You asked me why I joined the armed forces? I joined the Navy because I wanted to get training, and I could get it for free. I hoped that I could stay on the water to join the Pan-Am passenger Clipper fleet—it was a white, beautiful airplane, and I hoped that I could get a job flying it. While I was getting training the European war was going on, and while I was a cadet the Pearl Harbor incident happened. Did my parents approve of my being in the military? Yes, I’m sure they did. Everybody was getting in the war. My wife was part of the first contingent of overseas WAVES.

I bounced around from one squadron to another, and VP-54 was the one that I ended up in. I was stationed at Guadalcanal for ten months. We flew PBYs, which are also called Flying Boats. I was a navigator, but got to fly a little bit. They painted our PBYs with lampblack so that enemy searchlights couldn’t get a reflection off our airplane when we were below the clouds.

After the battle of Guadalcanal, the Japanese decided to retreat back to Bougainville, 500-800 miles away. We searched out targets of opportunity and did whatever we could to catch them on the water, such as the Japanese troop barges and other ships that came to pull their troops off the island. We also did a lot of rescues because our plane had the capability to land on the water and pull men in the water on board. Our plane was slow, about 90 knots, and wasn’t very heavily armed. We also worked with Aussie coast watchers in the 8000-10000 foot high mountains around the islands and in this way kept an eye on the Tokyo Express. This was a Japanese fleet that would raid our forces and try to pick up their soldiers.

What was our everyday life like? We flew every third day. You had to bathe carefully because of the humidity.   If you didn’t, jungle rot would get to you. Some guys got shipped home because of the rot. Your skin would get red, then crack and ooze a clear liquid. To prevent this, I would bathe a couple times a day, dry off and put talc all over. Also, you had to be careful when you put your clothes on because you might find a tarantula or a critter in your boot. One time a kid let out a bloodcurdling scream. When I came to see what happened I saw that he was standing on his bunk because he saw a huge centipede almost a foot long!

On my second trip, I went to New Guinea and Moratai. I was the pilot of a B-24. It was more heavily armed than the PBY with .50 caliber guns all around. The man in the belly turret had to be a small guy. If you got chewed up too badly you didn’t have any hydraulics, so you couldn’t get the guy out of there. So, I elected not to use it.   Our main mission was to find the Japanese fleet and we flew long distances with a 2000 pound overload and sometimes barely got off the runway.

This was a great airplane, and I got in a jam one time—I was mighty grateful that I had as much  firepower as I did. We were operating out of Tacloben on Leyte, and went to Moratai in the Philippines and moved up towards Borneo. There I got the surprise of my life. I thought I was moving in undetected towards our target which was an enemy ship in the harbor. I thought that we were in the ‘grass’, meaning that we were below the Japanese radar’s range. When I got close to the airport a bunch of enemy fighter pilots were taking off and they joined up on me. I saw that there were a lot of them as they were climbing and decided to try and get away instead of making a run on the ship. I flattened out and said, "the best thing to do is for me to go for the water so that they couldn’t make any overhead runs." I had her cruising as fast as I could go. There were two guys above, and two below—there’s four. And four in front—that’s eight. Another guy in back, that’s nine! Then, there was one guy, a "Betty" (a type of bomber) who was dropping incendiary bombs on me from above. And there were another couple of guys spotting for him taking triangulations on the target (us!) by communicating with him. There were twelve all total and it was a complete surprise to me. I flew though all the stringers (incendiary bombs) and didn’t take any into the engines.

The enemy planes would make a puff of black smoke when they accelerated, so we would turn into them as we saw them make their runs to make our plane harder to hit. I don’t know how long it ran, seemed like an eternity. I got a little piece of shrapnel here, a 20mm shell (clatters as he drops it on the table) that came in on the left side of the airplane. It hit the air-duct underneath my leg and blew up, went across to my copilot and hit the trigger guard of the .38 revolver at his waist, then hit the radio above us and knocked it out. When it fell back down, it dropped into my shoe because we wore them open at the top. When it fell inside my shoe I thought I’d been hit by some metal. I told my co-pilot "I’ve been hit!". When I finally got my boot off it was in one piece and all I had was a blister on my leg. We shot down four airplanes for sure and had pictures of them, and probably a fifth. Our plane was pretty well chewed up too. Finally they gave up.

They said, "Well, you guys did pretty good." Thanks to my crew, they did a good job. I think the whole crew should have got a Gold Star instead of just me. They were the ones that knocked the planes down. When the ordnance men went through the airplane there were 280 bullet holes in the airplane. You asked me what was my happiest memory? Getting back alive was my happiest memory.

Here are my medals. That particular incident was this Gold Star. I got the Air Medal and the Flying Cross and the Asiatic-Pacific ribbon. Here are the wings that we wore. Our unit in Korea led by Justin Miller, the 101, got a unit commendation. After the war, I flew the Super Connie with a radar on the bottom after the war as part of the Odin Group. This was a group of squadrons that were early-warning types that I flew with. We used these planes and land-based radar stations from the Canadian border all the way to Argentina to protect America from Russia (Our class saw a Super Connie at the Air Combat Museum, Forbes Field, Topeka). We flew these planes from Argentina south towards the Azores 24 hours a day, every day during the Cold War. That’s what our job was, to make sure that Russian planes and missiles didn’t come towards America without our knowing.

Two kids I knew wanted to get into the famous Top Gun school. They were great kids and I wrote them a letter of recommendation. These kids did great, and I was helpful in getting them into the program. One of them was "Top Gun" in his class and that makes me feel good. His dad got me this hat from him. I am proud of him and he’s done very well.