We just lost another of our greatest generation as a friend of our family, Paul Bohley passed away this past week. He was a pilot with the 446th Bomber Group (B24's) that flew raids against the Polesti Oil Fields (sp?), Ohio ANG that flew P-51's and F-86's before retiring in 1965 as a Colonel. He was a great father and friend to many! May he RIP!
The death rate of WW2 vets seems to be accelerating. I know of only one of my service buddies that remains, I heard that two in the past week have gone. I am an honorary member of the 451'st BG and they are getting so thin that they have joined two other thinning BG's for the next reunion. Soon they will all pass into history.
My late friend was a B-24 pilot in the 451st and he flew 4 subsequent missions to Ploiesti that DID put it out of commission. He left two of his heavily damaged B-24's on the Island of Vis returning from his missions to targets in Hungary and Germany. There is a well known photo of his group leaving the Ploiesti oil refineries in flames below and behind them.
When did it become Ploiesti? One of my dad's DFC citations says Ploesti... Maybe about the same time Pusan, Korea bacame Busan?
This is the way I always spelled it but every time I did, spell check challenged it. I guess we have always misspelled it. I don't really care to challenge it right now. All I know is, my old friend sweat blood every time they had a mission to PLOESTI. They lost a lot of men and airplanes to kill that place. I may have mentioned it before but I was stationed at Langley Field with a photographer/ gunner who captured the death of "Extra Joker" at the hands of FW-190's after a raid on the oil fields in Rumania. The operations in the MTO were much more difficult than those of the 8th and the oil fields and refineries were defended with everything the Luftwaffe could marshall. But at the same time, the 8th had it just as bad but they benefited from the Hollywood support of the news media then. My old friend told me of escaping from the Flack and fighters of the target to struggling to get across the Alps in weather on the way home. He told me of starting across with 5 airplanes in formation and leaving the mountains with two, him and one other.
Sorry, trying to be correct, sort of, I have a friend whose parents are from Romania, he told me the correct spelling is Ploiesti (the s is pronounced sort of like sh). And the OP knew he'd misspelled it. But I'd always spelled it Ploesti, too. And Peking became Beijing, and.... etc. Anyway, we're mourning the loss of another WWII aviator, not spelling. Sorry.
Mark- You were lucky to have him that long. My father (P-47Ds in 86th FBG) has been gone since 2003. I figure the youngest WW-II veterans were born in 1928 (17 in 1945), and that would make them 89 this year. I remember when the last Civil War veteran died and the last WW-I veteran died only recently. Sorry, I know you miss your father, as do I.
