China's Wings by Gregory Crouch

Author:Gregory Crouch [Crouch, Gregory]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-345-53235-0
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-02-27T16:00:00+00:00

The U.S. government listening post in Ventura, California, received a radiogram for Katharine Dunlop Bond on Saturday, December 13, 1941, the first she’d heard from her husband since Pearl Harbor. “I am safely in Chungking and feeling fine,” it said. “All our Americans are here. Have plenty of everything I shall need until we win this war and that will not be long. Everything is fine and the goose is hanging high. Love Bondy.”

The man himself wasn’t feeling so jaunty. On doctor’s orders, he spent Sunday in bed. His leg improved, but he moved around too much on Monday and had to return to the infirmary. Chuck Sharp was using the airplanes to recover the evacuated tools, spares, people, and sundry equipment from Namyung. Coolies carried Bond to the office on Tuesday. He forced himself to stay seated and wrote a detailed letter about the evacuation to Harold Bixby, hoping it would serve “for reference in the future.” Typed by one of the company secretaries, it ran to ten single-spaced pages and, disseminated by Bixby, it would be read throughout the American government.‖

In summary, Bond was characteristically self-critical. “It was a bad show,” he wrote. “… CNAC got badly caught … [but] after the hell broke loose we did our best to save the pieces.… We were doing alright until the Hong Kong government stopped us.… If you think this is a lousy alibi, I would like you to know that I think so too.” Bond felt he should have seen it coming. His men, however, had been humblingly magnificent. “Each pilot wanted to fly every flight.” The only way to stop fights between the senior pilots had been to assign two of them to each flight. “Sharp was a wheel horse and as steady as a rock. Soldinski, as usual, rode herd on everything in sight.… It is difficult to pick out outstanding cases, however. Every man did his job.” And that, coming from William Bond, was high praise, indeed. A man did his job, and that was all. It was hard to swallow the loss of five airplanes and such a large quantity of stores and spare parts, not to mention P. Y. Wong and M. Y. Tong—he’d had no news of Tong whatsoever—but to Bond’s eye, they were in better shape than they’d been in after losing Shanghai in 1937 or Hankow in 1938.

• • •

The airline’s performance wasn’t anywhere near as sorry as Bond imagined. Weeks would pass before Bond understood events and came to appreciate the multiplicity of disaster that had beset the Allied militaries in the Far East and the Pacific over the last ten days. Their armies and navies had fared infinitely worse: At Pearl Harbor, eight battleships and eleven other warships sunk or badly damaged, two hundred planes destroyed on the ground and another hundred damaged, 2,400 Americans killed; a hundred planes lost in the Philippines, most on the ground, even though the American military command had received notice of the Pearl Harbor attack at 2:30 A.

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