war storys from gramps

[JWkegger]

hello everybody, been reading this forum for a while finnaly decided to chime in

all this dogfighting talk makes me remember my grampa telling me a few of his old war stories being a pilot in ww2 and pearl harbor survivor. anyone got any good ones?

My favorite from my Gramps who was in the army air corps was when he was a bomber pilot on a mission over italy(i think) and the first time he got shot down and luckily lived, he told me he was RTB about 10 min after they dropped their bombes and got jumped by some fighters attacking out of the sun, he thought he must have been the first plane hit because suddenly he plane rocked and pitched violently to the right, after fightingt the controls to try and keep her level he finnaly noticed that almost half of his wing was missing and the engine was gone, he said he somehow managed to keep the plane level enough and slow enough for the entire crew to bail out, he said by the time he was about ready to jump out he was already too low to deploy his parachutte, despite that he knew he didnt stand a chance if he stayed with the plane so he hopped out at what he guessed was somewhere around 800ft i think he said. he pulled his chute as soon as he made his way out and before his chute opened all the way he hit the ground. he said he must have laid there for what seemed like forever believeing he was probably horably wounded. after finnaly taking stock of his situation and moving a little bit he founf out he was just a little banged and bruised as he called it. someone he had managed to land in a thick garden of some sorts which must have cushened his fall along with his half deployed parachutte. he was lucky to be alive and turned out to be even luckier later in the war being shot down 2 more times through the war, once more in a bomber and later as a p-51 pilot. ill share those stories as i can remember them.

id love to hear any of you have, my gramps really never did like to talk about ehm but i loved to hear them when he did. oh yeah and man did that man hate japanese, probably due to the fact that he was at pearl harbour when it was attacked. needless to say he ended up flying aginst the germans in europe and he actually held some respect for german pilots ( ie whenever he saw a german plane shot down he said he always hoped to see a parachute pop out) he had the oposite reaction to japanese, he never did fly against them but when talking about them he said it was a shame any jap pilot ever lived after being shot down, i guess pearl harbor affected him that bad.

for the record i do not hate japanese or any race