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WEST CHESTER – A 2,000-horsepower Pratt & Whitney engine propelled the fighter plane that Altoona native Cliff Long flew for the U.S. Army Air Corps in China during World War II.
Long’s recollections of that experience, however, hint at the subtler engines that propelled the man himself through 104 combat missions – service for which the Chinese government recently awarded him a medal.
Although he’s 90, Long remains alert, and the memories of helping divert Japanese forces away from battles with Americans in the Pacific remain vivid.
So do the resentments for perceived slights – counterbalanced by gratitude for affirmations and encouragement.
First, the slights.
Still strong after 70 years is his resentment against administrators at Altoona High School who required him to return to class as a condition for receiving the diploma he needed to attend college after the war – despite his military training, experience and success.
“I was insulted,” he said, recalling his presence, after having been immersed in the danger, camaraderie and killing of war, among callow students in high school classrooms.
Equally strong is his resentment over the judgment shared by an AHS teacher after he quit school to enter the service, that he’d never amount to anything – a judgment that a friend who remained behind passed along to him.
“She told them I would never make it, since I didn’t finish high school,” Long said.
“Well, I made it,” he said, smirking.
He also never got over his family’s failure to greet him at the Altoona train station when he returned from war, as recounted by his sister, Betty Calvert of Cape May, New Jersey.
The family wasn’t there because no one knew he was coming, Calvert said.
Her brother apparently thought the government should have informed them, she said.
Family members remain “amazed” that her brother continues to bring it up, she said.
But Long never forgot the validations, either.
While in training in Georgia, a well-known neighbor from back in Eldorado, Col. Richard Montgomery, who was in charge of the U.S. aviation cadet program, flew in from Texas just to visit him.
And after showing Long, the trainee, his plane – Montgomery declined an offer to visit with the base commander.
“Me, a lowly cadet,” Long said wonderingly. “Quite an uplifting thing.”
Later, while training in Florida, Long executed the landing well on his first flight in the single-passenger P-47.
“I knew I greased that plane in,” he said, relishing the recollection. “Normally, at least you feel the skipping of the wheels, but I never felt anything.”
At the close of that day’s debriefing with approximately 15 fellow trainees, the commander asked, “Who was flying No. 63?”
Long raised his hand tentatively.
“Good landing,” the commander said.
That spare compliment meant enough that Long visited the commander after the war and brought it up.
“What a good thing he did at the right time,” Long said.
Then, during the war, a Chinese commander who encountered a base occupied by Long’s unit turned over a captured, bloodstained Japanese battle flag as a gift for “Lt. Moon,” their nickname for Long, because of his slightly rounded face.
The former pilot still has it, and the bloodstain is still visible.
“I don’t know of any other pilot that came away with one of those,” he said.
Also during the war, Long got good assignments, he said.
“I don’t know how they graded me,” he said. “But it seemed like I popped up on important missions.”
He flew “wing” for the colonel of his unit.
“Wouldn’t you say that the colonel would want someone” who excelled? Long asked rhetorically.
Medal
The medal that a six-person delegation from the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries bestowed on Long at his home in West Chester on Dec. 7 is a “medal of honor” – one of 100 distributed worldwide in commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, said Long’s son, Cliff Jr., who lives in Glenmoore, Chester County.
All the eight or nine surviving members of the Flying Tigers group that fought on behalf of the Chinese during World War II received one, Long Jr. said.
Some got their medals at a state dinner at the Great Hall in China in September, while the rest, like Long, who couldn’t make the trip, received theirs in the U.S., Long Jr. said.
Initially, the Flying Tigers under Gen. Claire Chennault worked for the Chinese nationalist government as the American Volunteer Group, which wasn’t sponsored officially by the U.S.
After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which led to the U.S. declaration of war on Japan, the U.S. involvement on behalf of China became official.
Long entered the fight after Pearl Harbor as a member of the 25th Fighter Squadron of the 14th Air Force.
Starting in midsummer 1944, he flew his P-47 and occasionally a P-51 in support of Chinese ground troops – strafing, bombing and firing rockets.
Early years
The love of aviation began for Long in Eldorado, where he grew up a timid loner who took long walks by himself in the woods of Highland Park and elsewhere.
He built models of planes from balsa wood bought at five- and ten-cent stores and fantasized about being Spencer Tracy in a cockpit with a white scarf.
He figured out a way to launch his balsa planes on high, from kite strings, bending a pin to attach the planes, so they rode up until he would jerk the strings, releasing the planes, which would fly much further than when hurled by someone standing on the ground.
His neighbor, the dashing Montgomery, would buzz the neighborhood when he came home to visit, further agitating the young Long’s lust to fly.
War
The bombs they carried on the P-47 included fire bombs and fragmentation bombs designed to fly apart over an area the size of a football field, Long said.
Once, in China, he attacked a bridge, releasing a bomb designed to crash into the side of an abutment, with a delayed fuse, so he could get his plane up and away to avoid being consumed by the blast.
Once, he launched rockets at a building that served as headquarters for a Japanese unit outside a town.
He remembers following the flight of the rockets into the building.
The scene – focused on his plane – is depicted in a painting that hangs on his wall.
The painting was reproduced in a book on the war.
Long dive-bombed targets routinely.
Dive bombing required an especially intense focus.
The steeper the dive, the more accurate the placement, but the more critical it became to pull up in time, like some pilots did not do, if they became too entranced by the target and failed to shift their focus soon enough.
He was taught to scream when pulling up, to counter the gravity forces that can cause black outs.
He relished his competence.
“I got better and better and better,” he said. “It all came to me unconsciously.”
Was there an adrenalin rush?
“I didn’t feel anything,” he said. “Totally, totally unconscious.”
Twice, projectiles hitting his plane forced him to make emergency landings.
One of those times, a projectile came up through the fuselage, piercing the fuselage tank, passing under his seat, raised dust in the cockpit and exited through the wing, leaving a hole the size of his hand.
Vapors from leaking fuel could have ignited, but did not.
He was able to return to friendly territory and land at a base.
The other time, a bullet from a Japanese fighter – one of 13 that attacked their unit after he had fired rockets at a target – passed through the cockpit, grazing a lens of his goggles, loosening snaps that held the goggles to his cloth helmet, and knocking them loose.
He showed the helmet and the deteriorating goggles.
The attack also disabled his right aileron, forcing him to fight to keep the plane under control.
The enemy fighters didn’t follow, probably because they thought they’d shot him down.
“I kind of slid away,” he said.
He could have bailed, but because the plane was unstable, it might have rolled and caught his parachute.
So he stayed with it and headed to a grass emergency field he knew about.
The plane had lost hydraulics, and the landing gear wasn’t working, so he came in on the belly, but at 180 mph, because otherwise, in its damaged condition, it would have tipped and cartwheeled.
When he touched down, the propeller tips struck the ground, breaking the propeller shaft and sending the props spinning away.
The field was short, and he soon came to the end, so he pushed the stick forward, cartwheeling the plane a little, before coming to a stop.
He blacked out, then came to, but could get the canopy open only a little, as smoke and steam swirled around the engine.
Being trapped in fire is an airman’s greatest fear, he said.
So he put both hands on the canopy crank and yanked.
It came open.
“I jumped out and ran like hell,” he said.
The plane didn’t catch fire.
Misgivings
The bombs they dropped exploded “on troops or anything we were given to hit,” he said.
He paused.
“I think of that now, and …”
He grew quiet.
He doesn’t recall that he felt he was killing people when he attacked.
Rather, he recalls an extreme focus and a rage to perform the task, to follow orders, to hit the target, to excel.
“They must have done a good job with us psychologically, that we didn’t have that thought (of killing),” he said.
Only one weapon threatened to burn through that concentration on performance: napalm.
A visiting manufacturer’s representative showed them how it worked one day, putting some of the jellied gasoline on his shoe and lighting it.
It was like molasses, and you couldn’t put it out, Long said.
Later, he carried napalm on a bombing run.
Inexplicably, the stuff left his plane in the mountains along the way.
He doesn’t recall triggering the release.
“(But) I felt it go,” he said.
He continued on the mission, going through the motions, flying where he would have gone if he had the payload, and when he got back and reported what had happened, no one said anything.
But they didn’t ask him to carry napalm again.
He wiped his eyes, and asked “Do you think I intentionally did that?”
Done
When the war was over for him, and he came back to the U.S., he had an opportunity for either of two prestigious jobs as an instructor, one at advanced flying school, and one on the new P-80 fighter jets.
He also had enough credit to leave the service.
He chose to leave.
He had dubbed his P-47 “Shirley,” the name painted on the fuselage, just behind the propeller.
And when he was done, he returned to Shirley, the girlfriend who shortly became his wife, and who’s still with him. It was the best decision he ever made, he said.
He didn’t want any other of the many returning servicemen to take her away from him.
“I gave up a promising flying career,” he said. “But I got Shirley.”
Mirror Staff Writer William Kibler is at 949-7038.