Robert E. Irion, Sandy, Utah: an interview by Benjamin Bahlmann, September 20, 2002: Saving the legacy tape no. 537, 538, and 539

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Rob rt . Irion ept mber 20'11 2002 And I r m mber this guys comment. He said Hey, mate. If you think it bad her you hould have seen it when we dropped that flare over the target. You know we' re all heading for the same point!" That set your mind to thinking. That must have been a startling sight! BEN: So on your downtime you never dogfighted, dog ... ROB: Dogfought, no. No, we really didn' t. No. We did have a Spitfire come over to the base one time and do some demonstration flying with one of our airplanes and when he took off and put that nose straight up and climbed like a homesick angel, we knew he could out climb us hands down! Oh Yeah that plane could turn and Yeah it was a great airplane. BEN: How about, I wanted to cover quick life on the base itself. What kind of- ROB: - Okay. We had a really pretty good life there. We had nissen huts. And in our flight we had, you know, ordinarily, about eight pilots was about the max we had in there and sometimes you're down as low as six (but most of the time about eight). You had a coal stove right in the center of the hut. And you had a ration of coal you could have a fire part of the time, but not all- didn't have fire all night. We went out to the dump area near the flight line and salvaged the wooden boxes that the wing tanks had been shipped in, the plywood boxes, and we took them up and lined the interior of our nissen hut with the plywood from that and used some wire, bailing wire, and didn't have any nails. Just tied them and mounted them up there so we could cut down and have some dead air space. And this came up in a circle, and we put these straight things - so you had a space of dead air around that to make it a little warmer there in the winter. And 125