 Thank you, John, very much. I really want to thank John Kennedy and the folks here at Naval War College Museum for having me. It is a great honor. I didn't know Admiral Mahant spoke here, but that makes it even more special. So I have a tiny bit of naval warfare history in my background. My grandfather was a Coast Guard, retired Coast Guard. He was a skipper of an LST out in the Pacific and also a sub-chaser in the Atlantic during the war. So that's my naval history background. But today I'm here to talk to air stories, not sea stories, but air stories, a few ground stories thrown in here. And this is the summary of the book that I wrote about a guy from a small town in Ohio near Dayton named Bob Uregg, who enlisted in the Army Air Corps before World War II, came in as a private. He was basically just a mechanic, a mechanics helper for a while. Then sort of worked his way up through the ranks to be in the Warren Officer, Lieutenant, and then by the end of the war a captain in his career field was aircraft maintenance. So they were called engineering officers in those days, and now we call them aircraft maintenance. And that was the same career field I had when I was in the Air Force, so I identified quite a bit with what his experiences were. And I was fortunate enough to meet his daughter, who had his diary that he kept all through the war, as well as this huge box of letters that he wrote home to her mom, his wife during the war. So there was an abundance of material there, all first person. And you can imagine how valuable something like that would be. This week, in fact, we hear a lot of stories about it being the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address, and how important Gettysburg was to American history. And you can imagine if you went through somebody's attic today and you found a diary written by a soldier from the Civil War, how valuable would that be to us to get that first person narrative taken after it happened in 1864? Or maybe later on the diary of a cavalry trooper out in the Western Plains, you know, in the American frontier, how that first person experience would be very valuable to us today to know how those people lived. So that's what I was able to come upon with Bob's diary was a day-to-day, as it happened, account of the war both in North Africa and in Europe. So he was very meticulous about his writings, very detailed, and also able to glean a lot of information from the letters as well. And as I went through the material, there came to be rather four stories all sort of nested together. The first one, of course, was Bob's story of his wartime experiences, you know, first as a crew chief and then as chief of maintenance, and his transition from being sort of a line guy to being a commander and how that influenced him and the things he sort of had to learn along the way. The second story was the relationship between him and his wife. He was married before the war and then went overseas and had to leave his wife behind kind of almost at a moment's notice at Fort Benning and get to North Africa, basically leaving his family behind. And so he was separated from her for almost three years from November 42 through May of 45. And so the relationship between them and how they were able to hold that together, even those long, long months of separation, because at the time he didn't know when he would be coming home. As a guy who was not an aviator, not an aircrew person, he didn't have the same opportunity to rotate back to the states like, say, the bomber crew guys did after 25 or 35 missions, they could come home. And even the airman and his squadron who were transport flyers could come back to the states after so many hundred combat hours. But the ground guys, the mechanics, all the logistics folks, they had to stay there for the duration. So it ended up being the full war for him overseas. And that's something kind of unusual that we don't really see is the guys having to stay overseas for the whole length of the war. The third part of the story is actually kind of how the American airlift force is matured as the war went on. Before the war, he was assigned to a small squadron at Patterson Field in Ohio that had just a few airplanes. Eventually they got, which were the first generations of modern aircraft, the DC-2s or C-33s, C-39s, as they were called in those days in the Air Corps, the first big, good-sized transport planes. Later became the DC-3, which is kind of the father of all American airliners. And those aircraft were militarized for the war. They returned into C-47s. So they had taken out all the passenger seats, put in troop seats, cargo doors, you know, some advanced navigation equipment. And that was really the start of American airlift forces in early 1942. Along with that, along with the logistics mission that they had to fly, the fourth part of the story was the development of American airborne operations. The paratroopers were really coming into their own at that point. The Americans were trying to take some lessons learned from the European wars and apply them to American infantry trying to put GIs and parachutes and kick them out the door and have them go into battle. So his development of military airlift was going along the same time they were developing the airborne forces. So you see throughout the book kind of all those stories sort of melded together as time went on. Well, as I mentioned, his first assignment was at Patterson Field in Ohio right by his hometown. He spent a good number of years there going from enlisted to warren officer. And this was a time when the Air Force was going through a lot of changes. He was able to see a lot of these experimental aircraft like the old B-17s and P-40s coming along in their first-generation evolution, trying to develop a more modern bomber and fighter force. And then they went on a few deployments at that time to some of the exercises in the U.S. that were flown in the southern areas of the U.S. where there were large army forces that they were supporting and also some of the maneuvers out west. Eventually after Pearl Harbor, the squadron gets mobilized on December 8th, 1941. And they get sent to Alaska. And their mission is to ferry this squadron of P-40s there. You can see it in the lower right-hand corner that are going from the U.S. to Alaska to try to guard the illusions because they weren't sure maybe if the Japanese were going to invade the illusions, which they eventually did right before the Battle of Midway. So it kind of ties into next week's author as well. So they stayed there in Alaska for nearly six months flying cargo around rather unimproved conditions. There's a lot of descriptions in his letters about the fields they had to fly into. Basically they were just hacked out of the forest. The trees had just recently been felled to make a runway. All the maintenance was done outdoors, no hangers, no buildings of any kind. You know, they had to warm up the tools before they could use them. It was very austere conditions. So they learned a lot of hard lessons out there in the Alaskan frontier in that period right after Pearl Harbor. So eventually the squadron was returned back to Ohio in middle 1942. And they were sent to Fort Benning for several months where they were assigned to the Airborne School there. So they did a lot of the early jump training for the paratroop forces, a lot of the perfection of the techniques that would later be used in Europe as far as formation flying and mass jumps and trying to assemble a paratroopers all in one place so they could go into battle. So his unit was one of the first ones that was sent to Fort Benning as kind of a training squadron to be used to support the Airborne School down there. Well, November 1942 Operation Torch kicks off in North Africa where the U.S. and the British forces invade over on the western side. At the same time, his unit gets mobilized from Fort Benning and sent to North Africa on the eastern side. They're supposed to go to Egypt. So they're being sent to the area around the Suez Canal Zone and their mission is to evacuate the American dependence and residents who live there because the Germans are on the doorstep of Egypt. They're about ready to invade Egypt and the fear is that they're going to overrun Cairo and they're going to seize the Suez Canal. So they're sent there as kind of an emergency force to evacuate Americans in the area. Well by the time they get there, because they have to go the long way, they fly from Fort Benning through Miami down through Puerto Rico, Brazil and across the southern Atlantic through Ascension Island up through the central part of Africa and into Alexandria. By the time they make it to Egypt, the Germans' threat has subsided because Field Marshal Rommel has won the Battle of El Alamein and now the Germans are on the run in the other direction. So their mission shifts from that of evacuation of Americans to resupply the British forces that are now chasing the Germans back through Egypt and Libya and into Tunisia. So they spend the next almost full year following the British Army as they hopscotch their way across North Africa. So they go from Egypt through all the bases. You can see here the little airplane symbology is the places they were stationed as the British kind of chased the Germans along the coast road and into Tunisia. So this was a very difficult time. The conditions out there as you can imagine in the desert were pretty austere. They would move every couple of days, every few weeks. They lived out of tents. They did their maintenance outside. They were subject to extreme heat and sandstorm and bombing raids and it was really a rough environment. The other thing that complicated matters was that when the squadrons got there, part of this troop carrier group, they only had a certain amount of support guys that were able to come with them. The rest of the element came as what they called the seaborn tail that had to leave the states on troop ships and didn't get to Egypt until several months later. So Bob and a small handful of mechanics were the only ones available to keep the airplanes flying during that time while they were waiting for the rest of the ground echelon to show up. So it was extra difficult for them. As I was going through Bob's diary, he was pretty good about keeping a record of where they were and locations that he knew of. And one of the locations he mentioned a couple of times was a spot out in the middle of North Africa called Marble Arch. You can see it here on the map. It's about dead in the middle of Libya. And it's called Marble Arch because there was a gigantic arch built out in the middle of the desert by Mussolini. And it was there to commemorate the victories of the Italian forces or the hapless Libyan troops and commemorate the Italian Empire expanding into North Africa. So this massive arch, which you can see there in the photo, was out in the middle of the desert and it was a pretty big landmark about the only structure you could see for hundreds of miles around. And it was a stride to coast road that went back and forth along the top end of Libya. So this was one of the advanced airfields, landing grounds that the British were using to supply their forces. Also, they had a couple squadrons of P-40s there, P-40 fighter planes assigned to the RAF. So I said, well, you know, I try to find a photo of that Marble Arch and see if I can use it in the book. I'll see if there's one available on the internet. So I searched around to see if there was any available and I did find one on a website for the Royal Australian Air Force. And this was their history page where they kind of talked about some lineage of their units. And this particular page was about the number three squadron of a fighter craft based out there at Marble Arch in December of 1942. And the story that was on this particular web page was written by a medic who had treated four British soldiers who were wounded by a mine at this airfield. One of the guys jumped off a truck and stepped on one of these German S mines, they called them, which were bounding mines. They would fly up from the ground and then explode and there would shrapnel would go everywhere, nasty business by all accounts. And so he wrote this extensive summary of how he had been able to treat these guys, put them on American transport planes and send them back to a hospital in Benghazi. Well, as it happened, I was just that day reading the passage in Bob's diary where he described being at Marble Arch and watching these four British soldiers be wounded by this mine. So what I got was the same story told from two different sides of the battle by two different guys who didn't even know each other. And that was absolutely chilling to be able to read that, you know, same account, same day. And it was Bob's squadron that flew the wounded British guys back to the hospital. So it was really amazing what you can find on the internet if you poke around a little bit. So here we see Bob, he's in his Warren Officer uniform. At this point he's been promoted to Warren Officer and now he's the chief of maintenance for the 36th troop carrier squadron, which is one of four squadrons assigned to the three sixteenth troop carrier group, which is about around about nearly a hundred airplanes out there in the desert going across, you know, from east to west, making their way into Tunisia. Well, since most of the men were from the same area in Ohio, it was a little bit of an odd unit because they'd been put together before the war. So a lot of family members lived within close proximity back in Ohio. It wasn't like the later units which were cobbled together once the war started, so there were guys from all over the U.S. or draftees. These were mostly guys who had known each other for a good long while, and all their families lived in the same general area there around the base. Well, one of his comrades, who was a maintenance guy for the group, got the local paper from Springfield, Ohio, one day in the mail from his wife. And after it got done reading it, passed it on to Bob to see if he would be interested in it. So Bob picks up the newspaper, and on the front page he reads an interesting story about his wife being pulled over for speeding by the local Springfield cops. A fact which he has conveniently left out of the letters she has written to him. And so now he finds out about it, and so of course he sits right down to write her a letter and give her hell about this speeding ticket that she got from the local cops. And so it's kind of funny how the news sort of makes its way to you whether you like it or not. And there's a couple of other funny stories that go along in the book as well. One of them kind of centers around nose art. Now guys who've been around airplanes for a while know that this was kind of a popular thing that was done during the war. You know, guys would paint cartoon characters or fancy ladies on the side of their airplane. And the unit had been out in the desert for about eight months there, I think, in Tunisia. And they finally got their first movie projector. And they finally got a screen so they could now get movies from the states and watch them. Before then they were pretty much out of luck for any kind of entertainment. As well as none of them had seen a woman in about eight months either out there in the desert. So the first night they get the movie projector. The first movie that they show is an old Hedy Lamar film called White Cargo. Now if anybody you know, how many know who Hedy Lamar was? Well, yeah, she was a pretty famous actress back in the 40s. And she was actually Austrian, I think, by birth. But in this kind of rather not very well done film she plays this kind of saucy native girl who seduces Walter Pigeon and a couple other guys. But she's pretty fetching in this movie. So if you've been out in the desert for eight months and you haven't seen a woman, seeing Hedy Lamar in this film is a pretty big deal for you, I gotta tell you. And her character in the movie is Tandaleo, that's her character's name. And sure enough as soon as this film is debuted doesn't Tandaleo end up as Nozard on one of the squadron's airplanes there. And I think in fact she was so popular that she ended up as Nozard on a lot of airplanes because I've seen B-17s, B-25s, other aircraft have Tandaleo painted on the side and they were all pretty taken with Hedy Lamar. Well, once I finished my book I got home one night and I thought, you know, I gotta rent this movie. I've never seen it before, I should rent it, see what it's all about because I didn't even know it. And when you know I should go to Netflix or get it or something and when you know that night I turned on Turner Classic movies and what are they showing but white cargo? I couldn't believe it. I'm kind of glad I didn't waste my money to rent it. It's not very good but I was glad to see it anyway just to see what these guys were so excited about. And there were some other funny stories that Bob wrote about as well and some of his archives. You know there were censors all during the war that had to go through and censor the men's mail and had to take out things that had references to places or military events so that in case the mail was captured by the enemy they weren't able to do any kind of intelligence on it. So in all of Bob's letters there was only one section that was ever censored and that was where he mentioned going to some town in Egypt where they were able to get cold beer finally for the first time in a couple months and the censor had carefully cut out the name of the town where they were that had the beer. Well the only other thing that got censored was this rather interesting little Italian postcard that he sent back to his wife back home that had a fairly innocuous picture on the front of a Sicilian donkey cart. They're kind of colorful. They had small carts with the donkey on the front and they're kind of brightly painted and everything. And down at the bottom of the cart it probably just said Sicily and so the censor had carefully cut out the word Sicily from the bottom of the postcard. Now who they were trying to fool I don't know because obviously the Italians would know that was Sicily and the Germans who'd just been kicked out of Sicily would know it was Sicily and the Americans would know it was Sicily so what was really the point of censoring the whole thing? So there were lots of funny stories like that as well. Well after the North African campaign winds up the group converts over to doing a new mission and that's airborne operations. So they're assigned to drop troops into Sicily as part of Operation Husky the invasion of Sicily in July of 1943. So they are paired up with the 82nd airborne guys who are now in North Africa. The 82nd has done a small jump really only one regiment has done a small jump in North Africa not very successful and now they're going to drop the whole division into Sicily over a two day period as well as the use of glider troops which to then had never been used. So Bob's unit converts over to doing airborne operations so they start doing exercises with the 82nd they start towing gliders on a large scale to practice doing that in conjunction with the airborne drops so they do the first drop the night of the 11th of July and it's reasonably successful some of the troopers get scattered as far over on the eastern side as the British beaches but not too bad and they're able to capture most of their objectives. Well the second night the generals decide they're going to do another airborne operation this time is it going to be at night and this time is basically just kind of a resupply operation they're going to drop the 82nd guys the 504th regiment into an area that's kind of already held by the Americans basically just to resupply and support them with additional troops so they're going to drop on some of these airfields down here in the southern part of Italy. Well at this point the whole bay here the southern area of Sicily around Gala around the harbor is covered with American ships because the amphibious operation is underway you know General Patton's on shore, Admiral Hewitt on the back here is commander of the naval forces in the area so the amphibious operation is well underway and the British forces they're advancing on Syracuse you know Monty's out there with his 8th Army and they're going to link up in the middle and drive north toward Messina so there's a briefings held with all the commanders in the area you know don't shoot at these transport planes when they come over the fleet they're going to be over at 11 o'clock it's a carefully timed route they're flying from North Africa they're going to go over Malta, they're going to turn North they're going to fly in around kind of in the backside drop their paratroopers over these airfields and then get out of the way so allegedly the word gets to everybody that needs to hear it you know don't fire on the airplanes well of course plans are only good till the first shot is fired and then that evaporates rather quickly because all during the day that day the American ships in the harbor are subjected to German bombers coming over on a regular basis and in fact about an hour before the C-47s arrive there's another German air raid on the fleet at night so the gunners on the ships and on the shore are already pretty nervous about what's going to happen and they're not really thinking too much about American airplanes coming over at that point so around 11 at night you know the airborne troops come overhead and then somebody starts to shoot and then eventually everybody starts to shoot and it's one of the worst friendly fire accidents in World War II they shot up the entire troop carrier group coming over and Bob Squadron the 36 Squadron actually got the worst of it you know they had to come over right the first couple of airplanes got in and out without much trouble but about the middle of the force took it the hardest the guys at the end of the airstream you know the long trail of aircraft coming in was so bad some of them turned around and came back without even dropping their paratroopers they just figured it was not even worth it to try to go in the area so his unit took the worst of the damage there was only one airplane I think out of the whole squad they didn't get flak damage into it several were shot down there was a lot of guys wounded on all the other aircraft a lot of paratroopers were wounded as well it was really a big disaster just to give you an idea of the scale of this this is Jim Ferris's airplane was nicknamed Geronimo he was Bob's roommate and he was the ops commander for the 36 Squadron and this was what his airplane looked like it got flak damage in the half cargo door and then as they flew lower over the water to try to get away from some of the anti-aircraft one of the airplanes in front of them released their what we call parapacks these were big cargo containers strapped to the underneath of the airplane they let their parapacks go one of them tumbled through the fuselage here ripped its way through and tore all the way back towards the end of the airplane so he had to struggle to get that airplane back to all the way back to North Africa in one piece and the picture you see of him here is taken in later in 1944 where he received a distinguished flying cross for getting that airplane back to North Africa so this was kind of typical of the damage that went on as part of this airborne operation so friendly fire casualties were a very big issue at that point in fact so much so that the Squadron the next day almost was non-operational because they had lost so many guys so many airplanes were out of commission it was really a hard lesson that had to be learned really hit them pretty hard because a lot of experienced guys were wounded or taken out of action well once Sicily is captured a few months later the group redeploys from North Africa now they're based at Castel Vatrano which is an airfield in Sicily and they start to operate out of Sicily on a regular basis flying cargo around the Med for a couple months and then it's early 1944 and the forces are being built up in England now for the invasion of France so his group along with a lot of other troop carrier groups in the Med are sent from Sicily or North Africa up to England to be refitted and to get ready for the Normandy invasion so his unit has to fly from Sicily to Cadesmore which is going to be their new base in England but they can't go the direct route of course they can't fly over France because there's likely they're going to get shot down by German fighters or Flags so they've got to go a long way they've got to go from Sicily through Gibraltar to Portugal and France and into Germany so they make it to Gibraltar okay they're kind of stuck there for weather for a couple of days and there's some interesting stories about Gibraltar and his diary and then they all launch squatter by squatter into head to England but when they're halfway there in the middle of the night they have the worst experience possible engine fire in flight so one of the engines catches fire and the airplane that bobs on fortunately as the most experienced maintenance guy in the unit he knows what's wrong so he's able to talk the pilot who used to get the engine fire out and what possibly might be wrong with the engine so that they can nurse the airplane all the way back to England and they eventually do they make it there in kind of rough shape but they all make it there in one piece back to England but it's a pretty dicey couple of hours there as they're flying over the Atlantic because the last thing they wanted to do was put down on the water the only other option was to put down in France which was occupied at the time they would be POWs even landing in Portugal or Spain wasn't a good idea because although they were officially neutral during the war they were going to be interned in one of those countries basically have to sit out the war as under house arrest because they couldn't be returned back to Allied line so they were in trouble nearly wherever they went unless they made it to where they were going so now they're in England and Bob's able to continue writing to his wife back home and one of the things he's able to take advantage of were these new techniques for getting messages back and forth across the Atlantic and one of them was called V-mail maybe some of you have seen V-mail letters before they're pretty small, they're pretty tiny things and what we might think of today is almost the first generation fax machine these were started in 1942 by the British and later adopted by the US what you would do is in the States or overseas you would get a special form from the post office write your letter on the form take it back to the post office they would photograph your letter put it on microfilm and then string a bunch of these letters together on microfilm and then send them back and forth across the ocean on transports as film rather than as letters then when they got to the other side they would put the film on a special machine which would then print the letters out in smaller size so that the GIs could read them or the folks back home could get them so they could put 1500 of these letters on one roll of film they were printed out at about a quarter size for the people on the other end 2500 pounds of mail could be reduced to 45 pounds of film for transport across the ocean so it saved a lot of weight on these transport aircraft still being able to get the letters back and forth between 1942 and 1945 there were 1 billion letters sent by this V-mail process so this is actually one of Bob's letters here that he sent to his wife back in Springfield so they're in the ETO now and boy it was rough there it was certainly as rough as the desert there were no dances like this in North Africa or Sicily it was a much nicer life there they had a regular base that had hangers they had regular maintenance facilities they had better chow they had girls in the local area so conditions improved greatly for the GIs once they got to England but they were training intensely at that point for the Normandy invasion the paratroopers squadrons were paired up with airborne units in this case the 36 went with the 82nd again they were going to drop the 82nd now in Normandy and they started into large scale exercises with many groups together and formations flying so they could drop their paratroopers all in the same spot unfortunately during one of these exercises about a month before D-Day there was a mid-air collision that happened one night when they were headed back towards Cottesmore one of the paratroopers who you saw on the previous slide there was killed along with the group commander they were in two different airplanes were killed along with the squadron chaplain and a bunch of paratroopers when two airplanes ran into each other making the turn to come back to the base so Bob lost his roommate of many years as well as a couple other guys that he knew on an accident right before D-Day so it hit the group really hard because they lost the Colonel of Group Commander was expected to take him into combat but he didn't notice everybody and it was kind of a big blow to them right before this big operation so June 6th is about ready to kick off the invasion of Normandy and now I kind of explain a little bit more about invasion stripes and why my book is called Invasion Stripes well as the Chief of Maintenance for the troop carrier squadron Bob got the first classified order from Schaeff through his Air Force chain of command to paint these airplanes prior to D-Day to avoid the friendly fire mishaps which occurred in Sicily there was a plan put together to paint the airplanes every allied airplane except the strategic bombers so all the fighters, all the transports British and American were going to be painted with these large black and white stripes on the fuselages and the wings to be able to provide some recognition for the guys on the ground and in the air to know they were friendly aircraft so this was supposed to be a surprise and it was going to be deployed right before D-Day so June 3rd they send the guys out there and the maintenance units and all the MPs and the cooks and the clerks, anybody who wasn't busy on base got to go out with brushes and mops and brooms and hurriedly paint these airplanes because they were supposed to take off on the night of June 4th for the invasion on the 5th so all through the day on June 3rd they were busy painting these airplanes up in black and white invasion stripes they eventually got the job done but the invasion was postponed one day because of the bad weather so they had to kind of sit and wait for the 5th the night of the 5th and then his squadron launches with the 82nd on board for the first missions into Europe on D-Day here you can see some shots of some of the aircrew fitted out here in their garb for D-Day they looked very much like infantry soldiers because they were concerned at some point they might become infantry soldiers that if their transport aircraft were shot down they would have to hoof it back to Allied lines or they'd have to mix in with all the ground troops until they could get back to friendly forces so they were wearing their steel helmets carrying their pistols and wearing their leggings as they would if they were normal ground-based GIs the photos on the bottom are of a ground accident that happened on the 7th of June two aircraft from another squadron collided on the runway as they were taken off and Bob was the first guy on scene to be able to yank the guys out of the burning aircraft that were there on the field and was able to rescue some of them from the aircraft that collided there in a confused environment all taken off all at once so the D-Day missions are fairly successful his group actually had the best accuracy of any of the troop-care groups as far as dropping their guys in the vicinity of Sam Eringles then after the D-Day operation they swing over to doing cargo hauling again they do that for a few months until the airborne pace picks up again for the invasion of Holland in September 1944 Operation Market Garden and the squadron again drops the 82nd around the town of Nijmegen in Holland and then a month later Bob receives a significant decoration he's awarded the Legion of Merit in October of 1944 at this point he's been promoted to captain you can see him there with his captain's bars on but this Legion of Merit was awarded to him for his work in North Africa for the work that he did to keep the airplanes flying and the austere conditions in the desert and the Legion of Merit at the time was barely two years old as a military decoration so he was one of the first guys to be awarded it and it was really to be reserved for senior officers even today, even this day and age it's not usually given to junior officers and certainly not to somebody as junior as a captain so that was a pretty significant award for the work he'd done in North Africa the war is kind of going along it's now into 1945 they're assigned to drop paratroopers into Germany in March of 1945 and Operation Varsity which is the last airborne operation of the war and we find along in the records Air Force records some photographs of the 36 squadron here flying some of their missions in late 1944 you can see the invasion stripes at that point have been somewhat painted out on the tops of the aircraft they're still maintained on the fuselage and the bottoms of the wings the airplane in the center there tail number 4330652 is assigned to the 36th troop carrier squadron it's part of Bob's unit it appears in his diary along with the tail numbers of all the other aircraft that he's assigned to maintain here it is, another shot of it in late 1944 wartime markings are starting to fade a little bit with rough service you can see on the bottom of the fuselage there they've got a radar set it was set up as one of the Pathfinder aircraft kind of a ground mapping radar used to find the drop zones for the paratroopers and it's showing its age a little bit there but you can see the serial number 30652 painted on the tail and this is what it looks like today same airplane based at Geneseo, New York about 20 miles from my house and about 10 miles from the home of Bob Yerig's daughter so this airplane is still flying today 70 years later 30652 at the National Warplane Museum Geneseo, New York there is an effort underway now the museum is trying to raise funds to send this airplane back to Normandy in June of next year to participate in the celebrations of the 70th anniversary commemoration of D-Day so that's a testament to how rugged these these old Douglas C-47s were that they're still flying 70 years later and this one may be headed back across the Atlantic again in June of next year so tough airplanes maintained by tough people so they were kept flying for a good long time in the worst conditions so Bob is able to return to the states in May of 45 where he's reunited with his wife they're able to get their choice of assignments so he decides he wants to stay in the Dayton area so he remains at Wright Patterson Air Force Base now after the war is over consolidated into one unit and then the Air Force becomes a separate service in 1947 he's sent out to Edwards Air Force Base in California where he meets Chuck Yeager and a bunch of the guys in the test pilot community so he and Yeager become big friends for several years his daughter's got loads of photos of the guys out there hunting and fishing out west and all over the world he's able to stay in the Air Force for 30 years this is a shot of him in Thailand in the mid-60s right before he retires with his wife still by his side so a good news story there that the two of them are able to stay together and they're finally reunited a full career in the Air Force so that's my story I am happy to take questions I am happy to take questions and the books are on sale in the War College Museum Library here if you're interested if you want to get a book bring it back I'll autograph it for you I'm happy to do that it's about Rose this guy when you were in Africa and dealing with the sand and the harsh conditions and also the fears of supplies and working with the British and what was that relationship like? well they were they were notionally under US control they were part of the American Air Corps and I don't remember what Air Force was a 12th Air Force assigned to that part of North Africa but they were basically detailed to support the British fighter units that were moving forward as they leapfrogged across Tunisia well Libya and then to Tunisia so it was a bit of a hodgepodge allied air command there and they were really the only American transport unit doing it there were a few bomber and fighter units B-24s cobbled together were supporting the British on the other side but most of the American effort was supporting the Operation Torch landings over Casablanca Algeria, Morocco so they were kind of on their own in fact there's a picture in the book there of a couple of the guys in the squadron wearing British battle dressed trousers because they couldn't even get American uniform items they were so short of American supplies and Bob mentions in the book that they really were encouraged to wear British uniforms because none of the natives in the area had ever seen an American before so they didn't know what GIs would look like in American uniforms so they gave them all British uniforms to wear so they wouldn't be fired at by some of the native guards so it was a really sort of a shoestring operation they had going on some of them were they were in some French speaking areas there were also Italian speaking ones like in Libya because that had been an Italian colony for a good long time did you take part in any of the Marshall Plan in bringing in the the airlifts into Berlin and things like that his group did not because they actually they had been overseas longer than any other troop carrier group so as soon as the VE Day was over with their unit was broken up reassembled their high point guys were sent back to the U.S. and the group as a whole moved back to Pope Field in North Carolina right after the war some of the guys who hadn't been there quite as long were on the ground for the Berlin Airlift period but they were the long timers on station so they got to come back first and they were even thoughts that they might have to go to the Pacific too because it was never sure that things were going to be over in August of 45 so same planes in the Berlin Airlift basically yeah the C-47s they carried a good bit of the load for the Berlin Airlift there were DC-4s that were around by then a little larger four-engine aircraft that hauled a lot of cargo but the C-47s did quite a lot of the work for Berlin in fact I think the sculpture there at Tempelhof the air bridge sculpture I think is there's a C-47 there and if you know the Candy Bomber story about Gale Halverson he was a C-47 pilot as well that flew for the U.S. Air Force Tony, back oh the V-Mail ones, yeah yeah you really need a magnifying glass for those they're pretty tiny yeah they're like a 3x5 car yes sir this airplane that's going to fly over to Europe would you do it on your own? yeah they're going to go the old way they're going to go up through Newfoundland across Greenland, Iceland into Scotland part of the money they're trying to raise is to outfit it with additional avionics and survival gear because it's not a sure thing it's kind of risky maybe that's an understatement I don't know yeah even for New York in that regard who are going to be the pilot navigator etc are they going to be active duty Air Force? no they're the back up the slides here a little bit if I can maybe not the markings that it's painted in now are for a different squadron because during the war the airplanes were kind of shifted around especially ones that had special equipment on them they kind of traded them back and forth his original squadron had I think 18 airplanes when they got to North Africa by the time Normandy came around they had well over 25 airplanes per squadron and so the group went from say 70 airplanes to almost 100 and so they even didn't have enough air crews for all of them this particular airplane was kind of seconded to the 37 squadron for D-Day and their markings were W-7 and then it went back to the 36 squadron where it's marked as 4C so the museum maintains it in that marking but the guys who are flying it are just basically volunteers they're airline pilots on their weekends they fly the airplane and air shows like a lot of Warbird museums and so they're the guys who are going to fly it over to France so it's all volunteer labor now because they've got it painted up in the markings of the 37th Airlift Squadron that squadron still exists today at Ramstein Air Base in Germany so they're hopeful the guys from Ramstein will kind of come in and join up with them once they get to France because they're the last C-130 units in Germany I think the Italian name was like Arco-Fillene Orum or something like that Mussolini built it in the 30s to commemorate the conquest of Libya by the Italian forces well it was a little further south and where it was located was there's two regions in Libya and this was like right on the border of the two regions it survived the war I think it survived up to the time when Gaddafi took power in the 70s and he eventually had it demolished but it was very tall I can cycle the slides back here and show you it's extremely tall and it had stairs that went up to the top so Bob was able to go up there with a couple other guys and look out across the desert to you can see that in the picture here there's a 6x6 truck down there at the bottom so that gives you some of the scale of how extremely tall it was so there were intricate carvings on the side and it was called Marble Arch it was a nickname given to it by the British Tommies actually because it reminded them of the one in London by Hyde Park there is an actual marble arch they're called Marble Arch a tube station there too and so that was where the nickname came from and it reminded them of how big the scale was and this is the center of Libya there between the two different regions and right as stride this one coast road which is all there was as far as hard surface roads so it was a pretty big landmark what do you have here? the ample arch full out of Libya it might have been in the 60s I think we had Willis Air Force Base there for a while which was a logistics base I think up to the 60s the Tommies actually and when their tankers went in they would invite Air Force people aboard and then on the way in the Libyans would dip the ensign to it so it changed I think Willis was open until the 60s it was like a big logistics depot I think where they did a lot of overhaul there but now it's all gone when he left the service after 30 years Lieutenant Colonel Lieutenant Colonel well thanks for coming thank you