that's my story my whole story hinges around airplanes and I was born in Brazil in some Paulo and the area was Villa Mariana and the tref name was a quite well-known in that particular community because it was a German community that kept to themselves and didn't really mix with the regular population in terms of who they married and friends and so on anyway that was 1923 and my father was an adventurer of sorts and he came to the United States on a lark in 1919 and went to work for the Steinway piano Factory in Astoria New York but went back to Brazil got married I was born and german was the first language I spoke which was something that was corrected by the New York City Education Department the school system I got rid of any German accent I might have had my parents had a mixed German Portuguese accent and that persisted throughout my whole life but when I was a year and a half old there was yet another revolution in Brazil and my father said that's it we're getting out of here we're going to the United States so we arrived in New York mmm somewhere around 1925 New York City that is and naturally went back to his old neighborhood which was the Steinway section of Astoria and we were way up north at the end of Steinway Street although we were on foot 41st Street and Steinway Street went to the end of the East River where it emptied into Long Island Sound and the piano factory had a very very large lumberyard there and and there was a beach called North Beach and North Beach at the turn of the century or a little before had a amusement park on it called the gala amusement park and it was quite a sensational place steamboat rides from Manhattan used to go there and so on but part of my story again Aviation I'm just filling in the background my father used to take me on walks when I was 6 7 8 9 years old and we used to walk to what used to be the site of the amusement park and this was the Glenelg Kurtis Airport and it was a private field and I think one of the key points of my memory was that one Sunday summer Sunday we were walking around towards the airport and we saw the last dancehall out on a pier burned down that was the last thing that was in that area that was part of the amusement park well there was still a carousel there running there were still foundations from the roller coasters and everything else and there were hangars and by the time I was eight years old I would walk there summer days myself and go up on a hill and that overlooked the airport and I used to watch airplanes and that was it airplanes for me I saw that the elects land and it the DLX was at Glenelg Curtiss then later known as North Beach Airport the DLX was there for one summer when they did an engine change and they took off the twelve German engines that were on top of the wing and replaced them with Kurtis conquerors which were now one of the first geared airplane engines and they were v12 yeah v12 oh about 600 horsepower apiece well I saw the DAX take off to go back to Germany I also saw the Hindenburg on the day that it burned it was flying over New York City this way the Lakers yeah yeah so needless to say I had propellers in my pants from from way back way back well when it came time to pick a high school I knew it was not going to be possible for me to go to college so I went to Manhattan high school of aviation trades and graduated as a airplane mechanic in the process I also belong to the glider Club and I guess I had my tail end off the ground for a half a minute or so in a primary glider and fluid actually down a gentle hill somewhere in the Pocono Mountains and the instructor was a an old German glider pilot a miele hecka and he was one of the first silver see holders which meant I think the requirement was you had to do a cross-country in an engine Lilith glider well that only increased the the desire to fly but I built model airplanes and I made a lot of gliders and where we live later on and I was a teenager there was a an old ball field near the East River gas company and we used to have model airplane contests there but when it came time to pick a high school of course I picked the oh I'm repeating myself like I I picked the Manhattan high school of aviation trades I graduated when I was 17 in 1941 New York City had split years so I graduated in February or January 1941 and I had a job offered to me that I never I never went to get with went to work at for Pan American Airways at let's see 41 yeah it was now called LaGuardia field I had a job there for a planet with pan Pan Am but I had nine months and I really needed a job so I went to the engineering employments business in in Manhattan and got a job as a tracer a draftsman and that was that was the end of being an aviation mechanic from there on in I got to be a layout man and so on and I think when I was in high school I finally realized that what I was doing was too easy I graduated with honors but it was so easy so while I was a senior in high school I went to Bryant high school at night to make up college credits so I could perhaps someday go to college well in 1942 I got classified 1a to go in the army I I suppose and there were several of us that decided that we better look around and see what else we can do well at that time President Roosevelt reconstructed the services to begin training pilots at an accelerated rate and he wanted to graduate fifty thousand pilots a year so they waived the college requirements for an an aviation cadet and if you were able to pass a written examination and of course the physical you could be an aviation cadet well they would I guess four of us that went in to the old Roosevelt Hotel on Lexington Avenue I think that which became an army base for recruitment and whatever and I passed the test so the next day which was Oh Lord I have the date on a piece of paper there was I think December 2nd 1942 that I was sworn in and given the uniform and everything else and I reported back to the Roosevelt Hotel in January of 43 to go to Atlantic City for infantry training well infantry training for a quote-unquote for private buck private air crew student was the official title given to us got special attention from the drill sergeants they they'd let us know that we were going to be officers and they wanted to make sure that we were going to be good officers so we marched in the sand and all the infantry guys marched on the boardwalk and these these were drill sergeants that fit the picture everybody's heard about they they were these guys well when we got done with basic training the services had a problem as to what to do with us because now they were beginning to accelerate the aviation program but I didn't have it up to full speed yet so they sent us to college I went to Lafayette College Oh roundabout mmm march/april of 43 and we expected to take technical classes for about six months and then go on to flight training well two months later I was shipped out to Nashville Tennessee to the qualification testing base where we were given all kinds of psycho motive tests and of course several physicals again but at that point we were classified as either pilots navigators or ba madea's hi happily was classified as a pilot and I guess we were in the classification Center about a month or a month and a half and at the end of that time I came down with a vincent's throat and I was put in the hospital for a couple of weeks which I recovered but when I got out of the hospital I was really out of shape but I got out of the hospital two days later I was on a train going to pre-flight school in Montgomery Alabama and the first thing I saw from the train window were upperclassmen waving swords at us and from that day on it was double time anytime we were in formation we marched of course like all good cadets but if we were gone anywhere it was double time and you know what I got into pretty good shape real fast but it was a class system so all we heard double-timing it to our barracks from the upperclassmen as they were yelling at us I hear eyeballs clicking you can't look around mister you can't buy this place and and all all kinds of rattle and stuff like that and well we were underclassmen for a month and during that months I had one upperclassman who singled me out to be his personal project so one of the things he he did was I talked about the fact that I had a stomach I didn't have a stomach I was 6 feet and I weigh 255 pounds but he kept asking me for a piece of my belt because he was going to make me nice and slim so I I had a second belt I gave him a piece of my second belt and he asked me for pieces of my belt about five or six more times during the months that he was the upperclassmen and I kept cutting the other belt and giving it to and on the last day when he was leaving he called me into the barracks and he said mister you sure got skinny didn't you and he had the six pieces of belt laid out it was it was almost a foot my hat but our boy to class system they yell at you now you know practically touch your nose to nose and there are many stories and I I don't remember very many from pre-flight but it was an experience we double-timed all the time once a week information one hour of double time to a cadence and once a week the Burma Road which was a two and a half mile cross-country trail through the woods and then all kinds of calisthenics and chinning and climbing ropes with your hands only and all that sort of thing just explaining the the gym instructors were we're actually real nice guys and they explained look you're gonna have to to be able to resist g-forces if you're gonna if you're gonna be a fighter pilot but g-forces are in your future and you you better be in good shape well I was in good shape then they shipped me to Orangeburg South Carolina in September of 43 and I was now officially in class 44 see which meant I was scheduled to graduate in March of 44 anyway these were bt 1700 pt-17 the Boeing biplane open-cockpit airplane and I have pictures of Orangeburg taken from the cockpit of a of a 17 and that was a round field it was a round field it had some grass some sand and markers so you could always land a pt-17 dead into the wind because that airplane was a ground rule for once you've got it on the ground it didn't want to go straight and one of the most prevalent failures on that airplane was the tail wheel tire because the tail wheel was steerable and if you've got the tail down you had to actually kick the rudder and the tail wheel to keep that pt-17 from spinning around and digging the wingtip into the sand well I guess I had about eight hours I'm not sure and I was flying with my instructor all that time learning how to land that the 17 the Stearman and one day I thought I was doing pretty good and I I get it into three point attitude and we were supposed to level off a foot off the ground and let it just settle just drop down on three points and I was I thought I was doing pretty good and I was about to make my last landing when the instructor hit the stick and pushed it forward and it bounced the airplane and then of course I had to recover from that which was a matter of applying power get that flying again and landing it again well I landed it again not so good and the instructor got on the Gosport tube now a Gosport tube was a rubber tube that he spoke into he had a funnel like that he spoke into and the Gosport went into your helmet earpieces well he gave me the devil he yelled at me and oh that was the lousy ending I ever saw it cetera et cetera and he all the way all the way across the field as I was taxing he was giving me a hard time and I finally we get to the upwind side of the field and he says stop this airplane I'm getting out you can go kill yourself if you want I think he climbs out of the cockpit closes the the seatbelt the safety belt takes this parachute walks off and sits on a a boundary marker and he said go on go kill yourself do it three times if you can then I'm taxi in a way I didn't know whether whether the SR go blind you know and I look up in the mirror the rearview mirror that was up on the wing and he's laughing awake like anything well I made three lousy landings then after that okay I was allowed to practice landings and then with a little more duel I was allowed to fly around the area and finally I got sixty hours and and we had all kinds of fun things we did like landing stages landing stages were done at an auxilary field and it was sort of a a practice for a short field landing and what they did was they put a clothesline across the end of the runway at about four feet high yeah and you had to land without touching the clothesline as close as you could and there were other other neat stuff they had they have us doing the school had in Orangeburg was actually originally a flight school for civilian and the instructors were civilian but they had some kind of military rank of some sort and I don't know what it was my instructor was a guy by the name of Dale Harlan H a our lan i think southern boy and a really nice guy and I do have a black-and-white picture of my flight yeah and Dale Harlan excellent one of my stories about primary flying school that one of the instructors was a little bit eccentric and he would stand up in the forward cockpit and point at an instrument to the student in the back cockpit by leaning over standing up in the cockpit leaning over pointing and one day he was doing that in the traffic pattern and he said the kid told me about this he was pointing at the altimeter he said he was saying when I say a thousand feet I mean a thousand feet pointing at the history the kid turn the airplane upside down and dump them out and well he had a parachute of course the kid came back landed went right into the co and said I want another instructor okay then the instructor came in with this parachute in his arm matter and the Dickens yeah but he couldn't do anything yeah because he he he made an unauthorized move but the the kitchen by then by that time we had we had been doing acrobatics and a favorite some of the favorite things we used to do is one chase Hawks into clouds and then dive around the cloud and watch your spin out of out of the cloud intifada another thing is to take Nowell balloons and blow them up and throw them out and then try to break them with the propeller okay Oh what else did we do we had all sorts of things so we used to do but buzzing clouds man that was that was sheer fun yeah doing loops around clouds and know all kinds of things we we had blood fun with that plane you couldn't hurt it yeah you couldn't hurt he's still in the Stearman right and the Stearman right well next I was shipped to Schofield Sumter South Carolina for basic training and this was in a bt 13 a Loing fixed gear airplane with flaps that's new a two-speed propeller and that was new and you had to crank the flaps down by hand to land the BT 13 and it was called the vaulty vibrator because in doing acrobatics that airplane would do the slowest snap rolls I ever saw all you had to do was just lift the nose a little and just push the rudder pedal in and it would go didn't did it around in a snap rope and you couldn't get two snap rolls out of it you could get one and a half and then of course you had to recover from a dive or something but it was called a faulty vibrator for that part for that reason but one of the features of basic flying school was flying formation and we used to take off and land in formation with an instructor two students in an instructor take off wing clearance and all of that but you had to hold your position while taking off and you had to hold your position while landing and you had to land it three points and another requirement that was new was we used to have to practice power off landings where on the downwind leg when you got opposite the numbers of the runway you chopped the throttle and then you were obliged to try to hit the numbers on the runway without using any power flame and there was night flying and night flying actually claimed a couple of students because the BT 13 if you had full flaps down and you put power on to go around if you weren't successful in your landing attempt it had attended tendency to go way nose-up so at night students would forget to pull the flaps up while they were applying power so it's not that gets caught in a stall at maybe 50 feet in the air but a couple of guys killed themselves with that well planation flying acrobatics the beginnings of instrument flying with a hood in the back seat and by the time I got done with basic flying school I had maybe a hundred and twenty hours or something like that got about sixty hours of per school I was then selected to be a fighter pilot in basic some of the men were selected to be bomber pilots and they transition with into twin-engine Cessna zai think they were Cessna trainer I forgotten that the number designation but anyway they were at that field also and then I was going to go to fighters fighters school so I went to Mariano Florida to fly a t6 and the 86 huh was also a ground looper it you put it on the runway and and I wouldn't roll straight so the dominant practice was you put your feet up on the brakes on your final approach leg to be ready to use the brakes to keep the 86 rolling stressors but 86 is more formation instrument training and now we had to make instrument takeoffs from the backseat under a hood and you had to keep it on the runway so you lined it up set the directional gyro to the runway heading and then close the hood and then the instructor said okay you got it now take it off so you had to take it off and make a smooth takeoff and not hit any of the runway lights in the process and get it up up to altitude and why don't one of the practices in 86 extra training was the instructor would take the controls and do acrobatics and you were under the hood and he did he sometimes leave you like this and shake the stick and say okay you've got a kit so you had to you had to senator needle son of the ball son of the air speed that was the procedure get it flying again and keep it level yeah and that was a little bit of a thrill like time did you ever have any airs like this or motion sickness from all this yeah yeah did you have trouble with that or you can through endure I got through it I got through it and I I I got used to it okay and I was lucky some guys did they didn't get used to it well one day I was it was near graduation and I had to get a some more time under the hood so a a waft was my lookout pilot Oh ladies Air Force pilot went into the front seat and I was in the back under the hood and I I was so practicing I don't know fundamental things but after she landed the airplane she signed the form 1a and handed it back to me the sign because I was the pilot in command and she had written up relief to be used and she was wearing trousers and I could see part of her and I wasn't paying any attention and i sat there scratching my head and she laughed and just walked off you don't remember her name do you no okay no I don't but my my my other story was I took my acrobatic check ride with the squadron commander who was a major he he'd been in Pearl Harbor and so on and was backed in the Training Command and as I was getting into the cockpit he said mister would you go get me a cup of water yes sir so I tried it off I got him a cup of water and he drank about half of it and while I'm buckling myself in I get myself hooked up with now Electrical headsets and so on he gets on me in the comment he says mister you see this proper water if you spill a drop you flunk well a fighter pilot was supposed to fly acrobatics coordinated that is we're keeping the ball in the middle the skid and slip ball you had to be able to do barrel rolls loops well not implements because emmalin was a slow roll at the top of a loop but a lot of maneuvers you had to work at coordinating that airplane so that the ball was stayed in the middle that is because in a fighter with fixed guns if the ball is off to the side your bullets are not going where you're aiming them so that's how we had to do and of course he drank the water but he was he was the same guy that just before I graduated he took me up for my final check ride and he said mister I want you to go up to 15,000 feet and I want you to put this airplane in a spin and hold it in a spin and count the turns until I tell you to pull out I'm not countin turns and that was I forgotten 18 turns or something like that and we get down to about 2,000 feet and he says okay now stir take it out take it out of the spin so I kick it out of the spin and I was thoroughly dizzy and I wonder what the hell was going on he said I just wanted to demonstrate to you that the 86 does not have a vicious spin he demonstrated all right well he let me know that he had put me in for instructor training okay so I went back to Mariana and I was teaching acrobatics and formation and I was waiting to go to instructor school and there was it was a month of that and it was getting boring and I don't know when I was somewhere around v-day no no no no no the the invasion that I I went to see him and I said sir I want to go to combat hi I just don't want to just do this so I was I went down the Eglin field for gunnery and it was 86 is shooting at the ground targets and sleeve targets with 86 s been right after that went to another auxilary field where well where we were introduced to the p40 I think I had oh I might have had 240 hours or something like that in military airplanes and we had to read the manual which was a little thin 6x9 made me a graph book and then we had to sit in the p40 and and practice with a blindfold identifying everything in the cockpit so you could put your hands on it and then because the p40 was a totally electric airplane why we had to demonstrate that we could start the engine but it was also the first engine that had an idle cutoff start which meant that you you had the mixture control in the off position for no fuel to the engine and you would prime it and I think the p40 had a plunger primer I'm not sure that but Prime it and then turn on the mags and had an electric starter and started on the Prime and the minute the engine started to run on the prime you pushed the mixture control up and up into what was supposed to be automatic rich because there was a stop in the mixture control quadrant to keep you from putting it into full rich although full rich was something that we never used any way any way the instructor at the time I was starting that engine which was standing on the wing the minute the doggone engine caught and started running he was on the ground he pulled the chocks it said go this is June 90 degrees and you had the taxi rather fast because you had to keep the engine from overheating because now it's a liquid-cooled engine so the p40 didn't want to roll straight either so when you went to a sit so you could see where where you were going down the taxiway you practically had to stand on the opposite rudder pedal to keep it from winding up into a ground loop so like I got to the end of the runway and I the coolant temperature who was still in the green but my legs were shaking they were overruled just shake it from me from the effort of keeping that thing going well anyway I took off you were alone in the aircraft now yeah you're all alone no duel well I I think I went about five miles before I pulled the landing gear up and we took off without flaps and oh I started climbing and climbing somehow it didn't seem like it wanted to climb real well and I got to about 6,000 feet and there was black smoke coming out of the stacks I'm looking at all the temperatures the oil cooler coolant temperature cylinder head temperature I was looking for something wrong and everything looked good and then I just happened to touch the mixture control and I went click back into automatic rich and the airplane would you learned right but those were war-weary p-40s and a couple of guys put them in the fields because the engines so were not very reliable they were the Allison's and they were old and Allison was Congress's baby General Motors anyway that's that's a long story I need be published right now but anyway I thought about I don't know 20 hours in the p40 and I was shipped up to the first step loss and that was richer in the Virginia as the reception field for the first step was and then I went up to Bradley field and um my home is Long Island I'm at Bradley field I went home on weekend but that was that was neat but Bradley field was about all Bradley field then because yeah that's where Bradley put the p40 into the that was earlier in right the airport got named after him first oh is that right yes how you have it safe well it named Bradley Bradley field was camouflaged with netting yes to look like a tobacco field and the meting was painted across the runways so that but they I first flew a thunderbolt which is now a Razorback C model or something was as September warm hazy day and I couldn't find a field and I called the tower and I said I'm in the vicinity but I can't find the field in the tower left and he said all right you go down the Hartford come up the river and when you get to a sandbar in the river you turn to a heading of 300 degrees and get down as low as you can and you will see there is a flat spot in the netting and max the runway you know what i i've got 4,500 hours in Muniz flying them all over the country yeah and one day I made an instrument approach on Bradley field and that very same runway and I went right over the very same sandbar it's still left in the river well so you're playing a thunderbolt now yeah Brad yeah at Bradley yeah and that was that was fun you know hi I arrived there around Labor Day weekend and I was I think it was Friday night I went to see the CEO and he was at the officer's club bar and I was talking to him and I I wanted to I wanted to go down to Richmond to see a gal and I wanted to borrow an a20 for Douglas thoughtless dive-bombing yeah then they had them as has transitioned airplanes on Bradley oh I had got about six hours in it or something like that I wanted to go down the Richmond anyway I've talking to the CEO and I said major what does a thunderbolt fly like and he's answered with a smile like well if it flies like an airplane Wyatt like an airplane if it flies like a fighter god bless you have a good time yeah well I don't know how many hours by then I forgotten I probably had $300 or something like that and they shipped me to Suffolk a base for gunnery and this was so October of 44 something like that and one day one day I was supposed to just practice laying down a smoke screen and the wind the wind was blowing from the west and normally anything we did close to the ground like ground targets shooting ground targets dropping bombs that kind of thing would be done in in the field that was west of Suffolk Air Base but the wind was blowing from the west and the towel was concerned about my smoke screen blowing over the over the field so he said why don't you get down to the beach and put it down on top of the waves right where they'd break so I'm tooling along with two smokescreen tanks I'm down to about ten feet altitude probably doing 200 knots or something and I passed some fishermen fishing a surf fishing around the Hamptons somewhere and I had gone past them with the smoke screen and I said boy that's interesting so I cut off the slug string I went out to sea about four or five miles climbed up to about five six thousand feet maybe more and then drove down to get a lot of speed and I broke through the smoke screen just off the ground right at the fishermen going about 300 miles an hour oh yeah yeah yeah have a little fun and then we wish the other thing that happened to me was we were shooting gunnery that's now sleeve targets yeah where they totally the top plane oh I forgotten what it was might have been in 86 but I'm not sure of that but the tow plane would tow the target about a mile out over the ocean parallel to Long Island beaches from Fire Island the Montauk Point and then turn around and come back and we were we would fly along with the tow plane or in opposite directions depending upon the exercise of the day from 10,000 feet and then peel off and make a firing pass at the target I mean your bullets were painted so when the target got back to the field they could tell how many hits you had well I'm I'm at 10,000 feet and I'm about to make a pass and I decided that I probably ought to switch gas tanks before I do this that Thunderbolt had two internal tanks I don't remember yeah I say it might have been all silver you all so anyway I switch tanks and started my my run and the engine quit dead completely dead it wouldn't start it wouldn't start and I was above John speech now John speech has a Parkway on the north shore of it that was really a four-lane highway with an island in between and I said okay I'm gonna have to stick this thing down on that road and all the while I'm black gliding down and I'm talking to the tower telling them I can't get it started I can't get it started I'm gonna have to stick it down on the road at Jones Beach would you notify the police yeah that's that I'm gonna do that well I probably got down to 50 feet and the damn engine started again wow I am so I called the tower I said hey the end just decided to run again and I was down to about 50 feet he says I I think you better come home right all right so I went back home well I seems like I I had a calm voice when all of this was going on and so there were many toasts at the officer's club that night but after that it was where the port of embarkation in New Jersey well I've gotten the name of it the army base in Brunswick New Brunswick New Jersey not camp shanks I'm sorry ham shanks no no I don't think so anyway so then then I was I was ship ship to go overseas and let do your cover on the HMT Volland dam sometime around the middle of January I I don't remember the date but arrived in urk Scotland and we all thought while there was sick oh yeah there was six of us aboard six fighter pilots were aboard with a bunch of troops so all the fighter pilots got army jobs I became the ship's gunnery officer that was my job going across to Scotland I didn't get a lot of sleep yeah except in the daytime but we arrived in Scotland and then I got orders to go to the 56th Fighter Group now we all thought we were going to go into a thunderbolt outfit in the 9th Air Force and and do ground support work but no I was I was shipped to the 56th Fighter Group and I was assigned to the 61st Fighter Squadron and then well the next thing was more schooling it was operational training and we had to learn tactics and doing a lot of aircraft recognition at 125th of a second but what we also had to do was we had to look at the pictures aerial photographs of cities in France and Germany at a twenty-fifth of a second and we had to recognize them and we had to know what the heading was home and how much gas you needed to get home so you couldn't get us lost we didn't use any charts we just know it like the back of our neighborhood you know the back of your hand oh the final test in that schooling was they gave you a blank map of Europe and you had to draw in all all the rivers and put in the principal cities and so on you guys had requirements like well no wonder you know that the father guys at this point in time were no longer navigating there was a lead bomber yeah that did the navigation for the whole mission so a lot of times they were lost if they got out of formation and they'd get on the radio and call for little friends little friends you know you know and they described where they were what they saw on the ground yeah and we were obliged to try to help them yeah well one day in a mission I guess we all got scattered and I was going home alone and I heard somebody calling on 8th Air Force common frequency because that was if you were alone you did try your where you tried to get your buddies and see if you could join up with them but as the last resort you'd call a therapist and tell him where you were and what you were doing so I heard this bomber and he he was close to where I was so I helped him home and happily there weren't they German fighters around so we got home all right well I I had a day off we got two days off every two weeks and we had an apartment in London where was your base during where was your back part where were you base oh sorry yeah this was box dead England okay in East Anglia okay [Music] okay so you had an apartment in London yeah we had an apartment in London so I had I had the next day or so naturally go down to London and have a little fun and I didn't know where they eat because I didn't know a heck of a lot about London at that point in time so I went to the officers mess in oh one of the big hotels in London and as a fighter pilot as we wore blue patches under our wings that that meant that we will come back crew and that a air raid warden couldn't order you into a bomb shelter you you're on your own you were on your own well I had the blue patch so I got my tray of food I at the officers mess and there was a round table with about six pilots at it and I sat down and started talking to them they were all bomber guys and that as it turns out a couple of them were the one the guys like ferried home the day before so needless to say I had enough to drink that I said bet you did yes yes yeah now but I people ask me how many missions did you fly it's just where I was going yeah well I don't know about the other air forces but I believe it was 8th Air Force where fighter pilots had a tour of duty of 250 hours ok and I had I don't know 120 hours something like that so I had an average length submission and near the end of the war we were doing 6 hours routinely gone to Berlin and everything else so just say ok average hours of for perhaps that turns out to be what 60 mission something like there could be less and yeah one one mission was that the Remagen bridge incident as I understand it the 9th Air Force couldn't get off the ground because of weather on that day and we were ordered to go to the Remagen bridge and take care of anything that needed taking care of well we went in on we went in on the deck there was battle formation at 500 feet and we were on the deck and I was flying yellow for yellow for was the 4th the fourth flight this was now battle formation flight leader wingman element lead the wingman yellow foot yeah I'm shakin yellow for was way out we were spread out flying abreast I was way at the end and yellow foolish job was always to listen to a their fourth channel she had four channels in the VHF radio it was yellow for his job to listen date their force in case there were any orders okay well I was yellow for and I'm way out nobody to my left and I'm looking around wondering no look love it did that they're not getting off the ground either and then I looked and I saw something coming out of the clouds going like hell it was a red p38 a recon airplane and coming down out of the clouds and it looks like he was he dove into the clouds to get away from some Germans and there were two focke-wulf following him trying to catch him and he must have seen our formation and this guy pushes the button 8th Air Force common he pushes the button and says look to Lockheed for leadership state disappeared I never saw them again we didn't do anything we just milled around there for a while and then went back home so that was that was a non incident and a lot of the a lot of the missions were really milk grunt you you sat there for hours and hours and hours and there wasn't anything happening or you'd get you'd get bounced by how many - six twos with jets a couple of them yeah because they were they were the only airplanes that the Germans had that could get up to the thirty thousands and still have some speak all of the all of those German engines had gear-driven turbines and that they could only pull maximum power for the last time at something like 22 or 24 thousand feet but the Jets now the two six twos they could get up to 35,000 feet were there many of them out there no they didn't they didn't know how to fight with him yeah they didn't know how to fight with an airplane that was so fast that it couldn't turn and shoot in front of anybody else yeah all right so what we used to do when when they attack us is we'd break to meet them head-on he'd call a break and that was standard that was standard procedure turn then that's why we was spread out so we could all turn turn and make the enemy head-on well with the two six twos by the time he got turned around they were gone so we used to start startup break and knew that they couldn't hit us because they were going too fast and then as soon as they started to pass us we'd straight down and take a shot at him take a potshot at him yeah but they they'd make one fast and then they were gone yeah but you were going up every day that probably no no word what is it now is it well morning five is it still 44 whoa it's weird the 45 what's I the year yeah yeah that's 45 yeah yeah we had troubles early on with the airplane this was now the p-47 m we got we got all the M's that Republic made and it had an extra powerful probably the most the most powerful are 2800 engine that Pratt & Whitney ever made and it was a C version and we had the big GE exhaust turbines okay so we could draw a full power all the way up to 35,000 feet and that was 3,300 horsepower at that altitude and that was a twenty-eight hundred horsepower engine and Republic made 130 of them and it was it was Dave Schilling who was the group commander and oh by the way the group was called Seth Keith Wolfpack yes I read about that yes okay well Schilling was the group commander then and Dave Schilling and most of the most of the brass did not want p-51 but when we had engine troubles they flew in some p-51s and we were supposed to transition and fly them on missions and so on and we flew him a couple of times and Schilling said no take him away we want we want the m's fixed so that they run good okay so we finally of course got him running good and what also happened was the tech reps that were there to cure the engine problem one of which was a grant to cool so coming home for missions and just would quit because they they you'd be running them lean and low powered to save fuel and they would quit men you'd had to start them which they readily started but then he had to run it with more power and you'd be sweating gas for sure but they fixed the cooling problem and they ran warmer but they said look you've got so much extra cooling in those engines you can take a little more manifold pressure than what you're now getting by just running the turbine a little faster so the machinists in the bunch I think they worked on the turbine speed cams and got more more manifold pressure okay the engine was rated at 2800 horses at I think it was 84 85 inches of manifold pressure with 15 minutes of water injection to take the place of the take the place of the extra gas that would be needed to keep the engine from detonating well they posted the turbines up to 95 inches and I know one guy was able to get a hundred inches of mercury into that engine I'm at 35,000 feet that was in that particular airplane that was an honest 500 miles an hour and the best of the best a p-51 ever did I think was something like between for 450 or and 470 something like that well that was some airplane that were you using drop tanks then or yes yeah yeah 500 gallons externally yeah yeah yeah you'd you'd run the drop tanks until they were empty you actually waited for the engine to quit and then you would switch to internal gas and then switch to the other drop type and run it out of gas and then you you just pull a lever drop them you did drop it oh yeah oh yeah well most of the time we were over Germany yeah when we did that yeah yeah we know I think gotten one mission I think I logged six and a half hours and they I just about turned off the runway and the engine cut it close right well that's probably the standard approach if if if we returned intact with the squadron if we returned intact then it happened frequently we would spread out for flights three flights or five flights whatever and get in trail for airplanes of the time and the deformation this guide wingman would fly out here to have an echelon and the lead this flight leader would take the flight down to about all 500 feet and maybe about 300 miles an hour and then we peel up and fan out fan out for a turning approach and we made turning approaches and it was called a Widowmaker pattern and flight leaders used to pride themselves on being able to break to break for the landing and put it down in 45 seconds so most of the time when I was landing I was turning and we were obliged to land at 45 degrees from the guy in front of you you know on one side of the runway and the other and ultimate and it was always the squadron commanders objective to land this fighters fast enough that the last guy would be touching down when he was turning off the runway how many guys were you how many fighters were in a would it depend on the mission or how there was three squadrons okay 60 first 60 cycle 63rd and a standard flight and you rarely had a standard of Mana a standard mission yeah mission squadron mission would be 16 airplanes four flights sometimes if you have enough airplanes you'd put five flights up sometimes you put up three because airplanes were down for one reason or nothing yeah and so we used to take off it's the same way yeah and I have a painting that I want to show you of a typical take off yeah we would we would take off we would we would assemble on the downwind end of the runway in flight formation with the flight leader hugging the left boundary of the runway his wingman tucked in to the gun barrels the element leader hugging the right hand edge of the runway his wingman tucked into the gun barrels and we took off two at a time and there was a an officer waving us on to start to start to take off and he'd wait until the flight before you was about 45 degrees to you and made way beauties so it was the flight leaders job to keep that flight at 45 degrees the other the other thing was the flight leader was not allowed to get his wheels off the ground until his wingman was already flying and already had his wheels coming up okay Ben and the flight leader could retract his gear I'm the wingman after taking off would fly slightly higher just so that whatever the flight leader cleared on his takeoff the wingman was sure to clear the squadron commander would go about five five miles up wing make a 180 turn and the rest of the squadron on the mission would warm up on him as he was passing the airfield so once he was past the airfield we were all formed up and if there was 16 airplanes why the airplanes it'd be like this and the squadron commander would fly instruments through the ever-present clouds and we would fly off the squadron commander and everybody kept everybody in sight and many times many times the the clouds were ten thousand feet or so and we just climb on through now the three squadrons there were three runways the three squadrons would take off on different runways and the second squadron to take off would fly the mission heading going through the clouds the first to take off flew a little bit to the north like five degrees or less you I'm a blast squadron the third squadron would fly a little to the south going through the clouds so when you broke out you broke out in the clear and most of the time you could see each other that you don't get a chance to practice that you can't this is your experience oh yeah you do it you just do it you're do it that's right so when I see pictures of those planes spiders stacked up there they didn't do that for the camera that's that's how they fly yes I see but the minute we got above the clouds which spread out in battle phalanx okay which was nearly line abreast okay so that the whole group you know 48 airplanes would be flying approximately lineup rest so we could all turn we could all intercept whatever was going on Wow yeah yeah yeah yeah you know one of my story in the States practicing fighter tactics and so on it became mandatory to use a standard phraseology and you had to practice calling him other airplanes in the sky well in the States it would be airliners and other military airplanes and you you had you had to always say it the same red leader this is red for two bogies six o'clock high or two bogeys wherever they were whatever the the position was so you got you got used to doing that yeah you know I'm I'm on my first mission and my feet are freezing and I held - 65 degrees and the heater was for nothing you know didn't do much but the sun's heat it at 35,000 feet was substantial so yeah I think it's outside anyway hi my feet was so cold I was stamping them and I was miserable and I heard in Indiana in the earphone somebody pushed the mic but you could hear it then all of a sudden the voice comes on Jesus Christ Messerschmitts the heck with the procedure yeah you know what my feet will want for the rest of the mission so and and that if if you cured the what does it be where'd the Thunderbolt um I'm on the air I'm being photographed Oh somebody want me now oh okay wanted me huh they wanted me but I said I was being photographed oh okay excellent anyway on May 13th of April we were to go on a fighter sweep now because we had the airplanes we had a lot of the last bend of the law we were on fighter sweeps which was what Jimmy Doolittle authorized there was a time when you weren't allowed to leave the Bombers but Jimmy Doolittle turned the fighters loose he allowed them to go on fighter sweeps and then it became a standard mission we would take off and just fly into Germany under radar guidance and radar if they saw any German fighters would put us up son and higher altitude and then that was our job to bust them up yeah not stay and fight with him just to discourage him let's sight then Gary you got to shoot a little bit anyway so that the fighters would be on the ground when getting gas when the Bombers were making their bombing run okay so we were we were on a fighter sweet 13th of April and I was flying Vic fast swing now Vic past was my my flight leader at that time and I think we were deep life and I was flying Vic past swing and Vic had just been made assistant operations officer because he was the ranking captain and also he had the most experience and we were supposed to go to the South Pacific and Vic was going to be the squadron commander in preparation I went to intelligence school in London with the British because no ground officers were going to go to the Pacific with us so we had to do some ground jobs anyway I'm flying Vic's wing and Jim Carter who was the yeah he was Jim Carter was the squadron commander then he was a major had a problem with an engine so he aborted the mission and they appointed Vic to lead the squadron so I'm flying Vic swing but I don't know who the group commander was but he ordered us to do top cover if if anything happened and we got some action well anyway we get into Germany nutmeg nut house nut house was the radar outfit nut house said there aren't any fighters up in a year we have a ground target for you go to egg back edram in southern denmark there are a lot of German planes sequestered there go shoot it up so we let the egg back a drone well Vicki picking his flight being included we're flying top cover and the group commander and the other squadron commanded they go down and they start shooting up the place well Vick reports a paragraph in beware the Thunderbolt where he said they finally let us go down and do something and they left something for us to shoot at well the group we shot up we destroyed 95 German airplanes that say wow yeah yeah yeah when I got three and three destroyed five damaged and I had a gun camera film that the 8th Air Force Museum was going to use and they couldn't get it to run okay to make a digital copy but that that film shows that I flew through one of the explosions one of the Ju 88 that I hit blew up yeah I've seen film of that sort of yeah the fighter goes yeah right through its destruction yeah why did we sweat gas going on that thing yeah man that was all the way from Denmark yeah but I think I'd like to take a break okay well let's do we wanna wrap it up we've been going for over two hours yeah oh that's enough yeah that's enough well let's let's wrap this up in there's there's no reason that we can't okay had a future date but I want to say at this point it's been a pleasure and it's been an honor to meet you and be here today to hear about flying in the 56th and alongside the 8th Air Force and your your war experiences so Ernie trap I thank you and the veterans history project thanks you and the Library of Congress thing you are welcome thank you okay I'm very happy to talk ok thank you all right so the other story okay you're you're talking about now after the war you did what after the war I first off flew 86's again at Mitchell field on Long Island but how then was lucky to get accepted by the New York air national guard at Oh White Plains Airport okay and they were flying forty-sevens at that time and then we got brand-new fifty ones that came out of mothballs these were 51 k's and it was a nice airplane to fly but the engine was a terror we had to run those 50 ones at full bore every 30 minutes that is full throttle to clean up the plugs otherwise they quit on you and the reason I only found out recently was that the engines both the the rolls-royce Merlin and the Allison General Motors Allison both the engines were designed for a full power operation on 100 octane gas and then when they started getting more power out of internal combustion engines the so called octane rating was insufficient to support the power they were getting out of the engines so they started putting tetraethyl lead in the fuel to raise the grade up to 130 or 150 the Pratt & Whitney's handled this with a plumb but the the inline engines both them both of them they would lead plugs and you had to be extra careful that anytime the engine started getting a little rough you had to put on full power for at least two minutes well we used to take off and go down the Floyd Bennett Field saving our full power time Floyd Bennett was flying Navy airplanes and we go looking for Navy and then use our full power up but yes there was like a little less than 500 hours and p-51s was the air guard we used to chase a Russian recon airplane out of New York State about once every two months that was before the dew line was finished okay that that was always a thrill in the middle of the night going up the Merritt Parkway as fast as you could drive but above all we used to we used to race came with those fifty ones you on a calm day you could get a fifty one if there were two of you you could get a fifty one to the point where you pull a rooster tail out of the water without touching it on Long Island Sound and then goes through sailboat races okay now did you did you maintain contact with any of your ear yeah Byron after reunions and that sort of reunions of course if there's spec passed who's still alive he stayed in okay he stayed in he's he lives in in the summertime in all Oconto Wolcott oh no same stages Milwaukee Wisconsin Wisconsin Oconto Wisconsin which is just north of Green Bay and I think he's in the phone book and hippie glad to talk to you yeah I noticed on the website there was a recent reunion at Windsor Locks at Bradley field did you get that one yes I do I have photographs of ants yes I saw that on the website yeah it's great yeah that you guys get together yeah yeah I went to to set several of the of the reunion most interesting one was the one in Phoenix Arizona okay at what's the name of the field pink huh look yeah look Air Force Base yeah and as far as I know the 56th Fighter Group including the 61st squadron is at Luke Air Force Base and they are Top Gun guys oh really yeah but we had a reunion at Luke wonderful and I raised I I flew the airplane I used on business maimoni I flew my money into Phoenix Arizona so yes after I started flying again somewhere around oh 77 78 when I went to a wedding with a friend in his airplane in Florida and when we went when we were in Florida he said okay now we're gonna go flying I want you to see what I'm airplane is like these days and this was a what was that it was a piper arrow I think that he he had so on Sunday after the wedding he puts me in a left seat I said oh come on John yep crazy he said oh go on get it in the left seat I'll run the engine you fly the airplane well it flew all right and I got over the water a couple of thousand feet I said John would it be all right if I did some coordination exercises with this airplane he says yeah sure go ahead so I started with doing steep turns and Shondells and lazy eights and that kind of thing I look over at John and he's looked white knuckled I said John am i disturbing you he said you a slow beat five minutes in this airplane and you wear it like a glove and what year was an attorney that was about 78 I think I started I started renting his airplane to fly on business and then in 81 herself I bought a Mooney oh well on the way home from the wedding we were obliged to stop at Norfolk for fuel so I'm flying the airplane now John says go on you're gonna fly at home anyway I'm gonna land it at in Norfolk and the tower says follow that Mooney in and I've looked at John I I said hey what's a Mooney he's just wanted it the tail leans forward yeah he's he's the tower should follow that morning in well I saw that Mooney on the ground because I parked near it that boy I fell in love with it so I had to have a Mooney and I'll show you the pictures yes I'll show you the pictures of the moaning we had two of them we had one that I flew for 4,000 some odd hours put three engines in it and then I bought a 231 redo which had a tuned and ported engine in it and it was rated for 28,000 feet and it actually true doubt at 200 knots at 28,000 feet and it had eight hours of fuel I I took off over gross many times anyway so that's that's that's this just flying okay well again I say thank you and it's been an honor a real honor to meet you and share these stories with you so and feat wasn't wrong was it Pete I couldn't stop talking yeah it's a pleasure real a real pleasure and the thrill to meet you and yes a plane entrance I've interviewed your story Sarah ruff really really different than anyone else a couple of oh well yeah we'll just have to get back to it anyway thank you so much you're welcome and you thank you from the world veterans history project right okay huh okay Ernie just remembered something he forgot to tell me one of the missions at Bradley field was a low-level cross-country navigation mission we had to stay below 500 feet above the ground and fly a triangular course and they the the course was up to Albany from Bradley down to Poughkeepsie and back to Bradley field well I got up to Albany and there are hills all around so I got down on the Hudson River and I was mmm down about you know 20 30 feet off the ground p-47 because yeah it was part of the training of p-47 and I've gone down the Hudson River and I I come to the Bear Mountain bridge and I say hmm do I go over it or do I go under it well I went under it and as I went under it I looked up and oh boy I got a lot of room here now I happen to have a brand new p-47 I think it was a d23 or something like that that hadn't had the numbers painted on the wings yet it was still unpainted and it also still had the water injection attached so I went under the bridge and I said mm I wonder if I could do a loop around it so like so I climbed up I climbed up and accidentally started the water injection while I was climbing up but I climbed up to whoa I don't know seven eight thousand feet and dove down and went under the bridge at about four hundred and seven miles an hour then pulled it up to a loop and while I was upside down I kept it inverted climbing just to make enough room so that I could then go down under it again I did that there were guards on the bridge there were guards on the bridge that reported that one of the Thunderbolts he saw go by did a loop around the bridge so I get back and the there were four of us with unmarked airplanes the CEO calls us in to his office and well he's reading us out he's really giving us the baloney one of you guys did a loop around the fair mountains bridge today and I want you to tell me who it is we're standing there with our mouths shut tight nobody's talking and he quit bawling us out after a while and that said if I find out and can prove who did that his tail end is gone from here well I'm about to close the door behind me and he says come here tomorrow morning you and I are going up as a flight we're going up to 30,000 feet you're gonna fly my wing and then I'm gonna put you in trail you ought to stay on my tail regardless of what I do and he did everything he knew how to do in a thunderbolt and I stayed on his tail and we get back down on the ground he said that was a nice job come on I'll buy you a drink and he buys me a drink and he says did you use any water in that on the boat you're in I said yes accidentally he said that's why you flew with me today yeah yeah he was he knew what was going on but [Laughter] thank you yeah
