philippines and contract with ship’s captains who were willing to attempt the journey. While supplies in Java and Australia were plentiful, captains and crews willing to make the attempt to get through the Japanese ships patrolling the Celebes Sea were not. Only three blockade runners managed to actually reach the Philippines, along with six submarines. Several others started but were either intercepted and sunk or their captains turned back. Consequently, the ATC and the B-17s and LB-30s from the 19^th Bombardment Group became the means of delivering supplies to Mindanao and bringing men out.

In early February when the FEAF Air Transport Command activated, the three B-24 transports that had previously belonged to the Army Ferrying Command and their crews transferred into it. They performed heroic service in Java, but two were lost during the evacuation when they were caught at Broome, Australia by a Japanese air attack. A warning had been given for all airplanes to be off of the ground by 10:00 AM, but the two B-24s and two B-17s were still on the ground while fifteen flying boats were in the harbor when a flight of nine Japanese Zeros attacked. One B-24was caught on the ground and strafed while the other was shot down immediately after taking off from the Broome airport with a load of wounded on board and crashed into the harbor. Only two passengers survived. Fortunately, the third Liberator had departed several hours earlier for Melbourne and was out of harm’s way. It could continue to provide valuable air transport services until early May, when its crew was forced to ditch due to fuel exhaustion.

After the US withdrawal from Java, the 19^th BG B-17s and LB-30s joined the remaining Liberator and other FEAF transports on transport missions to Mindanao. Unfortunately, few of the B-17s were even flyable due to a lack of parts. With Java and Borneo in Japanese hands, flights from Darwin to Mindanao no longer had the option of landing to refuel and rest, but were forced to fly non-stop over Japanese-occupied territory. All of the FEAF transports had the capabilities to fly all the way, but except for a single tail-gun in the remaining Liberator, they were unarmed. Still, they continued operations by planning flights so they transited Japanese-held territory mostly at night.

On March 20, 1942 Captain Gunn made a trip in his personal C-45 with Cecil McFarland riding as his copilot. As the Gasoline and Oil Officer for Far East Air Force, McFarland was returning to the islands to check on aviation gasoline supplies. Seven hours after takeoff from Darwin, they lost an engine. As they were approaching the vicinity of Zamboanga, the C-45 was spotted in the moonlight by a Japanese float-plane fighter. Gunn was forced to crash-land on a nearby island. Friendly Filipinos took the two the airmen and their cargo across Illana Bay in a boat and they eventually were transported to Del Monte. There Gunn found a B-17 that had been abandoned due to an ailing engine. He rounded up a crew of mechanics and they managed to repair the engine. Gunn loaded as many of the mechanics on the airplane as he could carry and flew it to Darwin. McFarland remained on Mindanao, and was later captured by the Japanese. He died while a POW.

Gunn and McFarland were both awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, and on the same order DFCs were also awarded to Captain Harl Pease and his crew for a flight they made to Del Monte Field on March 11 in a B-17 to deliver supplies. There is a popular myth that Pease was at Del Monte when MacArthur arrived and that the general took one look at his worn out airplane and refused to ride in it. But as appealing as the story may be to MacArthur critics, when Pease and his crew landed at Del Monte, the quartet of PT Boats carrying the general and his staff, including Brig. Gen. Harold H. George, were still at least two hundred miles away to the north. According to his DFC citation, Pease and his crew departed Darwin on March 11 for the 1,500 mile flight then, after offloading their cargo, departed again with sixteen Air Corps passengers for the return flight. Pease’ flight was heroic because the hydraulic system had gone out, yet the crew continued on to land without brakes. They returned to Batchelor Field in the same condition. Pease had to ground-loop the airplane to stop at both destinations.

For some reason General Brett decided against using one of the FEAF transports to pick up MacArthur and his party at Mindanao. No reason has ever been given for his decision, but he wanted to pick him up in a B-17, probably because the Flying Fortresses were armed. None of the 19^th Bombardment Group B-17s were in commission, but another squadron that had seen little combat had arrived in Australia, but was under Navy control. Brett wired Washington to request that the squadron be transferred to his command, and sent three of the Fortresses to Mindanao to pick up the MacArthur party. When they arrived at Darwin, they switched to a FEAF C-47, which took off immediately after the last member of the party boarded the airplane. MacArthur was upset that the crew acted so hastily – until he was informed that a flight of Japanese aircraft had been spotted headed for the airfield.

The little airplanes of The Bamboo Fleet continued operating out of the airfields on Bataan as long as they were flyable. According to the USAAF history, the WACO was shot down near Del Monte with a load of passengers onboard. By the time of the surrender of Bataan, only the Bellanca remained, along with two P-35s and two P-40s. The Duck was at Bataan Airfield but its engine was inoperable. Ed Dyess was in charge of operations at Bataan Field and he sent the two P-40s – including his own – and the P-35s to Cebu, which had yet to be occupied by the Japanese. The two P-35s each carried another pilot in their baggage compartment. Dyess had been ordered to leave, but he elected to disobey the order and send one of his other pilots out in his place and remain on Bataan with his men. His maintenance officer finally managed to get the Duck’s engine running and he sent it out with five officers and Filipino Carlos Romulo on board. Captain Roland Barnick was the pilot. They got as far as Panay.

There are differing accounts as to the final flight of the Bamboo Fleet. Before the fall of Bataan, Maj. Bill Bradford took the Bellanca on a special mission to Mindanao by way of Panay, which was still in friendly hands but its status wasn’t known to the men on Bataan at the time. It was the last time Dyess saw him. Somehow, he got word that Bradford made it to Mindanao and became a POW, but that information was false. Exactly what Bradford did hasn’t been fully recorded and the official USAAF history is misleading. It relates that he returned to Corregidor with a load of precious quinine and was departing for another urgent mission when he cracked up on takeoff. In reality, Bradford took off from Corregidor with a Japanese-American agent, another Japanese-American civilian who had been in Manila and a Chinese general on board. Another Nisei intelligence agent was supposed to be with him, but Sgt. Richard Sakakida gave up his seat to the civilian. Sakakida remained on Corregidor and after the American surrender he managed to infiltrate the Japanese headquarters in Manila. That he was still in Manila was highly classified and the official records were altered for his protection.

Bradford evidently cracked up the Bellanca at Panay because Pappy Gunn, who had returned to the Philippines in a B-25 as part of a mission commanded by Brig. Gen. Ralph Royce, flew up from Mindanao to pick his passengers up. Just what happened to Bradford after that is unclear, but he somehow made his way to Australia. He returned to the United States and was stationed at the Army Air Field at Hondo, Texas. He was a lieutenant colonel when he was interviewed by a USAAF journalist in 1944. Based on comments made by Carlos Romulo in an article he wrote for the Rotary Club magazine, Bradford evidently flew him from Panay to Mindanao. Considering that there were several days between the time the Duck left Bataan until Gunn picked up the passengers at Panay, Bradford evidently operated out of Mindanao for a few days, and flew a load of quinine to Corregidor when he went up to pick up the three Asians.

The Royce mission operated out of the Del Monte complex for two days, then departed for Darwin, allegedly because General Ralph got word that Japanese troops were only a few miles away. However, Del Monte remained in friendly hands for at least two more weeks. Transports continued coming up from Darwin to deliver supplies and pick up passengers who were being evacuated. The remaining Air Transport Command B-24, in particular, made several flights. Its original pilot, Captain Ben Funk, had been replaced by Captain Alvin J. Mueller, who had gone to the Philippines with the 19^th Bombardment Group and had already won a Distinguished Service Cross for a mission to Lingayen on Christmas Day, 1941. Mueller, like Pappy Gunn, was one of those men who went far beyond the call of duty. After flying a number of missions and performing other duties with the 19^th Bombardment Group, he began flying transport missions in the ATC Liberator. During the evening of April 29, 1942 Mueller’s crew made the last recorded landing at Del Monte Field, and after a three hour ground time, returned to Batchelor Field with a load of passengers.

Six days later on the night of May 5, Mueller and his crew took off for what turned out to be their final mission to Mindanao. They arrived over Del Monte to find the field completely dark, and there was no signal that it was safe to land. Mueller circled over the field for over an hour, but no signal was ever seen so he turned back for Darwin, knowing that he had used up precious fuel and there was no possibility they would make it back to a safe haven. Still, he continued flying as long as the fuel held out. They were still 800 miles north of Darwin when the aerial engineer advised that it was time to put the airplane down. Mueller spotted an island and decided to ditch just offshore in a lagoon. Although the B-24 would develop a terrible reputation for its ditching capabilities, the ditching was successful. The crew survived on the island for several days until they were finally picked up by a submarine.

Lt. General Jonathan Wainwright, who had been appointed Allied commander in the Philippines, surrendered the island fortress of Corregidor on May 6, the day after Mueller’s final flight to Del Monte. The Japanese surrender terms were that he must surrender all forces in the islands. There was still a large Allied force on Mindanao – some say as many as 30,000 American and Filipino troops – but Wainwright surrendered them all. The Philippines were now entirely in Japanese hands.

Immediately after he arrived in Australia, General Douglas MacArthur made a promise to the Filipino people that “I shall return,” a promise he was determined to keep. He did, and his return at Tacloban on Leyte on October 20, 1944 was made possible to a large extent because of the accomplishments of the 54^th Troop Carrier Wing, the successor to Pappy Gunn’s Air Transport Command. The small force of transports he had put together in Australia in early 1942 and had grown to a large troop carrier force that enabled American and Australian troops to overcome the natural obstacles on New Guinea and begin MacArthur’s march to make good on his promise.

The End