Every Day a Nightmare: American Pursuit Pilots in the Defense of Java, 1941-1942

"Every Day a Nightmare is a gripping account of an almost forgotten campaign of the Second World War. Bartsch's command of the subject is impressive and his skill as a first-rate historian is evident on every page. Highly recommended!"-Robert von Maier, Editor-in-Chief, Global War Studies

Bringing to life the story of American pursuit pilots in the Pacific during the disastrous early days of World War II...

In December 1941, two transports and a freighter carrying 73 P-40 fighters and 101 pursuit pilots were sent to the Philippines to bolster Gen. Douglas MacArthur's Far East Air Force. They were, subsequently diverted to Australia, with new orders to ferry the P-40s to the Philippines from Australia through the Dutch East Indies.

But on the same day as the second transport reached its destination on January 12, 1942, the first of the key refueling stops in the Indies fell to rapidly advancing Japanese forces heading south to seize the oil riches of the Dutch colony. Their ferry route broken, the pilots-their number augmented by fourteen newly-arrived veterans from the Philippines -were ordered to relocate their a to Java for participation in the desperate Allied defense of that ultimate Japanese objective Except for the pilots from the Philippines, almost all of the other pilots eventually assigned to, the five provisional pursuit squadrons ordered to Java were recent graduates of flying school with just a few hours on the P-40. Only forty-three of them made it to their assigned destination, the rest suffering accidents n Australia, shot down over Bali and Darwin or lost in the sinking of the USS Langley as it carried thirty-two of them to Java.

Even those who did reach the secret field on Java wondered if they had been sacrificed for no purpose. As the Japanese air assault intensified daily, the Allied defense collapsed. By contrast, only eleven Japanese aircraft fell to the P-40s.

Author William H. Bartsch has pored through personal diaries and memoirs of the participants, cross-checking these primary sources against Japanese aerial combat records of the period. He has supplemented these narratives with official records and other American, Dutch, and Australian accounts. Until now, the only published version of what happened to these brave airmen during the fall of the Dutch East Indies has been the three-part 1944 article by Chicago Daily News war correspondent George Weller, acknowledged by its author as an incomplete account. Bartsch's thorough and meticulous research yields a narrative that situates the Java pursuit pilots' experiences within the context of the overall strategic situation in the early days of the Pacific theater. Students and aficionados of World War II will appreciate this gripping account of one of the few remaining little-told American combat stories of the war in the Pacific.

William H. Bartsch is the author of two previous books published by Texas A&M University Press: Doomed at the Start: American Pursuit Pilots in the Pacific, 1941-1942 (1992); and the award-winning December 8, 1941: MacArthur's Pearl Harbor (2003). Bartsch, a former United Nations development economist and independent consultant now exclusively researching and writing on the Pacific War, lives in Reston, Virginia.