Our guest this week on Veterans Chronicles is Wayne Whitey Johnson. He's a World
War Two veteran and a veteran of the famed Flying Tigers. Sir, thank
you very much for your time. Thank you. Let's start at the very
beginning. Where were you born and raised? I was born on a farm
in western Minnesota, just about twenty miles east of the city of Ortonville,
which is right on the border of Minnesota and North and South Dakota. When
did you join the service? I joined the Army Air Corps December eighth,
nineteen forty one, the day after programmer, and you had to get in
a long line, as I recall correct. Yes, probably started at about
four o'clock in the morning, and there were probably three to four hundred guys
lined up to get into the recruiting station. Why did you join the Air
Corps. I'd had a little bit of pilot time and I didn't like walking
that well, so I wanted to fly. Of course, the Army Air
Corps told me not to tell anybody that I knew how to fly, because
they wanted to train me their way. What kind of flying had you done
already? It was in a small airplane. I did some crop dusting in
a Steermen, and I had a I think it was an around car with
about a eighty horse power engine and with crews at about a hundred and ten
or something like that. And were you eighteen years old when you joined or
were you a bit younger? I was? Uh, I was sixteen when
I learned to fly that airplane. How about when you joined the service,
Let's see I was twenty twenty. Okay, where did they send you for
training? I went to Jefferson Barry, Missouri for basic army training. And
then because I didn't have any college education, just high school, and they
wanted college trained pilots for some reason. Uh, So they sent me and
several others up to Holding Mining and Technology Co uh College and spent about I
think about six months there and then went back to the traditional army training.
Now, you write a lot in your book about the different planes that you
got to operate in training, and you certainly preferred some more than others.
Yeah. I like the Steerman. It was hard to land and hard to
take off because it had very narrow landing year, but it was a very
good aromatic airplane. And once you got the air very nice to fly.
What about the P Fortyes, P forty was really my favorite fighter. Nothing
could catch it in a dive. It wasn't quite as maneuverable as some of
the Japanese planes, so we were taught not to try to get into a
dogfight with him, to make a path and dive away and then climb above
them again. So that was the tactic we were tauted, and it was
a very successful one. Another plane that emerged was the P fifty one.
What did you think of that one? That, of course was the Cadillac
of airplanes, easy to fly, very comfortable cockpit, wid wide cockpit,
and had very high speed, probably oh thirty to forty miles faster than the
P forty, and highly maneuverable. So the only chartcoming it had was the
coolant lines were in the belly and we did a lot of low altitude strafing
of enemy air bases and troop concentration ships, and so it was vulnerable from
that standpoint because you got hit in a coolant line, the engine would quit
in about three minutes. And when I went down, that's what happened to
me. I got hit in a coolant line. I think we were strafing
in an anime air base at I believe at Canton at the time. How
much did your crop dusting experience help you in training? Most of the crop
dusting I did was after my service. Oh okay, I just flew a
couple of times before I went in, So you really were learning from scratch.
Yeah, okay. One of the things that was very interesting in your
book is that even before you were assigned to China, you were very interested
in the Flying Tigers and what they were doing. Right, Yes, And
of course most everybody admired John Chanelt, and so that was a wish of
many to go to China, to be able to fly in ch Chanault's command.
And of course the Air Corps sent you, not where you wanted to
go, where they decided. But fortunately I got sent to China. What
did you know about the Flying Tigers or General Chanelt that made them so attractive?
Well, they were popularized, of course in the press and in movies
and in books. So that was where I wanted to go. And how
how long were you in the service before you finally were sent to China?
Probably about a year and a half or two at the most. We were
pretty well trained by that time and learned fighter technics. So to go to
China be under Chenos command was what I hoped would happened. Fortunately it did.
So what happened when you got there? I was there. She went
through India and there was a training field near Karachi in India, and probably
spent several weeks at that training field were combat experienced pilots from China. She
came down and taught us combat tactics, and then I went to after that
training, then went to Kunming, which was the headquarters of the fourteenth Air
Force flying Tigers, and then the next day I was sent out into a
rather remote base in southeastern China which was located about halfway between Hong Kong and
Shanghai, and that was where we staged. The Japanese didn't think we had
enough range that we could from our base get to either Hong Kong or Shanghai.
But we had another little base about halfway between that base and Shanghai where
there were supplies of gas, and so we could stage out of there,
refuel and get to Shanghai quite easily. And that was your first major mission.
Yes, the Shanghai Raids. What was the objective. Our intelligence learned
that the Japanese had brought in a lot of airplanes from Formosa and Taiwan,
and they apparently were concerned about American invasion of the China coasts, so had
brought in over one hundred fighters and they were all staged at that field and
they were lined up in beautiful roads because they didn't think we could have enough
range to get there and back. And we came in at about UH fifty
or sixty miles out, which would be be beyond their radar, and then
we dove down to UH treetop level, and so UH they did had no
idea we were coming because we were solo below their radar. And UH when
we got to the field to UH the UH airport that we were gonna be
strafing, UH, there were soldiers standing out in the fields waving at us,
apparently thinking that we were Japanese coming in from Formosa until we start shooting,
of course, and UH that first UH raid we destroyed UH. I
th I think it was ninety four UH Japanese planes on the ground and I
believe UH three in the air that was just taking off. So I it
was probably the most UH successful raid of the war, although we had a
lot more straightening their air bases and their troop concentrations and uh, they're shipping.
Basically, my job was a almost all low level. I wann't know
was conducive to good health because they had the bad habit of shooting back.
I but I survived. Sir. Let's pause right there. We'll have much
more with Wayne Whitey Johnson when we come back on Veterans Chronicles. We are
back on Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus, honor to be joined in studio
today by World War Two veteran Wayne Whitey Johnson. He is a veteran of
the famed fourteenth US Air Force, also known as the Flying Tigers. And
Sir, we were just talking about the Shanghai raids and how successful those were.
What was that like as part of your first major mission, Because we
were well trained during the combat, you tried to stay calm and focus on
what you were trying to do. Once combat didn't last long and gives a
matter of minutes really, and when you left the target and started back home,
that's really when the emotions I guess, Sati, you realized that you
were fortunate to get through it. A lot of the guys would throw up
and so forth. Once you had to let down, and the rule was
that if you nerded up your plane in any way, you had to clean
it up yourself. Now, you mentioned the great success of taking out ninety
four planes on the ground and three that were taking off. So were the
Japanese able to launch much of an air resistance? They did? They brought
in more airplanes and they did for a while. We really found out that
the pilots that they brought in them were not very well trained, and they
if you've got their leader, they didn't seem to know what to do.
They just sort of mill around, and we're quite easy to knock down.
Did you have a lot of experience in the in the dog fighting? Was
that a big part of the training? In the training it was? Yeah.
Actually, as I said, almost all of my missions were low level
and I only got in to a real aerial combat just a couple of times.
When that happens, are you trained to respond and attack and defend in
specific ways or do pilots develop their own styles? No, we were We
were trained by high experienced combat pilots, and in my case, because I
went to India and then onto China. All of the training that I got
from experienced combat pilots were guys that had flown combat in China and knew very
well the gap techniques. You mentioned how often you were flying low level missions.
You also write about how because you were at such a low level,
there could be smoke coming up and other things that could be confusing or obscuring.
Did you run into that a lot? Yes, obviously when you started
fires in there on their planes and in their hangars and other installations, there'd
be a lot of fire, a lot of smoke. So normally we were
taught to just make one pass and then get out of there. But if
we didn't get very much opposition, sometimes our flight leaders would make maybe one
or two more passes once they recover enough to start shooting at us, then
we'd leave. You also write about the fact that you often had a lot
of time between missions. It seemed like you were itching to get back in
the air. There were stretches where you didn't have missions. How frequent was
that Quite often, It'd be seldom that you'd fly more than two or three
missions in one right after the other, and then we might sit for weeks
and do nothing sometimes because we ran out of gas and an ammal and waited
for the cargo planes to bring in gas and ammal and bombs. On the
fifty one p F we could carry two five hundred pound bombs, so if
we had a short mission then we could carry bombs. Otherwise, we had
two one hundred and sixty five gallon tanks under each wing that we could fly
longer patients up to about four or four and a half hours. Your seat
got pretty tired after that time. Pause again for a short break. We'll
be right back with Whitey Johnson on Veterans Chronicles. We're back on Veterans Chronicles.
I'm Greg Corumbus honor to be joined today by Wayne Whitey Johnson. He's
a World War Two veteran and a veteran of the fourteenth US Air Force known
as the Flying Tigers. And Sir, one of the things that's unique about
your story is that you decided to write it all down as it was happening.
You kept a diary of your time in China. How did you decide
to do that? A lot of the guys kept diary. We were instructed
not to do so, but our commander said, hey, go ahead and
just don't carry it with you, and so a lot of guys would keep
a diary and record the events on a day to day basis. Unfortunately,
a lot of pages from my diary got lost. I had sent it home
and my one of my brothers had put them in a trunk, and unfortunately
the trunk was stored in the basement, so some of the pages got wet
and foggy were not readable. But we were able to some people from the
University of Minnsola who were good at restoring books. I took it and were
able to restore probably about half of it, which I was able to then
use to record my memoirs. And the book is Whitey, which is your
nickname, of course, from Whitey because of my white hair I had from
the time I was a little kid, and it was Whitey from farm kid
I was born and raised on a farm to flying Tiger to attorney. It's
a nurse. Four sections in the book. It's an incredible story, and
it reminds me that you were a little taken aback when you first got to
China because Tokyo Rose called you out by name. Yes, tell that story.
I think It was probably the first or second day that I was there,
and we used to listen to music from Japan because they played a lot
of American music, and Tokyo Rose would come on and talk about the events.
Kind of set me back a little when she said, Whitey Johnson of
Lieutenant something like that came to China, and he'll last very long because our
fighters, our superior fighter pilots will knock them down. Not too really encouraging
news, but we learned that she had a tendency to fabricate things, and
you figured out that somehow they had spies getting personnel information. Correct Chinese,
of course, most of the workers, or call them peasants, were very
poor and they were easily to bribe. So rather than maybe one ball of
rice aday, the gaps would give him a couple of balls, and you
use them as spies. And they would actually steal our mission orders of the
bulletin boards, and some of them finally got caught because they we had guards
that watched the bulletin boards and if they came and ripped off a page they'd
reported to a Chinese general, the general would shoot him on the spot.
I asked one of the generals I thought you were a democratic society and give
people a fair trial, And he said, we do. We give him
a fair trial, then we shoot him. Well, that spying. Also,
you write about a friend of yours who was captured by the Japanese and
when he denied what his orders had been and they had the paperwork, he
was beaten very badly. Yes, he was one of the few that was
taken prisoner. It happened to me on Christmas Eve of old days. And
uh so he spent the rest of the war as a pow prisoner war.
And uh at first they had him in Hong Kong, uh in an old
uh British jail. They stripped'em naked, and UH beat the hell out
of'em with silk ropes. And then uh he was uh put on a
ship and sent to Japan and remained there for the rest of the war as
a prisoner. And UH interestingly enough, uh Greg uh Bayington uh was also
in that same jail, and he apparently had a number of packag cigarettes in
his baggage, and so he give the jump gyuards a cigarette, and so
he got the job, was working in the kitchen and spent the rest of
the war working in the kitchen. Let's go back to the combat there.
You also tell the story, and I'm probably not going to say this word
right about your actions at Loan Ping. Yes, tell us about what happened
there. Low On Ping was a small base located about halfway between our headquarters
at kun Ming and and shange High and probably about equal distance between uh Hong
Kong and Shanghai, and so uh we were able to uh strike both uh
Hong Kong and Shanghai. Uh Japanese bases from that base. They had a
huge uh Japanese uh army uh uh about uh uh fifty miles uh from our
base, but uh because we would uh go out and straight from quite often,
uh, they just sort of stayed put and so they never uh bothered
to raid our base. Uh. So we were uh uh quite secure there.
Uh. The Japanese uh uh did uh come over, not during it
because they'd get shot down, but they would come over at night, and
our fighters were not equipped very well to fly at night, but they came
over with their bombers and dropped the bombs on our installations in our barracks,
and we would get warnings from uh uh Chinese spies that were at those Japanese
bases, and they let us know when the bombers had taken off so that
we could get to the UH trenches slit trenches, which were a narrowed,
narrow trenches, probably about two feet wide, so a man just could fit
in him and they were about four or five feet deep. So when there
was a a raid, we'd run and jump on those and sit there till
the raid was over. Fortunately, they weren't acker enough to hit our trenches.
You mentioned earlier on about being in a P fifty one that went down.
What do you want to share about that? Uh? As I said,
the UH coolant lines for the UH coolant used in the radiator, UH,
we're in the belly and so at low level of fifty one was very
vulnerable to ground fire. And since UH we did a lot of low level
strafing, I got hipped in the coolant line, and of course I could
tell that. First I could hear the shots hitting my wings, and then
immediately the temperature started up, and so I knew I had been hit in
the coolant. So I had enough speed, probably going about four hundred or
four fifty, so I could have climbed up to eight or ten thousand feet
quite safely and then bail out. But the Japs were shooting guys in parachutes,
so if we got hit, we felt it was safer to billy the
plane and skidding in on wheels up. Then it was to try to climb
in and bail out. And Chinese natives peasants we call them, were very
good about rescuing us. If they could get a five minute head start on
the Japanese troops, they would save us. So you had good interaction with
the Chinese people overall. Yes, it was quite a change in diet because
we didn't have any American food. Sometime later we got the Sea rations,
but at first we were fit in by Chinese messals, and so we just
learned to eat the Chinese food. You mentioned earlier that your plane was in
combat a few times, and you talk about that in the book, and
you were fortunate enough on some of those occasions to be with one of the
great aces of the Pacific theater, correct a. Charles Older. He became
a judge after the war on the Benson trial. Yes, and game a
lot of fame there, and he was one of the commanders. Really a
nice guy and great to fly with, and he had many kills. Correct,
Yes, I think he was not the Poppy's Texas Hill was the poppy.
But I think he had I believe sixteen aerial kills. That's amazing.
So one of the things you also write about in the book is when General
Channel resigned about a month before the atomic weapons were dropped. That was very
frustrating to those of you serving in the theater. Correct. Yes, Arnold,
who was the Air Force commander and Marshall was the Armed Forces commander.
Both disliked Chennult because he would kind of avoid going through channels and if he
wanted something, uh, he would go directly to Roosevelt, And of course
Roosevelt loved him, so whatever he asked Roosevelt for uh, he would generally
Yet, so if we ran short of gas splies apple, he'd get on
a plane and go to Washington and few days later supply ships would come in.
We'll take a short break. We'll be right back with more conversation with
Whitey Johnson on Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus. This is Veterans Chronicles.
Honored to be joined today in studio by Wayne Whitey Johnson, veteran of World
War Two and the famed Flying Tigers. Sir, we had talked a little
bit in the previous segment about your belly landing of the P fifty one and
being rescued by the Chinese. Talk about that a little bit more and what
it was like to know you were going down after being shot. I had
enough speed, as I said, I was going about four fifty miles an
hour when we're strafened coming from a dive, So I had plenty of speed
to climb up to a safe altitude and bailout. But I didn't want to
do that because the Japanese UH had the rather bad habit of shooting guys in
parachutes, so I didn't want to give them that UH risk. And so
I saw what I thought was a nice straight uh road that I could uh
safely uh belly land on at least, and looked like from the air that
was lined with bushes on each side. Well, just as I started to
round out UH to land, I realized that UH those were not bushes at
all. They were huge boulders, and the road was so narrow that UH
when I leveled off the land uh, the wings UH caught on those boulders,
and it ripped off a bul wings as I skidded along, and then
uh the plane uh turned a little and it hit the tail and ripped the
tail off, and uh then I'll spun in the other direction, and the
engine hit the boulders, and I ripped the engine off. Uh, and
then it kind of straightened out and skidded it along just in the cockpit,
uh for some distance, maybe a couple hundred feet or so, and then
uh came to a stop. And uh there were some Chinese fellows uh in
the field, uh working in the rice field, and uh they saw me
uh crash, and uh they uh ran over and uh pulled me on the
wreckage. And this one uh guy probably was uh five feet tall and maybe
weighed a hundred pounds, but tougher th nails, and uh he put me
on his back and ran for miles to get away from the uh Jap troops
up her coming down the hill. When they got uh looked like they were
getting too close. They put me in this uh pond nearby and had had
uh bamboo uh shoots and uh those were a hollow uh probably a inch and
a half or two inch uh in diameter in hollow and uh so they uh
uh tossed me in this little lake and uh uh they would signal when the
Jamp troops got close and uh letting out the kind of funny little whistles.
And then they told me to dive under the water, and uh put this
read in in my mouth and let it stick up so that I could survive
under the water. And uh I laid there for and one time I saw
this uh jamp boot. He stepped into the water, and the water was
deep enough so it went over the top of his boot. So he he
backed up, but uh his uh boot was probably within uh two feet on
me. If he'd uh step one more step, uh, he'd uh stepped
on me. But fortunately he didn't you want to get his boot to it,
I guess, so he backed out and I stayed there until dark,
and then they came and fetched me out, and we traveled all night,
mostly during the night. At the day they'd hide me away somewhere. It
took I think about three days to get back to safe territory. So it
was a kind of an exciting experience, but I survived. What were you
thinking through all this? To get back safely. Were you worried at any
point? Oh? Yeah, scared as hell. Talk about the end of
the war. Did you know that the end was in sight before we actually
dropped the bombs. Yes, we were staging in the eastern, very far
eastern in China to join the attack on Japan. We had enough range in
a fifty one that we could fly from the coast above Shanghai to Okanao,
and which I think is about four or five hour flight, and that was
just as long as we could stay in the air. We heard that our
country had some very high powered explosives of some type. We didn't know what
they were, of course, but some of the guys had learned that they
were very high, testing, very high explosives. So it was a surprise
to us, of course when they dropped the mom that wiped out so much
of Tokyo and some of the other cities. And we knew from what the
Japanese radio was saying English speaking that they were prepared to surrender because they didn't
want their country destroyed. So when they surrendered, what was the reaction like
a great relief, I guess. When we knew the war was over.
We knew that the risks we had been taking, we wouldn't have taken anymore.
We then knew we were going to get safely home, or we're pretty
sure we would in our last few minutes. Here your next phase in life,
becoming an attorney and a record setting city attorney. What did you do
after the war? Our viewers and listeners. UH, I got out of
the UH service in UH November of nineteen forty six, and UH I signed
up for college at Fargo and North Dakota to start on the first of January
or second of January, cause Fargo was a pretty cold spot. I think
the day that I got there was about forty below and of course I'd been
down in Texas where it was nice and warm, so that was a bit
of a shock. But I liked UH. I liked college and because of
my experience flying P fifty ones UH, the North Dakota Air Guard Air National
Guard had droppen fifty once, so UH they got a hold of me and
asked if I would come back into the Guard and UH help UH train new
pilots UH, which I did for two years while I was going to college,
and UH because of my low level experience, they found out about that,
and so I was offered a job doing UH crop dusting. UH So
I I did UH crop dusting UH for a while while I was in college
and I was UH. I liked it. It was fun. You could
fly a lot, come over the field, have to go under the telephone
and power lines, and and climbed back up and take another pass. Very
interesting, definitely. How did you get into the law. There was a
a fellow from UH Oxford, Mississippi in my tent UH who had started law
school, and of course he kept talking about UH his interest in the field
of law and what he had started to learn about it, and UH so
I became interested in that. Soon as he got out of the service.
UH. I signed up UH at college, took UH pre law at UH
at Fargo, UH was then called the Agricultural College, or we call it
the Cow College. Then I went down to UH transferred to Saint Paul to
a law school there. That's where I was admitted to the UH Minnesota a
bar in UH nineteen fifty two and practice law from then on for fifty some
years. And UH i'd helped legally organize UH two communities and became their city
attorney, and I held uh that job in each of those UH small towns
really uh for over fifty years. That uh set a record of uh the
longest serving city attorney, and not only in Minnesota but in the United States.
The only thing wrong when it was they didn't pay me any longevity pay
for it. What were the names of the towns, Silver Bay, Minnesota
and Beaver Bay, Minnesota. Beaver Bay was just a small town of a
one hundred or a couple hundred population and Silver Bay, which was a new
town built by the mining company who had sent up a mining process plant there.
And they contacted me to organize Silver Bay into a legal city, and
so of course they appointed me as their city attorney and I served that fittied
also for over fifty years. Last question, mister Johnson, back to your
time in the service, what are you most proud of? I guess that
I survived and the fact is that I did fly a lot of interesting missions
and I met people that became lifelong friends. It's quite a legacy. Thank
you so much for sharing it with us, and thank you very much for
your service. Thank you, Wayne Whitey Johnson, World War Two veteran and
a veteran of the fourteenth US Air Force, the famed Flying Tigers. I'm
Greg Corumbus reporting for Veterans Chronicles. Hi, this is Greg Corumbus and thanks
for listening to Veterans Chronicles, a presentation of the American Center. For more
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