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Dad's situation was different that most. He was drafted before Pearl Harbor and trained on B-24's before being selected for pilot training. He didn't finish the pilot training though, the only part of that he talked about was the cadet training at Butler University. Some how after that he ended up as a gunnery instructor for quite a wile before volunteering for combat duty (I think he was board with Texas and New Mexico) and ended up in the 8th Air Force as a flight engineer/top turret gunner just after D-Day. When Doolittle fazed the B-24s out of the 8th he went to the 15th AF in Italy as a bomb strike photographer where his plane was shot down during a mission to Vienna. Anti-Aircraft fire took out 2 engines and disabled the feathering device so they couldn't maintain altitude and the entire crew bailed out safely when they were near the ground. All were taken prisoner shortly and he spent just under 3 months as a P.O.W.That was cool! I didnt realize how many bases the airmen went to before heading overseas.
Dad didn't say much about the German fighters but he had a healthy respect for the German anti-aircraft gunners. Years and years later when my wife asked him why he had to bail out of his airplane he just told her "Too many holes"My favorite entry, (other than "dad, save the bottle") was "The Germans were good" after his first misson. There is no doubt that he was not refering to their personal habits.
Today would have been Dads 100th birthday.
Even though he's been gone going on 20 years I still miss him a lot.
Dad on a hunting trip back in the late 1950's