Mar
08

Help me honor my 91-year old grandfather who was a B-24/B-29 pilot during WWII and flew missions in Austria and Italy

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My grandfather, who flew bombers during World War II, was recently selected by Eastern Iowa Honor Flight to be flown to the World War II Memorial in Washington, DC. EIHF honors WWII Veterans by sending them and 89 of their fellow WWII veterans on a private, chartered flight from Cedar Rapids, Iowa to Washington, DC for the day, and then flying them back to Cedar Rapids by 10:30PM the same night.  On the plane ride home, EIHF surprises them by giving the veterans letters that family, friends, and the community have sent to honor them.

This is where I need your help! I would like for my grandfather to have baskets full of postcards from all over the world thanking him for his service in World War II to read on the plane ride home.

You don’t have to write much. You can just write “thanks for your service” and where you’re from or you can write something more in depth. Please just write.

All postcards should be sent to:
Eastern Iowa Honor Flight
Attn: Letters for Veterans
P.O. Box 502
Hiawatha, IA 52233

Note: For the mail to get to my grandfather, you will have to put in large, bold letters “Earl Blair”. All mail must be received by April 14, 2012.

Here’s an excerpt from his 23-page autobiography (which you can read in full here):

I never saw very much amusing about war, or combat, but one experience tickled me.  We were always warned not to use the radio phones between planes over enemy territory because they could pick this up from three points on the ground, and they would know exactly what our altitude was. This was information very useful to the anti-aircraft gunners. The German fighter planes would never fly into a large formation, but they would go after a crippled bomber that could not keep up with the formation and shoot it down so it couldn’t return to base, and they would get another star on their uniform.

Our fighter plane protection was the famous all-colored checker-tail P-51 Squadron, which always stayed out of sight, about 10,000 feet above us.  We had just come off from our bombing run on Linz, Austria with 500 planes, and a plane from the formation just ahead of us had an engine shot out (and I don’t know what else). He started losing altitude to maintain speed and stay with us.  I would judge that they had probably dropped about 2,000 feet.

When he came on the radio in a panic, he shouted, “Checker Tail Squadron, Checker Tail Squadron, Where are you:  This is B24 # ??? with engine shot out, losing altitude badly.  Need help!”

There was silence for about thirty seconds, and then from out of the sky above dropped two P-51’s checker tails, smoothly lining up on each side of the wounded ’24.  From where I could look on above them, it looked as if they had landed one on each wing.

A voice came back over the air, “We’s rawt heah, Boss!”  We learned later that this plane made it back to friendly territory.  The whole five-hundred plane formation lost only two airplanes.


Grandpa is in the back row, all the way to the right. Click for bigger.

Categories: General

  

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