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 I got hold of my father's discharge papers and assembled a collection of duplicate WWII ribbons and medals for which he is eligible. (The originals have been lost for forty years.) I had them framed in a shadow box around a 9th Air Force shoulder patch and gave them to him for Christmas. Out came the box of old photographs and the war stories, many of which I've seen and heard many times. Some of the pictures are pretty good and so are some of the stories, so I'm sharing them with you now.  That's him above, about half as old as I am now, dressed in one of his two pair of fleece-lined mechanic's overalls. The other pair resided permanently under a blanket in his cot and served as a sleeping bag. Those boots are the first new pair of shoes he ever owned. Dad wasn't the heroic front-lines type. He was a supply sergeant for the 10th Fighter Squadron, 50th Fighter Group, just one of the thousands upon thousands of draftees that more or less anonymously saved the world back in the middle of the century. He told me he only fired his carbine at the enemy on one occasion, and they were so far away he couldn't single out an individual target. Even so, the war must have been a tremendously affecting experience for him. Mom tells me that Dad never talked about his military experiences until some fifteen years after the war, even with other veterans.  Hal Fischer, Bill Lurch, Sgt. Hayden, Tom Johnson. My dad's only 5-10, so he's either standing on a box or these guys are really tiny. He mentioned that Sergeant Hayden was a certified genius. That's probably why he was in charge of the Supplies |
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 I wrote to the National Air and Space Museum concerning the livery of the p-47s of the 10th Fighter Squadron.  Other planes in the 50th fighter group were painted with red on the forward cowling and a red horizontal stripe on the vertical stabilizer. The halftone on the cowling here matches the white on the invasion stripes on the wing, so I'm guessing white for the 10th.  This picture provoked a story about Lt. Farr, a pilot "no biger'n a pinch-o-shit" who nursed his damaged P47 fighter back to the airfield and crash landed alongside the runway in a field which was kept plowed for just such contingencies.  That afternoon Lt. Farr flew a second mission, got shot to bits again, nursed his plane home again and crash landed it right next to the first one. Now that's what you call being consistant! There must be millions of photographs a lot like this one in shoeboxes in the back corners of garages and attics all across the country.  Carentan, France. There's nothing particularly special about this picture. It's just a P-47 by the name of "Gallopin Gertie" fronted by her proud support crew. But notice the bicycle in this picture and compare it to..."  ...the bicycle in this picture. And compare the pretty fraulein in this picture to... Okay, so here's the story on the pretty fraulein. The army was always hounding Arkie to get circumcised, so once the army moved into northern Germany and the war looked like it was just about over and things looked pretty quiet. Arkie decides that this would at least keep him in camp and out of trouble and besides the operation was free. "Hey, Arkie, over at the hospital they'll 'whittle on your winkie' with a sharp knife! No charge!" I never knew my dad to turn down ANYTHING that was given away. Like so many army buddies, these guys had a sense of humor that was a little sadistic. They brought this girl of about sixteen (seventeen or so, if you counted fast enough) to flirt with Arkie and get his involuntary reactions to stretch painfully at his stitches.  The girl probably didn't even know specifically what he was in the hospital for. That's my dad leaning on his elbow in the window. Here he is at the pretty fraulein's home near Wurzburg. He and his buddies were billeted in her home and occasionally she and her mother would come by to take care of routine chores and work the garden.  Dad assures me that was the full extent of his acquaintence with the ladies, but look at the photo above and tell me Arkie wasn't a rogue. The first day Arkie and his pals moved in, he noticed a nice vegetable garden filled with plump, ripe strawberries. To which, he helped himself, plucking them from the garden and popping them into his mouth. The next day he saw a tank truck emptying septic tanks and using the sewage to fertilize all the gardens on the block.  I include this picture only because it's so well composed. My dad couldn't be very specific about what it was. Some kind of French repair depot. You can see that the bellows on his camera has a leak. There's a white diagonal smudge across all of the pictures taken with this camera. The first order of business upon occupying a town was to confiscate all firearms and cameras. Most of these pictures were taken with one of those liberated cameras. I used to play with that souvenir camera when I was a kid. It's probably still around somewhere.  When these cameras were liberated, there were often half exposed rolls of film in them. Here's an exposure from one of those confiscated rolls that found its way into my dad's photos. Arkie should have kept this camera instead of the one with the hole in the bellows.  Near Lyons, French FFI and civilians murdered by Nazis and thrown into mass graves, probably getting a less dignified send-off than the guy going into the grave in the previous photo. |
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 This is a USO wagon distributing hot coffee and doughnuts to the officers and warm coffee and doughnuts to the enlisted men. This was something that hit a nerve with Arkie, that the officers always got in line first for the hot food. I remarked that cowboys always let the herd drink first and it's customary to water your horse before you yourself drink. Arkie just reckoned that the world looks different to a hog that's got it's chin over the edge of the trough.  Not that Arkie ever went hungry. That's Arkie above and old man Errikson (Errikson was almost forty). having dinner on New Years Day, 1945. Errikson was from way up north, although Dad wasn't sure exactly where.  Someplace exotic and cold, maybe Minnesota. Errikson was the guy that painted the nose art on the planes. Compare the portions in the shit skillets. Dad loved army food, and still likes all-you-can-eat buffets.  Before shipping off to England, Dad posed this picture with his dad by the shed behind the Johnson homestead near Cabot. He handed the old man a shotgun, propped him on a stump by the shed, plopped a floppy hat on his head, got the hound to relax by his foot. That's Arkie on the left, an out-of-focul blur. Looks like the shutter stuck, and the spherical distortion in this lense is pretty bad. Probably glass rather than quartz. The arrangement of saddles, loops of copper tubing and wagon tires behind Grandpa and the lack of props to either side suggests a phony scene, specially arranged for this one picture. And sure enough, that's what it was. He showed this picture around to all his army buddies and told them that's his home, his slow moving pellagric Pa and his slow-moving pellagric coon dog. Of course, all any of them knew about Arkansas was what they read in Li'l Abner, so they believed it. |
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Below is a pair of pictures I like. First photo you see pilots being driven to their planes before a mission.  Next you see the pilots returning from planes on foot through the mud after a mission.  SiteBuilder: Email me at: HAHN-50THap-k9@webtv.net if you were in the 10th Fighter Squadron and I'll pass the note onto Russell's dad, Arkie aka Thomas T. Johnson.  |
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