YANKEE DOODLE
—
Mystery Man Slaps Japs
This is the last in a series of stories from behind the scenes of war, telling of the daring and courage of the hush-hush heroes of the present conflict.
By HAROLD A. ALBERT
The Japs just didn't know what hit them. Striking out of the fleecy China clouds, a mystery air force blew Tokyo's over-boasted invincible squadron into tatters of flaming fuselage and seared chunks of metal.
Four days later, 1,000 miles away, a second Tokyo ace squadron tried to strike at lease-lend supplies piled on the docks at Rangoon.
In pairs against Tojo's dwarfs came the same nightmare planes—machines with devil eyes and sharp-toothed jaws painted up—on their prow heads.
From the rolling, slashing sky duels few Japs survived to tell of the terrifying advent of the Flying Tigers.
In four days the Japs lost more aircraft than in the whole previous year. In four weeks the cowed spirits of 300 Jap airmen were saluting their ignoble ancestors.
Four more months . . . and the wreckage of 600 Japanese planes littered the green hills of Shan States and Yunnan.
What precisely was the link between the holocaust and the fighting career of a lean-faced kid who ran away from Texas in '16 and smuggled himself across the Canadian border to join what was then the Royal Flying Corps?
Major
Frederick Lord has been called the most mysterious of all the mystery men.
Yankee Doodle Days
Way back in the Yankee Doodle days of the last war he won one of the first D.F.C.'s for his superb show against 20 enemy raiders in the skies over London.
Fighting the Huns at 2-1 odds over France, a bullet whanged against his skull and—as he says—richocheted.
His official bag was 22 enemy machines destroyed—and a kite balloon!
Two days before the armistice he was shot down in flames.
The boys came marching home but Major Lord couldn't stop fighting.
He limped out of hospital—head-first into revolutions in Mexico, revolts in Honduras.
He fought in Russia, and there's a London Gazette commendation about how he saved the town of Pinega from certain annihilation.
It makes Lord grin.
Whisky Bottle Bombs
"They don't mention the whisky bottles," he says. "Pinega was surrounded, the enemy's horse-drawn artillery moving in on all sides. The Russian officers asked for help . . . .
"It was midnight. We had no bombs, but there were empty whisky bottles lying around.
"I piled all I could into the cockpit. The bottles sounded like bombs. To finish it off, I started firing at the horses with a Very pistol.
"They stampeded, started pulling the guns into the river. The whole place just went mad. Gosh, what a laugh."
Then came Hitler's dress-rehearsal for war—the Civil War in Spain.
Lord caught the first boat to Barcelona. He didn't intend to join in. He merely expected fun and excitement.
A bomb screaming into Madrid changed his mind. And the sight of a little girl just after the explosion, not crying, but staring curiously at the stub of her arm. . . .
Lord knew then that he could never look on at total war.
In a ten-year-old French Breguet he pitted his skill against brand-new Junkers and Musso's best Fiats.
"They came so close," Lord once told me, speaking of a one-sided battle against his brickbat, "you could see their goggles. Our machine-gun just gave one short burst and one of those enemy machines fell off in a dive. We'd hit it.
"Boy, did those fellows ever open up on us! When I got home I found I'd only 20 rounds of ammunition in my machine-gun!"
Racy? That's the word for Lord. Hero, oil prospector, soldier of fortune, his thrills have been pungent.
Yet the oubreak of this war found him merely working as a flying instructor at a private airfield in the States.
Air ace—retired!
You might say it looked like carpet slippers for Lord.
Few of his pupils know the toughness behind his flying skill, his Astaire smile. He kep quiet about his D.F.C., his Croix de Guerre, his congratulatory letters from generals like Plumer and Ironside, his Russian orders of St. Anne and St. Stanislaus.
He Smelt Adventure
Maybe he was settling down!
Then he heard that Bill Pawley, of the Central Aircraft Manufacturing company of Miami, was privately recruiting fliers to help China.
Fred Lord smelled adventure. Experts with experience of military flying were being enrolled in the American volunteer group. Associated with Pawley was another forgotten air ace in Colonel Claire Chennault, sometimes a school teacher.
Pay was £120 a month, with £100 bonus for every Japanese plane shot down, plus £250 for every enemy plane brought down intact.
There were no planes—until Sweden cancelled a delivery order for 100 old-type Curtiss P.40's.
The British purchasing commission held them—and finally agreed to their release.
It all had to be kept dark from the Japs.
That is why it is still too soon to tell the full part Lord played in training and building up the thrill-loving sky-kids—both British and American—who soon formed the A.V.G. nucleus.
It is said that Freddy smuggled the fliers into China through Jap-held ports by registering the volunteers as tourists, acrobats and artists.
Fought Terrific Battles
Officially they were under contract to the Chinese government and the P.40's were Chinese property.
Then, overnight, the Japs attacked Burma.
Lord is reported to have flown and fought in the terrific battles over Rangoon when the road to India was barred not by a joint air force of the United Nations . . . but by the A.V.G.'s.
Scores of Jap planes were wrecked and crippled.
When at last the Flying Tigers were dissolved, the Chinese government anticipated a bill over £75,000 to the flyers in salaries and bonuses for kills.
Instead the Flying Tigers tore up their contracts and took no more than expenses.
Shortly afterwards Major Frederick Lord was in Britain. His job this time was another special training one—and equally hall-marked hush, hush.
My letters to his airfield, however, have failed to elicit a reply for some weeks past. Lord is doing the greatest job of his career as a cog in the R.A.F. But when Fred Lord vanishes, I know the answer is hair-raising excitement somehow, somewhere . . . .
Winnipeg Free Press (Winnipeg, Manitoba) - Thursday, May 13, 1943
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