A Sergeant Pilot Showing the Ropes to a Major

A Sergeant Pilot Showing the Ropes To a Major
When you first went to the dessert flying, you know, you really couldn’t tell what was on the ground, you’d say nothing. It’s like looking at that carpet; there’s nothing there. And it took several weeks of many operational flights to realize that there were all kinds of things. Well, you could fly over a field to begin with and couldn’t even see the air planes on the ground. See, it’s all dusty and camouflage. Then maybe the sun would glint on a tele, on the perspecs and you’d pick up the rest of the field. But new pilots coming out from England with their Spitfires were just wrecking them. They’d land fifteen feet in the air because there was nothing to tell them where they were. We had a time when the United States group came out to join us flying P40's. They came to...they sent a squadron to, around with the other to, to double bank sort of thing. Find out what was going on. And to our squadron, the major, the CO of one of the squadrons came and he flew number 2 to me for a while. I’m a sergeant pilot and he never argued a bit. Someone said, “That’s the guy to fly with.” Anyway, he was my number 2 for a... I was very careful that we didn’t run into Huns because I knew, you know, they... But these Americans were on P40's for a long time and they could really fly their air planes. They showed us, they taught us how to, how to cope with these things. They were beautiful flyers. This, incidentally, this major became a 3-star general in the (inaudible) and he’s still living in the States.