The same year, but two different worlds.The photo on the left is a vacation snapshot of the Grand Canyon, taken in 1941, the car an up-model Chevrolet, a good car that took a young couple from San Diego to Arizona in style and comfort, while getting 17 miles per gallon, according to their trip notes.
They stayed in motor lodges, motels and then the national park's luxurious accommodations. They rode to the bottom of the canyon on a tourist mule train and it was all pretty much like Donald Duck and his nephews' vacations. It was a fun, safe, comfortable world they lived in, and which they expected to continue forever. Why should it not?
This photo to the right below was taken that same year, in the Philippines. Army Air Force pilots walk past obsolete Boeing
P-26A fighter planes. Within weeks of this photo being taken, most of
these men would be dead, killed in a desperate struggle with the
invading Japanese, against whom their old fighter planes were no match.One of my great uncles was in the Army Air Force in the PI when the Japanese attacked, and fought them in those early days. He died in that distant land.
From what I understand -- and I don't know much for sure -- he started out there flying P-26s, then moved on to P-35s, then the P-40s. All I have seen of his days then are a few old snapshots of old planes. He was not killed in combat but became a PoW after the surrender, an experience which he did not survive.
Besides the P26As, we had P-35As that the government had commandeered
from a Swedish order. When they arrived in the Philippines, they still
had the Swedish Air Force markings on them. They were highly maneuverable fighter planes, with a tight turning circle,
but they were under-powered and slow, with a poor rate of climb. They
didn't dive very well either and were under-gunned. Below is a photo of some of
these P-35As taxiing for take-off on a sunny day in the summer of
1941. Many of them would fall in air combat in the weeks after Dec. 8, but, surprisingly perhaps, more were disabled by lack of spare parts than were shot down by the enemy.
The plan was for both the P-26 and P-35 to be replaced by P-40s by the spring of 1942. Some early model P-40Bs had arrived in the PI earlier in 1941, and a number of the current-model P-40E had begun arriving in November, the last shipment on Nov. 25. They were crated and had to be hauled from the docks to the airfields, assembled and flight-tested, the engines slow-timed, while the new pilots who arrived with them and who had never even flown anything more sophisticated than an AT-6 advanced trainer, read the operating manuals and tried to get some flight time in them.
To
the right below is a photo of a P-40B being assembled. Not a lot of
sophisticated equipment to do it. Just some crates and hand tools.Fifty cal. ammunition for their guns came loose in cases. "Belting parties" were held to load the bullets into machine gun belts so they could be fired. I looked at the amount of .50 cal. ammunition that had arrived in the Philippines by December 8, when the Japanese attacked, and compared it to the number of .50 cal. guns in the P-40s that were on hand at that date and calculated that if all of it had been belted -- which it hadn't -- it would give each gun three seconds of firing time.
When the Japanese attacked on Dec. 8, the P-40 pilots, contrary to old myths, acquitted themselves very well on their first encounter, shooting down and killing the pilots of eight Japanese Zeros while losing three of their own planes, and
having only one pilot killed in the air (at least eight of our pilots
were killed on the ground trying to get airborne and 20 of their
airplanes destroyed). They continued to acquit themselves well in
subsequent days.But their fate was sealed from the onset of the war, as no reinforcements or resupplies were ever sent, and the Japanese came down on them in overwhelming force. At the left is a photo of a shot-down P-40. Pretty grim memento mori.
Still, they and our ground forces held out for four months on the mainland of Luzon and another month on Corregidor. Heroes and legends were born in those days. And long since have been forgotten.
We should not forget such times and such events. But, of course, we do. We have our own lives and our own wars, and what happened in grandpa's day seems increasingly irrelevant to our own times. But is it?
Below is a photo the Japanese conquerors of the United States Territory of the Philippine Islands took of a disabled P-35A they seized when they overran one of our airfields. Note the American flag dishonored on the ground as our enemies exult, proud in their possession of a war prize, waving their own banner high.
Do we ever want such a thing to happen again? If we don't, we had better remember that it has happened before, try to understand why it happened, and do whatever we can to make sure that it never happens again. Ever.
