The Candy Bomber Has Passed Away

[Peter Gunn]

A man I worked with in my first USAF assignment served in the Polish Army in WWII, was wounded on the first day of the war, and spent most of the war in a German POW camp. He escaped, was recaptured and treated so badly that he vowed he would never try to escape again. The RAF bombed their camp one night and one day P-38''s strafed the hell out of it. Late in the war the camp guards were replaced by old men and boys and so he escaped again. He and the other POWs were trapped in a house as the battle raged around them but finally they were able to reach the US Army. He volunteered to accompany them as a guide and interpreter, since he spoke Polish, French, German, and Russian. One day his jeep hit a mine; the driver was killed and he woke up in a US Army hospital in France weeks later, where he met his wife-to-be, a nurse. He went to work for the USAF as an engineer and one day a contractor came to discuss some civil engineering work they were doing, bringing his head foreman with him. The foreman looked at my friend in shock and said, "You're supposed to be dead! Your Jeep hit that mine and I put you on the stretcher! We knew you would never survive!"

Those people used to be all around us., the high school teacher who was a WWII USN Aviator and suffered serious injuries in a crash, the high school teacher who was a bombardier on the Doolittle Raid, the next door neighbor who flew B-25's in the Med and B-24's in the Pacific, the building general contractor who flew Spits and Hurris in the UK before the US entered the war and then B-24's in the Pacific.

Agreed, when I was younger you were *always* running into WWII vets, hell, I was surrounded by them growing up. It's a stunning fact to think that just about all of them have flown west now.

 

[MIflyer]

Ever see the Speilberg remake of the WWII film, "A Guy Named Joe?" entitled "Always"?

My next door neighbor flew B-25's in the Med. His squadron commander was Ted W. Lawson's co-pilot, who told him that they used some of the real Doolittle Raiders as extras in A Guy Named Joe: and of course that movie starred Spencer Tracy and Van Johnson, also the stars of "30 Sec Over Tokyo." If Speilberg had known that fact I suspect that he would have tried to get some of the Raiders as extras in "Always."