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Show CALVIN P. R DD J 7 2001 two choices. I keep telling you the Arn1y always gave you choic (laugh ). I ju t shoved everything forward and hoped. And that was it. Well, when we got up to Washington the mechanics up there were all radial mechanics they didn 't know what an in-line engine was and they didn 't know what a Curtis electric prop was and so on. For example, sometimes I'd go out in the morning and say to the crew chief, "Is it ready to go?" And that poor fellow would look sad and say, "Lieutenant, I don 't know." And I'd say, "Well, let's listen to it for a minute." And I'd say, "Does it sound all right to you?" And he'd say, "Yeah, but, it. .. " You know, he was just honest and he felt bad. "It sounds okay to me." And I said, "It sounds okay to me, so we've got to do it, so let's do it." But on top of that we had poor gasoline. We didn 't have fuel with a high enough octane, really, and so we had a lot of accidents. There was a companion field over at Ephrata. You should go talk to Paul Hansen, who lives just down the street; he was at Ephrata. [Editor 's note: Ephrata was an Army Air Base located at the Ephrata, Washington Airport between 1942 and 1945. This Ephrata base was fifteen miles northwest of the larger Army Air Base located just north of Moses Lake in Central Washington.] It was the same kind of a deal there. He'll back up my story, but there was a time period there when we lost-a short time period-we lost an average of a man and . a quarter per day. And it got to be a pretty hard deal. But anyway, as I say, that was ... someone says to me, "Were you in any battles?'' I say, "Yes. I was at Moses Lake" (laughs). BEC: Yes, and it sounds like there were a lot of casualties. CAL: So I went from thereto-well, there were some stops along the way at different bases for a short period of time to do stuff that didn't matter a great deal. But eventually I 22 |
