World War II, Russell K. Drenon

In the summer of 1937, I was working at the ice plant in Warsaw. I wanted to go to college, but only had $80 saved up. I was making $1 a day. The Baptist minister heard that I wanted to go to college and asked if I would like to go to William Jewell in Liberty. Of course I was interested, but didn’t think I had enough money.

The Rev. Russell Storer told me he’d write to the business manager who was in charge of jobs for students who needed help. I ended up working in the men’s dining hall and mowing the campus lawns in the summer.

At the end of my second year, I tried to enlist in pilot training in the Army Air Corps. I couldn’t pass the color vision test for pilots, so I went back to school and finished with a degree in physics. I worked throughout the summer of 1941 for Phillips Petroleum Co. in Kansas City, Kan.

That fall I volunteered for the Air Corps again. This time they accepted me for communications officer training at Scott Field, Ill. Now a second lieutenant, I was sent to South Carolina and shipped out on the USS Brazil in April 1942. We stopped in Cape Town, South Africa, for a few days.

Next we traveled up the east coast of Africa and were met by Army trucks in Karachi, India. We were taken to a tent city, where we stayed about a week. We got on a DC-3 airplane which flew us to the Hump in the northeastern part of India called Assam.

As passengers, we didn’t have oxygen, but the pilot did. We flew at about 20,000 feet to clear the mountains. We got a little sleepy and cold. We could see the Himalayas, wild jungles and rough country below us. We landed in Kunming, China, headquarters of the 14th Air Force under Gen. Claire Chennault.

LIFE IN HENGYANG
I was assigned to the 75th Fighter Squadron, 23rd Fighter Group. The next day, a DC-3 dropped me off at Hengyang, China. The base was the closest to the Japanese line, where they were fighting the Chinese army. Our P-40s would take off and help by strafing the enemy. The Japanese planes came over us and tried to wipe us out.

I was the communications officer for the 75th. My duty was to keep the radios in the planes working. I was told to find a gun pit and get in it when the Japanese came over. They gave me a Bren gun, a 20-shot, .30-caliber British automatic rifle.

I used this on low-flying Japanese planes. The enemy tried to catch our planes on the ground, but only managed a time or two on planes that were out of commission.

Big dog fights took place over the base at 15,000 to 20,000 feet. The P-40s tried to be above the enemy planes and dive through the formation, knocking them down with the .50-caliber wing guns. We could see these battles by watching the vapor trails. When a P-40 gun cut loose, it sounded like a roll of thunder. Some of the enemy planes, if hit, would try to dive into what they thought was an important building. One time, a plane hit our operations shack, but no one was in it. The Chinese replaced everything in a short time.

The Japanese would come over and bomb the runway to try to keep our planes from taking off. The Chinese had a good warning system that gave our pilots time to take off and get ready. The Chinese had a group of more than 200 workers who filled in the craters as soon as the Japanese planes were gone.

They broke up rocks, hauled dirt, filled in holes and carried dirt on yo-yo sticks with baskets on each end. When they got the hole filled, they got hitched up to a big concrete roller and pulled it over the crater until it was smooth and looked like the rest of the runway.

CLOSE CALL
While in Kunming, I was given the duty of finance officer. Once a month I was supposed to bring the payroll to the troops at base camps, where the planes had been pulled out. I picked up the payroll in Hengyang and got on a DC-3 with a few Chinese passengers, the pilot and co-pilot.

We took off and climbed through heavy cloud cover. The pilot needed to get above the clouds because it was mountainous country. We got to Hengyang, but the pilot didn’t want to try to go down through the clouds because there were some pretty high hills around the air strip. However, he knew how much it meant to the men to get their money and mail.

He tried to let them talk him down through the clouds. I was looking out the window when right in front of us one of those hills appeared. The pilot pulled up hard and barely missed the top of the hill. Well, that was it. He pointed the nose up and started to head back to Kunming. This was about 80 to 90 miles away. With the best of luck, we barely had enough gas.

It wasn’t long before he decided he needed to find a closer place to land where there weren’t as many mountains. We flew an hour or so over the clouds and couldn’t see the ground. Then it happened.

The engines sputtered and quit. I was sitting next to the pilot’s compartment, so I put my back up against the bulkhead with my feet toward the rear of the plane. It was a good thing that there were so many rice paddies in China. At about 100 feet we came out of the bottom of the clouds and saw a rice paddy. The pilot did a wheels-up, engine-dead, belly landing in the paddy. It threw the Chinese family around some, but no one was hurt badly.

As luck would have it, we were close to a Chinese military post. They didn’t have anything available to take us back to Kunming, which was 60 miles away. They us pointed in the right direction and two of us started walking. The pilot and co-pilot stayed with the plane.

We had walked about seven or eight miles when a Chinese charcoal-burning truck came. The intelligence officer with me could speak Chinese, so we bummed our way back to Kunming.

We reported to Gen. Chennault, who wasn’t very happy about losing a plane. Later they sent me back to pay the troops in Hengyang. We had good weather that time.

RIDE OF A LIFETIME
I had two good roommates in Hengyang, Lt. Vernon Tanner and Lt. Folmar. They were both P-40 pilots and both from Texas. We three became good friends. Lt. Folmar asked me if I would like to fly in a P-40. I said, “Yes, but how?”

The P-40 was a one-seater with a fairly small cockpit. Lt. Folmar told me to get in. He then sat on my lap. We couldn’t use parachutes because there wasn’t enough room. Lt. Folmar gunned the engine and down the runway we went up in the air and around the field. We landed after a short trip.

I got to fly in a P-40, not as a pilot, but as a passenger. I believe we were the only ones ever to do it. It was not just a stunt, but a trial to see if it was possible to pick up a downed pilot at a remote air strip.

However, the commanding officers decided it would be safer to have the Chinese bring the downed pilot back on the ground by horseback. This was better than risking two pilots and a plane. It would have been extremely painful for the one on the bottom for a very long trip.

LOVE LINE
While stationed at Kweilin, I received a letter from my cousin who told me about a girl named Jerry Cunningham who I had gone to school with. I wrote to Jerry and got a letter back. We kept writing during the rest of my stay in China and I sure was looking forward to seeing her at home.

I had been overseas for 32 months. The first night home I had a date with Jerry. We were married by the Rev. Walter White in Warsaw. Not long after that, I was discharged from the Army in North Carolina. I couldn’t ask for more in life. God has been good to me.