Night Flight To Davao

 

Meanwhile, the 63rd Squadron was still flying its missions to Davao from Owi and on the night of September 4, al about eight o'clock. Lieutenant Roland Fisher lifted the B-24D Miss  Liberty off the runway. Fisher and his crew had been briefed to search for shipping south of the Philippines and in Davao Gulf, with Matina airstrip as their secondary target. By midnight they had found no shipping, and Fisher decided to attack the airstrip.

 

It was a very bright, moonlit night, which the 63rd crews disliked intensely, but there was no apparent opposition as Miss Liberty began her bomb run at five thou­sand feet. They were approaching the coast and the bombardier. Lieutenant How­ard Hammett, was taking control for the bomb run when the B-24 was caught per­fectly in six or seven searchlight beams. Antiaircraft fire followed, but it was fairly inaccurate. Fisher felt the plane bounce as the bombs dropped and he turned hard to the left and dived to shake off the lights. He had just rolled out of the turn and picked up speed to about one hundred and seventy-five when he saw small flashes in the shadow of his plane, straight ahead. Miss Liberty was still nailed in the searchlights but they were coming from behind, and what Fisher was looking at was a Japanese plane coming in head on, shooting.

 

Fisher saw '"the gun muzzles blinking and caught the outline of a plane. I started to call a warning to my crew when my senses told me that plane was going to take me head on. I reflexed and rolled the aircraft hard to the left and pulled back on the yoke. The fighter flashed by, clearly visible, and passed directly under my right engines. His right wingtip missed the lower right part of my fuselage by inches. I could see his aircraft very clearly in the bright lights and I saw his head, flying cap and goggles through the canopy as he went by. The plane was a Nick.

 

"I was still hollering on the intercom at the crew that we were under fighter at­tack and I rolled the plane back to horizontal and stuck the nose down hard to get some speed, I think I was hitting about two hundred and was maybe at four thou­sand feet when I heard some pop-pop sounds and there was a terrific, muffled bump and I went into an even steeper dive. I remember hearing the top turret swiveling but nobody said anything and I was trying to sort out just what was going on and read the instruments when the radar operator came on and said his radar was gone. By then we were down perhaps to two thousand feet and I remember my air speed was pretty well over two hundred and I decided to ease it back and discovered I had no pressure on my elevators. Again reflexively I snapped on my master cut-out switch on the auto pilot and began to feel for con­trol over the elevators with the elevator knob. There was a brief response, I thought, but it did not last and I was still in a sleet dive, still picking up speed. I could see the surf on the beach on the south end of Samal Island very clearly. It felt as if I was looking straight down.

 

"I remember then thinking 'Jesus, we are going to hit it.  Should push the bail­out bell, but nobody could make it anyway.  While was thinking this, I started rolling the trim tab back. The damn thing worked and we sailed out of the dive. I don't know how much altitude we had left, but I will never forget being able to see those damned waves in the moonlight, at any rate I left my power on and l got her reasonably level using the trim tab and we sailed out of Davao Gulf and  took up a heading for Owi.

 

"We lucked out going home.  Those Pratt and Whitneys ran perfectly all the way and the weather was calm. The Flight engineers assessed the damage and reported huge gaping holes, that our main elevator control cables had been cut, that we had no hydraulic pressure because of severed lines and the electrical system was erratic because of torn wires and conduit. We had three crewmen wounded, with masses of fragments of metal in their backs. From this we thought that we had been struck by a large shell causing the big holes in the bottom of the aircraft just in back of the bomb bay keel between the two waist windows, and also throwing fragments through (the sides tearing out the cables, longerons and fearing a hole in the top. Actually it was cannon fire that cut the cables on the sides and blew the top out as well as wounding the men.

 

"It was all hard to figure out and we were more concerned with helping the wounded men than trying to repair the cables. The engineers worked hard with pli­ers and spare wire trying to splice the cables, but whenever I put pressure on the yoke the splices would part. We decided I should continue to fly home on the trim tab and that we would try to disturb the trim of the aircraft as little as possible by all sitting still. This is why we lucked out on the weather because I'm convinced I never could have made it if we had hit turbulence.

 

"When we approached Owi, control told me they might request that I ditch because they had the entire day strike almost ready to line up for takeoff and they didn't want to take a chance of my crashing and blocking the runway, I reported to them that 1 did not have good elevator control and did not think I could ditch it, and we had wounded men aboard. So they agreed I could take a crack at landing. I swung the old lady down south of the island in a big gradual turn and got her headed north on a long slow final approach. We figured if we could get fluid back into the hydraulic system we would have enough to operate the brakes with maybe one shot if we cranked everything else down by hand. So we collected fluids in the customary manner of shot up bomber crews . . .grapefruit juice, coffee and water from canteens, urine and spit.

 

"On the approach we cranked the wheels down, but I did use hydraulic power to put down about twenty degrees of flap and lock them. I just kept on easy power and played the trim lab over the fence and made the best goddamn landing I ever made in my life. Right at the end of the strip I popped on the brakes.  They lasted for a second or two and then went out so I ground looped it right in front of the palm stumps.

 

"Everybody was excited and kept looking at the plane. The two sides of the rear of the fuselage were intact but the top bad a hole blown just above the waist win­dows and the bottom was shredded.  "Inspecting the torn condition of the bottom we found strange pieces of metal and glass sticking in it and only then realized that we had been struck by another aircraft. This was when I remembered a big orange boom I had seen off in the night and I felt satisfied that the twin engined fighter I bad seen in the search lights had attacked us from the rear, collided with us and clashed. So we reported the mission as such."

 

On the ground at Davao a Japanese night fighter squadron was congratulating Warrant Officer Yoshimasa Nakagawa and his observer for destroying an Ameri­can intruder. They had taken off to intercept Miss Liberty and were closing in when the cannon jammed and it seemed that the enemy bomber would escape. The Japanese pilot decided he would ram, and his propeller slashed into the bomber's fuselage. Nakagawa reported that the big American aircraft started to fall immedi­ately. His plane, its canopy smashed, kept flying. Flying glass had gashed his eye and the wind buffeting his face forced him to turn sideways in his seat, but he managed to control the battered plane. When the bomber started to level off again Nakagawa was about to repeat the attack, but the American plane reportedly fal­tered and plunged into the water. The damaged Japanese fighter landed safely back at its base.

 

Twenty years later Roland Fisher and Yoshimasa Nakagawa would meet, after Fisher read of the "loss" of Miss Liberty in a book about the Japanese suicide pilots.