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Pilot
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posted 03-14- 09:30 AM
  
Big Roger on that link! Besides telling you how they made their ground runs, the 44th is pretty important to me personally.
The 44th got three pilots into the air at Pearl Harbor, and despite that necessary transition to mud moving, not only bagged over 160 Jpns planes before the war was over, but never lost an escorted bomber to their Naval fighters on all those missions up the Slot to Rabaul. Bob Westbrook's rules for escort were wizard.
Bill Starke's squadmate, Col. Jack Laurie (Ret.), got to Guadacanal a month earlier than Bill, and on his rotation home, finished the war testing the P38-M, the two-seat radar nightfighter. Jack is also my friend and neighbor, so I haven't just read Bill's book, I've seen the videotape he put together from 8mm film he took at the time. There are a couple of pictures in the book showing one of the guys flying the CO's personal p40 that he'd kept after the transition to p38, (without authorization as the CO was away). You see a pic of it in flight with the wheels down, and then of it belly down on Fighter Two after he forgot to put the wheels back down. Funny enough when you think of it, but in the film, you see it cruising by wheels down and just above stall, and as the camera pans you see the other pilots sitting on the ocean cliff saluting his passage with some suspicious looking bottles! There's a lot else, and Bill's narration is particularly good. I do hope he will offer it for sale too. One note on that is that since 8mm film was impossible to get, the gun camera crew slit 16mm gun camera film halfway to the sprockets to make him 8mm.
Col. Jack is writing a book on his career (he later carried the nuclear codes for Eisenhower), and I've been noodling at 44th graphics and a website for him; so with Panzer in the hospital, it looks like time to start pushing that job further up the queue.IP: Logged |
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posted 03-13- 08:04 PM
