LAST EDITED ON Dec-09-08 AT 11:20 PM (EST)
 
>Lopez's Into the Teeth of the Tiger
>is pretty much the definitive memoir of the American fighter pilot's
>life in the China-Burma-India theater. (It also contains two of my
>favorite fighter pilot anecdotes, the punch lines of which are "Your
>streamers were still there" and "No, sir, I don't know how they found
>out" respectively. :)

I just found the latter, and it has so much of the Golden Age WDF nature (or, well, technically the other way around, I suppose, though I hadn't read Into the Teeth of the Tiger when I wrote the early WDF stuff) that I want to share it here.

Background: The 75th's beloved commander, Major Quigley, has been shot down and captured, and to the squadron's dismay, his replacement, Major Home, turns out to be a coward who avoids flying if at all possible and doesn't go anywhere near anyplace the enemy is likely to be when he's forced to go up.

For three straight weeks in October I didn't fly at all. That was primarily because of the weather but also because Home's operations officer kept most of the senior flight leaders on the ground while sending some of the others on half-assed missions. Segura, Jones, Gray, and I were really fed up. With little else to do, we had a lot of time to bitch. Home must have gotten wind of our bitching (it would have been hard not to), so one night he called a meeting of all the officers in his room.

When we were all assembled, he harangued us for a while about all he had done for the squadron and how he demanded loyalty from all his officers at all times. He paused dramatically and said, "Segura, stand up. Have you been telling all the new pilots that I was a yellow, no good son of a bitch?" Segura, standing at attention, said quite seriously, "No, sir, I don't know how they found out." It took us all, Home included, about ten seconds to register the comment.

We didn't have many officers like Major Home in the Golden Age WDF, but it's precisely the kind of thing I could see, say, Daver or Max Sterling saying to some allied-force officer under whose command the Eight-Balls briefly found themselves in the course of some operation - or possibly some latterly-joined-up fill-in who took over while G was figuring out how to bust out of a POW camp at some point.

--G.
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