I haven’t been… His wife’s name was Ruth. They lived in Colorado Springs. And they had no children of their own.
I think they adopted six or seven boys. And he was the city manager of Colorado Springs. Walt Cuning.
I don’t remember… Yeah, yeah. He just took me in his arms and cared for me. That’s his obituary.
But he was a personal equipment officer. Okay. Here’s what Ruth, his wife, wrote me after he passed away.
I didn’t mention his funeral. Oh, I’ve got to spend all this afternoon. Yeah.
Huh. He told me to leave this together.
With the art on his… He was a wild pilot. Maybe one day he’ll picture me flying a… Oh yeah. We was gonna go dogfight, but I… I cut that off.
Yeah. I didn’t want to be a casualty after the war was over. There were a few of those.
Horsing around. But it’s a good thing they didn’t have an operational Messerschmitt 262. I like that.
I dream sometimes I could have been shot down and made it to the end of the runway and see one of them 262s. I don’t guess I’d have figured out how to get it off the ground, though. Yeah, I think that was a little harder to fly.
Yeah, I imagine so. You said one time you were defending a bridge and what was that, a Rado 234? Yeah, they were kind of a fighter bomber. Yeah, they were bigger.
I think they were. They weren’t like the 262. But you also didn’t catch them, either.
No, they were fast. They didn’t pay no attention to us. They bombed.
You’d have to fill the air full of airplanes. Hope they’d run into one. That must have been at the very, one of the Rhine bridges or something like that.
Yeah, it was that. Either the Rohr or the Rhine, one of the two. I’ll just relabel it and put on the outside what’s inside.
Yeah, that works. Who was the B-29 pilot? Now, this was not in this group, but he came over to the pig pen and said, that’s what they fed us in Korea. Oh, Warner, Sid Warner.
Yeah. He’s a B-29 pilot. He was flying 29s when he got shot.
He was a Korean War casualty. He and I were classmates that went to flying school, and we were stationed in Las Vegas together. But he didn’t go on Thunderbolts.
No, no. See, I’m the only one that ever got out of that Thunderbolt. I’ve told you in that story that my girlfriend wrote me that letter.
I’m the only guy that ever went to a fighter unit from there, that I know of. Yeah. All the rest went to bombers.
Well, they were flying bombers over there. They later used a strip B-26s with no armament or anything on it for tow ships pulling targets. And when they were getting ready to see, when I got to Las Vegas, it was new.
It was just starting to, and they just had junk. And they didn’t have really no good method of training gunners. Sitting in the back end of a T-6 flying at a target sleeve, it’s just nothing compared to what you’re going to actually do.
You might as well be sitting on the ground doing that. Oh, I see. Now, they had, that was really interesting then.
They had a lot of equipment in there. They had real B-17 ball turrets mounted on the back end of trucks, hooked up with electricity, had a 50-caliber, maybe they were changing 30 in it. And they had railroad tracks out there in a triangle.
And they had a motor pulling it, and they had a target on the track. And the motor thing pulling it around this track like that. They had an embankment here so that you couldn’t shoot the tow vehicle.
Yeah. Just the target was sticking out. And they would set the actual turrets.
And they was training, you know, fire at that thing going around down the tracks. And we’d have to be a range officer sometimes. Instead of flying, we’d be out as a range officer.
And they had another device I really liked. They had a, they called a Martin Baker turret. It was a smaller turret.
It wasn’t as big as the one that they put on the 17s and 24s. I don’t know what they used them on. But it was a smaller turret.
And we had AT-11s with a twin-engine beach. I flew them, but Gunners was it. It had that turret in it.
But they had one of those mounted in the back end of a truck and powered by the truck hanging on back in there. And instead of a machine gun in there, they had a Browning shotgun in there. And you went out and shot skeet with that thing.
I don’t know what for. Try to shoot skeet with a turret. I loved it.
They’d let us, you know, range officer, would you want to try this stuff out too? Yeah. Know what you’re doing. About the same thing, isn’t it? Shooting airplanes.
You know, to be a good turret operator, that takes skills too. You’re converting from shooting like that to handles like here. And you’re moving your whole body, you know, to follow the target.
And it was an interest. They had a lot of equipment like that. But anyway, I started to say, they were starting that.
They wanted to get more realistic in this. Whether Gunners had a more realistic view of what they’re going to run into. And they started taking B-17s.
And they were trying to see how they were going to use it and work that out. And they wanted a fighter making passes at that B-17. Well, we didn’t have no damn fighters.
We had T-6s. So they asked me, they wanted me to act as a fighter pilot and make passes at the 17. And I knew one of the T-6s had a little bit more oomph in it.
I told them, let me have that airplane. And they took the B-17 and put the flaps down and flew it at just above stall speed, you know, and keep slowing it down so I could manage to stay with it. Yeah, because it was fast.
The B-17 was darn fast. T-6 ain’t no speedster, you know. So anyway, I was out there all myself.
And I’d come in and make passes at it from this and pull up. And then I’d make a bottom pass and come up at the turrets and so on. And hell, you had to make sure you made your break right so if you stayed with it, you’d lose your 17.
Yeah, and never get him. Took too long to catch up to make the next trip. And then I caught him when he was going to make a turn.
I got myself positioned where I could make a head-on attack on him from the front and not forever get lost catching him again. I worked it out pretty good. And when I got down, they told me, you did a good job on that.
So I don’t know. I just did it once. And that was the first one to try it.
To see whether it would work at all. Yeah, oh, man, they were experimenting with it. They developed it then.
They had B-17s and they had, but I don’t know what they used for fighters. But I know it was a rather dangerous business, a head-on pass at that time. I know there were several B-17s that had T-60s between the engines on them.
I don’t want to whisper to one of my friends who got killed that way. Anyway, but they finally realized they’re going to have to train these gunners a little bit better. Yeah, because they weren’t shooting anything.
So they got the real, they got the B-17 with the chin turrets in it and so forth. I never, they had a one P-39 that was rebuilt at Chenute at the mechanic school over there. And I just wanted to fly that thing so damn bad.
I got myself in it half the time. Didn’t have no tech orders or nothing to read up on it. But they didn’t let me fly it either.
I never got to fly it. So I sure didn’t want to. That’s kind of like, that Focke-Wulf wasn’t the only thing that I flew that I didn’t know nothing about.
When they moved from Saint-Gizier to Belgium, they decided to fly a mission on the way up there while they were transferring the planes from Saint-Gizier up to Belgium. And the pilots, a lot of them had old gas tanks with the truck doors in it and the engines on it. And they put all their personal belongings in there.
And they were going to get them up there on the fly. Well, they decided they were going to have a mission on that flight. They had their stuff in their tanks.
And we sort of had the Germans trained on it. They didn’t want to destroy as many of them as they did. This was on the way close to the Ruhr Valley.
And the Ruhr Valley is where the Detroit of Germany was. And they had defenses that were terrible. Well, they had a mission flying to the Ruhr Valley on a trip.
On a ferry trip. Were they glad when they found it. They got the bottom shot out of them.
They didn’t want to drop their tanks with all their personal belongings. But anyway, they had a P-51 over there. They wanted to transfer it up to Belgium.
I’d never been in a sat in a P-51. I said, I’ll take it. I looked around and kind of familiarized myself with what they had in it.
I took that damn P-51 off. And I played around with it a little while. And I never got the damn thing down on the ground.
I held it in a light that suited me. Because I had a rain warning light on a damn steel plank. There wasn’t much room for error.
Yeah. I made it on. And I flew 150 miles an ounce after that.
I forgot what tank I was on. Anyway, that’s only 2,350 miles. That’s a little different airplane than yours.
Oh, it was a nice flying airplane. They were good. The view was.
See, we had that big old. You couldn’t see shit out the front. Like that time I got hit with an engine that oiled the whole thing.
I couldn’t see. That didn’t make much difference. You had landings looking outside anyway.
When I was late, it took so many days. But I guess that time I came in. No, I don’t know.
That was a hairy thing when I came in. The weather was so bad. We all got scattered.
Couldn’t find it. And I had my fuel warning light. It was already blinking for a long time.
I knew it ought to run out of fuel. Couldn’t see nothing. That’s the time you landed in front of that C-47? Yeah, well, I came in and flying through that misty stuff, I spotted this serene light on the ground.
Real bright light. And I knew what it was. And the RAF had those at the end of the runway.
And that’s all they had, just that one light. Now, hell, you don’t know which way the runway went from there. I couldn’t see the ground.
All I could see was that light shining. And I knew it was going to run out of fuel almost any minute. And should I go up and bail out or should I try for a landing, see if I can figure this thing out? And it was brakes, and I was flying through the brakes.
I didn’t have to fly instrument all together. I was kind of partially visual. And I came and made my turn, and there was a P-47, C-47, transport, geared down, flaps down on approach landing.
Hey, I got it made now. I just got on his wing, and I said, you know, it’s very unethical to land ahead of somebody like that. He’s on his approach, and you don’t do that.
But he said, I’m going to do it this time. Because with my high approach speed and landing speed, I was going to be way ahead of him unless he was landing high or something like that. So I just got in front of him.
I said, you got instruments. You can do this again. I ain’t.
I made it, boy, and I got down. I mean, I was close enough where I could see runway, but it was right ahead of me when I broke through the clouds. I made a good landing.
Yeah, I had lots of luck, I guess. Well, somebody had to have luck. Somebody had bad luck.
Yeah. There’s one of them you talked about where you took off, and you took off and you hit the building. You hit the guy.
Oh, yeah. That was at Christ Church in England. Oh, that was already back in England.
No, we had one way to take off. He went over a bunch of trees, and the other way was out in the building housing. And this guy was his first mission, and we took off in elements, two ships at a time.
We tried to get out of that farm up. And he was flying on the wing as his first flight. And that morning, and I wasn’t on the – that was my off time.
I wasn’t on the mission. And he took off, and he didn’t make it off. He hit a brick building at the end of the runway, and he leveled it.
And when it stopped, he opened the canopy and walked out. That Thunderbolt with that big engine would knock a hole and pull you through it. And it was built so strong.
And so they decided, well, let’s not let him think about it too long. We’ll just give him another mission this afternoon. And so he took off that afternoon.
Like I said, we took off two ships at a time. He didn’t make it that time either, and he hit another house. But this time, one of his 500-pounders went off.
And the next man out was old Chapman from Corpus Christi. He didn’t make it off either. But he hit a cabbage patch and wound up in it.
And his ship caught on fire. And his wheels were up when the bombs were underneath him. And we had an ordnance officer that went out there and rolled those bombs out of that Thunderbolt underneath that burning airplane.
Holy! Anyway, this other guy, first he hit that building, and that bomb exploded and killed him. And it was airy. A friend of mine got killed, and I made friends with him before I got there.
We were down at a pull-up having some of that warm beer, and we heard the explosion. And we were walking up toward it, and we saw the fire, and we figured out what was happening. And on the way up, the English fire department came by there to try to put the fire out.
About the time they got there, the second bomb went off and killed a bunch of the firemen. Airy and I were still far enough away, it didn’t bother us. It’s hairy things happen now, I guarantee you.
Or was it the Aries that came out here? That’s the one I was talking about, Airy. He and I were walking up toward the thing when it blew up. He got killed later on.
Oh, okay. After we was in that building that we lived in in San Jose, he got killed on a mission after that. They came and visited me in a travel trailer.
Yeah. That was the parents. Yeah.
He was the only child that they had. I met him when I was at Richmond, went through Thunderbolt transition. You see, he was like most of them, they were just out of flying school, and they sent him to Thunderbird.
Well, I had a whole year of flying experience with fire engines. The experience, I hated it over a while. Hell of a place.
At that time, no air conditioning, no heat. I was building a damn building. I got there in December, and it froze my butt off.
No heat anywhere in the building. And then in the summer, I sure would like to have some of that cool air. Yeah, and just even it out a little.
It got mighty hot there in the summertime without any air conditioning. I didn’t like Las Vegas at all. I had a girlfriend there, but I didn’t really.
We’d go out every weekend, and I’d have to booze it up and so forth. I didn’t really enjoy it that much. They had good eating places, I’ll tell you that.
Nice clubs. Oh, yeah. The Frontier was new up there.
It’s not there anymore. Not? I don’t think so. It was out of town at that time.
Yeah, it wasn’t out of town anymore. And then what? We had the Apache Bar downtown. Oh, man, we’d meet there all the time.
On the Frontier and the Rancho Vegas or something like that, a big club. But, yeah, we all got drunk every night, or most of the night. In the morning, at the flight line, we’d get ready to fly the gunner.
And we’d have the guys out to the chickens to see if they were sober enough to fly. When I got to Las Vegas, they still had staff sergeant pilots that they hadn’t converted to flight officers yet. They still wore their coveralls, staff sergeant insignias on it.
And all these poor little gunner boys that were drafted, sat over there. They didn’t want to be there in the first place. Right.
Scared of airplanes. And their instructors would say, if you get in this airplane, you’re going to go out for flying. And the staff sergeant pilot had on his coveralls, his rifle, and his gun.
We had to check, you know, did I check around the airplane before takeoff, and keep the fires and all that stuff. Well, while he was doing that, he looked up and said, you won’t have to mind if I look at this airplane. And then he called in and took off with it.
So they’d had a pretty bad indoctrination with them. Yeah. Oh, Lord.
You were mean to them. You know, they should have told us pilots to be more conscientious of what we were doing. They didn’t tell us nothing.
They just took them up to the range and fired on them. And, hell, we were the ones that played. We played all the way, dog fought all the way up there.
And that poor devil had never been in an airplane before. He couldn’t stand it by his feet. T-6 going through loops and rolls and everything.
They were indoctrinated when they got back. That was every day. About four flights a day.
They were chasing us through them damn mountain valleys and up to the ranges. Poor devil. I feel sorry for him.
I think maybe that flying combat wasn’t as bad as it might think it was. Yep. I had J.P. Camel from San Diego was my co-operator a couple of times.
He was the one that reeled the target out. We’d kick and drop it, and he’d reel the cable back in. He flew with me.
Did you count the holes in the target? Huh? Did he look at the holes in the target? No, no. We dropped it at an area. Flew over an area.
Oh, he’d reel out a target, they’d shoot it, they’d drop the target? Yeah. We had a ring he’d drop on that cable. When it got there, it tripped.
And the target would release, and then he’d pull his cable back into the plane. He had a winch in the back. He had a target in the plane with him.
When he took off? When he took off, and he had the cable, he’d drop it out the bottom, and then he’d let the reel, the winch, let it out. But it was poor training for the gunner. Where the hell are they going to get to fly at something this way fast? They wanted to get hit, so I just take it right up close to the target.
The hell you couldn’t miss it. Fly right next to it. We were supposed to make a pass, you know, by force of that sort.
Yeah, so they’d learn how to lean it. Lean it a little bit. Didn’t do any of that.
Not very good training. One thing I’m disappointed that I didn’t do. You know what the B-10 was? The Martin B-10.
I’ve seen one, actually. There’s one at Palm Springs. It was one of the early, the first bomber that could outfly a pursuit plane.
It was a business. Curtis LeMay and all of those were the pilots that flew them back in them days. When I was at Rand, I was a mechanic.
We had B-10s over there. They were not used as bombers, but they were used for this sort of thing. For, you know, pilots to train in.
And it was a neat airplane, really. And it had the engines out. It had the engine instruments out there, the pilot looked out there.
Oh, it read the engine directly. Right, right on the engine. Instead of in the cockpit, he’d read his engine instruments out there.
And it had a deep fuselage. The pilot sat up here, and then way back there was the gunnery. Canopy for the gunner.
And then there was a bomb base in between that. And the, I don’t know why, but the pilot’s seat, the seat part of it, had latches where you locked it. And he’d sit in that, that’s cushions.
And it was in the, we always had to work on the thing, but the one thing they’d learn real quick, you made sure it didn’t latch really nice, because if you stepped on that seat, it wouldn’t latch. You’d go all the way down into the bomb bay. Probably hit your chin on the way down.
But you could go down into, the pilot could unlock the bottom, and he said, get down into the bomb bay. And you could walk back to the gunner’s position in the bomb bay. Wow.
But it was a fast airplane. Oh, what I started to say, when I got to Las Vegas, I didn’t know they were using some of those tow ships to pull targets. And some of my classmates went out there and checked out, got to fly them.
I’d have loved to have been able to say I flew a B-10. Yeah. That would have put me in the whole group.
You and Curtis LeMay, right? Oh, well, missed opportunity. Now, we had oddball airplanes that ran now, and Douglas B-18s. B-T-18s? B-18s.
They were bombers, real combat bombers. But in the war, when they used them, and they were obsolete, you know. By the time the war came.
The B-17s were becoming, well, my first B-17 didn’t have no tail gun, you know. Yeah, they were. Just a real tiny thing back then.
Yeah. And I worked on those. But the B-18 was actually a C-47 with a big fuselage, a bomber fuselage.
The wings and the engines were, I guess you could interchange with a C-47. Oh, really? Was it four engine or two? It was two engine. So it’s just another C-47 with.
It was like the transport, the C-47, the DC-3. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, it had a light engine in it.
And I was working. I wasn’t working on the crew on the B-18. I was another hangar.
I had an A-17 attack plane I was crew chief on. But anyway, when they had to change carburetors on that B-18, they had three bolts in the front and three in the back to put the carburetor on. And that metal bolt in that, it was almost impossible to get to.
And when they’d get ready to put the carburetor on, they’d get them a box full of bolts. And they’d sit down and try to get one of them. You had to take your finger and stick it to it and get it started on that.
And they’d cuss, and they’d read hell. And I’d watch them, and I’d say, let me try that. And I got it all right quick.
And then you had to put the panel nut, you know, the lock nut on. That was even harder to get on there. So I did that for them.
From then on, every time the carburetor changed, they’d say, go get Tice. I don’t know what I put that nut on for. I had real, much had good sensitive touch in my fingers or something like that.
Sense of judgment, too, probably. I could do it.