When you started the plane
you could not take too much time getting into the air the air. You
needed to taxi out and take off as soon as possible as it was a liquid
cooled engine and the liquid would overheat and boil out al1 over the
plane. That would make your maintenance crew real unhappy as they
would have to clean the sticky material off the whole plane. This
happened to me just once as I was getting ready to take off and it was
the only mission when my flight had to go without me. The P-51 landed
at about 90 mph and took off at 100 to 110 mph.
One day Bruce, Tilson and I were flying together and landed at another
field where they had P-47s and we had the opportunity to look them
over closely. We didn't think much of them as they were big and clumsy
next to our sleek planes. The fog started to close in and we headed
home in a hurry. By the time we got back to the field we were on
instruments only as we couldn't see a thing. The base put us at
different altitudes 500 feet apart and brought us down one at a time
by radar. It was a good thing we had all the instrument training and
by following the radio instructions we were brought right to the end
of the runway before we even saw the ground.
We were in the Ninth Air Force, the 363 Fighter Group, and the 380 th
squadron. Each field had three squadrons at different locations around
the field. We had the 380th 381 and 382 squadrons. Our squadrons
consisted of 25 pilots and a lot of the guys I flew with in the States
were in the other squadrons, but we didn't get together much.
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