The the uh stripe the black stripe is called the bar sinister and it’s the symbol of illegitimacy.

How many how many pilots have you ever heard of who on their first combat mission in the Solomon Islands where we were shot down five planes on one mission? Well, at one time we were I was sitting under ready alert at the end of the runway in case some Japanese plane came in and some of the ground marines came out of the bush and were saying in effect, you guys do the greatest job.

What we were doing was firing at the guns that they had put up in the hills to pop down on us.

He says, “You were saving our lives and uh I I just can’t believe what you’re doing.

” But but tactically he was a very fine uh leader and inspiration with his own conduct in in combat.

Boing would catch him taking off.

That’s when they were most vulnerable.

The brash used to try to force the fighters to stay close to the bombers and uh it staying close to the bombers you could fend off the attacking zero Japanese but you couldn’t get a kill.

and we all got to work together to make this thing happen.

And uh I think that was what inspired them most of all just because he was a downto-earth person and uh basically led by example in the airplane.

Soon after the squadron was authorized and began their training, they decided that they needed their own identity and their own name.

And because of the nature of their formation that it was informal and that they had been brought from different units, some had experience, some didn’t.

The first name they hid on was Boington’s Bastards.

And when Smoke learned of this, he was so insensed that he dredged up a very obscure regulation in which officers were not allowed to go to group headquarters.

in on their own business.

And using this regulation, smoke had Boington arrested.

And here the prisoners were put to work walking across the causeway every morning to clear the rubble from the streets after the B29 raids the previous night.

And again, they were underfed.

They were often beaten.

The Japanese performed experimental surgeries on certain prisoners.

And it was a rough existence for all of them.

First time I ever saw Papy Moose Moss and I were in this little town of Tangoo, which is about 8 miles out of where our base was there in central Burma.

And uh so we were in this little town there and we heard this racket.

We were rooting around somewhere there and and uh we heard this racket and we jumped back kind of off the side of the road in a little kind of a path and here comes this damn rickshaw.

Papy’s pulling the rick shaw and got the in the sitting in it drunk as a goat.

You know, at times he would report to work the next morning and he wasn’t capable of flying and I was in operation.

So I’d take him off the the scramble list and take him off alert.

Bob Neil finally got fed up with him and uh uh he things went from bad to worse.

Walton would after you were all there at night.

He’d be in the office and he’d be writing press releases and he’d send press releases to the Times speaking union where I lived in New Orleans.

Man, my parents thought I was the biggest hero in the war.

I think that uh that Frank was very compassionate and I I know that he agonized when a big flight would go off, 16 planes uh on a sweep over Bugenville or something like that.

He was concerned that every single one of us get back.

 

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