DARING ESCAPE

Evening Post, Volume CXXXIII, Issue 96, 24 April 1942, Page 6

DARING ESCAPE

PILOTS IN PATCHED

PLANE

JAVA TO COLOMBO

(0.C.) SYDNEY, April 15. The history of the war in the Pacific is full of stories of amazing escapes from areas where the fight had gone against Allied forces, but always they are different. The stories have in common only this: that they tell of initiative, daring, improvisation, endurance, and luck. Suchl a story, disclosed this week in Sydney, was of the escape from Java of four sergeant pilots in a patchedup Lockheed bomber. They are Alan Martin, of Sydney, Douglas Jones", of New Zealand, Frank Munro, of Grafton (New South Wales), and J. Mendazabel, of Canada. They found the badly-damaged bomber on an abandoned airfield, and made it serviceable with pieces of bamboo and parts from two other J wrecked planes. Then they flew the bomber to northern * Sumatra and to Colombo, a distance of 2500 miles. Pilot Martin described the party's escape. ; . "We were at' Buiterizorg when the evacuation started," he said. "We were placed in charge. of 15 Chinese, Indian, and Malayan ground staff, given rifles and bayonets, and sent to the hills as j guerrilla troops. We made our way to Goreot, and stayed there two days. At 10.30 p.m. on the second day the Commanding Officer rang and told us we had better hand in our arms and surrender, as the Japanese had surround- J edthe town. • We said 0.X., piled into, trucks/taken from the A.1.F., and beat it down towards'Pameungpuak, on the south-west coast of Java. LEFT GUARDS GAPING. "Fifteen • miles out of town the Japanese caught us, and their commander, who'could speak English,'left six men to guard us, instructing them to keep us: there until further notice. He left in one "direction, we started our {trucks -and^leffhr the other, leaving the guards standing. Eventually we arrived' at Pameungpuak in the early hours of the .morning; and spotting an airfield we hurried over to it. . There we found .three Lockheed 10's, which had been damaged by the Dutch. One had its tail missing, and another its nose. We took the tail off the second plane, and fixed it on to the first, patching it with ropes arid pieces of bamboo. We completed the job with odds and ends from the third plane, and filled the tanks with petrol 'drawn from the other two. "We left at dawn the following morning for Medan, North Sumatra, a distance of 1100 miles. There we refuelled, arid left for Klugknow, the most northern point- of Sumatra. We took off from Klugknow the same day, and flew straight across the Bay of Bengal oh a-mean course. It took us 8. hours and 10 minutes to reach Colombo, a distance of 1400 miles."