Robin:

In reply to your e-mail, I am writing about some of my thoughts on flying out of Grand Central, on the preparation for “Bolero”, on the flight to England and the flight to North Africa.
In digging into my files I found a diary which I had not looked at for years and also my Form 5 to confirm dates. These were very helpful in bringing back details. I am transcribing parts which you may find interesting. If there is too much, disregard it.

Before the 71st moved to Glendale, we were stationed at North Island Naval Air Station, San Diego. I was assigned there in January of 1942, about a month after graduation from Kelly.
I had no twin engine time at all. Our checkout in the P-38 consisted of reading the tech orders and sitting in the cockpit for a couple of hours to get familiar with the controls and instruments.
The old timers, who had about 10 or 12 hours in the P-38, told us of a few of its characteristics.
Then we just started up the engines and took off.

I remember one incident which gave me a lot of confidence in the airplane. We were doing aerobatics within 3 or 4 hours. One day we were doing a “rat race”. I was flying #4 in a flight of 4. We started up into an immelmann. I was too close and gaining on #3, so I eased forward on the elevator to get more spacing and before I knew it I was going straight up with the controls in the full forward position. The airplane came to a stop in that position. I didn’t know what to do, so I did nothing. The P-38 very gently lowered its nose, started down, and when it picked up flying speed I neutralized the controls and I was flying again. In a single engine fighter, probably the result would have been a hammerhead stall, followed by a spin and maybe an auger in, as we were not very high.

Sometime in late April our 71st Squadron Commander, Rudy Rudell came back to Grand Central from headquarters in downtown L.A, called all the pilots together and closed the doors and shaded the windows in our briefing room. He announced that we were going to fly our airplanes to England over the North Atlantic by way of Labrador, Greenland, Iceland and Scotland. We were stunned by this information, hardly believing it. As far as I could remember, Lindberg, “Wrong-way” Corrigan, Amelia Earhart and a few others were the only ones who had flown from the States to England.

We picked up our brand new P-38F’s at the Lockheed factory at Burbank on about May 1st, 1942 and flew them the few miles to Grand Central Air Terminal in Glendale. We then began to take various local and short cross-country flights to check out our craft and make any necessary repairs and modifications. I recall one flight where I climbed up to 40,000 feet to check out the service ceiling and was impressed by the blue, almost purple sky and the visibility of several hundred miles in all directions. There were a lot of funny and near-tragic things that happened as we were doing a lot of flying—night missions, false scrambles, informal gunnery practice, etc. We made a lot of low level flights across the L.A. basin, sometimes never climbing above 200 feet. In those early days of the war, no one got into trouble until Vince Rethman was identified and that was the end of it. I wont go into any further detail, as this is long enough as it is.

On May 20 we departed Glendale for the trip east. I remember the forming up the squadron into a tight formation and over-flying the strip at a very low level. We waved goodbye to our wives and girlfriends who had gathered for the emotional departure. On May 20 we flew the first leg of 3 hours and 15 minutes to Biggs Field, El Paso, Texas. We were delayed by weather for one day and while waiting for the weather to clear I ran into several classmates from Kelly Field and also “Wrong Way” Corrigan. Of course we quizzed him about his crossing. He was still claiming that he had intended to fly to California, not to Ireland, but that his compass was reading backwards.

On May 22 we flew from Biggs to Barksdale Field, Shreveport. LA. I was flying tail-end Charlie. We passed about 4 miles north of Odessa, Texas where I had been working when I joined the Army Air Corps as a flying cadet. I couldn’t resist the temptation, so I peeled out from the formation, gave it full throttle and dived down for a very low buzz job down the main street in town. I remember looking up at the upper floors of the Court House and also seeing people in the streets scrambling around like a bunch of ants. When we reached Biggs, Rudell asked who that was that left the formation in West Texas and I confessed. He asked why I did it and I said that I wanted to check our location. He frowned and said that he was the navigator and not to do that again, and that was the last that I heard of it.

On May 23 we flew to Patterson Field, Dayton, Ohio. We spent a couple of days there due to bad weather and then on May 26 flew to Mitchel Field, New York. We visited the big city for a couple of days. This was my first visit and I was disappointed. All that I can recall was a lot of people milling around in the unearthly darkness of the “dimout”. On May 27 we flew to Dow Field, Bangor, Maine where we were issued our Colt 45’s and began training for the flight over the Atlantic.

While at Dow Field, word came down that the flight to England had been cancelled and we were to return to the West Coast. Rumor (which proved later to be true) was that we were going to be diverted to Alaska, where the Japs had invaded the Aleution Islands—the first invasion of our nation since the War of 1812 On June 5 we started back west. I had to land, along with Charlie Hoey, with engine trouble, at Mitchel Field. The rest of the squadron got as far as South Carolina, when word came down to go back to Dow. So, on June 8, we did.

We began training again for the overseas flight. The idea was that 4 P-38’s would fly on the wings, 2 to each side, in formation with a B-17, whose crew would do the navigating and instrument flying, if necessary. This worked fine until one day our B-17 pilot suddenly announced that we were going to enter a cloud to see how it worked. It turned out to be a towering cumulus just about to turn into a full-blown thunderstorm. We instantly lost visual contact. I was not prepared to go on instruments (and wasn’t very proficient anyhow) and lost control in the severe turbulence. My gyros became uncaged and my airspeed varied from under 100 mph to over 400.

Finally, I popped out of the cloud with my windscreen all covered with ice. I looked back and saw P-38’s and the bomber popping out of the cloud in all directions. Fortunately there were no collisions while we were milling around in there.

We made a number of training flights out of Houlton, Maine and Presque Isle, near the border of New Brunswick. On the Fourth of July we flew without incident from Presque Isle to Goose Bay, Labrador. There we slept like animals in a big barn-like building. The weather was bad, but every morning at about 4 a.m. a colonel we called the “Screaming Eagle” would come in and shout for us to get up to do nothing. The food was lousy (mainly cabbage) and the mosquitoes were BIG and flying in swarms.

On July 11 we formed up with the B-17’s and flew almost all the way to Bluie West One near the southern coast of Greenland, only to find that the strip was fogged in, so we had to return to Goose Bay. The next day we made it, except for “Bull” Mathis, who lost an engine and got behind the squadron. He came in sometime later and made a good single-engine landing on the steep, uphill metal landing strip. It ran up the side of a glacier, and there was no going around with either one or two engines.

In the middle of July at that latitude the sun never fully sets, it just goes around the horizon so it is daylight 24 hours. That messes up your sleeping. On July 15 the squadron took off for Iceland. My one generator was not functioning, so I had to return to BW-1. The repair was done, but I had to await the arrival of the next 27th Squadron to fly with them to Iceland. While waiting, I did patrol duty up and down the fiord looking for enemy shipping , finding none, but seeing a lot of icebergs and spectacular scenery.

On July 24 we took off for Keflavik, Iceland. The weather was marginal and we did a lot of circumnavigating trying to avoid going on instruments, for which I was grateful. However, we got away off course. Compasses were unreliable in that part of the world, being off as much as 90 degrees. The only means of navigation we had in the P-38 (other than ded-reckoning) was a little dry-cell battery operated low frequency radio. There was a beam at Keflavik and as we approached a hundred or so miles out, I could get an “N” signal, so I knew that we were north of course. When we made landfall, the B-17 turned NORTH. We were supposed to be maintaining radio silence, so we fighters followed them north for about 45 minutes, then one of our guys said “We don’t know what you bomber guys are doing, but we are turning south for Keflavik”. The bombers landed about an hour after we did. The flight time was over 6 hours.

Immediately I flew a few miles to Reykjavic, where my squadron had been weathered in while I was behind in Greenland. Within 4 hours, on July 25 we were on our way to Stornoway, Scotland. We had B-17 navigator trouble again and landed 1 ½ hours late. Then on to Heith Field, which I think was near Ayr. We had tea and then were led by a British Beaufighter whose crew knew how to navigate to Goxhill, across the river from Hull upon Humber near the east coast of the Midlands of England. I had been in the air for more than 14 hours of the last 24 and was pretty weary. I almost lost it when I was following close behind another P-38 and got turned upside down in his prop-wash at about 100 feet on short final. I managed to roll it upright and go around for a normal landing.

During early August we made a number of practice missions with the bombers. On one of these the group lost a pilot (I believe he was in the 94th) when he got his airplane into compressibility. We didn’t know much about it at that time. He and his wingman were sent up to about 40,000 feet by the group commander to investigate a vapor trail, which turned out to be from a British Mosquito. After identifying the aircraft, the element of two split-essed and headed down. Both got into compressibility and one went straight in. The other pilot regained control at about 12,000 feet and leveled out under 1,000. Most of the rivets were popped and the airplane was totaled.

On August 13th we were transferred to Ibsley, about 20 miles north of Bournemouth on the Channel. There we flew a few fairly short missions over the continent escorting B-17’s during the months of September and October. It was on one of these missions that we lost our first 71st pilot, “Sleeper” Young, who just disappeared. No one knows what happened.

On November 6 we flew down to Chiveron, which was near Land’s End on the Southwest corner of England, in preparation for the flight to North Africa as a part of the “Torch”operation. The weather was bad and we couldn’t depart until November 14th, several days after the invasion of Algeria and Morocco. We had to leave Charlie Hoey behind with an ear infection and he never rejoined the 71st. We flew across the Bay of Biscay, led by B-26’s, down the coast of Portugal, turned east through the Strait of Gibraltar and I was relaxing with a cigarette when I began to see puffs of black appearing all around us. We woke up and began taking evasive action, realizing that the Moroccans were shooting at us! We landed after sunset at La Senia, near Oran, having been in the air 8½ hours. The field was in bad shape with bomb craters and several P-38’s were damaged, but we didn’t lose any pilots.

This may be more than you wanted to know about those days, but here it is.

Roy