20 for I

Pilots Kenneth Jernstedt and William Reed popped out of a cloud into the hot blue sky over Burma. Below them, on the Jap-held airdrome at Moulmein, 25 or more enemy planes were lined up in tempting rows. The two "Flying Tigers" clawed the field with incendiary bullets, and Jernstedt dropped small fire bombs which he had packed into his flare release. The field was a junk heap of burning, exploding Jap planes when Jernstedt and Reed gunned their P-405 away, over the Salween River.

Two days later the Japs retaliated with a big bomber raid on an American Volunteer Group airdrome. Alone, Pilot Parker Dupuoy tackled the first wave of 27 bombers. Eight Jap fighters charged him. He blew up one fighter at 17,000 ft., then his ammunition ran out and he scooted for the field, on which bombs were already dropping. When he landed, a bomb fragment creased his right arm. Jernstedt, who had gone up to help him, got a bloody face from a shattered windshield, but landed his plane safely.

When the second Jap wave came over, bomb fragments wounded a pilot and two mechanics in a trench flanking the runway. An A.V.G. doctor lugged the pilot to a jeep and drove it across the field to a hospital, with Jap bullets chasing him in the dust like puffs from his own exhaust pipe. One of the mechanics died. In an ambulance plane the pilot and the other mechanic were carried over the mountains to Calcutta.

The A.V.G. flyers were doing deed's that a movie director would reject, in a script, as too fantastic. For every one of their own planes lost, they destroyed at least 20 Japs. Their total bag neared 400. It was beginning to be not enough. With the Japs sending endless replacements, and U.S. replacements not yet in sight, A.V.G. was rapidly becoming a group of grounded heroes.

But they had earned their pay--$600 a month plus a $500 bonus for every Jap shot down. In Kunming they could spend it easily--for cigarets at $2.80 a pack, for Scotch at $45 a bottle, for cheese at $12 a pound, for tooth paste at $4 a tube. In Burma there was nothing to spend it for, except cables to the folks at home. For that they spent a lot.

>Pilot Frank Lindsay Lawlor cabled his 20-year-old wife in San Diego. They were married in 1940, against Navy regulations (he was a fledgling ensign then). Now he has a ten-month-old son, Lindsay. Said his cable: "Shot four Japs. Is Lindsay walking?"

>Pilots Raymond Hastey and Gil Bright took on seven Japs at 21,000 feet. Hastey was on a Jap's tail, firing, when an unnoticed Jap behind shot off the tail of his plane. Hastey stayed with the tumbling wreck for nearly a mile, then bailed out. To give the Japs the least possible chance of potting him as he floated down, he decided to fall another two miles before opening his parachute. Meanwhile he took off his wrist watch, which had been jarred loose, and put it in his pocket; remembered a passage in his textbook which said that in a free fall the sensation is one of floating rather than falling. "Nuts," reflected Pilot Hastey, "I can feel myself falling now and it's terrific."

>John van Kuren ("Scarsdale Jack") Newkirk, death-dealing leader of the A.V.G. Second Pursuit Squadron, was killed last week. Newkirk had started to be a marksman at the age of five, when he got a bow & arrow. When he was ten his friends in Scarsdale, N.Y. dared him to shoot the first person who came along. That person happened to be the county sheriff, but Jack let fly anyway. When he grew up he studied chemistry and aeronautical engineering. A double mastoid operation in childhood almost kept him out of the Navy's air school at Pensacola, but his hearing was normal and he squeezed in. His weak eardrums were twice ruptured during dive-bombing practice. They healed. Last summer Newkirk married a Michigan girl; she took a defense job in California when he went to the Far East with the A.V.G.

After bagging 25 Jap planes, Squadron Leader Newkirk was awarded a D.S.C. by the British Government. To his family he wrote letters describing the flora and fauna of Burma; he told of killing a seven-foot cobra in the barracks one day.

Newkirk's last combat was a raid on the Jap airdrome at Chiengmai in Thailand. He and his squadron dived low, burned or shot up 40 planes on the ground, machine-gunned the Jap pilots as they ran for their cockpits. At the edge of the field a Jap gunner with a machine gun mounted on a truck drew a bead on the enemy leader's plane, poured a long burst into its belly. While all the others zoomed away, Scarsdale Jack's plane stalled, shuddered, crashed in flames.

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