-On his initial flight to Korea, piloting a B-26 during the Korean War:
To start with, the B-26B is the hard-nose. It has eight guns in the nose and three in each wing, fourteen forward firing .50s, and it did not have a bombardier. I really never flew the B-26C, which was the soft-nose with the Norden bombsight in it. So, I never had a bombardier, but, you know, you had a navigator who flew the right seat and he was kind of the co-pilot and the navigator, yes. We had a three-man crew, with an enlisted man, and, yes, we had a lot of training together. We went through combat crew training at Langley as a team. We went to Stead Air Force Base in Reno, Nevada, survival school, as a team. Then, we went to California and practiced some more bombing in the Sacramento Valley. We went to Travis Air Force Base outside of San Francisco.
Flying B-26s to Korea was an extremely difficult job. We had to get the planes flying very efficiently, from a fuel point of view. So, we had to keep flying them until we got them fairly lean on fuel usage. We had to have at least, not a headwind, but preferably a tailwind, and, if you can visualize this, the primary wind direction is from west to east in the United States, but we needed an east to west wind to make Hickam in Hawaii and we needed good visibility, because the B-26 has no navigation equipment on it and a C-54 would be our lead ship. We were going to have twelve B-26s fly to Korea. The longest leg was the first one, from Travis to Hickam. We needed good weather, good wind, the plane in good shape and to follow the mother ship with the navigation equipment. We knew we were going to be in the seat for twelve hours without being able to get out, go to the bathroom or anything else, and one other thing, the B-26 is nose heavy. You cannot ditch a B-26. It has never stayed afloat longer than thirty seconds. It hits the water, dives. So, we knew that if we had to bail out, if we’re going to go down, we had to bail out; we couldn’t ditch. So, we finally got, after a long period of time, everything right and we flew to Hickam, and then, to Johnson and Guam and Wake, Okinawa, and, eventually, to K-9 in Korea. It was a tough flight.
