Will you allow me to tell another story? No? Tough, listen anyway. I was close friends with a B-24 pilot who flew with the 726th Bomb Squadron, 15th Air Force, Castellucio, Italy. Both of us worked together at the Boeing Company in the SST program. One day when we were at lunch we joined up with a new associate who also flew in the war, a P-38 pilot also in the 15th. Naturally the conversation went to the days when the two of them were involved in the assault on the German oil industry in southern Europe. The P-38 pilot flew out of Bari, Italy. My friend Lew flew out of the above mentioned field and they began to talk about their experiences. The P-38 pilot related an incident where he escorted a wounded B-24 across the Adriatic with number one and number three feathered. There was a long silence while the two of them went back 23 years to Italy. Lew asked about the time and date and the P-38 pilot mentioned what he thought was about the correct time. Lew asked if the fighter pilot remembered anything about the B-24 and he recalled some numbers on the fuselage and that number one was feathered and number three was smoking. After along silence Lew said," That was me, number 53 'Patches'." Further discussions locked it up with Lew remembering some of the squadron markings of the P-38. We had many lunches together after that with me hardly tasting what I was eating as they recalled their days in the 15th, stuff that one cannot imagine, stuff that the movie people try but can never recreate. I saw an obituary in today's paper where the P-38 pilot, " Don" had passed on at age 92, to join Lew I suppose.
I am still, and always will be in awe of the stories I have read and heard about from that time. Just kids, a lot of them. It is hard to comprehend what they did with what they had, at the age they were, especially compared to what I was doing at their age.
What a reunion. I wonder if either of them brought home any souvenirs in the form of flak still in their bodies. Crippling Germany's oil industry was one of the main reasons for their downfall. Just finished reading The Wild Blue which is filled with more spine tingling stories just like this but of course nothing like hearing them from the men who lived it. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0743223098/ref=oh_details_o04_s00_i00 On one mission George McGovern's B-24 had a 500lb bomb fail to drop over Linz, and after his crew worked frantically to free it (couldn't land the plane with a bomb aboard) it finally let loose over the Austrian countryside. Unfortunately it landed dead nuts on a bucolic farmhouse they happened to be over at that exact time, leveling it and whoever was within a good distance. McGovern and his crew were stricken with guilt until some 50 years later, when after an interview with an Austrian TV show a man contacted the station, who put him in touch with George, to tell him that when he was a boy his (anti-Nazi) family heard a bomber approaching and ran away from their farmhouse, only to see a single bomb land right on it. Nobody was hurt, and McGovern finally could release decades-old feelings of guilt. Good thing the pilot in your story was able to feather those props, according to the book the Liberator was a real slug on only 3 engines, let alone 2.... Bob you mention movies and how they haven't been able to recreate the "reality" of the air war in WWII. I've avoided seeing "Red Tails" because just from the trailers could tell it was way too "hollywood" (confirmed in an interview with an actual Tuskegee airman). What movies would you say came closest to accurately portraying WWII's aerial battles/life on the ground on bases?
I think that "12 O'Clock High" will always be the benchmark by which other WWII air war movies will be judged.
Red Tails was horrid. It was so bad, I was literally ANGRY by the end and would have walked out had I been alone. If you know anything... ANYTHING at all about WWII air combat - it will insult your intelligence. Everything from spaceship style physics defying maneuvers to utterly absurd tactics, graphics, language, style, script, acting - Grrrrrr makes me angry thinking about it. It would be fantastic if Hollywood would make an accurate WWII aviation film, but they apparently cannot. Technology has come so far that it would be possible to CGI things accurately and convincingly, but they apparently cannot recognize that the truth is BETTER than their fiction. I would like to see a biopic film on George Preddy, Tex Hill or Bud Anderson. Terry
I agree with Jim, " 12 O'Clock High" is really accurate. " Command Decision" I thought was very good, " The War Lover" was okay, too. Back to my old friend, his airplane," Patches The Tin Tapper's Delight" lived up to its name and returned many times riddled with flak damage. As Lew put it once, it was in the "hospital" for three weeks getting patched up and then we took it out again and the first mission put it back in the hospital. Both his plane and crew survived the war somehow. I bunked near a B-24 gunner who looked like his legs and backside had been hit with shot gun pellets. At least once a month he had to into the base hospital to have shrapnel removed from the abscessed eruptions on his skin from those that surfaced. Hard one to figure out because flak shrapnel was not that small. Anyway, he predicted that he would carry most of it to his grave.
I agree. Just two nights ago, I pulled "12 O'Clock High" of the shelf and watched it again. It is a great movie. For a bit of the absurd mixed in with some reality, try "Catch 22"....;>)
Perhaps it was from 20mm shells from an enemy fighter? Exploding 20mm fire would throw off all sorts of small shrapnel both from the shell itself and whatever part of the plane it hit. A neighbor of ours when I was growing up (also a Delta pilot) had burn scars on his face and around his eyes from hot oil spewing out of his flak damaged F6F Hellcat. He was landing back on his carrier after taking fire over Okinawa (may have been Iwo Jima - cannot remember for sure). Oil covered the windscreen, he could not see so he stuck his head out the side - oil covered his goggles and face and just before trapping he had to tear off his goggles to see. He got her down but that was his last flight in the Navy as the war ended before his injuries healed enough for him to fly. He shot down 6 Japanese during the Marianna's Turkey Shoot, name was Leroy Robinson but he went by Robby. Terry
I think that you might be correct on the possibility that it was some sort of 20 or 30mm cannon shell. Pat kept a box into which he would put the metal that was extracted from his body. They looked black and jagged , about the size of a pea. He also was suffering from an unsuccessful attempt to rebuild his left heel, which had been partially shot off. I imagine that reconstructive surgery was in its infancy then because it was an ugly purple "thing" that never stopped hurting him. He drank a lot and it wasn't difficult to figure why. Your friend sounds like another "tuffy" and he was a real ace.
I would bet 20mm. Planes that got hit by the 30mm didn't tend to come home. Slow rate of fire and terrible trajectory supposedly made it hard to be accurate with, but when they hit it was devastating. But you never know. Robby Robinson told me about getting 4 victories straight in a row - Val dive bombers. Said they flew in loose formation and not one of them ever moved as the entire formation was being decimated. Probably barely knew how to fly. He ducked under the last one to avoid hitting it and said it dropped its bomb as it was catching fire and it missed his wing by inches. He had the gun camera film, but it was pretty poor quality. He was a character. I visited with him in 1992 and we shot skeet on his farm, he was still a crack shot. Terry
I didn't see "Red Tails" on purpose, because that's about what I expected, and now I'm glad that I didn't. I hated "Pearl Harbor" for the same reason. I was given a copy as a gift, watched it once, and quickly gave it away. Movies made with real aircraft, like "Tora! Tora! Tora!", will still be superior in my opinion.
Right on, Jim. I am fed up with the computer generated crap and the phony acting in too many of these movies. They are a cartoon of what really happened and based on the concepts of Hollywood newbies who think they know how to portray it but were never there. One sequence that curdled my milk was the one in "Memphis Belle" where two of the hero's were talking at living room levels in the waist of a B-17 and SWEATING !. And commiserating about not wanting to die! Too many guys have been in that position with the roar of wind and engines and freezing their butts off in -60 deg. temps and sucked it up without a word. Stupid!
Patches; http://www.b24bestweb.com/patches-v8-1.htm http://www.b24bestweb.com/patches-v8-2.htm Leroy Robinson; http://www2.wjbf.com/special_section/2011/oct/03/voices-freedom-leroy-robinson-ar-2501493/
Thanks for posting! He tells it a little different than I remember him telling me.... and he is a LOT older. Wow. It has been over 20 year ago since I last saw him, he lives way out in the sticks. I never knew his brother died in the war, he never said anything about that. Terry
"The Battle of Britain" used as many real, authentic and accurate aircraft as they could put in the air. The hardest to find were the 109s. A total of nine were used IIRC. No models and no computers though. Makes me want to see it again. Bob, thanks for sharing that story. Regards, Stan
Nice story ! o/t: Over the years, I have spoken to quite a few celebrity pilots, in a quest to obtain old squadron patches. The last six months, I spoke to both a TBM and Fireball aviator - and a few other pilots. The aviator who flew the Ryan Fireball, claimed it was not a robust airplane. Ryan, had little experience in building military airplanes. While attending school at UCLA (post-war), some ****** stole his flightjacket.
Thanks for posting the photos of Patches and also introducing us to that B-24 web site. The shot of Patches over the Alps I believe could have come from a film clip. I think that I saw it from a documentary on the P-51 and they were mentioning the bomber escorting that they did and bingo, there was Patches. Lew said that the Alps were a worrying threat along with the fighters and flak. On a return trip he mentioned hitting instrument conditions over the Alps, entering with three other airplanes and only two emerged. He and some of his crew almost casually talked about flying through the wreckage and bodies of the crew after a B-24 exploded in front of them. All of these guys of whom I speak had no mental or emotional issues and were exposed to the worst. This puzzles me in face of all the emotional problems that so many of our military is having today. I went to college with ex-infantry, ex-Navy, ex-Air Force, and ex-Marines that saw terrible action during the war and they weren't completely over it but they were in control of their emotions even when we were partying. Go figure. It was really funny to see the Dean of Freshmen attempt to enforce pre-war type Freshman " disciplines" on men who had lead companies in action or had flown B-29's over Japan. He was told many times where he could shove the little Beanies.
I think that Ryan made its mark with the NYP, the ST, and the PT-22. The SC was beautiful but it appears that the Fireball was the end of the line. They turned to build sub assemblies for Boeing and Douglas.
My Father was a Navy Chief who after the war went back to his reserve unit as a Midshipman to finish school. He and his Vet classmates had to answer to a young 2 striper who had trouble getting much respect from guys who had 4 years in the Pacific under their belts.
And of course, the Ryan NYP (New York Paris) was designed to some extent by Lindberg from Ryan's M-1 Mail Plane. The Navy's Ryan Fireball was interesting; a big radial on the front with a turbojet engine in the tail. Both engines burned avgas. They built a Drone and a Missle after that, also.
You learn some amazing things when you can drag it out of WW-II fighter pilots. Dad never talked about his experiences unless really pressed to do so. I was reading an RAF Flying Review magazine in the early 60s and came across an article by a P-51D pilot at Williams who had his tail cut off by another P-51D. The author told the tale like he was completely faultless and he ended up having to bail out. He landed in a cactus patch and needed to have many needles pulled from his rear end. Turns out my father was the other pilot in the top P-51D. The author was a bomber pilot with virtually no fighter experience and he came up underneath my father's aircraft in his blind spot. All the other pilot would have had to do was look up and back, or used his mirrors, and he would have seen Dad's P-51 above him. Dad's aircraft sawed the tail off the lower aircraft and you have heard the rest of the story. Dad was found completely faultless in the accident investigation, but you would never have known that from the printed story. He landed his P-51D safely, but he said it was vibrating pretty badly since the prop blades were not in too good shape. Accident rate just after WW-II was 144 majors per 100,000 flying hours. It is now less than 2.
Yea, 2/3 of pilot losses were from training accidents or operational accidents. My Dad always said about Warbirds - "Those planes were built to kill people - and they are not too particular about who it is!" Terry
