I have found a picture among the combat pictures of George
Hebbel that shows a pilot with the "Wilson" patch on his A2 jacket. The pilot is unknown to me
and I would appreciate an identification if anyone recognizes him. I will accept that for the time
being.
I still would appreciate any information any of the people
from the 523rd can give me.
Lowell Smith of the 27th Headquarters sent me the following. "The
picture of the patch Bob Wilson sent you was the official 523rd patch. It was made there in Italy.
The squadron had a contest when we were in Gaudo, and that was the winner. The paper work was sent
to higher Hdqs. For some reason it never made it back to Washington.
About the pictures of Col Nevitt and Gen Seville, that was taken
at Loyettes France around late September as it got very wet and cold, muddy as all get out, look
at their shoes & boots, I am in the process of locating one of the pins we had made around 1980."
For this last comment, see:
http://www.charlies-web.com/WWII_med/combatpic07.html
In WWII combat fatigue was not a recognized psychological
problem but it was a known phenomenon. It was combatted by sending people occasionally to "Rest
Camp".
Various hotels or resorts were kind of taken over and people
were given permisson to use them for a period of tme. I was sent twice for a week to the Hotel
Morgano (now closed) on the Isle of Capri. The Hotel Quisisana was also used and is still open and
opulent! Once I got a one day pass to the Hotel Excelsior, the "infantry" hotel in Rome.
This picture and the one of the Blue Grotto were on postcards collected by another pilot in my group, Lt. Robert J. Workman, scans of which were went to me by his son, Sott Workman. Thank you Scott.
It's amazing how little I remember about Capri.
But then I seldom left the hotel. I didn't visit the Blue Grotto or Tiberius's Castle. I vaguely
remember the square and the orange groves on the hill going up to the square from the boat. I have
a vague memory that there was a funicular railway. I remember the not too pleasant ride over and
back from Naples in a little "tug boat".
We did not get a chance to see the Blue Grotto because the
weather was too rough. I would really like to have seen it since I missed it the first time too.
My wife and I had a chance to re-visit Capri, and there is
indeed a funicular railway. But the trip over to Sorrento and back is now done by hovercraft, a
fast and comfortable airboat!
I remember having my picture done in pastels by an artist who
spoke no English, as I spoke no Italian. We got along in very primitive French. He told me that he
had a famous studio in Rome before the war. He preferred working in oils but couldn't get them at
that time.
He also said that one of clients had been Mussolini's doctor and
that this doctor had told him that Mussolini had syphilis and that it hit his brain about 1935.
That made sense to me because that's about the time he started doing odd things like invading
Ethiopia.
Actually, Mussolini did many great things for Italy in the 20's. He
built primitive farm houses, drained the Pontine marshes and built farm implement factories. They
came as close to being self sufficient as they ever have been.
When we docked on the way back we were met by the next wave. One
of them pointed to my 2nd Lieutenant bars and said, "Well, those aren't any good anymore." Being
naturally pessimistic about the military, I thought, Good grief, they've just demoted all 2nd
Lieutenants to Flight Officers for the duration. Then he smiled and said, "You're a 1st
Lieutenant now!" And so, it was back to Pomigliano and back to work!
Sometime around this time they sent the B-25 to Malta to get a load
of "good" whiskey. The Officers were allowed to order and I think I ordered two bottles of Scotch.
When it came, I didn't get very much of it. I took it down to the crew chiefs and I remember them
as making short work of it.
It takes about 120 airplanes to keep a group going and we couldn't
get any replacements. Only 500 were made in the beginning. There was a training group in Baton
Rouge LA, a group in Burma and two groups in Italy. We were losing planes for one reason or
another and we and our sister group, the 86th were down to around 60 planes each. It was getting
increasingly difficult to operate. So someone came up with a great idea. The two group commanders
would flip a coin and the winner would get all the airplanes. We lost.
I've said it before but I'll say it again. Thank you to all of
you unsung heroes and particularly to mine, Tiny Hunter.
My P-40 was peculiar. It behaved in a most unaerodynamic manner.
We would sit out on the roof of the apartment we lived in and watch
it. It had its own weather. The rest of sky could be clear but there would be a ring of cumulus
clouds around the smoke column with lightning. A group got together with Glen Maltby and they flew
the B-25 over to get a good look. They went through a pretty little cumulus cloud and just made it
back the base. The cloud was full of rocks and the plane was quite battered.
A bit later, several of us drove up to the end of one of the lava
flows. It was butted up against a small town, pushing it off the mountain very slowly, but
inexorably.
It was a bed of black coals, probably a hundred feet across at
least and about twenty feet high. As it moved a large black boulder would roll down the side of
the pile leaving a vivid red streak of hot coals behind, which rapidly blackened. It was so hot we
couldn't get closer than about thirty feet.
It was butted up against a house and the people that lived there
were casually, resignedly going in and out, removing what they could. The wood frame of the door
was on fire, but flickeringly small. I never felt so powerless in my life. It was awesome. And we
were probably two miles from the crater!
Having flown P-40's in the States, I was one of the pilots that
were taken to various dumps around Italy picking up war-weary P-40's and bringing them back home!
I remember being stupid on the way back on one trip and I
looped the P-40 from 700 feet. It was not a good loop however because, being fundamentally a
chicken pilot, I came out of the loop at 1200 feet!
A further complication was that the A-36 had an Allison engine with
American style nuts and bolts. These P-40F's had Rolls Royce Merlin engines which were metric.
And our crewchiefs had no metric tools. I never asked how they did it but they must have kept
these planes in the air with crescent wrenches! I understand that sick call every morning had a
number of crew chiefs with infected hands when the wrench slipped and they would bang their hand
on the engine and cut it.
But they kept us alive, somehow!
My P-40 had a scorpion painted on it, left over we believe from
one of the squadrons of the 33rd Fighter Group. We didn't paint any of our planes because they
were temporary. (I just found out that this P-40 was part of the 64th Squadron of the 57th Fighter
Group.) An exception of course was mine with the name Patty B II painted on it. She was the girl I
was stuck on in high school, and I believe was the only one that wrote me a couple letters while I
was overseas. It was our way of hanging on to things back home.
I think you can get some idea of the condition of the planes. We
even had a directive from group operations that if any mission reached the bombline with less than four
aircraft, we were to abort and return. Our crew chiefs worked wonders and we were all very
grateful for the extraordinary and beyond the call work that kept us alive.
To explain, you must realize that when an airplane is in the air,
out of contact with the ground it must observe the laws of aerodynamics. One of them is a great
demonstration of one of Newton's Laws. The huge propellor rotates clockwise as viewed from the
cockpit. But there has to be a reaction to this, so the airplane would tend to rotate to the left.
This is called torque. So changes were made to counteract this. The trailing edge of the left wing
was washed in (The trailing edge was bent down somewhat to increase lift.) But this increased the
drag on the left wing and made the plane turn to the left. To counteract this, the vertical fin,
the non-movable part of the rudder, was offset slightly to counteract this tendency to turn.
Of course these corrections could be made for only one speed, and
this had to be the normal cruising speed.
This meant that when one is taking off the corrections were not
enough and it would tend to roll to the left.
But we used these planes for dive bombing so we spent time at
considerably more than cruising speed and then the corrections would overcorrect and the plane
would roll to the right.
We had trim tabs on all movable surfaces so that we could make the
subtle adjustments needed. Then we could dive with a little better control. But since the speed
was constantly varying, we had to do most of the work with our legs on the rudder pedals giving
rise to rather overdeveloped leg muscles which we called P-40 legs!
I said, in a dive, the plane would tend to roll to the right. Mine
rolled to the left. This makes no aerodynamic sense and people that understand aerodynamics
probably won't believe me. They will probably think I don't know the difference between a tab on a
fixed surface and a tab on a movable surface. I want to assure them that I do know the difference
and this plane was backwards!
Before going into a dive in a P-40, one adjusts the electric
trim tab for that dive. Normally you would want to counteract a roll to the right. This means you
want to raise the left aileron to decrease lift on the left wing. To do this you need to lower the
trim tab on the left aileron. But in mine you had to do the opposite. And if you didn't you were
in trouble.
My P-40 lacked zip and I used extra gas to keep up with everybody
else. This did worry me a little. So I talked to our engineering officer, Joe Glover, and he
agreed that what I wanted to do was possible.
I wanted to remove the sheet metal wing tips and replace them with
square, P-51-like wooden wingtips. We got permisson from Maj. Kelly, the squadron commander, and
set about doing it. We took the regular wingtips off and then Major Kelly drove up and told us to
replace them. Again, they couldn't figure out how to explain it if something went wrong!