Oh yes, he scared her, quite badly. He disappears and she runs into the house, eager for comfort from her mother. Once inside she is aware something is terribly wrong. The grown-ups were sitting around the dining room table. They were all crying.
The year was 1942. America was at war.
Young men and woman across the nation had signed up serve in the Armed Forces. Of course, the little girl, really knew nothing about what had happened just a little under a year before at Pearl Harbor. But she did know that at school, every child had a little pillow, and if the sirens wailed, they had to take them and sit in a row along the hallway wall, until the siren wailed again.
On this particular day, her family was personally touched by this mysterious thing that was happening in her country. She would not fully understand this event until many, many years later when as an adult she was able to piece together for herself that the day she was frightened by the neighborhood bully, and the day her family learned her uncle died in the crash of his Curtiss P-40F Warhawk were one in the same.
So, before I forget, I want to share this incident with you.
The Warhawk flew for the first time in mid-1941, it had been test-piloted, and proved worthy of flight, and the United States Army Air Corp began to train young men how to fly this model. Some Warhawks never made it to battle, and some young men lost their lives as a result.
My father's younger brother, Levi A Shaffer, Jr. was one of those young men.
I've learned through research, and having a copy of his accident reports, that the Warhawks, and the men learning how to fly them, were in the air almost around the clock. There would be a training flight, a report filed, time out for maintenance work, a report filed, and then another training flight some days three or more of these cycles occurred. Each flight would be over an hour long. It was obvious, the nation was eager to get the planes and pilots into active duty. It needed these planes and pilots in active duty.
Unfortunately accidents happened, some were pilot error, some were a result of the plane. I speculate, that although the planes were test-piloted before being put into service. It was the young men learning to fly them that really tested them, found their short comings, and learned first hand what could and did go wrong with them.
Don't get me wrong, the Warhawk turned out to be a fine fighter plane and served our country and other countries well...as did their pilots. And, it was the test pilots, and the first groups of young men in training that made the Warhawk what it eventually became. They were the ones that "got the bugs out", so to speak. We owe them our thanks and gratitude.
I've learned some about the series of numbers of the P-40's my uncle was learning to fly, I've a list of what happened to them. I've learned the P-40 was upgraded over the years and became even better. Some of its off springs, are still around in museums, Seattle's Museum Of Flight has a Curtiss P-40N on display, and I'm guessing occasionally one might even show up at annual air shows around the country. You should try to see if you can find one some where. If you are interested, Wikipedia has an excellent article about this model.
In the meantime, and thankfully before I forgot, I'm glad I could share this snippet of my personal history with you.
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