Tailwind. Amazing Stories

2009-09-13 TailGunner

Reprinted with the kind permission of Bud Davisson

Original article can be seen on Budd's website here.

Those of us who weren’t there will never understand

We hear stories like this a lot these days, but this time it came in an e-mail from a friend. He’d been helping with the EAA’s B-17, Aluminum Overcast, when an ambulance rolled across the ramp and up to the crew hatch in the rear of the fuselage. He assumed a visitor had dinged their head on something inside the airplane or there had been a heart attack. Then the ambulance attendants unloaded a stretcher, a backboard actually, with a graying old warrior securely strapped to it.

My friend watched as they carefully loaded the old man through the rear hatch and slid him as far inside as he could go. As they did, a familiar flame began to flicker in old eyes. They then stepped back and let the graying gentleman lay in the ancient bomber in silence. It was a private ceremony between two old warriors. Five minutes later he was in the ambulance on the way back to his reality.

No name was given and no explanation was necessary. The attendants explained the entire event by simply saying, “He had been a tailgunner.” That says it all, doesn’t it?

He had been a tailgunner. There, in a few short words we know his age, his past, and his fairly immediate future. In reverse order, we know that he’s getting ready for the inevitable and we clearly understand that his memories include some which scarred him forever. And as a tailgunner, we know that he was most likely a kid, eighteen or nineteen at the most, when his soul was permanently marked by the experience that defined his generation.

Those of us who have never been in combat don’t have the vocabulary to describe the fear and gut-wrenching emotions hundreds of thousands of young men have experienced. However, beyond the bombs and bullets there are other factors that, try as me may, we’ll never truly comprehend.

The phrase “band of brothers” has become a cliché, but, as with all clichés, it has been elevated to that stature because it is so true and says so much. Combat vets come home as part of another family, one that shares a bond that will never be open to the rest of us. And it doesn’t matter which war forges this relationship. It’s happening today in Iraq and Afghanistan, just as it did in the skies over Germany or in the swamps of Vietnam.

The old tail gunner was closing the final chapter of a life that undoubtedly included enduring relationships with those who had been there during the best, and the worse, times of his life. At the root of this relationship is the simple fact that they understand more about each other than their families do because they once stood shoulder-to-shoulder as they were crudely catapulted into manhood in a few cataclysmic hours.

In a clumsy attempt at honoring the ancient warrior’s clan, we label it “the greatest generation,” because we don’t know how else to single it out. However, even those who waded through the flames will acknowledge a simple truth: they did what they had to do, when they had to do it, because they just happened to be the generation on stage at the time and their choices were limited. The world had gone horribly wrong and they could either set it right or huddle within our protected borders and let future generations live with the consequences. They made the tough decision and set it right.

Those in combat don’t see their actions or their contributions on a global scale. When bullets tore through the fragile aluminum skin surrounding our old tail gunner, he wasn’t thinking of mom’s apple pie or the stars and stripes. Every warrior sees combat in the framework of their personal survival and a desperate need to support their buddies. The fact that an entire generation of vets preserved freedom for following generations was the happy by-product of individual soldiers struggling to protect their extended families in the worse conditions imaginable.

In reality, no war, on either side of the lines, is the legacy of a single generation. Wars are started and controlled by an older generation, but fought by an overlapping younger one. When a conflict is over, the generals and politicians die off, leaving the aging younger generation to take their place in the next conflict. Those who were in the trenches in WWI, manned the conference tables of WWII and the dogfaces from Normandy and the aces over the Mariannas presided over Vietnam. It’s a cycle that never ends.

What does end, however, is a generation. This is a subject about which I think and write often. And when I think of a failing warrior who asks to share a few minutes with a mechanical loved one with whom he had often faced death, it brings tears to my eyes. He was reconnecting with an emotion-filled place that had lived in his heart for more than half a century. As he lay in that airplane, if he never opened his eyes, he would know for a fact where he was. There’s a feeling, sponsored by the strictly-military aroma of hydraulic fluid and zinc-chromate primer floating on the slightest essence of avgas, that exists in no other place on the planet. And that’s what the old gunner wanted to feel one more time. He asked nothing more than to be in the presence of the friend who had brought him home time and time again.

As he lay there, we can only imagine what went through his mind. The chaos, the machineguns hammering away between his feet, the young faces he once knew so well all came flooding back. And in those few minutes he gained closure. He felt whole again. Most of us will never know this kind of closure because we don’t know how or where to seek it. But, the old tail gunner knew. And for that, I envy him.

2009-09-08 Betty Jo Reed, WASP WWII

Reprinted from Operationfifinella.org

Betty Jo Reed was so proud of her silver pilot’s wings and Santiago-blue dress uniform.

But after she turned in her parachute and went home, she did little bragging. Few knew that 1,074 women had served as military pilots during World War II.

A still clip from a 1943 newsreel featured Jo Myers Wheelis flying a twin-engine Cessna. Even her husband’s buddies were skeptical when she tried to recount her experiences.

“Their eyes would roll back and they’d look at their friends, so you just didn’t talk about it,” she said. “No one knew about us.”

Ms. Reed is 82 now and lives in Corinth, but in 1943 she was a teenager fresh out of high school who dreamed of being a pilot.

After six months of training in Sweetwater, Texas, Betty Jo Streff became one of the Women Airforce Service Pilots who flew military planes stateside, freeing male pilots for overseas combat missions.

Today, Ms. Reed and two other WASP program members, Jo Myers Wheelis, 87, of Weatherford and Marion Stegeman Hodgson, 84, of Wichita Falls, will relive history when they fly into Dallas Love Field – passengers this time – on three vintage bombers.

The veteran aviators are part of the six-day “Wings of Freedom Tour” at the Frontiers of Flight Museum.

The U.S. was desperate for military pilots when the WASP program was organized in 1942. The women ferried planes from factories to air bases across the country. They towed targets and got shot at by pilots training for combat missions. They trained men who flew off to war.

Thirty-eight of them died in the line of service.

But the WASP program was deactivated in December 1944 before the women were sworn into the military. They were not recognized as veterans until 1977.

Sixty years later, many people are not aware of the pilots’ service during World War II. A museum was established last year in their old training hangar at Avenger Field, and exhibitions like the one in Dallas are raising their profile.

“I call them the unsung heroes of World War II,” said Nancy Parrish, founder and director of Wings Across America, a project to document the experience of her mother and other female service pilots.

Ms. Reed knew as a little girl that she wanted to be a pilot. Her father would take her to barnstorming shows and read her newspaper stories about aviators.

“My parents were proud of me. But my friends I’d gone all through school with, I think they thought I was weird,” she said. “They were having babies, and I was flying airplanes.”

Ms. Wheelis was a young Dallas divorcee when the call went out for women pilots during the war. Her husband had bought her a plane, and her romance with the air lasted longer than the marriage.

Ms. Hodgson wrote a book, Winning My Wings, about her experience as a WASP member and the wounded Marine pilot she married.

She was terrified of flying.

“But we were at war, and they needed pilots,” she said.

Ms. Hodgson was stationed at Love Field during the war and lived for 50 years afterward in Fort Worth.

“The thing you saw then that you don’t see now is that the whole country pulled together,” she said.

She didn’t feel like a pioneer for women back then, and she didn’t care if she got a medal or a thank-you ceremony. “I was grabbing a glorious opportunity to help my country,” she said.

2009-09-06 Team seeking fate of WWII bomber crew

By Kevin Dougherty, Stars and Stripes "Stripes Sunday" magazine, October 19, 2003

They were known as the "tough-luck crew."

Dogged by Messerschmitts and misfortune, the aircrew skirted death in Normandy, only to vanish from the heavens three weeks later.

Now, nearly 60 years after its disappearance, 1st Lt. David P. McMurray's B-24 bomber crew appears to have been located in a small farm field southwest of Berlin.

"They did not perish in the North Sea, as some people believe," said Enrico Schwartz, a German man who alerted U.S. authorities to the site.

While much work remains, the case could be one of the more intriguing of its kind in recent years, at least from a historical sense.

A former 492nd Bombardment Group squadron commander, a man who knew McMurray, wrote in his memoirs that the crew "had the dubious distinction of being the first plane shot down over the Normandy beachhead."

"McMurray assembled what was left of his crew and hitched a ride across the (English) Channel on a LST (Landing Ship, Tank)," James J. Mahoney wrote in "Reluctant Witness: Memoirs of the Last Year of the European Air War 1944-45."

"We picked them up at the English port and brought them home," he wrote.

Six decades later, a different kind of homecoming is awaiting them.

Read the full story here.

2009-08-09 Not by the Book

By Roy Stafford, August 2009. Reprinted from Flyingmag.com
Read the full story here.

This is not your normal "learned about that" story. But an example of how a little bit of aviation knowledge, which didn't appear in "the book," that was passed on by a consummate professional probably saved my life and an airplane to boot.

Many years ago (more than I'd like to admit) I was a young "Studley Do Right" going through the West Coast Marine F-4 RAG at MCAS, Yuma, Arizona. Basically it was the Marine F-4 training squadron (VMFA-101); from there, once we were qualified in the F-4 we would go out to the fleet.

My primary Phantom instructor pilot was John McAnally, the coolest guy you'd ever want to meet and one of the smoothest "sticks" I've ever known or flown with. Tom Cruise only wished he could have been John McAnally. No pretender he; John was the real thing. I was excited when I was assigned to him, as John had the reputation of being the best of the best.

Normal procedure in those days was for the student to do a ride along on the first familiarization (FAM) hop in the back seat with the F-4 instructor putting the airplane through its paces and explaining to the student what was happening and why. The reason for this was our Navy and Marine F-4s, unlike the Air Force, did not have sticks in the back seat. This first ride was also to give the student some knowledge or indication of how fast the airplane accelerated and how it responded in different configurations. Most of us had already been checked out in the A-4 Skyhawk, but none of us was quite prepared for the incredible acceleration the two massive J-79 engines in full afterburner provided. I was impressed with John's skills and approach to flying, smooth as silk; he was a professional in all respects.

By the way, it was common practice in those days for the instructor pilot to bet a bottle of booze with the student as to whether he (the student) would be quick enough to retract the gear and flaps on his first full AB takeoff before he exceeded the placarded gear speed of 250 knots. That's how quick the beast accelerated under max thrust, once you left the ground. It was akin to your first cat shot at the ship; the plane was up here, but your mind and reflexes were still back there. Once you got used to it, it was old hat, exhilarating and fun. By the way, more often than not, the instructor won.

I think it was just before my second or third hop in the front seat. It was hot as Hades in Yuma, probably about 115° on the flight line. John had already clued me in on having two sets of gloves as part of my flight gear. The airplane could get so hot out in the desert sun, you really didn't want to touch it. John had recommended one set of gloves to preflight with and the other to fly with. Without the first set of gloves on, you really didn't want to open panels and push or pull on things like a good preflight required because the metal was so damn hot (a plane captain actually fried a beautiful sunny-side up egg on a wing one day as a joke), but with the hands protected you didn't have that problem anymore.

You needed the second set because it was impossible to not get grease and oil on your gloves during preflight, which could lead to explosive results when coming into contact with the 100 percent oxygen that we flew with. It also went along with John's fastidious personality. He was one squared away dude, in and out of the cockpit.

Please click here for the rest of the story.

2009-06-11 Playing Out the String

By Col. Robert Powers, June 2009 Reprinted from Flyingmag.com

Please read full story here.

In the mid-60s I was posted to Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska, home of Headquarters Strategic Air Command. I was not in the HQ, however, but in the Operations Squadron of Offutt's Air Base Wing. The ABW ran all the base's goods and services, we in the ops squadron provided support for all the aviators assigned to the HQ. My primary duty was as instructor pilot and flight examiner in the T-29 (navigator trainer based on the Convair 240), and ditto in the C-97 (military version of the Boeing B377 Stratocruiser).

The Air Force never encouraged multiple currency, but when you only have some 20 pilots doing the instructor and examiner duties for well over a thousand HQ denizens, you have to double up -- or more. I would eventually add two more birds to my list, but that isn't germane to this tale.

Every weekday we would launch a C-97 called the East Coast Courier, destination Andrews AFB, near Washington, D.C., via an intermediate stop at Patterson Field at Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio, outbound and inbound. The primary purpose of the mission was moving large loads of classified material, usually tied down in the lower aft compartment. On the upper deck were some 50 passenger seats, and it was a rare day they weren't filled with temporary duty travelers, military people hitchhiking on leave, occasionally even a congressman who was serious about fiscal responsibility.

Most of our C-97s were castrated KC-97G tankers; boom pod, refueling boom and fuselage tanks for jet fuel removed. Clamshell doors replaced the boom pod, and a jury-rigged stairway raised and lowered by hand through the open doors provided for passenger use. The interior was as-built basic; no soundproofing, few windows, but the seats, while not fancy, were roomier than any air carrier's coach seat.

The crew consisted of the two pilots; a navigator, who logged time, ran the radar and played follow-the-pilot, since our route was on airways, always IFR, irrespective of weather; a flight engineer, essential to the operation of the airplane, most of the engine information and control being under his hands in coordination with the pilots; and two scanners, the particular airplane's crew chief and his assistant.

A rule of long standing was that each C-97 flight be under the command of an ops squadron instructor/examiner, which is why I was in the right seat of the Courier one murky Nebraska morning.

I met the pilot for the first time ever in base operations, where we checked weather and filed our flight plan. It was a matter of pride that the Couriers took off at precisely 0800 local time. FAA was so used to the operation that we were never delayed. Once departing the parking space for taxiway and runway, the next time the parking brakes would be set would be at Patterson.

Off we went, into a ceiling of perhaps 800 feet, got our vectors for Des Moines, and settled down in a nice, steady climb. I had eyeballed the pilot, a young captain, closely. He knew his procedures and flew well for somebody whose days were spent shuffling paper. Things were going smoothly, my coffee was strong and of the right temperature. Should be a good day. Bang! Rumble! Vibrate!

Please read the rest of the story here.

2008-10-15 The Final Mission for Aircraft 42-50491

The 492nd's B-24J 42-50491 had transferred to the 446th BG. On 27 Dec 44 engine problems forced Lt Wallace Malone to ditch it in the English Channel. Seven of the crew were killed and three were rescued.

To our knowledge, none of these men ever served in the 492nd at North Pickenham. We've added their ill-fated flight here in an effort to complete the aircraft's history.

Read the full story here.