Not everybody wants to fight

Been exchanging memoirs with some vets and offer this extract, fwiw:

"One of the pilots that was with me in cadet and P-40 training was transferred
to a non-flying assignment. He had been with the squadron since September 1943
and had not flown one combat mission. He just didn’t want to fly the P-38, so
he managed to stay drunk all the time. He did check out in the plane and flew
locally, but refused to fly combat.

"There was one incident that I’m sure contributed to his condition. When we
moved to Sicily to bolster the 12th Fighter Wing during the invasion of Italy,
he was supposed to fly one of our planes from Mateur to Dittaino. When he
arrived over Sicily, he flew to the northern shore and started looking for the
airfield (the field was on the eastern coast). He spotted a field near Palermo
that had a P-38 parked on the ramp. The field had one very short north-south
runway. The north end stopped at the edge of the beach and the south end
stopped in a canyon. The windsock indicated that the wind was out of the north,
so he maneuvered into the canyon, flew down to the runway, did a fighter-type
360-degree approach, and attempted to land. The runway had a very steep slope
toward the sea and he was “hot.� The result? One P-38, wheels up, and in
the water. After that, you couldn’t get him to fly even in the local area."


Chris Mark