Cairo Kids and 22 hour Flights
Heroes Remember
We were in Cairo for about a week, waiting for this VOAC plane,
and that was an experience. The Egyptian bazaars, the kids that
would steal your pens and then go around the block and try to
sell them back to you. And the worst part was, they shine your
shoes, you know, sob, and if you didn’t do it, they’d smear
it with beetle juice and then you had to have them done, then,
because it would deteriorate your shoes. Well, we’d leave about
eight o’clock in the morning from… there’s two airstrips in
Ceylon. There was Sigiriya and Minneriya, and Minneriya was
on China Bay. It was off the ocean. We used to take off about
eight o’clock in the morning and we’d come back about seven
o’clock the next morning, sometimes seven thirty.
But you used to run 22, maybe 23 hours.
Interviewer: What was the morale like at that time?
Oh, excellent. We were a crew of eleven. We had a few bad eggs
in our crew, but all in all it was a good crew. We were dedicated
too. We had a… our captain was Al [Bassar], very conscientious
man, and he wanted his crew to be conscientious, too.
At first, I was a bomb aimer and spare air gunner for the front
turret. But when we ended up in India, in Ceylon, with 22 hour
trips, I had to do some of the navigating. I was second navigator
And then I was responsible for finding the drop zone, DZ,
in Malaya, and dropping our supplies or men, whatever,
and ammunition. A lot of ammunition, a lot of grenades, a lot of
M1 machine carbines we used to drop for the people down below,
and then try to get home.
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