My name is Charles Morley.
I was a World War II fighter pilot, flew in England and France.
I flew a P-47 Thunderbolt.
This airplane had an 18-cylinder, 2,000-horsepower engine in it.
It had four 50-caliber machine guns in each wing, so a total of eight guns.
Under each wing on that pylon, we could hang as much as a thousand-pound bomb, a 500-pound
one on the belly, and in the wings, we carried 4,000 rounds of armor-piercing and cendiary
50-caliber bullets like that.
One of these things will go all the way through an automobile, including the engine and start
a fire.
When you squeeze the trigger to fire the guns, all eight guns fired at once, and you put
out 96 of those a second.
Something in front of you is going to get hurt real bad.
There's a railroad on the ground down there with a train on the tracks.
Right there is the engine.
Those little white spots you see right in the cab of the engine, that's where bullets from
all eight of my guns came to a point, and the thing is beginning to explode.
It's unlikely that anyone survived that.
When I fired that burst, I'm coming at it out here about 500 feet above the ground at
300 miles an hour.
That's 250 yards in front of my airplane, and all it took to blow that engine up wasn't
even a one-second burst.
It's like, blip, and it's all over.
That's the remains of a German marshaling yard.
They brought these boxcars in, loaded them up, hooked an engine to them, took them out.
This photograph was taken by a very low-flying P-38 photo recon airplane four hours after
we went by and dive bombed the place.
Let me explain dive bombing the way we did it.
This airplane, the P-47, was the biggest, heaviest fighter of World War II.
When you got the nose down on it, the acceleration was extreme.
Tech orders warned you, never start a dive below 8,000 feet and dive at a 45-degree angle.
8,000 feet is almost two miles up, and you drop a bomb two miles up at an angle like
that and you have no idea where it's going to hit the ground.
So our squadron commander, Major Ralph Jenkins, experimented around and came up with this
idea.
Assume that the point of that bullet is the target.
We would fly toward the target, not at 8,000 feet, but at 5,000.
You rolled on your back like that and went right straight down.
Adjust your dive to get the dot of your gun sight on the target, release the bombs, and
then pulled out of the dive going back this way.
We would be down about 700 feet at 400 miles an hour.
That low and that fast, you're hard to hit.
So we didn't lose anybody down here, and we also never had one fly into the target.
But the accuracy of our attacks improved to where it was not unusual to see a guy roll
on his back and dive down and a pair of bombs straddle a German tank like that.
This is also what we would do.
That's what's left of a German troop train carrying soldiers.
There isn't much left.
These boxcars were a steel frame with wood sighting and top on them.
We would hang a 100-gallon tank of gasoline on the belly of our airplane, fly about 50
feet over the top of it, and drop the tank on it.
It would burst and splatter gasoline all over that wooden boxcar, and the following fighter
would shoot it and set it on fire, just burned everything up.
This is an interesting photograph.
That's a picture of the five-tenth fighter squadron that I flew with, assembled for takeoff
June 6, 1944.
That's D-Day morning.
There are 12 P-47s in that picture, and we could get all 12 of them in the air in about
three to three and a half minutes.
This was the airfield we flew off of in England, on the south coast of England.
This is the shoreline, the white cliffs.
Here is the runway.
The tech orders for a P-47 called for a minimum of 5,000 feet of concrete paved runway.
That's 4,500 feet of wire mesh.
There's your airfield, fellas.
This is the little village of Muddeford.
One day, two of my pilot buddies and I were walking right down here, and watching one
of the other squadrons in the group takeoff, and one of their planes got up about there
and the engine quit.
He went down, hit the top of a house, crashed in there, and burst into flame.
Well, the neighbors around there did what people anywhere would do.
They all came running down to look at the wreck.
We knew there were three 500-pound bombs in that fire.
So we were running down there to warn the people and chase them away.
We got about 75 or 100 feet away from the fire.
One of those bombs cooked off.
The guy next to me, Arthur Williams, was from Kansas.
He was about arms length away, and a piece of shrapnel, scrap metal, about so big hit
him in the chest and went right through.
He was killed right there.
The guy on the other side of me had a piece of shrapnel hit his ear, and it took a hunk
of his ear out.
He recently retired as president and emeritus of the South Carolina Senate, Senator John
Drummond.
I didn't get badly hurt.
I got skinned up a little bit, but was introduced to the concussion from an explosion like that.
There were 21 people killed there, and I'm walking around in the middle of that carnage
with no idea where I was or what in the world I was doing.
After the Normandy invasion, our fighter group moved across the English Channel to France.
What we flew off of in France was even more ridiculous than this one in England.
That is it.
That is a British Spitfire doing a buzz job over our runway.
This runway, also, it wasn't made of concrete.
It was made out of what was called Hessian matting, a heavy-weight tarpaper.
In addition to that, it was not 5,000 feet long.
It was 3,800 feet long.
We still overloaded the airplane and still got the thing off the ground.
You sat at the end of the runway, locked your brakes, opened the throttle wide, opened and
turned it loose.
My description was when I began to feel life in the wings, I just pulled the landing gear
handle up.
The wheels wouldn't retract because they couldn't slide too much friction.
But the minute there's enough lift to reduce that friction, the wheels started up.
You pulled the nose up and climbed out.
It looked like that.
We'd leave the ground of 150, 200 feet from the end of the runway, which you see way back
there.
Now, I want to talk about this runway.
The Air Corps engineers, this is an apple orchard.
The Air Corps engineers moved into that apple orchard with a bunch of bulldozers and went
through just uprooting trees, shoved the logs out of the way, filled the holes in, tapped
the dirt down and laid this hessian matting, the heavyweight tarpaper.
They moved in with those bulldozers and two and a half days later delivered an airfield
ready to fly off of.
That included the taxi strips to move the airplanes and the hard stands to park them on.
That's something Adolf Hitler hadn't thought of, to deliver an airfield in two and a half
days is remarkable.
There's a picture of them laying the hessian matting.
They'd pull those edges of the tarpaper together, lock them.
This seam has been locked and pour the melted tar on them.
And then before we started flying off of that, they took those trees out.
We didn't have fancy living quarters.
You did your bathing and shaving out of your steel helmet.
We've got some water heating in a bucket back here on an open fire.
That's pretty primitive living.
This is also how we lived.
A couple of my buddies, Sandy Johnston's getting a new hairdo and Eddie Whittison's doing the
barbering.
It wasn't a barber, he was a florist when he got in the service.
It didn't matter, he was just chopping hair off.
We lived in the tents, you see scattered in the trees.
There's someone's laundry hanging on a tree branch back there.
Pretty primitive.
One day there's a young girl, she's about 14-year-old kid standing in the weeds out there.
Our flight surgeon, Doc Milligan, went out and he spoke French and he asked her, what
are you doing here?
You're right in the middle of a combat outfit.
The girl explained she hoped when we finished a meal, if there's any food left she could
take some to her family because they were hungry.
The war had killed all their animals, torn up their gardens so they couldn't grow anything.
This is an apple orchard, no fruit on the trees and they were afraid to get on the road to
look for food because if they did they're likely to get killed.
Our orders were, if you catch anything on the rails or the road's moving you shoot it.
Our mess sergeant, Sergeant Lee Singh, he said, Doc you go tell that girl to come back
with her family three meals a day.
She'll take care of them as long as we stay here.
So we had guests for our peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
One day Sergeant Singh came to me and he said, Captain would you do me a favor?
Well sure, sergeant, whatever you want.
On the wings, on the pylons, under the wings of this airplane, these things we hung bombs.
We could also hang external fuel tanks to extend the range of the airplane.
One type of those tanks were made by the English.
They held 108 gallons and were made of paper mache which was liquid proof for maybe three
hours.
Sergeant Singh mixed up 70 gallons of powdered milk, dumped in 20 gallons of mixed fruit cocktail,
25 pounds of sugar, three gallons of cavados, a good tasting apple brandy they made in that
orchard country, a few other spices.
Got it all mixed up real good, poured it in one of those paper tanks, hung it on my airplane
and said now, take that up where it really gets cold.
So I took off and climbed up to 35,000 feet where the outside air temperature is 45 to
50 degrees below zero.
It's going to freeze that mixture pretty quick.
Slop the plane around like that about a half hour to try to keep it stirred up, rolled over
and dived down and landed.
They dropped the tank from the wing, chopped it open with an axe and we enjoyed tutti frutti
ice cream.
Now that was expensive ice cream because the engine in that thing burned 100 gallons an
hour of 150 octane gasoline at cruising, 300 gallons at power.
We didn't care.
Sergeant Singh wants ice cream, he shall have ice cream.
In that part of France, up in the Brittany Normandy area, the farmers didn't separate
their fields with fencing like ours do.
They built a berm, a mound of dirt planted trees and bushes on it and that's what separated
their fields.
That's the dark lines you see.
Some of those have been there longer than the United States has been a country and they're
real solid and pinned our soldiers down.
A ground soldier looking over the top of one of those is likely to get his head blown off
by a sniper.
When our tanks tried to run through that, they'd run up over a berm, the bellies exposed
and they got hit by a rocket.
So to get them out of there, they sent a bunch of heavy bombers, B-17s and B-24s and they
just blew out about a five mile square, wiped out everything in there and our tanks got
through that opening into flat country south of the hedgerows.
When our troops landed up in Normandy, the Americans landed at Utah Beach, Omaha Beach
just east of there and General Montgomery's British Army landed three beaches.
Over on the west side of the Contantine Peninsula is where General Omar Bradley had the American
First Army, Montgomery's on the east side of the peninsula.
They blew the hole out over there close to Bradley's Army and he got his tanks through
that opening into flat country south of the hedgerows and headed toward Paris.
We were flying out of San Mayor Glees on the east side of the Contantine Peninsula.
Now the Germans are trapped between Montgomery and Bradley and they got out of, their headquarters
were at St. Low.
They got out of there on a road to try to escape from that pocket.
That pocket became known as the Filet pocket or the Filet gap.
They were trying to reach the little town of Filet down south of Cannes.
We didn't know they were moving, they got on the road at night.
We didn't know they were moving and we took off just at dawn, flew a search pattern and
came across that German column, bumper to bumper enemy traffic as far as you could see.
Turned and flew up to the head of the column, dropped a bomb on the lead tank and stopped
them, called our squadron and told them what we'd found.
Squadron reported to the group and the group sick the other two squadrons on that German
column.
That's 36 P-47s pounced on them and created the wildest sky you could imagine.
Anti-aircraft coming up all over the place, fires and explosions up and down the road,
airplanes coming in from every direction.
The radio traffic, a guy screamed I'm on fire, I'm bailing out, I'm hit, I'm going down,
I'm out of ammo, I'm going back and right in the middle of that frenzy came a voice
that said I want my mommy, you had to have a sense of humor to survive in that environment.
Now our job when those bombers went in was to go in ahead of the bombers and strafe the
anti-aircraft guns.
You have seen pictures of streams of anti-aircraft fire coming up.
Flying down into that is a really dangerous business.
But you see there's only one pilot in a fighter, so if you're going to lose an airplane it's
best to lose a fighter with one man than a bomber with ten men.
So we went down ahead to strafe the anti-aircraft guns and shut them down.
This is the briefing for that mission.
I'm going to talk about dead men.
They were not all killed on the one mission.
This guy commanded one of the other squadrons in our group.
That's my squadron commander Major Bruce Parcell.
He was killed.
Next to him is me.
I wasn't killed.
Next to me is Jim Pelletier who was killed, Kelly was killed, Michael Reagan survived.
He was killed.
That cap is my best buddy Ben Savage who was killed.
That's Jim Coots who was killed.
Of the recognizable people in that picture, two survived.
This is something that people don't understand about the loss of life in World War II.
Most everybody is familiar with the Marines on Iwo Jima and it was a slaughter all right.
But the highest loss rate, that is the percentage killed relative to the numbers involved were
the submarine crews because after all you sink one of those you got a hundred percent
of them.
But the second highest loss rate were the airmen.
The 8th Air Force alone, just the 8th Air Force flying out of England in just three
years had 47,000 airmen killed.
The hundredth bomb group of the 8th Air Force, we call them the Bloody Hundred, they took
off on a mission and two hours later one airplane came back and that was all that came back.
They lost a thousand men on a single two-hour raid.
That one airplane, believe it or not, was flown by a guy named Lukadu.
He comes into our museum on the fourth Fridays of the month for our Happy Warriors meeting.
We call him Lucky Lukadu.
When my buddy Ben Savage, this guy was killed, we were strafing a truck convoy and the aircraft
fire hit his plane and it crashed and killed him.
After we and the Germans left the area, the French people around there got his body out
of the wreckage, wrapped him in an American flag and buried him.
Two days later the front lines had moved past there so our flight surgeon Doc Milligan
took a couple of guys in a jeep, went down and dug him up and took him to the American
cemetery at Normandy, which you see there.
You've probably seen pictures of this place, some of you may have been there, marble crosses
with stars of David for the Jewish guys and beautifully landscaped.
That's my buddy Ben Savage.
I took that picture 40 days after D-Day.
There were 6,400 graves in there.
They just nailed the dog tags on the crosses to identify the grave.
When I took that picture, there were 6,400 graves.
Right behind the tree line is Omaha Beach where our soldiers landed D-Day morning.
5,000 Americans killed on that beach in one day, June 6, 1944.
Our freedom, our liberty is a very expensive proposition, both in treasure and in blood.
And the folks in this country today are worth every bit of that.
That's my squadron buddy, Ben Savage, whose grave you were just looking at.
You can see the size of a P-47 by the size of the engine cowling right there.
He called his airplane the Red Honey.
His wife was a redhead.
This guy is one of the volunteers at the museum.
He took these pictures about a year ago.
That's my squadron commander, Bruce Parcell.
That's my buddy, Ben Savage.
The reason that place is as beautiful as it is, and you can see the beautiful landscaping,
that land belongs to the United States.
It was given to this country by France so we could bury our dead in American soil.
But it isn't cared for by either the French or American governments.
It's cared for by families that live around there.
A family will adopt five, six, seven graves and they take care of them, and that's the
reason that place is so beautiful.
So instead of complaining about the French all the time, we owe them a thank you for
taking care of our folks that beautifully.
If you want to gripe about Parisians, that's okay, because they don't like anybody, including
other Frenchmen, unless they are Parisians.
But these are the real people of France, and you get in that country and let them know
you're an American and you'll understand real quick that we are appreciated.
That's an illustration of the amount of abuse that a P-47 could absorb and still bring you
home.
That's the tail of the airplane.
He got hit by a 40 millimeter shell like that that blew a hole big enough for him to stand
up in, but he flew it back.
We had another guy come back from a mission with a piece of telephone pole about that
long jammed in the wing.
He hit the pole about a foot from the top and it broke off, and he came back with it.
They had to replace the wing, but it got him home.
My airplane got shot up on 13 different missions.
That's the first time.
This is the elevator back in the tail, the movable part that makes the plane go up and
down.
I got hit by a 20 millimeter anti-aircraft shell like that that blew the hole in the
tail.
The hole is not the problem.
The problem here was that big piece of metal blown down there acted as a giant trim tab.
The airplane kept trying to climb and I had to fly it with both hands jammed against the
stick to hold the nose down.
Part of the time with my foot on it, because 45 minutes of that was really worrisome.
The worst I got hit, I wish I had pictures of this, but I don't.
The worst I got hit, I'm coming back from a mission into the Ruhr Valley in Germany.
I'm about 8,000 feet and an 88 millimeter anti-aircraft shell blew up under the wing
and rolled the plane.
You've seen this as a 20 millimeter, an 88 millimeter is about that long.
When one of those things goes off near you, you sure know it.
It blew up under the wing and rolled the plane.
I got it right and just as the next one hit the engine cowling.
It blew a cylinder and two cylinder heads off the engine and the thing kept running
for 40 minutes long enough to get me behind the American lines so when I crashed I didn't
get captured.
We got back to the little town of Chalon-sur-Marne, a grass airfield east of Paris where we
intended to land and refuel.
I put the landing gear handle down and the right wheel dropped down and locked.
I couldn't get it back up because there was no hydraulic pressure which meant that I couldn't
use the flaps to land and there was no left landing gear at all.
The first shell had jammed it in the wheel well.
We had a controller down on the ground, a guy with a microphone sitting in a jeep and
I called down and asked for permission to land and that controller told me I don't want
that wreck on my field, you go away from here and bail out, we'll come pick you up.
I was scared to bail out and decided to land it anyway.
I came in about 185 miles an hour and just set it down very gently on one wheel, held
the wing up as long as I could, it dropped down, dug into the dirt and spun the plane
like that and I never got a scratch.
P-47 is the best fighter plane ever built as far as I'm concerned.
That's an illustration of the size of the airplane.
It was the biggest fighter of World War II.
In that picture, I'm seated right there on the wing and just look at the size of the
nose.
When you came in to land, if you made a straight in approach to the airfield like airplanes
do at our local airfields and you're way back in that cockpit looking over that big
nose, you couldn't see the airfield out there, much less see a runway.
So you see pictures of World War II fighters coming into land, they come in low and they're
peeling up like that, they're not hot-dogging, there are two reasons for that.
One is that a fighter at low altitude and low speed is very vulnerable.
So we wanted to come in real fast and then kill your speed to get on the ground quickly.
If you cut the throttle and pull it in a tight climbing turn, that will kill your speed.
So that's the way we did.
We came in, cut the throttle, pull it up, immediately put your landing and flap handles
down and you're landing out of a circular pattern.
About here, your landing gear is down.
On the backside of the turn, your flaps are down and you're looking out the side of the
airplane looking down the wing at the runway and you just slide it sideways like that till
you get close to the ground, kick it straight and let it land and it worked every time.
That's what it took to keep a P-47 in operation in World War II, a four-man crew assigned
to each airplane.
I'm the pilot that flies it.
These guys don't fly, they are my ground crew.
Sergeant Francis Jones was the crew chief.
His mechanic was Sergeant John Icaveta.
His armor was Corporal Stan Stone who took care of the guns, bombs and ammunition.
He did a perfect job.
I never had a malfunction in any of the armament.
But Stone was an interesting guy.
He was from Brooklyn, the world's most accomplished griper.
He complained and griped and bellied about everything all the time.
So one day he's under the wing working on that bomb shackle making adjustments, had
me up in the cockpit pulling the release for him and a fighter came in and landed and parked
next to our plane.
The pilot dressed in a sweaty old flying suit got out and walked by and he looked down and
he looked down at Stone and he said, how are things going, Corporal?
Well, Stone didn't look up, he just said, oh, they'd be all right except there's some
blankety blank blank blank big shot coming in and they had us cleaning things up around
here all morning and that pilot said, I didn't expect any special attention.
Both Stone and I look out at Major General Elwood P. Casada, commander of the 9th Tactical
Air Force under whose command our group flew.
General recognized him, what could he do, he jumped up and saluted and the general returned
the salute but he made an issue of it.
He scowled at him and just leaned in and very slowly brought his hand up to his cabin and
held him there for a little bit and then very slowly lowered his hand away and grimmed
at him and walked off.
General Casada was sort of our hero.
He was a Puerto Rican Major General, two-star, he's the guy that invented the idea of supporting
ground troops with fire planes.
He got radios and frequencies in the planes and the tanks so we could communicate which
allowed us to attack targets close to our own troops without fear of killing them.
That was General Casada.
These guys were absolutely heroic.
We could bring an airplane back all shot full of holes and by morning that thing is repaired
and ready to go in first class shape.
They weren't in a nice airport hangar, they're out in the boondocks with flashlights.
They took great pride in their airplane and that was their relationship with me.
That was their airplane and they allowed me to fly it for them.
I would get up in the cockpit to fly a mission, Sergeant Jones would get on the wing and help
strap me in and he always said, good luck Captain, now you take care of my airplane.
I walked up to the plane one day, Sergeant Jones is up in the cockpit, he had tied the
tail down so it couldn't bounce and was running that engine wide open doing an engine check.
Just as I walked up he began shutting it down and he came over and he said to me, I wonder
what that sounds like up in the air.
Well, Jones, would you like to find out?
He said, sure.
So we took the parachute and the cushion out of the seat, he sat in the seat, I sat in
his lap, we couldn't get the seat belt around both of us but I went ahead and took off anyway.
I got up 12,000 feet and just opened that throttle wide open, you've got 2,000 horsepower
screaming out there, flipped a little level aside and went beyond it to the next stop which
turned on the water injection and got you somewhere between 300 and 500 more horsepower
and it just slammed you back in the seat and Jones let out a yell, his baby is really
performing and I dived the airplane and rolled it.
Now remember, no seat belts.
In a slow roll like that, you're going to fall out or fall into the canopy but a barrel
roll is like swinging a bucket of water around, do it right and the centrifugal force will
keep you in the seat so that's the way I rolled it like that and obviously did it right because
I'm still here but he was the only one of my crew willing to try that.
That was my second airplane, they're both D models, this is the D16, that's the D25,
this we call the razor back and that's the bubble top, essentially the same airplane
except for that bubble and obviously the visibility out of that bubble was a whole lot better
than out of the greenhouse on the razor back.
However, there's a little turbulence in a slight vacuum that formed back there which
slowed that model down about five miles an hour so while this one's prettier, this one's
faster which says cosmetics are not everything.
I want to give you an idea of what we accomplished, don't panic I'm not going to read all this,
I will pick and choose a few items from it.
In just one year we destroyed and this is destroyed, damaged is another list.
We destroyed 6,289 motor transports, that's big trucks, 358 battle tanks, 840 railroad
locomotives, 4,410 railroad cars, 27 bridges, 237 artillery positions, 23 fuel and ammunition
dumps, cut 748 railroads, blew out 234 railroad marshaling yards, sunk 61 vessels and 240
enemy airplanes on the ground that never got into the air.
In that year's time we expended 6,167,000 rounds of that ammunition, dropped 4,633 tons
of bombs, lost 125 aircraft and had 700 of them come back badly damaged but they made
it back, all in all we were a pretty destructive bunch of people.
That's an interesting photograph, that's General Dwight Eisenhower, supreme commander
of all Allied forces, this is General Cassata, the guy I was talking about a minute ago.
The picture came about this way, Eisenhower wanted to fly over the front lines and look
at the battles going on down there.
General Cassata took a P-51 Mustang, cut a panel out of the side of it, took out the
radio and oxygen equipment behind the seat, put a bench in there, sat Eisenhower on that
bench and un-escorred and flew him up and down the front lines so he could look at the
battles going on.
General George Marshall found out about that, he's the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
he was so angry he put near court Marshall, both of them.
It wasn't the smartest thing in the world, that's your supreme commander and one of the
two top air generals, but that was General Cassata's style and he got away with it.
That's what I learned to fly in, that's a little fair child, PT-19.
Flywood wings, fabric fuselage, little six-cylinder engine in it, and I'll assure you that open
cockpit was really cold in the wintertime.
I have pictures here to show you what that kind of flying did to a pilot.
The first is a picture of me when I was just learning to fly, 21 years old in primary flight
training at Uvalde, Texas.
I've got to depart here and talk about Uvalde for just a second.
A bunch of my classmates were New Yorkers, Manhattan, Queens, Yonkers and so on.
We went in town one day to look around and you can walk around Uvalde pretty quick, it's
a small town.
We came upon an old man sitting under a tree and he had a wash tub full of pecans, he was
shelling pecans, so we walked up and just started a conversation with him.
He was more interested in my friends than in me, with their New York accent, they obviously
weren't Texans.
In about 15 minutes got ready to leave, I stuck out my hand and said, sir, I've enjoyed
visiting with you, my name's Charlie Morley, good to meet you Charlie, my name's John
Garner.
And then we recognized John Nance Garner, Vice President of the United States, sitting
there shelling pecans.
He was born and raised in Uvalde, Texas and that's the reason that little town, everything
around there is Garner, it's Garner State Park and Garner Field and so on.
It took nine months to go through three phases of flight training, here we had already been
through ground school and then we started, this is primary flight training, I went from
there to Randolph Field in San Antonio for basic flight training, from there to Moore
Field in Mission, Texas for advanced flight training, got my wings and commission, was
sent to Sarasota, Florida to learn to fly fighters, P-40s like the flying Tigers were
flying in China and from there I was sent to Walterboro, South Carolina where they were
just forming the 405th fighter group.
I was placed in the 5 tenth squadron of that group, when a pilot joined they took a portrait
like that of each of us.
In that picture I'm 22 years old and consider myself to be a hot shot fighter pilot, kind
of interesting little sideline here, one day a bunch of school children were in our museum
and there was a little bitty girl right in front, she was five and a half, maybe six
year old and she just looked real puzzled and kept looking from this picture back at
my face like that and held up her hand and I said, yeah, what is it?
She said, what happened?
That's just priceless.
Look at this picture, look at the face in that picture.
I'm 22 years old there, I'm 22 in that picture also, but that is after only 50 combat missions.
The exhaustion, the weariness, the tension is pretty evident in that picture.
I had just returned from one of those filet gap missions when they took that picture,
which is the reason I have my flight gear on, it was right about that time that General
Cassata was on our field and we were bull shooting with him and somebody said, General,
eighth Air Force pilot to get to go home after 30-35 missions, most of us have already
flown 50 missions, when are you going to let some of us go home?
The general looked at him and said, Lieutenant, we're prepared to replace every airplane three
times and every pilot twice.
That ended the conversation, at least on that subject.
The general was there for several reasons.
One was to tell us that we had been recommended for a presidential unit citation.
That was for that filet gap mission.
It turns out that we were the smallest outfit to destroy a whole German army, I guess it
was an army.
Probably just 36 P-47s in just two days, two and a half days, we completely destroyed
that German outfit.
For that, we did get the presidential unit citation.
Every pilot that flew those missions got an air medal or a distinguished flying cross.
He was there also for other reasons.
One was to award medals to four of our pilots, and one of them was my wingman in a fighter
squadron, two planes stay together to watch each other's tail.
This guy was my wingman.
His name was Boleslaw Kosinski.
Now, clearly, Boleslaw Kosinski is no Irishman.
He was a good Polish kid from Buffalo, New York, clean, decent, smart, excellent pilot,
and he got a medal.
The general pinned the medal on his shirt, shook hands with him, said, congratulations,
Lieutenant.
Thank you, and God bless you.
He started to step to the next one, and he stopped and looked back, and he said, Lieutenant,
how old are you?
I'm 19, sir.
The general nodded and started to step aside and look back again and said, does your mother
know you're over here?
We didn't call him Kosinski, we called him coach.
Here's a picture of a coach standing on the wing of his airplane, which he called the
K-Kid.
He was shot down and killed a couple of weeks after that picture was taken.
Let me explain how it happened.
It was a real hazy day with about two-thirds broken overcast.
Major Jenkins is leading the mission, and he sent a coach and I down to skip bomb a
small bridge to take it out.
We had just dropped our bombs when somebody yelled bandits.
Well, that's code word for enemy aircraft, and we both looked around, and there were,
I don't know, four to six of them diving through the clouds coming at us.
We turned into them, both of us.
The leader of the Major Smiths was coming so fast he couldn't get his, come out of that
dive fast enough to get his guns bearing on me.
I couldn't get around quick enough to aim at him.
We passed each other just like that, so close that I could see he was wearing a white uniform,
about 50 feet apart.
But coach and the Major Smith wingman were farther out, and they came at each other head
on like that, both of them firing.
There are 11 of us up there watching this.
Nobody knows for sure whether they blew each other up or collided, whatever.
They both ended up in a pile of trash on the ground.
Now I want to talk about our country for just a minute.
That's the way the P-47 Thunderbolt was built.
This is the bubble top.
The razor back was about the same thing.
That is a pretty complex structure.
Just before America got in the war, that airplane did not exist.
There were two men building airplanes up in Long Island.
Alexander Seversky was the president, his design engineer was Alexander Kartvely, Russian
immigrants that came here after World War I and stayed because they wanted no part of
communism.
They were building a small plane, a racer on floats, also a small plane, a P-35, which
was mostly used to train fighter pilots.
General Arnold, half Arnold, said, I need a new fighter.
It's got to go higher than anything we have, go faster than anything we have, be more heavily
armed and heavily armored, and it must have an air-cooled radial engine as opposed to
the liquid-cooled engine like in a Spitfire or a Mustang.
Those two men decided to see if they could build an airplane that would fill that order.
From the time they began designing on this thing until they flew the prototype, the first
one was nine months.
And that's before computers.
That was done with slide rules and tracing paper.
Can you imagine designing and building that airplane in nine months?
Before the war was over, in just three years, they had built 16,400 of them.
The airplane that America built the most of was the four-engine B-24 bomber.
We built 18,000 of those in this country.
This country built 400,000 war planes.
That's twice as many as Germany, England, Russia, Japan, and Italy combined.
If Hitler in Germany and Tojo in Japan had had any idea of the productive capacity of
a free people unencumbered by a bureaucracy, they would never have picked on us.
Field Marshal Gunther von Kluge, Supreme Commander of all German ground forces, made this statement.
He said, we were not defeated by conventional forces.
We were defeated by the P-47 Thunderbolts of the 9th Air Force and the British Typhoons.
Nobody knew whereof he spoke.
This is a picture of the Filet Road, where we caught those Germans on the road.
There's nothing left alive down there.
There are dead horses, dead people, dead tanks, dead trunks.
I think that road was about 25 miles of that.
We were extremely effective.
Now, I would like to recite a poem for you, because it's the most eloquent description
of flight that I've ever heard.
It's called High Flight.
Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth and danced the skies on laughter-silvered
wings, sunward I've climbed and joined the tumbling mirth of sun-split clouds and done
a hundred things that you've not dreamed of, wheeled and soared and swung high in the
sunlit silence.
And hovering there, I've chased the shouting winds along and flung my eager craft through
footless halls of air, up, up the long, delirious, burning blue.
I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace, where never lark nor even eagle flew.
And while with silent lifting mind, I've trod the high, untrespassed sanctity of space,
put out my hand and touched the face of God.
That poem was written by John Gillespie McGee Jr., an American pilot who joined the Royal
Canadian Air Force during World War II and was killed at age 19 to have written that
beauty at age 19.
There is McGee's portrait and there is a picture of him standing in front of his British Spitfires.
I wrote a poem also.
I was a commercial artist and our squadron intelligence officer and I put together a
history of our squadron and I wrote this poem to print on the page where we pictured all
of our killed in action guys.
It's called Forever on My Wing.
In fighter planes, they flew with us.
These gallant men with silver wings.
Those all through hostile skies, a peaceful world we sought to bring.
Then flame from hell lanced upward, the air was ripped by jagged steel and terror was
the major thing that each of us could feel.
All knew in such a frenzied sky that some of us would not survive.
Yet their guns with ours erupting fire into the face of death we died.
The gods of war by random choice called these young men to flame and die.
We saw them spin like shattered hawks but in memory still they share our sky.
And now in silent ghostly echelon these faithful comrades from the past will fly our wings
in close formation till all our squadrons still at last.
At a squadron reunion held 30 years ago, Flight Surgeon Dot Milligan had bought a $450 bottle
of the finest brandy ever made, had a beautiful wooden box made to contain it, presented it
to the squadron to be consumed by the last of us still standing.
I'm hoping to get that which may explain why I'm still here at age 90.
My last personal little story.
We were strafing a truck convoy one day.
Strafing is where you aim at your airplane and shoot at a ground target.
That's a German truck.
I'm shooting at the truck pulled out of the dive and turned and in my turn I'm probably
150, 200 feet above the Germans down there and saw one of those soldiers swing his rifle
like that and felt a bullet hit.
I wasn't bleeding, I didn't hurt anywhere so I just kept shooting till my ammunition
was gone.
Got back and told my crew chief, Jones, I think I got hit.
He said, yeah you did.
This bullet had come through the side of the airplane and was embedded in the side of my
parachute about an inch behind my back.
That's an interesting bullet.
It's a copper jacket, 8mm, probably used by snipers, but what's interesting about it,
it's made of aluminum.
Bullets are supposed to be made of lead, you know.
However, the Germans were having hard time moving their supplies around because we were
up there tearing up their trucks and trains all the time, so that's probably made out
of a melted down crashed airplane.
You see pictures of anti-aircraft fire in the sky that look like black puffs of cotton
up there.
That ain't cotton.
Each of those black puffs is either an 88mm shell or an even bigger 105mm exploding.
When they explode, they break up into chunks of steel called shrapnel.
This piece came through the side of my airplane right there by my shoulder and stopped right
there in the instrument panel.
It's an interesting piece of shrapnel.
It appears to have aluminum embedded in it.
I knew they didn't make cannon shells out of aluminum, so I asked an artillery sergeant,
what is that?
He said, well, when that thing came through the side of your airplane, it was white hot.
It just picked up aluminum as it went by.
So I've got part of my airplane permanently enshrined in steel.
I want to thank you folks for listening.
It's a privilege to get to tell the story of the wonderful people that I flew with.
Thank you.
