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61 CHAPTER THREE “There Goes Our Ferry Route” when parker gies reported in at Amberley Field on Monday, January 12, he found that he was being assigned to the first of the three squadrons planned for Sprague’s new group, the squadron to be led by Allison Strauss and designated the 17th Pursuit Squadron (Provisional). It would be flying seventeen P-40Es of the Pensacola convoy that were now assembled and flight-tested. One other P-40E of the convoy’s shipment had been sent from the States minus a rudder and left wingtip and could not be made operational .1 But Gies was now wondering whether the planned ferry operation to the Philippines was really feasible anymore. Word was out at Amberley that the Japanese had landed at Tarakan on Borneo two days earlier and at Manado in the northern Celebes the day before. Tarakan was one of the stops on the ferry route north, and another one—Makassar in the southern Celebes— would be threatened now, too. “There goes our ferry route,” Gies thought. He figured they would now probably be going to Java instead.2 Gies was also wondering if it was a wise decision to rush a single squadron northward with only seventeen planes. Wouldn’t it be better to wait until the whole group had been formed? He feared that with only seventeen P-40s, this quick movement would end up in a repetition of what he had already gone through in the Philippines . Gies’s worries this day carried over into questioning his own flying capabilities after slow-timing one of the fifteen new P-40Es now assembled and operational. He had not flown a P-40 since December 22, three weeks earlier. The air today over Amberley was “very rough,” and he had made a “terrible landing” coming back to the field.3 62 Chapter Three The following day, Al Strauss called the first operations meeting of the new squadron. Strauss designated Walt Coss to lead B flight of six ships and Bo McCallum C flight of five only, while he would lead A flight’s six P-40Es. Besides Coss, only Ben Irvin, Gies, Rowland, and Hennon of the two Bataan Beechcraft groups would be flying with the squadron, each as an element leader. Ten of the Republic pilots would fill in the squadron, each as a wingman , except for the more senior Hubert Egenes, who was also assigned as an element leader.4 Sprague had picked whom he regarded as the most experienced of the Republic lot for Strauss’s squadron. George Hynes, Bill Stauter, Wade Holman, Ray Thompson, Bryan Brown, Chester Trout, and Dave Coleman were 41-E flying school graduates, and Spence Johnson and Phil Metsker were 41-Fs. Gies had heard that each of them had 75–90 hours’ flying time in the P-40 before coming to Australia. Along with more experienced Egenes and Dwight Muckley, they were listed by USAFIA as those Republic pilots “qualified to fly P-40s.”5 The next morning Gies was up at 0530 to swing the compass in the P-40E assigned to him. He noticed an oil leak in his engine and came back in for another bad landing. After going over the ship with a mechanic, he took it up again. The oil leak was fixed, but he made yet a third bad landing. That afternoon , Gies took his plane up once more, this time for some formation flying practice as an element leader in B flight. He was not happy with his performance , blaming it on his unfamiliarity with the type of formation flying flight leader Coss and the others in the old 17th Pursuit did in the Philippines. To top it off, he made another “terrible landing,” almost spinning in.6 When Gies landed, he met Bud Sprague and Buzz Wagner, who had returned to Amberley after being absent for two days. Sprague apparently had been in meetings to make arrangements for the departure of the squadron north. But now Gies was informed that the “old deal” was off. Sprague himself would lead the squadron north and take with him all the Bataan Beechcraft veterans plus Bo McCallum, who had arrived in Australia almost two months earlier. They totaled thirteen of the seventeen pilots needed. Four of the “newies” were retained to fill the remaining positions, all 41-Es: Brown, Trout, Stauter, and Thompson. The newly designated 17th Pursuit Squadron (Provisional) was being ordered to Darwin...

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