Happy birthday TAM

[Commander Cody]

"There is really no bonus or extra privileges for being a senior member... except then you have to start giving TAM his fee".

Ya think with this happy birthday wish... maybe I can get a discount this month?

[Divided Attention]

Happy TAM Day! Wishing you a blessed year!

[The Annoyed Man]

Thanks guys. I wish I knew what this fee is that the others are talking about. I'd use it to buy a lot more guns.

[Diesel42]

Ditto TAM.
Have fun and do something nice for yourself.
Happy Trails! N

[USA1]

Happy Birthday bro.

[mikeintexas]

Happy Birthday TAM!

[terryg]

Happy Birthday!!!!

[SewTexas]

Happy Birthday TAM! many blessings in the future!

[carlson1]

Happy Birthday my friend!

[jocat54]

Happy Birthday!!

[68Charger]

Happy Bday TAM!

I'll shoot left handed in your honor. :P

[The Annoyed Man]

It was a pretty good birthday. I spent the afternoon out with my camera. We went to the Frontiers of Flight museum at Dallas Love Field. I took a few photos, most of which didn't turn out as good as I had hoped, but that wasn't the real treasure. The real treasure was sitting down and listening to a brief lecture by WW2 veteran Captain Charles D. Mohrle. Mohrle volunteered for military service after the attack on Pearl Harbor and became a P-47 Thunderbolt pilot. He received a Distinguished Flying Cross, an Air Medal and is entitled to wear a Presidential Unit Citation Ribbon. He flew 97 missions over France and Germany, and he showed us three portraits of himself—one taken of a confident young man in flight training, one taken as a newly minted combat pilot with a very self assured expression on his face, and one taken at 50 missions, about the halfway point in his overseas tour, with the expression of a man who was not convinced that he was going to see tomorrow, and who desperately needed some sleep.

He showed us lots of pictures from his personal story. One was of his squadron on the runway, just before taking off for the D-Day invasion, the prop wash kicking up sheets of water from the still wet ground. There was a picture of him in his airplane, the "Touch of Texas" with a big rattlesnake as nose-art, taken by his wingman over the hedgerows of Normandy. There was a picture he showed us of a pre-mission briefing. All of the pilots are sitting on the grass, looking worried, while a senior officer is giving them the dope. Included in the picture and sitting on the ground are his squadron commander, his wingman, himself, and his best friend. The other three were killed that day. He got misty eyed when he talked about his wingman, who was an 18 year old boy when they first met, and a 19 year old man when he was killed.

One day, the squadron's head cook borrowed one of the disposable single-use external fuel tanks they used. He was Sargent Sing, a Chinese-American. These tanks were made of paper maché and only designed to hold together and retain their shape for about 45 minutes or an hour. They would be mounted to the wing pylons and filled just before takeoff. The P-47 pilots would burn that fuel first before switching over to the wing tanks. His squadron operated strictly in a ground attack role, shooting up trains, convoys, gun emplacements, tanks, and such, so they didn't need the larger fuel tanks which mounted under the fuselage for the longer bomber escort missions. I guess the paper maché made the tanks lighter than the metal ones, and they would be destroyed on impact with the ground when released, so they would be useless to the enemy or anyone else; and they could also be used as an ad-hoc "napalm" bomb. Anyway, Sargent Sing had "liberated for other purposes" one of these fuel tanks and filled it with reconstituted powdered milk, sugar, calvados brandy, and several large cans of fruit salad. He then asked Capt. Mohrle for a favor. "Sure Sargent, whatever you want." Sing asked Mohrle to mount this tank (and hurry up before it falls apart) on his P-47 and "fly it up to where it is real cold, and do some acrobatics for a while." So Capt. Mohrle took his plane up to 30,000 feet, ostensibly for a flight maintenance check, where he did side-slips, barrel rolls, and immelmanns for a while until the delicious mixture in the fuel tank froze. He then returned quickly to the field, where the tank was dismounted and torn open, revealing 50 gallons of the most delicious (and most expensive) ice-cream in the ETO. Jones thank him, and Mohrle concluded the story with "whatever Sargent Sing wants, Sargent Sing gets.

And speaking of napalm, they didn't have any. Mohrle would fly over a convoy, drop a tank of gas on it (one thing which they had plenty of), and the P-47 behind his would light up the gas with incendiary rounds. He said it was pretty effective.

He told us stories about his squadron mates, about various missions, about the P-47 itself (which he averred was twice the airplane that those primadonnas in their P-51s flew). He showed us pictures of where anti-aircraft fire had punched big holes in his stabilizer surfaces. He showed us the rifle bullet that was recovered from his parachute and told us the story of how it got there. He always began each story with "Here's how it happened...." So Mohrle was on a strafing mission, and as he flow real low over this truck he had just shot up, he saw a guy standing in the back of the truck quickly swing his Mauser up as Mohrle passed over and take a shot at him. He felt the bullet impact in his back, but he felt no pain and could see no blood. He was so busy flying the mission that he had to concentrate on other things, but when he landed his plane, he told his crew chief "I think I've been shot, take a quick look to see if you see anything." Sure enough, there was a mashed up rifle bullet buried in his parachute. He still has that bullet today and he passed it around. The interesting thing about it was that it was really light in weight, and the exposed core seemed to be something other than lead. He said that it was aluminum. Apparently, the Germans were having such difficulty moving manufacturing materials around by this time, largely due to the disruptions by Allied bombers and ground attack aircraft, that they were substituting whatever metals they had on hand to pour bullets with. One of the metals they had a lot of was aluminum, scavenged from all of their aircraft that had been shot down. Mohrle also showed us a piece of shrapnel from an 88mm airburst that had embedded itself in his instrument panel, narrowly missing his head. The piece looked as if it also had some aluminum in it, but when he showed it to his crew-chief, the Sargent said that it was all steel, but that it was white hot when it punched through his canopy and the aluminum had just melted to it when it stuck in his instrument panel.

Mohrle had nothing but praise for his ground crew. He told us stories about each one of them too. He said that they very much thought of the airplane as theirs, and they merely allowed him to fly it. Each time he climbed in the cockpit for a mission, the crew chief would assist it strapping him into his harness, and tell him, "you be sure to bring my airplane back."

He remains to this day the only American pilot ever shot down in Arizona. It happened like this.....

Toward the end of the war, Captain Mohrle shipped back to the States, where he was posted to an air gunnery school in Arizona. There, he flew the P-63 King Cobra. What the Air Corps did was send up bomber crews in B17s, armed with .30 cal machine guns, instead of the normal .50 cal guns. These .30 cal weapons were loaded up with frangible bullet ammo. The P-63s had bullet-proof glass canopies, and the pilot sat inside a sort of armored steel bathtub, much like an A-10 pilot today. The fighters had sensors mounted under the skin all over the aircraft, and the nose cannon was replaced with a blinking bright light that would flash like a strobe whenever the pilot activated the firing button on the stick. The sensors under the skin would record the bullet strikes of the frangible ammo. It sounded completely crazy to me, but I can't think of a more realistic exercise for training a bomber's gun crew. The P-63 pilots would "attack" the B-17 formations, firing their blinking "nose cannon" at the lumbering bombers. The bomber air crews would fire their frangible .30 cal machine guns at the attacking fighters. Each of the gunners on the bombers were issued ammo for their guns in different bullet colors. These bullets would leave streaks of color on the fighter's skin as the bullets broke up. When the training mission was over, the planes would all land together, and the gunners to examine the fighters and get some sort of a score tallied up by counting the different colored bullet "strikes" on the fighter planes. Anyway, on one such mission, one of those frangible bullets found its way between the louvered slats protecting the P-63's radiator and the engine rapidly began to overheat. Mohrle had to shut the engine down, request a cleared runway, and bring it in under a dead-stick landing.

I could go on and on, and already have, but my wife and I were transfixed by the whole experience. When Captain Morhle recited the poem "High Flight," everybody got a little misty eyed, he as well. If you ever had a free afternoon to go check out the Frontiers of Flight museum, be sure to try and do it on a day when Captain Charles D. Morhle is giving his presentation. He is 90 years old now, and one of only 2 or 3 still alive from his squadron. You really owe it to yourself to hear this man tell his story, while he is still around to tell it.

Thanks again everybody for the birthday wishes.

[Bulldog1911]

Well, better late than never I guess, so Happy Birthday.
Great Stories.

[fishman]

Sorry I just saw it, Happy birthday TAM.