The Night We Blitzed Aberdeen

From the South China Morning Post 
Written by Jo Bowman

April 16, 2000

A RETIRED US air force pilot who flew dozens of raids over wartime Hong Kong believes the bomb found near Queen Mary Hospital last month was one he dropped on a mission 55 years ago.

Former "Flying Tiger" Jack Stettner, now 76, told the Sunday Morning Post he recalled a flight to bomb Kowloon docks that went severely off course in heavy cloud.

Lieutenant Stettner

"It's very possible that it was one of mine," he said of the 127kg bomb found on a building site near the Pokfulam hospital three weeks ago. Police bomb disposal experts who carried out a controlled explosion on the device said that had it gone off, it would have wiped out much of the hospital.

Mr. Stettner said he had heard of the find through a friend in Hong Kong and immediately remembered a raid on August 1, 1944, when he was a 21-year-old flier in the 14th air force.

"We were intending to go to Kowloon but we didn't make it," he said from his home in New Hampshire.

"We had been coming down the Formosa (now Taiwan) Strait and when I asked for a heading into Hong Kong, the flight engineer said three generators were out and my navigator said he couldn't give me a heading.  We went in south of the place we were supposed to turn and that's what led us to Aberdeen." Aberdeen, next to Pokfulam, was a secondary target at the time, and Mr. Stettner was flying his B24 bomber between two "Thunderheads" which were providing cover from anti-aircraft missiles fired by the Japanese occupying forces.

B-24 Flight Crew

"It was cloudy.  The mission report say there was seven-tenths could cover, but we saw lights," Mr. Stettner said. "Our bombardier just went for the lights.  It suggests that the bomb that was discovered could very well have been from that night."

Originally from Brooklyn in New York, Mr. Stettner spent 10 months in charge of a young and frightened 11-man crew flying raids on Hong Kong from bases near Guilin on the mainland.

"We were very fearful of Hong Kong because it was very well defended," he said.  "We heard that if you got within 20 miles, the whole sky would be full of anti-aircraft fire and there would be no chance of getting there. We were all very, very frightened of it, but that wasn't a reason not to do it. We believed it was necessary so we could have peace and stop the killing, and we didn't panic, which was very important. I don't think we realized that at such a young age, that there's nothing wrong with being frightened -- just don't panic.  You think back to it and I'm glad we were able to carry it out as well as we did."

As First-Lieutenant Stettner of the 308th bomb group, he flew 44 missions over Hong Kong.

In China

"Our principal effort was against shipping -- we were trying to cut off Japanese shipping into Indochina (now Vietnam) and further south," he said.

"Of course we were hitting land targets too.  My crew sunk seven ships and had one probable (sinking).  As far as land targets were concerned, we did a lot of damage.

"Thank God for the diversions though," he said.  "One day we went into town, Guilin, with Red Cross bags full of Chinese money.  We spent it all on fireworks.  With arms full of firecrackers and rockets, we ran into a Chinese religious procession with large paper-mache figures and kids urging us to light the firecrackers.  We unloaded and lit everything while the kid jumped and danced.  It was great fun.  It was very good to be young."  His co-pilot, radar operator, nose gunner, flight engineer and navigator are still alive and he is in contact with most of them.

Mr. Stettner left the air force after three years' service and became a civilian pilot for Veterans' Airlines, which flew cargo and passengers around the US and later flew United Nations drops into eastern Europe.

He married wife Dorothy in 1948, and they have three children and three grandchildren.  Mr. Stettner later studied to be an engineer, and his work has brought him back to the Far East many times.  He was last in Hong Kong in 1982.

"I've been back to Hong Kong a number of times, in fact my wife came with me in 1977 and I took her to the Kowloon docks and showed her where we bombed on another mission, but obviously there was no sign of that," Mr. Stettner said.

"The whole thing was quite an adventure."