Unfortunately, I’m starting my research with dead fliers, who are easier to find in the records, so most of what I find early on is going to be immensely sad. The young men who volunteered for air combat–you had to volunteer–tended to me better-educated and gifted in different ways (they were musicians, artists, teachers, architects). Few of them were over 24 years old. Just a few things I learned about them today:

1. The P-38 was much more difficult to fly than the P-51, my Dream Airplane. One engine going out on a P-38 was almost as bad as the ONLY engine going out on a P-51. Jack Langston, Atascadero High ’39, was flying a P-38–it would have looked exactly like the one in the photograph; it was June 22, 1944, so Allied aircraft still had their recognition stripes from D-Day– over Cherbourg when he, along four other members of his air group, was shot down in what all the young pilots realized was a half-baked suicide mission. Jack was married. He was also a gifted musician, a saxophonist.

2. SLO native and war hero Elwyn Righetti flew a P-51, On his last mission, as commander of his fighter group (he was shot down and vanished), he ordered two fliers to turn around and go home. It was the last mission required of each man, and he didn’t want them to get killed. The word is “mensch.”

3. “Mission Belle” was the B-26 co-piloted by Lt. James Pearson of Templeton, shot down over Belgium during the Battle of the Bulge, Dec. 26, 1944.

4. The cruelest loss of all, in some ways, was an Idaho accident. Sgt. Charles Eddy was a part of the crew that perished in an Idaho B-24 training accident. On the plane’s fourth practice high-altitude bomb run, it suddenly fell, in two minutes, from 20,000 feet to 100 feet, when the pilot and co-pilot finally pulled it out of its dive. Once they had the bomber level, they gained altitude and started to make a gentle right turn to get back to base. The plane nose-dived into the ground.

5. Lt. Clair Abbott Tyler, Morro Bay, was a B-17 co-pilot killed over the Channel in 1943. The best man at his 1941 Mission SLO wedding to Miss Joanna Renetzky was Alex Madonna.