So my dad and I went to the Air Expo on Sunday, didn’t we?
It was pretty fun. I didn’t enjoy it as much as my dad did I think, but that would have been hard to do. He loves airplanes and he loves WWII history.
A few of the highlights, let’s see.
The coolest person, to me, that we saw one of my uncle’s father, Ed Dunn. He was a B-26 pilot in WWII. He was awarded a Distinguished Service Cross, which is the second highest military decoration in the US Army (behind the Medal of Honor) and is awarded for “extreme gallantry and risk of life in actual combat with an armed enemy force”. He was piloting his B-26 (over Europe I think) when his plane was hit with major flak and took serious damage. His crew of four was immediately decimated. Two crewmembers were killed and the remaining two were injured. He considered bailing out of the crippled plane but decided the only way he and his crew were going to get back with any chance was to fly home. He took the plane back to base with his tail being held on basically by the skin of the plane and performed a crash belly landing at the base because the landing gear was jammed and he couldn’t get them down. I’ve known Ed since I was a kid and I had never heard this story, it was so amazing.
We also met a F6F Hellcat ace from WWII. He had 8 1/2 confirmed kills, but his own count was 12. He joined the army when he was 22 in about 1943. It was amazing how old and frail he now looked. This whole generation of heroes is getting so old and will soon be no more. It is pretty sad.
The navigator of the Enola Gay, Captain Theodore Van Kirk was there, though we didn’t see him. For those of you who don’t know, the Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb ever used in warfare, the Little Boy, on Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, 1945, hastening the end of World War II.
Probably the most famous person there was Senator George McGovern, who lost to Richard Nixon in the 1972 Presidential Election. He had been a B-24 pilot in WWII and told my dad and I a story about crash landing his jet on an island in the Mediterranean Sea.
We also met two of Doolittle’s Raiders. I had never heard the story of Doolittle’s Raid. If you have the time you should read the story, it’s amazing. The gist is that only a few short months after Pearl Harbor was bombed a raid led by Jimmy Doolittle took off and bombed Tokyo, completely surprising the Japanese. The twists include the fact that the bombers were not made to be launched from aircraft carriers and that they had to take off early after being spotted and thus didn’t have enough fuel to do their original plan. After bombing their targets many of them were running low on fuel and had to make emergency landings. The effects were not the devestation or military targets, but the morale boost for the Americans from such a bold mission succeeding.
There were a lot of neat planes there as well, of course. Probably my favorite three were the F4U Corsair which have a really cool scooped “gull” wing design. They just a fun to watch. Then there were the two bombers a B-17 and a B-25. Both of them were big and loud but the B-17 was immense. You could sign up to take rides in them for only $400 and $300 respectively. For a second I think my dad wished his oldest son was working at a slightly more lucrative job.
Anyway, I had a fun time.
