I always remember the anniversary of Pearl Harbor. It was only during his final years that Dad talked about the war. He spent most of it escorting ships, and rarely saw land.
I'm looking at a catalog “Totally Tomatoes...” Maybe order seeds for indoor planting in a few weeks.
My dad was born in 1906 and was a little too old to step forward in ‘42. Yet, with his commercial flying experience, he was accepted as a C-46 freighter pilot in the China-Burma-India Campaign that helped keep one million Japanese troops pinned in China while the American forces made their way up the islands in the Pacific toward Japan.
Dad always referred to the C-B-I Campaign as the “bump on the butt” of the Allied effort. He was a civilian pilot who wore the CBI patch but without officer's rank and was referred to as “captain.”
There were dozens of fliers in civvies during and after the war. “Air America” was one outfit in SE Asia. The Berlin Airlift also saw “out of uniform” American pilots who risked their lives...