Floren Bennion "Nails" Nelson, Layton, Utah: an interview by Becky B. Lloyd, July 15, 2006: Saving the Legacy tape no. 762-763

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FL RE " AIL " LO J 1 200 BE : o after you took all that training in the U you flew yourself v r th r ? NAI: I picked up an aircraft in Sacramento and I flew that over to Japan. They w r doing some atomic test work at Kwajalein at the time. So it was quite a hop. From Sacramento, we went to Honolulu. That was the first leg of the journey and the longest one. That was about twenty-four, twenty-five hundred miles. I went from Honolulu to I believe, Johnson Island. From there I went, I believe, to Wake Island. I can't recall the route I would have taken had they not been doing some test work with the H-bombs down at Kwajalein. From there, I detoured around and went to Iwo Jima. I landed at lwo Jima and from Iwo Jima, I flew into Tokyo. So to get the aircraft over there doing all that island-hoping, I was almost thirty-days getting that aircraft over there, jumping from one island to another. BEC: You kept the same aircraft the whole time, and landed it there? NAI: Yes. BEC: How many people were on your crew? NAI: We had three, a pilot, a navigator, and one gunner. We had two versions of that aircraft. It had a hard-nose that had eight fifty-caliber machine guns in the nose. We had another version that had a navigator up in the nose area. He was the bombardier. On many occasions, we had that hard-nose. A lot of our work was interdiction work. We were mainly shooting up rolling stock at night, the enemy trucks, locomotives and and other vehicles that were coming from North Korea, moving supplies down to the thirty­eighth parallel. If you'll recall Korea on the map, it looks very much like Florida hanging out there. The thirty-eighth parallel actually was our bomb line. Everything south of the thirty-eighth parallel was South Korea and everything north was the combat zone. The 15