The Army Air Forces in World War II, Vol. 1 (archived PDF)

L O S S O F N E T H E R L A N D S E A S T I N D I E S
mantle on 2 2 February, however, three of them, carrying most of the
Army personnel, ten P-~o’s,and many motor vehicles, had been
directed to Burma rather than to Java in keeping with a decision
which had been reached by 17 F e b r ~ a r y . ’ ~The decision had been
dictated by considerations which apparently also brought into ques-
tion the destination of the Langley, with its deckload of thirty-two
fully assembled P-~o’s,and of another vessel, the Sea Witch,in whose
hold twenty-seven crated P-40’s had been stored. But on the day of
its sailing General Wave11 ordered the Langley to Java, and a similar
order was subsequently issued for the Sea Witch; for shortly after
sailing, the Langley and, sometime later, the Sea Witch parted com-
pany with the other ships to set a course for Tjilatjap on southern
Java.98 The Sea Witch got through five days later, but the Langley
went down on 2 7 February-and none of the P-40’s they carried sur-
vived to fight the Japanese.”
Meanwhile, the I 7th Pursuit Squadron (Prov.) approached the
end of its brief and tragic history. Between 2 1 and 26 February, its
pilots claimed ten enemy planes shot down, but the unit at the same
time had lost Lts. George W. Hynes, Wallace J. Hoskyn, and Gerald
McCallum. On 26 February it had only thirteen P-~o’Sin reasonable
readiness to fight an enemy who, as he closed in on Java, counted his
planes by the hundreds.” The American bombers knocked out a
number of grounded aircraft a t the Denpasar airfield on 2 2 February,
“definitely sank” two transports at Makassar two days later, and on
the 28th claimed the sinking of one transport and probably another
off the northern coast of Java. But under conditions of increasing
insecurity on the ground between missions, which added to the wear
and tear on both men and machines, the bomber command sent out a
total of eleven missions, or thirty-one sorties, between 2 1 and 2 8
February which could only be recorded as failures.100
The last missions were flown against Japanese forces gathering for
the invasion of Java. By 2 7 February a large enemy convoy had come
down from Jolo through Makassar Strait to join the main elements
of the enemy’s Third Fleet, while a second amphibious force moved
into position off Batavia in the west. Reports reaching the bomber
command were confusing and incomplete; one transport claimed by a
flight of three A-24’s seems to have been the extent of the damage
* See below, pp. 398-99.
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