There he was, my uncle, having bailed out of his bomber and losing both boots when his parachute opened, breaking an ankle upon landing in Mussolini’s private game reserve, and facing a man with a pistol pointed at him!

I used to love talking with my Uncle Tom who was in the Army Air Corps in WWII and was the navigator of a B-24 bomber out of Pantanella, Italy. He would lead the plane to the IP, the Initial Point, from which he would plot the course to the target of the day.

The bailout was caused by an engine fire and an order from the pilot for all to bail out. After they did, he shut off the fuel supply to that engine and flew the plane back to base! My uncle ended by saying that the man with the pistol turned out to be a partisan on our side, and he put my uncle on a donkey and led him to the nearest village. He said that he had his parachute draped over his shoulder and he reckoned that he looked like Jesus going into Jerusalem!

Uncle Tom flew 29 missions in his plane, and after the end of WWII, when the Army Air Corps had become the U.S. Air Force, he went to pilot school in California and learned to fly the huge B-29 Stratofortress. He was in charge of the weather version of one (B-50) and flew it out of Japan, into typhoons and along the coast of Russia sampling the air for radiation that would indicate atomic testing.

When I was a kid he gave me a “Rocket Ship Control Panel” for Christmas, and I think I took it to the moon! I’m sure that my love of flying was fueled by Uncle Tom’s living history. After he retired from the Air Force he settled down on Tablerock Lake, and had a lovely home on the highest hill on the lake. It was a privilege for me to fly him in my two-seat Grumman Yankee out of the School of the Ozarks Airport over the lake and near his house. I gave a eulogy at his funeral in the form of what a typical one of his 29 missions may have been like.