And I remember when I was in Norfolk, Virginia for gunnery training. I had a room, oh, we just were there for a couple of weeks. It was kind of a sub-base from Richmond where I was taking my fighter training.
In Norfolk, it’s Navy, Navy, Navy. Oh, yeah. Nothing but Navy.
We was kind of oddballs around that. Anyway, my roommate had a tour. I don’t know where he got from.
And he had met up with some of the Navy nurses. And he had a date with one of them. And he said, she’s got a friend and she wants, if I can find somebody to take her, go with her friend.
I said, well, I’ll go with you. And so we went there. Oh, those Navy nurses, they had the cutest dang caps that they wore, you know.
And so I think we went to Naval Officer’s Club or some place and had a party, go with our wives. And when we got ready to go home, our last gallon. We all had a little bit more to drink than we should have.
Well, of course. So one of them, I don’t know whether the lady I was with or the other one she was with, they were pretty cute. And she had all these cruisers and everything was tied up on the docks along there to where we was at.
And she said, we’re going to board one of these ships and we’re going to have breakfast. I thought, I bet that don’t fly, but we all go along for it. Sure, yeah, you’re along for it.
So we went up to the gang plant and we go right down there. And she told them we’re going to board the ship and we’re going to go eat breakfast. Of course, they didn’t let us do that.
But anyway, it was kind of fun, so I gave it a try. Yep, don’t work that way. I figured that wasn’t going to work.
Was that before you went over? Yeah, I see. I left Las Vegas and I went to Richmond for fighter training. And then we had to do a fight to do our firing.
We flew over the Atlantic. We had an area out there that we could use to fire, use to shoot at our targets. And we had a ground target place too.
We’d take, as trainers, we didn’t put that real high octane fuel in the front of the boat for training. But the guy that towed the target, he had 150 octane in there. They laid the target out on the field with a cable and it stretched out and he’d take off with a target.
See, when I went to Las Vegas, we had a target in the plane and they’d release it up in flight. We had a greater winch to pull it in and all that. But these, they had a cable in the target out there.
He had lots of drag, is what he needed. Yeah, well, he had to use a lot of power to pull all that out for him to take off. Anyway, I know one time I got out there, man, the weather got rough and it was overcast.
Finally found a break. I can say, boy, that Atlantic was itch sharp. I could just see the white foam on the ground.
And I found a hole and I just skipped through it to get underneath the clouds. Yeah, you skip too far, you end up in the water. Yeah, well, we was pretty high.
I don’t know how we knew exactly where we was at that we was in our area because Atlantic looks pretty much the same everywhere. And you had very precise navigation. Yeah, well, I think I mentioned in there that I made a sharpshooter.
I thought it was the first one that ever made it over there. And, you know, that’s really, I don’t know. I had a little bit of extra abilities that most of them didn’t have.
Boy, that was a real tough day.
I don’t know why, it’s strange, to me now it’s strange that it affected me that way. Anyway, going to the Pacific, but the Japs didn’t last long enough. No, they, well, how could you know that they were going to bomb them like they did? That was, that was, I can’t read this part of it, that.
You see, I was a, I told you, I said, you know, I came as a replacement pilot, we weren’t accepted right away. Well, you came over as a sergeant, right? No, no, I was a second lieutenant. I graduated from flying schools as a flight officer, you see.
Oh, okay. They quit the sergeant program. And while you were in the, okay.
Yeah. So you got a commission while you were in the program. After, you know, after, I was a flight officer, which is not considered a commissioned officer.
Yeah. But I went by the board and I made it to second lieutenant after that. Okay.
And then from then on, you know, it’s been a chain of events. Oh, no, that’s my B-26. No.
Oh, well, I don’t know what it is. Oh, here it is. You know what that airplane is? Well, that’s an A-26.
No, B-26. Oh, that’s the B-26, that’s the same engine, that’s the Martin one, the A-26. Oh, that was the B-26.
That’s the same engine that’s in the Thunderbolt. It’s a story about a group of young people. One day, this thing, I think, was interesting.
Stuff in it, I didn’t even know. Oh, that was Roodle. Oh, what’s his name, Roodle? Roodle.
That’s the story about him surrendering at our base. Oh, you can turn this off, I guess. I can turn it off, or I can leave it running.
You were talking about the 1,000 pounders. Oh, that’s that. I tripped off with that thing.
Not one, but two. I think the name of that fort was a huge concrete thing, and I had hell trying to do anything with it. And so they sent us out with 1,000 pound bombs, the bombers.
And I made my run, dive at it, and I hit the bomb release, and just one of them released. Oh, hunks to work. And I had 1,000 pound on one wing.
I pulled out, and I just stayed in and turned like that. I couldn’t get the wing up, and I said, I’ll just give this another shot. But it came in another fast.
I dropped the second time. You’re lucky. Could you have landed with it? I don’t know.
I’d have probably had to bail out. You’d probably have to bail out. I don’t think you could have landed with it.
I didn’t like landing with bombs. Especially not. Sometimes we had to carry fragmentation bombs.
Oh, yeah. Yeah, I know. Clusters of them.
Cluster bombs, yeah. Little bombs, whole clusters of them. Yeah.
And they’re not individually stable like the other bombs are. And sometimes our bombs didn’t drop. And if you had a cluster hung on you, you didn’t land that airplane.
You bailed out of it. Yeah, but it was going to go. You had a bad habit of dropping them.
They’re going off when you land it. I never didn’t. I dropped them a couple of times, but they always went off.
They always went off, yeah. But they were dragged. Oh, they’re huge.
They’re nasty. They’re flat. Yeah, I mean, there’s just no aerodynamics whatsoever.
Man, it took some power to get them off. They were particularly heavy. Heavy, light.