Presentation Date: October 28, 2004
MAJ Jim Dumas USAAF/USAF
* Served Under GEN Claire Chennault, Famed Leader of the AVG, P-40s * Flew 69 Combat Missions In China-Burma-India Theater of Operations * Has Over 2,000 Flight Hours, Primarily In Fighters: P-39, P-40, P-47, P-51, F-80 and even A B-17 * Served Under GEN Claire Chennault, Famed Leader of the AVG, P-40s
* Flew 69 Combat Missions In China-Burma-India Theater of Operations
* Has Over 2,000 Flight Hours, Primarily In Fighters: P-39, P-40, P-47, P-51, F-80 and Even A B-17
* While Flying A General's B-17, Flew Under San Francisco Bay Bridge After Takeoff, In Heavy Fog, From NAS-Alameda Enroute To Hamilton AFB
* After Twelve Years As Military Pilot, Resigned and Became A Rancher and, Later the Business Owner Of A Furniture Store
* Authored His Book, Titled Longburst and the Flying Tigers, Available At His Presentation October 28th
Longburst & Chennault
The air war against Japanese forces in China and the far East was started by the American Volunteer Group and continued by the China Air Task Force and the 10th and 14th Air Forces. Jim Dumas holds the rare distinction of being a replacement pilot who bridged the transition from AVG to the 14th Air Force under General Claire Chennault.
Jim Dumas learned to fly in the Civilian Pilot Training Program CPTP program in Arkansas, before coming to California and becoming an aviation cadet at Cal-Aero in Ontario in the spring of 1941. From there, Dumas trained in Tulare and Stockton. With the attack on Pearl Harbor, Dumas was assigned to Paine Field in Everett, Washington, and the 54th Fighter Group, which was tasked with protecting the Boeing Aircraft factory. But, the 54th was soon ordered to Harding Field at Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to train in the P-40 Warhawk.
The stay at Harding Field didn’t last very long. In fact, Jim says he was transferred, ‘in a rush’, to Miami, Florida. He explains how he was chosen for this assignment - -
“All commanders always have a list. I don’t want to name it, because it’s not very nice. I was at the top of my commander’s list. The moment he got a chance to get rid of me, he got rid of me... I’ve always been a person that if you ask me to do something, I want to know why you want it done and how to do what you want done. And I questioned several things that he wanted us to do. So I was on his list and he got rid of me.”
And, with scarcely the time to pack, Dumas was on his way. He says his squadron commander told Jim that if he had any family, they could join him later.
“They took me in a staff car to a building with a sign on the front saying ‘Port of Debarkation’. I asked the duty officer there where my job would be. And he said to me, ’Have you had your overseas shots?’ I said no, I didn’t know I was going overseas.
“He said, ‘You mean your squadron commander didn’t tell you that you were going to Karachi?’ I had never heard of Karachi at that time. I had no idea where it was.”
Jim said he started receiving a battery of shots that night - - every single one of the inoculations he needed to combat disease and infection in the rugged environs of Asia.
“They gave me shots all over... and that night, I slept very little, given the location of some of the shots.”
The next morning, Dumas was aboard a Martin 301 flying boat with three other air force officers, headed for Haiti and ultimately across the South Atlantic to Africa. There they transferred to a British Wellington bomber for the journey to Karachi. As the bomber crossed the fence at the end of the runway to land in Basra, the canvas on the back half of the left wing stripped completely off. Fortunately, the pilot was able to safely land.
At Basra, the travelers enjoyed the luxury of sleeping in an air-conditioned room for five days while repairs were made. The challenge was passing the time. Dumas says one afternoon, he and one of the other officers walked out to watch the work being done on the bomber.
Jim says he noticed the rubber of the main gear carried the molded lettering ‘tyre’, “And I said to the other officer with me, ‘Look how they spelled the word tire.’ And that British pilot was really indignant. He said, ‘To spell it any other way means you’re exhausted.’ ”
The wing repaired, the Wellington took off again with the four USAAF officers. Over the Persian Gulf though, at 10,000 feet, the canvas again departed the wing.
Dumas says he the other pilot-passengers had been carrying their parachutes since Miami. When the British pilot asked them to put the chutes on, he told them they should try to remain aloft until they got to the shore, because the waters below were shark-infested. Yet through skillful flying with lowered flaps, the Wellington pilot coaxed the bomber on to another safe landing, at a British base in the Saudi desert.
“We stayed there three days to get that fixed. That was the most miserable three days I’ve ever spent in my life. The wind never stopped blowing, I believe, at anything less than 50 miles an hour. The sand was in everything that you touched, in your bed, everywhere. We didn’t have anything to do while they were repairing the wing.”
Finally getting to Karachi, Dumas discovered he and two other pilots were going on to Kunming, China. As the first passenger to step off the Wellington, Jim laid claim to being the first replacement pilot for Chennault’s Flying Tigers.
As a member of the 76th Fighter Squadron, Dumas was assigned to fly one of the original P-40 Tomahawks built for the British but diverted to China, a somewhat war-weary ship equipped with a radio receiver but lacking a transmitter. In this fighter, he was able to hear what other pilots were doing on a mission, but not talk with them.
He admits to being impressed with two parts of the systems the AVG under Chennault had in place in China - - the early warning system, which gave alerts to AVG crews of incoming Japanese attacks, and the pilot return network, featuring blood chits sewn on flying jackets to identify AVG pilots, that the Chinese would safely return them through Japanese lines.
The area around Kweilin is covered with some of the most unusual mountains in the world. Dumas described each tall peak in the series as being shaped like “an ice cream cone, turned upside down”, covered with shale, and treeless.
Action came quickly for Dumas. The very next day he was scrambled on an alert that proved to be false. The following day, though, another alert had Jim flying wingman to AVG veteran Tex Hill. Taking off and climbing to 21,000 feet, they were vectored toward a Japanese airplane formation over Kweilin. The formation proved to be a formation of 15 bombers and a similar number of fighters.
“We made contact with them. I was flying Tex’s wing and he was leading the flight. So he was first to peel off and I peeled off behind him and I went through the flight, and shot at one of the bombers. I went through the formation and on down below them, and lost the whole flight. You might think, ‘how could you lose a whole flight of airplanes?’ But, it’s pretty easy to do.
And while the rest of his Flying Tiger flight was busy downing seven Japanese airplanes, all Jim could do in his battle-weary P-40 Tomahawk was listen to the action.
“I was circling the air base, afraid to get away from it. I heard ground control say ‘P-40 over the air base, there is a Zero coming up underneath you.’ I turned up on one wing... and sure enough, there was that Zero coming up right underneath me. So I turned on over, l came down, let the nose drop, and when I thought I was in proper position to shoot it down, I pulled the trigger. And I pulled the trigger. And I pulled the trigger again. I finally had to pull on through the maneuver, to keep from running into the Zero.”
Dumas was the last of the Flying Tigers to land, and after parking his P-40, he attended Chennault’s mission critique. Jim says Chennault asked which pilot had made that ‘long burst’ of machine gun fire. When Dumas broke the silence he’d kept during the twenty minute de-briefing by responding that he was the pilot with the ‘long burst’, he gained a nickname. That name has stuck with him over decades. In a letter Jim received in 2003 from from Flying Tiger Robert Scott (author of God is My Co-Pilot ), Scott still referred to Jim as Longburst.
Sixty years later, Dumas retains his high admiration for General Claire Chennault.
“General Chennault was one man that I think I respected more than most all of the other people I met during World War II. He was from Louisiana and I have always referred to him as a southern gentleman. And he was absolutely unbeatable when it came to teaching us the proper way to fight the Japanese.”
Chenault’s tactics included flying in pairs - - a flight leader and wingman looking out at all times for each other - - ane the use of speed and altitude to advantage, avoiding traditional dogfighting with the more maneuverable Japanese fighter planes.
General Chennault was so confident about what his little air force could accomplish that he sent a letter to the War Department, stating that if he was given a mixed force of about 150 bombers and fighters (a force maintained at that level), he would be able to cause the collapse of Japan.
Dumas says Chennault called upon him many times to perform special tasks and missions. These ranged from recon flights, to delivering letters, handling personnel issues and aircraft maintenance oversight.
“I really think General Chennault was quite fond of me, and I have never understood why. When I was on active duty, I tried to be a good officer, and always have my uniform clean and pressed, and I tried to do everything he wanted me to do. Being a lieutenant and him a general, I was always wondering what I had done that he would be calling me for. And usually, I hadn’t done anything (wrong)... that they could court-martial me for, anyway.”
On one such mission, Chennault flew with Dumas on a C-47. Jim says the general spoke of his own aerial combat with the Japanese.
“We passed over a little village out there in the hinterland of China, and he punched me on my left shoulder and said ‘Dumas, right here is where I had my last combat with the Japanese.’ To this day, there is no record of him ever having any combat with the Japanese, except this one expression he made to me that day.”
After Chennault returned from China at the war’s end, the city of New Orleans gave Chennault a homecoming celebration. Although he says he doesn’t know who made the selection, Jim Dumas was chosen to be a member of Chennault’s honor guard.
In China, Dumas flew not only the older, export version of the P-40 Warhawk, but also the P-40E and a rare P-43 Lancer. The P-43 was a pre-war fighter design valuable to Chennault’s AVG because of its high altitude capability. The P-43 had a turbocharger, giving it a ceiling up to 30,000 feet, allowing for reconnaissance flights above heights Japanese fighters could easily reach. Most of the autobiographical accounts of the AVG, tell of the P-43 that Chennault assigned for special missions.
Chennault sent Jim to Lashio one time, to circle the air field at high altitude, watching for a large number of Japanese fighters reported to be landing there.
“I went over there, and I was looking at the left wing, out at the end of it, and I could see fuel running out of the tank over there. The P-43 had a turbocharger under the elevator. And the dihedral of the wing was such that if the wing (tank) leaked, the gasoline would follow the wing down to the fuselage and then run back in the fuselage back to the turbocharger. And when they met, there was a big boom, every time, and the airplane was destroyed and the pilot was killed.
“Well, as soon as I saw that, I shut off the turbocharger off and I started back to Kunming. And when I got back there I reported in to General Chennault. Well, he was a little perturbed about it and disappointed, because I hadn’t seen any airplanes there.
Chennault told Dumas to return to Lashio in a P-40 at a lower altitude and keep vigil for the expected enemy air fleet. Dumas followed orders, but still saw no Japanese airplanes.
On another special request to deliver a letter to Gen. Stilwell at Chungking, Dumas says he was feeling very sick as he got his orders. He flew the P-43 to Chunking, but became so delirious while flying he questioned whether he could safely land the Lancer.
“Because the landing gear is close together, they were easy to ground loop. And if they ground loop, usually the struts broke off and they’d go up through the wings and into the fuel tanks and that’s all she wrote.”
Dumas managed to land the P-43 and survive a rough jeep ride into Chungking. He recalls he had such a headache, he thought several times while bouncing down the road in the jeep that his head would explode. Dumas did deliver the letter to Stillwell, who recognized Jim was not well. He had the aviator hospitalized until Jim recovered from what proved to be a severe attack of strep throat. A nurse told Dumas he had been in a coma for three days, and she wasn’t sure he’d make it.
On another Chennault special assignment, Dumas was put in charge of ensuring three damaged P-40s were repaired and returned to Kunming, and that the planes’ pilots were on good behavior. There had been reports the pilots were causing problems in town.
When the first of the P-40s was ready to fly, Dumas took it on a test hop, landed, and refueled for a second flight to test the guns. After landing following the gun check, the crew chief told Jim Japanese bombers were inbound. With only a partial refueling, Jim climbed up to the airspace between the airfield and the bombers’ expected route, a position where he could attack the bombers from out of the sun. He searched for nearly an hour before spotting a tight ”V” formation of five bombers, and then dived at the rear bomber on the right leg of the “V”.
“I had hardly started shooting, when the bomber’s wing started smoking, and then folded up. Then it rolled over and went straight down. I didn’t follow it down, but I climbed back up to see if I could get another shot at ‘em. Again, I got to where I thought I could come out of the sun, but this time they were watching for me. But, I started firing too soon. At least I thought I did. I saw pieces of the empennage flying off and it also rolled, the other direction.
Dumas didn’t hang around to watch the bombers crash. instead scanning the skies for possible fighters, even though he hadn’t seen any.
“That night, I thought General Chennault would be real proud of me. But you should have seen the telegram I received from him the next morning. He let me know that under no certain terms was I to ever to attack a flight of Japanese bombers alone.
“Those two bombers, if you search the record, you won’t find them. But they’re there. I didn’t report them to General Chennault. He knew that I’d gotten them, because he chewed my pants off, because I had. But anyway, he thought that the plane was more important than I was.”
Dumas almost became a victim himself when he was returning from a mission over Burma. He says he was within sight of his airbase at Kunming when an enemy fighter slipped behind his P-40 and riddled it wit h bullets. Jim says he has relived that moment many times over the years since it happened.
Among the offensive missions Dumas flew were strafing attacks on boats moving up and down China’s rivers. The boats frequently carried supplies for the Japanese army.
“I hated to strafe boats on the river, because I never knew if the Chinese who were piloting the boats on the river were being forced to do it or whether they were doing it on their own. So I was always hesitant to shoot a boat.”
Moving back to Kunming in early February, 1943, the Flying Tigers turned their attention to a reported Japanese Air Force concentration at Bahmo, Burma. Dumas recalls the distance from Kunming to the Japanese air base was just about a maximum four-hour flight for a P-40 with a belly tank of fuel.
Five planes from the 76th Fighter Squadron were to attack the base at Bahmo. Two pilots were assigned to knock out a pair of anti-aircraft batteries guarding the field, and Jim was to be the first of the Tigers to strafe the field. Jim says the anti-aircraft guns were cleanly taken out and he lined up his run on the Japanese planes.
“One of them blew up and all of the flames came up and I flew right through the top of the flames. I was a little bit concerned because... this (Jim pointed to the nose cooling scoop on a P-40 model) was our oil cooler and Prestone cooler. And if a piece of metal would go through either of them, I was going to walk home or stay with the Japanese, one or the other.”
Of the dozen enemy fighters parked on the ramp, all were lit up by the strafers and left burning. The Tigers also hit some trucks under trees at the end of the runway before turning for home.
Jim says after his last pass he was out of ammunition, and then the P-40’s engine began vibrating, “shaking all over, and I had no idea what what was wrong with it.”
Dumas says he was fortunate to make the flight back to Kunming, as there probably was no place to land in the mountains between Bahmo and the Tiger’s base. After landing, Jim was sitting in the cockpit, doing his post mission paperwork, while his crew chief inspected the P-40.
“Finally he came around and jumped up on the wing and said, ‘Lieutenant, did you know you have bullet holes in your propeller?’
“I said, ’Bullet holes? How could that be? I didn’t make any head-on passes with any Japanese fighters.’
“He said, ‘Well, these bullets are from inside out. The holes show the bullets went from the inside out.
“I said, ’That couldn’t be. I ran out of ammunition on the second pass with the trucks.’
And Jim says the crew chief responded, “It’s a damned good thing you did. You might have shot yourself down.”
Dumas then remembered that on his first pass strafing the trucks under the trees, his right wing clipped a tree. He soon realized he had bent the outboard machine gun blast tube inward, sending its bullets into his own plane’s propeller blades.
“Each of them had a hole about 18 inches form the end. So, I’m really grateful they stayed on there, because if one of those had come off, that engine would have vibrated off of the airplane.”
For their successful strafing attack, all five pilots on this mission received a letter of commendation signed by General Chennault.
When Jim Dumas returned to the United States in early December, 1943, he had flown 62 combat missions in China. In his Army Air Corps/Air Force career, Jim Dumas logged more than 2,000 flight hours, mostly in fighter aircraft - - P-39s, P-40s, P-47s, P-51s, F-80s and even a few hours in the B-17 .
“I never got to fly the P-38, but always wanted to. We had one in China - it was the reconnaissance version - but I wasn’t a photo man and never got to fly one over there and never got to fly one when I got back from China.”
After twelve years as a military pilot, Jim resigned from the Air Force to become a rancher. Later, he became the owner of a furniture store and the mayor of Chowchilla . Today, at the age of 87, he still flies a private airplane.
The many colorful experiences of Jim’s life, before, during and after his days in China are recorded in his autobiography, Longburst and the Flying Tigers.