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Do it now.

Keith Warren was given a 99CE by Ron Coburn during a pig hunt here in Texas. Did not see The High Road but suspect this may be the fancy rifle. Tom

My Dad would have been 90 this last June 20th. He learned his trade turning wrenches on Liberators and Flying Fortresses in the Mighty Eighth. I was able to publish some of his stories to the 487th Bomb Group website about a year before he passed. He was never onto firearms, but from a very young age he did instill in me an appreciation for the heavy bombers and the hell they endured. Thanks Dad, wherever you are this fine day.

You're right Gnoahhh. I'll probably start on it today. My brother is coming here in about a month and maybe we can polish it up then.

Get to it David. My Dad was stationed in India, with the 412th. He seemed to get into more trouble than anything else. When he got to India one of his home town buddies was already there. Herbert, my Dad's buddy, spoke a couple languages and several dialects, and had made friends with the big shots in several of the local villages. They used to get Herbert and Dad to do animal control for them. Once they had a troop of some kind of monkey ripping up the village, they ate some fermented fruit and had them all drunk, the monkey's, that is. Dad shot one in the chest with an M1. He said it stood up and put a finger in the bullet hole, held it's bloody hand out, then fell out of the tree. He said it looked so like a human he could never hurt a monkey again. Another time they had a man killing tiger in a village and he and Herbert rigged up an ambulance with a twin 50 waist gun, a floor full of batteries and a couple headlights off a plane. Unfortunately, the rains had started up river, and they lost the ambulance in the river. He had to do 30 days in confinement for that one, and pay for the ambulance on the monthly deduction plan. He said he got off easy on that one because they never recovered the ambulance so they never found out about the machine gun mounted in the back. He also contracted Jungle Fever and Brain Malaria at the same time. He got a 10% disability for that, but after the war he never applied for it. He passed away in 2004 at 81. He was so healthy I thought he'd make it to 100 easy. Prostrate cancer got him. I still miss him every day, Joe.

That's a great story Joe.
I mentioned in another post that I started the writeup on my Dad yesterday. I guess he was really straight-laced. He didn't drink for one thing. I mentioned that because the ground people would give the flight crews a shot of scotch when they returned to sort of calm them down before their debriefing. My Father and several others who didn't drink would give their scotch to the drinkers. By the time they'd get to the debriefing a couple of the guys would have had three or four shots of scotch. These were of course the guys who started telling about seeing German fighters that didn't have propellers. After that they didn't get their scotch until after the debriefing. My Father said he saw one of those propeller-less fighters but he sure wasn't reporting anything that preposterous. What they were seeing were the early German prototype jet fighters. David

Ye Gods and little fishes! Were it me crawling out of a bomber after spending all day dodging flak and fighters, I wouldn't give the bottle back if someone handed it to me!

The half dozen or so guys I knew who were flight crew/pilots in B-26's and B-24's were all lushes and died relatively young. My best friend's dad was a B-24 tail gunner and had a framed certificate on the wall bestowing the official title of Ace on him- he shot down five German fighters from back there in his own personal little corner of hell. I bet he consumed a bottle a day, and died in 1977. Thank God he was a happy drunk, and would talk about the War on rare occasions- mostly stories about a certain motorcycle and pub crawling around England.

Met an old guy in a saloon a couple years ago who was a P-38 pilot based on Guadalcanal, and who participated in the raid that shot down Yamamoto. But that was about all I could squeeze out of him. I was mainly impressed that there he was at age 90-something, hanging out in a bar!

Tail gunners did not bode well. It was a dangerous position for attacking fighters and they usually took them out. Seems to me that I once heard that the tail gun position had the shortest life expectancy of all the positions (ten on a B 17) once the plane entered into combat.